Progressives are victims of their own fallacies

Progressives are the victims of their own fallacies. They think criticism of Islam is an attack on Muslims.

[this shows a failure to discriminate between ideas and people; Muslims might benefit from abandoning Islam]

This hostility is explained as racism.

[this is category confusion - they appear unable to distinguish a belief system from a race]

They don't want to be racist.

[racism is now a loosely defined term for any hostility towards another group. Might the persecuted Yazidis and Christians of Iraq feel hostility towards Islam and Muslims? Are they therefore being racist?]

Progressives don't want to be racist so they avoid criticism of Islam and attack those who do as racists. It's a self--perpetuating cycle of confusion and ignorance. Progressives like to think of themselves as more socially enlightened. They are not. They are victims of the fallacies they perpetuate.

I'm ever on the lookout for antidotes to progressive woolly-mindedness and I think I've found a particularly good one.

Canan Arin is a Turkish lawyer and women's rights activist. As a lifelong campaigner for women's rights, a woman, and a Turk it is difficult for progressives to dismiss what she says as either racism or bigotry, which is what they like to do as soon as they hear criticism of Islam. This is another of the fallacies they fall victim to: the idea that a person they disapprove of can say nothing that is true.

The author of the article (Uzay Bulut) also points out that those unwilling to criticize Islam are simultaneously surrendering millions of women to a misogynistic culture, a culture rooted in Islam, a culture dominated by Islam for wherever Islam holds sway it dominates totally.

I think as many progressives as possible should be exposed to what she says. She is extremely articulate and makes superb points, taking on some of the cliched responses that progressives typically give during discussions about Islam and Muslims.

Here it is:

The West's Dangerous Enchantment with Islam

The Primacy of Guilty Feelings

It comes up again and again. It surfaces in thousands of articles, dramas, speeches, sermons; in millions of conversations and prayers: we are responsible; we are guilty.

The West carries a presumption of guilt. Whence comes this presumption? I was speaking to a committed Christian just recently and he assured me that the doctrine of Original Sin is alive and well within the body of Christ – His church. He even described it as the “guilty gene” as something intrinsic to our nature.

Christianity has made a virtue out of thinking ill of oneself; it has taught us to see ourselves first and foremost as sinners who have the opportunity to find redemption through Jesus. This teaching has engendered a widespread inclination in Christian civilisation to see the acknowledgement of guilt and sin as the foundation of morality: to be moral is to be aware of one’s fallen state; the more moral you are the more you are aware of your failings.

There is a way out. The Christian can acknowledge his inherent sinfulness, seek repentance, and seek salvation through the sacrifice of Jesus. It’s a mind-boggling doctrine but there is a way.

The idea that we are fundamentally sinful and guilty has been part of our culture for at least 2000 years. Are we to suppose that it has left no impression? Surely not. I see it surfacing again and again. In conversations with the politically correct and well-meaning it breathes like an undying assumption.

One facet of political correctness is the notion that we owe a debt to certain groups of people: those who can be seen as the victims of past and present imperialism.

In a peculiar twist of reasoning we are deemed responsible, guilty, of things done by our ancient forebears long before we were born. This guilt is not personal, it is collective. We all share it and yet it belongs to no-one in particular. There is no way to finally redeem oneself from this guilt; it is simply there as an ever-present legacy of the past. We are guilty by virtue of our membership of one group rather than another, regardless of our personal conduct. Conversely, those belonging to victim groups are wholly innocent and cannot be held accountable for anything. They are pure victims and to suggest otherwise is oppressive.

We see this tendency expressed in the never-ending apologising of the West, in the obligations felt towards the Third World, even towards that nest of imperial vipers known as the “Muslim World”. In fact this nest of vipers has learned how to play on this tendency very skilfully.

There is no escape from this guilt or its obligations because it is collective and impersonal.

We have been taught to examine our behaviour from an early age and some of this is a healthy form of taking responsibility for our actions. This is quite different to the impersonal guilt of the collective.

The tendency to attribute guilt to the “we” often has the effect of absolving the “they” or the “other” of any guilt or responsibility. To suggest “they” bear any responsibility would be to undermine their status as pure victims.

We saw an example of this recently when the odious George Galloway said in the British Parliament that we were to blame for British Muslims going to fight for ISIS because we had not been good enough to them. Unfortunately this way of thinking, even if not articulated so clearly, is very prevalent in the West, particularly on the Left.

This phenomenon is sometimes given the label “white guilt”. This is indeed an aspect of it. However, the prefix “white” implies a mainly racial dimension as if it applies to the treatment of non-white peoples. The phenomenon is actually far more general than this and underlies the sense of obligation towards any group that can be defined as “other” or “not we”.

Repentance is a major theme in Western culture. Within Christianity repentance is a key element of salvation. Indeed, one can see in psychological terms that there can be little possibility of personal change unless there is a willingness to acknowledge where one has previously gone wrong. Through repentance we achieve forgiveness in the sight of God. God loves a repentant sinner most of all.

But in the collectivised guilt of the politically correct how is one to repent? No personal wrong has been done to any particular person so reconciliation cannot be sought there. Repentance thus tends to take the form of taking the side of the “other” of showing solidarity with the right victim groups or of doing endless penance through endless accommodation. By identifying with “pure victims” guilt-ridden westerners can associate themselves with their guiltlessness.

The “Palestinians” spring immediately to mind in this context because they have been elevated to the world’s pre-eminent victim group and all that this implies: unaccountability and guiltlessness. Those Westerners who are fully signed up to the collective guilt paradigm enjoy any opportunity to share in the “suffering” of the Palestinians. An especially egregious example of this solidarity was shown in the placards bearing the slogans “We are all Hezbollah” and “We are all Hamas”.

One approach to explaining the psychology of this behaviour is to acknowledge the primacy of emotion in the mind. Jonathan Haidt describes the reasoning part of the mind as a rider on a much larger animal mind which he likens to an elephant. The elephant represents all the automated responses of the mind: urges, feelings, snap judgements, pre-conscious perceptions and so on which provide so much psychological momentum.

The reasoning part of the mind can forward plan and guide to some extent but the elephant, in any given moment, has generally already decided which way to turn and takes the rider with him. The reasoning mind then provides the rational justification for moving in that direction, of adopting that stance. What this means is that we will find explanations for our behaviour that match the feeling-state we have.

If our feeling-state has a large measure of guilt, as many Westerners do, we will provide explanations which are consonant with that guilt. As Westerners many of us are riders of guilt-ridden elephants. We are experts at finding justifications for these guilty feelings. They have become tenacious aspects of our “nature” and culture.

The guilty feelings are there as primary mental facts. The rational mind has to account for them and does so by means of thinking up spurious notions of collective guilt.

Liberal Culture and the Loss of Reason

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:

1. Poisoning the Well – vilifying the speaker in advance in order to discredit what he/she says.
2. 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.
3. Argumentum ad hominem – (attack the character of the speaker)
4. 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.
5. 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
6. 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:

1. An argument is valid because the speaker belongs to a recognised victim group and what they say must be accepted uncritically
2. The speaker cannot be criticised because he/she belongs to a recognised victim group
3. An argument can be true for one group and simultaneously false for another. Each group can have a different truth.
4. 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.