Guest New York Times columnist Matt Miller offers some thoughts in a column last Saturday which strike me as thoroughly persuasive:
Speaking just between us - between one who writes columns and those who read them - I've had this nagging question about the whole enterprise we're engaged in.Is persuasion dead? Is it possible in America today to convince anyone of anything he doesn't already believe? If so, are there enough places where this mingling of minds occurs to sustain a democracy?
Marshaling a case to persuade those who start from a different position is a lost art. Politicos huddle with like-minded souls in opinion cocoons that seem impervious to facts.
[Edited excerpt from Is Persuasion Dead?, New York Times, June 4, 2005. (Also available at urielw.com/refs/050604.htm.)]
I wrote in a quite similar vein last November (though I proferred "blocs" rather than "cocoons"):
Our reality is bleaker even than the one portrayed in the movie, The Matrix. It's something that renders polemics pointless, something that should shut us all up.The characters in Matrix, after all, enjoy an unhampered ability to communicate with each other. There is a single and unique simulated world for everybody.
That's why the Matrix allegory is really too cheerful. There are no "separate realities"! Even Bush and Kerry supporters hear the same thing.
In our real world, by contrast, we are divided into innumerable reality blocs. We might call them opinion blocs. And the information boundaries between these blocs are impregnable.
Allow me to expose myself here, for the public interest. Taking myself as an example, it's practically inconceivable that anything would lead me to change my mind about an opinion I've already developed.
And I assure you I'm exceptionally open-minded.
You, dear reader, are the same way. If you got an opinion, it ain't gonna change.
So. This certainly raises uncomfortable questions about what we're doing here. And about communication in general.
[Edited excerpt from Irreconcilable Differences.]
The only point on which I'm obliged to regretfully part ways from Mr. Miller is when he supplements his observation that there is no communication with the suggestion that it makes no difference anyways. Just as I did (in making a different point), he offers himself as an example:
The embarrassing truth is that we earnest chin-strokers often get it wrong anyway. Take me. I hadn't thought much about Iraq before I read Ken Pollack's book, "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq," a platonic ideal of careful analysis meant to persuade. It worked. I was persuaded! So what should we conclude when a talent like Pollack can convince us - and then the whole thing turns out to be based on a premise (W.M.D.) that is false?Continued on the next page Page 1 — Page 2
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