April 20th, 2005

Part I - The Post Hoc Fallacy ... "C'mon! Everyone's doin' it!"

Ever heard of the Post Hoc Fallacy? Or, in its full name, Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc? You can sum it up thus: "A precedes B; therefore, A causes B." Feh ...

It's used by everyone in the so-called media (especially American) and all politicians when they are busy twisting facts to make a lie they can't get caught in ... hell, it's even used by three-year-olds to describe behaviour in the world (and, probably, three-year-olds are about the only people that are justified in having such fallacious thinking). Well, it's wrong! If I coughed and immediately a building in Malaysia fell down, would I think that my coughing caused the building to fall? No, but people do this sort of thing all the time. A and B may seem to be cause and effect, but they aren't.

Here's an example. This is a personal example, by the way. In 1997, the night before a job interview, I went and saw the digital redux of the original Star Wars movie. The next day I had a great interview, and got the job. So before every job interview since then, I've watched Star Wars (I can now play the DVD on my computer, so I don't even have to leave my Command Chair, except to grab another can of soda). I've clearly got some fallacious thinking going on: Watching Star Wars results in my getting the job. It's a Post Hoc Fallacy, and now I have to scramble to justify it, often using sillier and sillier rationalizations. ("See, it makes my mind sharper because, uh, it reminds me of my childhood, when I was bright and fresh, and it makes my thinking clearer because, uh, it's not just any fiction, it's science fiction ... uh, so I come across in the interview as smarter than if I had watched Sophie's Choice ...")

Part II - But at least our homes keep getting smaller

It's fascinating to see the ebb and flow of cultural values. I've always maintained that people themselves haven't changed in all of recorded history, though the things they value do. Frequently. Several times within a lifetime, even.

And such is the case with the size of cars. I don't know how far one would want to go back in time, but let's look at how automobiles grew in size and comfort in the 1950s and 1960s. Fins and power brakes and power steering, heated seats and a bigger, throatier-sounding engine, seats you could sleep on, and enough headroom to bounce up and down excitedly at the vision of the expanse of open road lying before you and your boat -er- car. And if you fail to negotiate a corner and steer it off the road into a tree, hell, they could even bury you in it.

And then, in North America, came the so-called "energy crisis" of the 1970s, when we were warned that, by 1986, there would be no oil and no viable energy sources left. Times were pretty desperate and there were daily line-ups at the gas pumps. Rules were instituted about who could get gasoline on which day. I'm not that old, but I still remember half-watching the news with my parents while I played with my toy trucks on the carpet in front of the TV and hearing such announcements as "Today was an Even Day" (referring to only even-numbered license plates being allowed to get gas) and "A fist-fight broke out at a gas pump in Encino, California, as the gas station's tanks ran dry before being able to supply everyone with enough fuel ..." or how about rumours such as this one that I saw in a newspaper: "A 60 Minutes camera crew followed a tanker truck full of gasoline down a dirt road, and observed it emptying its entire contents into a ditch." Wow, one for the conspiracy theorists! Well, as you can clearly see, there was all kinds of hysteria and turmoil in the air.

(By the way, it was all crap. Panic-mongering newsmakers, people trying to capitalize on the public fears of "running out of" energy ... and politicians making knee-jerk and ineffectual responses to something they couldn't understand anyway because ... well, heck, they had to look like they were doing something, for Pete's sake!)

So the response to all this artificial and vastly-misunderstood public angst was a blossoming of the small-car market. People stopped buying Chrysler and Ford, and started buying Honda and Toyota (then later American manufacturers caught on and managed to claw back some of that market) but the result was that a lot more North American folks were zipping around in little four-cylinder cars. Smaller cars meant less fuel consumption, after all, didn't they? And they were even a few bucks cheaper too!

But one doesn't have to read The Hidden Dimension by Edward T. Hall to understand that North Americans (and those folks in the US especially) like to have some space (man) around us. We like a large heavy tank-like shield of metal surrounding us in every direction. Call it a result of a Culture of Entitlement, where we were, generally speaking, taught by example by our parents to respect nothing except what we want, and have no thought at all for walking softly and keeping a small footprint in the world. After all, why else would we explode into fervid panic over dwindling fuel supplies back in the 1970s and now over the seemingly catastrophic and inevitable environmental destruction in this decade?

Why, it's a guilty conscience, of course! We know that we are using and not replacing, we know that we are selfish and single-minded, and we know that we lack empathy for others ... because we don't know how to be otherwise; it's not something taught by our parents or our schools. So, instead, we get guilty and act strangely, illogically ... sometimes minimizing, other times pretending we don't care ... and still other times doing exactly the opposite of what makes sense—in an attempt to prove to ourselves and others that there isn't a problem at all. We are, after all, the good guys, and if we want to drive big cars we should be allowed to, damnit.

And thus the SUV and other large cars were borne of such "anti-guilt".

SUVs are the mechanical equivalent of "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." or perhaps, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"

We don't need such big hunks of metal cruising the roads. And I've seen folks trying to shoehorn one of these things into parking spaces in underground lots. I've seen the cost of a tank of gas. I've seen what these things do to smaller cars in accidents.

And an entire culture of rationalization has cropped up with SUV owners who don't need them, but somehow need to convince other people that they do. (But why? Why would they care what the non-SUV drivers think? Oh, ahum, yes, of course: Guilty conscience.) So here are their justifications, those reasons they scramble to come up with after they've bought their tanks:

Ah well, in the end it really doesn't matter all that much. The trend has been toward larger vehicles for a long time and now you can sit in traffic and look at all the single-occupant SUVs surrounding you and marvel at how little humans have changed. As a learned co-worker put it: "Farmer Brown may be able to make a case for it, but not Soccer Mom."

We buy these behemoth vehicles because we see real live action heros driving them; because they are glamorized as being driven by tough—yet enigmatically practical—characters on TV and in movies; and because they are somehow, culturally, "cool" to drive. Then, later, we drive them because of imitation: Everybody who is anybody drives one, so we want to drive one too.

Part III - The problem with studying a pendulum too closely is that you eventually get smacked in the face by it

Did you spot what may be a Post Hoc Fallacy? I implied that people bought smaller cars as a result of higher costs and the perceived diminishing quantities of fuel. I implied an "A causes B" concept and supplied no proof (maybe there is no proof—at least concrete proof—of that). And here is my second point, which, again, may be a Post Hoc Fallacy: Have you seen the cost of fuel lately? Holy fading fortunes, Batman! Cars get bigger, which means everybody needs more fuel, which means the cost of it goes up. It seems pretty obvious to me that the law of supply and demand will dictate this.

Um, er, except I am ignoring a few minor details, such as the world's political situation (basically, in a nutshell: America vs. the Rest of the World).

Certainly, the chain of events is true:

  1. We North Americans have a sense of entitlement.
  2. We want to drive tanks.
  3. We buy them and reverse a decades-long trend of reducing automobile fuel consumption.
  4. Fuel prices rise.

    Are you ready for the next shoe to drop? Here it is:

  5. Cars start to decrease in size again.

Yes, just like the 1970s and 1980s, people are going to eventually become overcome with that guilt they are already nearly wracked with. The SUVs driven by regular folks today will eventually find their older and rusted ways into college students' hands, and new cars will shrink again. Shh! Listen: Can you already hear the faint whispers as hybrid cars by Ford and Toyota are on the roads, and tiny little half-cars by Mercedes and others are starting to be delivered to dealerships all over North America? I'm not saying that in 18 months we will all be driving Toyota Priuses, but I do see that the pendulum has started its backswing.

Those are the facts. Where the Post Hoc Fallacy comes in is if I were to say this: "Cars are getting smaller because gasoline is so damned expensive ... and gasoline is so damned expensive because cars are so big ..."

But what is this guilt thing I am talking about? Haven't I seen the news lately? Haven't I noticed how overtly nasty everyone is towards everyone else? How half of North America is saying, "Take it and rape it, baby ... and get the hell out of my way anyhow" while the other half is saying, "You 'people' are dreadful rotten bastards! You can't even make a pretence at being nice and thoughtful and respectful" in response?

Well, sure, of course I have. But both sides of the pedantry that now goes for public discourse is inspired by an internal guilt ... an ingrained sense that, somehow, we are not good enough in some way. Both sides are a reply in action to the tacit belief that if we can only face down the demons, we will feel better through acknowledgement.

The noise

The pain

"I'm gonna drive this fucking beast wherever and whenever I want. You pansy environmentalists can get on your knees and suck my tailpipe."

"I know the world is going to hell in a hand-basket ... but I don't know what to do about it. So I am going to ignore it. Maybe the problem will go away."

"You're killing the Earth! You are threatening future generations! The environment is so fragile and it may already be too late!"

"I know I am just as much a user and abuser as anyone else ... but I don't know how to change. So I will just tell those people over there what they are doing wrong."

And it's always the same, isn't it? There are a lot of accusations and name-calling flying around, but not much information on how to make things better. So I offer my one little piece of advice:

Without righteous indignation but without self-loathing, find out what burns inside when someone else angers you ... and don't blame anybody.

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