From What’s the Differend? by Sinéad Murphy. Murphy is addressing the difficult position of independent thinkers when addressing a received wisdom which is at least implausible and at worst, wrong. His specific target is the public discourse around lockdowns. All the received opinion from the Mandarin Class Media is that of course Covid-19 has been among the worst natural disasters on record, fully warranting bad public policies which had already been rejected in past similar events, i.e. lockdowns and isolation.
Murphy's criticism can be extended though to include such matters as Anthropogenic Global Warming, Social Justice, Critical Race Theory. In each case there is an Eric Hoffer True Believer ideology which precludes effective communication. The subscribers to the ideology tautologically preclude engagement with empirical rationalists.
So as to rise to something better than mere scorn at this degrading display, I began to consider the question: What is it that has given Owen Jones such assuredness, such an implicit sense of immunity from censure, that he puts himself abroad in this way – so full of his own opinions, so lacking in respect, so unmoderated, so misjudged? If it is the style of a mean-spirited child sticking out his tongue from behind his mother’s skirts, then from what does Jones’s extraordinary sense of security stem? Whence his heady experience of standing on ground that is so protected from counter-argument or criticism that he can throw aside established forms of reasonable and respectful exchange of ideas and indulge himself in childish antics?
When I arrived at an answer to this question, I found that it explained something of far greater moment than the misjudged outburst of a high-profile journalist. In fact, it solved a problem that many of us opposed to Government lockdowns have repeatedly encountered during this year: the problem of negotiating that title – ‘Denier’ – which is flung at us with such vitriol and whose heavy weight of judgement has been infuriatingly difficult to defend against.
Are we “Covid Deniers” or are we not? We have been squirming under versions of this question for months. Because the truth is that we are neither – not because we are something in-between, but because our experiences and analyses of the events of this past year simply do not fall within the ‘Covid’ framework. If we are dragged into that framework, as we so often are by the sheer volume and persistence of its promotion everywhere, we inevitably flounder and appear weak and become easy targets for the likes of Owen Jones.
Murphy gets to the heart of the matter:
The French philosopher, Jean-François Lyotard, describes a radical kind of divide in outlook and opinion, which does not consist in disagreement about something but in the absence of any shared ground on which to establish disagreement. This divide is not merely a difference, then, but what Lyotard calls a “differend”. When there is a differend between people, there are no terms on which any differences between them can be meaningfully identified, discussed, compromised on, resolved. Any attempt to engage in debate works in favour of one of the parties (the one whose terms of debate are used to frame the encounter) and so profoundly against the other party that they are of necessity stripped of the means even of representing their position, let alone of having it prevail.
Bill Readings identified a good example of a differend in Werner Herzog’s film Where The Green Ants Dream (1984), in which an Australian mining company seeks to quarry on land that is of traditional significance to the Aboriginal people. A court case is held to arbitrate between the claims of the mining company and those of the Aborigines. Its remit: to determine who owns the land. The problem, however, is that the Aborigines do not have a concept of land ownership; any court that seeks to determine whether or not they own land has established the terms within which justice is be done in a manner that is necessarily unjust to their assertions of entitlement.
Readings describes the divide between the Aborigines and the mining company as a differend because there is no common framework of relationship to land within which their opposing interests can be compared and arbitrated on. Even if the court decides in favour of the Aborigines, it will do so in the mode of finding against them, imposing on them a relationship of ownership of land that is anathema to their culture and so alien to their ways of living that they would have no means of acting upon it or fulfilling it, leaving them ripe for subsequent exploitation – say, by a mining company, expert in negotiating the terms of property rights with which the Aborigines are utterly unfamiliar.
When a differend is in play between two parties, any presumption of a common ground of reference necessarily confers privilege on one party and censors the other. The party that is privileged is the one whose framework is presumed to be the neutral or common one.
That is a deep and valuable insight. It is easy to assume that the rhetorical skill of True Believers is due to their frequent reliance on the motte-and-bailey fallacy.
The motte-and-bailey fallacy (named after the motte-and-bailey castle) is a form of argument and an informal fallacy where an arguer conflates two positions which share similarities, one modest and easy to defend (the "motte") and one much more controversial (the "bailey"). The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged, they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position. Upon retreating to the motte, the arguer can claim that the bailey has not been refuted (because the critic refused to attack the motte) or that the critic is unreasonable (by equating an attack on the bailey with an attack on the motte).
The appearance of a motte-and-bailey fallacy is a strong indicator that the proponent lacks the evidence or logic to support his or her position. In the climate change debate, early on, the climate change promoters led with Anthropogenic Global Warming with the claim that manmade CO2 would lead to runaway global warming over the next hundred years and stark claims about the disappearance of glaciers and snow winters and polar bears and other wild claims which were quickly demonstrated to be wrong. Not just wrong, but repeatedly wrong. AGW is a classic bailey rhetorical position. It is extreme and non-obvious.
As scientists and the general public began unpicking the errors of AGW, the AGW advocates pivoted from their bailey to the motte - global climate change. Again, a classic rhetorical dodge. Virtually no one claims that climate is static and unchanging. It obviously so and has always been understood to be so.
The motte-and-bailey fallacy is a useful but dishonest rhetorical device, but it is deployed in the context of a differend. Those looking for logic, evidence, empirical data are usually not working with the same, almost religious, precepts of the AGW advocates and therefore it is hard to reach a meeting of minds.
Read the whole essay for interesting insights.
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