<< And the very fact that you were not willing to rest your argument with the
nonsense of the premises and assumptions (which you may have explained
well) may well have implied to the audience you were not sure of your
argument and therefore had to supplement it so you could win the
debate--which is what it was for you, a debate.
Big deal, we get affirmative action, some may have thought, even though
we may be racially inferior. And you wonder why some were angry, though
you probably did not notice those who went despondent after the emotional
violence of the evening. >>
Um. I am not sure what to say here. In a part I didn't quote, you say you wonder how I could have read what you said asa call for passionate unreasoned polemic, and here you implicitly criticize me for debating Levin, which is what I was asked to do, and what I thought I should do. As I see it, the problem with your strategy is that it concedes that the argument is valid, that if the premises are coherent and true, if Blacks are genetically dumb, then they can be consigned to the rubbish heap of society, or at least that there is no point in affirmative action. It seems to me that this point ought not be conceded, because the argument is invalid.
You may be right in your diagnosis of why my rhetorical strategy fell flat. I am not sure how to remedy that. Charles' suggestion, that I substitute white men for Blacks in the argument, strikes me as promising. Next time the occasion arises I may try it. However, a mere denunciation of Levin and his ways strikes me, in the context of an academic debate, as inappropriate. I agree, as I said, that there are contexts where reasoned debate is beside the point, for example at a demo where the point ofa speech is to inspire solidaritya nd action rather than reflection, but if I had felt that I should not engage in argument I would have declined the invitation to speak. And I do think the Levins of this world should be discredited by argument as well as by contempt. That is why I have read, and, I think, understood Chomsky and Rose and Lewontin and Kamin and all the people who participated in the IQ debate. (You should knwo me by now well enough to give me credit for doing my homework.)
I do think it unfortunate that many people cannot understand conditional argument, that they cannot grasp that if someone says, EVEN IF I were to accept that premise, the conclsuion does not follow, that the speaker is not endorsing the premise. I am genuinely surprised that you feel to fall in that category on this occassion, since I normally have only the highest respect for your analytical abilities. I suppose you find it so deeply insulting that anyone might consider it even to be logically possible that racist assumptions might be true that it shuts down your normally fearsome reasoning abilities. Clearly the Antioch students felt that way. Most of them were white, btw, as you might expect at an expensive liberal arts college. However, I think that the ability to bracket the sense of insult or outrage to one's political sensibilities and see how an argument goes is an important part of an education.
As for the emotional violence of the evening, if Antioch had not intended to offend people's sensibilities, they would not have given Levin a platform. If they had wanted someone to merely denounce him, they would not have picked me, who wrote a coolly dispassionate refutation of Levin's fallacies in the APA Proceedings, rather than any of the many people who wrote angry denunciations, some of whom were not a lot further away than Columbus (one was at Purdue).
I do not say that I acrried off this long-ago occasion with success. On the contrary. But I do not find your strategy for doing better to be appealing.
--jks