Argument

Wednesday

Melissa Kite

I just can’t face one more argument with anyone, ever again

The cyclist was on the wrong side of the road coming towards me head-on. It was a winding country lane with blind bends and as I came round one, there was the cyclist, pedalling furiously along the lane on his hard right hand side. I slammed on my brakes, but instead of beeping my horn, I thought: ‘Let it go, I can’t be bothered. I just can’t face one more argument, ever again, with anyone.’ I never seem to get disputes one at a time. Troubles always come to me in multitudes. I fight at least two major battles on behalf of someone else or myself at any given time.

Monday

Micah Mattix

Picking a fight

From our US edition

Lee Siegel’s defense of argument in the latest volume of Yale’s “Why X Matters” series is original, provocative and frustrating, which isn’t bad for a book on argument. Siegel is less interested in what argument does than in what it is. An “expression of a universal longing for a better life” is how he puts it initially. It is also a justification for “ways of living,” something that“ flows from our intuitive certainty that our right to exist is the most fundamental truth,” and an expression of our “unique, particular existence.” Albert Camus stated in The Myth of Sisyphus that the only serious philosophical question is suicide, “whether life is or is not worth living.” Siegel therefore writes “To exist is to argue your existence.” You get the idea.

argument

Saturday

Peter Wood

Why discord delights

From our US edition

Finding fault takes finesse. Oh, anybody can complain. We are a nation of complainers, carping at everything from breakfast vittles to late-night TV. We complain about our politicians, our prognosticators and our pop stars. But these complaints run like water down a windowpane in the same old channels to the same wet destination. Finding fault — finding new faults in a familiar subject — is much harder. It takes talent. It takes a critic. I am well aware that these days a lot of Americans complain that we are too divided. The nation bristles with parti pris. We revile the exponents of political views opposed to our own. We sneer at their provincialism, their pissant pettiness and their lack of civility, for which they should rightly be crushed.

discord