People often forget or ignore the “aggressive” part of passive-aggressive. And people who are really skilled at being passive-aggressive—that is, abusive people—use passive-aggressive tactics that enable them to hurt others while looking so blameless that if the victim calls attention to the harm, the victim looks “sensitive,” or as though they’re “over-reading.” People skilled at being passive-aggressive are good at hurting others and evading the responsibility or accountability for it.
There are a few ways they do that. One of the most common is burying the aggression in the major premise (i.e., the logical fallacy of assuming what is at stake or what used to be called “begging the question”). Here are some ways of burying the aggression in the major premise:
Love the sinner; hate the sin.
Well, as a liberal/conservative/teacher/atheist/Christian, you’d of course think that.
You shouldn’t criticize this war because you should support the troops.
Were I Queen of the Universe, I would make people learn about enthymemes and syllogisms, not because they’re how people should reason, but because they’re how people reason badly. In logic, the fallacy is called the “undistributed middle,” and you can often show the problems with Venn diagrams.
I want to start with the second example because it’s simultaneously the one I run across most often, and the most problematic.
Let’s imagine that we’re arguing about whether small dogs are on the side of squirrels in the squirrel conspiracy to get to the red ball (this was an issue about which two of my dogs disagreed). You say they aren’t, I say they are, and you have an IRA with stock investments making you a Wall Street investor, so I say, “Well, you just say that because you’re a capitalist pig.”
Here’s the argument I’m making:
All Wall Street investors are capitalist pigs.
All capitalist pigs support the squirrels or don’t see the danger of their conspiracy.
Therefore, your being a Wall Street investor means your position can be dismissed.
That’s the syllogism. The two major premises (the unstated assumptions) are false. Not all investors are capitalist pigs (since many people have pension funds); not all all capitalist pigs support or don’t see the danger of the squirrel conspiracy (since that’s something we can’t possibly know, not having asked every capitalist pig about the squirrel conspiracy).
Here’s another way to think about my argument. Were my argument logical, then the Venn diagram would have a circle of “people who support (or don’t see) the squirrel conspiracy” and every Wall Street investor would be in that circle (because they would all be in the circle of capitalist pig, and that circle is completely in the squirrel conspiracy circle). Notice also that there’s considerable ambiguity about the term “capitalist pig,” as there is about the term “sinner.”
Obviously, the assumptions in this argument are wrong, or, at least, shouldn’t simply be presented as premises out of the range of argument. But it’s so hard to point out that the argument is bad because the assumptions are wrong, since so few people understand that a statement they believe is true that has bad assumptions is definitely not a logical argument, and probably not true.
When people are engaged in this kind of passive-aggressive argument, you have to bring up their premises, and then it’s easy for them to frame you as a pedant or quibbler. But, for a good conversation (which is not what they want to happen), their assumptions need to be argued.
Burying the argument in the premises gives rhetors a rhetorical advantage, especially if they’re appealing to common stereotypes. It enables them to avoid the rhetorical responsibility of fulling defending your position—that is, including your premises.
So, for instance, the “love the sinner, but hate the sin” enthymeme has as its major premise that some group is sinning, as well as an unstated premise that “hating the sin” justifies discriminating against the “sinner” whom they claim to love. They love the sinner, but, in the name of “hating the sin,” they want to be able to pass laws that restrict the civil rights of a group they claim not to hate.
What, exactly, does it mean to say that you love someone, but you won’t let them have the same rights as you?
They might say it isn’t hating the sinner, but it’s certainly quacking like it.
Further, they do not want to have to defend how they’re defining sins that should be hated. They will say, “It’s in Scripture.” Of course the term “homosexuality” isn’t in Scripture, but there are things (ranging from pederasty to rape) that get translated as “homosexual” acts.
Setting aside the translation issues, which are huge, what assumptions are they making about what should be considered a sin?
If they are defining “sins that should be hated” as anything condemned in Leviticus or Paul (or pseudo-Paul), then they’ve got a lot of sins they need to be hating. Do they? Whether homosexuality is a sin is a surprisingly complicated issue. Whether homosexuality is a graver sin than braided hair in church, paying interest on loans (or benefitting from an economic system that involves getting money from money being loaned), adultery, having non-procreative sex, getting a tattoo, exploiting or ignoring the poor, endorsing the death penalty, is an argument they need to make to support the enthymeme they throw out. They don’t.
They don’t, because they can’t come up with a consistent hermeneutic that justifies their hating the sin of homosexuality more than they hate the sin of charging interest (let alone exorbitant interest). Were their hierarchy of sin-hating rationally defensible, they’d be insisting on SCOTUS justices who go after pawn shops. I wouldn’t recommend that you hold your breath till that happens.
When I’ve pointed out this inability to explain why homosexuality and not braided hair should be a major cultural issue to homophobes, they said the former is not a cultural rule. They defend that distinction with arguments so shabby that, were they clothes, Goodwill would throw them out.
Basically, they neither value nor understand that simply being able to support your point with a quote from Scripture is not logical proof, unless you’re consistent as granting an argumentative win to every person who can do that. Everyone can, so that’s a problem. And therefore they don’t. That’s a winning strategy for them, but no one else.
As long as they can keep themselves and others from noticing the ethical and logical train wreck of their position, they’ll continue to think that discriminating against non-cishet people is okay, as are pawn shops, braided hair, and a justice system grounded in “an eye for an eye.”
They won’t accept the burden of proof because they believe that their personal conviction is all the proof they need.
So, we should throw the burden of proof on them. We all have people in our lives who are bigots, and whom we try to love.
Instead of trying to drag into the sunlight and then dissect their appalling major premises and assumptions, we should take as our motto that they’re bigots, and we will try to love them. They are, and we do try. And then they might notice what it’s like to have one’s condemnation buried in the premises. Let them try to figure out why the logic of an argument matters.
Or, put it this way: imagine that your passive-aggressive relative says, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” and you reply with a smile and a kiss, “Love the bigot, hate the bigotry.” Think about what happens next.
