I’ve been thinking about how politics, philosophy and religion are always intellectually degraded when the medium for their presentations is a conflict of opposing opinions.
This is opposite to what people believe, of course; it is commonly believed that a dialogue of opposing views improves the arguments, but this is not my experience. According to my experience, I can present the highest quality of arguments and make the best possible case for my ideas when I’m left alone to write a careful, deliberate monologue in which I can explore ideas in peace, and write one of my rhetorical arcs. Occasionally, I can improve my arguments in a discussion with an intelligent, knowledgeable person who has an intellectual position that is very close to my own. If I’m having a discussion with someone whose opinions differ greatly from my own, the result will be that everything beyond the intersection of our opinions will be hotly contested, and since I’m yet to see someone actually change his mind based on good arguments from the opposing side, usefulness of the entire exercise is questionable. The best discussions take place when the point in contention is very narrowly constrained; the wider the constraints, and the greater the area in contention, the greater the probability that the entire discussion will degrade into a shouting match and an ad hominem shitstorm. Similar but slightly different viewpoints, on the other hand, can create very fruitful brainstorming sessions, but of course one must be careful not to descend into the echo-chamber mentality in which outputs are reused as inputs and people start using very dubious suppositions as facts on which they proceed to build quite insane mental constructs. It must always be an exercise in “let’s see where this leads if we take the arguments to their reasonable limits”, but one must remain mindful of the word “reasonable”.
I tried dialogue as a rhetorical instrument. God knows I tried. The results were almost always insignificant compared to what I could do in a monologue, when I can explore my thoughts without interruptions. What interruptions can do is clearly visible in TV and Youtube arguments where all discussions worth seeing are basically between people of very similar positions. Whenever their positions diverge too much, the discussion degenerates and is very difficult to watch. I’m not talking only about the positions I personally agree with – for instance, I personally hate Islam and hold it in greatest imaginable contempt, but if I want to understand what the Muslims really think about an issue, I will watch them talking to other Muslims, expressing their true thoughts unhindered and uninterrupted by opposition, among people of similar beliefs. Watching a Muslim’s speech interrupted by constant shouts of consternation isn’t useful for finding out his actual opinion. The same goes for everyone else; a discussion between advocates of very different positions is more of an exercise in rethorics and skill in manipulating the audience with sound bites, than an exercise in finding out any kind of truth. I, personally, don’t function well in a situation where I have to condense my entire position into less than five carefully weighed soundbites delivered with humour and cynicism. I prefer to tell a story, to make an atmosphere in which you can get a taste of an idea cooked in its own juice. I prefer it to be a complete meal, rather than a short snack.
Don’t get me wrong, I am good in a live dialogue, but I’m deadly in a written monologue, because when I’m arguing with someone in realtime, I have less time to consider my arguments and it is more difficult to source supporting quotations and facts. I have to rely on my memory, which is quite good, but not as good as a search engine that allows me to find supporting facts on the Internet and link them into the narrative. In a realtime discussion, I’m also limited by the capacity of the audience for processing what I’m saying in realtime, which is too much of a constraint for my arguments to bear, because in written form I can go far beyond almost anyone’s ability to follow in realtime and count on the audience re-reading the texts for years in order to digest them properly. If I did that in a realtime discussion, I’d lose them entirely, because in a live discussion you win if you can leverage what people think they know, and introduce only as much new information as can be digested in realtime. If one degrades things further from the already low baseline, by introducing opinions that are so divergent as to make any kind of a discussion hard (for instance a physicist and a flat-Earth apologist, or a religious mystic and a militant atheist), you can be sure only that the opponent with most practice in delivering comical soundbites will “win”, but the entire exercise will not be greatly informative.
So what I’m saying is that I like to watch opposing ideas and philosophies and see where they lead when their advocates are allowed to extend them to their logical limits and beyond, in the same way in which I like both hot sauce and ice cream. I just don’t like them mixed together at the same time, because the result is useless.
I am wondering, is there any point in continuing an argument of opposite opinions if my “opponent” is dead set on his opinions and would not accept any facts presented to him, the same goes for me. I think there is no point and one should not waste time and energy on it because it would be only empty bickering.
One must also have a “validated scale” on which to measure the weight of a fact. In ideal conditions, one side should be right and one wrong, as we learn from the duality of our lives. What will happen when those opposite sides are really sides of the same coin, just emulated in different systems. Can we really realign our brains to accept that opposites can exist in the same system? In that case one must change form the core, and that is scary.
These are my jumbled brain droppings, unfortunately I don’t know how to express them clearly.
There are three ways in which you can see an exchange of arguments. First is that the two sides attempt to present their case in order to change the opposing side’s opinion. Second is that the two sides each attempt to convince the audience in the validity of their viewpoint, and that convincing the opposing side is not a realistic goal because he is the enemy you compete with, and convincing the audience is the goal. The third way to see this is that it’s not about either side winning or the audience being convinced, it’s about finding out what is actually true and adapting both positions in order to reach the greater truth.
Now, I’m not sure that either view is universally valid. If I argue with my wife, it’s her I want to convince, not the audience. If I have to care about the audience in that case, then all is already lost.
If I’m arguing with an enemy, convincing him is not the goal. In that case, my goal is to limit the damaging influence of his ideas on the general public and to contribute to the health of the global “mindspace”.
If I’m not sure of my position, I will approach arguing from the third position – I will tentatively defend or attack a certain position and I will listen carefully to the opponent’s arguments, and then I will decide. I use that often when I’m deciding on whether to buy a certain piece of hardware, like a smartphone. For instance, I asked one guy whether it makes any sense to buy an iPhone 4S (it was then the current model) when you can get a powerful android device for similar amounts of money. He made a good case and I proceeded to buy the iPhone. So when I do this, it can seem that I changed my mind but that’s not what actually happened, I was arguing from a tentative position in order to figure out what is the best course of action.
So there’s your answer. Whether something makes sense in an argument depends primarily on what you’re trying to accomplish. Sometimes you want to convince someone, sometimes you want to make a point in front of a wider audience, and sometimes you want to convince yourself of the validity of a certain course of action. In either case, different things make sense.