I think national politics in the US has gotten disgusting enough that this is a great idea. I’d like to see it in high school as part of the civics or history curriculum. The US has already tried to address some of the issues embedded here: we do have freedom of religion and speech embedded in about the most prominent place possible in our founding documents (the first rebuttal, so to speak). However, the connection between tolerance of people who disagree with you, and actually FEELING some respect for the intelligence of the people you disagree with seems to have been lost in the rush of testosterone, cortisone, and political action we get from hitting the wasp’s nest with a stick. So the simple fact that more action is carried out by angry ideologues than by any 5 reasonable intellectuals has degraded the value of reasonability and intellectualism.
The idea of being able to make the best form of the argument you disagree with is, I think, and old one. This would probably be a great time to take it out, dust it off, and feature it in the showroom window again.
I think national politics in the US has gotten disgusting enough that this is a great idea. I’d like to see it in high school as part of the civics or history curriculum. The US has already tried to address some of the issues embedded here: we do have freedom of religion and speech embedded in about the most prominent place possible in our founding documents (the first rebuttal, so to speak). However, the connection between tolerance of people who disagree with you, and actually FEELING some respect for the intelligence of the people you disagree with seems to have been lost in the rush of testosterone, cortisone, and political action we get from hitting the wasp’s nest with a stick. So the simple fact that more action is carried out by angry ideologues than by any 5 reasonable intellectuals has degraded the value of reasonability and intellectualism.
The idea of being able to make the best form of the argument you disagree with is, I think, and old one. This would probably be a great time to take it out, dust it off, and feature it in the showroom window again.