This whole thing saddens me. I read Plato and Aristotle and get the sense that they really were arguing in such a way as to find the truth. If someone turned out to be wrong, well that was no big deal, in a sense. It was a simple matter of education and correction. The argument was not successful and so the defeated person either chose to learn or abandon the discussion. One doesn't see sarcastic dismissiveness or name calling or derision in a Platonic dialogue, unless you were a sophist and got frustrated with the questioning, like Thrasymachus. And I'm convinced that the reason for this is that people actually believed in the truth in those days.
But we are too evolved for all of that. We now know that there are so many perspectives, so many interpretations of history and even science, and certainly there are a dizzying array of moral opinions out there. This has led us towards an odd way of arguing. Instead of making a logical case for a position, we appeal to convenient statistics, opinion polls and emotional rhetoric along with passion and personality. The result is that many if not most people are persuaded towards a de rigeur midline. Our culture does a fine job through public education and the popular arts of homogenizing thought. There is, after all, not much use for logic in our culture, so this form of communication sets the popular mean, the language game by which we all play. Even Christians today assert the compliance of Christianity with custom rather than its defiance of custom, at least as a general tendency.
For example, Person A says that abortion is morally wrong. Person B overhears this and says that she is offended by such comments. She had to have an abortion when she was young due to her financial and life situation at the time, and anyone who ignorantly (a favorite term of modern dialogue) pontificates about moral absolutes like this should understand the perspectives of other people. No one can know the struggles of other people. Voila! End of conversation. Person A is not shown to be wrong in his ideas. He is merely shown to be offensive. It is not as if his argument is unsuccessful and thus he can be merely corrected and set on the path of truth. He is just an idiot!
Or say you read some Theodore Dalrymple and become convinced that the transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor may not actually succeed in solving the problem of poverty. Those of a different "perspective" hear this and think you are a greedy capitalist interested only in your own position. They accuse you of oppressing the poor for your own benefit. Again, it is not as though you, or Dalrymple, are shown to be in the wrong. Anyone who speaks the way you do is just a bad person or an idiot or both! Nobody argues with you; you are just shouted down.
To the contrary, perhaps I become convinced that someone else is wrong. How will a person, suckled in a postmodern culture, hear me when I try to show him that he is wrong? For example, how might a postmodern atheist understand my attacks against the arguments of naturalism? If he is quite committed to a postmodern view, he can only see my opinions as arrogant claims to the truth and not truth itself. He is pre-committed to the notion that there are only enculturated perspectives, thus my view is merely my privileged "anglo-American Protestant view." So, again, he will not be persuaded by my argument. He will only be offended by it. Note what I am trying to do, as a person committed to the truth; I am trying merely to show him that he is in the wrong, not that he is an idiot. But he responds by helping me to see that only my worldview commits a person to right and wrong, and thus it is arrogant for me to try to impose truth upon him. Thus, I am not wrong; I am just an arrogant idiot... again.
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