Jackson Lears writes:

Characterising Carter’s views on the nuclear arms race, Luce resorts to a familiar – and misleading – antithesis: the president’s ‘heart’ hated nuclear weapons, while his ‘head’ feared vulnerability to a Soviet first strike. One could just as easily say that the effort to move towards nuclear disarmament came from the head, as the only sane alternative to the fantasy of a winnable nuclear war, and that the fear of a Soviet first strike came from the heart – from the terror that the Soviets were so maddened by ideology as to provoke their own annihilation by America’s weapons.

Good point! I think this problem often arises with head vs. heart arguments, that by labeling one position as the “head,” you’re already rhetorically stacking the deck.

This is kinda related to the One-Way Street Fallacy: Considering only one possibility of a change that can go in either direction. In both cases, the framing of the problem is implicitly doing most of the work.

Overall I disliked Lears’s article—it seems a bit “tendentious,” as the scholars like to say. For example, he writes that CIA backing of jihadist groups “provoked the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979,” quoting Zbigniew Brzezinski as saying, “We did not push the Russians into intervening, but we did knowingly increase the chances they would do so.” The quote is interesting but I don’t buy the “provoked” thing: Lears is committing the attribution error of assuming that “we” have agency and “they” don’t. Nothing was forcing the Soviet Union to invade a neighboring country. This is not to say that the CIA behavior was appropriate or wise, just that I think Lears is misattributing the blame.

I guess that Lears has a thing about Russia, because later in his article he refers to Putin actions toward Ukraine as “Russia’s concern to maintain friendly relations with its ‘near abroad.'” Friendly relations, huh? Nothing shows friendship like invading and bombing the hell out of a country, I guess. With friends like these . . . . He also writes that Putin “focus on his own nation’s interests,” but I don’t actually see why it’s in his nation’s interests to start an aggressive war. I wonder whether Lears thinks the U.S. government is focusing on our nation’s interests with its bombing campaigns.

Anyway, no need for you to agree with me on the details. The reason for my post is to share my appreciation for Lears’s point about head-and-heart arguments. I put in the rest just to note that I have my problems with his whole article. That’s fine; someone can make a good point within a larger argument that I disagree with.