Found quote at
Andrew Sullivan's:
I was warned many, many years ago by the great Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of Yes Minister and director of the comic masterpiece My Cousin Vinnie, that Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. When Jonathan first went to live in LA he couldn’t understand the terrible silences that would fall when he trashed an statement he disagreed with and said something like "yes, but that’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s self-contradictory." To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle.
Jonathan soon found that most Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust. Yes, one hesitates ever to make generalizations, but let’s be honest the cultures are different, if they weren’t how much poorer the world would be and Americans really don’t seem to be very good at or very used to the idea of a good no-holds barred verbal scrap. I’m not talking about inter-family ‘discussions’ here, I don’t doubt that within American families and amongst close friends, all kinds of liveliness and hoo-hah is possible, I’m talking about what for good or ill one might as well call dinner-party conversation. Disagreement and energetic debate appears to leave a loud smell in the air.
I've long been baffled by the people's lack of willingness to discuss religion openly, but perhaps the problem isn't just religion? I've never noticed the problem in quite the terms given above, though serious debate in social settings is unusual enough that I could make the following joke through the Facebook page of the campus philosophy club:
The first rule of philosophy club is you don't talk about philosophy club.
The second rule of philosophy club is you don't talk about philosophy club...
This week, each one of you has a homework assignment. You're going to go out, and you're going to start an argument with a total stranger. And you're going to lose.
Now this is not as easy as it sounds. Most people, normal people, do just about anything to avoid an argument.
2 comments:
Well, perhaps here more than other places religion has become so much of people's identity that any discussion (and rejection) of this becomes somehow ad homonim.
Plus there's the faith angle, faith being unproveable, thus 'hands off' by some social consensus. Menken's observation about the subjectivity of the beauty of a man's wife or intelligence of his children comes to mind as a reason for such constraint.
Plus: a relative, I think, summed it up at the end of a religious discussion. I had told her it contradicted itself, and at bottom made no sense. She expoded, "OF course it doesn't make sense to you! It's supposed to contain mystery and demand your faith! If it made sense it wouldn't be religion!" I pretty much agree with her assessment, but she thinks it's a major selling point, and for me it's one of the reasons I think the concept is ridiculous.
Did anybody see George Gallaway being asked questions by Congressmen (or was it Senators)?
Those poor people have never tangled with a Glaswegian before....
They rather expected him to behave like an American when facing a hearing.
Some of what George said...
'I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims did not have weapons of mass destruction.
I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al-Qaeda.
I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11 2001.
I told the world, contrary to your claims, that the Iraqi people would resist a British and American invasion of their country and that the fall of Baghdad would not be the beginning of the end, but merely the end of the beginning.
Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.'
How many Americans would have had the guts to stand up in a hearing and say things like that to the elected politicians?
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