The Daily Sceptic has now settled down to fight a battle on three fronts: against COVID-19 policies, against climate change, and against ‘Woke gobbledygook’. I would like to introduce a useful phrase which might help us make sense of what is currently going on on all three fronts. This is not a phrase I invented. I found it in a book called Reality and Its Dreams by the philosopher Raymond Geuss.
Geuss is a charming, idiosyncratic, very late Marxist. His hero is Adorno. His essays are always interesting; and in his most recent book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal, he gives a reason out of his own experience why he thinks certain people are likely to be able to resist, or criticise, their contemporary culture. In his case, it was because he was educated in Pennsylvania by Hungarian Catholics, and thus inoculated against some of the average assumptions of Americans in the 1960s. He was not inoculated against all of them, since he appears to have very standard views about two of the three of our subjects, namely, Covid and climate change – not to mention the usual hostility to ‘neoliberalism’. Indeed, he cited a book by Andreas Malm, which I bought and read on the strength of Geuss’s recommendation: and it was the worst kind of book, one which hastily, in 2020, used the pandemic in order, firstly, to lament that the Climate movement had not got its act together as well as the Covid movement, and, secondly, to suggest that the climatists should copy the Covidists and turn the world upside down as quickly as possible. So Geuss is not an ally. However, his phrase is still useful.
This phrase is argumentum hystericum. By it, Geuss means a type of argument which proposes an absurd dichotomy: that is, offers us two propositions which appear to form a perfect either/or, and then asks us to choose one of the two propositions: with it being clearly understood that the first proposition is the favoured one, while the second proposition is one which involves, for anyone foolish or evil enough to agree with it, immediate moral suicide. This argument, though apparently logical, is to be made with the maximum amount of emotional turbulence and moral coercion.
Geuss’s own example of an argumentum hystericum is related to Iraq (since he wrote the book in 2016). Geuss was clearly outraged by the argument that if you do not support the invasion of Iraq then you are condoning Saddam Hussein’s crimes or even condoning the events of 9/11. He considered calling this the “Tony Blair”. And we should take up this suggestion. For do we not also have the “Anthony Fauci’” and the “Greta Thunberg”? The “Anthony Fauci” is something like if you do not support the recommendations of the CDC and the National Institute of Health then you are against the science. The “Greta Thunberg” is something like if you do not try to reduce carbon emissions then you are stealing my dreams. I leave it to the reader to formulate the “Neil Ferguson” and the “Susan Michie”, and the rather duller, greyer, “Chris Whitty”. (There is also the “Boris Johnson”: if I do not repeat this draconian tosh then everyone will give me a Paddington stare for the next hour or so.)
I submit that one of the gravest problems in our contemporary politics is the argumentum hystericum. Not least because it sells newspapers. Admittedly, we have lost our minds before. The British, as Macaulay said in the nineteenth century, suffer from periodic fits of morality. But the most famous exhibit of an argumentum hystericum in modern times, the unattractive hounding of everything Germanic during the First World War, was at least comprehensible. In 1916 or so, D.H. Lawrence was holed up in Cornwall having to explain Frieda to the local policemen, and acquired a distaste for his own country. An old Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, changed his name from Waldstein to Walston. Even the King changed his name. The argumentum hystericum carried all before it: Bertrand Russell ended up in jail. But there was a war. Whereas the argumentum hystericum has become an almost insolently negligent entity now. Consider the hounding of Russians in 2022 – when we are not at war with Russia ourselves. The argumentum hystericum is a staple of the climate movement. It has had its most signal victory in COVID-19 policies. And it is obviously very influential in the unthinking Lineker world in which footballers get down on one knee (in order to tackle racism?). It is now a pons asinorum in our education system: repeat these propositions or ‘You shall not pass’. It is a major weapon in fighting thought crime. As our police have recently shown, it has enabled “causing anxiety” to become a criminal offence. Causing anxiety nowadays being the emphatic proof of thought crime. (A finesse Orwell missed.)
Let me end with some examples of the argumentum hystericum, which I shall put in ad hominem form.
- Either applaud footballers taking the knee – or you are a racist.
- Either take the vaccine/wear masks etc – or you are endangering lives.
- Either reduce your emissions/stop eating meat, etc. – or you are damaging the planet.
- Either repeat these politically correct phrases – or you are guilty of thought crime.
This is a politics of tar and feather, and it is being conducted through a pseudo-logic of coercive dichotomies, all of which have the form of the argumentum hystericum.
Until we collectively restore some sort of sense of proportion to our entire culture, there is nothing to be done. But at least, for the moment, we can identify the problem.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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All going well if the intention is to undermine trust in this and many other institutions.
Well I just think we’re going to have to resort to putting ‘Penis-owners’ and ‘Vagina-owners’ on toilet/changing room doors because evidently the old, traditional ‘Female/Ladies’ and ‘Male/Men’ is just way to ambiguous these days and is clearly open to interpretation, and with delusional loonies like the woman below ( who doesn’t even know what a woman is ) then we need to be literal to a fault;
”I feel conflicted sometimes when posting these videos.
She’s going to be so embarrassed one day, if she isn’t already, which I think she is. (She showed up the next day just to complain about me speaking with her on camera, even though she approached me to come speak on camera.)
These clips will live on forever, as other people post them.
Evidence of a time when much of the world lost its mind.
She’s going to be so embarrassed that she was sucked into a cult this badly and doesn’t know what a woman is, even though she’s a woman.
It’s just mind-bogglingly stupid and damaging, this whole thing.
But this is a war to protect our kids, and the widespread nature of this insanity has to be shown. The embarrassment these people will feel is unfortunate collateral damage.”
https://x.com/BillboardChris/status/1797494220414185488
Meanwhile, what with Father’s Day round the corner, what to get the man who has everything? Well which man could possibly say no to a ‘Period Bracelet’? Yes, real men wear a piece of tat around their wrist to show they’re totally onboard with ‘riding the crimson wave’, and I think it just reeks of masculinity, personally. Well, it’s a thing in Turdeau’s Canada, apparently;
”People don’t bring their own toilet paper to work, so they shouldn’t have to bring their own pads and tampons.
We changed that. We put free menstrual products in federally-regulated workplaces.
This bracelet is for Menstrual Hygiene Day.”
https://x.com/BillboardChris/status/1795687328440316022
Off this topic but Farage has put his cock on the block !!! What Next
‘Cock block’?
Standing as MP for Clacton & taking charge of Reform
By their logic other mammals can have their gender assigned at birth.
Yes we know that most of our institutions have been hijacked by the Wokerati. The Liberal Progressives, formerly known as communists, know that communism gets a bad press, so they do what they do with everything else and just change the language. They think “Progressive” sounds modern and good. Who could possibly object to “Progress” right?
Except “progressing to what? The answer is more and more government controlling every aspect of people’s lives
They lost trust in 2020, anything after makes no difference to me.
Dropped shopping to Old in laws this morning ! ITV morning guff prog (Cat Deeley) over to quiz they said to win a Merc & Cash , I didn’t catch the link up presenters name but nothing could have prepared me for the They Them Things Appearance , I’ll try & describe – big boned camp bloke buffed to the limit with tiny hot pants full make up doing enough to win Top prize at any Pride event ! Main stream Tele for you trying to normalise the abnormal
Sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is determined at conception and noticed at birth or before, and I guess these days in most places sex is legally recorded as part of the process of registering the birth, and I suppose also for hospital records. Sex is not some invented social construct, it’s something provided by God or fate or nature or the universe or whatever you choose to believe in.
“Sex assigned at birth”?
How? Do they hold the baby in front of a Hogwarts Sorting Hat in order to have it’s fate decided?
B*llocks.
Lancet, you need to go the way of News Of The World or Titbits; you have sunk to the same level.