Author Stanley Fish concludes his book Winning Arguments with a chapter titled “Why We Can’t Get Along,” which serves as an overall summary of his main thesis on why human beings so often find themselves in argument.
Fish begins by interpreting human culture through an argumentative lens. Some of the greatest surviving art of the ancient world was made, as least partially, to serve as propaganda: which is, in other words, an argument in favor of the local king or kingdom. As an example, Fish uses the example of the Egyptian hieroglyphs to show how visual language was used to make an argument — in this case for the divinity of the Pharaoh — even in an age of mass illiteracy. As a secondary, more modern, example, Fish refers to a political cartoon which makes the case for ending the British policy of appeasing the Nazis; that would be a difficult argument to make in the political climate of the age, but the artist did so by comparing supporters of appeasement as incompentent fools that would bring the country to ruin. Fish goes on to state that it is not just everything we see that has some sort of connection to an argument: everything we do is also reflective of our own personal beliefs. Even something so simple as the clothes one chooses to wear reveals what the wearer believes to be socially acceptable to be shown in public.
Efforts to end arguments, the supporters of which Fish categorizes proponents of enlightenment liberalism, who wish to create a society in which all can consent to the same truths, and adherents of religion, who wish to create a world where all follow the same rules, as mandated by the same deity. What both groups fail to consider, then, is that argument is more than two or more camps debating each other; arguing is a deeply personal connection that is a consequence of human individuality, which no larger organization can stifle.
