The lost arts

Today's fast-paced, electronic sound bit world seems to hold no time for careful contemplation and persuasion:

This is the hardest lesson for advocates to learn. To persuade, you must anticipate and refute objections. It means exposing your convictions in advance to thorough, skeptical scrutiny. This is a lot harder than making emphatic statements of belief designed, consciously or not, to draw cheers from those already in your camp, which is what passes for political argument for the loudest voices in public debate.
Being persuasive is hard, because it demands that you consider, even if only momentarily, for purposes of argument, that you might be wrong. For anything beyond closing the sale of a vacuum cleaner, it requires broadening your mind. To refute opposing points of view capably (and winningly) means you must first be willing to listen to them.

To really hear opposing points of view, you must make yourself open to them. There's a catch here. Sometimes you might find that after really hearing an opposing viewpoint, you can't refute it. Then you must do the unthinkable: Change your own mind.

Such honesty and revelation can only come during a committed search for Truth, however. And in an age of relativism (perhaps the motto 'cogito, ergo veritas' applies?), that's not really most people's objective.