Monday morning facts and stuff brought to you by Stephen L. Hall.
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So often we get in conversations with those of a leftist bent which gets to be amazingly frustrating because those type of personalities tend to elevate feelings and emotional reactions to the level of absolute and abstract truth.
In a video relating to a discussion the other day, a young man who based his position upon what he felt rejected anecdotal evidence out of hand as evidence of nothing. I was certain the same man would be equally dismissive of statistical evidence. He was simply dismissive of evidence which contradicted the way he wanted to believe, what he felt.
Very often we see a distinction between those of the right who argue facts and their implications and those of the left who are more concerned with how words and ideas make people feel. It is a certain contempt of those on the right that they base their opinions and conclusions in facts rather than merely their feelings about an issue. It is a certain contempt of those on the left that they base their opinions and conclusions in education which values people’s feelings and subjective views over traditional beliefs.
But I think back to visiting the Holocaust Museum in Israel in my youth where they showed lampshades and gloves they said the Nazis had made from the human skin of their Jewish victims in the concentration camps, and soaps they told us were made from the rendered fat of Jewish victims. Given that these claims were made by a museum, authorities, I believed them as facts.
It turns out that those stories were pure fiction, and that never happened. In fact when you think about it, you cannot really render fat for making soap from people you are starving to death. But, it was a good story, especially for the horror show which was the Holocaust Museum.
I heard another man on a youtube video talking about a picture they showed his daughter in school claiming that the picture showed Nazi atrocities bulldozing emaciated bodies into a mass grave. He then claimed to have pointed out that the uniform of the guy driving the bulldozer was that of a British soldier, and that it was a British bulldozer and that these were people who died of typhus, not mass murder.
I am reminded of a brochure designed to elicit donations to save the horses claiming to show a herd or horses dying of starvation. My father pointed to the background of the picture showing that the horses were in a field of three foot tall grass. Those horses were emaciated, but it could not have been from starvation surrounded by food.
When scholars reviewed the records of the Spanish Inquisition, they discovered, contrary to popular belief, that torture was used sparingly and in moderation. There were guidelines that limited the duration of torture to no more than fifteen minutes, and was seldom used more than once, and rarely more than twice on the same victim. Our “facts” about the Spanish Inquisition owe more to the Gutenberg printing press being invented in a Protestant country, and the proliferation of anti-Catholic propaganda lead to our image of the Spanish Inquisition.
All of this, and many, many more examples of “facts” which turn out in retrospect to not be true at all can shake the faith of the intelligent and the educated. As Ronald Reagan observed, “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
We have heard over and over again false statistics, or “facts” from leftists, such as them claiming that one in three women are the victims of rape, numerous fraudulent statistics about guns, climate, and just about any other subject you can name. But then I think about things I have believed which were factually incorrect, and it is hard to condemn their foolishness just because they have their facts wrong.
Because of this, I generally do not rely upon facts, and I most certainly do not rely upon my feelings upon the matter under discussion, rather I tend to want to argue principles and ideas rather than facts. Abstract reason is more reliable than quoting facts which may turn out to be incorrect and blow up your argument.
Discussion. however, can only be had on any topic with people who are in agreement on some things while disagreeing on others. If you disagree on every fact, on feelings, and even the rules of the discussion, then there is no real way to communicate.
It is that reason which prompted me to discuss the modern mis-education where people choose to make up their own subjective definitions of words or create their own words with vague or non-existent definitions.
The rules of argument, of the very method of proof and reason, are no longer being taught to most children. Trigglypuff is the product or the abandonment of reason, the beginnings of which began with the departure from the age of reason into the transcendental era.
Mathematics teaches us that every argument begins with axioms or postulates, that is simply statements of facts. From this follow rules of logic where one builds upon those facts with reason and deduction to come to conclusions which are not merely speculation, but conclusively proven results.
If anyone states a conclusion which is demonstrably false then there are only two possible reasons for a false conclusion. Either the person’s logic is invalid, a fancy way of saying that the conclusion does not logically follow from the initial facts; or if the logic is valid then one or more of the facts upon which that conclusion is based is false.
If one seeks to help those who have come to a false conclusion then you have to get them to examine their premises, and to examine their reasoning.
However, in this internet era, people are not as interested in their online actions being correct, factual, and provable, but are interested more often in name-calling and belittling those who have reached a conclusion that they don’t like.
As much frustration as everyone has at one time or another had with people who simply deny facts and reality in favor of their preferred beliefs and dogma, imagine the frustration of a logician with the complete and total abandonment of reason by people pretending to be intellectual.
Are your feelings, your facts, and your reasoning consistent, valid, and true? As John Locke said, “To love truth for truth’s sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.” And it was Socrates who said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Never be afraid to re-examine the facts that you think you know, to rethink that which you think you have already resolved, always question whether there is another explanation for what you observe.
However, do not suffer fools lightly. Or as Thomas Paine said it, “To argue with a man who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” There are many other admonitions not to waste your energies trying to convince those who refuse to listen. I prefer to test whether a person is or is not willing to reason.
