ORANGE, Ohio -- I recently heard Kara Swisher ask Parler CEO John Matze to provide proof of the idea that the election was stolen. His brazen response was that evidence should be provided demonstrating that it wasn’t. Calling out Matze’s appeal to ignorance or the assumption that whatever hasn’t been proven false must be true, the whip-smart tech journalist remarked, “Oh my God. Come on. That’s Loch Ness Monster talk.”
This exchange reminded me of two things from the years when I taught Arthur Miller’s play, “The Crucible.”
There is a particular line that the outraged central character, John Proctor, delivers sarcastically after he’s informed that his wife is accused of using little dolls or poppets to cast spells and torment people. To a cowardly and paranoid local reverend, Proctor insists that his wife does not have any poppets in the house. And when the reverend suggests that her poppets are just probably hidden and the Proctors should prove that there are no poppets, the enraged Proctor responds, “There might also be a dragon with five legs in my house, but no one has ever seen it.”
Marina Vladova is a former high school English teacher.
Arthur Miller peppered his play with irony and fallacies because it was the best way to convey the absurdity of a horrifying chapter in U.S. history, the Salem witch trials, and the play was encased in the rich irony of debuting during the Red Scare.
Both were characterized by delusion, fear, panic, division, and paranoia; points in history when accusations were enough to establish guilt, and anybody who asked for real evidence placed themselves at risk of being accused.
After an exhausting unit studying fallacies — loaded questions, slippery slopes, red herrings, ad hominems — I pleaded with students to always remember how to recognize them so they could arm themselves against impediments, at times seductive, to civil discourse. This was mostly a theoretical idea to my students, however, who enjoyed the play but felt far removed from these tragic calamities of the past.
And yet, here we are. And Miller’s art and commentary could not have been more prescient.
Twenty years ago, in an essay for The Guardian newspaper, Miller warned that “an ideological war is like guerrilla war, since the enemy is an idea whose proponents are not in uniform but are disguised as ordinary citizens […] and whose imagination is captured by a vision of something that isn’t there.”
The Donald Trump presidency is characterized by self-inflicted fluctuations in violence and paralysis. Although our country is weakened on many levels, I’m optimistic that reason and light will prevail, if we take measures to live up to the responsibilities of protecting democracy.
We must prepare the citizenry to recognize and reject demagogic tropes that pit us against each other. We must ensure that our children are taught evidence-based history and that the Cubist renderings of who we are as a people — the noble ascents and the moral failures — are examined courageously head-on.
This, much more than a unit on logical fallacies, can empower people to recognize and break from the next seductive ideological grip that will send us spiraling once again. And there will be a next time. As Arthur Miller noted, “There are no passions quite as hot and pleasurable as those of the deluded.”
Marina Vladova taught high school English and philosophy through film in Cleveland and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public health, focused on community-needs assessment and arts-based intervention programming, at Kent State University. While living in New York, Vladova wrote for Interview, Surface, and Big magazines.
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