Wonderland on steroids
Charles Dodgson was a mathematician. Under his pen-name, Lewis Carroll, he was also an author of books cherished by children and adults alike for the past 150 years or so.
In an essay published 20 years ago, I wrote one of Carroll’s recurring themes is the inability of language to approximate the precision of mathematics. All of this was preface to a discussion of all the traps awaiting those who attempt to mount consistent and convincing arguments.
Readers who visit this fish wrap on a regular basis are familiar with many of these traps, including a whole basketful of logical fallacies. Add to this the Wonderland of antonyms, homonyms, hyperbole, malapropisms and neologisms. Oh, yes, there’s also gaslighting and dialectics thanks to our old pals Hegel, Marx and Sergis Bower, the cinematic character portrayed by Charles Boyer in the 1944 film “Gaslight.”
Among the most easily identified fallacies is the categorical syllogism, which purports to transubstantiate two anecdotal observations into a singular form of universal truth. Dodgson the mathematician would recognize the lack of mathematical precision of such an illogical lingual construction; Carroll the author would belittle it; and I would coin my own neologism for such a practice: sillygism.
It’s indeed silly when an individual watches a clip from, say, “The Daily Show” and grants buy-in of the premise a heavily and strategically edited interview conducted between Samantha Bee or some such knucklehead and a rube target actually conveys some degree of truth. Further, not only is the rube depicted as a big dummy, but as well is held up as a representative of a wide swath of equally stupid if not more stupid people.
News flash! “The Daily Show” and the “Weekend Update” segment of “Saturday Night Live” aren’t real journalism. Nor, for that matter, is what often attempts to pass itself off as journalism, Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow included (more on this in a future column).
As evidence, I refer readers to a sillygism offered up on this page this past weekend in which the writer claimed to witness someone on the teevee asserting former President Obama is a practicing Muslim as evidence of … something or other. This doesn’t really prove anything other than one person said something absurd rather than all people possessing an opposing point of view are “wild- eyed loonies.”
Such thinking implies the corollary: “If you disagree with the view of the ‘cool kids,’ then you’re a tin-foil hatwearing conspiracy theorist in ‘dire’ need of an enforced stay in one of our reeducation spas.”
This sillygism is also an example of a sweeping generalization, and, for the record, reveals a particularly toxic form of prejudice in which those abusing their respective soapboxes identify as the Borg who’ll threaten all ideological opponents with ignominious and endless ridicule, bullying and abuse until assimilated.
“People tend to believe anything — anything, as long as it mirrors what they already believe.” Anything?
This pool of tears doesn’t hold water, Alice.
I believe this banal observation refers to an extreme form of confirmation bias, but the example doesn’t really hold up under even a modicum of scrutiny. I’m certain not everyone who disliked Obama’s policies bought into the notion he was Muslim. Funny there was no mention of the Steele dossier, its providence, and all the ensuing hornswogglery it perpetrated.
Further, the author succumbs to the straw man logical fallacy, as well as acknowledges his own confirmation bias against Republicans, conservatives, libertarians and actual, practicing Roman Catholics who respect the scientifically sound fact the unborn are living entities, while simultaneously highly speculative whether their household pets hobnob with fairies.
Apparently, all that matters is the arrogant presumption the “truth” resides exclusively with the author in question and, of course, members of his likeminded tribe.
It’s Wonderland juiced on denigrating steroids.