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Quote of the Day: From a Devil
Screwtape: Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking “Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?” they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make.
Screwtape (a fictional character from C.S. Lewis) is a devil, a demon, a minion of Satan, a deceiver and tempter of men. Here he’s giving some advice to a younger devil on how to deceive. The devils want us to ignore genuine reason and commit fallacies. Like ad populum fallacies–appealing to the preference of a majority when the majority lacks knowledge.
Closely related to ad populum is an argument form we could call the ad futurum argument–the appeal to the future. This will usually be fallacious, and for more than one reason: because it’s not guaranteed that the future will be wiser than the past, because it’s hard to know just what the future holds, and because of the circular reasoning Screwtape points out (what the future holds will be shaped by what we do now on the basis of what the future holds).
In my 51st comment on Ricochet (“What Makes Men Good?”, #7) I pointed out that conservative appeals to history generally rely on solid inductive logic because they are empirical–we look to evidence in the past that economic liberty does more to reduce poverty than big government, and so on. Ben Shapiro’s new book is a case in point.
Leftist appeals to history are different: They commit ad futurum fallacies by arguing from the authority of a future where they assume everyone will agree with them.
Screwtape would be pleased.
Published in Culture
You’ll be singing a different tune when Gene Roddenberry’s Replicator comes online and humanity is forevermore able to conjure forth a delicious cup of tea merely by intoning “Earl Grey, hot!”
We already have the technology to tell the computer to 3D-print the teacup. We’re centuries early on that one, and it wasn’t the economics of the future that got us there.
Yeah but, 3D printers are exceedingly slow ;>)
And what’s worse is I don’t have a comeback.
Excellent post!
As a 1936 Sci-fi movie, H.G. Wells’ Things to Come is a well produced movie with “good” special effects. I particularly liked the helicopter, which had a normal tail rotor for takeoff / landing, and could pivot 90 degrees for propulsion like an airplane. This was before the first practical Sikorski VS-300 in 1940. The pivoting tail rotor is still being investigated today.
You see H.G. Wells’ progressive ideas in the movie, first predicting a massive World War in 1940, leading to world wide (i.e., A-bomb) destruction. Mankind then learns to live underground, with the elite group of politicians and scientists “Wings Over the World” keeping the peace and promoting technical progress. Of course, some backward thinkers want to destroy that progress, leading to the final dialogue at the end:
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There’s also a not-so-solid form of inductive reasoning, which goes something like this:
This reasoning plays out in all sorts of sordid ways. It’s responsible, in part, for our worship of political activism. It explains why transgenderism has so quickly gained a foothold in popular culture, and why political movements are constantly scrambling to redefine terms like racism and sexism. It’s the reason why status quo has become a pejorative. (“Slavery was bad, and slavery was once the status quo. Therefore, the status quo is bad.”)
As my former pastor (and fan of the Screwtape Letters) likes to say: The deceived do not know they are deceived, because they are deceived.
At any point on the continuum, if we embrace deception, then all else we see and believe will be deception.
Screwtape would be pleased with a great deal of what the Left finds appealing.
Hmmm….how about, “…at which time the tea would no longer be hot”?
How have I missed all this philosophy? I’d better follow your posts in the future. (I too have dealt with Hume.)
I think we agree, although I think what you’re describing is an argument from analogy, and those arguments can be good.
But…but the arc of the moral universe and stuff!
“Dealt with” sounds so Mafia.