This is a simple and self-evidently fallacious technique, yet it would be difficult to find an author who has not, at some stage, indulged it to some degree—largely because all analogies that aren’t actually tautologies are not, strictly speaking, true in logical terms. The following extract, however, shows how important questions of degree are—along with the elusive question of what we judge to be reasonable or unreasonable. In the spirit of a debate currently animating Prospect’s blog and postbag, it is taken from Peter Hitchens’s review in the Daily Mail of his brother Christopher’s God is not Great:
As the serpent promises: “Ye shall be as gods.” These may be the most important words in the whole Bible.
Take the enticing satanic advice, and you arrive, quite quickly, at revolutionary terror, at the invention of the atom bomb, at the torture chamber and the building of concentration camps for those unteachable morons who do not share your vision of a just world.
And also you arrive at the idea, embraced by Christopher, that by invading Iraq, you can make the world a better place.
An astonishing number of assumptions and equivalences are crammed into these three paragraphs, but their besetting error is that of false analogy—lumping together a roll call of items that are, supposedly, similar enough to constitute of themselves a coherent argument.
Peter Hitchens may, of course, truly believe that his brother’s support for the invasion of Iraq is best understood in the light of Satan’s words in the garden of Eden; but the pretence that he can offer a coherent historical argument supporting this claim (as is implied by the words “you arrive at…” ) is dishonest. What we are given is a series of opinionated descriptions pretending to be an argument, underpinned by the demonstrably false assumption that the analogies between a Biblical story, revolutionary terror, the invention of the atom bomb, concentration camps and American foreign policy are so self-evident they need not be spelled out. Analogies there may well be, but unless these are precisely defined and qualified, they can have no force or validity (or utility).
Speciousness-watchers may enjoy combing through Peter’s review for their further edification, furnished as it is with gems like these—”We abolished the gallows… and found we had created an armed police and an epidemic of prison suicides,” or ” If you do not worship God, you end up worshipping power.” It’s enough to make you wonder who the real devil’s advocate is.
A small factual correction first of all. The review was not published in the ‘Daily Mail’, for which I do not write, but in its separate sister paper, ‘The Mail on Sunday’. Minor, I know, but small errors often betoken a general carelessness. Now, where is this false analogy of which you speak? All the actions and desires recorded there are linked together by one thing - the arrogance of believing that you possess the whole truth, are good and right, and that there are no limits on what you are permitted to do, up to and including mass murder. I think the temptation “Ye shall be as Gods” sums up what I have just said in words more potent than any I can deploy. Their meaning is not in doubt. I am surprised that you feel a more elaborate explanation is necessary. In all the correspondence I received about this article, favourable and critical, nobody else had faied to understand this point. You obviously belive you are wielding Occam’s Razor, but it appears to me that the thing in your hand is in fact a nit-comb. Do you dispute the connection between the actions I list? If so, I should be interested to debate it with you.
Are you really unable to see the connection between the abolition of the gallows and the arming of the British police? Do you know so little about prison that you think the introduction of long, long sentences (itself a consequence of the abolition of the gallows) is not one of the reasons for the appalling number of suicides in prisons? Or had it just never occurred to you before because you (speciously?) imagine the abolition of the death penalty to be an unarguable good? As for the worship of power, where God is spurned, I should have thought it self-evident. But I’m happy to explain. Your remarks are steeped in the assurance of someone who doesn’t expect anyone intelligent ever to disagree with him, or who assumes that anyone who disagrees with him must be stupid.
Peter,
First of all, thank you for taking the time to respond to my post so carefully. And secondly, my apologies for the factual error: I located your review via the Daily Mail’s website, of which I am a regular reader, and was careless enough not to note your piece was published in the Mail on Sunday; it is lamentably hard to tell online.
Secondly, the tone of my remarks was, I hoped, derived from the happy experiences I have had disagreeing with those more intelligent and experienced than myself; and I hope I am never stupid enough to think myself beyond correction (which would, as you note, be rather ironic in any column pertaining to philosophy). In any case, I apologise if any of it seemed unreasonably ad hominem.
I would, however, argue that while I do not dispute the potency or resonance of words like “Ye shall be as Gods,” it is precisely because such words have such universal force that I feel the intellectual steps connecting them to the conclusions you draw need spelling out. Diabolical pride lies at the heart of so many human evils that using it as a stick with which to beat Christopher’s politics seems to me little more telling than saying pride lies at the heart of almost every historical crime of injustice, from the massacres of the Crusades to Stalin’s purges. Where is the possibility of contradicting you if you argue in these terms? Who would dream of saying that overweening arrogance is anything other than wrong, or that the Holocaust was anything other than a bad thing? It is only by spelling out the terms you omit that we can even begin a debate. Nobody sane is going to stand up and say that genocidal arrogance is defensible; but this does not mean that the invasion of Iraq can be wholly explained and dismissed via a single ancient phrase, however profound.
It is precisely because I feel that “assumed arguments” do need to be spelled out that I wrote this post; and I would certainly say that “an unarguable good” is, outside of discussions of Godhead, a contradiction in terms. There is, as you note, a discussion to be had concerning the death penalty and prisons that cannot happen if an unyielding fundamentalism inhabits either side - but this surely suggests the unhelpfulnes of making implicit appeals to any “connection” so obvious it need not be articulated. Of course there is some kind of a relationship between the abolition of the gallows and the arming of the British police; but it is the complex nature and historical circumstances of this relationship that should interest us if we wish to devise solutions that will work - just as in Iraq. The world may yet be made better by both invasion and execution, although in each case I have yet to be persuaded.
I would never deny that the Bible’s anatomies of human vainglory and wickedness connect in a powerful way to the world today, and offer wisdom and insights that anti-religious hardliners are too quick to dismiss. But these connections cannot become an active force for good until we move beyond what we may believe is self-evident, and take the time to articulate our assumptions lucidly. We may even find that others, to whom such links are less clear, have arguments of their own that can change our minds.
A reply to Mr Chatfield’s reply. What got my goat ( and still gets it) was the superior tone, as if naturalists were being asked to examine some clumsy beast dragging its knuckles through the jungles of fact and logic. “Speciousness-watchers may enjoy combing through Peter’s review for their further edification, furnished as it is with gems like these…”. You can almost hear the superior giggle. Why are the alleged ‘gems’, so sarcastically enumerated, actually ‘gems’ at all? Mr Chatfield, so anxious for others to show their workings in detail, fails to explain. They’re obviously so self-evidently idiotic that their idiocy doesn’t need to be spelled out. Or does it? I include these not terribly original or unfamiliar connections here because I believe them to exist and because pointing them out sometimes makes people think about subjects about which they have firm received opinions which they have never actually considered. I’m a journalist. I write in limited spaces. If Mr Chatfield is really as puzzled as he claims to be, he may write to me for elucidation.
Then there was the assertion (based on thin air, and indeed contradicted by other things I’ve written on the subject, notably a Spectator article back in 2001 that caused Christopher to excommunicate me for years) that I believe that my brother’s support for the invasion of Iraq is *best* understood in the light of Satan’s temptation “Ye shall be as gods”. Well, no, I think there are many other ways of explaining this, overlapping and complementary to each other, all part of the whole explanation which we do not yet have, in my view. But Christopher has decided to write a book (which I reviewed) about how religion is hogwash, and how faith has no good effect on human action, and about how religious people don’t behave any better than non-religious ones. So I thought it was worth pointing out (in that review) how religion, with its penitential aspects and insistence on our imperfection, might have kept him from enthusing about this particular piece of overweening human arrogance. If I were him, I would be wishing like anything that something had kept me from this course. Those who choose to read the whole review can see how I introduced the matter.
A coherent historical argument can easily be made for the belief that the abandonment of humility before God leads people to acts of idealistic savagery which they would never have imagined themselves capable of committing or endorsing. And the fact that people professing religion (not just atheists) often abandon that humility is a useful warning that one must always pay attention to the content as well as the form. It is also a reminder that religious feeling is not to be found only in formal adherence, or necessarily absent from those who have no formal adherence. It is to be found in a proper understanding of the purpose of faith and the purposes of God. A tyrant in a mitre or a pulpit is likely to be one of the worst sorts, just as bad as a tyrant who thinks he is going to bring about an earthly paradise - though these are more common nowadays, and score higher on the skull count.
Who would dream of saying that overweening arrogance is anything but wrong? Why, those who practise it, and let it rule their lives, and cloak it in idealism, often with lips trembling and eyes brimming, and much talk of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ ( one thinks of a recently-retired Prime Minister whose response to every challenge was to say how well he had meant). As for saying that the Holocaust wasn’t a bad thing, you don’t hear this much - at least in public - in the West. Here, Judophobia takes the ‘enlightened’ form of ignorant defamation of the State of Israel, which is intellectually respectable. I think you might find some voices in the Middle East that come alarmingly close to defending the massacre, and one of the founders of what is now the Palestinian cause, Haj Amin al Husseini, actually allied himself to the Third Reich as a recruiter of SS troops, and is not wholly discredited (I put this mildly) in the Middle East as a result. But German National Socialism is everywhere a beaten and discredited cause, whereas Communism and fellow-travelling - now in a new, revised form - persist among the irreligious intelligentsia. You will still find people (and until recently you would find a lot more ) who would defend the massacres of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, or excuse those of Pol Pot. And there are plenty today who defend the prison state of Cuba, on the questionable grounds that it has excellent hospitals and schools.
Mr Chatfield has a habit of assuming that because, in one place, I offer a certain explanation of an event, that by doing so I state that I believe this to be the whole and only explanation. If I wished to say this, I would. For him to allege that I think the invasion of Iraq can be “wholly explained and dismissed via a single ancient phrase” is simply wrong. I never used the word “wholly”. Nor did I imply it. Nor do I think this. Nor can he possibly believe that this is what I think. Since my opponents assume that everything I say is wrong, and resort pretty swiftly to ad hominem attack, and since my entire position rests on my having changed my mind, I regard nothing as self-evident.