Large and Startling Figures

Reading back over my posts, I see that I have used harsh terms and a very (some would say) uncharitable tone to describe my opponents and their views. I have a simple explanation for why I do so.

            I grew up being taught to be reasonable, and to find common ground and merit among all sides in discussions with people of good will. But at heart I’m a very black and white, or as lawyers say, bright-line sort of person. If you give me a thoughtful, nuanced position that is not obviously adversarial, I automatically respond in kind. If you’re argumentative, I am argumentative in return, usually playing (or not so much playing as being) devil's advocate no matter whether I agree with your position or not. It’s instinctive. I’m a teacher, and I use the Socratic method. This is how I do things.

            The reason I’m being harsh on this blog is that, based on what I’ve seen and heard in the last decade or so, I do not believe my opponents to be people of good faith. Their belief is ideological, their tactics revolutionary, their objectives subversive, and their exercise of power fascistic. They have long since poisoned the well of true dialogue. When they themselves appeal to the importance of “dialogue,” it usually means, at least in my experience, that they may talk while dissenters must be silenced.

            There is no real dialogue with these people. You can’t reason with an unreasonable person. All I can do, therefore, is show the fallacies in their arguments and the inconsistencies in their behavior in the clearest, and thus harshest, light possible. 

            There are a great many people in the Church who are people of good will who have nevertheless unwittingly been exposed heavily to modernism. My quarrel is not with them. In fact, I consider them as being a major component of my audience, whom I hope to convince by reason that my views are correct. Perhaps they’ll find my tone off-putting. If so, I would remind them of why Flannery O’Connor—one of the most Catholic of all twentieth-century novelists--wrote her Southern Gothic in such a way as to make her readers uncomfortable. “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do,” she once wrote, “you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock-to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”