My previous post was pretty foundational, but in a mainly conceptual sense – I wanted to reflect on my intended audience, what I’m hoping to provide, why I’m writing here at all, that sort of thing.
This post is foundational in a more systematic sense. I’m going to walk you through a system I came up with to keep myself from being overwhelmed or underwater when I try and maintain my footing in discussions or arguments. Plus, I want to be able to reference this post when I’m talking about other evangelical & conservative viewpoints in order to explain disconnects – for example, it helps me understand why steps that feel like progress in terminology, visibility, or behavior to the left can be so easily labeled and summarily discarded (as “cancel culture”, “woke”, “politically correct”, and so on) by the right.
Also, lord knows I’ve gone on about my Argument Ladder (tm) concept to enough people in my life at this point that I might as well write it down.
Ultimately, the Argument Ladder isn’t necessarily a system for deployment in an argument or to the person you’re at odds with. Rather, it’s a way to navigate those situations in your own head and know when you’re in a discussion that’s able to progress constructively vs. one that’s likely to result in a big tangle of topics that will end with you having to go for a long Thanksgiving walk to cool off.
“But Cam, this post doesn’t sound like it’s about your formative experiences at an evangelical summer camp!” Buddy, it’s my blog / newsletter / series of posts on this regrettably awful platform; I can do what I want.
Why I need the argument ladder
Okay, let’s get into it. Picture, if you will, a family get-together: you’re talking to an extended family member (of a differing political disposition) at the kitchen counter about something innocuous, and the price of eggs is mentioned.
Oh, it’s crazy how expensive eggs are, they say. You agree, but your internal DEFCON has gone up to 4 (or down to 2? I forget how DEFCON works). They make some comment about bird flu; you see your opening to point out who the president is, currently, and imply that the president might be at fault in some way.
They in turn see an anti-Trump viewpoint coming their way and (assuming they’re like most Trump voters I’ve personally met) sidestep your comment and instead say something about how all politicians in Washington are crooked and this is just another example of lazy government oversight. You consider trying to make a play for defending the legitimacy of the CDC, but you’re pretty sure they think RFK is doing some good stuff because you heard them say “seed oils” a couple of hours ago.
If your brain works like mine (if so, I’m sorry) you can easily extend this hypothetical conversation essentially indefinitely, with your heart rate escalating alongside. Usually scattershot back-and-forths like this either escalate to someone actually getting pissed off, or (more often than not, because most people are decent and everyone has a conscience) sort of flit away into vague agreements (“yeah, it sucks how crazy everything is right now”) or are given a reprieve through a distraction (your cousin walking up or a funny commercial coming on or whatever).
In conversations like these, I find it incredibly stressful to try and pin down topics as they’re flying past. Any one of these items is the root of an entire conversation – are we talking about bird flu? Grocery monopolies? The FDA? The White House? Commercialized farming? Augh! This is where the argument ladder helps me ground myself.
The Rungs of the Ladder
The argument ladder is made up of 4 rungs:
What’s the problem?
What’s the solution?
Who’s responsible for the solution?
Who’s responsible for keeping the responsible, responsible?
Most conversations like the above egg-CDC-Washington hairball become messy because they’re skipping rungs, leaping around, or otherwise not consistently grounded. Let’s climb the ladder:
Rung 1: What’s the problem?
First-rung conversations are focused on a simple but broad topic: what problem are we discussing, exactly? Take, for example, “the price of eggs is too high” – this is a problem, granted, but it’s a really unsatisfying problem for our first rung because it’s a subjective problem (maybe they’re high for you, but for ME, I buy eggs at Costco, and they’re doing okay, but I heard across town they’re fresh out, etc etc etc) and also because the price of eggs itself is ultimately the outgrowth of various other more systemic problems.
But hey - it’s harmless to have a price-of-eggs kind of argument, if the topic is relatively benign (egg expensive, egg out of stock) and you can keep the conversation at this rung. In general, hanging out on rung 1 simply means sharing gripes with someone else. Everyone in the conversation is allowed space to talk about THEIR experience with the problem or similar problems, and ultimately it’s not that big a deal if your problem and my problem are different.
But if the topic is more serious, things can get messy very fast. Most “culture war” topics are fundamentally not aligned at the problem definition level. To leap right to a particularly gnarly example, pro-choice people are generally arguing for personal autonomy – their problem statement is, broadly, “people currently do not have a right to decide what happens to their own body when they are pregnant” – while someone who identifies as “pro-life” is arguing against abortion because they believe it to be murder, implying a problem statement of, essentially, “people are able to legally murder babies”.
Woof. Rather than attempt an elegant segue, let’s move on to rung 2!
Rung 2: What’s the solution?
So you’re in a conversation with someone, and you’ve more or less agreed on a problem. Congratulations! A whole lot of conversations never make it here in one piece – or skip rungs, likely resulting in a big mess as previously illustrated.
If you’re talking to someone who shares your political beliefs and fundamental values in a broad sense, you’re much more likely make it to rung 2 intact. For instance, maybe you both agree that climate change exists and is an existential threat. Great! Now you can start talking about what to do about it, and you’ll find yourselves moving to rung 3 in no time flat.
Beware, though – many culture war topics & stances are a big enough mess at the rung 1 level (abortion, immigration, climate change) that skipping to rung 2 without being aware of that will create Problems.
Here’s an example: you’re at Thanksgiving and notice your mom bought a nice ham from a local farm and it doesn’t have added nitrites (or sugar, or hormones, or whatever, you get the idea). You say something positive about the fancy ham, and your conservative Uncle, who’s hanging out nearby with a brewski, chimes in with agreement.
You then start chatting and realize you have common ground: the general idea that we should all be eating more healthily (a rung 2 solution, sort of). However, the first rung of your perspective – the true problem to solve that led you to hold that solution in the first place – is “corporations are incentivized towards profit and have no incentive to provide health, so most people can’t afford healthy food”. However, as you continue chatting and he tosses off some derisive comments about others, you realize his first rung sounds like it’s something more like “people these days are dumb and lazy and make bad health choices”. Your 2nd-rung agreement, then, is going to be incredibly tenuous.
But let’s assume a more gratifying scenario where two people who are aligned on the problem are able to discuss a solution. This can be a pretty satisfying conversation! Perhaps you’ve found common ground with your cousin because you’re both freaked out about microplastics (rung 1). If you both eventually agree that there should be less plastic in packaging, you’re standing firmly on rung 2.
Rung 3: Who’s responsible for the solution?
Awesome, so you’re both on your third glass of wine and venting about how packaging has too much plastic and it’s getting into our brains or whatever (haha lol or whatever haha). Let’s stick with that scenario, because if I keep inventing new example scenarios this post will be ten thousand words long.
Now you’re at rung 3! There should be less plastic in packaging. Okay, great. Who’s responsible for reducing the amount of plastic in packaging?
This is the point at which intraparty schisms start emerging (they’ll become quite stark in rung 4). Take the plastic usage issue: where I live, there’s a plastic bag tax at checkout – essentially a way to acknowledge the idea that plastic is harmful in some sense, but also legislation that essentially puts the onus on me, the consumer to “use less plastic”, else I must pay a (tiny) fee.
Of course, the idea that this fee cuts down on plastic is either absurd (I don’t currently run a factory that converts oil to bags) or an incredibly long feedback loop (if we all use fewer bags, grocery stores will order fewer bags from the plastic bag factory, and eventually someone at the plastic bag factory scales down plastic bag production a few percentage points).
So, you might end up disagreeing with your cousin as to the responsible party here. Should consumers using less plastic to help curb the issue? Should companies start using more sustainable packaging? Should plastic factories themselves be shut down?
You’ll also likely have to avoid losing a conversation like this to a rung-1 pivot – say your cousin says “well, most of that plastic is coming from overseas anyway because everything has to be so cheap” and next thing you know, the entire problem statement is something about international vs. domestic labor and production, or something.
However, let’s get back on track here and assume you eventually agree with your cuz that companies should be using more reusable packaging. You’ve ascended to rung 4!
Rung 4: Who’s responsible for keeping the responsible, responsible?
I’ve been struggling for ages trying to form a rung 4 phrasing that doesn’t sound insane, so at least for now I’ve settled on one that sounds insane in a funny way.
Rung 4 is a luxury; a place to really spread out and get down to brass tacks. Rung 4 is what some issues can elevate to when one party gets full control of the branches of government. Rung 4 is often only material to people who have 3 rungs in common.
My go-to rung 4 example is to contrast neoliberal policy vs. progressive policy. Take our plastics solution. Sure, companies should use less plastic in their packaging. How do we make that actually happen? Here are some options:
Society innovates some technology that makes plastic harmless (yay! Companies can continue making decisions that maximize profit, because the problem is solved Elsewhere, by Progress)
Society innovates a cheaper, safer material that makes it cost-effective to switch away from plastic (yay! Companies can continue making decisions that maximize profit, because the problem is solved Elsewhere, by Progress)
Okay, we’ll set those aside, because they’re get-out-of-jail-free cards; they just allude to the idea that the problem will solve itself eventually, at some point. Here are some more grounded rung-4 options for our scenario:
It’s the consumers’ responsibility to hold companies accountable! We should vote with our wallets and not give our money to companies or products we judge to be too plasticky.
It’s the company’s responsibility to hold itself accountable! The company should use less plastic by being led by someone with more principles (note: this is typically only raised as a backwards-looking non-solution, usually idealizing some former leader of a company who had better principles)
It’s the government’s responsibility to hold the company accountable (neoliberal edition)! The government should incentivize companies in some way to use less plastic (e.g. with subsidies), essentially putting their thumb on the scale and creating a situation where it’s more profitable / desirable for a company to follow the rules
It’s the government’s responsibility (progressive edition)! The government should make that kind of plastic illegal, full stop, sorry companies, your profit model is at odds with humanity’s continued survival
I honestly think a lot of potential rung-4 arguments tend to be avoided up front because people who are generally on the same page are fairly good at sensing where those divisions exist, and “don’t want to get into it”. Maybe you’ve experienced a conversation at work with peers that have a shared implicit (or explicit) understanding that they all hold left-leaning stances, but one is, say, a Warren supporter and thinks we should be subsidizing corporations to encourage better behavior, but another is a dyed-in-the-wool leftist who thinks health care should be nationalized. They probably both know that to some degree but nobody is gonna go to the mat at happy hour over it.
At the same time, the 4th rung is where stances actually become fully concrete: what legislation is actually passed? What regulations are put into place?
On missing rungs & large-scale slogans
Hopefully some of my probably-too-numerous examples have resonated with you and you’re starting to think about situations you’ve experienced through this framework.
In practice, this is a helpful system for avoiding messy conversations that aren’t likely to go anywhere, or knowing when to punch out of (or, maybe, repair) one that’s fallen off the rails.
But it’s also not an excuse to fully bail on situations where people are agreeing on something despite not sharing lower rungs – a lot of “bipartisan” solutions are definitionally that: compromises that provide solutions that address different problems to different people. I’m not saying those solutions are often comfortable or efficacious, I’m just saying it happens.
Next time I’m going to use the ladder framework to talk about some slogans (Defund The Police, Make America Great Again) and unpack why I think some work in ways others don’t. And yes, I do think this tool really helps explain evangelicalism – we’ll make our way back there eventually.