Why can't Johnny learn to argue? "Solipsedelic Giddy Up a Ding Dong: Brexit, continued", continued...

My Friday July 1, 2016 Highbrow post touched upon an interesting problem in contemporary discussion patterns: People don't know how to argue productively. Here (and HERE) is that post:

Solipsedelic Giddy Up a Ding Dong: Brexit, continued

In this matter of Brexit, I've observed that many people don't argue or debate, they fight. Rather than an informative conversation, people are locked in stubborn bickering. I have observed this in other discussions touching on topical subjects, and words like "insipid" and "solipsism" come to mind as I seek to understand why people are so angry. The intolerance is such that you might as well give up on a political discussion. People have their minds made up and that's it. People don't seem to want to compare their feelings as feelings. Feelings are treated like positions, and if they are not my positions, they are ridiculed and dismissed in a flurry of ad hominum invective. People don't want to analyze their own or others' levels of understanding. They don't want to learn why other people have the positions they do. People don't want to understand why others have differing views, they just want to label and condemn. Rather than seeing shades of grey, or cultivating a good sensitivity to irony, things are simply either "correct" or "incorrect."  Very tiresome. 

Remember the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." 

The phenomenon of strident, indignant and intolerant discourse continues, and it is of course evident across a broad spectrum of political and cultural subjects. Instead of discussing difficult subjects, people are quick to jam, yell, deploy anger and outrage, filibuster and censure. We read descriptions of universities cancelling controversial speakers; militant "protests" that shut down people holding "incorrect" views; activists in the academic community co-opting (necessary) traditional standards of collegiality and reforming those standards for political  purposes.  Alas, race and gender have become institutional control spaces and management tools. Education, journalism, film, television and music have become fields of social engineering, where political standards have been set by "corporate" experts. It is as if we are under the shepherd's crook of some dystopian "Nu-Academy" (compare, for example, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis). Have the authoritarian cultural- and social-engineering theories of Hegel been instituted, moreover without any sort of constitutional, democratic or proper academic process and review?  It has just emerged--or perhaps we have been maneuvered into this state, by technocrats.

My novels (listed on the right of this page) address these issues in a variety of ways.  Please read them.

Tilting at windmills? One wonders.

Meanwhile, in the original post, my International Authors colleague Prof. Horace Jeffery Hodges posted a characteristically amusing comment (again, click HERE).  Humor is an effective palliative.  Also meanwhile, Emanations 12 is close to publication.  Watch this space.