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Cultural logic in political argument

  
 
No star here laces
09:19 / 13.05.03
So, mods, feel free to correct the title of this thread, I'm sure there's something more accurate that we could change it too.

Anyway, having been keenly observing the Clare Short kerfuffle and the way my peers tend to discuss these matters, something occurs to me.

It is a very common trope in politics itself, and in laypeople discussing politics to use a type of argument that I have right this second named 'cultural logic' but that probably has a much better name.

This argument runs as follows:

Person (x) said statement (y)
Statement (y) has much in common with statement (z)
Statement (z) was uttered by person (u)
We do not like person (u)

Therefore person (x) is wrong.

Obviously, the main heft of this argument lies in casting an unwelcome cultural aspersion, much in the same way as one might say "dood, you're wearing a trenchcoat, and only comics geeks wear trenchcoats, you loser".

I must personally admit to finding this form of argument highly persuasive, being, as has been observed, a shallow and feckless trend whore. However, do we feel that it is legitimate or even welcome in political discourse?
 
 
Cat Chant
09:25 / 13.05.03
Godwin's Law...

Um, but seriously, apart from referring all these arguments to proper names ('we do not like person u'), I think there's something to be said for this mode of argument. Any statement made or action performed by person x is drawing on a huge reservoir of assumptions and cultural knowledge, and the 'that's what [person u] said!' argument is one way of making visible the potential pitfalls which person x's implicit assumptions carry with them.

If you can carry a pitfall, of course.
 
 
No star here laces
09:43 / 13.05.03
Yes, but there is an inherent logical fallacy at its heart, isn't there?

Marx - anti-christian.
Nietzsche - anti-christian.
Marx =/= Nietsche

Hitler - disliked jews
Arafat - dislikes jews
Hitler =/= Arafat

The argument does tend to assume that people say the same things for the same reasons. it is inherently lazy in that it involves jumping straight to the nearest familiar comparison to an argument instead of examining the argument itself.

We'd all accept that the Godwin thing illustrates a bankrupt thread of argument, but indeed aren't all such comparisons bankrupt for exactly the same reasons?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
10:54 / 13.05.03
For starters, it's a nonsense to use the same expression "dislikes Jews" to describe the different ideologies of Hitler and Arafat, and this is before we get onto the issue of whether Arafat can be said to "dislike Jews" which is a whole separate issue.

So what's the laziness/error here is the conflation of two widely different and indeed irreconcialable viewpoints, not the assumption that you can tell a lot of about person x from the viewpoints they share with person u...
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:39 / 13.05.03
But isn't this the point, Flyboy? That Arafat isn't Hitler, so tying them together along arguably commonly held views is always going to give you an incomplete picture. (I don't really think we want to get into the validity of this example, but it might be worth noting that the comparison isn't unheard of.)

Personally, I think it is interesting to try to work out where someone is coming from. But there is a danger in letting that be the basis for your judgement of them and their views. Namely, it is too easy to impose one's own interpretation of a common position on someone else via a few clues.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
13:21 / 13.05.03
Sorry, but I'm going by that example, and in that example, I don't think you're going to convince me that there are any commonly held views.
 
 
Salamander
14:37 / 13.05.03
The point was bad but it still made sense, comparing key words or points which are culturaly sensitive instead of analysing the logical structure of an arguement can lead to all kinds of misunderstanding.
 
 
No star here laces
14:46 / 13.05.03
A better example might be:

Blair is privatising stuff
Thatcher privatised stuff
Therefore Blair = Thatcher
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:40 / 13.05.03
I think that one illustrates what Deva was saying about the usefulness of the technique, in a way. On one level, we are all aware that Blair is not Thatcher, and that the privatisations that Thatcher performed are not the privatisations that Thatcher performed (can't be, really).

But this isn't really a syllogism in the pure sense, because the B is disjunctive - Thatcher privatised x, Blair privatised y, therefore Blair does not equal Thatcher - it's more a metaphor. And as a metaphor, it communicates not only the corroboration (which is by definition an inexact corroboration) of the key principle, but also a whole load of metaphorical information - the way that Blair (leader of the Labour party) stands in relation to Thatcher (leader of Conservative party) the point being that there *shouldn't* be a coherent syllogism here, and the fact that one can be created, even if not entirely accurately, shows how far Blair has moved away from what are being presented as what should be his characteristics (in this case, not privatising, as Leader-of-Labour-government), using the discrepancy between the expectations of the two correspondents and the weight of anger against the other correspondent as leverage (which is why, of course, if you say it somebody who supports both Thatcher and privatisation, the effect is different).

So, Arafat-Hitler doesn't work nearly as well, even if we look for some point of comparison closer than "anti-Semitic", which, if Arafat is, he is in a culturally wholly different way. On a formal level because the comparison isn't really close enough to be coherent - Hitler was a European dictator, Arafat in effect an exile, and an Arab to boot. It's a bit like saying that Cortez and Montezuma both drank chocolatl, so Cortez was just like Montezuma, really; the relationship is off, and specifically the power relationship. "Arafat is like bin Laden" is a much more logical metaphor, with the syllogistic bridge provided by "Arab", "terrorist", "sponsor of terrorism", "anti-Semite" and so on. That is dangerous, as it attempts to suggest that Arafat, and by extension activists for an independent Palestine, are like the architect of 9/11, which is probably why the Israelis try it so frequently. There needs to be a commonality in the logic, or it falls down. Marx and Neitzsche makes a lot more sense - both 19th Century European writers, for starters, and I can certainly see a possible PPE question along the lines of "Marx's views on Christianity mirrored in economic and social terms the project Neitzsche was pursuing in philosophical terms" not being entirely or immediately laughed off the table.

But yes, and so Godwin's law is that the symbolic weight of the Nazi Party is such that it will snap off the lever; it is simultaneously, as a general signifier of the most reprehensible thing imaginable, almost universally appropriate (feminists, union leaders, right-wing politicians, those who practise sexual discrimination in the workplace, people who prosecute those who practice sexual discrimination in the workplace, political corectness before, during and after its natural evolution into having gone mad, and so on), and at the same time, because of the sheer depth of the metonymic load of disgust (who is *actually* like Hitler? Stalin? Mosley? Enoch Powell? Ariel Sharon?), it will only serve to demonstrate the irrationality of the person drawing what they claim to be, metaphorically if not actually, a comparison of like with like. You'll notice that not one person picked up on Marx and Neitzsche...

Does this make sense? It's something I'm finding quite interesting on this thread, which is the first time, certainly on Barbelith and I think in my experience of message boards, that somebody's philosophical and political position is so in tune with the extreme right of politics *in so many different areas* (which is worth noting - "Blair is like Thatcher" carries a lot of associations beyond privatisation, including mental instability, dogmatism, the authoritarian silencing of dissenting voices, which remain immanent even if the comparisions are not brought out) that it's actually inordinately difficult not to trip Godwin by accident, as I did early in the discussion.
 
 
Spyder Todd 2008
17:56 / 13.05.03
This logic is blant everywhere in the media, if you look for it. A great example was when Bush was trying to convince America to go to war with Iraq because Saddam Husien was working with bin Laden. Then, of course, bin Laden says he doesn't like Hussien, and the Bush administartion didn't reply at all. It was so obvious they were simply comparing the too because they both disliked America. I think this really is something that we need to avoid in politics if at all possible, but I know its not going to happen.
 
  
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