Ben Conroy
Ralph Waldo Emerson Everyday Philosophy
Popular aphorisms, proverbs and phrases sometimes pithily summarise good ideas. And sometimes, well, they don’t.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend
You might figure that ‘strong opposition to the government and general programme of Josef Stalin’, might seem to be a pretty good indicator of virtue and wisdom. Not, however, if the person possessing that attribute is Adolf Hitler.
In general, though, this attitude is more dangerous when the enemy of the enemy is less obviously bad, where the disagreements don’t seem quite as great. It’s very tempting to take a tactical alliance and turn it into wholehearted support: before you know it you’ve adopted positions you’d previously opposed, or you’re endorsing actions you’d once have decried.
We need to have a national conversation about this
Normally when people say this they have in mind some definite conclusion to the proposed conversation, the absence of which would render the conversation itself pointless. It would almost always be better just to argue for the conclusion.
A national conversation around alcohol which concluded without new policy proposals being made or new social norms being established would not do any good. In fact, it would probably be counterproductive: vaguely talking about doing something is often an excellent way to ensure nothing is done.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em
This one isn’t often invoked in so many words. But it does pretty neatly describe a kind of political behaviour. Sometimes when people lose a referendum or a public debate, they’ll abandon their previous position and actively work to advance the opposite one.
It’s not that this is always a bad idea: on some administrative matters, it’s perfectly fine. But sometimes people behave as though the mere fact of a democratic majority is enough to reverse the polarity of the moral universe. Politicians seem particularly prone to this. Theresa May went from campaigning for a remain vote in the Brexit referendum, crying at the leave result, and telling her closest advisor that “the ones who voted for Brexit will be the ones who suffer the most”, to being an enthusiastic Brexit advocate. I’m not saying there isn’t some kind of galaxy-brained way to make this make sense. But it is very strange. Other, still stranger examples of this phenomenon abound in Leinster House.
We have a very sophisticated electorate in this country
Substitute: “The electorate have lately been agreeing with me.”
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds
This phrase of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s is generally taken to be warning against letting consistency make you petty, legalistic, and nitpicky. Worry too much about your ideas being consistent with one another, and you’ll fail to achieve the freedom of thought and originality that characterises, in Emerson’s words, a “great soul”.
Nonsense. Intellectual nitpicking is real: the smug ‘well, actually’ of the pedant is to be avoided. But it has nothing to do with consistency.
If two ideas are inconsistent with one another, that means they cannot both be true at once. If you have two inconsistent beliefs, you have at least one false one. No amount of expansive hand-flapping about greatness of soul changes that.
Emerson himself may have been talking not about believing contradictions, but about being unafraid to change your mind: don’t let the fact that you said one thing for years stop you from recognising that you were wrong out of a fear of being labelled inconsistent. But the way his phrase has been taken licenses stupidity in the name of broad-mindedness. The man who believes that two plus two equals five is not a visionary: he’s an idiot.
Everything happens for a reason
You get a bit of a pass for this if you believe in a strong version of divine providence. But for some reason, the set of people who believe in a strong version of divine providence and the set of people who say ‘everything happens for a reason’ are almost entirely non-overlapping.
Even when talking about divine providence though, I suspect this way of talking obscures more than it reveals. In a sense, there’s a reason for everything that happens, in that there’s a reason God didn’t prevent it happening. But not everything that happened is actively willed by God: nothing evil is, for instance. Thinking of moral evil as fundamentally unreasonable places us in the right relation to it: one of consistent opposition. This, though, is the one I’m least sure about.
Whatever gets you through the night
Nobody actually believes this.