Thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
― Hannah Arendt
I've learned my lesson in the past 48 hours: arguing with right-wingers is thankless.
Foolishly, I joined two Facebook "conversations" inviting comments about the Black Lives Matter marches.
I was daft enough not to know "only the closed-minded need apply."
Right-wingers often pose as moderate and thoughtful, but are lightning-swift to unleash mockery, once presented a view at odds with their own, or with facts that contradict the dubious and paranoid bullshit they champion. They'll even throw in emojis to reinforce their contempt.
Mockery as a rhetorical strategy predates Trump's ascendance, so you can't blame that buffoon for right's embrace of it. Nor can you blame Rupert Murdoch and his cavalcade of stooges.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle scolded Greek orators who mocked their opponents, insisting "the arousal of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts."
The writer Thomas Friedman last week called right-wingers "angry and stupid," a characterization I can agree with.
But I'd go farther: right-wingers are colorless dummies―the Mortimer Snerd kind―without intelligence, profundity or courage.
And, like Mortimer, they work hard at being ignorant.
I'll share a fantasy of mine: I long one day to make a "knockdown argument," in the sense of that term as defined by the late American philosopher Robert Nozick.
The knockdown argument, Nozick said, represents the "attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not." Perfect in its power over others, it "forces someone to a belief."
But knockdown arguments aren't easy to come by, because listeners are so stupid. "Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain," Nozick said. "If the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies. How's that for a powerful argument?"
I can only wish.
