NYT, if you want credibility on the issue of "call-out culture" and "social justice", for God's sakes, don't have a Republican columnist write the piece. I know David Brooks is a genteel Never Trumper. It doesn't matter. You don't build credibility to talk about an issue by speaking as the enemy.
An ad hominem is fallacious because it is irrelevant to the argument - an argument is not irrelevant merely because it is about the speaker. If the speaker's stated political goals are to oppose a political movement, arguments about how that political movement is actually bad should be treated with suspicion.
(Also, it would make more sense to attack the argument on the merits if it contained merits beyond "It's bad, and I don't like it, and here's an anecdote.")
Yeah it does matter. Are you calling out Brooks and just dismissing anything else about him ... as a person so you can call him out?
Are you trying to illustrate the point of the article in a weird way?
We should be thankful that the people who use these smearing tactics are so lacking in self-awareness. This makes them easier to call out to people of good sense who can still recognize real intellectual discourse.
For instance:
>But the “Invisibilia" episode implicitly suggests that call-outs are how humanity moves forward. Society enforces norms by murdering the bullies who break them. When systems are broken, vigilante justice may be rough justice, but it gets the job done. Prominent anthropologist Richard Wrangham says this is the only way civilization advances that he’s witnessed.
>Really? Do we really think cycles of cruelty do more to advance civilization than cycles of wisdom and empathy? I’d say civilization moves forward when we embrace rule of law, not when we abandon it. I’d say we no longer gather in coliseums to watch people get eaten by lions because clergy members, philosophers and artists have made us less tolerant of cruelty, not more tolerant.
Here Brooks straw-mans Wrangham and Brooks' other ideological opponents. Many/most of us would not say that "clergy, philosophers, and artists have made us less tolerant of cruelty". We would say that, as a society, we no longer gather to watch people being fed to lions because the lowest sectors of society have gained enough power to prevent themselves being fed to lions.
This difference in lens derives directly from Brooks' being a Republican: he comes from what has traditionally been called an "idealist" tradition, and he illustrates that here. He thinks that ideas move history, so better ideas (from philosophers, artists, and clergy) make society better.
In other traditions, particularly the one he's attacking, the engine of moral progress is the gradual, halting, progressive balancing of power across individuals and groups.
To successfully attack the "balancing of power" model, you have to actually name that model, then show counter-evidence. Brooks has instead casually elided the model he hopes to attack in favor of pillorying his purported opponents as incompetent at applying his model.
If you have a severe fever, you might have mononucleosis, and you might have meningitis (this happened to someone I know). Or you might have the flu. If I think you have the flu, I can't label running a test for mono as incompetent treatment of the flu. It's testing an entirely different hypothesis which stands on its own.
This goes to the heart of Brooks' conclusion:
>The problem with the pseudo-realism of the call-out culture is that it is so naïve. Once you adopt binary thinking in which people are categorized as good or evil, once you give random people the power to destroy lives without any process, you have taken a step toward the Rwandan genocide.
If you think that ideas drive history, call-out culture is the first step to the Rwandan genocide. If you don't believe that in the first place, you have no reason to accept the conclusion: preventing an "American Rwandan genocide", in your view, might require something else entirely, or such a genocidal war may be a priori so unlikely that it's no more worth "preventing" it than spraying "tiger repellent" on oneself when going outside.
I don't think the article was written as some sort of Republican or any kind of attack on ... whatever it is you think it is.
I think this really is more about behavior and our choices and the consequences in this day and age. That's it.
In some strange way your post also seems a bit like how the call-out stuff happens. The context of some event is skewed and there's no way for some folks to see anything else.
I think that talking about behavior and choices gets to the heart of it: we can't try to convince people to adopt different ideas or different culture and expect behavior to change. We have to examine, empirically, what is actually driving call-out witch hunts -- which I very much agree with you and Brooks are a terrible, stupid pathology of our present (polite, urban) society.
To stop this, we need to ask: why is this happening?
In particular it's noteworthy that when the left calls itself out, it reacts as the left desires (see Emily in this article, or Al Franken, or John Conyers, or ...), and when the left calls the right out, the right attacks the legitimacy of even being called out in the first place and starts making arguments about the "rule of law" because the law tends to be on the conservative side (since conservatives are, somewhat by definition, those who are on the side of what the law presently says). It's not new, and it's absolutely relevant context for this article.
That seems absurd.
Happily, the GP's statement makes an empirical claim, so there's at least some hope of it being testable.
That said, since the GP is making a questionable generalization about two large populations, it would be helpful it he/she provided a larger body of supporting examples.
>starts making arguments about the "rule of law" because the law tends to be on the conservative side
I think that definition of "conservative" is too broad, since it encompasses left-liberal aspects of the law. For instance, Title IX is law, and means that universities (such as where I work) have strong codes of conduct and reporting for sexual harassment.
>(since conservatives are, somewhat by definition, those who are on the side of what the law presently says).
Again, being a conservative is a different thing from using the status-quo as a reference point, and in particular, the latter is a near-universal human trait across most behaviors.