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Laurie Penny |
A recent article called "It isn't feminism. It's Islamophobia" by Laurie Penny in The Guardian is a good demonstration of where
politically correct thinking takes us eventually. In his book The Retreat of Reason Anthony Browne
argues that political correctness is an abandonment of Reason in favour of
feeling; feeling guided by those presented as victims versus those presented
as villains, typically those deemed to be powerless versus those deemed to be
powerful, poor/rich, weak/strong and so on. Laurie Penny’s article takes us
into this mental landscape.
Robert Spencer has provided a very good rebuttal of her
article here but I want to explore the mode of thought that it represents.
Penny deploys a catalogue of fallacious arguments. The ones I’ve identified
are:
- Poisoning the Well – vilifying the speaker in advance in order to discredit what he/she says.
- Argumentum ad odium – (argument to hatred) whereby either the speaker is deemed to be so hateful that their argument should be discounted or the argument leads to such a hated conclusion that it cannot be true. Sub-type of appeal to emotion.
- Argumentum ad hominem – (attack the character of the speaker)
- tu quoque – a charge of hypocrisy as an attempt to invalidate what the speaker has said. It’s still a fallacy even if the charge of hypocrisy is justified.
- Straw man – exaggerate or take an extreme case of what the speaker is saying in order to counter this instead of the more reasonable case that the speaker is actually making
- Guilt by association – the speaker’s argument or point of view is invalid due to the people they can be associated with or the people who may share their point of view
You will find fuller definitions and examples of these
fallacies at www.fallacyfiles.org
The above are examples of fallacious reasoning which have
been recognised for centuries but Penny (and modern liberal culture) introduces new variants of fallacious
reasoning which are the fruits of political correctness:
- An argument is valid because the speaker belongs to a recognised victim group and what they say must be accepted uncritically
- The speaker cannot be criticised because he/she belongs to a recognised victim group
- An argument can be true for one group and simultaneously false for another. Each group can have a different truth.
- Some arguments are highly offensive to certain recognised victim groups and must therefore be false. One suspects that even if true they would still be forbidden.
One thing that we learn from studying fallacies is that
Reason has rules. Go against those rules and you go against Reason. Reason has
guided us out of the darkness for centuries and we abandon it at our peril.
Instead of trying to write cogent arguments Penny attempts
to discredit viewpoints through vilification (or assumed viewpoints which are
given to her a priori as a
consequence of which group someone belongs to in her conceptual world).
She writes, “the
rhetoric and language of feminism has been co-opted by Islamophobes, who could
not care less about women of any creed or colour.”
This statement
reveals a lot. She has labelled those showing concern about women’s rights under
the impact of Islam as Islamophobes. This label is a term of vilification for
her. She thinks that anyone she defines in this way cannot possibly have any
real concern for women. She is thus poisoning the well by declaring that anyone
in this group should not be listened to regarding women’s rights. She thus
attempts to invalidate their arguments based on the group she assigns them to.
This is fallacious reasoning and we can see how it arises out of politically
correct modes of thought.
Instead of being
pleased that support for women is coming from unexpected quarters, she proceeds
to base her evaluation of this concern on her own prejudiced and
demonized view of those expressing
concern. If she took the time to listen to their arguments and the evidence
that supports them she would discover that she has in fact missed something.
But she will not do this because she has defended herself against reason will
fallacious thinking.
“It's the dishonesty
that angers me most.(1) It's the hypocrisy of men claiming to stand for women's
rights while appropriating our language of liberation to serve their own
small-minded agenda.(2) Far-right groups like the English Defence League (3) and the British National party (4) rush to
condemn crimes against women committed by Muslim men (5), while fielding
candidates who make claims like "women are like gongs - they need to be struck regularly". (6)
(1) Appeal to
emotion
(2) Conclusion
drawn from stereotype – what makes the EDL far-right?
(3) Assumption
based on her own prejudice
(4) Guilt by
association
(5) The nature of
the speaker does not invalidate the accusation
(6) Biased sample, guilt by association, tu quoque
Penny is playing
games with victims and villains in this paragraph. Her thinking is dominated by
which group a person belongs to and who they are associated with in her own mind. The validity or
otherwise of the things they say are buried underneath this heap of fallacies.
Of course, having accepted guilt by association as a valid form of reasoning
she is hoisted on her own petard since she now feels that feminism may be deemed
in some way guilty by association because members of the EDL and BNP are
actually agreeing with them. Perhaps the motivation for the whole article is an attempt to forestall this terrible eventuality.
Elsewhere in the
article she says,
“I am not
writing here on behalf of Muslim women, who can and do speak for
themselves, and not all in one voice. I am writing this as a white feminist
infuriated by white men using dog-whistle Islamophobia to derail any
discussion of structural sexism; as someone who has heard too many
reactionaries tell me to shut up about rape culture and the pay gap and just be
grateful I'm not in Saudi Arabia; as someone angered that so many Muslim
feminists fighting for gender justice are forced to watch their truth, to
paraphrase that fusty old racist Rudyard Kipling, "twisted by knaves to
make a trap for fools".”
There is a lot of
politically correct diplomacy at work in this paragraph (as well as a fantastic array of fallacies). She doesn’t want to
appear culturally imperialist so we get the disclaimer about not writing on
behalf of Muslim women. There is an implication that all Muslims are black when
she says that “she is writing as a white
feminist infuriated by white men
using dog-whistle Islamophobia” and that all those opposed by Islam are white
men. White men are apparently her principal villains and we have already seen
how poisoning the well has poisoned her thinking about them. The black/white
footwork is probably designed to distance her from any accusations of racism –
the cardinal sin of the left. But the thing which really intrigues me in this
paragraph is the phrase “their truth”.
This points to
epistemological relativism, the view that the truth status of something can
only be evaluated relative to the cultural background and assumptions of the
speaker. It’s a popular view with politically correct thinkers because it
provides them with a means of escape from making judgements about other
cultures which could be deemed culturally imperialistic. So, within the Islamic
culture that we’re concerned with here it is true that Muhammad was Allah’s final messenger and it is their mission to cleanse the world of unbelief. That’s the truth for Muslims whatever we might
think of it so we have no basis on which to question it since we belong to a
different culture.
It is on this basis that Penny and her ilk give Islam
uncritical acceptance because the people holding these beliefs belong to a
“good”, politically recognised group. Of course, if she was to be consistent
(dream on) she would also accord the likes of the EDL and BNP “their truth”
since they belong to a culture or sub-culture which could be treated as
self-validating. But no, they have been assigned the role of villains and
nothing they say or think has any validity.
Consistent with the cultural and epistemological relativism
that Penny espouses we would presumably be forced to accept (which in fact we
are) the argumentum ad baculum (the use of force or threat of
force to silence an argument) which is justified in Islamic culture (but which
is nonetheless a logical fallacy from the viewpoint of rational culture).
For Penny, as for many in her camp, an opinion is not to be
judged on its merits in terms of evidence and supporting arguments (abiding by
the rules of logic) but rather given uncritical acceptance or rejection based
on who is speaking and which ethnic/racial/cultural or political identity that
she assigns to them. This mode of thinking is particularly vulnerable to the
effects of affective priming and perceptual set discussed elsewhere.
One commenter at “Comment is partly free” gave another twist
to this which was very witty,
Laurie is understandably upset that certain sections of our society are too lazy to make their way to Oxbridge, but the fact remains the testimony of 4 feminists is only equal that of one male EDL supporter
In order to maintain her black and white conceptual world
Penny has to ignore or find some means of excusing all those pieces of reality
which don’t fit: Muslim patriarchs, non-white members of the EDL, black victims
of Muslim persecution, sex slavery justified in Islamic theology, etc. You can
see why relativism is so useful to her.
But in this process she continuously distorts reality and
supplies justifications for doing so based on her politically motivated
assumptions. This allows her to avoid ever questioning these very assumptions.
It is rapacious, ill-disciplined thinking like this which has fuelled the
explosion of irrationality that we see today in liberal culture.
What Penny’s screed demonstrates above all is the dire
consequences of abandoning Reason and its rules: a descent into error, then
confusion, then madness (random, emotive, and purely associative ideas predominate). Conversely, it also points the way out of this madness
which I have called Malsi-Tung. We must abide by the rules of Reason and follow
its guiding light.
If we have truth on our side we have nothing to fear from Reason.