'Look I can see you're an open-minded gentleman...' Photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP via Getty Images
In the Catholic Church, when someone was being put forward for sainthood, the supporters of their canonisation would put forward the miracles and good works that they had performed in their lifetime. But someone else — the promotor fidei, promoter of the faith — would take the opposite tack. They would go through the candidate’s life, looking for things they’d done wrong; or look for evidence that the purported miracles ascribed to them were fraudulent or illusory. The promotor fidei was better known as the advocatus diaboli, or the devil’s advocate.
(You can see why, given the Catholic Church’s recent history, it might be important to check for skeletons in the closet of any potential saints. They weren’t so careful with their Papal knighthoods, for instance. But the office of promotor fidei no longer exists.)
Strangely — to my mind — the idea of the devil’s advocate is pretty unpopular these days. I remember using the phrase once and someone responding dismissively “Oh, a big ol’ swig of devil’s advocaat,” which was pretty funny, I have to admit. But playing devil’s advocate is now (in some circles, at least) considered a cover for racism and/or sexism, only a step removed from “I’m not a racist, but…”, and stories about it are illustrated with pictures of Milo Yiannopoulos.
It’s a form of what I think of as intellectual inoculation. You take some weakened form of an argument and expose yourself to it, and then when you come across the real thing in the wild, you have a ready-made defence. I should really stress that, although the dislike of the devil’s advocate comes mainly from the left, intellectual inoculation is apolitical – everyone does it.
The most perfect forms are those “bingo cards” you see sometimes. I remember them especially from the great atheist-creationist wars of the 2000s, but they’re common all over the place. They give you weakened versions of the arguments you’re likely to see, so when you do bump into them, you’re prepared.
A few seconds’ Googling found me this one, a “feminist bingo” card. When someone tries to tell you that women shoulder more of the unpaid labour burden than men do (surely an undeniable truth), you can simply say “Ah ha! ‘Women do all the housework!’ Cross that off the bingo card!” Or if they say “A sexist society forces men into specific gender roles,” you can say “Oh! ‘Patriarchy hurts men too!’ Bingo!” There are plenty of these cards.
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SubscribeSomething I believe Dominic Cummings is keen on.
We shouldn’t just be doing this, we should be building it into our educational practice.
We badly need to develop young people whose response to disagreement is to sharpen their wits or change their minds, not resort to insults and ad hominem. Though first, of course, we need teachers at all levels who are more attached to reason, the pursuit of truth and the development of children’s minds than they are to their own dogmas.
J.S. Mill in On Liberty pointed out that if a correct view isn’t routinely challenged, it is held not as a considered position but as a prejudice.
“I can’t see them welcoming a Devil’s Advocate’s view of their dearly held beliefs. They are in the right ““ no question.”
But surely that is the very reason why we need to be brave enough to play Devil’s Advocate with them? Too often we have sympathy with their position but questions or concerns about the specifics – it is right to question those things but right now no-one is prepared to step into the fray because of the consequences of challenging what is increasingly becoming more like religious dogma (back to the online wars of the 2000s then)
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Is it that we have lost the ability to critique even our own thoughts or to respond reasonably to those who do? Or is it more that only the shrill voices are heard because the rest of us have more important things to do than argue with strangers on the internet?
With 8 years of Jesuit education well behind me, my fascination with all Latin references continues to soar. Great article, again.
Thank you for the article . Other approaches to testing people’s assertions were looked at by Karl Popper with his careful comments about the difference between propositions that are in principle refutable and those which are not . You could also argue that a jury trial , properly conducted , is a good way of testing arguments to destruction assuming that you can get the lawyers to abstain from cheap rhetoric.
Similarly, if you say “people should be willing to listen to other people playing devil’s advocate,” then someone will use that as cover to say “but just playing devil’s advocate, what if Hitler was right?”
And, just playing Devil’s Advocate – so what if they do? I would be very interested in discussing such a thing if only to get an insight into the mind of someone who thinks that way, or to shine a light on those beliefs and expose them for what they are.
I agree, Cheryl. Hitler was a monster, but I think it is interesting that Tom used Hitler in his example, not a Communist mass-murderer like Lenin or Mao. And right about what? I find there is too often a tendency to assume that because a tyrant’s work was evil on balance, he was wrong about everything. To look at Lenin, rather than Hitler, I remember reading conservative journo Peter Cook denouncing Lenin’s New Economic Policy as if it were a terrible economic blunder, when it was in fact a sensible pullback from the terrible economic blunder of War Communism, partially restoring market mechanisms in the Soviet economy. A debate on “What if Lenin was right about the New Economic Policy?” would be an interesting debate. I suspect a debate on “What if Hitler was right about making the Sudetenland part of Germany?” would be an interesting one too, without prejudging the outcome.
This is good for honing and better understanding your arguments and therefore strengthening them, which is well worth doing. The real challenge comes when it exposes fundamental flaws and you have to change. This is the real reason for the bingo card response because it cuts off that requirement. When someone is ideologically driven and has a poorly thought through position, it will not help move things forward one jot as their defence is not rational and so will not be rationally defeated. Where there are two reasonable people involved, a willingness on both sides to adjust position at least slightly is more beneficial to optimising wicked problems than a beautifully constructed argument.
Or a Proud Boy, a Tommy Robinson supporter, a Male Rights Activist, a UKIP member, a Brexiteer…
If you’re going to go around attaching these labels to people you’re doing another form of what is being described in the article with Bingo cards. Wait for something that might put the person in the group, and then discount everything they are saying, because they can’t possibly be right.
The reference to Hitchens was almost inevitable, but not sure it’s apt. If the point is to see the possible counter arguments and develop cogent responses to them then the Hitchens example doesn’t really work. I have never seen a decent rebuttal of his points, nor do I think one is possible
‘Sometimes the statue crying tears of blood is a fake;’ You cannot seriously suggest, when arguing against ‘becoming dumber’, that sometimes the statue’s ‘tears of blood’ are real?