The Yes But Game

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Clarissa

January 8, 2015

“On the one hand, religious extremists should not threaten people who offend their beliefs. On the other hand, nobody should offend their beliefs. The right to blasphemy should exist but only in theory. They do not believe religious extremists should be able to impose censorship by issuing threats, but given the existence of those threats, the rest of us should have the good sense not to risk triggering them.”

This is precisely what bugs me about many of the articles I have seen in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. “Of course, they didn’t deserve to die, but they shouldn’t have published these offensive cartoons.”

We’ve seen this a million times before. “Of course, nobody deserves to get raped but she shouldn’t have been out drinking that late at night.” “Of course, hitting people is wrong, but he shouldn’t have mouthed off like that.” “Of course, Putin was wrong to invade Ukraine but he shouldn’thave been provoked into doing it.”

“Yes, but” is a very old game where people underhandedly ally themselves with ideas they are uncomfortable expressing openly. If you allow yourself to be caught in the endless loop of a “Yes but” debate, you will never get out because your opponent is not being open and direct with you. The best way to frustrate a “yes butter” is to walk away at the first sign of yes – butting.

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13 responses to “The Yes But Game”

DWeird

January 8, 2015

I do this, or at least think it at times. ‘It’s a reasonable person’s job to avoid harm, so why didn’t the victim just do the reasonable thing?’ is roughly the thought. I don’t think it’s necessarily anything particularly aggressive, though I’m sure it can look like it from outside.

What’s happening instead I think is a kind of hiding under the blankets to make the monsters go away. Instead of seeing the event as something that happened to a different person, you imagine yourself in their shoes instead, and go through possible individual strategies that would allow you to avoid their fate. They didn’t keep their head down enough, so all I need to do is keep my head even lower than I am now and I’ll be fine.

So now instead of things just happening to you without you having a say in it, you’ve got both active and imaginary control over a problem. It even works to a degree, as an individual strategy. As far as a way of coming to terms with the world we share, and dealing with the problem as it presents itself, it may well be worse than nothing.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 8, 2015
  
  So true! Of course, the human brain immediately goes into “Bad things like these won’t happen to me if I do everything right” mode. It’s a mechanism of self-defense that is absolutely understandable and normal. But we’ve got to fight this instinct because it leads to superstition and silliness.
  
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Jonathan Mayhew

January 8, 2015

Yes. Saying “but” negates whatever comes before it, often in a deeply dishonest or at least self-deceptive way.

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David P. Bellamy

January 8, 2015

I am skeptical of this. It seems to me that “yes but” is an important technique to use to challenge students to think more carefully about a topic.

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 8, 2015
  
  Yes, of course, pedagogically we do many things that have no place outside of the classroom. Like assigning grades. If you start grading your family members on how well they do things, that would be abusive. Or if you make your wife raise her hand to get permission to speak. 🙂
  
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musteryou

January 8, 2015

I’ve started to notice, belatedly regrettably, what was always lurking behind this tendency, as well. “I’m so equivocal that butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth and you really, really wouldn’t want me as a friend.”

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Jones

January 8, 2015

Did anyone see Rick Santorum’s “butter melting” defence of free speech yesterday?

I think it was on the Bloomberg US feed.

Slick Rick was telling the viewers how he supported the Charlie Hebdo people, how he was a defender of free speech, but the Bloomberg guys caught him out with a suggestion that he highlight the cartoons themselves.

Then it was all about how “he didn’t put anything on his Web site” and how he’d only put “relevant” and “responsible” stuff there …

It was the most impassioned non-defence of free speech I’ve seen from an American politician.

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1. aglaonika
  
  January 8, 2015
  
  “Then it was all about how “he didn’t put anything on his Web site” and how he’d only put “relevant” and “responsible” stuff there … It was the most impassioned non-defence of free speech I’ve seen from an American politician.”
  
  I don’t know the American laws very well but here the online legal dictionary says that there are exceptions from the right of the free speech such as “fighting words”, “terrorist threats”, “defamation”, “obscenity”, and “false advertising”. So maybe that wasn’t an act of non-defence on his behalf.
  
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el

January 8, 2015

If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/the-blasphemy-we-need/?_r=1

Meanwhile, in Ukraine (in Russian):
http://frankensstein.livejournal.com/580290.html

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el

January 8, 2015

Just since this needs to be quoted too – Aglaonika, with which point do you disagree?

it’s precisely the violence that justifies the inflammatory content. In a different context, a context where the cartoons and other provocations only inspired angry press releases and furious blog comments, I might sympathize with the FT’s Tony Barber when he writes that publications like Hebdo “purport to strike a blow for freedom when they provoke Muslims, but are actually just being stupid.” (If all you have to fear is a religious group’s fax machine, what you’re doing might not be as truth-to-power-ish as you think.) But if publishing something might get you slaughtered and you publish it anyway, by definition you are striking a blow for freedom, and that’s precisely the context when you need your fellow citizens to set aside their squeamishness and rise to your defense.

Whereas far too often in the West today the situation is basically reversed: People will invoke free speech to justify just about any kind of offense or provocation or simple exploitation (“if we don’t go full-frontal seven times on ‘Game of Thrones’ tonight, man, the First Amendment dies”), and then scurry for cover as soon as there’s a whiff of actual danger, a hint that “bold” envelope-pushing might require actual bravery after all.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/the-blasphemy-we-need/?_r=1

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 9, 2015
  
  Can we not quote Douthat on my blog? He is a vicious little piece of uncollected garbage.
  
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  1. el
    
    January 9, 2015
    
    \ Can we not quote Douthat on my blog? He is a vicious little piece of uncollected garbage.
    
    OK. I quoted w/o even checking who it was, btw.
    Do you disagree with what he says here? Why?
    
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  2. Jones
    
    January 9, 2015
    
    #DontDouthat 🙂
    
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