July 6 2000, 804 words
People who disagree with what I write rarely disagree with what I have written. That is, instead of dealing with what I say, they resort to a set of cheap debating tricks to give the illusion that they have refuted my opinions.
For example, responding to a column I'd written criticizing his thesis that "national divinity" was the key explanation for Japan's economic success, Express columnist Trevor Millett took issue with my view that it was instead the Japanese penchant for rationality that explained their success.
Millett began his column with the Horse laugh/Ridicule approach: "Instead of letting this foolish claim slide quietly into oblivion, Baldeosingh actually troubled himself to throw stones at this empty mango tree."
I use a similar technique myself every week in my Independent column, except that my satire attacks irrationality, bigotry and injustice (and is rather more witty). Millett's curious logic, however, is that I should have criticized him only if I felt his thesis had substance or sense.
Millett ended his column, titled "Your truth, my truth", with another common trick - the Subjectivist Fallacy. "People always need something to believe in, even if its rationalism," he wrote, the implication being that rationality is no more valid than religious belief. (This argument is usually made by people who wish to believe things for which there is no logical or empirical proof.)
The most popular trick, though, is the Straw Man argument - ignoring a person's actual position and presenting an oversimplified or misrepresented version of that position. In a column titled "Out of Africa", I argued that the term "African" is meaningless, except geographically. There was, I pointed out, no political, cultural, linguistic or even physiological basis on which to call a person "African".
This aroused the ire of letter-writer Theodore Lewis, who sets up his straw man by applying my linguistic criteria alone: "...we would not be able to speak of 'Indian', because in India there are hundreds of spoken languages...We would have to dismiss the concept of 'Chinese' for the same reason," he writes.
Lewis thus pretends to ignore the rather obvious fact that India and China, unlike Africa, are political entities and thus the terms "Indian" and "Chinese" are nationalistically meaningful.
Which brings me to Express columnist Indira Maharaj. Ms. Maharaj last week took issue with my assertion that "Being Trinidadian can only be defined by what is not purely ancestral. Whatever is purely African, Indian, European, Chinese, Syrian or whatever is, by definition, not Trinidadian."
Ms Maharaj describes my position as having a "sheer absence of logic" and, inappropriately, goes on to use set theory to lend her opinion a spurious authority. (Her paradigm works only if Trinidadian culture is part of Indian culture from India.) I myself frequently use this Appeal To Authority approach, except that I use authorities to clarify my reasoning, not to create a bogus image of erudition.
My assertion is not, in fact, logically refutable. The Law of Contradiction states, "For all propositions P, it is impossible for both P and not-P to be true." Therefore, if something is purely Indian, it cannot also be not-Indian - e.g. Trinidadian. (The real argument against my assertion is that there is no such thing as a "pure" culture. But no ethnocentrist can admit this.)
Maharaj also uses the straw man, saying that my "cockeyed and myopic definition of Trinidadian...includes shared similarities and excludes differences", whereas what I actually wrote was, "'Trinidadian' refers only to what is indigenous to our society...cultural items that have evolved from ancestral traits to become definably Trini". I also quoted Derek Walcott: "It's wonderful to keep the heritage and even the distinction of identities in terms of culture, but when it's ultimately said...the composite nature of Trinidad...is what it means to be Trinidadian."
(Significantly, Maharaj does not define her "differences", nor even what "Indian" means. To do so would expose her muddled thinking - or worse.)
She also employs the lowest trick in the book - the Big Lie. Describing my definition of Trinidadian as that of the "Creole nationalist school", she concludes, "We have seen its failure in Trinidad and Tobago."
Uh-huh. Indians came here in 1845 and since then this country has avoided race wars, racial murders and, for the most part, institutionalized racism. People of Indian descent have advanced economically, educationally, culturally, and now politically. If this is failure, what is success? But I suppose the Indocentrists can always use the subjectivist fallacy to refute me.
Mind you, I don't blame my critics. I blame myself. By writing reasoned, empirical commentaries, I have left these persons with no choice but to use cheap tricks instead of honest argument. I guess I'll have to try and do worse in the future.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh