It’s funny, really, because most of the time I think that my university education was a bit of a waste. It was pleasant enough, I’ll tell people, but I mainly spent it sitting around, eating biscuits and smoking things. Growing dreadlocks. Getting intimidatingly good at Tekken 2 on a PlayStation. Taking some excellent walks. Just occasionally, though, I’m struck with the pleasing realisation that three years of philosophy in one of the best universities in the world did, in fact, leave its mark. Because everybody else is a total idiot.

It is not my plan, here and now, to discuss whether Boris Johnson was right, in his well reported speech to the Centre for Policy Studies other week, that equality is impossible because some people are cleverer than others. We can, however, discuss how unable vast swathes of everybody seemed to be to comprehend what he was saying. They thought they disagreed, these Twitter hordes, but they actually hadn’t got that far, because they didn’t understand what they were disagreeing with. Their utterances, as I think Gottlob Frege would have put it, were devoid of truth value. But of course, they wouldn’t have known what that meant, either.

Johnson’s critics took a vague proposition — that, all other things being fair, economic inequality would still exist due to variance in human ability — and mistook it for various other things. These included:

1 A conditional which demonstrably isn’t true, best expressed as ‘If stupid then poor’ (or ‘A⊃B’)

2 The opposite conditional which also demonstrably isn’t true, best expressed as ‘If poor then stupid’ (or ‘B⊃A’)

3 Both of those conditionals at once, or the biconditional ‘Poor if and only if stupid’ (or ‘A≡B’), which I shouldn’t even have to tell you is demonstrably untrue, because I already have. In fact, twice.

Then (no, I’m sorry, but there’s more), from nowhere, they plucked a whole new set of wholly different conditionals, about the rich, and how clever Boris must think they invariably, essentially are, as though that set inevitably followed from the first set — or worse, meant the same thing as the first set — which isn’t the case, at all. And then — then! — having comprehensively failed to grasp the logical structure of what was being said, they suddenly dragged in another discipline entirely, plunging us into the realms of ethics. So, where Johnson’s fairly intuitive hypothesis ended up, was somewhere like, ‘If you’re poor you deserve to be because you’re invariably stupid, too, and if you’re rich you deserve it, too, because you’re a genius.’ Which was not what he said. Or, indeed, thinks. Probably.

I was lousy at philosophy, and particularly poor at logical philosophy, so if my conditionals up there are all over the place, please do forgive. But what I learnt, and will never forget, is that they exist. I also learnt that quite a lot of the time, people have simply no idea that they’re talking no end of crap. True, not all philosophers believe that arguments devoid of logic are senseless. Bertrand Russell thought they were merely wrong. Either way, they’re a waste of everybody’s time.

And yet, these are most of the arguments we have. Occasionally, yes, philosophical terms pop up in popular discourse, but they are used so crassly and badly (‘Ad hominem!’ ‘The argument from deference!’) that they do far more harm than good. Like drivers who can’t work a clutch, our world throngs with thinkers who don’t know how to think.

With this, perhaps I, unlike Johnson, really am guilty of elitism. If so, that only goes to show how poor a state we’re in. There should be nothing elite about knowing how logic works. These formulations are the building blocks of sense, and if you don’t know how they work, then you can’t, well, build it. Every once in a while, somebody writes an article calling for philosophy, or at least logic, to be mandatory in schools. This should be considered one of them. Think of Wittgenstein’s beautiful phrase, so often so completely misunderstood. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.’ And right now, we can’t speak whereof very much.

Peaches’ breaches

It was, of course, quite stupid of Peaches Geldof to suppose that tweeting the names of women who allegedly allowed a man to abuse their babies would be a good idea. Probably it’s indicative of how daft our courts have become — about injunctions and the like — that when something like this is kept out of the papers, the first assumption of many is that it shouldn’t be.

What I mainly wonder, though, is how all this is going to end. Probably, Geldof didn’t give the courts any thought at all. Today, everyone is a publisher, and everyone can tweet, Facebook, blog and audiowhatsit. So is everybody going to learn media law? Will a few high profile cases — like that of poor Peaches, and poor (now poorer) Sally Bercow — cause the population at large to get the message? I don’t think it will. And yet, I also don’t think that court protections which prohibit the identification of victims, or libel laws (albeit in a revised form) are things that we want to lose. Although maybe we will.