We need to learn how to argue

We need to talk about whataboutery. Imagine if every time you spoke or stood up for anything, or stood against it, people turned around and said, “Well, what about the time when YOU …” That’s whataboutery. So when a person complains about a sexist boss, say, and someone replies “but what about female genital mutilation?” then that, my friends, is whataboutery.

It’s also known, officially, as the ad hominem argument: when you attack the person, not the discourse.

Full disclosure: I once went on a course at night school on how to argue.

Yes, me, possibly the most argumentative person in the world – although I’m not going to argue with that contention right now, because it’s not what we’re discussing. That would be a fallacious argument, to use the lingo.

Anyway, it turned out to be a course not on how to argue so much as on the ways in which people argue, and how arguments can be fundamentally flawed, whatever the topic.

For instance: Jennie is blonde, Jennie likes apples, therefore all blondes like apples. Obviously that’s not true. Or, most recently: White people protested against Zuma, white people are racist, therefore protests against Zuma are racist.

Without even discussing if all white people are racist (an argument of gross generalisation), does the fact that white people protested against a president who is materially and manifestly damaging the country mean the protests are wrong? Obviously not. So can we stop with the whataboutery now please?

Because the fact that there have been past objections to someone’s actions, or indeed their inaction, does not mean that everything they ever say or do is wrong henceforth.

When Donald Trump says nerve-gas attacks are heinous, he is right. If Jacob Zuma said smoking causes cancer, he’d be right.

If my brother beats his wife and I didn’t intervene, but then I take action when I see him attack our mother, I’m not wrong for stepping in.

I may have a history of moral cowardice, I may have behaved deplorably regarding his wife, but now I’m doing the right thing.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.