Asking for an Argument

A typical response to 'The Patriarchy Paradox'

I’ve had a few requests to go through an article hostile to ‘The Patriarchy Paradox’. Fulton Sheen wrote that ‘the hardest thing to find in the world today is an argument. Because so few are thinking, naturally there are found but few to argue. Prejudice there is in abundance and sentiment too, for these things are born of enthusiasms without the pain of labour. Thinking, on the contrary, is a difficult task; it is the hardest work a man can do - that is perhaps why few indulge in it.’

This article exemplifies these problems. What follows is selections from the article followed by my commentary.

'The teacher in question, Will Knowland, had every right to express his foolish, misogynistic, poorly-argued, tedious pub bore opinions.’

Calling the video ‘foolish, misogynistic, poorly-argued, tedious pub bore opinions’ is not an argument; instead, it is the appeal to ridicule fallacy.

‘He also had every right to do so on YouTube. But where it gets tricky is that he did so while clearly identifying himself as a teacher at Eton, and with the intention of showing the talk to his pupils. Teachers have a duty to represent the school and to abide by the laws of the land and the rules of their school.’

I was told to identify myself as a teacher at Eton in order to include the disclaimer Eton instructed me to add to my channel. And pupils have the right to freedom of thought: curriculum content is exempt from the Equality Act 2010 for this reason. The law of the land is that all political topics must be covered in a non-partisan way, and Eton’s ethos and aims seek to uphold a broad-based education and the pursuit of independent thinking.

‘Knowland was not being censored by the headteacher…but rather being expected to abide by the conditions of his employment. He was asked repeatedly to remove the video and refused to do so. At a certain point, effectively telling the headteacher to fuck off will have consequences.’

I didn’t require Eton’s permission to have a YouTube channel. Nor did I refuse to remove the video: I offered to edit it or - if given a reason why its content or delivery were problematic - remove it. At no point did I refuse to remove it.

‘The Times Jenni Russell has picked it up as the theme of her weekly despatch. From word one she mischaracterises the situation:’

Britain’s most famous school has dismissed a teacher for uploading a lecture containing “dangerous ideas” to the internet.

The quote marks around ‘dangerous ideas’ suggest that’s what the school has said about the YouTube video but it’s not. Eton, as the Provost has said, is required to abide by exactly the same laws as any other school in the country.’

Actually, the content of the video alone - not merely my questioning why it should be removed considering the school’s ethos of debate and the need for a balanced curriculum - was deemed gross misconduct. That means the ideas were forbidden.

‘Furthermore, the headmaster — who is as the name suggests the head of the school and usually the principla [sic] safeguarding officer — has every right to tell a teacher that certain content is not suitable for lessons.’

Curriculum content is exempt from the Equality Act 2010 specifically to avoid the range of ideas students can critically debate being censored.

‘The emotional manipulation of including the fact that Knowland, who lives in school accomodation [sic], will lose that if his appeal against the finding of gross misconduct does not succeed, is cheap.’

This fails to realise that the point in question is whether the dismissal was proportionate.

‘False equivalence fallacies are a frequently fumbled-for tool in the columnist’s arsenal and Russell goes straight for one here:

What thesis could be so inflammatory that Eton could not contemplate its pupils hearing it? A defence of fascism, or paedophilia, of public executions? None of the above. Knowland’s lecture was a defence of the patriarchy and a criticism of radical feminist thought.

By choosing three extremes (fascism, paedophilia, and public executions) she is attempting to make the idea of ‘defending the patriarchy’ sound minor. But that’s a matter of perspective and not fact as she would like the reader to believe.’

The fallacy of false equivalence claims equivalence where none, in fact, exists. It does not compare two things to make one of them seem minor. And the exemption of curriculum content under law actually does mean that students would be able to hear, for example, a defence of fascism. Moreover, Andrea Dworkin’s work does give a defence of paedophilia, and students are perfectly entitled to hear and respond to it. What’s the alternative? Removing her books from libraries and burning them?

‘Having done false equivalence, Russell immediately jumps to another fallacy — “the slippery slope”:

This is far more than a spat within a school. It is an ominous indication of how frightened our society is becoming of free discussion. Some ideas are now defined as beyond questioning. As a journalist and feminist, I could not be more dismayed by Eton’s fear of letting boys hear a counterargument. Their reluctance implies one of two things: either that all feminist analyses are so self-evidently true that they can’t be questioned, or conversely that feminist arguments are so weak they will collapse once challenged.

Eton invites a wide range of people to talk to its students. It’s one of the many privileges that the boys there have. The notion that ‘free discussion’ is not allowed at the school is a joke.’

Russell does not commit the ‘slippery slope’ fallacy. That would involve a conclusion based on tenuously connected premises. But Russell’s conclusion is that boys aren’t allowed to hear a counterargument to some ideas. And that is exactly what deeming curriculum content challenging those ideas gross misconduct entails. It’s not a slippery slope. It’s the thin end of the wedge.

‘The fact that pupils at the school have written a letter protesting Knowland’s dismissal actually suggests that free thought and debate is alive and well at the school.’

The letter argued that judging any idea that causes offence gross misconduct threatens the essence of a liberal education in general and Eton’s ethos in particular. This, then, is an odd remark. Moreover, the mere existence of a letter doesn’t guarantee its contents will be debated. And no mention is made of the masters who only felt comfortable signing the letter anonymously.

‘Russell — bringing out an inelegant variation of the ‘think of the children’ line — says pupils are frightened they will be next: “They argue that [Knowland] is being dismissed and bullied for holding a view that varies from the mainstream, and ask, will boys who express the same ideas be similarly dealt with?” No is the answer. Because there is a difference in responsibility and position between students and a teacher.’

Now the cat comes out of the bag. Because of a teacher’s ‘responsibility and position’, he is only allowed to expose students to some ideas. This is the essence of the woke stranglehold on education: teachers, this view maintains, are responsible for indoctrinating students - teaching them not how but what to think.

‘Like me, Russell has watched Knowland’s video and, like me, she wasn’t impressed:

The right to think must be defended, regardless of whether one agrees with a particular view. I watched Knowland’s lecture expecting to be impressed by his cogency and intellect, and was surprised to find its points obscured by an incoherent ramble of nonsequiturs and contradictions. Among his absurd assertions: that women aren’t repressed by rape, because men in prisons get raped even more, and that “biologically speaking, the idea that men exert power over women is nonsense”. But these arguments need to be interrogated, not repressed. Unexamined, they acquire unwarranted power.

Note how, again, no non-sequiturs or contradictions are actually identified. The video does not, moreover, make the claim that women aren’t repressed by rape: it states, rather, that rape obviously cannot be a unique tool of male oppression of women if men are in fact raped more often than are women. The attempt to dismiss the way in which, ‘biologically speaking, the idea that men exert power over women is nonsense’ makes no attempt to engage with the fact that, as argued in the video, dominance hierarchies are exclusively intra- not inter-sex. This is the appeal to ridicule fallacy again.

‘Yes, students should encounter tricky concepts and arguments that are challenging to them. But there is absolutely no need for a teacher — someone they look up to and respect — to be allowed to deliver a rambling, ill-thought out semi-rant that includes fact-free assertions about rape, power, and the struture of society. There is a reason we speak of young minds as “impressionable”.’

Neither ‘rambling’ nor ‘ill-thought out semi-rant’ is an argument. No ‘fact-free assertions about rape, power, and the structure of society’ are identified. The real substance of the objection is the sentiment that ‘impressionable’ young minds shouldn’t be exposed to ideas the writer finds objectionable. T.S. Eliot was right when he quipped that ‘as only the Catholic and the communist know, all education must be ultimately religious education.’ Impressionable young minds must not be exposed to what the religion of woke considers heretical, dangerous ideas: think of the children!

‘As a reader of this newsletter, an adult choosing to read a publication for adults, I encourage you to also watch a bit of Knowland’s YouTube video, which I’ve embedded below. I don’t think it’s necessary to ‘censor’ him as I suspect you will, as I did, find the lecture so boring that you won’t manage to watch the full 30+ minutes. Knowland censors himself by being so fucking tedious.’

What’s genuinely tedious is repeating ‘tedious’ and ‘boring’ as if they might eventually turn into arguments. Note, too, the lack of willingness to engage in debate. The earliest sense of ‘boredom’ in English is ‘fit of listless disgust’ (1766), and ultimately that sentiment is the sole substance of this attempt at criticism.

The swearing is typical of this kind of response to the video, and studies show it’s more common from the left on social media in general. Their language is more hateful because hatred of the order of things is the essence of the left. As Marx said, ‘everything that exists deserves to burn’. This is one reason for the extreme violence of leftist regimes: the most bloodless regimes in theory have always proven the bloodiest in practice.

Patriarchy is universal and partly based in female biology: ovulation, for example, makes women prefer more muscular, more dominant men. These facts don’t fit the progressive agenda, leading to acute frustration. Why did the author put a picture of me deadlifting 300kg+ at the top of his article? Did it get under his skin? Did it whisper softly to him, ‘Thunderlips is here. In the flesh, baby’?