False Logic and the Freedom Convoy

8  Types of Logical Fallacies affecting the current split in Canada regarding the “Freedom Convoy.”

• —An ad Hominem fallacy uses personal attacks rather than logic. In relation to the current split precipitated by the Freedom Convoy, both sides are guilty: the protestors heaping disdain on politicians and the opposite side characterizing protestors as ignoramuses. The end of ad hominem false logic is that it obscures the vital issues at hand while unfairly demeaning the opponent.
• — Straw Man fallacies reduce the disagreement to an attackable size. Presently the debate about a national approach to a pandemic is a monumental issue that’s been reduced to attackable size. On the protest side, the straw man being attacked is the over-simplified “Freedom” shibboleth. The other side in the controversy has made the cost and inconvenience of the occupation it’s straw man, one that can be (supposedly) eliminated in police action.
• — Appeal to Ignorance is simply explained by a statement like, “I didn’t see Joe at the demonstration, so he obviously wasn’t there.” Individual protestors can say there was no violence in the group of occupiers because they were there and didn’t see any. On the other side, it’s too easy for counter-arguers to say the police committed no violent acts against protestors because they watched all available videos and saw none.
• — Slippery Slope fallacies are predictions that what is happening now will continue to its worst possible outcome. Protestors have been saying that the freedom to cross international borders without vaccine protocols will get worse and worse until all of us have lost our basic freedoms. The counter-arguers warn that unless this occupation is successfully disbursed and the perpetrators punished, this kind of illegal occupation will become routine every time there’s a dispute.
• — Hasty Generalizations are often inserted into arguments as evidence for a set of facts. In simple terms, it’s like saying that smoking doesn’t really harm health because Grandpa smoked all his life and lived to be 100. Basing an argument on a few instances is a logical fallacy used by both sides, who select isolated incidents and publicize them as validating their opinions. There are 7 billion People on the planet; incidents of even the most bizarre anecdotes can easily be found.
• — Red Herring logical fallacies attempt to divert debate from the real issues. In the current division over pandemic protocols, the assertion that it’s about individual freedom can be considered a red herring since Canadian law makes all kinds of individual actions mandatory in the interest of public safety. On the counter-argument side, anything from the inconvenience borne by residents of Ottawa or the support from foreign sources might be red herrings drawing us away from the real question of governance during pandemic times.
• — Appeal to Hypocrisy along with ad hominem fallacies both fall into the category of attacking persons instead of issues. In the case of the former, the strategy is to scuttle an opponent’s argument by asserting that he/she/they don’t practice what they preach. Protestors rail against the Canadian government for bypassing the freedom clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms while preaching its defense of freedom. The counter-arguers make much of the “you can’t win freedom by stealing it from others” argument. Hypocrisy, in both cases, with valid reason, possibly, but failing in logic.
• — Argumentum ad populum fallacies point to the number of people who endorse an opinion as proof for the validity of that opinion. In this case, the Freedom Convoy has pointed to its numbers and its widespread support as evidence of the rightness of their cause. The counter-arguers have pointed to polls suggesting that 70% of Canadians approve of the dismissal of unvaccinated employees. Correct statistics can be hard to gather; in any group, the 19 who agree on a plan may be shown in retrospect to have been wrong while the one dissenter was right.

I’ve listed only seven logical fallacies. Some texts and websites list more than 40. What is most disappointing to me in this age of social media and the leaking of divisive, confrontational communication from south of the border, is that it’s becoming almost impossible to separate the false from the factual information. People without the ability to detect when a statement is fallacious or logical are put in a real bind, one in which charlatans have free rein on our loyalties and emotions. 

Brecht, McLuhan and movie violence

 

I’ve been working my way through the many episodes of How to Get Away with Murder on Netflix. It’s one of those productions that explores the dark, seamy side of the American policing, courts, and big money. I could criticize a few choices made in the writing, but somehow it drew me in like a fire, or a car crash, so horrifying that you can hardly look away.

The main plot involves a professor in an American law school who picks half a dozen students in her class to work with her in her law practice as a kind of work experience. She’s a cracker-jack defense attorney, but it turns out that her successes in the courtroom depend heavily on a strategy of win at any cost. Typically, the defense of a client begins with denial, then lying, then tampering with witnesses, then shifting the focus onto someone else and, finally, manipulating the jury with a convincing oration. As the plot develops, these tactics rub off on the students and it’s their progressive downfall that the plot follows.

How to Get Away with Murder raises some thought-provoking questions. If in a society, winning at all costs includes calculated deception, bribery and threat, how long does it take until the number that can be trusted dwindles to none? We all know how being lied to on trivial matters leads to mistrust on even weightier things. We also know that dishonesty, deception and its cousins are universal temptations because we all want to be bathed in the best light. But when the courts, law enforcement, governments and wealth are full of people who legitimize such strategies almost as a habit, what happens eventually to justice?

I’m following that up with a series called Start Up, which shares many of the characteristics of How to Get Away with Murder: internet hacking, copious gratuitous sex, graphic murder, and corruption in the halls of power and law enforcement. Assuming makers of film series respond to demand, I find the series troubling—assuming, of course—that this type of content is actually what's drawing the largest audiences.

I don’t want to be prudish, curmudgeonly. Like you, I’ve been too many times around the block for that. I occasionally ponder the meaning of passages like Matthew 15:11 (ESV) “… it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Is Jesus talking about eating and vomiting here? Are the person defiling and the one defiled the same person? Do we gradually become defilers by too much watching, reading material spewed out by defilers in love with money? “You are what you eat” also comes to mind, but I can’t find that passage in my Bible. I’m trying to remember, is that other saying, “Life reflects art” or is it “art reflects life?”

Bertold Brecht is quoted thus: “We have art in order not to die of the truth. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. If art reflects life, it does so with special mirrors.” I hesitate to call How to Get Away with Murder and Start Up art, but that we have these series to prevent us “dying of the truth” connotes  what? That art makes us recognize that our world could be a lot worse than it is? But here I’m wandering into the complex world of human psychology.

Marshall McLuhan coined the expression, “The medium is the message.” “McLuhan argued that modern electronic communications (including radio, television, films, and computers) would have far-reaching sociological, aesthetic, and philosophical consequences, to the point of actually altering the ways in which we experience the world.” 

Persons watching action movies and series like I’ve mentioned and doing little reading will come to understand the world differently from the person who gets her/his/their information from books and newspapers. The persons in the “Freedom Convoy” currently happening in Ottawa may have been influenced in the direction they’ve taken by getting their news from computers, social networks and Fox TV News, as opposed to the daily papers.

Which media have shaped those people protesting the protests? I wonder.

As regards the depiction of gratuitous—and generally adulterous or fornicative—sex at least once in every episode and generally contributing little or nothing to the plot, well, I don’t understand it except as porno-candy.

I was about 12, I think, when our country school took us all to a real movie in a real theatre in Rosthern. It was King Solomon’s Mines (1950 version) and I was already edgy when Stewart Granger pulled out a revolver and stuck it into the belly of a bad, fat man … and I ran out of the theatre. In an episode of Start Up, a corrupt cop kills his female partner with the cover of a toilet tank and sits down watching as the puddle of blood grows around her battered head.

I’ve said before that we all believe in censorship, we just draw our lines in the sand at different places. These lines change positions with time, but I hope against hope that the images of violence so freely depicted these days don’t so dominate the minds of impressionable youth that they end up finding them normative. 

I sometimes think we’re already seeing that happening.

Why did you--Brecht, McLuhan--die while we still needed you?

 

Law, freedom & John Locke

 

It’s no coincidence that I’m writing this as a “Freedom Convoy” is occupying downtown Ottawa in protest of government measures to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Some deep and long-standing concepts of how the country, Canada, operates as a nation, where power lies, what law enforcement should look like are being tested. But it goes even deeper than that; a struggle to balance free will with social convention is as significant now as it was at the turn of the 15^th – 16^th Century, when the Reformation took hold, when a poor peasantry rose up against the privileged powers that kept them enslaved and hungry.

               The time marked the end of the “Middle Ages,” and the birth of a humanist sensibility that changed everything. It took a few hundred years, however, and a Christian Reformation, the French Revolution, the Magna Carta, the period of discovery and the rending of the church from the clutches of the state to shunt humanity in Europe toward democratic governance. It’s no coincidence that Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and growing literacy hastened the growth of a humanist view of the world in opposition to the power of a corrupt, mercenary church/state dictatorship.

               Quite obviously, laws made by a dictatorial regime existed to enslave and keep enslaved the lower classes whose labours generated the wealth, hence the privileged status, of the dictatorship of the church/state. But what was needed to free the enslaved was not the abolition of law, but a means for formulating laws that protected the freedom of the most people, most of the time. Laws that didn’t favour the few, but which allowed every man, woman and child the opportunity to freely seek to better their situation, realize their dreams. Laws that made justice for everyone the centrepiece of what it means to be a nation. It’s hard to visualize lawmaking that leads to justice and freedom to be made in any better way than with participation of the entire citizenry. That’s what democracy has sought to achieve.

               It’s not been entirely successful, of course. Human greed, human ignorance, human gullibility, economic systems that can be exploited to divide us once again into the haves and have nots persist. In such an environment, it’s hard to see what individual freedom actually looks like, hence the “peasant revolt” of the truckers who are not attacking authority with pitchforks and hoes, but with massive trucks. For the protestors, it’s apparently hard to see why emergency government mandates (laws) extend freedom rather than curtailing it. Mandates (vaccine, masking, social distancing, etc.) free me to shop for groceries without fear of contracting the virus, for example. Over 80% of Canadians voted for the mandates by being vaccinated, wearing masks and adhering to gathering limits. The strategy may prove in the end to have been wrong, but that’s not the point. The choice of how we are governed is far more significant for ours and future generations than is a short period of requiring a vaccination to cross a border. Protests are acceptable, even protected, in Canada but the current truckers’ convoys are not just the presentation of an objection, they’re an attack on democratic governance.

               In their occupation of key sites like border crossings and legislatures, the protestors are attempting to buy their “freedom” by stealing it from others. This case can be made logically; freedom of movement at protest sites has been curtailed by the demonstrations. But to make this case would be more argumentative than useful. The key to our behaviours during this pandemic may lie too deeply in our very nature as humans, down in the depths where fear and anger and their opposites lie.

               I conclude this with two quotes:

“So that, however it may be mistaken, the end [purpose] of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom: for in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom: for liberty is, to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be [exist] where there is no law: but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists [wants] ( … ) but a liberty to dispose [act] and order as he lists [wishes], his persons, actions, possessions, and his whole property, which the allowance [protection] of those laws under which he is, and therein [because of their protection] not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own. — John Locke, Two treatises of government, p. 234 (1689).”[1]

“Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.”-Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

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[1] https://inpropriapersona.com/articles/locke-where-there-is-no-law-there-is-no-freedom/ed, retrieved February 6, 2022. Edited for clarity by GGE

A Marriage of Convenience

 

... 'Til disappointment in our leader do us part.

I have to wonder what’s really happening in the Conservative Party of Canada other than the Unite the Right movement reverting to its Progressive Conservative/Reform Party roots. Erin O’Toole, caught in the dilemma of campaigning to both “progressive” and “reactionary” factions of Conservative voters didn’t have a chance. The odds of his successor doing any better are, well, figure it out.

            Rather than Unite the Right, the CPC should have learned from the NDP/Liberal book that more moderate and more progressive ideals are better off remaining separate, but close enough to work together, if necessary, on the passage of legislation. NDP and Liberal voters don’t have to hold their noses much when they vote. The NDP does well in elections despite having virtually no aspirations to forming government, but Liberal and Conservative parties’ aims are to rule, first and foremost. It’s like the medieval monarchies in Denmark, where most kings gained power by killing the incumbent.

            Marriages of convenience, like Unite the Right, end up being loveless marriages. Blame it on our antiquated party system of democracy if you like. The emergence of Maxime Bernier’s “Reactionary” Party of Canada and the evisceration of O’Toole must have many moderate and hard-line conservative voters scratching their heads in disbelief, not knowing whether to fish, cut bait or abandon the fishing expedition entirely.