I’m all for sharing my ideas and assumptions or expounding on the ideas and assumptions of others, and I welcome comments that agree or disagree with all of that; however, I have become utterly uninterested in trying to convince anyone of the rightness or wrongness of my stated positions, opinions, beliefs, notions, or assumptions, not out of indifference or conceit but from my recent realization that the time for convincing anyone of anything has passed.
Once again, this does not entail that I refuse to consider disagreements, new information, or other points of view, only that I do not want anyone to convince me.
I do consider most of what people share here. It often helps me to expand my understanding or re-examine whatever idea I have shared.
At the same time, I feel no desire to wade into drawn-out comment exchanges that hope to convince me. Conversely, I feel no impetus to hammer my thoughts into anyone else’s head.
The etymology of convince may help shed some light on my aversion to convincing anyone of anything in this time and place.
The word stems from the Latin con, meaning with, and vincere, to conquer. Thus, convincing is all about decisively overcoming and defeating someone else in an argument, to firmly persuade by argument, usually with the support of some kind of evidence.
At its root, convince is a bellicose, fighting word, but convincing is not the kind of fight I want to have with anyone here and now.
Dr. Charlton has written extensively on the primacy of assumptions, particularly metaphysical assumptions, and how those — not experience, not education, not facts, not evidence — fundamentally shape our relationship with the world.
Assumptions are essentially unprovable beliefs, and it is these unprovable beliefs that provide the foundation for everything else a person accepts as real or unreal. And, yes, this extends well into the provable stuff, too.
I don’t find the old argument-battle framework appealing anymore because my self-declared argument-opponents cannot grasp that we are on entirely different battlefields with no hope of meaningful engagement.
The best anyone can hope to do now is to share ideas and assumptions unobtrusively and peaceably.
Whoever wants to consider the ideas and assumptions will consider them, not by being overcome or conquered by decisive arguments but by thinking more deeply about his own ideas and assumptions...
...which is exactly what everyone should be doing in this time and place instead of yearning to conquer or be conquered with arguments.