Elsewhere, I said this about false dilemmas.

A dilemma occurs in an argument when one party is driven to a position of having to choose between two courses that are both unattractive. It is like having two pieces attacked by one piece in chess – being forked – or being snookered: whichever way you try to get out, you are in trouble.

A dilemma is false if it says there are only two choices when there are more. What you generally get is that if you do not do A, you will have to go with B, which will be truly awful. The truth is that there are other possibilities, but you face an attempt to induce you to believe that you have no real choice. Naturally, it is a weapon of choice among politicians.

As often as not, people say that you have to choose between two factors when you do not. In his history From Dawn to Decadence, the French–American author Jacques Barzun wrote: ‘True opera is a kind of music rather than a kind of play’. Putting to one side the question of what a false opera might look or sound like, opera is both music and drama; the joining of the music and drama defines what opera is. We do not have to make a choice about what we like more or regard as the more important. This is one occasion when you might truly say that it all depends on how it goes on the night.

When the United Nations published a report on the crisis of climate change, one notorious sceptic said the question was whether the report involved ‘science’ or ‘politics’. It of course involved both – the conclusions of science called for political action. It is simply wrong to say that the writer could only enter into one category at a time.

The footy match fallacy is different.  It says that if you go to a footy match, you must support one team over the other.  Why not just enjoy it – or shoot through if you don’t?

We see a lot of this kind of thinking, and instruction and propagandising, at the moment in the appalling suffering of humanity in the Middle East – as Europeans in their selfish imperial way are wont to describe that part of the planet that they so badly interfered with.  People who have no connection with either side – oui ce’st moi – are urged by both to join them – and then denounce the other.

Thanks, but no.

One problem – and there are many – is that such an invitation entails an obligation to make moral and political judgments that are at best left to God.  And I don’t think He’s in.  But almost all on the two competing sides think that He is in.  Except that there are at least two versions of Him.  And they are very different.  They just don’t get on.  In truth, they hate each other.  But unlike the even more fallible Roman or Greek gods, each of these Gods claims to be the only one.  And although the ancient gods took an active part in wars, they did not start any wars.

And moral and political mayhem on earth is the inevitable result.

Together with the butchering of history.

Another problem is that people take sides by reference to their faith or ancestry – or both.  And neither warrants a sensible approach to dealing with others of different ancestry or faith.  No war is good, but tribal and religious wars are the worst.

The result is that each side claims to be a victim of the West, and that the history of their suffering somehow makes them more vulnerable and more in need of protection than the other.  And what is fondly called ‘freedom of speech’ is banished to the corner of the room.

But because history has become mangled, the most distorting issue is how far back you go in assessing or apportioning blame – if that is what you have in mind.

For some time, the common law had a simple but closed view on how to deal with allegations of negligence.  The old law was that any negligence on the part of the plaintiff was a complete defence.  Then parliament intervened, and the court was required to assess the degree of negligence of either party in the case. 

That exercise in traffic accident cases at Petty Sessions was hit and miss, but these ‘crash and bash’ cases helped me to fend off the bank manager in my first few years at the Bar.  And they were instructive in revealing the limitations under which mere mortals purport to apportion blame among themselves.  Was this any more than licensed gaming? 

Well, they were nearly all over in about half an hour.  An affidavit of the repairer, two amateur witnesses cross-examined by two equally amateur barristers, $20 on the brief – to be paid months or years later, if you were lucky – and a brief summation from the bench: ‘On balance, I think his version may be a bit more likely than yours  Work out the costs.  Call the next case’.  Justice of the people by the people. 

(On one memorable day, the plaintiff and defendant could not agree on which intersection the accident occurred at – so His Worship – who was wont to bring a cut lunch with him on to the bench in a brief case – found that it took place at a third!  I wonder now if that finding would be enough to classify His Worship as an ‘activist.’)

Well, the alternative – all or nothing at all – was unthinkable.  As it should be in any assessment of conflict like that currently raging in the Middle East.  It is one thing to adjudicate upon the blame of two drivers at an intersection.  It is altogether a different to purport to adjudicate upon the blame of two peoples at war, or the justice of two competing claims to ownership of land.

We should not therefore overlook the obvious irony in the remark of the great historian Sir Lewis Namier that I referred to the other day:

The basic elements of the Imperial Problem during the American Revolution must be sought not so much in conscious opinions and professed views bearing directly on it, as in the very structure and life of the Empire; and in doing that, the words of Danton should be remembered – on ne fait pas le procès aux revolutions. 

Those who are out to apportion guilt in history have to keep to views and opinions, judge the collisions of planets by the rules of road traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court.

But one thing you soon learn in the atmosphere of ‘a police court’ – or a Court of Petty Sessions hearing a ‘crash and bash’ – is the unavoidable truth of the remark of our greatest jurist, Sir Owen Dixon.  ‘Experience of forensic contests should confirm the truth of the common saying that one story is good until another is told….’ (His Honour went on to say ‘but a testator is dead and cannot tell his.’)

Another thing you learn at the bottom of the litigious pile-on is that it is just silly to mumble platitudes that you don’t understand.  Like – ‘The witness is not allowed to say what Smith said…’  That is not a correct statement of the hearsay rule, and it suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of the law of evidence.  It’s like saying ‘You must not refer to an insurer’.  Or ‘You can’t treat with them – they are terrorists!’  Or, ‘If you criticise my government, that means you have it in for my whole tribe.’  (Very sadly, that particular fallacy now looks like being a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

We may however reflect on two aspects of our humanity.  One is that no nation or people wants to be invaded.  Another is that no nation or people wants to be dispossessed of its land.

The peaceful young advocate from Arras, Maximilien Robespierre, might be seen now as the archetypal terrorist, because of his role in implementing the policy of Terror in France in 1793.  This was the man who had resigned as a judge, because he was morally revolted when the law required him to sentence a man to death.  Some of his invocations of terror later would now curdle our blood.  But when in the triumphal dawn of the Revolution, the Assembly of the newly free French voted to go to war to export its glorious ideals, Robespierre, almost alone, opposed the aggression.  He stated what is spellbindingly obvious.  No one likes ‘armed missionaries’.  If you are being raped or bayoneted, you are not minded to inquire of the political or religious motivation of your assailant. 

You might usefully put this to the still unrepentant Messrs Bush, Blair and Howard about another Western disaster in the Middle East – the invasion of Iraq. 

It is something I saw on my only visit to the Kremlin.  ‘That’s the gate he came in by.  And that’s the gate he went out by.’  And the ageing Russian patriot guide was not referring to a second-rate Austrian corporal, but to a third-rate Corsican aristocrat – who left five million dead witnesses as testimony to the cruelty of his ego.

(On our way in to Moscow from the airport, at a distance from the centre about the equivalent of Mooney Valley to the Melbourne GPO, the guide pointed a monument and said: ‘That is where we stopped the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War’.  She did not say – and probably did not know – that Stalin and Hitler had done a deal under which they would – and they did – rape Poland.)

As for being dispossessed of land that your people have held for time immemorial, look not just at our First Nations, but to the almost total dispossession of the original inhabitants of each American continent – by those acting in the name of God, or a European empire that owed fealty to God, or the British Empire, or by the greed and unlimited territorial ambition of a preppy republic that had contempt for inferior races burned into its psyche from birth.

And what enabled all that dispossession?  Military might.  And cold hearts.  And the Word of God.

And did God try to stop it?  No.  To the contrary – He was part of it.

And the problem with God is that He is so absolute, and unrepentant.  And He does have a propensity to take sides.

So, there is rather more to these vanished supremacies – another phrase of Sir Lewis Namier – than a mere footy match. 

And the horror of it all – as predictable as it is inevitable – just passes all understanding.

The footy match fallacy

Elsewhere, I said this about false dilemmas.

A dilemma occurs in an argument when one party is driven to a position of having to choose between two courses that are both unattractive. It is like having two pieces attacked by one piece in chess – being forked – or being snookered: whichever way you try to get out, you are in trouble.

A dilemma is false if it says there are only two choices when there are more. What you generally get is that if you do not do A, you will have to go with B, which will be truly awful. The truth is that there are other possibilities, but you face an attempt to induce you to believe that you have no real choice. Naturally, it is a weapon of choice among politicians.

As often as not, people say that you have to choose between two factors when you do not. In his history From Dawn to Decadence, the French–American author Jacques Barzun wrote: ‘True opera is a kind of music rather than a kind of play’. Putting to one side the question of what a false opera might look or sound like, opera is both music and drama; the joining of the music and drama defines what opera is. We do not have to make a choice about what we like more or regard as the more important. This is one occasion when you might truly say that it all depends on how it goes on the night.

When the United Nations published a report on the crisis of climate change, one notorious sceptic said the question was whether the report involved ‘science’ or ‘politics’. It of course involved both – the conclusions of science called for political action. It is simply wrong to say that the writer could only enter into one category at a time.

The footy match fallacy is different.  It says that if you go to a footy match, you must support one team over the other.  Why not just enjoy it – or shoot through if you don’t?

We see a lot of this kind of thinking, and instruction and propagandising, at the moment in the appalling suffering of humanity in the Middle East – as Europeans in their selfish imperial way are wont to describe that part of the planet that they so badly interfered with.  People who have no connection with either side – oui ce’st moi – are urged by both to join them – and then denounce the other.

Thanks, but no.

One problem – and there are many – is that such an invitation entails an obligation to make moral and political judgments that are at best left to God.  And I don’t think He’s in.  But almost all on the two competing sides think that He is in.  Except that there are at least two versions of Him.  And they are very different.  They just don’t get on.  In truth, they hate each other.  But unlike the even more fallible Roman or Greek gods, each of these Gods claims to be the only one.  And although the ancient gods took an active part in wars, they did not start any wars.

And moral and political mayhem on earth is the inevitable result.

Together with the butchering of history.

Another problem is that people take sides by reference to their faith or ancestry – or both.  And neither warrants a sensible approach to dealing with others of different ancestry or faith.  No war is good, but tribal and religious wars are the worst.

The result is that each side claims to be a victim of the West, and that the history of their suffering somehow makes them more vulnerable and more in need of protection than the other.  And what is fondly called ‘freedom of speech’ is banished to the corner of the room.

But because history has become mangled, the most distorting issue is how far back you go in assessing or apportioning blame – if that is what you have in mind.

For some time, the common law had a simple but closed view on how to deal with allegations of negligence.  The old law was that any negligence on the part of the plaintiff was a complete defence.  Then parliament intervened, and the court was required to assess the degree of negligence of either party in the case. 

That exercise in traffic accident cases at Petty Sessions was hit and miss, but these ‘crash and bash’ cases helped me to fend off the bank manager in my first few years at the Bar.  And they were instructive in revealing the limitations under which mere mortals purport to apportion blame among themselves.  Was this any more than licensed gaming? 

Well, they were nearly all over in about half an hour.  An affidavit of the repairer, two amateur witnesses cross-examined by two equally amateur barristers, $20 on the brief – to be paid months or years later, if you were lucky – and a brief summation from the bench: ‘On balance, I think his version may be a bit more likely than yours  Work out the costs.  Call the next case’.  Justice of the people by the people. 

(On one memorable day, the plaintiff and defendant could not agree on which intersection the accident occurred at – so His Worship – who was wont to bring a cut lunch with him on to the bench in a brief case – found that it took place at a third!  I wonder now if that finding would be enough to classify His Worship as an ‘activist.’)

Well, the alternative – all or nothing at all – was unthinkable.  As it should be in any assessment of conflict like that currently raging in the Middle East.  It is one thing to adjudicate upon the blame of two drivers at an intersection.  It is altogether a different to purport to adjudicate upon the blame of two peoples at war, or the justice of two competing claims to ownership of land.

We should not therefore overlook the obvious irony in the remark of the great historian Sir Lewis Namier that I referred to the other day:

The basic elements of the Imperial Problem during the American Revolution must be sought not so much in conscious opinions and professed views bearing directly on it, as in the very structure and life of the Empire; and in doing that, the words of Danton should be remembered – on ne fait pas le procès aux revolutions. 

Those who are out to apportion guilt in history have to keep to views and opinions, judge the collisions of planets by the rules of road traffic, make history into something like a column of motoring accidents, and discuss it in the atmosphere of a police court.

But one thing you soon learn in the atmosphere of ‘a police court’ – or a Court of Petty Sessions hearing a ‘crash and bash’ – is the unavoidable truth of the remark of our greatest jurist, Sir Owen Dixon.  ‘Experience of forensic contests should confirm the truth of the common saying that one story is good until another is told….’ (His Honour went on to say ‘but a testator is dead and cannot tell his.’)

Another thing you learn at the bottom of the litigious pile-on is that it is just silly to mumble platitudes that you don’t understand.  Like – ‘The witness is not allowed to say what Smith said…’  That is not a correct statement of the hearsay rule, and it suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of the law of evidence.  It’s like saying ‘You must not refer to an insurer’.  Or ‘You can’t treat with them – they are terrorists!’  Or, ‘If you criticise my government, that means you have it in for my whole tribe.’  (Very sadly, that particular fallacy now looks like being a self-fulfilling prophecy.)

We may however reflect on two aspects of our humanity.  One is that no nation or people wants to be invaded.  Another is that no nation or people wants to be dispossessed of its land.

The peaceful young advocate from Arras, Maximilien Robespierre, might be seen now as the archetypal terrorist, because of his role in implementing the policy of Terror in France in 1793.  This was the man who had resigned as a judge, because he was morally revolted when the law required him to sentence a man to death.  Some of his invocations of terror later would now curdle our blood.  But when in the triumphal dawn of the Revolution, the Assembly of the newly free French voted to go to war to export its glorious ideals, Robespierre, almost alone, opposed the aggression.  He stated what is spellbindingly obvious.  No one likes ‘armed missionaries’.  If you are being raped or bayoneted, you are not minded to inquire of the political or religious motivation of your assailant. 

You might usefully put this to the still unrepentant Messrs Bush, Blair and Howard about another Western disaster in the Middle East – the invasion of Iraq. 

It is something I saw on my only visit to the Kremlin.  ‘That’s the gate he came in by.  And that’s the gate he went out by.’  And the ageing Russian patriot guide was not referring to a second-rate Austrian corporal, but to a third-rate Corsican aristocrat – who left five million dead witnesses as testimony to the cruelty of his ego.

(On our way in to Moscow from the airport, at a distance from the centre about the equivalent of Mooney Valley to the Melbourne GPO, the guide pointed a monument and said: ‘That is where we stopped the Nazis in the Great Patriotic War’.  She did not say – and probably did not know – that Stalin and Hitler had done a deal under which they would – and they did – rape Poland.)

As for being dispossessed of land that your people have held for time immemorial, look not just at our First Nations, but to the almost total dispossession of the original inhabitants of each American continent – by those acting in the name of God, or a European empire that owed fealty to God, or the British Empire, or by the greed and unlimited territorial ambition of a preppy republic that had contempt for inferior races burned into its psyche from birth.

And what enabled all that dispossession?  Military might.  And cold hearts.  And the Word of God.

And did God try to stop it?  No.  To the contrary – He was part of it.

And the problem with God is that He is so absolute, and unrepentant.  And He does have a propensity to take sides.

So, there is rather more to these vanished supremacies – another phrase of Sir Lewis Namier – than a mere footy match. 

And the horror of it all – as predictable as it is inevitable – just passes all understanding.