Author: Curt Doolittle

(inspiration)

WRITE TO SOMEONE

I love writing on the web because when I write on a blog, or FB or a comment somewhere I know what voice to use: the speaking voice, not the thinking voice. And it is very hard to write philosophy without falling into the trap of writing with the thinking voice.

Most writers will tell you to visualize talking to someone particular. For some reason, that doesn’t work for me. It might for novelists. But for argument, you have to understand the particular logic of the person you’re speaking to. And that’s pretty hard to visualize. I do best if I visualize writing to PFS friends. Because it forces me to be clear without carrying the burden of communicating basic concepts.

If we write to ourselves, we aren’t communicating very well. You can tell when a writer is doing it. It’s when he’s having a hard time engaging you. One of the reasons lecturing professors tend to communicate well in writing, is that they practice their ideas verbally in front of students a few times before putting a book together. After a while your book voice can evolve to become your lecture voice, and at that point most of us are comprehensible.

There is a very narrow space for self-talking voice. Poetry certainly, and the sort of stream of consciousness technique that borders on poetry can work if it’s full of cultural associations, gives insight into psychology that’s eccentric, or helps descend into the maelstrom of madness.

Using your outer voice also stops you from the little lies we tell ourselves to feel good about ourselves. It is very easy to lie to yourself, or let yourself skate on something or other. I just read a book by a very well known economist that suggested we have voters take tests. And of course, that’s ridiculous and only an academic would be stupid enough to write a book on politics that would recommend testing as voter criteria. So it’s not possible to stop all your stupid ideas. But it is possible to at least avoid the obvious ones.

Given that libertarians tend toward the autistic end of the scale, this advice is even more valuable for our end of the spectrum. Reading for example Hayek, whose language structure I largely adopt, is quite different from reading Bohm-Bawerk’s impenetrable, arduous, self-talking paragraphs. I don’t think writers should try to reach everyone because that’s impossible, but they should try to address someone as a defense against the inner voice.

We all have inner voices. Mine is spatial. I don’t really talk to myself as much as visualize as ‘real’ spaces – something I can’t really express easily, even if I want to. Logic is very intuitive. I feel it the way normals feel emotions. Logical things make me calm and illogical things make me agitated. So I sort of feel my way through arguments, the way you feel your way through a cave in the dark.

So in my head it’s a lot like my writing. I sort of construct arguments as tests. like stacking playing cards or something. I just try them this way and that way. And most of them fall down. But every now and then, usually in the morning, I try something new and I can build the stack of logical cards a little higher.

Then all the work is trying to reduce that sensation to some sort of simple expression that others can, if it’s worth their time, try to grasp. And its at that moment you appreciate the great poets, great authors, and particularly Lao Tzu, for their talent at using words to tie together concepts and generate new understanding that we today, can still make use of. And that is humbling. Awe inspiring. And at least for most of us, an unattainable goal.

There are those who do the same, not with ideas, but with experiences. I am not so in awe of those authors. Possibly again for artistic reasons. They just confuse me. I run away from those authors as fast as I can. 🙂 But that isn’t to say it isnt an equally exceptional art. Just one that has an audience that the author is speaking to, and some of us are not in it.

Now, you can desperately try to remember all this while you are writing. Or, instead, you can pretend you are arguing with someone who disagrees with you or doesn’t understand, and write as if you are speaking to that person. You don’t have to write his responses. Just answer his objections one paragraph at a time. Something Hayek is absurdly adept at.

The advice I would give in writing argument, that I have learned over time, is Popperian. Do not try to be right. Make your argument. If you can’t make it. Start over and try again. If you still can’t, then you don’t know enough to make it. Over time you should understand a problem well enough to handle any objection to it. And be able to enumerate all the known objections. And when you have sufficient scope of knowledge to handle all known objections, it starts to become fun trying to find new objections that you can answer.

Mastery is the best form of persuasion. Persuasion without mastery is just trickery. Rhetoric, if an art of trickery is immoral. Discourse, in the pursuit of truth is not.

And it is the pursuit of truth and liberty that makes us libertarian.