An old post… Go and Sit Down!! How often have you found yourself in one of those internet debates that rapidly degenerates into name calling and mudslinging?; Fool! Bastard! God punish you! Boko Haram! Thief like you! Olodo!..or the more cryptic and hackneyed ‘End times! A simple discussion on a neutral topic like a solar eclipse or the weather can within a nanosecond deteriorate into an PDP, APC, Arewa, Ndi-Igbo, Odua or Izon nation battle for supremacy. I had earlier written that “The death of intellectual debate in our society is seen every day in the inability of our people to have a difference in opinion (especially on social media) without resorting to name calling and mudslinging”. However having further deconstructed this malaise, I have since identified four key culprits; Self Imposed Dyslexia (SID) – Simply put, our people no longer read…and no… reading solely Linda Ikeji’s blog, City People, the Bible, Encomium or SaharaReporters does not count. One of my standard recruitment interview questions is “What kind of literature / books do you read?” In Nigeria you will receive responses like “I read a lot of motivational / Christian books”, or “I have read Macbeth / Eze Goes To School / The Marriage of Anansewa / So Long A Letter / The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born / Arrow of God / Things Fall Apart”. The former response implies that the candidate’s grasp of the English language is handicapped by a limited pool of alliterative phrases and clichés while the latter has not read beyond the Literature texts recommended as part of the Nigerian Secondary School curriculum. SID, which has since become endemic in our society, leads to a poor grasp of grammar, semantics and idiomatic expressions….and no, you can’t learn good English simply by watching Super Sports, MTV, SoundCity or Channel O. The Tweeter Effect (TTE) – A close relative of SID, this malady manifest in the inability of a good number of us to read any piece of literature that goes beyond 140 characters. Thus more often than not, people jump into facebook debates without having read through the original post. The moral here? You can get away with it on Twitter, but try it on facebook and you may end up looking and sounding like “Ukwa”. Pastor Taught English (PTE) - The fact that your Pastor repeats phrases gleaned from a few John Maxwell books and speaks English with an affected English accent (an Aussie, Cockney, American and South African Combo) does not imply that he/she has a good understanding of grammar and semantics. Your Pastor is probably a Celeb so he/she can get away with it…unfortunately by mimicking them you may end up sounding like Chief Zebrudaya Okoroigwe Nwogbo, elias 4:30. Sound and speak like your pastor at your own peril. Logical Fallacies (LF) – The ‘guiltiest’ Logical Fallacy in this case is “Argumentum ad Hominem”. Arguments of this kind focus not on the evidence for a view but on the character of the person advancing it; they seek to discredit positions by discrediting those who hold them. This is where the genre of curse words and mudslinging belongs to; Bastard! Thief! Idiot! Go and sit down! Clueless! God Punish you! Go back to your paymaster! and the latest, trending and already hackneyed member of this genre ‘Attack dog!”. Quick on the heels of ad Hominem is “Argumentum ad ignorantiam”, an appeal to ignorance. Essentially assuming that a claim is true (or false) because it has not been proven false (true) or cannot be proven false (true), without a shred of evidence to support it. This is followed by “Argumentum ad Nauseum’, you know those urban legends that we repeat so many times that people begin to believe they are based on fact. Then someone vociferously uses it to justify a position….and there is “Argumentum ad antiquitatem”, the argument to antiquity or tradition. Used by someone on one of my facebook posts recently, it insinuates that some policy, behavior, or practice is right or acceptable because its always been done that way. Unfortunately, fully addressing the flawed debates based on logical fallacies will probably require a thorough engagement in logic for some and a lobotomy for others for there are so many other ‘just as guilty’ Logical Fallacies, too numerous to mention here. What is clear is that fallacious reasoning, an inability to think critically, Self Imposed Dyslexia, Pastor Taught English and the Twitter Effect is expressed in our inability to properly articulate our views and premise our positions on sound logic. Did I hear you say “Go and sit down! God Punish you!! Na grammar we go chop?”
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 20:01:17 +0000
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