Ugghh

Something that I struggled with quite a bit, growing up in Arkansas, was the lack of any resolution to arguments about evolution and Creationism. The arguments were interminable because there was always something to quibble about. Basically if someone is willing to be unreasonable, there is no amount of evidence or logic that can bring him around. There is a kind of fractal character to these arguments. For each issue, you can get into the weeds, each of which turns into its own issue with its own weeds. So for instance, if you start with the fossil record, there are a lot of details, including, "How do we know the fossils are that old?" So then you get into a discussion about carbon dating, which itself is a somewhat complicated thing. Creationists will fixate on any shortcoming or past error to argue that carbon dating is unreliable. You have to firm it up if you want to "win" that portion of the argument. One annoying aspect of this is that Creationists sometimes educate themselves quite heavily on this kind of minutia, which can make them seem better-informed to a casual observer. "Oh, so your claim is that carbon dating is solid science? What do you make of such-and-such incident, in which it was way off?"

My point is not so much evolution, because who cares, but the nature of debate itself. I went through a period of my life when I thought that essentially everything was indeterminate, and then I kind of aged out of it. Partly that came from my exposure to the legal system, which for all its faults actually does tend to reach judgments about difficult questions. Of course it's political, and of course it's not perfect, but it made me realize that it's simply unreasonable to tolerate endless debate.

Anyway for the last couple of years that exhausting kind of debate feels as though it's come roaring back. Maybe it's just that I'm older, but I have very little taste for the debate now. I have very little interest in pretending that there is any such thing as getting to the bottom of anything. Of course in a sense that's how they get you. Someone has to go out there and make the argument. But I can see the appeal of a depoliticized life, particularly given the degree to which bad faith and stupidity have come to dominate political discussion.