Fallacies We Live By

 

I have special difficulty explaining to students the ad populum fallacy and the ad temperantiam fallacy. The problem is that public discourse as a whole is largely currently founded on these two fallacies. Pointing them out causes major cognitive dissonance. They tend to do a double take, and at first be incredulous. 

This is precisely why it is vital to teach them. The fact that we do not teach the logical fallacies in every school is profoundly sinister. It allows us to be manipulated.

The “ad populum” fallacy is the notion that truth is a majority mandate. If everyone thinks something is true, that proves it is true: “everybody knows.” This is the very premise of “constructivism,” the currently dominant educational philosophy. Constructivism holds that all truth is “socially constructed.” Truth is whatever the majority of any given social group says it is, and accordingly varies between cultures. Which is why we get “cultural relativism” and the insistence that all cultures must be accepted to be equal. It is also why we get transsexualism: according to constructivism, if an interest group can just get everyone to agree that a man can become a woman, it is a fact. For this very reason, dissent cannot be tolerated.

This is why classroom teachers always want to break into small groups. They cannot teach; the group must decide. The current Vatican synod on synodality seems to be based on the same dynamic: there is no truth other than whatever the people in the pews want to hear. We all get to vote on whether the sun goes around the earth, or vice versa. In fact, until the time of Copernicus, according to this theory, the sun DID go around the earth. Galileo was dead wrong. Einstein was a lunatic. Slavery was perfectly moral in the US South until those meddling Yankees got involved. 

Interestingly, based on constructivism, a bridge built in India by Scottish engineers, would probably collapse. Scottish mathematics and physics cannot work in India.

The “ad temperantiam” fallacy holds that, whenever there are two opposing views, the truth must lie in the middle. A popular view, as old as Delphi, but also already exploded in ancient times. This fallacy is implicit whenever people object to “extremists”; as if holding a view strongly proves it is wrong. This is perfectly illogical. 

The “ad temperantiam” fallacy is also implied when people demand an immediate ceasefire and a negotiated settlement for, say, the war in Gaza or the war in Ukraine. As though the problem is always a refusal of both or either side to compromise.

If two people hold opposing views strongly, there is no reason to think that a position in the middle between the two, which perhaps no one holds or would argue, is more correct than either of them. If some people think the sky is blue, and some people think the sky is red, this is not proof that the sky is purple. If teacher thinks 2 + 2 = 4, and little Johnny thinks 2 + 2 = 7, this does not prove that 2 + 2 = 5.5. If some people believe the sun goes around the earth, and others that the earth goes around the sun, it does not follow that the heavenly bodies dance around each other. If one country invades another, it does not prove that they have a legitimate grievance, and their opponent is equally responsible for the war in pig-headedly defending themselves.

In the natural course of things, if there is a disagreement between two parties or two positions, one position is probably wrong, in error, and the other correct.

Wild in the Streets

 

Justin Trudeau is increasingly facing hostile crowds wherever he goes, crowds shouting things like “traitor” and “criminal.” Trudeau seems to lean into this, lingering, smiling and waving—almost as if he is taunting them. 

Brian Lilley warns this is because the crowds make him look good, and make his opposition look immoderate and scary. They play into his hands. They are winning him sympathy and support.

I think Lilley is wrong. He has fallen for the moderate fallacy, which all professional politicos seem to believe, even though it is a formal logical fallacy, and has been disproven repeatedly in political practice. If it were true, after all, that the moderate ticket wins, that most of the votes are in the centre, the Liberal Democrats would be in perpetual power in Britain.

Has the left, effectively in power in Canada and in the US, almost in perpetual power, been conspicuously moderate in recent years? Has Black Lives Matter? Has Extinction Rebellion and the environmentalist movement? Have the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and the trans movement? Has Antifa? Has Idle No More and the aboriginal movement, with their church burnings?

This is how it really works: the average person mostly wants peace and quiet and to get along with their lives. They don’t care about right or wrong. If a small group kicks up a fuss, they will want them suppressed. January 6 was suppressed precisely because it looked insignificant, not a real threat to anyone. Or the Freedom Convoy. Unlike, say, Antifa or Black Lives Matter. If this does not work, if the group seems persistent, those in charge, and the general public, will give them whatever they demand to settle them down. This is what the left has been exploiting for many years: the appeasement instinct. 

It would work just as well for the right. Indeed, the right must do it, or lose ground indefinitely. It is necessary to make it more trouble for those in power, or for the big corporations, to appease the left than it is to appease the right. Only then will the right make progress.

We are seeing this now. Disney, for example is trapped between irate leftists demanding no dwarfs appear in Snow White, and rightists no longer watching, no longer going to Disneyland, declaring this a travesty. Bud Light or the LA Dodgers are caught between irate trans people demanding public tribute, and irate Christians and “frat boys” protesting and no longer buying. All these corporations probably wanted was to keep everyone happy and keep peacefully making profits. 

Because until now the right was determined to stay polite and reasonable, the left kept always getting what they want. The squeaking wheel gets the grease.

Now the right is employing the same tactics. It may be distasteful; public protests are anti-democratic by their nature. But there is no alternative, so long as the other side is employing the tactic. And it is working. Contrary to Lilley’s prediction, Poilievre and the Conservatives are rising, not falling, in the polls.

Moderation as a Moral Value

 

Friend Xerxes has his own definition of sin: “I define sin as taking something good, beneficial, healthy, and pushing it to an extreme. Too much, or too little.” Life, then, is a matter of balancing opposites. 

Carl Jung believed in something similar. He credited the concept to Gnosticism. It is also perhaps reflected in the yin-yang symbol familiar in the Far East.

This is not the Christian idea, and it does not work.

For balance itself, being a value, must be balanced by its opposite. Moderation must not be pushed to an extreme, or one is immoderate. One must be only half-balanced. And “the good” must not be pursued, but must be balanced by evil, or – or evil happens? Too much good is not good?

In other words, the concept produces immediate self-contradictions.

And can we hold that there is such a thing as too little rape and murder? What amount of each would be just enough? By what standard can we judge this, or anything, if there are no absolute values?

Christianity holds, instead, along with ancient Greek thought, that there are absolute values: one cannot have too much good, too much truth, or too much beauty.

Sunday Gospel Reflection: Moderation in Most Things

The Wedding at Cana: Russian icon

There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee,
and the mother of Jesus was there.
Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short,
the mother of Jesus said to him,
“They have no wine.”
And Jesus said to her,
“Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come.”
His mother said to the servers,
“Do whatever he tells you.”
Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings,
each holding twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus told the them,
“Fill the jars with water.”
So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them,
“Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.”
So they took it.
And when the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine,
without knowing where it came from
— although the servers who had drawn the water knew —,
the headwaiter called the bridegroom and said to him,
“Everyone serves good wine first,
and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one;
but you have kept the good wine until now.”
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee
and so revealed his glory,
and his disciples began to believe in him.

Gandolfi: Cana

I often wonder how prohibitionists got around this passage. Jesus’s first miracle was making wine. And note the circumstance: “Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.” In other words, Jesus turns water into wine at the point when the wedding guests are already drunk, too drunk to know or care the quality of the wine they are drinking. And does he make just a little bit more for them? No; six thirty-gallon containers, 180 gallons of fine wine. We don’t know how large the wedding party was, but we do know that less water than this was considered adequate for them to bathe and wash up. We are talking epic bender.

For millennia, the idea that moderation is a virtue has been popular. The Greeks called it “the Golden Mean,” and made it the mainspring of their morality. Confucius believed in something similar. “Nothing in excess.” “Moderation in all things.” The same concept fuelled the prohibition movement: “temperance,” after all, means “moderation.”

De Vos: Cana

Yet Christianity actually seems to pull against this. Temperance would have suggested Jesus take a wife; that he not drive the moneylenders out of the temple; that he hold his tongue and avoid criticizing established authority. Instead, he provoked them into killing him.

And this seems to me to be the main point of the present story, the story of the wedding at Cana; since a marriage is by its nature a celebration of balance and moderation, the union of the ying with the yang. Jesus is celebrating this--reluctantly--yet also subverting it. As he does by not, himself, marrying.

Bloch: Cana

Temperance is the path to success in this world, no doubt. Temperance is a good idea if you want to remain healthy and become wealthy. But, as St. Paul says, the wisdom of the world is foolishness to God.

There is, in fact, an innate contradiction in the doctrine of the mean. If we must have moderation in all things, mustn’t that also include moderation? Otherwise, aren’t we being immoderate?

Ergo, “moderation” or “balance” is not an eternal virtue, but something advisable in some situations, and not at others.

And I'll drink to that.