In Canada and the United States, we are asked to “support our troops”. My response is the opposite: I do not support our troops.

This is a dangerous position to take in North American society, where unqualified “support” is demanded of us from bumper stickers on ambulances and fire trucks, and where even a local politician not mouthing this mantra on cue may as well pack up and move out of the country. It isn’t difficult to imagine that many people would be satisfied by adding the phrase “or get out” to this slogan. A popular witticism suggests, “If you don’t stand behind our troops, feel free to stand in front of them.”

The United States has a strong military tradition, and mass unqualified support for it is part of its culture. This is a latent phenomenon in Canada. With the election of a Conservative government in this country, the role of the Canadian military has taken on a new perspective. For example, there has been a shift from a traditional role of peacekeeping, to active, prolonged military engagement in Afghanistan.¹ The government has created the issue of “Canadian arctic sovereignty”, dubiously spending more than four billion dollars of the military budget for it. And, most telling, Prime Minister Stephen Harper paternalistically chided the Canadian public in March 2006, when the debate about Afghanistan began in earnest. Borrowing the phrase “cut and run” from hawkish American discourse intended to make opponents of the Iraq war appear ignoble and cowardly, Harper neatly described the Canadian Conservative world view.

Canadians don’t cut and run at the first sign of trouble. That’s the nature of this country, and when we send troops into the field, I expect Canadians to support those troops.

In Canada, as much as in the United States, the unqualified demand to “support our troops” is issued from all quarters, by the most nondescript soccer mom from the rear of her SUV, and by the most powerful person in the country.

When Mr. Harper says that he expects Canadians to support the troops, he is effectively demanding that all discourse on the subject of troop deployment come to an end. His demand is tantamount to saying, “It doesn’t matter where we send our troops or for what purpose, you are expected to support them.” This line of thought pushes back discussion of foreign policy issues in the public arena, and favours martial sentimentality over discourse. The Prime Minister is actively discouraging dialogue.

The most common definition for regular Canadians sporting bumper stickers with this phrase seems to go something like this: “Support our troops, because they are in harm’s way while performing a dangerous job at great personal risk.” If this is accurate, then what they are really saying is that there is a need for society to collectively support troops, because there are elements that actively want the troops to be in harm’s way. But this is an absurd proposition. While there may be psychotic individuals who would like troops to be harmed, this is hardly a problem that needs to be confronted by common citizens. Clearly something else is implied by the reverse of “support our troops”.

“Support our troops”, coming from ordinary citizens in 2008, holds exactly the same message that Mr. Harper’s comment held in 2006. “Support our troops” means, “It is enough for ordinary citizens to be sentimental about troops.” There is no further form of support, other than sentimental support including signed cards, flags, and home-made muffins, that ordinary citizens can offer troops. From this perspective, support for troops must be unqualified. There is an implicit wishing away of all questions regarding why troops are deployed in the places they find themselves.

I am not informed enough about the issues in Afghanistan to understand whether or not I should be supporting the foreign policy decisions that sent troops there. I can make no judgement as to whether or not the troops are “protecting and guaranteeing Canadian freedom,” which seems to be the popular notion (although I do know that Canada will be free for a very long time, should its troops withdraw from military action in Afghanistan tomorrow). At best, I am by necessity neutral on the foreign policy issues involved. I suspect many Canadians are in my position.

I am not neutral about supporting troops. I cannot support troops without qualification, and I certainly cannot subscribe to a popular chant that seeks to put all Canadians under the umbrella of what is tantamount to a political slogan that holds an underlying connotation of willful ignorance.

The command to “support our troops” is an appeal to emotion lacking any evidential value. Not merely a logical fallacy, since the statement as commonly used does not in itself propose any kind of argument, “support our troops” is an empty juxtaposition of sentimentality with public policy. Everyone should be suspicious of such appeals.

1. The Canadian military was initially deployed in Afghanistan by the Liberal government in 2002, marking its first combat role since the Korean War. The Conservative government has since sought several extensions for troop deployment there despite political opposition, and has increased military spending to $19,000,000,000.00 for 2009. [↩]

Louis Politics Conservatism, Debate, Logical Fallacy, Military, Politics, Troops

I get a lot of mental exercise at DPChallenge.com, where the main subject of photography seems to be heavily subsidized by discussions of religion, belief, atheism, and politics. Unfortuantely, it’s not the good kind of exercise, where I’m kept on my toes by someone obviously much smarter than me, who uses reason in ways that show up my ignorance, or who has relevant information at his or her fingertips.

Truthfully, there is some of that. But more often, I’m left to dodge the exasperated insults of someone who has taken great umbrage with the fact that I’ve presented an opinion contrary to theirs. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, the discussion concerns faith, and the respondent is — you guessed it — Christian. But often times, discussions take a turn for the worst even when they are about other issues, and also occasionally when they are concerned with the most banal corners of photography or photographic equipment.

The membership at DPChallenge is largely American, and the truth of the matter is that it’s mostly Americans, and to a marginally lesser degree Canadians, who seem pathologically predisposed to accepting a contrary opinion on any number of subjects as a personal attack on their character. It is an absolutely frustrating experience to come up with sound arguments, rebuttals, or exposés of weak propositions, only to have the opposing person cry foul, or act like a wounded teenaged drama queen, or, most often, reply with the vilest kinds of insults imaginable. What a spectacle it was to have someone at DPChallenge call me an “amoral pig” when I made his argument look weak. When called out on it by another participant, he apologized to the pig for the unfair comparison with me.

Such is the level of discourse in our North American society on subjects as wide ranging as religious faith, green house gases, Hoya lens filters, and the awfulness of an amateur photograph.

Stephen Fry, the British actor from Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder series and others, posted a very revealing blog article concerning this phenomenon. He’d been dining with an American colleague when things turned nasty. Fry doesn’t deny that he has strong opinions, that he may even be the kind of person that is very frustrating to have an argument with. But he notes some solid differences between European and American discourse.

To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle… [M]ost Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust… Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.

So what’s the cause of all this?

There is no appetite for true debate in the stream of discourse of North American society. Opinion, however outrageous, unfounded, or offensive, is sacrosanct. People have come to think that their opinions are unassailable, and that any attempt to weaken their position by argument is an unmitigated personal attack on their character. Their opinions, and the irrational way they defend them, are more like articles of faith than judgements of their environment based on fact. Any attempt to undermine those opinions is perceived as a sort of heretical undertaking, a below-the-belt attack against the very person holding them. There is little separation in these people’s minds between themselves and their opinions, their beliefs — their articles of faith.

For this state of affairs, we have unfounded faith itself in all its forms to blame. Faith blunts an individual’s ability to observe his own opinions objectively. There is no cool dispassionate consideration possible with faith. It merely is, and remains unassailable, untestable, impervious to critical analysis. It bleeds into all areas of a person’s life, infecting their powers of rationale. Ultimately it emboldens an individual’s confidence in herself, creating an overblown sense of self-importance that insulates from all inquiry the reason-defying catalogue of opinons she holds.

I knew that listening to Monty Python records throughout my teen years was going to help me, so I’m confident in saying that argument is a series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It’s not just contradiction. Neither is it holding one’s ground until the opponent is scared off, put off, or brow-beaten into accepting the fact that one’s position is ultimately inviolate. An argument is a process whereby one attempts to analyze an opponent’s position, find the logical or reasoning flaws in them, and ultimately expose the proposition they uphold as unfounded. It is neither a tit-for-tat, nor a kid’s game, complete with veils of childish tears and the loud stamping of feet.

But this is not understood, and argument, in its most useful form, has died. Long live argument.

Louis Argument and Debate, Believers Argument, Debate