After almost sixty years devoted to the life of the mind, it has come to this. I despair of reason. Or at least in what passes nowadays for public discourse, its degradation into something that resembles pilpul – a Talmudic form of argumentation that justifies a desired outcome by linkage to a fixed text.
This is about guns and absolutism of ideas. I’m a pretty passionate moderate. Generally speaking, the nutty right and the nutty left both make me cringe. Mostly the nutty left wants me to feel bad for having money or because I’m a white male, and I can deal with that. But the nutty right wants nutty people to have the right to have not just guns, but guns that provoke the image of Neo at the end of The Matrix (Tank: “So what do you need besides a miracle?” Neo: “Guns. Lots of guns.”)
I have pretty scrupulously avoided getting involved in constitutional debate (a) because it’s a crowded field already, and (b) what I’m about to say has always underlain my “meta” feelings about many (or most) of the debates. But having been sickened once again by a mass shooting, having no affinity for guns whatsoever (never held a real one, I don’t think), and believing that what sounds like legal reasoning is instead a means of justifying or rationalizing an unchangeable and absolute position by linkage to an antecedent text, I’m going to (at least) dip my toes in the water.
As I have said to several people in the last few days, I’m pretty sure I have a right under the Second Amendment to keep a musket (and maybe even a couple dueling pistols) to grab when the Massachusetts Militia calls on me to resist an invasion of Birkenstock-clad Catamounts from Vermont, but every right beyond that calls on lawyerly argumentation and dialectic for its justification. And I’ve spent a good part of my brief but intense academic career thinking and writing about lawyerly argumentation and dialectic, at least as it compares and contrasts with making judgments, and particularly in the business arena.
So how is it that what most people seem to think – that there ought to be reasonable restrictions on gun purchase and ownership – can’t get past the absolutists? It’s because reason is no longer part of the discussion, and debate isn’t about what makes sense but about Law with a capital L as though we were dealing with the words of a constitutional deity.
Let me try to explain my despair (in this particular instance, about gun control, but more generally about what passes for the reasoning process) by talking about pilpul.