"Guilt by Association"

I. F. Stone (Isidore Feinstein), 1907-1989

very progressive journalist, and pioneering user of 

the trope "guilt by association"

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology.  I.F.Stone

A "new McCarthyism" is seen in the manner in which guilt by association has been pursued by the likes of Glenn Beck and "mainstream" GOP leadership (if there is such a thing).  Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association. And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all.  Jeremy Ben Ami, President, JStreet

 The tenuous "evidence"—later discredited—that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe?  Naomi Klein

This is the story of a late-twentieth century invention, namely the ostensible moral and intellectual sin of accusations of "guilt by association."

This trope, "guilt by association," or GbA,  has a curious history and a curious present.  It has the following characteristics:

1) The trope user is almost invariably a self-described person of the "Left," or, in somewhat more modern usage, a "progressive."  The target is someone perceived as, or at least designated as someone opposed to the Left, a "right-winger."

2) The trope has a surface resemblance to accusations of established errors of reasoning -- fallacies -- but in fact it is the user of the trope who is illogical and irrational.

3)  The accusation underlying the usage of the trope is as much moral as intellectual;  the trope user combines a disdain for the ethics and morality of the target (the ostensible bad faith of so-called right-wing McCarthites, for example) with an accusation of intellectual incompetence (failure to understand elementary logic).

4)  The trope enables its users, who are often devoted supporters of totalitarian and other hateful movements, to pose as moral and intellectual superiors.

Morris Raphael Cohen (1880-1947)

Except when an author is involved in left-wing political polemics himself ( e.g. Fearnside and Holther in "Fallacy," 1959),  books on formal logic do not discuss this trope;  despite the claims by its proponents, it is not one of the recognized "fallacies."  But there is, or can be, some kernel of truth in the otherwise mindless GbA trope, namely that generalizations can be inappropriate.  Here is what that eminent American logician and long-term CCNY professor Morris Raphael Cohen (with Ernest Nagel) had to say in their Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934):

We have so far discussed the relation between premises and conclusion in case of rigorous proof.  But complete or conclusive evidence is not always available, and we generally have to rely on partial or incomplete evidence.  Suppose the issue is whether a certain individual, Baron X, was a militarist, and the fact that most aristocrats have been militarists is offered as evidence.  As a rigorous proof this is obviously inadequate.  It is clearly possible for the proposition Baron X was a militarist to be false even though the proposition offered as evidence is true.  But it would also be absurd to assert that the fact that most aristocrats are militarists is altogether irrelevant as evidence for Baron X having been one.  Obviously one who continues to make inferences of this type (Most Xs are Y's, Z is an X, therefore Z is a Y) will in the long run be more often right than wrong.  An inference of this type, which from true premises gives us conclusions which are true in most cases, is call probable. 

Those who employ the GbA trope misconstrue statements of probability to make them appear to be statements of certainty.  For example, the Wikipedia article on GbA employs a Euler diagram to argue the obvious:  if some B is part of C, it does not follow that all of B is C.  But in the political discussions to which the GbA users address themselves, the arguments by the GbA targets are not arguments of certainty.   It is not (typically) claimed that all members of a Communist front organization were dedicated Stalinists.  Insofar as such arguments were at all serious, they were arguments of probability, not certainty.

The "guilt" in the GbA trope is also telling.  "Guilt" is a term most frequently used in the criminal law, where the standard of proof is much higher  -- "beyond a reasonable doubt" --  than in the everyday world of political discussion.  The judgements we make in ordinary scholarship and in ordinary life  rely on what seems more probable, not on what seems probably beyond a reasonable doubt.   During the lifetime of the late Paul Robeson, for instance, both he and the Communist Party always insisted that he was not a Communist at all, just a very progressive person.  (After he died, the CP revealed that he had been a secret Communist all along).  But in his lifetime, given all the various associations of Robeson, it was reasonable to hold, by a balance of probabilities, that Robeson was a Communist, even absent proof beyond reasonable doubt.

Moreover, the trope "guilt by association" is ambiguous in its very nature.  It is regularly applied to the following types of statement, among others:

1)  A was once seen in a certain bar in which the notorious gangster B was also seen.  Therefore A is a gangster.

2) A is a member of five groups that were dominated by the Communist Party.  Therefore there is a certain probability -- whether high or low needs to be established by all the other circumstances -- that A is also a Communist.

It is the gravamen of GbA proponents that the truth-value of propositions 1) and 2) is exactly the same, namely nil.  That is of course preposterous on its face.  Pace these progressive writers and activists, associations among men are varied.  Sometimes negative inferences can be drawn from them to a greater or lesser degree of probability.  In some instances, as for example in those designated by the law of conspiracy, association may indeed give rise to valid findings of criminality.  In other cases association may be totally harmless.  Most generally, human associations are relevant without being conclusive in a great many of the judgements that we are called upon to make.    The proponents of the GbA trope must know this as well as we all do;  in the course of their daily lives they must know, just as the rest of us do, how to chose their spouses, their friends, their business associates,  their merchants, all on the basis of some sort of "guilt by association" judgements.  But when it comes to politics, these progressive GbA proponents declare that all evidence of human association is ultra vires, inadmissible for discussion in the market place of political ideas.

The origins of the GbA are not altogether clear.  The usage seems to have arisen in the post-WWII era, most specifically in the nineteen fifties.  The country was faced, on the one hand, with a Stalinist conspiracy, both through an elaborate network of Communist front organizations and Soviet espionage.  On the other hand, there were demagogic politicians, notably Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sought to use the Soviet conspiracy for his own purposes by making exaggerated claims of Communist penetration of the US government.  But there were indeed many Communists in places of influence, for example in the trade unions, who by and large attempted to rid themselves of Communist domination.  The trope "guilt by association" seems to have arisen in this atmosphere as a defense mechanism by Communists and their fellow travelers.  I. F. Stone, quoted above, was one of the most prominent users of the trope.  The logic was always this:  true, some members of the front organizations are Communists, some may even be Communist spies.  But this has no relevance, no relevance whatever, to the nature of the "progressive" (read front-organization) movement.  Not a few of these progressives had been students at CCNY during the tenure of Morris Raphael Cohen;  their ears had obviously been deaf to his teaching.

Today, the trope seems to be used in two specific efforts by the progressives.  The first is to criticize (and to misconstrue) the public's concern over Islamist terrorism.  This concern is termed "Islamophobia," a fairly new addition to the progressive polemical armamentarium.  The GbA argument runs as follows:  a) it is true that some Muslims are terrorists;  b) not all Muslims are terrorists; therefore, c), it is unjust, it is "guilt by association,"  to be more concerned over activities of American Muslims than over those of American Christians and Jews.  The fallacy of the trope, of course, is to construe the heightened concern by the public as holding that "all Muslims are terrorists."  This latter proposition is not advanced by anyone in public life who is at all serious.  Were it to be encountered, it would of course be both false and malicious.

The second GbA effort concerns the overlap of self-described "leftists" and "progressives" on the one hand with the organized anti-Israel movement on the other. As I have shown in a previous posting, the progressive group JStreet contains a sizable number of aggressive opponents of Israel.  Those of us who point to this association are regularly accused of using "guilt by association."  The logic, or rather the illogic of this accusation takes the same form as that of the other GbA accusations that we have seen.

I recently reported my finding that six of the nine identified top leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement were also active in the anti-Israel movement.  One reader, an ordained rabbi no less, wrote to complain that I was engaging in a "guilt-by-association" argument.  I wrote back, explaining, among other things, that I made no accusation of "guilt" but I also insisted that surely, to a thinking man, there would be something of interest in this finding.  "Nothing of interest at all," replied the rabbi,   "what you say is a red herring."  Red herring ?  Here is another left-wing trope from the fifties. My curiosity was aroused.  "Rabbi," I wrote back, "indulge  my curiosity:  do you personally support the boycott movement against Israel ? "  "I will not answer this question;  it has no relevance to our discussion,"  replied the good rabbi.  Well there you have it:  an I. F. Stone of our time, bearer, unlike his predecessor, of the nice Jewish name of his birth.

Snake Oil for Sale: The Charlatans of Jewish Public Opinion Research

Two well-known Jewish organizations with contrasting attitudes toward Israel have recently claimed to have plumbed American Jewish attitudes in this subject.   Each group has claimed that its own political stance is the one actually favored by the Jewish community as a whole.  But since neither of these groups -- JStreet on the one hand, the Committee for Accuracy in Media (CAMERA) on the other -- has used scientific methods of public opinion research,  neither's claim can be said to be supported.

I have recently written an article in which I summarized my objections to JStreet's methods, including its polling, so I will not repeat this material here.  My objections to CAMERA's polling materials will become clearer presently.

*****

Some thirty or forty years ago my colleague Tony and I were sipping a little something in the Faculty Club, and this is the amusing tale he told:

It seems that a couple of decades before this, a man who later became quite important as "an intellectual" -- let's call him X -- crossed the US-Canada border from Detroit to Windsor to spend a half hour  of "observation" in Ontario.  He carefully took note of the automobiles that passed him in the street of Windsor, noting the manufacturer of each.  Upon returning to Michigan, he penned a report to his nephew.   Canadians, X averred, favor the Ford automobile over any other make, by a margin of about ten to one.  That "observation," I believe, later became enshrined in the X's published oeuvre.

But snake oil sold as social-science wisdom is not always so charmingly harmless.  During the presidential election campaign of 1936, the Literary Digest polled ten million Americans (of whom about 2.5 million responded) and concluded that Ralph Landon, the Republican, would be an easy winner.  In November, as we all know, it was the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt who won, overwhelmingly, carrying 46 out of 48 states.

What went wrong ?  And what went wrong with the current polling of American Jews that I am so concerned about here ?

When properly done, the science of public opinion polling can accomplish remarkable feats of understanding.  By consulting about two thousand people -- an appropriate random sample of about this number -- it is possible to gain insight into the opinions and attitudes of millions.  The theory of  this sampling (i.e. probability theory) has been understood by mathematicians for hundreds of years, but it has been the social science of the twentieth century that has developed the techniques to accomplish adequate public opinion polling.  But recent times have also brought to the fore a host of charlatans in this area.  How can we tell the genuine from the specious ?  The genuine from the grey-area operator ?

The principles are clear enough.  On the one hand there is a "population" or "universe," too large or otherwise impractical to study directly, on the other hand there is the random sample which, to a known degree of accuracy, "represents" this population.  How can this sample be obtained ?  The most basic requirement is that each member of the population has an equal chance to be drawn for the sample.  So, in principle, we must have a complete listing of the members of the population, and then a mechanism, such as a lottery cylinder, to draw individuals by strict random methods.

In practice, the strict adherence to random principles is generally impossible, not least because a complete enumeration of the underlying population does not exist.  If American Jewry is postulated as the population, there is also the additional problem of definition:  who is a Jew, exactly;  is synagogue affiliation either a necessary or sufficient attribute ? Jewish parents ?  If so, how many ?  And so forth.  Also, as I have shown elsewhere, there are inherent problems of a sample of American Jews if it is based on a random sample of all Americans,  primarily because American Jews are not distributed randomly in the American population, so that such samples systematically under-sample areas of Jewish concentration.  All such problems have reasonable solutions, but these are scientifically complex, and also generally more expensive than certain "pollsters" will want to consider. The  National Jewish Population Survey, on the other hand,  furnishes an example of responsible scientific work.

For the use of public opinion polls in general, the New York Times has published its own very sensible standards.  What can the reader do when faced with reported "public opinion data" of unknown quality ?  Responsible, high quality social science in this area is not always easy to verify, since there are so many variables:  the selection of a scientific sample (obviously the first necessity), the formulation of the questions (sometimes inadequate, sometimes biased), the overall scientific quality of the various steps in the research process.  On the other hand, there is a telltale of absolutely unacceptable work:  failure of the researcher to disclose the details of his work.  When, as is the case of both JStreet and CAMERA here, the researcher fails to specify how his sample was obtained, the research, if for no other reason, is unacceptable.

As it happens, I have in the past corresponded with the executives of CAMERA, and so felt free, especially in view of my overall support of the work of that group, to express my suggestions in regard to their use of polling data.  I wrote to two of these people, for a total of three times, without ever once receiving a reply.  Here is the text of one of my messages:

Dear   , 

It would appear that the Luntz poll, which CAMERA sent around in its latest Alert, is not a scientific poll.  If I am right on this, it should be labelled non-scientific, to be accepted, if at all,  with caution. 

I am particularly interested in this problem because I recently had to criticize the polling practices of JStreet....It would appear that my methodological points here apply to Luntz as much as to  Gerstein (JS's pollster). The problem is the following:  it is very difficult (read expensive) to have a valid sample of the American Jewish population.  As I point out in my blog, the National Jewish Population Survey does a very good scientific job of surveying the Jewish population, but, as far as I can tell, nobody else does.  I wrote to JS's Gerstein to voice these concerns, but never received an answer. 

Yesterday I wrote to Luntz, as follows: 

Would it be possible to get details on how your sample was selected ?
My interest in the matter is detailed here:
http://www.fringegroups.com/2011/05/jstreet-gentle-facade-and-whats-behind.html
thanks for your help
Werner Cohn 

to which I received the following reply: 

Thank you for contacting us.  We appreciate your thoughts, suggestions and time it took you to write us. 

You MUST register ON OUR WEBSITE to be eligible for one of our focus groups or nationwide surveys.   You can sign-up on our website at http://www.theworddoctors.com/  Sorry, but requesting to sign you up by emailing us will not work. 

Due to the high volume of emails we receive, we cannot guarantee a response to your email. 

Remember: it's not what you say, it's what people hear. 

Sincerely, 

Dr. Frank Luntz & The Word Doctors Team
*Become a fan on Facebook* http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Frank-Luntz/249263279310

The report of the Luntz survey, to which CAMERA links, contains no information on how the sample was selected.  When this information is missing, no knowledgeable  reader can accept the results as scientific.  I think that you should press Luntz to explain his methodology publicly.  If he does not provide this information, and/or if, as I suspect, his methods prove to be less than scientific, there needs to be a disclaimer on your website, IMHO. 

No doubt you will appreciate the position of CAMERA supporters like myself when we criticize JStreet's various obfuscations.  If, as I hope it will, CAMERA comes out for truth in polling, our criticisms of JStreet  can gain significant additional force.

IN MEMORIAM:  John Gray Peatman (1904-1997), my first statistics professor at CCNY, ca. 1949


UPDATE, MARCH 2013

The organization Workmen's Circle has an old and proud history in the American Jewish community.  Formed by Eastern European immigrants in the early 20th century,  it had connections with the anti-Stalinist Jewish socialist movement.  It gained many members through its "fraternal benefits," i.e. funeral arrangements.  I myself belonged to it for a short while.

But lately, partly through its emphasis on its Yiddish-speaking heritage, it has largely fallen prey to a new type of membership:  militantly secularist, allied to anti-Israel causes.  Its old-time membership, people in their eighties, seem bewildered and outgunned.

Now this latter-day WC published what it calls a poll of American Jewish opinion, arriving at conclusions that purport to show that American Jews actually care little about Israel.  And how did the pollsters of the WC learn all this ?  Here is their description of their sampling method:

The poll was commissioned by the Workmen’s Circle / Arbeter Ring. For more information on the organization, go to:www.circle.org.
Principal investigators were Professor Steven M. Cohen of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) and Professor Samuel J. Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College and Stanford University.
The Washington office of IPSOS, under the direction of Dr. Alan Roschwalb, fielded the survey. Respondents included 1,000 American Jews, by Internet, who had previously agreed to participate in social research conducted by IPSOS. Survey was conducted April 19 – May 3, 2012.
The results were weighted to reflect the American Jewish population with respect to age, gender, regional distribution, educational attainment, marital status, intermarriage status, and Jewish parentage (none, one, two parents). They were also weighted to reflect registered voters

The participants in this "poll" were, it would seem, self-selected.  All were internet users, which of course automatically eliminates Haredi Jews.  The procedure seems, as if by design, to evade all scientific understanding of sampling.

Or did I perhaps miss something ?  Can something be said by way of reasonable scholarly explanation of this poll ?  I sent polite separate e-mails to Professor Cohen and Abrams, as well as to IPSOS and even the WC itself, asking for more details on the sampling method used in the poll.   Not one of these bothered to answer my  questions.