How to Reason in a Slovenly Way for Fun and Profit

On the uses and abuses of analogy

We must…stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought.

-Michel Foucault

One can learn a great deal about human nature from history. One can learn a great deal about one’s own society, too. But there can be few things more damaging to intelligent reasoning than the intemperate or inappropriate use of historical analogy - the drawing of inferences from the past about the present or future arising from superficial, often spurious, resemblances.

This form of reasoning is everywhere, and you will be familiar with it. It runs roughly as follows. An event or figure from the past is identified as being in some way worthy of opprobrium. Then, an event or figure from the present is chosen for indictment. Next, a connection is drawn between the two so as to cast them under the same shadow, with the effect being that the latter is made to seem even worse than it, or he, already purportedly is.

The undisputed heavyweight champion of the use of this technique is the Nation’s Favourite Classicist (TM), Mary Beard, who a couple of years ago managed to make the claim with a straight face that Nigel Farage is like Julius Caesar because, er, well, Julius Caesar was in some vague sense objectionable, and so is Nigel Farage, so they must be alike, right? And in drawing this analogy Beard made the beauty of this line of thinking clear: by deploying this strategy she didn’t actually need to go to the trouble of explaining why Nigel Farage is wrong or engaging with his proposed policies or otherwise. She could simply smear him by association. That the association is both crass and asinine, and ill-explained (something to do with both figures having once given speeches in which they expressed reluctance to enter politics), hardly matters. Bad man + bad man = really bad men. Case closed, and the aim of the exercise realised: Beard and her readers are reassured that they are good people, because they are not like Julius Caesar, or Nigel Farage, the bad men in question.

People hailing from all locations on the political spectrum are guilty of this form of reasoning, of course - a quick trawl through YouTube will unearth thousands of examples of right-wing ragebait interviews in which some talking head or other is explaining why a given contemporary figure on the left is like Stalin, or Lenin, or Pol Pot, or Mao. But a recent particularly loathsome example I came across - loathsome because it comes in the more formal guise of an actual argument presented in a proper publication by an honest-to-goodness purported expert - comes in the 2023 book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History, by Dan Stone, a Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Stone’s book, I should say, is in the main riveting, if a little breathless. It is dedicated to exploding various myths about the Holocaust for the lay reader, among them being the almost-exclusive guilt of Germany and Austria in the phenomenon (there were actually almost a series of mini-Holocausts across the continent, with a wide range of government culpability) and the idea that the process was almost entirely one of ‘industrial’ slaughter (which did happen, but which was accompanied and perhaps outweighed by much more old fashioned, one might say traditional, methods of massacre, at a vast scale). In this respect The Holocaust: An Unfinished History does a sterling service. But Stone also seems, unfortunately, to have felt pressured, or pressurised himself, into using his book to signal in a cack-handed way his commitment to the fashionable causes of the day. This is a ritual that is (believe me) all too common in academic writing nowadays. But the use of the Holocaust as a vehicle to do so seems particularly tin-eared.

It is in the very introductory chapter to the book that we see historical analogy rearing its ugly head. Having declared sweepingly that the Holocaust offers us no lessons - ‘[it] teaches nothing except that deep passions that owe nothing to rational politics can move human beings to do terrible things’ - Stone then proceeds to set out a litany of other things that it does in fact teach us: it ‘reveals the fragile identity but awesome power of the modern nation-state’ while 'call[ing] [its] very organisation and functioning into question’; it is fraught with ‘political, religious, cultural and social implications’; it shows how ‘magical beliefs’ can operationalise bureaucracy; it demonstrates how ‘economic recession, protectionism [and] nativist movements’ combine to ‘mak[e] people poorer, more afraid of others, and more turned in on themselves’, etcetera, etcetera, and so on and so forth. And chief among the lessons of the Holocaust is - yes, you’ve guessed it - ‘something something Brexit, something something Hungary, something something populism, something something Trump’.

That isn’t a direct quote, of course, but it almost may as well be. We learn from Stone that, as in the 1930s, ‘we live in an age of increasing nationalism, right-wing populism and xenophobia’, all of which ‘are pressing hard against the mainstream acceptance of international cooperation and multiculturalism’. How, he then asks, do we explain ‘the elections of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the vote for Brexit, the election of a radical-right component to the Austrian and Italian governments, the success of self-styled illiberal democracy in Hungary and Poland, or the rise of radical-right movements?’ How do we explain the fact that ‘we are seeing these movements not just in countries such as Greece’ (I’m not sure why the poor Greeks are singled out in this way) but ‘also in Germany, with the Alternative für Deutschland, Spain, with Vox, and France, with the National Rally, and in countries with longstanding and deep commitments to Holocaust education and commemoration such as the US, the UK, and Germany [sic; Germany appears twice in the same list]?’

Well, the answer, Stone goes on, can only be that the memory of the Holocaust is overestimated as a factor in shaping politics. Despite knowing about the genocide of the Jews of Europe, despite having been told about it in school, despite having watched Schindler’s List and The Sorrow and the Pity, despite visiting Auschwitz in their millions, people still do things like voting for Brexit. They still ‘press hard’ against ‘multiculturalism’. They still - God help us - elect people like Donald Trump.

Stone finds these facts startling. That people could do something so wicked as to vote to leave the EU, even though they know that the Holocaust once happened, borks his brain. And this leads him to make a series of bizarre and unfortunate pronouncements that would challenge even Mary Beard’s claims about Farage and Caesar in the crassness stakes. ‘Fascism is not yet in power,’ he mutters grimly, ‘But it is knocking on the door…the postwar order built on internationalism and individual freedom…will be decisively done away with and we will have sleepwalked into authoritarianism, if not full-blown fascism.’ Through ‘forty years of neo-liberal economics and the consequences of austerity since 2008’ the people have become impoverished, threatening existing governance structures, and ‘when elites become desperate to hold on to power’ they can do ‘terrible, traumatic things’. He concludes with a flourish:

If much the same is true today [as it was in the 1930s] - the radical right attacks immigrants, Muslims, Others of all varieties […] - then saying it is not about using present-day problems to explain the past. Instead, it is the reverse: it is showing how the appeal of Nazism could lead to the commission of a crime that exceeds the cognition of the rational mind, even as we are sleepwalking into a twenty-first century catastrophe.

God that? It is not that present-day problems explain the past, but the reverse - the past explains the future. If you voted for Brexit, or Donald Trump, you are not only literally Hitler or worse than the Nazis. You are, to all intents and purposes, complicit in forthcoming genocide. Another Holocaust may some day happen, and it will be all your fault that we ‘sleepwalk’ into it.

This lazy - not to say unhinged, or even deranged - use of historical analogy is a symptom of a deep intellectual sickness. It demonstrates a simple unwillingness to do the hard work and actually think things through. What is happening in our current moment is nothing like the 1930s except in the vaguest sense - the number of things that are different far outweighs the small number of half-resemblances that exist. It does a disservice to Stone’s readers to portray things in the way that he does (he clearly can’t imagine that anybody who had voted for Brexit would want to read his book - maybe he imagines that such people don’t read books at all), and it also does a disservice to history itself. The Holocaust was an event to be understood in its own right. Of course we can learn lessons about human nature from it. But it is not something to be used to score cheap points in a culture war or a lazy shorthand way of smearing those one considers one’s political opponents. A professor at a leading university ought to be better than that - especially within the context of a book that is otherwise supported by such a wealth of evidence and learning.

At the root of the Beard-Stone problem is a failure to properly put into effect something that any person purporting to be an intellectual - or, for that matter, simply educated and intelligent - ought to understand, which is the function and utility of analogy.

Analogy is a device that should be used with caution. A poorly thought-through analogy will quickly derail an argument. This is why Scott Adams labels an analogy a mere ‘story about a different topic’. As soon as one brings up an analogy attention in the listener tends to shift to the question of whether or not it is an apt one, and where the differences lie between it and the subject of comparison. The result is that nobody is persuaded of anything and the argument devolves into a dissection of the appropriateness of the analogy. Hence, Dan Stone’s problem: no Brexit or Trump voter is convinced by the analogy of the 1930s, because they can immediately spot a thousand holes in it, and any chance he had of persuading them that their views are wrong quickly sinks without trace beneath an avalanche of observed discrepancies or errors.

(Perhaps this is the point, of course: such analogies are not used to persuade at all, but merely to reassure right-thinking people about how very right-thinking they are. If the people who voted to leave the EU were like the Nazis, then it follows as day follows night that those who voted to remain were definitely the goodies. This helps salve the wounds of political losses.)

This is not to say that analogies are not useful in some contexts, though, if used correctly. Perhaps the best example of reasoning by analogy that I know of - one which can be very usefully and helpfully deployed as an illustration - is that of the famous English judge, Lord Denning (or humble Denning LJ as he then was), in his judgment in the contract law case of Entores Ltd v Miles Far East Corporation [1955] 2 QB 327. I teach this case to first year undergraduate students each year - it is one of those cases that all law students must know - and each time I impress upon them how good an example of analogical reasoning is, and why. Denning was not always benign; in fact he did more than any English judge in the 20th century to mess up the law of contract. But in Entores his judgment is perfectly executed.

The facts of the dispute are easily summarised. An American company had an agent in the Netherlands. The agent sent a message by Telex, a kind of primitive form of email or fax, to an English company in London, that in ordinary circumstances would have created a contract. The question for the court was simple: where was the contract made? Was it made where the Telex was sent - i.e., in the Netherlands? Or where it was received, i.e., in England? This mattered, because according to the law then in force it was only if the contract was made ‘in the jurisdiction’, i.e., in England, that a writ of summons could be served against the American company where a breach of contract was claimed.

This was the first significant litigation concerning formation of a contract by Telex. So there was no specific precedent to apply and the court had to either use a pre-existing one from somewhere, or make one of its own.

Telexes were curious devices. Although I described them as primitive forms of email or fax, the better analogy (see what I did there?) may be an IRC channel or one of the old online chat tools, such as MSN Messenger, that used to exist in days of yore. Company A has a Telex; Company B has a Telex. Company A contacts the post office to establish a connection with Company B, and then somebody at Company A types a message into the machine. This is then printed on paper, more or less in real time, by the Telex machine at Company B.

Most people would intuit that in order to make a contract by Telex the final communication making the contract binding (the ‘acceptance’) would have to be fully printed at the other end. The difficulty was that English law at that time (and still, by default) operated the other way around with respect to postal mail. If an acceptance is posted through a post box, the contract is created at that point (subject to many exceptions and provisos that we do not need to go into here) - i.e., not when it is received.

The defendants, the American company, argued that the Telex was, by analogy, like the post. And since it was like the post, it ought to follow the ‘postal rule’ - i.e. that acceptance is communicated, and hence the contract formed, at the point the message of acceptance is sent. But the claimants argued that the analogy was incorrect, and that common sense dictated that a Telexed acceptance was only binding when it arrived at the other end.

The court’s job was clear then. Is a Telexed communication like a letter? Or not? Is the analogy appropriate? And Denning LJ gave a classic example of reasoning by analogy in response.

First, Denning declares - note this - that it is important to go in stages. The first stage is a hypothetical analogy of a face to face conversation:

Let me first consider a case where two people make a contract by word of mouth in the presence of one another. Suppose, for instance, that I shout an offer to a man across a river or a courtyard but I do not hear his reply because it is drowned by an aircraft flying overhead. There is no contract at that moment. If he wishes to make a contract, he must wait till the aircraft is gone and then shout back his acceptance so that I can hear what he says. Not until I have his answer am I bound.

Indisputably true. If I shout to you across a river that I will sell you a ton of widgets for £5,000, and you attempt to reply ‘I accept!’ but a plane flies by and drowns out the sound, we both know that we don’t have a contract yet. I haven’t heard you and you (reasonably) know I haven’t heard you, so neither of us would think there is a binding agreement at that point. We only have a binding agreement when we have waited for the plane to pass by and you have shouted ‘I accept!’ again and we both know the shout was capable of being heard.

The next stage:

Now take a case where two people make a contract by telephone. Suppose, for instance, that I make an offer to a man by telephone and, in the middle of his reply, the line goes ‘dead’ so that I do not hear his words of acceptance. There is no contract at that moment. The other man may not know the precise moment when the line failed. But he will know that the telephone conversation was abruptly broken off: because people usually say something to signify the end of the conversation. If he wishes to make a contract, he must therefore get through again so as to make sure that I heard.

Again - indisputably true. If I call you up to tell you that I will sell you a ton of widgets for £5,000, and you attempt to reply ‘I accept!’ but the line goes dead, then we obviously don’t have a contract because we both know the words have not been heard. We only have a contract when you have got in touch with me again to ensure that you have told me, and that I have heard.

The third stage, still on the subject of telephones:

Suppose next, that the line does not go dead, but it is nevertheless so indistinct that I do not catch what he says and I ask him to repeat it. He then repeats it and I hear his acceptance. The contract is made, not on the first time when I do not hear, but only the second time when I do hear. If he does not repeat it, there is no contract. The contract is only complete when I have his answer accepting the offer.

This, of course, reinforces the point, and emphasises that the important factor is that the contract is only formed when both parties reasonably know that the acceptance has been heard by the other party.

And then the final stage:

Lastly, take the Telex. Suppose a clerk in a London office taps out on the teleprinter an offer which is immediately recorded on a teleprinter in a Manchester office, and a clerk at that end taps out an acceptance. If the line goes dead in the middle of the sentence of acceptance, the teleprinter motor will stop. There is then obviously no contract. The clerk at Manchester must get through again and send his complete sentence. But it may happen that the line does not go dead, yet the message does not get through to London. Thus the clerk at Manchester may tap out his message of acceptance and it will not be recorded in London because the ink at the London end fails, or something of that kind. In that case, the Manchester clerk will not know of the failure but the London clerk will know of it and will immediately send back a message ‘not receiving.’ Then, when the fault is rectified, the Manchester clerk will repeat his message. Only then is there a contract. If he does not repeat it, there is no contract. It is not until his message is received that the contract is complete.

And, finally, again - this is indisputably true. It is obvious there is no contract if the line goes dead before a message of acceptance can be printed. And this must mean that when it comes to Telexes, a contract is created only when the message of acceptance, which makes it an agreement, is received by the other party. And this means that Telexes are not analagous to the post, but analagous to conversations in person, or telephone calls at least in so far as the formation of contract is concerned. And this also, of course, meant that the contract in question was formed in England, because that is where the Telexed acceptance was received, and not in the Netherlands, from where it was sent - meaning that the contract was formed ‘in the jurisdiction’ and a writ of summons could be issued.

You are not (I assume) a student of contract law. But there are three important lessons here to bear in mind when venturing into the minefield that is reasoning by analogy in general.

The first is that Denning is very careful, as I earlier mentioned, to go in stages. He does not simply say, ‘a Telex is like a telephone, isn’t it?’, in the manner of Mary Beard’s, ‘Nudge nudge, wink wink, Nigel Farage is like Julius Caesar, isn’t he?’ He builds up to this conclusion in simple, uncontroversial increments (what a mathematician might call lemmas), beginning with the face-to-face shouted conversation, and then a telephone call, before finally moving on to the Telex itself. And at each stage he makes unambitious, but true, statements - statements that cannot be nitpicked, or refuted. There is no gap, no chink, no ‘seam’, as it were, for an opponent to spot and use to insert a counter-argument.

The second is that Denning’s analogies are abstract and idealised, not concrete. He is not telling stories about the real world that resemble one another in crude detail. He is carefully constructing hypothetical scenarios that are designed for a specific purpose - to make a case that is as near as possible to incontrovertible. People might still argue about some aspect or another about the aptness of those scenarios, but the likelihood is drastically reduced because they are not complicated or multi-factorial. They do not, as is the case with Stone’s analogising between the 1930s and 2020s, omit a countless number of known and unknown variables. They are tightly bound.

And the third is that the analogies are properly rhetorically constructed. Denning begins with an ‘easy win’ in the form of the shouted conversation and the aircraft noise. This secures immediate agreement from the listener. And this has the effect of carrying the listener along; he or she unconsciously now thinks that if the first stage of the argument is irrefutable, then the second and third stages surely are too. And he or she is thereby won over. Rather than leaping to a sweeping conclusion and thereby generating push-back and criticism, Denning instead starts with something everybody will agree with, and goes from there. And he therefore takes his audience with him to his conclusion, step by step.

When reasoning by analogy, then, it is useful to adopt Denning’s approach - going in unambitious stages, keeping things as abstract as possible, and thinking carefully about how to guide the listener through the process by securing quick agreement from the start. Doing things in this way helps to win arguments as it allows the listener to follow a process from one observation that he agrees with to the next until the conclusion - which is never separated from the preceding argument by a gap in the reasoning.

But it also helps us to get to the bottom of things by teasing out, and focusing on, what is really significant or (as a lawyer would put it) what is material. What Denning emphasises in his scenarios is, as you will have noticed, always that a contract is ordinarily formed when both parties reasonably know that they both want in. It is not enough for one party to want to contract, but the other to be ambivalent, and it is not even enough for both parties to want to contract but for the communication of this to be ambivalent from one side. This is what is material in contract formation because it would be unjust to hold somebody to a contract without his or her knowledge. And the only way knowledge of a contract is ascertained is where both parties’ communications are not only unambiguous but definitely received by one another.

The rhetorical device of the analogy, therefore, is not only a good argumentative tactic. It is also a way of elucidating and fleshing out the things that really matter in the subject under discussion. It helps us to understand principles and values better. And it might even be said - this sounds grandiose in the context of a contract law point - to help us to understand the world better. Through the skilful use of analogy the salient points in relation to a particular issue are further raised and elaborated on. They are brought out for all to see, discuss, and understand.

Lazy historical analogy, on the other hand, is generally sweeping and blithe; refers to concrete and therefore exceedingly complex and multifaceted ‘stories about other topics’ in highly simplistic ways; and is a poor argumentative tactic likely to generate knee-jerk opposition from the start (‘He said we’re like Nazis?’). The main result is that nobody on the receiving end is ever persuaded of anything, and that back and forth argument about the appropriateness of the analogy is the only fruit. Consider Mary Beard and Caesar-Farage: was there a Reform supporter in the land who changed his or her views by a millimetre as a result of her comparison? Consider Dan Stone: is there a single Trump fan who is dissuaded as a result of being compared to a supporter of a 1930s extremist movement? Rather the opposite.

But the secondary result is that nothing is really elucidated by this type of analogy either, except perhaps the bias of the author. Does the historical analogy of Julius Caesar really help us to understand Nigel Farage and his significance? Does it draw attention to something, or indeed anything, salient or important? Is it informative about underlying principles, values or ideals? Is it founded in a genuine attempt to identify material commonalities between the two figures - and in so doing to help us to identify salient factors in the trajectory of a political career?

Again we are lead to the conclusion that the chief purpose of this type of reasoning is not to win arguments or persuade listeners, but only to signal that the reasoner is on the side of the angels by damning political opponents to the status of devils-by-association. It is neither designed to learn anything about history, nor the contemporary phenomena that the historical comparison is supposed to elucidate; it is mendacious and should be avoided at all costs in public discourse.

More broadly, we should be concerned that purported intellectuals find it so easy to reach for lazy historical analogy, since it indicates that demonstrating commitment to the certain viewpoints, chiefly these days by dissociation from identifiable bugbears such as Brexit voters or Donald Trump, has become very much more important than establishing truth or elucidating cause, effect and consequence. This is not a sign of a healthy intellectual environment, needless to say - it is indeed indicative of a situation in which intellectuals consider the trumpeting of position to be more important than reasoning effectively. As Baudrillard might have put it, our ‘thought leaders’ seem to have reached the point at which they seem to prefer the simulacrum - the ersatz fact which easily arranges reality for them (Nigel Farage is like Julius Caesar; Trump voters are like Nazis) - to reality itself. This does not bode well for the meeting of future societal challenges, big or small.