Imagine a world where people snub literature and knowledge. Those who read are “readers”, a derogatory term barely superior to being a burger-flipper. It’s a world just like our own. When you think of it, it is our own. Welcome to Illiterary Fiction, my latest literary-fiction novel.
What if people stopped reading altogether? What if there existed professional readers, whose job would be to read and summarize for those who wouldn’t read anything longer than a tweet?
The world of Illiterary Fiction is not a pleasant one. It becomes even less so once you realize it doesn’t differ at all from our world.
Writing a review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce, by Paul Torday, is an exhilarating experience. I get to talk about the brilliance of the novel and the hopeless mediocrity that surrounds us.
Indeed, it’s interesting to give you a quick briefing of how I discovered The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce.
I saw the book at the local library. As I sometimes do with authors I haven’t read before, I took a quick look at Goodreads reviews. The average rating of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce is (at the time of this review) 3.49/5. The thing is, I have the experience to know that if a book (or a film) features bad ratings by the social masses, it might mean it’s actually good.
Taking a look at one or two reviews, I felt certain it was a book I wanted to read. People complained that there was no resolution to the story. Others gave the book 2 stars because… the protagonist was in denial.
The level of ignorance and mediocrity is appalling, when it comes to unsophisticated readers.
And so, let’s see what I thought about Torday’s novel. This is a review of The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce. It’s also another chance for me to express my dismay at the social mediocrity that has enthralled the world. Ironically enough, the two processes are metatextually related as you will see.
Articles on fallacies are popular on the Home for Fiction blog. We’ve talked about the Appeal to Nature fallacy, the Bandwagon fallacy, and the Only Game in Town fallacy. Today I’ll talk to you about the Appeal to Hypocrisy fallacy, also known as “Tu Quoque”. The term is Latin and means “You, too”. I will use the terms interchangeably in this article, they mean exactly the same thing.
As with all fallacies, the Appeal to Hypocrisy is an attempt to ameliorate one’s argument with parameters that do not stand the test of argumentation and logic. Generally speaking, a person committing a fallacy might do it inadvertently; that is to say, without intent. Here’s an example:
Everyone at the office agrees, the boss is stupid.
This feels like a very natural thing to say. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it, right? And yet, though the statement might still be true, it’s not argumentatively solid. The mere fact that every employee agrees, doesn’t prove that the boss is indeed stupid. This is an example of the Bandwagon fallacy.
Conversely, it is uncommon that a person would commit the Appeal to Hypocrisy fallacy unknowingly. The nature of this fallacy is such that the person deploying it in an argument is usually fully aware that his/her argument is weak, and the fallacy is committed precisely to create distraction.
Just because someone is a hypocrite, it does not remove the validity of their argument
