Disenchanted

There will probably be nothing novel stated in this post, but it's getting to the point where I have to put something down on paper.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the political system in this country.  It's not the Republicans and the Democrats or the conservatives and the liberals, or even the rancor that has, in fact, existed in American politics since day one.  In truth, I'm not sure that I can articulate exactly what is wrong with our system today.  I believe it is some combination of apathy, acceptance of a deteriorating status quo, and a desire to "win" the debate and to control the process even at the expense of the welfare of the nation.  When the political discussion becomes about winning, the quality of the national debate will suffer.  Facts become a means to an end, to be manipulated to shape the nature of the debate in the optimal way as opposed to letting the facts speak for themselves.  Distortions, half-truths, campaign promises, hyperbole.  All of these come about as the result of a "control the process" frame of mind.

Now, the obvious question here is, "Well, who is to say what the facts are?  Is it not reasonable to expect there to be disagreements with regards to the facts?"  I would agree with that.  Debate is caused by disagreements of fact.  However, the nature of the disagreement has changed.  As I mentioned earlier, the goal of nearly everybody is to win the debate.  Socrates famously declared that he was not the smartest man in the world and that he was seeking out a man smarter than he.  His debates were fueled by a search for truth.  Winning for him, presumably, was learning something or expanding his mind.  Demolishing somebody and making his opponent look stupid wouldn't be an accomplishment, it would be self-congratulatory.  It would be empty, and nobody would benefit.  Socrates isn't known and studied today because he won every debate, he's studied because his debates furthered our understanding of a variety of topics.  Bringing this back to the modern day, debates today are about defeating your opponent as to furthering the public knowledge and exposing new perspectives.

I think that there are two reasons for this.  The first is pride, or hubris.  Nobody likes to lose a debate.  It's thought by many that if you lose a debate you're somehow less intelligent or knowledgable than your opponent.  This really isn't the case.  Perhaps your opponent just, by chance, happened to have been exposed to some knowledge that you, by chance, were not.  It is the height of intellectual maturity to be able to accept that your opponent has a better understanding of a given topic than you do, and to be able to implement some of their knowledge and perspective into your own beliefs.  The immature person is more likely to belittle the opponent and neglect the information at the expense of the furthering of the development of the debate, because of their own pride and misguided sense of what debate is.

The second reason is just as important.  The attention span of the national audience has shrunk.  We no longer have time to study and absorb nuanced debate.  Ad hominems and oversimplifications are easier to digest than a peer-reviewed study or an elegantly articulated thesis.  I believe that this point, the shrinking of the national attention span is what gave rise to the proliferation of a desire to "win" debates, as I discussed in the previous paragraph.  If the public demanded a higher form of debate and discussion, and was willing to think in greater depth about the extraordinarily important topics facing this nation, pundits that go for the easy win as opposed to a well-articulated argument would fall by the wayside, surpassed by deeper thinkers.  The Lincoln-Douglass debates of 1860 followed a format where the first speaker spoke for an hour, the other spoke for 90 minutes, and then the original speaker got a 30 minute rebuttal.  This was considered to be, by many, the pinnacle of debate in the United States.  Why?  A clear, uninterrupted delineation of views, policies and beliefs could be given to the audience without interruption.  The shrinking attention span and academic diligence of America is the real crux of the issue.  Education and intellectual discipline are the solutions.

I'm going to publish this now and review it tomorrow.  It is by all means a work in progress.  I hope that in the next couple of days I will be able to clarify my opinions on some of the more important political issues of today.