I am still working out thoughts on Ad Hominem. Also on fundamentalism of the Catholic kind, which like extra-terrestrial close encounters, may or may not be a kind of artifact of some types of minds, a figment rather than a real thing.
The bigger question: to what extent is a sociological emphasis on collective groups productive for discourse or in fact for anything that concerns human affairs? I think the prospects for solving that question in this post are basically equivalent to those for a 3rd kind encounter in the next few minutes. But one can't help noticing that the type of sociological group most likely to develop a category called "Catholic fundamentalism" and then apply it to various Catholic individuals like Mother Angelica and Eric Sammons is likely to be an aging Jesuit academic.
I am making a point here, of course. Part of modern late-stage rationalism seems to be what post-modernists call "othering" -- a tendency to clump other people into categories, while standing outside the clumps, of course. It is probably part of the 19th-20th century effort to make "soft" sciences seem more objective, but it tends to get co-opted quickly into political or social agendas. I couldn't find a term for the fallacy, if it is one. Rather than "to the man" it is "to the group".
Anyone can do it, though it is usually academics of a certain venerability that can get a book published on the topic. You choose your group based on certain attributes... let's say, white men born in the 15 years after WW2 ended, whose vocational trajectory led them into the Society of Jesus where they teach university classes and write academic papers and books. After you've picked your group, you can assign several traits to them which may or may not apply fully. To save time and allow me to discuss the group in a socio-historical context, I would probably use a parallel version of Massa's traits of fundamentalism, which he derives from the phenomenon of Protestant fundamentalism in the United States. It wouldn't be difficult, because I actually do think there is a kind of progressive-catholic-academia fundamentalism. I would obviously need to come up with a more pithy term.
With this thought experiment-- several considerations arise.
The nature of power. It is a power move to typecast and then analyze a group, especially one that your kind thinks of as an antagonist. And as mentioned, it fits in with the observer stance much beloved by Enlightenment scientists, which indeed had some methodological advantages but is often adopted uncritically and then, as mentioned, over-applied to sociology and psychology and history.
The nature of logic. This approach doesn't do anything to address the respective merits of the case. Anyone can do it to anyone; the success of the stereotyping depending on plausibility, which again, usually involves power structures. If you pick a group unpopular with and antagonistic to the academic classes, you basically have free rein to discuss their failings and limitations.
It is pretty endemic. Everyone has their "others". It is not just academics; in fact, it seems to derive from a very basic human trait -- a tendency to cluster. When you cluster, whether in a tribe or village or nation or voluntary association, you define your group partly by who doesn't fit in, who seems opposed to your agenda.
It is reductive. People are not treated as people when they are treated as parts of a collective. Collectives can be treated in a way that one would hesitate to treat a neighbor (hopefully). If there is a bottom-line theme in regard to one's fellow humans in Scripture, it is about the tension between their "otherness" and what one owes to them anyway.
Though reductive, there may well be some value in the approach. Sociologists, I suppose, and historians think in categories and trends. This kind of abstraction can make certain group phenomena clearer. My issue with it would probably distil into the things I am mentioning -- in other words, with a simplistic overapplication of the method by labeling individuals or not reflecting on one's own embeddedness.
Finally, I do it too, which is related to the "endemic" point. For example, I wrote my "stories" about the 4 kinds of Catholics because I wanted to understand better what is going on, but I felt uncomfortable about it. There was a stereotypy about it, and it made me question the whole project. I liked the "narrative" approach because I think it is more potentially humanistic than the statistical-grouping approach. I don’t think it was ad hominem in a toxic way, but it did typecast the groups in terms of their stories, and that has a reductiveness to it. I think eventually I'll figure out my own framework. (I couldn't help noticing, while writing out the narratives, that some of them are more narrative than others -- and in fact, that putting them alongside each other shows the shortcomings of putting things alongside each other. That is vague, because in this post it's a side issue, but I think it's important as well. )
Obviously I did it again in this post -- that is, collectivizing a group of people,but I think that's closer to the direct and classic form of ad hominem, to make a point about the nature of the argument itself.
Disclaimer: I should mention that I have not read Fr Massa's book. I downloaded the Kindle sample, which was fairly generous in providing the whole introduction, so I think I know roughly what approach he intends to take, but I am sure there are nuances and erudition in his development of the approach. As far as I've heard Fr Massa is a good teacher, a decent human being, a learned scholar. I'm critical of sociologization, perhaps, but not of Massa personally, because I do not know anything about him except the basic statistics offered above. You see that I'm once again making my point about collective ad hominems and their limits.
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