Where Has All the Logic Gone?

Logical skills have pretty much vanished from our society

I remember years ago watching a travel show segment on Nepal, and the presenter encountering a group of monks playing a game. The monks would pick one abstract statement, a philosophical position, and then two monks would debate it, one speaking for the idea, one against. A third monk would decide who had done the best job. College debate teams in the West of course have long played the same game in a slightly different form.

The game is supposed to teach several things at once. It’s not just about rhetoric, or eloquence. It’s also about logic. Rhetoric is the art of using language effectively and persuasively. But logic is the art of thinking about a thing in an ordered, rational and reasonable way, as well as having a more formal meaning as a particular kind of thought based on a scientific method of examining ideas.

It’s rhetoric that allows you to present your argument persuasively. But that’s made a lot easier if you have already thought about your argument in a calm, clear, and ordered fashion. The two inevitably go together whenever someone discusses ideas or abstractions, and have supposedly been part of the western intellectual armoury since the Ancient Greeks. Ancient philosophic schools taught both at once, inculcating both a manner of speaking and a manner of thinking designed to compliment each other, help people share thoughts more efficiently, and engage more fully and competently on the twin projects of understanding both the World and the Self as clearly as possible.

Both the Hellenistic pagans and the Christian scholars and thinkers who replaced them accepted the centrality of training in rhetoric and logic not just as tools of debate, but as tools of self-improvement, key foundation stones in what it meant to be an educated adult and an animal uniquely gifted with the capacity for Reason (whichever God was thought to have supplied that gift). Theologians like Saint Thomas Aquinas did not see their capacity for Reason and their capacity for Faith in dispute, and would not have recognised a modern distinction between Science and Religion at all. Comprehending the world better meant also comprehending God better, as much as man’s finite capacities could achieve. Talking about the nature of the world, examining its physical properties, classifying the natural laws the world is operating by, and providing taxonomies and definitions based on both experiment and deduction, was not a process inimical to also understanding the world as the Creation of a divine being. Rather, the sense of order discerned by investigating these things, and the ordered way you yourself were conducting these investigations, were only further proof of a meaning beyond our comprehension and an intelligence beyond our own.

It’s true the pagan philosophers had often mocked the Gods or been considered impious by pagan priests, and equally true that looking for explanations beyond ‘the anger of Zeus’ for lightning or ‘the anger of Poseidon’ for a storm at sea formed part of the impetus of Greek philosophy, but individual pagan deities were perhaps inherently easier to dismiss than a monotheistic God whose portfolio covers the whole of existence, not one or two significant forces. Greek gods, too, and their Roman counterparts, were especially human, even the ones that were not born human and later deified. In Christianity this is reversed. Christ did not ascend to Godhood. He is God descending to the level of Man for a specific divine purpose. Thus, while a Greek God like Zeus might seem somewhat less divine in his very earthly and sensual obsessions, or while an ascended Hercules or former living Caesar whose living faults were known might be harder to frame as a perfect being, Christ’s human limitations do not taint his divinity, but rather humble the believer with the awareness that a being so far beyond themselves should suffer and die on their behalf, investing a portion of its divinity in a human vessel deigned for this sacred purpose.

All this theological description might today seem very far from what we think logic is, but would not have seemed so divergent to the Ancients or even the Medievals. It’s really only post Enlightenment man who keeps insisting all these things are separate. Thinking about the order of the universe, the laws by which it operates, was both a material investigation of physical things, and a philosophical discussion of fundamental abstracts, both scientific and religious, with rhetoric deployed to discuss these things persuasively, and logic to order your thoughts before you share them.

In the post Enlightenment world, we came to view logic in a more particular and distinct way, narrowing its definition more and more towards what can best be described as a dispassionate mode of thought which focuses on available evidence and rational deductions from that evidence. In popular culture, of course, logic is associated with the Star Trek figure of Spock, and the Vulcan species and society invented for the show. In that hugely influential popular depiction of what logic is, it is primarily a mode of thought that suppresses and controls the emotions, which are disordered and irrational. Other popular manifestations of how logic functions are suffused throughout the detective genre in both literature and film, with Poe’s Dupin, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot all being masters of logical deductive reasoning.

Its connection with detectives may be something of a cliche, but it is a helpful one as it highlights the primary function of logic. Logic exist to reach reasonable conclusions based on available evidence, and is always born in the space between a question and a conclusion. It is an investigative tool, a method of analysis. It is always prompted by an originating question, and it always proceeds by both asking and answering a series of following questions.

Nothing lays this process out more obviously than the detective plot. The initial question, usually ‘who is the murderer’, is answered by answering a series of following questions-what was the time of death?, what was the method of death or murder weapon?, who had a motive to do this?, who could expect a reward or benefit from the death?. Collectively, the clues and deductions that answer this string of questions eventually lead back to the original question (the identity of the murderer) with all false conclusions eliminated.

What’s somewhat bizarre about our culture today is that we will all be very, very familiar with most of the things I have outlined above, particularly the more recent detective fiction and popular culture depictions of people defined by their logical nature and their mastery of logic as a tool of understanding……and yet despite this inherited familiarity, very few people will be good at applying logic to contemporary politics or to significant events or to how they form an accurate picture of the world they live in.

Logic has been with us for at least two and a half thousand years. It predates Christianity and most of the major world religions. It may be an innate mental capacity. It is as old as the earliest precursor forms of the scientific method. It was part of what it meant to be properly educated through most of the history of western civilisation, and it was a required feature of every educational institution since before the very first universities. It is still, supposedly, taught today as a primary component of the ‘critical thinking skills’ we say are taught to every undergraduate student no matter what their specific course of study is.

And yet any debate on any significant topic will tell you within seconds that the majority of people don’t know what logic is, don’t employ it themselves, are rendered impatient and uncomfortable if others do, and would not know where to begin in terms of which questions should be asked in which order to reach a reasonable and logical conclusion about anything.

Most people have never been taught how to think logically, and never apply it to issues they are emotional about even if they have been.

Institutions which claim to be imparting ‘critical thinking skills’, institutions which are suffused with a misplaced pride in the intellectual credentials of both the institution itself and its alumni, are in fact the institutions most likely to produce emotionally incontinent, hysterically ideological zealots who are actually incapable of examining their own prejudices, questioning received opinions, and forming fresher or more accurate perspectives by means of independent logical analysis.

And we see this again and again, whether or not we fruitlessly engage in online arguments or more courageously share frowned upon opinions we reached by logical thinking with work colleagues or family members or employers who have not and never will apply logic to any alleged controversy.

It’s my firm belief that almost all bullshit, almost all cant, hypocrisy, mendacity and deceit, including every fraudulent but modish theory and every ridiculous but strongly held assumption, can be and should be defeated by logic, but at the same time we must acknowledge that this is rarely if ever what happens in reality.

In reality, Thomas Sowell has destroyed, with perfect logic and irrefutable evidence, the entire basis of both the gender and race hustles which are so influential in the western world today. He has obliterated them, as to be fair so have many others since. The key arguments of feminism were debunked in the 1970s, by logic. That’s half a century ago. My entire lifetime. For my entire lifetime it’s been possible to order yourself a book by Thomas Sowell and read the complete logical dismantling of every key feminist position. You don’t even have to do the hard work yourself, and none of it is based (by Sowell or by me referring to him) solely on the man’s name, status or academic post. None of it is based on authority. It’s based on the enormous weight of carefully examined, rigorously analysed evidence he puts behind his argument.

Fifty years later, we still hear the exact same arguments, only now we are more likely to see Jordan Peterson devastating them by logical rebuttal based on evidence, rather than the elderly Sowell.

Sowell himself says that you cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reach by reason. That is true, and that is sadly the case whenever a person who IS capable of logic discusses a political topic with a person who is NOT capable of logic. The incapable are the majority now, and the least capable are the most educated, because the educational system is controlled by those who talk about critical thinking skills while being ideologically determined to suppress all thought that they do not already control.

The uselessness of external logic in the face of contemporary zealotry should not however be cause for the abandonment of logic as either a thing we cherish or as a thing we teach to others. Because if these blinkered, indoctrinated types who come out of university spouting all manner of ideological nonsense had encountered logic first, they would have THEN been armed and prepared for the ideological assaults thrust on them as ‘education’. What matters most, as the Jesuits knew in religious battle with Protestant influences, is who influences the most susceptible minds, which are of course the minds of children.

They know this. This is why they took an iron grip on education. This is why they target your children with messaging and psychological conditioning. This is why they want their slogans on children’s clothing, prominently displayed everywhere at all times. If you have let them shape that developing mind for five or ten years it is very hard to reverse that. It’s as difficult as disconnecting a Palestinian mind from lessons in hate towards Jews they have received from infancy.

I have said before that basic Christian instruction (the traditional version, not the contemporary Jesus Was Woke sort of instruction) destroys most of the least moral opinions and policies of our time. Very basic logic does too.

How long would it really take for a person talking about the Zionist genocide of the Palestinians to find out that the Palestinian population is one of the fastest growing in the world, and that there is a logical disconnect between ‘victims of genocide’ and ‘fastest growing population in the world’. How long would it take them to ask logical questions of the position they have adopted, and find answers like ‘the figures you are relying on to claim a genocide in one direction, are supplied by a terrorist organisation that openly wants a genocide in the other direction’?

It doesn’t take long. But this very process of questioning, which if we recall the use of logic in detective fiction is how logic works when we start using it, is never deployed. Prior indoctrination removes any inclination to apply logic, or to hear it when it is applied by others.

More broadly, there are all manner of logical questions which are necessary for any honest truth, and it’s remarkable how infrequently they are applied on any topic, both by those pressing dishonest positions from positions of authority, and by those engaging in wilder speculations in the other direction.

Asking questions like ‘does someone financially benefit from this?’, or ‘who benefits from this?’, or asking yourself ‘would this thing require more effort than reward?’ or ‘does this thing require more resources than anyone has’? are all points of query which could usefully and logically be applied to multiple controversies.

But in the vast majority of cases today people seem never to ask themselves a single logical question for things they will very forcefully assert as absolutely true. One need not be Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot to pick apart the clues on any of the major issues of the day, and yet most people don’t even begin to try. That’s something that saddens and angers me, because I believe in the human capacity for reason and that all of us are more than capable of basic logic. For it to be so universally absent testifies to its deliberate removal. For so many people to be impervious to logic AND incapable of it themselves testifies to years of, generations of, the human brain being stunted and underdeveloped on purpose.