I always liked Thomas Moore's interpretation of the Garden of Eden story, which simplified was something like how eating of the Tree of Judgement is what continues to keep us out of the Garden of Bliss, that only by refusing to eat from that tree can we ever get back to the garden.
--tully
On Tuesday 12 April 2005 08:39 pm, Tom Walker wrote:
>>Are you saying there is no point in discussing anything...
>
>No, there's a point to discussing many things but there's no point
> to discussing matters about which people have made fundamentally
> different assumptions. In the latter case, it would be more useful
> to dialog about our different assumptions than to discuss the
> putative problem.
>
> >some sort of signof moral or spiritual or psychological
> > deficiency?
>
>A cognitive error -- a mistake in our thinking that excludes
>self-awareness of how we are doing our thinking and how much our
>emotions and defensiveness restrict us from thinking the other point
> of view.
>
> >Just FYI, my business is "winning arguments," that is,
> >presenting reasons to courts that will persuade them
> >to do things they I want for my clients. Sometimes it
> >works.
>
>That's my business, too. Not as a lawyer but as an "expert".
> Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes, even when
> it works, one has to wonder if the conflict was really necessary.
> To be honest, I love having an arbitrator or judge say that my
> evidence was good and the other guy's sucked. There's ego involved
> there. But at the global level there is no considerate judge who's
> going to rule on behalf of the wretched of the earth unless it's
> "society" or a broad popular social justice movement. Just as
> harping on the labour theory of value isn't the key to building a
> BPSJM, insisting on letting go of the labour theory of value isn't
> either. A social justice movement can't be communist or
> anti-communist or non-communist. It must be sensitive and inclusive
> of difference.
>
>One thing I've noticed about polemic. It doesn't really matter much
> who has the best case. It's who has the loudest megaphone. So
> getting better at debating is only useful up to a point. If we're
> going to get beyond that point, we have to come up with something
> else. Not a way of persuading people so much as a way of finding
> strength in not having to persuade them. Even being grateful for
> what their obstinancy teaches us about ourselves.
>
> >But if you take this to an extreme there is no
> >point in non rhetorical discussion whatsoever. Do you
> >really think so?
>
>But you can't take it to an extreme. For one thing, it's hard enough
> to even get people to take the first step. But also people will
> always want to get back to "discussing the problem". They find it
> irritating to talk about this meta-conversation bullshit. But maybe
> after a little suspension, things won't be quite so oppositional.
>
> >For my part, I have been persuaded by a handful of
> >arguments in my life. One about the existence of
> >singular causality (never mind), therefore the falsity
> >of the D-N model of explanation (also never mind). I
> >was persuaded by Hayek about the needs to abolish
> >markets and by Marx about the needs for the working
> >class to abolish classes. I was persuaded by
> >experience and history that liberalism, was a good
> >idea and that Marxism was obsolete. I once persuaded a
> >student that her argument abortion was fallacious.
> >This aware rare, though.
>
>Did you perhaps mis-state what Hayek persuaded you of? What Hayek
>persuaded me of is the incongruity of the idea of a "socialist
> state" but what he also unintentionally persuaded me of is the
> exact parallel between a socialist state and a "free-market state"
> or a "work-ethic state" (Mickey Kaus). A state is a state is a
> state.
>
> >I disagree with ou about afanatics. They are the most
> >ferorious debaters in my experience. SOme of us,
> >perhaps less certain,like to discuss because we hope
> >we might learn things. Maybe you are not in that
> >group.
>
>Perhaps you misunderstood my comment about fanatics. They are not
>*aware* of being in doubt. Rather the function of their certainty is
> to hide this fact from themselves because their doubt is
> intolerable. They cannot tolerate their own doubt, so how could
> they tolerate anyone else's?
>
>If you are learning things from a discussion, it may not always be
>because it is a discussion but because there is also dialog
> happening. The dialog part of it could be internal. You might be
> examining your own assumptions more deeply in order to come up with
> a better argument to use against the other side. Or you may be
> conscientiously separating the "truth" from the "error" in other
> people's arguments. That's fine. But it's not what I'm talking
> about. What I'm saying is that while you have kept yourself
> occupied dissecting other people's arguments you may have neglected
> to notice that there is an apparent coherence to those arguments
> for the other person and that perhaps the same thing is happening
> to you -- parts of your argument are strong and parts are weak and
> you mix them all up together and hope the strong parts prevail and
> take the weak parts with them in the bargain. But then when
> somebody dissects your argument they go after the weak parts and
> perhaps you are thinking, "that's not what I meant." Meanwhile,
> when you dissect their argument they are thinking "that's not what
> I meant." So beneath it all there is an unacknowledged agreement
> between the two of you that you were being misunderstood. And all
> that I'm saying is to look at that for a moment and maybe there's
> something there that is at least as important as the truths and
> errors in the respective arguments.
>
>The obvious weakness in what I'm saying here is that I'm presenting
> an argument and it's an argument against argument. So its
> inconsistent. But if you would look at is as an illustration rather
> than as an argument then it is still paradoxical but it is not so
> inconsistent.
>
>The Sandwichman
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