How Many More Canadians Will Die in Afghanistan?

There is a very interesting article in today's Globe and Mail outlining a U.S. backed plan to build a pipeline to deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India. The pipeline would run through Kandahar province, the very place where Canadian soldiers are dying in record numbers to "bring democracy to the people." No doubt, the U.S. will be using similar meaningless rhetoric to justify this pipeline. Of course, it has nothing to do with the American endless thirst for control of resources which, of course, is also not the reason they invaded and are now bogged down in Iraq.

It is times like these that I wish I were still teaching Orwell's "Politics and the English Language."

Fallacies of Reasoning - Absolutisms

This is a strange time , Mister. No man may longer doubt the powers of the dark are gathered in monstrous attack upon this village. - The Crucible, by Arthur Miller.

As mentioned in my last post, after my disillusioning experience with class group think, I resolved to sharpen the focus of the language unit. This meant going beyond one of the core essays, Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” and including the "Knowing How to Think” Royal Bank newsletter. The latter opened the door to explore, in detail, fallacies of reasoning. Three of the fallacies I think my students most benefited from were “absolutisms,” “ad hominems” and “appealing to popular passions.” Coincidentally, these seem to be the three most commonly practiced by governments when communicating with their citizens, so there was no dearth of examples to be found for classroom illustration.

Absolutisms: This fallacy is perhaps the easiest to spot. It suggests that there is only one right and wrong answer, that everything is black or white, with no gradations of gray. In a world hungry for simplicity and straightforward answers, the often emotive context of absolutisms makes it easy to fall under their beguiling spell. How else, for example, could George Bush, shortly after the New York terrorist attacks, say to the world: “You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Or in my own country, how can Prime Minister Stephen Harper say that those who question the mission in Afghanistan are emboldening the terrorists?

As I said, there was never a shortage of examples to use in the classroom, but I often wondered how the principal would have reacted to a parental complaint that I was somehow being partisan in using these sorts of examples. As I used to tell my students, they can be found on any part of the political spectrum; it’s just that it is so easy to find them from the right wing, given the prominence accorded it by the media.

INCULCATING THE SKILL OF REASONING

I have a friend, Dave from Winnipeg, with whom I used to teach. An avid reader and acute student of politics and economics, he has frequently facetiously said to me, “Lorne, sometimes I wish that I had been born stupid, so I could live my life in blissful ignorance.” My response, other than to laugh, has been to think that the kind of ignorance or complacence Dave sometimes craves would probably sit well with a number of movers and shakers in our society. After all, what could be better than a compliant, unquestioning workforce and electorate? As Charlton Heston said in the original “Planet of the Apes” after spotting the mute humans, “If this is the best they’ve got, we’ll be ruling this planet in a week!” That is why I have always felt that educators have a special responsibility to produce citizens, not only with the marketable le skills demanded by society, but also with the critical thinking skills demanded by a healthy democracy.

In a recent post I mentioned two of the key resources I used to study language and logic use and misuse: George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit and the Royal Bank Newsletter, “Knowing How to Think” http://www.rbc.com/responsibility/letter/pdf/may_jun1992.pdf

Both are essential reading to begin the process of understanding how both language and logic can be misused for unworthy purposes. And both, despite being written in the last century, are more relevant than ever, given the lies, misinformation and propaganda that have become common substitutes for truth in our society. In my next post I would like to talk about when I first realized the need for such instruction.

Education, Language, and Politics

As an English teacher, central to my philosophy was the belief that the classroom is the ideal forum within which to explore ideas and engage with the world. While this might seem a truism, in many ways it ran counter to the very conservative nature of public education, which stresses the importance of teacher neutrality in the classroom. It was an expectation I regularly violated.

In teaching Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”, a seminal essay that is still frequently referred to today, some sixty years after its publication, it was impossible not to engage the students in the issues of the day. Central to Orwell’s thesis was that language and thought are intertwined, and if we are sloppy in our thinking, that fact will be reflected in our language, and visa versa.

However, his most trenchant comments are reserved for the political uses of language, which he describes as largely “the defense of the indefensible.” Whether in speech or in writing, he attempts to warn his readers of how language can in fact subvert truth. Taking examples from his time, he shows how euphemisms can conceal true horror:

Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

Amongst the modern euphemisms my students quickly uncovered are the following:

“did not meet course objectives” = failed
“finds it challenging to keep on task” = talks too much
“pre-emptive strike” = we started the war
“war of liberation” = we didn’t like their politics
‘the need for democratic reforms” = we don’t like who they elected
“socialist government” = we don’t like who they elected
“ establishing freedom and democracy” = electing a government that we like
“ethnic cleansing” = genocide

In future posts I’ll discuss some of the errors in logic my students studied, and how they applied them to international situations.