I am so crazy lucky to live five minutes away on foot from Tower Grove Park on the near South Side of the City of St. Louis. It's a huge Victorian walking park with eye-popping beauty for four seasons. Here's this evening's edition:
Tweet from Scott Barry Kaufman, who is one of my favorite podcast hosts at The Psychology Podcast:
Last week I found a big book of Grimm's Fairy Tales in my basement. Out of curiosity, I've been reading a few Grimm's Fairy tales each day for the past several days. More than a few of these stories involve people being desperately hungry or poor. On a regular basis, the wonderful ending is that the people end up with a comfortable house that includes a magic pantry that never runs out of food. These stories must have been written in desperate times. Reading them has reminded me how lucky most of us are that we are not chronically hungry and homeless.
Many of these fairy tales also seem bizarre, involving men actively coveting other mens wives, women treated like property, and families putting their kids to cruel tests. Reading these tales has reminded me that one of my daughters attended a Waldorf School in St. Louis County about 15 years ago. The teachers repeatedly told me that the ONLY thing I should ever read to my daughters, at least until 3rd grade, was Grimm's Fairy Tales. I refused to follow that advice. It strikes me as bizarre today as it did back then, and it was a factor in pulling her out of that school and enrolling her in a much better school. I suspect that they were expecting us to cherry pick for better quality fairy tales, avoiding the bizarre and pointless stories. Cherry picking is common, of course. I'm reminded of the many people who have insisted that I should read the Bible, focusing on the "good parts," not on the bizarre stories, such as the time God sent bears to kill 42 children for making fun of Elisha because he was bald. (2 Kings 2:23-25).
Until now, I didn't realize there was a name a peculiar type of argument, but from now on I will recognize it as a "Kafka Trap":
In The Trial, Kafka presents a totalitarian world where a man is arrested by unspecified authorities and accused of an unspecified crime. Kafka traps occurs when people are accused of something but their denials are interpreted as absolute proof that the accusation is true. For example,
You are an liar!"
"No I am not."
"That proves it. Liars always deny they are liars!"
Kafka Traps seem to work because they are circular, thus evidence-free, thus unfalsifiable. You can expose the fallaciousness of Kafka Traps by making some simple substitutions, e.g.,:
"You are a jelly donut!"
"No, I am not."
"That proves it. Jelly donuts always deny they are jelly donuts!"
Now consider this argument:
" You are a racist!"
"No, I am not."
"That proves it. Racists always deny they are racists!"
This argument that all white people are racists has been employed by Robin DiAngelo:
Yes, all white people are complicit with racism. There will be umbrage and upset. People will insist that they are not racist. That I don't know them ... 'I've traveled a lot. I speak lots of languages ... I had a Black roommate in college. I'm a minority myself.' This is the kind of evidence that many white people used to exempt themselves from that system. It's not possible to be exempt from it.
These Kafka Traps are fact-free pseudo-arguments that remind me of St. Anselm's alleged proof for the existence of God ("That than which nothing greater can be conceived") and St. Thomas Aquinas' Contingency proof for the existence of God ("even if the Universe has always existed, it still owes its existence to an uncaused cause. The only thing missing from these three fallacious arguments is the word "Abracadabra!"
To escape a Kafka Trap, you can also demand evidence for these extraordinary claims, then (after no evidence is produced) invoke Carl Sagan: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."
If you are facing an evidence-free claim that you are a racist, simply flip the argument 180 by substituting "maker of false accusations" for "racist":
"You are a maker of false accusations!"
"No, I am not."
"That proves it. Makers of false accusations always deny they are makers of false accusations!"
That is to say: Stop using “male” and “female” to refer to men and women. In fact, stop using sex-based words to refer to people at all. They’re words for bodies, not for people with hearts and souls and minds.I suppose we're going to need to scrub these offending terms from thousands of years of literature worldwide. Good-bye Shakespeare. Good-bye, The Bible. Good-bye biology and anatomy texts. And we'll need to erase the recordings to thousands of offensive songs, such as "Brown Eyed Girl" and everything ever recorded by the Beach Boys.