In the ‘good old days’, an educated, erudite person could expect to find themselves participating in two rather distinct kinds of ‘loaded’ discussion.
The first, more common — for it tended to occur within the context of one’s peers — was an often thrilling intellectual to and fro, exposing alternative perspectives and variations of informed-ness. They could could also be heated, but almost never to the point of real anger, at least while sobriety persisted, and lasting hatred and vilifications were almost never on the menu. Everyone involved would usually benefit in some way.
The second kind, an exploration of the issues with persons motivated by extremes of prejudice and ignorance, was typically a much less exhilarating experience. One sensed that the interlocutor was inclined to impose themselves and then settle scores even before the first exchange of words, and had usually pre-ordained that one was a devil or a fool.
But as I said, these were rare, and if one stuck to one’s peer group, could practically be avoided entirely, though it tended to be a notoriously inter-generational phenomenon, occurring seasonally or with random strangers on trains.
Unfortunately, today, some of the peer group has gone crossover with the rabid bunch.
Whether the ‘bite’ they received occurred on social media, via populist political discourse, or can be attributed to the fact that perhaps many younger people have just stopped reading texts with a lot of words — or perhaps some combination of all of the above — there sometimes seems to be no issue today with which people of all levels of culture and education are unprepared to align themselves, even define themselves, for or against — regardless of whether they’ve actually done the homework — as fully committed radicals, broadly intolerant of dissent, by which I mean emotionally and intellectually incapable of the first kind of human interaction described above.
In such exchanges, it often seems that the less you actually know, the better.
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