THE HONOURABLE ARGUMENT

Horowhenua Chronicle, 8 February 1936, Page 2

THE HONOURABLE ARGUMENT

if there is one thing for which I honour the human race more than for another, it is the way in which it goes on arguing, writes “Y.Y.” in the “New Statesman and the Nation.” The proverbial visitor from another planet, landing on earth, would be amazed a,t the extent to which controversy flourishes everywhere except in those ultramodern countries in which it is forbidden. He would say to himself: “Why do these people argue so hotly? Those who argue were not converted to their beliefs by reason, so why should they hope to convert others by arguments that would not have convinced themselves? The human being, as a rule, is a man who jumps mystically to conclusions, yet he never loses hope of being able to reason others into, the same conclusions/’ The fact that, in spite of the obvious truth of this, men go on arguing, seems to me to be a proof of the unquenchable optimism of the human race. Consider for a moment. You who arc middle aged must have taken part in thousands of arguments. You argued in the nursery and you won, though your nurse did not admit it. You argued with uncles and aunts, with great-uncles and great-aunts, ani thrashed them all without making the slightest impression on them. You argued triumphantly at school without ever converting a school-fellow. Later, your college rang with your incontrovertible statements on matters religious, political, literary, and metaphysical; and not a single contemporary of the opposite opinion even knew that you had won. In the wide world you continued to fight for the truth like a skilled fencer—in yours and other people’s homes, in offices, in restaurants, in the streets, perhaps in public-houses. You have been arguing, say, for forty years, and how many converts have you made? You will be lucky, 1 think, if you can name six. Considering the number of wobblers there are in the world, Jt is perhaps not suiqjrising that we go on arguing as we do in Parliaments and platforms. A large audience will probably contain at least one or two reasonable men. What particularly astonishes me, however, i s that we go on arguing just as hotly in private life—arguing with people who have not the remotest resemblance to reasonable men—people who would not show the faintest sign of wobbling if Socrates and St. Thomas Aquinas made a combined and overwhelming assault on them. Again and again I find myself arguing passionately with men who are not open to argument and whom ,1 know I could no more convert by argument than I could turn a stone into butter. They are men, I tell myself, so steeped in illusion that they can believe almost anything so long as it is not quite true. Yet I go °n trying, vainly, to outshout them, and to blow down the flag of illusion with a mighty wind of argument.. In cold blood I realize that this is very foolishh—that, for all the effect my arguments will produce, I might as well be a street evangelist whom I once saw preaching salvation with no audience but a lamp-post. No doubt, they feel much the same about me. I, too, am not exactly open to argument—at least not to the only sort of arguments other people seem to bo able to think of. Yet who that is of an argumentative disposition has ever given up hope? To the genuinely argumentative man every other human being remains a potential convert while alive. I have known enthusiastic youths who would spend a whole evening trying to convert an octogenarian miser to the moral beauty of Socialism. I have heard a Free Trader in a public-house frantically expounding the case for Free Trade to a tipsy bookmaker who could scarcely pronounce the word “whisky.” We arc all born canvassers for our causes, and are all the more deserving of admiration because we go on canvassing without ever turning a vote. Is controversy entirely useless, then 1 ? I do not think so. For one thing, it clears the controversialist’s mind and so enables him gradually to become a more lucid exponent of his creed. For another thing, it keeps ideas in the air; and it is by these ideas, not by immediate arguments, that men in the end are mystically converted, of, if you prefer the word, infected. Finally, controversy is a very good sport. It is because it is a good sport that I wish a referee had been present in my house on Sunday night to decide who won in the great middle-weight arguing contest between A 1 Communismo and Paddy Freeman.