In his latest column, George Will uses a line I have heard him use more than once on television: “It is axiomatic that you cannot reason a person out of a position that the person has not been reasoned into.” This is one of those lines that immediately causes anyone who employs words for a living to say to himself “I wish I had said that.” (“You will, Oscar, you will.”)
But a moment’s further reflection produces a second thought, wiser than the first, namely that this is so far from being axiomatic that it is not even remotely true. For my part, I have been reasoned out of a great many prejudices by a good argument. Are there people who stubbornly cling to positions that reason has demonstrably exploded? Yes. We may call them unteachable fools. (Will is probably right to believe that this category includes dedicated followers of Donald Trump.) But the world is peopled by a great many more teachable fools, thank heavens. Will’s “axiom” is in fact a flat–and demonstrably false–contradiction of the first premise of education, that the human mind is tractable. To pronounce people who have irrationally bought a lot of guff intractable by reason sounds awfully clever. But as an old teacher of mine once said, when you have written a line that is so wonderfully clever that you could not bear to think of cutting it–cut it. This goes double when the witticism just isn’t so.