Let’s Not Snatch Endless War from the Jaws of an Imperfect Peace

Abstract

For all its considerable virtues, the debate format as a means of clarifying volatile contemporary issues has certain potential defects. Since the participants must await each other’s thrusts, by the time they have finished with the subject as it was when they began, it may have shifted in ways demanding further comment. That is one problem. A second is the tendency of prolonged and intense debate shifting rapidly among the subject’s various facets to obscure one’s overall position; readers may be left in the position of the blind wise men holding different parts of the elephant’s anatomy and trying without communication among themselves to determine what the beast looks like. It seems to us that a brief final statement might obviate these difficulties.