Logic rules...!

Long ago, in the never-to-return days, when you could enrol as a fresher at Auckland University without conniptions about whether this was the most advantageous career path, whether these were the correct subjects and courses to take me through to a distinguished and lucrative professional life among all the right people – back then before anyone invented vocational counsellors or advisors... counselling indeed was a curious science still in its infancy and scarcely heard of... (pause for breath...) Long ago, I say, before gaining entrance to popular courses and subjects required A-passes and successful interviews with deans, to say nothing of a guaranteed supply of parental money for fees, books, trips, living expenses... Way back then, a lot of us used to sign on for Philosophy I. It promised to be interesting, and it was. It had not been taught in secondary school – and in my experience at that time at Auckland Grammar, teachers pretty well incapable of teaching Maths or English, History or Chemistry, would have been incapable of Philosophy. Also, as an added attraction, Philosophy seemed to have nothing to do with anything practical.

So it was, back then, we encountered Professors W Anderson and W Anschutz, and Mr K B Pflaum. I did not know at the time that Pflaum in German means plum. All I remember about Pflaum in that first year is that he was very keen on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who then, and to this day, remains impenetrable and incomprehensible. In subsequent years Pflaum seemed reasonably lucid on Locke, Berkeley and Hume, as also about Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz. I didn’t take any of Anschutz’s courses.

The department also included Father Forsman, whom we rarely saw. He was the parish priest at Parnell, and he taught Aquinas. I heard him say at a departmental party that so long as he had his beloved Aquinas and a full wine cellar, he was content.

Now, pay attention... A lot of us gathered twice a week in Room 19 for Anderson’s lectures on Logic. This turned out to be surprisingly fascinating to me. Anderson in some ways was a silly old goat. At least twice he arrived for the lecture, academic gown and all, staggered on to the rostrum, saw that the side door had been left open and went to shut it, but instead left by the side door and we didn’t see him again until next time.

Logic meant Socratic Logic. Syllogisms, major and minor premises and conclusions, fallacies, undistributed middle... I imagine no one teaches it anywhere now. Whatever was the textbook we used – I still have it somewhere on my shelves – it should be required study for politicians and all media personnel. We learned what doesn’t follow. It does not follow that because Hone Harawira supports his iwi, he is a racist. We learned about ad hominem and non sequitur. We filled ourselves with syllogistic logic. Our exams were a joyous process of spotting fallacies and constructing elegant syllogisms.

By the time we had passed Philosophy I we were really sensitive about these things in the circumstances of public discourse. To this day it profoundly frustrates me that spokespersons and media personalities seem unable to see that some charge is logically stupid. The inability or refusal to see this seems to be behind most of the current inexcusable media beatups on issues and personalities. Old Willie Anderson actually alerted and sensitised us to What Doesn’t Follow, and it stuck. It’s this kind of thing that makes some politicians froth at the mouth about ivory tower academia. If you are not from the outset sold out to compromise and half-truths, you are uncomfortable to those who assume that “Paris is worth a mass”.

Democracy...?

Some clown is now organising a Citizens Initiated Referendum which would attempt to require the government to enact anything decided in a Citizens Initiated Referendum. These people are hugely frustrated because they think if a “majority” has spoken in a CIR (eg, recently, to satisfy the apparent need of some parents to hit children) the government then ought to have no option but to implement it. This is what these odd people call democracy, and they are frothing at the mouth because the government seems normally to ignore the results of CIRs. I never cease to give thanks that they do.

Heaven help us all when naive idealists ever get their way. New Zealand has a representative democracy. We have only to look to Fiji to see what happens if this ever gets set to one side. Representative democracy means that we regularly and in an orderly manner elect people to decide important matters on our behalf. If we don’t like the people elected, we seek to change our representatives at the right time. If we want them to decide things our way, we lobby them and try to persuade them. This system has very real weaknesses, and it is generally inadvisable to listen in on parliament and their behaviour – but some good work still gets done, it seems to me.

I would be inclined to cancel the right to CIRs, as the waste of time and money they inevitably are, and urge the government to pay more careful attention to serious petitions. If outfits such as Family First want the government to do something, they should persuade by the force of their argument and data. It seems to me so utterly typical of right-wing pharisees that they instead seek to legislate and coerce.

Winston Churchill once said something very clever but wise about how no one in their right mind would support representative democracy, until they have surveyed the alternatives. (My own faith in representative democracy is regularly shaken when it generates someone like Rodney Hide – whereas Hone Harawira seems to me a national treasure.)

Miscellany

Small things occur to me from time to time. I had not really noticed or used the word miscellany, until I read about the English 19th century lord, Marmaduke or somesuch, who maintained an entire subsidiary and substantial family of children born to his various mistresses – and that they were referred to in polite society as Marmaduke’s Miscellany.

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A NZ Herald reporter, telling us about the trashing of a $4 million Queenstown mansion by its tenants, writes that “the secluded property... overlooks Coronet Peak”. Yeah, right...

It reminded me of the deliberate gaffe in the song Wunderbar, in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate:

Gazing down on the Jungfrau
From our secret chalet for two,
Let us drink, Liebchen mein, in the moonlight benign,
To the joy of our dream come true.

Given that the Jungfrau is the highest mountain in Europe, it must be some chalet.

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Mary and I took the TransAlpine train from Christchurch to Greymouth, stayed there for a couple of days, and then returned the same way. It’s a grand journey, just over 4 hours each way through the plains and the alps. But what a third-rate typical Kiwi tourism disaster! The train has a buffet arrangement with the usual cardboard food items, and booze, but no dining facilities. I was impressed with the number of people who, faced with a few hours of sitting still and other forms of tedium, as it seemed to them, filled up the space with eating and drinking. Some people on the end of a meat pie are not a pretty sight.

The piped-in commentary along the way is “Kiwi Basic” – a series of silly stories and jokes read from a script. Much of this vernacular is clearly incomprehensible to American and Asian travellers. You get the same lame and tame jokes on the way back. No serious facts lucidly presented about the amazing geology of the landscape, or the forests or the flora and fauna. We were given some comment on the impressive engineering of the Otira Tunnel, but even that could have been done much better.

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I am ploughing through Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel, Wolf Hall – a story of Thomas Cromwell. It’s 650 pages of florid dialogue, most of it singularly unlikely. And the writer has such an irritating style... The pronoun “he”, it finally dawns on you, is always Thomas Cromwell, and yet the story really contrives to be told in the 1st person. Both Cromwell and Wolsey, whom I always regarded as more or less monsters, are depicted as kindly, avuncular religious devotees, passionately concerned for truth and the law, who just happen also to arrange disappearances, torture and executions. Henry is unconvincing. Cranmer... You ask yourself, if such people were fluent in several languages as well as Latin and Greek, to say nothing of mathematics, how come they lived like cavemen among each other? The greed, the paranoia, the cruelty. The women... And how come that man Cranmer ever got to produce the sublime Book of Common Prayer?

You know that when one of those Tudor blokes, habitually wading through mud and blood, disease and danger, and vast social inequities, actually complains about the smell of the privies that day, they must have been apocalyptically bad.