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When I was younger, I wrote thorough, adequately documented, cited and corroborated positions papers, sometimes for politicians whom I liked in person but with whom I had intellectual disagreement. Because the challenge amused me. Because I believed that some sort of compromise promised to remind people with power that they were beholden to their own liabilities.

I was also young and believed I had something to prove.

I believed in persuasion.

I don't think I believe in the efficacy of persuasive reasoning anymore, in part because the continent spanning ideological superstructure in which I lived is gone. I "grew up" when there were clearly marked boundaries (the loss of the which I do not lament) between the world which assumed a right to my loyalties and the world against which I had to least nominally express disagreement. Us good, Soviets bad. Political and ideological persuasion tended to work within this superstructure, so that persons who disagreed fundamentally about how to be us still had an anchor in their expected agreement to not be them. The stable adversarial environment provided those within it with a fulcrum for their arguments, whether or not the were aware of it.

I think, in part, this may explain the manichean virulence of the Tea Party and similar movements - the enduring urge to recapture a stable fulcrum about which adversaries may disagree, but against the necessity of which they rarely argue. A shared loyalty. I've seen perhaps innumerable attempts to recreate this condition by persons arguing for a host of moral fulcrums which they believe, honestly I think, should be established and then just left alone: an attitude towards Islam, the necessity of deficit reform, or Wall Street reform, the need for universal health care or full employment, an anodyne faith in the goodness of "America," Judaeo-Christian values, et cetera. For the angry conservative, and the disappointed progressive, something is missing in the ideological environment, something which allows them (and us) to agree, something that places them in an agreed to context, so that they can believe they are on the same team with their current political and moral adversaries.

Because, without that context, their adversaries may very well be mortal ones. People have a difficult time persuading each other, if they believe in their own enmity.

I don't know if this angst is or can be experienced by the younguns, especially those who have come of age in the last decade or two. I have my suspicions, but no real way to confirm or refute them. So I guess I'll leave it at this: all that self-regard and digital solipsism might be explained as the moral autism of the unpersuadable.

You can sell to them - in fact, I cannot imagine a more perfect consumer - but can you really persuade them?

I don't mean to suggest that they cannot reason and draw conclusions based on arguments made - but that they just might be immune to argumentation, especially in an adversarial dispute, because the assumed anchor to a commonality - that fulcrum which can be moved, but not abolished - doesn't exist. 

How can you appeal to the logic of a shared universality if one of the parties doesn't know or care that it might exist?

And this isn't akin to disagreements between angry conservatives and disappointed liberals, who accept the faith in a commonality over which they must dispute but would not abolish, and so can therefore find points of agreement, but who have begun to feel the loss of it and have subsequently started to hunker down in moral bunkers, reinforcing belief with a hardening of temperament, until agreement and persuasion become impossible and contest becomes war.

I could be wrong, and I am fact writing these words with a perfect surety of my own error.

But what the hell, I'll die sooner than later and my past now casts a longer shadow than the landmarks of my possible futures.

I watched "Scott Pilgrim against the World" last night, with my wife snoring gently behind me. The first film I've ever watched, after which I felt old.  So dice, meet table, I'm aging and I'm ready to be wrong in the view of others again...