I was warned many, many years ago by the great Jonathan Lynn, co-creator of Yes Minister and director of the comic masterpiece My Cousin Vinnie, that Americans are not raised in a tradition of debate and that the adversarial ferocity common around a dinner table in Britain is more or less unheard of in America. When Jonathan first went to live in LA he couldn’t understand the terrible silences that would fall when he trashed an statement he disagreed with and said something like “yes, but that’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense. It’s self-contradictory.” To a Briton pointing out that something is nonsense, rubbish, tosh or logically impossible in its own terms is not an attack on the person saying it – it’s often no more than a salvo in what one hopes might become an enjoyable intellectual tussle. Jonathan soon found that most Americans responded with offence, hurt or anger to this order of cut and thrust. Yes, one hesitates ever to make generalizations, but let’s be honest the cultures are different, if they weren’t how much poorer the world would be and Americans really don’t seem to be very good at or very used to the idea of a good no-holds barred verbal scrap.
I'm not actually sure I agree with any of these propositions -- I've had great heated debates with a variety of brilliant American friends and accquaintances, and met many touchy British idiots.
Anyway, Stephen Fry then goes on to describe a furious argument he had with Jim, a West Virginian who works in the fossil fuel industry, about global warming. And Al Gore.
Jim now came to his central argument. “I’m not a scientist. I don’t have the technical knowledge to determine whether this global warming is a real, man made threat or not. Do you?” Well I suppose Jim was accustomed to this argument appearing to be quite a clincher. Obviously very few people he meets are likely to reply that they do have the technical knowledge. What is more Jim could spread his hands wide and claim not to be a ‘global warming denier’ (a phrase that made him very angry indeed. He denounced it as ‘that cliché’, which is not quite what it is, but we’ll let it pass). ‘I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, I’m not saying it does. I’m just saying I don’t know.’
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What I tried to explain next to Jim was made difficult by the animosity that was building up as a result of the charged nature of this debate. I think Jim was not used to being contradicted, I think he found the European admiration for Al Gore disgusting, and the whole British liberal attitude to the environment little short of socialistic, anaemic, pansy and pretentious. All the usual problems red-blooded Americans of his stamp have with Britons, in fact. And I have no doubt my tone, my voice, my vocabulary, my whole demeanour, affect and style contributed to this feeling and compounded it. And I too was upset and angry at his dismissive, illogical, contemptuous tone.
Having calmed down, in the essay ['blessay'] Stephen Fry outlines the logical fallacies and central arguments in the debates about global warming in general.
I really think he puts it very clearly, and brings out some very important points. Not least because he manages to weave in a discussion of the existence of God there too.
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