Letter to the Editor: We should listen to Glen Beck

The following letter to the editor appeared in the Kansas City Star on August 5, 2010

This is the Glenn Beck of Fox News that I know:

He grew up in the Northwest. His family owned a bakery, and he worked there with his father. For Christmas when he was 13 years old, his mother knitted him a sweater to show how much she loved him. The following year she committed suicide.

In his adolescent mind he couldn’t understand why she would abandon him in such a way if she loved him. He turned to drugs and alcohol. He went so far down that he had two choices. He chose to go through a long rehab and overcame his demons.

In his first marriage, he and his wife were told their baby girl would be born with severe physical disabilities. They chose birth over abortion. Today, in his second marriage, the now-24-year-old daughter lives with him, and he takes care of her. She shares his love of history and politics.

He is a voracious reader of history, a passionate defender of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and will relentlessly go after anyone who is a threat to those documents.

He has overcome obstacles that many people could not. I learn from him and respect him.

Roberta Newth

Leawood

As with many authors, this author does not make her conclusion explicit, but she seems to be saying something about the value of Glen Beck’s thoughts and opinions. In particular, she is trying to establish that Glen Beck is a person whose thoughts and arguments are valuable, is someone from whom we can learn, and is worth taking the time to listen to; in short, that Beck is someone whose views should be taken very seriously. If we take that as her conclusion then the question to ask is whether any of the information she provides in her letter is relevant to that conclusion.

Here are the claims the author makes about Beck (for reasons I’ll discuss below, I am dividing the claims into two categories):


Category I

• He grew up in the Northwest.
• His family owned a bakery.
• His mother knitted a sweater for him when he was 13.
• His mother committed suicide when he was 14.
• His mother’s suicide made him depressed and so . . .
• He abused drugs and alcohol.
• He went through rehab and overcame his addiction(s).
• Even though his first daughter was born with severe physical disabilities, he chose not to seek an abortion.
• His daughter currently lives with him.

Category II

• He reads history.
• He defends the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Do these claims establish the conclusion or make it more likely to be true? First we’ll consider the importance of the claims in Category I. So, does the fact that he has overcome obstacles show that we can learn at lot if we take his arguments seriously? Obviously the facts that he is the son of a suicide, a recovering alcoholic, and the father of a child with severe disabilities does not tell us anything about the strength, thoughtfulness, validity, or soundness of any of his arguments. Nor do they tell us whether he is, in general, a knowledgeable person or a truthful person. In order to know whether or not Mr. Beck’s political positions are well-reasoned or that his arguments are sound, we must take a close look at those arguments and those positions, not his family background. Undoubtedly people who have overcome great personal tragedies are still capable of producing invalid arguments and being careless with their opinions. So the fact that Mr. Beck has overcome difficulties is not relevant to whether any thought, opinion, or argument he offers is well-reasoned, insightful or valid. And thus claims about his personal life give us no reason to think that we can learn a great deal from him; but neither do they imply that we cannot. They are simply irrelevant.

The author of this editorial is asking us to pay attention to the person who is making the argument(s) rather than the argument(s) itself. Thus this seems to fit the pattern of ad hominem fallacies. However unlike most ad hominem fallacies, the effort is not to turn the audience against a person but rather the opposite—to get us to adopt a favorable attitude toward a person and thus (fallaciously) give credence to his arguments. Thus it is an example of inverse ad hominem.

Now, I divided the author’s claims about Beck in two categories because while it may be obvious that those in Category I are completely irrelevant to the issue of the worth (or lack thereof) of Beck’s arguments, it is less obvious that the claims in Category II are equally irrelevant. The fact that he reads history might seem like a legitimate reason to pay attention to the man. However, in the context of deciding whether a person’s arguments and opinions are valuable, the claim that the person reads history is much too vague to give us any useful information. Plenty of people read history but have only a superficial understanding of the causes and consequences of historical events. It is possible, for example, to read works by and about Thomas Jefferson without developing a very deep understanding of his thoughts and arguments. That a person reads history, or claims to read history, is no guarantee that their thoughts are coherent, insightful and worth paying attention to. Thus even the claim that Mr. Beck reads history is not relevant to the question of whether his arguments and opinions are well-founded.

This argument is in critical condition because none of the premises have any bearing on the truth of the conclusion.