The Fallacy of Grievances

You destroyed my property, you didn’t pay me for work I did in your garden, you stole my spouse’s affection.

These are all grievances I might have against you, and they are grievable. Various civil suits probably would settle the above matters; you provide restitution and the matter will be settled.

All grievances should be so simple. Paying people for slavery, for example, is not so simple. Reparations for stolen land may not be accepted. Sometimes people seem to go to war over their grievances.

It’s not the rightness or wrongness or magnitude of this or that grievance that is of interest here. It’s the proposition that certain behaviors obtain if, and only if, people have certain grievances that is of interest. And it’s the corollary of such a proposition, that aggrieved people will stop acting in a certain way if, and only if, their perceived grievance is satisfied that is just as problematic.

On the international stage today, to use that unfortunately trite expression, the Islamic world is perceived as having grievances against the West. The fundamentalists, allegedly acting on behalf of the Muslim world, see an obligation to punish the West over these grievances. They say they will stop their retaliation once the grievances are satisfied. This is a repeated claim of al-Quaeda - we will stop killing you when you stop killing Muslims and/or when you leave our soil. People who believe in this construction of grievances accept that the fundamentalists are acting only because of their grievances, and that their actions of necessity will stop once grievances are satisfied. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi has argued just this point about Iraq - the Jihadists came to Iraq only because the U.S. Army is there, so of course the Jihadists will leave when the U.S. Army does. She apparently forgets that the Ba'ath party in both Iraq and Syria killed Jihadists and their supporters by the tens of thousands.

This is the fallacy of grievances: If x (they; whomever) have a grievance against y (us; whomever), then x will act to punish y until the grievance is resolved.

The fallacy is in confusing “if and only if” statements with “if, then” statements. Would x (they; whomever) attack y (us; whomever) if and only if they had a grievance? Unless you can successfully argue this point, you don’t know why the aggrieved party is really acting. You don’t know if other alleged grievances will emerge; you don’t know whether the grievances are just a cover story for some other purposeful behavior; you don’t know how the grievances are being leveraged, even if they are real grievances.

Furthermore, the deduction that the offensive, putatively retaliatory behavior will stop once the grievance is satisfied can only be a valid deduction if, and only if, the grievance really was the only thing that led to the retaliatory behavior in the first place.

People who fall for the fallacy of grievances also engage in false dichotomies. The catastrophic Arab-Israeli conflict is a case in point. Without a doubt the Palestinians have a grievance against the Jewish state in particular, and the West in general. Most people who lived in geographic Palestine in 1917 were not Jewish, and almost none of those non-Jews would have supported the Balfour Declaration, which was the British document authorizing a Jewish national home in Palestine. The situation was not much better in 1947, when the United Nations voted for partition in Palestine (e.g., a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state).

Critics of Israeli policy, or of the existence of Israel itself, in effect say Palestinians and the Arab rejection front, confrontation states and steadfastness group couldn’t possibly be motivated by hate, or their own competing hegemonies, because they have valid grievances. That’s a false dichotomy. You can be motivated by hate, and by an historic sense of injustice, and by your own competing hegemony all at the same time. Why not?

Critics of Israeli policy say they are falsely maligned as anti-Semites. Of all the crimes allegedly committed by the Jews in history, from A to Z, we now have an additional one – the Jews can’t tell the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. I think some anti-Zionists are falsely maligned as anti-Semites. But being anti-Zionist cannot logically buy one immunity from the charge of anti-Semitism. One can be both anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist, and an appeal to false dichotomies is hardly a refutation of anything. One can even be Jewish in some way (the Jewish Question is still open, so it’s hard to say what is meant by "being Jewish"), and be anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist at the same time. None of these are mutually exclusive statements.

False dichotomies show up directly in competing universalisms and competing hegemonies. For example, if the Marxist critique of capitalism is valid, then Marxism must be the correct ideology, right? (And vice versa!) If the Muslims are right about Jesus, then the Christians must be wrong about Muhammad, and so on. But it's not true - everybody markets themselves and attacks the competition. It's not an either/or situation. Just because X is right in attacking Y does not mean Y is wrong in its attacks on X.

Let’s say the Muslim world overall has grievances against the West (which actually means against Liberalism and liberal democracy, one of the competing universalisms and competing hegemonies). Let’s not just say it; let’s believe it. Let’s accept it. The Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, is quite correct in pointing to the failures of diplomacy after World War I and a long history of meddling in the Islamic world. Osama bin Laden made essentially the same charges against the West in his first televised speech after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. While bin Laden fabricated most of the numbers of the dead in Palestine, Iraq and elsewhere – just as the “Peace and Justice” groups often do in America – the overall points were valid.

I’m not equating Ken Livingstone with Osama bin Laden. I’m saying they’re referring to the same, sorry history.

I’ll leave aside whether it is for someone like bin Laden to enforce those grievances. That’s not for me to say, but it seems heretical for him to do so – the community has to decide what is to be done, not someone who seems to be elevating himself to the level of Prophet, which cannot be according to the relevant teachings.

Logically, and empirically, people hide behind grievances to push their real agendas, which in many cases is just their own hegemony. They don’t necessarily want to erase the alleged injustices, but to replace the regime that put in place the alleged injustices with a new regime. You leverage the grievance; you exploit them. The more valid those grievances are the more leverage you will have.

Can we say that bin Laden is only acting because of Western meddling in the Islamic world? Is Ken Livingstone right that there would be no terror had there not been meddling in the Islamic world, continuing up to this day?

They would be right only if we can argue that the terrorists have acted because, and only because, of those of grievances. But no one can argue that. At best, that would be to confuse “if…then” statements with “if, and only if” statements.

Given the theory of competing universalisms, and competing hegemonies, however, bin Laden would be doing exactly what he is doing even without grievances, and he would have wide support even without grievances. If there is only one God, and if there is only one correct community of believers, he would feel he’s right to do everything he’s doing.

Abraham Aamidor is the author of “Real Feature Writing” (Erlbaum, 1999) and Editor, “Real Sports Reporting” (Indiana University Press, 2003), both college-level journalism texts. He has taught journalism at Indiana University-Bloomington, Butler University, Georgia Southern University and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. He works in daily journalism in Indianapolis