Ad hominem

In Western democracies, even when political disagreements rage, it is considered very much 'below the belt' to make ad hominem attacks. Even when it happens, as occasionally it does, it is viewed as very bad form, so there ensues quite a lot of tut-tutting and negative commentary, as President Trump has discovered - not that it seems to stop his rants on twitter nor limit his bilious invective during interviews. But I digress...

Recently, as you already know, dear reader, I have been spending quite a bit of time in Greece, where most political arguments are very much ad hominem, laden with sentiment and full of nastiness most certainly personally directed. Hardly ever is an expounded political position countered with reasoned argument as to why it is wrong/inappropriate or whatever. Rather, discussion focuses on the proposer's shortcomings as a person, their character (or, more often, their lack of...), their family's past going back to at least WW2 or before, anything that can be used as a weapon. The tone is, more often than not, at least condescending if not rudely aggressive and confrontational, and certainly unpleasantly personal.

Ancient Greeks may have cultivated logic and philosophy, but their descendants (of which I am, in theory at least, one) unfortunately give not a hoot, preferring emotion to logic and cultivating the illusion that this makes one more human, somehow more 'real'. We shrink from facts and figures, preferring instead to analyse personalities as perceived from the outside, ascribing motives and attributes to people barely known other than through the media. If they do not live up to our imagined standards we ridicule them, belittle them, talk about them as if we know them intimately and know they are not worthy. More importantly, we do not let little things like facts get in the way, preferring 'ideas', intangible concepts based on little but sentiment.

How else can we justify having an extensive (by current standards) part of the population who revile what they describe as fascism but believe that communism (as had been practised in the USSR and China) was a force for the good, an expression of freedom and progressive thinking? How else can we possibly still have a Maoist-Leninist party with fanatical devotees, when the facts about their idols and the things they got up to are freely available for all to appreciate? Why else did we accept the phrase ' the moral privilege of the (communist) left, promoted by the current government?

All attacks on any political figure in Greece begin not by belittling their work with facts and figures, specific and checkable, but with insinuations about their inadequacies as people, their perceived weaknesses of character, their faults; all these attacks are personal and the one thing missing, more often than not, is facts. And nobody feels the slightest bit ashamed about doing this, this grown-up version of a schoolyard quarrel.

Politics are dirty and unpleasant but needn't be so personal. Greece should move on and Greeks should grow up so that we get the political system that best serves us, not the current inadequate self-serving lot or the ones that preceded them in recent - and not so recent - years. Facts and logic are truly powerful weapons in a way that ad hominem attacks rarely can be, so we should use them instead.