So. This “missing mood” idea that’s been getting super popular of late…
…it’s just a generalized tone argument, right?
And, like, I am totally fine with that. To be clear. Tone arguments get a bad rap these days. Sure, “that’s nasty and you’re out of line” doesn’t reflect on the truth or falsehood of a proposition – in exactly the same way that “you have a missing mood” doesn’t – but it is in fact very useful to be able to say “this discourse has rules, because it’s important that as many people as possible be able to participate without fear, and if you break those rules we’re going to smack you down for reasons unrelated to whether you’re right or wrong.”
But, for better or worse, “missing mood” is a tone argument. It’s saying: Whatever you espouse, you’re supposed to be espousing it somberly and gravely, with a profound appreciation for the costs of your preferred policies. If you seem too cavalier or aggressive about scoring points, if you seem too happy about winning, that’s going to earn you some Distrust Points and we’re going to take you less seriously overall. And this logic applies to literally any discursive position that someone might take.
Except that I think a lot of the “missing mood” enthusiasts don’t realize how content-neutral this idea actually is. Based on the structure of the arguments I’ve seen, it seems like they expect the “correct” mood to point in exactly one direction for every issue – like, even if the evidence turns out to mandate Solution B, obviously every decent person is going to want Solution A, and a failure to feel that way is an indication of Something Being Wrong With You. Evidence of suspiciously non-moral thinking, at any rate.
Which is of course total nonsense. This kind of meta-argument isn’t actually that different from regular argument. Whatever your preferred position is, you’re going to be able to put together an argument for why decent people should want to agree with you.
Like…the archetypical display of a missing mood, according to that Bryan Caplan essay (and according to most of the discourse I’ve seen), is the chest-pounding aggressive joy of the nationalist hawk. “The reasonable hawkish mood is sorrow – and constant yearning for a peaceful path.” A hawk who doesn’t display those things is probably insincere or evil or at least very thoughtless. War is hell, dontcha know?
And to this, the actual (American) hawk replies:
The United States is better at war than any other polity in the world. We have developed the power to exercise our will across the globe through military means. When we do, the benefits for our nation are immense. The people, who are normally so fractious and so riven, are bonded together in patriotism. The economy soars. Young men (and women) are given the chance to forge their character in the only crucible of spirit that has ever really meant anything.
What do we seek to do with this great power? We seek to make things better, for everyone. We seek to overthrow dictators and tyrants. We seek to win freedom for oppressed peoples. We seek to spread democracy and prosperity.
Maybe, when all the evidence has been weighed, it’ll turn out that this doesn’t work; maybe all we can do, when we flex our military muscle, is cause more damage. Maybe we’re actually so powerless that we can’t defeat the wicked and bring a better life to the downtrodden. Maybe there’s no just war we can fight that will turn our feckless youths into heroes. But if that’s true, it would be a great tragedy. And if you’re fucking laughing and singing about it, if you seem thrilled to turn our symbols of martial valor into badges of shame amongst the smug elite set, this does not inspire me to think of you as a moral agent acting in good faith.
You can do this for pro- and anti-immigration positions, for economic authoritarianism and for libertarianism, for transhumanism and Leon Kass metaphysical biodeterminism, on and on and on. It’s not hard.
And if your response is “well, some of those alleged missing moods seem totally reasonable to me, and some of them just seem like empty argumentation – ”
– well, congratulations, you’ve discovered that humans sometimes have different moral values. Which is really where this whole thing should have started and ended.
This is an excellent post, but I think your example cuts against your point. That’s a really good steelman of the hawkish position - one that would be advance by a Prussian general, or maybe a Spanish-American war advocate. In the modern era, you almost never hear people exulting on the character building qualities of war, at least since the end of WWI.
It’s considered gauche to claim that the actual fighting of a war, as opposed to its consequences, is what makes a war worthwhile. And yet people really do like killing people and seeing our soldiers kill people on TV. So you’ll have people say in one breath “we’ve exhausted all other options with Saddam,” and in the next create YouTube compilations of bombed being dropped over “God bless the USA.”
Your steelman doesn’t have a missing mood. A good steelman won’t. But the actual existing American war hawks that try to reconcile their bloodlust with the Somme absolutely has a missing mood.
The question isn’t whether this hawk is displaying a missing mood. (Which, to be clear, he absolutely is – as you imply, he’s failed to learn the lessons of the Somme, and there are good reasons to look askance at that.)
The question is whether he sees a missing mood in you. Which he is, assuming that you’re a standard-issue American urban elite dove type. He sees your lack of interest in patriotism, your lack of respect for the sacrifices and the heroism of the military, etc. etc. etc., and thinks that you’re not reacting to the evidence like a decent person would, and therefore he probably trusts your evidence a little less than he would if you made the appropriate rhetorical genuflections.