I refuse to debate.

I‘ve felt this long before I say it. It’s heresy against liberal orthodoxy, my team’s creed, the rule of reason. Debate tests the truth of assertions. Opinions strengthen in self-defense. Western civilization has maintained this at least since Socrates ambled Athens’ agora four hundred years before Christianity started counting. Decrees, by contrast – declarations, edicts, pronouncements – are the language of tyrants, unwilling to expose their actions to Reason’s scrutiny. England’s Parliament and America’s Congress are predicated on the concept of productive debate. America’s debates over the Constitution and over slavery (between candidates Lincoln and Douglas in 1858) are episodes we boast about.

I love ideas. I love exploring them. But I refuse to debate.

Partly my allergy is temperamental. Neither physically nor intellectually am I a pugilist. I enjoy seeing, considering, but not prevailing. Debates are contests and I don’t want to contest, simply say what I see now. I italicize now because my views change as my vantage changes. What I think now can’t be what I’ll think tomorrow or thought yesterday, for truth changes with the light. This is what Emerson was talking about in his oft-quoted

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedA foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.

The pomposity of Emerson’s pronouncement pesters – he goes on to equivalate himself with Socrates, Jesus, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, no less – but candor takes his point to heart. A repeated assertion has lost the freshness of perception. Any requirement for consistency turns a speaker into, first, a contortionist – squaring an old thought with its successor – then a distortionist, maintaining from a pulpit a position they may have abandoned in person. The gotcha press delights in pointing out contradictions between politicians’ old words and new, but don’t we want our representatives to contradict themselves as they learn new facts? We do – if they’re honest – which they’re not: politics is the art of lying, an art of which the Nameless One is an unrivaled virtuoso.

A debate forces a speaker to erect a palisade of argument around their assertion and shoot arrows to keep attackers at bay. Debate is a game played to win. But the truth is motile, squirmy, a Protean blob that will not keep its shape. I’ve published almost four thousand of these daily missives over ten-plus years – without missing a day, he brags! – and may I never repeat. On some subjects I can’t make up my mind – capital punishment, say, or Alban Berg – so my conclusions spin like a weathervane in a gale.

I love to stand corrected. Criticism and information can only hone my opinions so they’re sharper, surer. You cannot insult me by disagreeing. Your opinion is valid – even if its whacky.

Debating, I’ve found over too many decades, is a waste of breath. No one’s persuaded by argument, except of their own eloquence. Debate’s more likely to ossify opinions, as pride scrambles to deflect defeat. Zestful debaters are showoffs. If ever I stumble into a debate, I bow out or, if that’s not feasible, go mute.

It may be argued that these missives are shadow debates, rigged in my favor. That’s true. I state my case, then launch it into the world, where it must make its way on its own.