Argumentation gone awry

Two recent discussions I follow perfectly point out key faults in today's society's thinking. Hopefully by pointing these out we are made aware, and we can do something about it...

1. First: Intelligent Design vs. Darwinism, as viewed by Scott Adams, the guy who does the Dilbert comics. Hilarious blog by the way. We are not getting into the details of this discussion, because it's the characteristics of argumentation that I want to point out rather than the content. Besides I'm not knowledgeable about the subject matter.

Adams says the following: "Neither side understands the other side’s argument. Better yet, no one seems to understand their own side’s argument. But that doesn’t stop anyone from having a passionate opinion." Now he makes this statement in context of the I.D. vs Darwin discussion, but I happen to think this works out quite well for other discussions as well. Religious discussions for example, or political ones, even those about football teams.

Adams goes on: "What you have instead is each side misrepresenting the other’s position and then making a good argument for why the misrepresentation is wrong."
And also: "To make things more complicated, both sides have good and bad arguments lumped into them. If you make a good argument on your side, I respond by attacking your bad argument instead. If it were a debate contest, both sides would lose."

I happen to think this is the lazy way of doing discussions. You just shoot at what you can hit, rather than hit what actually hurts. All you're doing is just irritating the shit out of each other.

2. The other discussion I follow is the Sony Digital Rights Management issue. In short, Sony BMG is sued on the grounds that they - without you knowing or agreeing - put copy protection software, the so-called rootkits, on your computer, should you play one of their (recent, copy-protected) music CDs in your home computer. Again, we're not going into details, because it's the argumentation I want to point out, rather than the contents.

Basically Sony BMG is completely adamant that it has done nothing wrong, merely protecting their copyrights. Mark Russinovich summarizes that Sony "denies that the rootkit poses a security or reliability threat despite the obvious risks of both"; and that Sony "claims that users don’t care about rootkits because they don’t know what a rootkit is."

Here's one side basically making statements that are already dismissed by evidence to the contrary. And it does so in name of incompetence, malice, arrogance or even outright denial. This tells me that there is no end to the degree in which we will protect our interests. As Stewart Baker, assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security puts towards Sony: "It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer."

My point? I feel we are heading in a wrong direction as a society, because the way we want to convince our peers, our audience, our sponsors is not based on strength of argumentation. We want to win people over without spending a lot of effort into the justification of our own ideas, or the flaws of the counter-arguments. We are looking for the shortcut to the quick-fix. We gradually stoop to more immoral ways of forcing people to see our way, like treachery, violence, terrorism even.

I take it that it takes far longer in the current social setting to get to grips with the world, because new information comes toward us thick and fast, and in ever increasing amounts. There's more of the world to understand, but we are not getting a proportionate additional amount of time (and skill? and intellect? and patience?) to make sense of it all.

The pessimist in me says we are not going to turn this around. The optimist even says we have a very long way to go. Our motives and our moral base need to be completely recalibrated, if we are to rise above ourselves and out of this mess. Only then will we have progress. Only then will we have proper arguments.