Argumentum ad hominem
I remember studying rhetoric in my college days, when they tried to teach you the now widely discredited skill of expressing yourself in a simple rational argument. And by “simple” I don’t mean “unsophisticated” but “clear.” This really hit home to me when it became my turn to teach rhetorical skill to young people with no interest whatsoever in it. “I’m not good at writing,” they would say, when of course they meant “I don’t really know what I think.” If you’ve arrived at your conviction through a logical thought process it’s already basically moved from emotion to language, and you just have to harvest it. Needless to say, most of my students then, like most of my compatriots today, had been handed their convictions, and hadn’t bothered with the thought process, so they had nothing to harvest. Or, as they lazily put it, “I’m not good at writing.”
Studying logic in my young days entailed studying logical fallacies so that you could recognize them in others and deny them in yourself. Circular reasoning, bandwagon, straw man, false dilemma, slippery slope, post hoc ergo propter hoc . . . Sharp thinkers have identified a goodly number of these infractions. Why so many? Because the human mind is a labyrinth that works by feeling first, then logic.
Back then, argumentum ad hominem (argument to the person), an attempt to refute an argument by ignoring it and trashing the person making it, seemed especially obvious, mainly because the examples tended to be.
I think this intersection needs a stoplight.
What do you know—you have bad breath.
This hasn’t really changed.
As I look around me today at the vibrant arena of public discourse, I see the full spectrum of those fallacies in all their splendor—particularly ad hominem. Most argument today is not argument but personal attack. It saves time to blame a problem on someone you hate, and to let the hatred stand in for the solution you no longer need to pursue. Just put people in categories—redneck, liberal weenie, neo-Nazi, coastal elite, white supremacist, atheist, and of course any number of racial and ethnic epithets—and you’re pretty much done.
Rational thinking is not natural. It’s difficult and makes you crazy because there are so many little neural dramas going on in your brain, which will damn well find a way to justify what it wants to believe. We all want a way around rational thought so that we can luxuriate in our prejudices and pursue something that really matters, like watching TV. On the other hand, if you can rein in your emotions for a few minutes, rational thinking can be satisfying, and the reward the mental equivalent of crisp mountain air. It’s worth pursuing, but my advice is, don’t waste your energy trying to convince yourself and others how stupid “they” are. It just means “they” are living parasitically in your mind. You don’t know them anyway, you just carry around a caricature of them.
Yes, we’re all guilty, in spite of the strategies we’ve devised to disguise our own guilt from ourselves. We all hide in the shadow of our expectations. Reason and emotion are interdependent. They vary only in their ratio from person to person, situation to situation. You can never convince yourself of something you don’t feel.
It should be easy to recognize argumentum ad hominem in public because it’s so prevalent within ourselves. We know our weaknesses better than anybody, and it’s inevitable that we blame this thing called “self” for our shortcomings—and just as inevitable that we apply the same process to our interactions with others. It’s only in rare moments of lucidity that we recognize these mental scapegoats as caricatures. Shortcuts. Ways to avoid the work of understanding and forgiveness.
Usually the truth is just too much work.
July 13, 2022