Rational Redoubts

Why don't discussants make much progress in debate, as occasioned by conversation, blogging or whatnot?

Our confrontations, about this or that, reflect deeper antecedent disagreements. We're less likely to concede a matter if to do so seems to overturn a cornerstone of our worldview.

My advocacy of social security privatization rests on my distrust of the state, and relative confidence in the market and its incentives; your opposition thereto rests on a distrust of the market, and relative confidence in the state and its incentives. Or: we differ as to what is the "just" distribution of costs and risk - who should bear them, and why. This one apparently "compact" question is pregnant with a panoply of assumptions in regards to political philosophy, economics, history, and human nature - a worldview in miniature.

I was for the invasion of Iraq, you were against it. We differ over: the normative status/character of the United Nations and International Law; the sense(s) in which Iraq was relevant to 9.11; the best use of finite military resources (money and manpower) and/or the priorities we ought to have, to best serve our security, and other important values; the moral hue of the modern ("capitalistic") nation-state, the personal character of our leaders, their trustworthiness; etc.

Differences which evidently entail a religious commitment (or its lack) are almost too obvious to mention.

It seems as if progress is made when/if one of the disputants comes to realize that his principles can, or ought to, entail the initially opposing view, so that a principle is, in effect, strengthened by embracing a newly discovered consequent.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I believe that one of my own core beliefs is exemplified and fortified by these reflections: even though persuasion is the fittingly humane instrument to realize social cohesion, "rational" discourse - especially in an age, ironically enough, where "everyone is Aristotle" - has a surprisingly limited efficacy, at least with respect to normative matters (properly scientific questions, which can more easily be resolved according to accepted procedures, are a different matter). Hence we cannot do without rhetoric, including "myth," and, alas, coercion; not now, or, I expect, ever.

The "libertarian" hope is that, by narrowly circumscribing the controversies in terms of which the private is made public (viz., is subject to legislation), the agreement to disagree in civil fashion can be afforded the widest scope. But this ideal is quite vulnerable to attacks on its Left and Right flanks, since such a "thin" view of social life isn't likely to command the civic spirit required to sustain it for any length of time. Hence libertarianism degenerates into apparent libertinism and indifference (or seems little more inspiring than "a nation of shopkeepers"), which provokes a cultural counter-reaction.