What's the best argument for the other side?

When I was young, I would spout off some deeply held belief to my father, electrically certain I was right.

He would hear me out fully and then say, "And what is the best argument of the other side?"

—The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate, Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic

Of the many things I read on the internet, most of them don’t stick with me until the time it takes to get to the end of their sentence. The one I cited above always has, though. Caitlin Flanagan’s father was a professor in my old graduate department at Berkeley, and apparently a very wise man. The older I get, the more I see the sense in deliberately and consciously doing what he recommends here: trying to construct the best case for the other side.

“The best argument for the other side” is, of course, the very opposite of the tonal style of the internet. The internet rewards moral and psychological certainty: bold points made in bold language that give no quarter to the other side. And have no doubt about it: the style influences the cognition, and the cognition the style, creating a feedback loop that I’d argue makes us all dumber but also more certain that we’re right, which in turn makes us dumber, in a feedback loop of bad logic and even worse prose. I’ve been thinking about this a lot in connection with Lindy West, whose name is in the news again because of her new memoir. West was the pioneer of what later became blogging 2.0: lots of shouty caps rants in a very distinct style about the moral failings of others—less related to actual political views that might theoretically do harm or good than to opinions on culture and life—that managed to convey the point that if there was any light in between you and the increasingly strange views that she pushed about such important matters as the feel-good Christmas romcom Love, Actually, you could turn in your feminist card right now, thank you very much. These were posts almost perfectly engineered to go viral, and they usually did.

However sound a business woman West is (and the buzz surrounding her memoir seems to prove that she is one), I’ve always abhorred the fact that her prose style has now become the default prose style of the internet, for the most part. In this I think I disagree a bit with Helen Lewis, who claims in her review of Adult Braces that West’s style pickled in the mid-2010s and reading it now is like using a time machine. Maybe the use of the word “welp” has declined, but in a more dire way, the internet has internalized the cognitive style of West and her compatriots. It’s a writing style that makes our thinking style worse. It allows for no subtlety, no occupation of a middle ground. It’s the style you see when people pull quote their own Substacks. Even good, thoughtful writers I know do this all of the time, and when they do, they tend to quote the worst part of their articles or notes: the ones that give no quarter to the other side, the ones that are most likely to be shared by those who hold their views, the ones that might be wielded not as an invitation to think more about what they’re saying, but a weapon against anyone who thinks differently. It’s primarily driven by financial metrics, I suspect, just as West’s work was and is. We’re still rewarding her for her dudgeon, and everyone else, too. Now, I’m not against anyone making a buck, but I am against being told that someone else making a buck is really for my own good, and if that making of the buck involves being told that the worst part of a thing is the best part. If I liked that sort of thing, I’d eat nothing but protein bars.

To quote the internet of the mid-2010s, I just can’t.

Fears about the decline in my own cognitive style from internet reading are therefore driving me to try to do something publicly and using the medium of the internet, mostly to see if it can be done with any integrity in a corrupt medium, or whether we’re all likely to become Lindy Wests if we spend enough time here.

In “What’s the Best Argument for the Other Side?” (in honor of Flanagan’s father, Thomas Flanagan), I’m going to attempt to take a view that I find initially repugnant and see if I can’t find my own way into it.

“Those without children lack a stake in the future.”

“You cannot understand my point of view until you have a child, anymore than someone who has never experienced true love can understand love.”

—Elon Musk

Elon Musk has come in for a lot of scorn because of this view, which accords in general with his pro-natalism and his desire to impregnate as many as women as possible. As with all things Musky, it’s hard to disentangle what I think is a strain of well-justified moral disgust at someone living the kind of life he lives (let’s just say that Aristotle wouldn’t call it flourishing qua human) with what he’s actually saying.

This seemed to make his pronouncements on this subject the perfect inaugural “What’s the best argument for the other side?”

The other reason this is a good candidate for the series is that perceptive readers will have noticed by now that he never really makes an argument, which means that someone needs to do it for him. In fact, as Jesse Signal points out, for support of his non-argument he retreats into a standpoint called “viewpoint epistemology”: the belief that you cannot possibly understand another person’s experience without having lived it yourself. When Musk utters it, it comes with a generous helping of hypocrisy, because it’s exactly the kind of argument that he’d insist that women couldn’t credibly make about misogyny, or black people couldn’t make about racism.

But let’s try to put all of that aside for now. It’s irrelevant.

What draws me in about Musk’s argument is actually the counter-argument that his interlocutor, Amanda Askell, tried to make as a rebuttal. It didn’t strike me as particularly strong. Askell says first that “it depends” on how much you are capable of caring about people “generally” v. your own kin. Already, this is an admission that caring about the future requires morality. Unfortunately, it’s a moral calling that most of us would assent to in theory but very few of us follow in practice. As Adam Smith once and wisely pointed out in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a man who considered himself of the highest humanity and moral concern would—and would be justified in—mourning the loss of his pinky finger more than an earthquake that killed millions in a country on the other side of the globe. And, as usual, a literary example helps us think through the “justified” part. In Bleak House, Charles Dickens created Mrs. Jellyby—a philanthropist who takes seriously and consistently the call to care for every human equally, without regard to her degree of relationship with them—as a neglectful mother and altogether repellant person. The point is that it’s very hard to care about eight billion people in the abstract, and doing so ends in moral paralysis and neglect of much more present and pressing duties. Most of us consider it morally intuitive that if it came down to a choice between buying our own children shoes and buying a child in a faraway country shoes, these moral claims would not press upon us equally, even if the child in the faraway country needed them more.

Then, Askell’s argument becomes even weaker when she admits that she’s actually planning to have children. This is effectively conceding Musk’s argument, for obvious reasons. Still, she then insists in the final move that she is one of the rare people who is actually capable of “caring about a lot of people thriving,” even if they’re not related to her.

This is when Musk employs the viewpoint epistemology: you can’t possibly understand what I’m saying because you don’t have children. At first, this rhetorical move just confused me, because it seemed entirely unrelated to the argument that either one of them seemed to be making above. But when I thought about it a little, maybe it is the proper rebuttal—possibly the only one—to a claim that you can care about eight billion people in the abstract. If you haven’t had the experience of caring for one single child and knowing the combination of adoration, terror, annoyance, grace, and awe that raising a child can produce in your heart, it’s hard to compare it to the experience of “caring about a lot of people thriving,” a rhetorical formulation that even leaves me feeling pretty blah.

Now, a waggish type might note that Musk seems to take a very small active role in the raising of many of his children, preferring the reptilian method of fathering and subsequently abandoning many offspring in hopes that a few will live to adulthood to pass on his genetic material, to the more common practice among mammals, which regards higher investment in a smaller number the better strategy. So his claim of viewpoint epistemology on raising children is a little questionable, at best. But I’m not interested here in whether Musk’s personal claim to this knowledge is true, but whether it’s generally true that caring in the abstract is hard, but caring for the particular is far more human.

That point seems fairly irrefutable to me. And allow me to exercise some of my own viewpoint epistemology here, as someone who didn’t want children for a long time and then eventually came around to it. The relationship with a child is a very particular one, a mix of so many feelings and thoughts that would have been entirely alien to me before I had my daughter. And I’ll even venture that I became a somewhat better person after this, if only because I acquired more empathy for the large number of adults who have children. I was definitely one of those childless people who scowled when I saw I was sitting in front of a likely seat-kicker on a plane, or that someone had decided to bring a group of eight-year-olds to a fancy restaurant on the same night as my birthday celebration. Now I’m more open-minded when encountering those situations: I don’t immediately think that my ride or my meal is going to be spoiled by the presence of children. I’ve discovered, among other things, that there is a large variation in both children and their parents, some of it due to children’s inherent natures, and some of it to their parents’ expectations for behavior. Being less immediately judgmental has been good for me. I’m much more likely to want to help a mother who’s struggling to feed a toddler while changing a baby’s diaper in an airport. In short, I’m more likely to try to make the world a very slightly better place in the here and now because I know what it’s like to be in that mother’s situation. Having a child, too, is probably the experience most likely to make you really exercise the muscle of entering another viewpoint. Children think about the world in a way that’s very different from how adults think about it. A lot of the work of talking to children is similar to the work that I’m trying to do here: of entering into another person’s perspective and trying to see how their thoughts might link up with and deviate from your own; to identify their premises, and your own, which is probably the hardest philosophical muscle of all to exercise.

In the end, though, I think the weakest point of Musk’s argument is not explicating the bias of the childless but in the idea that having children is an exercise in making the future concrete. I’ve found that most parental decisions I’ve made are less based on an abstract interest in what my daughter’s life is going to be like in the year 2060 and more on the here and now of “how do I get her into this summer camp that she really wants to attend when enrollment filled up several weeks ago” and “which school is going to make her spend the least amount of time on a laptop.” I guess the latter is a future thought in a sense—I don’t want her to grow up addled by technology and unable to write her name in cursive—but it’s one that’s very much linked to the now: what I know about her, what I know about the world and the trends about it I deplore. Children have a way of making you live in the present, which is probably one of the best arguments for having them. In some sense, your job as a parent is to prepare your children to leave you; but if that is the job, it involves an almost overwhelming attention to what’s going on right now, and quite abstract ideas about what might happen even two days from now, let alone 20 years. The future is and will always be a bit abstract. We can’t know anything about it, really. I believe Musk thinks that children help make it less abstract and thus easier to care about. But just like the future, the only thing you can know about your children is the now of them.

Now for the evaluation. Was this exercise useful for me? I think it was. I’ve never liked Elon Musk. In fact, in one of the first mystery novels I ever tried to write, I ended up killing off a character who strongly resembled him by locking him in a sauna overnight. There’s something about the name “Elon Musk” attached to an opinion that gives it less credibility for me, whether it’s a good opinion or not.

In particular, I think the most useful part of the exercise was when I had to explain the connection between his first and third tweets, because it made me realize that I do agree with the point that it’s hard to care about people in the abstract. I’ve always agreed with that. It’s a common moral instinct and an organizing principle of human life. In fact, I’d go even farther and say that there’s a certain kind of modern Mrs. Jellyby I know and deplore who does seem to replace a concern with what’s happening on Instagram right now with paying attention to their own child, on the grounds that they “have to know what’s happening in the world to be a responsible citizen.” I try very hard not to be that parent while maintaining an adult life of thinking and writing, while not confusing whatever’s happening on the internet right now with “thinking and writing and adult activity.”

But even better, it helped me sort out what I actually don’t agree with Musk or the other pro-natalists about here, which isn’t exactly what I thought it was. And that’s just that having children and thinking about the future are essentially two different and unrelated moral tasks, and the one doesn’t necessarily help with the other. I think this is certainly a problem for people who argue that others should have lots and lots of children no matter what circumstances they’re in. Having children without regard to your health, financial situation, or political environment is in fact showing a high level of what economists call “future discounting,” which means that you value the present far more highly than the future. This is the sort of behavior that you associate with people who are spendthrifts or other categories we’d call (after F. Scott Fitzgerald) “careless.” I’ve known this kind of parent, too. Despite having precarious finances or an overall terrible experience with a first child, they decide that what will fix this problem is having more children. That error has always seemed to me like a failure to imagine the future based on the data from the present.

Flanagan encouraged his daughter to make the best case for the other side because we don’t really know our own arguments until we do. This was certainly my problem when I started thinking about pro-natalism. I think and hope it’s a little less my problem now.

I also figured out in the course of writing the above how to improve that novel where I killed Musk in a sauna, so, bonus.