https://tennesseepartisan.wordpress....tual-war-pt-1/
Rational debate has the same relationship to ideological warfare that boxing has to an actual life-or-death violent encounter. Which is to say very little at all.
Let’s do a thought experiment together. Imagine for a second that some enterprising young urbanite out there wants to rob you. You’ve got a nice watch or a thick wallet. You know the deal. Now the easiest way to get your goods off you is to have you incapacitated or unconscious, and your mugger, not being the philosophical type, probably doesn’t care too much one way or another whether he accidentally kills you as he renders you thus. He just wants you knocked out. So he’s going to slug you in the head from behind or hit you with a brick. And then he’s going to rifle through your pockets afterwards. If you’re lucky you wake up in a little bit. If not the local news tomorrow night reports you as a “robbery gone wrong.”
If you survived such an ordeal, you might complain afterwards that your attacker struck you from ambush rather than lacing up and boxing you mano a mano in the ring like true mensch would have. That he was cowardly and dishonorable and afraid to face you. And you’re probably correct. Petty criminals aren’t typically paragons of masculine virtue. But ultimately you’re only correct in a trivial sense, and I doubt that such ex post facto exactitude will afford you much consolation. You may choose to persist in misunderstanding what that transaction on the sidewalk that night was all about, but your mugger won’t. He knew exactly what he was out to do, and he accomplished it efficiently. He’s already blown your cash on, I don’t know, malt liquor, and moved on with his life. He’s standing out there tonight beside a different byway with a different brick.
Boxing, wrestling, your typical dojo-purveyed Eastern martial art—these are ritualized versions of combat. They’re useful for teaching young men how to throw a punch, shoot, bodyslam, etc., all of which can be useful in a violent encounter. And if they’re taught correctly they teach people how to take a punch or a kick or an elbow, which is even more useful in a violent encounter. But violent encounters don’t follow their rules or their conventions. They look, sound, end completely differently. I’m sorry if that breaks your heart, but you’re probably never going to get to deliver a jumping, triple-axel back kick to the throat of a dumbfounded would-be rapist in real life. That’s just not how it works.
A stand-up bout requires broad agreement on the rules. An ambush ignores them entirely.
Now I wouldn’t go so far as to claim that logic, rationality, scientific empiricism, etc. are ritualized in the same sense that I’ve been talking about here. They’re intellectual technologies that have been developed to facilitate certain types of inquiry. And we get a tremendous amount of mileage out of them. But rational debate is certainly a ritual. Ritualized combat. And as such it’s a lot like a UFC fight or an Olympic Tae Kwan Do match. It, too, requires a broad agreement on the rules, and not only the acceptable rules but the relevant premises, and not only the relevant premises but what methods are appropriate for establishing them, and so on and so forth.
What so many conservative types, do, though, is pretend like the other side is interested in meeting them in the clean, well-lighted ring of rational debate. And how we engage is we trot out a worn old rhetorical chestnut that points out some logical inconsistency or hypocrisy or factual inaccuracy that the left’s been indulging in. “If you think women are equal to men, you ought to be campaigning against special favors for women!” “If you really cared about the economically downtrodden, you’d teach them personal responsibility!” “Immigration is a net cost to society!” This is a category error. You’re missing the point. You’re engaging in rational debate. You’re appealing to a mutual agreement about rules that isn’t in play. We rightists are strutting around the ring, warmed up and gloved up, in the best shape of our lives, entrance music blaring, just itching for those progressives to come through the ropes to meet us.
The progressives are not coming. They are not. Tattoo that forever on your very bones. They want to see you ruined, not to play some dumb intellectual game. You’re offering a ritual ideological combat, whereas they’re waging an ideological war. And they’re interested in winning, as quickly, efficiently, and unanswerably as possible.
That’s why they’re creeping up on you right now, brick in hand.