When one side in an argument deploys facts and the other chooses to employ rhetorical irrelevancies that score points with an unthinking audience but which do not address the other side's facts, we can be sure that the discussion is headed nowhere.
This is one reason why people today often cannot get anywhere discussing politics and/or religion, and why such discussions often degenerate into mindless name-calling and insults. Too many people think that whoever unleashes the most clever zingers against his adversary has won the argument.
This is very unfortunate for any society that seeks to embrace truth and avoid superstition, prejudice and bigotry. An argument ideally should be a discussion between two people, or two groups of people, both of which want to arrive at the truth.
When one side is interested only in obfuscation or scoring zingers, truth is not their goal and engaging in an exchange and defense of ideas with that person or persons is pointless.
Bill Maher, a man of the left, had on his show recently a conservative, Ben Shapiro, and a liberal, Malcolm Nance to discuss Critical Race Theory (CRT) and, presumably, whether CRT should be taught, or is being taught in schools.
Shapiro started off the segment with a succinct and lucid description of CRT, summarizing it in less than two minutes. Malcolm Nance responded by promptly changing the subject, confusing the issue by accusing those who oppose having CRT taught in schools of really saying they don't want history taught in schools.
This is, of course, disingenuous. If anything, conservatives like Shapiro want more history taught in schools. Many Americans are scandalously ignorant of anything that happened in their country or the world the day before yesterday, and that ignorance has pernicious consequences.
As Thomas Jefferson once said, "Any nation that expects to remain ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be."
What conservatives don't want taught, as Maher suggests at the end of the segment, is that all whites and only whites are racist, that every disparity between blacks and other races is proof of institutional racism, that whites qua whites enjoy a privilege denied to others, that objective truth, facts, reason and logic are oppressive tools of white supremacy, and that people living today have a responsibility for what people of their same race may have done two centuries ago.
The nine minute video of this segment of Maher's show is instructive in illustrating how an argument should not be conducted and how fruitless it is to debate someone whose main goal is looking clever rather than mounting a reasonable defense of his position.
