New Logical Fallacies–Part 2
The Personification Fallacy: Anthropomorphizing Nation States to Create Straw Man Villains.
by Micah E. Weiss
I wrote the following sentences in my last article:
“The Soviet state was explicitly in favor of, and worked towards global revolution along Marxist ideals[.]”
“There were many avenues that CIA agents and American diplomats and statesmen went down during the Cold War that they should not have[.]”
This may be that I am a poor writer, but I rewrote those sentences several times because of the fallacy I am proposing this week. The original form of those sentences was something more like this:
“The Soviet Union was Marxist and explicitly stated the goal of fomenting global communist revolution.”
“There were many interventions that America engaged in during the Cold War that it should not have.”
It is a subtle difference, but when the “before and after” iterations are taken together, I believe it is clear. In sentence 1, the “Soviet state” is the holder of an ideological position and mission. In sentence 2, CIA agents and American diplomats are the responsible parties. In sentences 1a and 2a, on the other hand, the “Soviet Union” and “America” are distinct actors. This grammatical difference may seem to imply very little in just a line or two in an essay, but over the course of many conversations, essays, and debates, this kind of verbal short-hand gains a very sinister aspect. The nation states in question cease to be complicated multi-generational cultural concepts in the minds of those within and without them, requiring time, thought, and experience to understand. Instead, the reader is left with anthropomorphized, monstrous, sentient beings with agency and consciousness, each flailing across the landscape of history, leaving crushed civilizations and broken people in their wake.
A very simple example of this usage is the oft-expressed sentiment from the left that “America is a racist country,” or even more simply: “America is racist.” In these statements far more is being expressed than the basic meaning of the words. Suddenly, America is less than the sum of its parts in passive reality, but an entity that thinks, feels, and hates. Just putting “America is racist” into my google algorithm reveals dozens of headline stories arguing for or against the phrase, edited minimally or not at all from the base syntax. Forbes, NYT, NBC News, WaPo, etc, etc., all have iterations of the phrase. If the articles aren’t claiming so outright, they are still complicit in the fallacy. By merely asking the question if America is or isn’t racist, it is implied that America can be racist, which is absurd.
The nation state is a relatively new mode of social organization. In Benedict Anderson’s landmark book, Imagined Communities, he observes that the modern nation state can only exist in the minds of the people living within it, and that the written word in the form of print media is the delivery system for the ideas that make up what is then imagined. These two important insights bridge the gap somewhat between early human tribal kinship groups wherein everyone had a genetic connection to everyone else, and today, wherein most people in the West don’t recognize kinship groups as the central organizing body of their personal lives or larger societies.
There’s a lot I’d like to argue about in Anderson’s brilliant little book, but for the purposes of this essay, and this fallacy, his theory explains somewhat why so many people in the intelligentsia of our imagined community tend to personify nation states when discussing “them.” Within our collective groups, we tend to imagine those groups into existence by attributing to them more than just boundaries, jurisdictions, and laws, but rather that they have sentience, personalities, and biases; traits that we ascribe to individuals. Nowhere is this more benignly obvious than when someone from one state discusses that state in comparison to another. I live in New Hampshire, for example, but so close to the Vermont border that half of my life (seemingly) is spent traversing the Connecticut River in one direction or the other. I have spent the other half of my life (seemingly) in conversation with Vermonters about how amazing their state is. It is extraordinary to me how often I find myself in this conversation, and how proud Vermonters are of Vermont–their patriotism is strong! Vermont Public Radio even has a full hour-long program called Brave Little State. Brave in the face of what, I am unsure (though this week there was some severe flooding–my thoughts and prayers are with you, Vermont, in this, the soggy summer of your damp discontent). Just this year I have learned the brag-factoids that 97% of Vermont’s energy is “clean,” and that, according to the latest census, Vermont’s Black population grew by 44%, and Hispanic population grew by 68.4%! Never mind that these details are not due to any particular virtue the Green Mountain State appears to hold as a nation-state. Canada provides the majority of Vermont’s energy via electric dam, and has for decades. And those huge percentage numbers of new Black and Hispanic residents in absolute terms number 2760 and 6300 residents, respectively. Vermont itself went from the 2nd whitest state in the US in 2010 to the 2nd whitest state in the US in 2020. So, yeah. No joking though, we love you Vermont!
And all over that paragraph I demonstrated a myriad of examples of the fallacy. Why? Because it’s easy, and funny–I got to smack around an entire state and “its” subculture of smug self-satisfaction for your reading pleasure. But it was all a little silly and a lot fallacious on my part. “Vermont” doesn’t use “Canada’s” energy, Vermonters do, but so do we here in New Hampshire. We in northern New England all share a grid, so technically, we all use all of the energy from all the same sources, and we can barely prove otherwise, unless someone has devised a form of wattage measurement I’m unaware of. We Americans, as a people, use 17% of the world’s energy resources, but represent only 5% of the world’s population. What does that mean for Vermont? What does that mean for us?
In answering that question, I must point out that there is a related usage to the Personification Fallacy with regard to the pronouns “us” and “we.” But here the madness can stop. When we (humans) use collective pronouns like that, the context is at least human (and what a relief to be discussing pronouns in a non-fraught way!).
One final example: “America” was not responsible for the war in Vietnam. The (mostly) men responsible for that great American debacle were legion. It is easier to simply say “America did it” than to think about who is to blame for that catastrophic failure. If you want to argue like an idiot to simply blame some hulking imperialist hegemony named ’Murica, then by all means, say “America was responsible for Vietnam.” But if you want to have a discussion that matters, one that can illuminate and perhaps help others avoid such a travesty from occurring again, then you need to sort out who, specifically, made what mistakes in judgment, and when they did so, that led to that interminable and bloody conflict. That requires breaking down the personified “America” into the constituent parts that contributed to the decisions that were made at a particular time and place.
Yes, I am generally against collectivist abstractions anyway, but I also understand that within a socio-political discussion, there is a place for those terms if properly contextualized and defined. However, personifying nation states (and other geographies; how much abuse have I heaped on “the South” in casual conversation, I’ll never know) is the opposite of discourse: it straw-mans a body without a mouth, and, as in the example of who is to blame for Vietnam, can actually relieve responsibility where it ought to be due. The sin of this fallacy is more than just linguistic laziness or stylistic economy. It allows one to sanctify or vilify an imagined community at one’s convenience, without fearing that community's ability to act as an individual, and change its ways, or even a spokesperson for many individuals, and defend itself.