Reply #5: If persuasion has died, it's because [View All]

[kenny blankenship]

the FACT was murdered long before. To attempt to persuade someone with an opposed point of view one needs a sound logical process (logos), an apparently well intentioned approach (ethos), but to engage in debate and get a concession, one needs the anchoring support of external, indubitable facts that either negate the opposed view or prove your own proposition. Persuasion doesn't require absolute mathematical proofs or fully expressed deductive syllogisms, but it does require a mutual respect for things-which-are-so. Respect for factuality is a personal and cultural attitude that is external and prior to any particular subject under discussion or any attitude towards any subject. Unfortunately under the pressure of including the corporate viewpoint in public discussions, and the pressure more lately of abjectly deferring to the corporate viewpoint without even a credible pretense of including any other side, that essential respect has been almost totally erased from our culture and our politics. I think I understand how it was gradually destroyed, but how to get it back again is a total mystery.

In America and also in many countries in our shadow, FACTS are now treated as infinitely debatable, infinitely disputable and valued at nothing, instead of being the guideposts and limits on rational discourse, the yellow lines on the road between which sane thought has to travel even against its will. When a political battle is joined one side makes itself immune to persuasion by simply ignoring the fact-status and factual content of the opposition's arguments. The truth value of facts enlisted as confirmation or abnegation for the arguments of the reality based community is instantly washed away by a refusal to examine them or admit them to the debate. Rather like Orwell imagined it in 1984, those little nuggets of external objective reality called facts can simply be unthought from existence. Facts are fatal and tend to force an end to debates. All some interests like corporations need however, is to keep debate perpetually open, to prevent debate from reaching democratically realized conclusion in a public policy: so the FACT had to die. The trick to prevailing in all debate, our friends on the ideological right have discovered, is never to engage in rational debate in the first place.

A culture that will not defer to facts, which no longer respects facts and which consistently puts its cherished ideologies (myths) before contradicting factual evidence has literally lost its mind and the end is probably soon coming for it.