Hello FR Readers and welcome to Wednesday. We mixed things up a little this week and so we have Stephen’s post today. Thank you Stephen.
There is in this rather condescendingly puritanical sniping, something other than that for which Mr. Cusick was so justly ratioed, which went distressingly unnoticed by his plethora of detractors, and that is directly addressed by my response . . . which went equally unnoticed. Ergo, I shall attempt to elucidate further, lest my passing observation be lost in even greater obscurity.
It is emblematic of an all too common fallacy of immoral reasoning to attribute abstractly ones own preferences and proclivities to some unidentified external force of will thus relegating the free will of the ego to subservient status flattering a fraudulent virtuous passivity.
In undergraduate and graduate school writing classes, I was encouraged to write, in as much as possible, in the active voice, to use words which conveyed action rather than passivity in order to be more persuasive of the audience of my writings and speech, to influence others like you, the reader of my words.
By not using words like “was encouraged” as the main verb as I just did, but to rephrase and restructure such sentences to say such things as “professors encouraged me”, readers participate in the action of the text becoming emotionally invested in the subject and thus significantly more persuadable.
Obviously the gentleman referenced above is highly educated and, as a retired member of a profession similarly constructed around the persuasion of an audience, well practiced, for many years being retired, in the art of the employment of active verbs as an integral part of a persuasive argument.
So, why the passive voice?
The reason is simple. He is lying. Lying in that, in the present instance, he seeks to inject a fair amount of hyperbole into his rhetoric without drawing attention to the irrationality and unreasonableness of the impetus behind his later expression of naught but his own opinion.
By whom was that priest he knows forced to ask the woman to cover her shoulders?
Obviously, no one. He was neither forced nor compelled in any fashion.
Was there actually such a priest he knew, or is that another rhetorical device merely designed to set up his statement of his own opinion? I’d wager that there is no such person, but a way of setting up sympathy for that “other priest” and his unfortunate circumstance, thus making his position that of coming to the aid and defense of someone else.
Let us pare down his statement to its essentials omitting and ignoring the rhetorical devices and polite pleasantries and take a look at what he really said: “Women, protect the purity of the men by covering your shoulders.”
Boiled down to its core, his is not a courteous request as it appears, but a command; ‘tis a command based on unspoken presumption of a weak male temperament; implying a wanton nature of those inclined to disobey.
There is a virtue in speaking plainly, but when what you have to say is ill reasoned or ill mannered, it is best to disguise the content of one’s character lest you be judged too harshly by those plainly spoken words.
That first part of his rhetorical device, that some mysterious force outside yourself compels you to action other than your own opinion, this appeal to some unnamed abstract authority is the cornerstone of every declaration of revelation.
I do not mean to limit this to merely a religious context, but would draw the reader’s attention to virtually every pontification by political speakers of all persuasion. I include those political speakers of other professions which are academic, theologic, bureaucratic, legalistic, or pseudo-scientific.
In order to persuade one’s audience, one must first lay out the axioms or postulates upon which one is prepared to build their arguments. It is one of the reasons I would make a lousy politician, because e’er a person ought to be permitted to put forth an argument, their premises should be investigated.
Virtually no axiom or postulate employed in the public arena is even questioned, and are most often completely false and fraudulent, yet they are placed in the context of a presumptive divine authority much like that which forced the priest above.
“Diversity is our strength.” Why? That which is diverse, is divided. Is not that house divided weaker than a house united? There is strength in unity, not division. Yet such a blatantly false premise is presumed as the basis of every identity political argument ever made.
Quick lesson in mathematical logic: if one of the premises of an argument is false, then any conclusion derived from such a false premise is meaningless. It is not necessarily false, it may be false or it may be true, but you can’t tell from that argument.
That appeal to the abstract authority as a certain basis of truth denies the audience of the opportunity to critically examine the basis for that argument. The denial of that abstract authority is an affront to the proponent of such argument.
Have you noticed that the most vehement, stubborn, nay violent arguments of the political left or right comes from when people fail to argue against their conclusions, but instead argue against the premises of those arguments which they have taken as a matter of faith to be true?
Men and women are not the same. Tarriffs don’t crash an economy. Employment is not exploitation of the worker. Guns do not kill people. All degrees are not equally valuable. Rap is not actually music. I could go on.
More to the point, you’ll notice that the gentlemen, while he appealed to such authority, never identified the source of that authority, nor the mechanisms by which such authority manifested. He was “forced”, but by whom, by what means? For example: chloro-flouro-carbons from aerosols are destroying the ozone layer, but the cloro-flouro-carbons produced by pine trees are harmless.
False premise aside, just look at how sympathetic he appears to be defending his friend, who has no name, well not a friend, an acquaintance, well just some guy he knows. Who speaks like that? If you know the guy and he is a fellow priest, did you just happen to meet at a convention and swap stories? Has he known him for years and just doesn’t like him enough to call him a friend? It is implied that he, being a fellow priest, was a friend, but who refers to their friend as “a priest I know”?
This gets into the other rhetorical device, that of “white-knighting”, or pretending that you are coming to the defense of someone else when you are really just pushing your own opinion or agenda. This is also a common tactic employed to distract from any actual scrutiny of the premises of a flawed argument.
Cory Booker famously created a fictitious friend, T-Bone, who “told him” of all of the problems in those poor communities, so that he could come to the political defense of T-Bone and people like him. Leftist “allies” come to the aid of feminists, minorities, gays, even abstract victims like “the environment”, “the climate”, “equality”, and so forth.
Feel free to criticize the person stating their own opinion, but how dare you attack someone who is just defending someone else while you were attacking this other person or thing. See, instantly the victims outnumber the attackers, and defending the helpless is an automatic virtue in and of itself, but really it is but a duplicitous way to state your own opinion without having to state that it is your own opinion.
White-knighting is a cowardly way to try to argue an otherwise untenable political position through emotion and distraction rather than reason. Notice the argument always devolves into some absurd hypothetical extremity which is nothing more than an emotional ploy constructing the most sympathetic of fictional victims.
So, if “white-knighting” is to come to the aid of the victim, what would you call it to create the fictitious damsel to be so white-knighted? Perhaps creating a phantom maiden deserves its own name.
Can we tie these two concepts together?
Notice that they are both fictions; both designed to distance the opinion from the advocate; the first creates a false premise while the other creates a false victim. “Reality is this, and in this reality you should really do that for the sake of them.” Except, this is not reality, there is no them, and all that is really left is someone telling you that you should do that without really giving you any valid reason for doing so.
I’m drawn back to a phrase from the beginning of this post, that of a “virtuous passivity”, but it is a false or fraudulent virtuousness as well as a false or fraudulent passivity. They are advocating action and they lack a virtuous basis for advocating that action, which is why such advocacy always rests upon an emotional appeal derived from a false premise.
