This article was written by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, whom I admire and have read in the past.

After what I wrote a few weeks ago, I wanted to share this piece of his, because I think it speaks directly to what I was talking about.

I hope you'll agree with me that it rings painfully true, and that once again we need to make a conscious effort, all of us together, to support and refuse to let a handful of people silence the valuable voices that still remain in these societies of ours, so thoroughly broken down.

The Harassment of Reasoned Argument

Until not very long ago, there existed an inviolable tradition, and what I mean by that overwrought adjective is that it could of course be violated, but whoever did so was immediately exposed to discredit and stripped of any claim to being right. This tradition governed the way arguments were conducted, whether in private or in public. If someone asserted something over dinner or at a literary gathering, and another person challenged it with counterarguments, the first party was obliged in turn to refute those counterarguments and bring forward new reasons to support what he had said and dismantle what the second party had put forward. If he couldn't find those new arguments, or if the ones he had lacked weight and failed to convince (not the adversary, necessarily, but the people present, who served in a way as referees, if only through murmurs of approval or disapproval), then his original assertions had to be withdrawn or qualified, or they were sufficiently discredited to simply dissolve: in any case, they did not prevail. It was considered an even greater disgrace to dodge and weave and avoid the confrontation directly, what people today call (in that clunky phrase) "deflecting": changing the subject, trying to draw attention away from the corner you'd painted yourself into. And the worst reaction of all, the one that most thoroughly destroyed a person's reputation and was never tolerated, was to say nothing at all, to go silent, to pretend that what the other side had argued had never existed and therefore required no reply. This tradition gave us the old saying "He who says nothing, consents," meaning that whoever looks the other way and starts whistling, whoever plays distracted and doesn't acknowledge a direct challenge, is conceding the point to the other person, acknowledging his own arbitrariness or his mistake. And that was binding. The individual in question could no longer return to the fray and keep asserting what he had been unable to prove or defend; he was dismasted, and every time he insisted on opinions that lacked foundation or support, he would be reminded of the argument he had failed to counter.

This old dialectical tradition, so fundamental to civil life, has been blown to pieces. Today's politicians would not have survived a single skirmish of this kind twenty years ago, let alone fifty. Not one of them would have been tolerated (not without catastrophic damage to his reputation) dismissing journalists' questions, ignoring the well-founded opinions of columnists, brushing aside his opponents' arguments. It would never have been acceptable to respond "That's not on the agenda today," or "What lovely weather we're having," or "All that matters is that we're the best thing for Spain" when faced with a direct question or in the middle of a debate.

They would have been called to account immediately: "Excuse me, you haven't answered my question," or "You haven't refuted what I just said"; and had they persisted in dodging the issue, no one would have allowed them to go on speaking, at least not about that issue. Not only is this behavior in politicians tolerated today without consequence, but it has infected the rest of society as well.

What's common now is that if someone makes a case or argues something with sufficient conviction and the person being challenged can't mount a defense, that person simply pretends not to have heard, or better yet pretends that no one heard, that the words making them uncomfortable were never spoken or written, never existed. Sometimes, at most, they dispatch the whole thing with that ridiculous catch-all phrase "That's your opinion," as though other people's opinions didn't affect us and didn't need to be refuted or countered by our own (with arguments, naturally). Today you can witness this exchange: "The sun rises in the east." "Well, that's your opinion."

The most serious consequence of this widespread attitude, admired as it is by the spectators and referees, is that soon, very soon, the people who still bother to reason things out will give up, seeing how pointless it is. And that is precisely what politicians and everyone else who cannot stand dissent or disagreement are ultimately hoping for. A few months ago I read that one such abandonment had already taken place: Félix de Azua, one of the finest argumentative minds in this country, announced he was leaving his column at El Periódico de Catalunya, not because he could no longer convince anyone of anything, but because the evidence was clear that his columns were being read the way you watch rain fall (I didn't see that piece of his, but I did see some commentary on it). How long will those who still aspire to be right (and therefore to be acknowledged as right) and take the trouble to demonstrate it keep slamming their heads against a wall or against empty air, as long as no one removes that right from them using the same legitimate dialectical weapons? How much longer before Sabater, Ferlosio, Ramoneda, Juliá, or Gómez Pin, to name just a few columnists from this paper, grow exhausted, if all they get back are barks in the best case and deaf ears in the worst? If those in power or their opponents don't acknowledge being called out even when a finger is pointed directly at them, and feel no obligation to respond or correct themselves, and the citizenry at large permits it? At this rate, a day will come when the thinking minds will have been silenced by exhaustion, by tedium, by the despondency this situation produces. And then we will be even more thoroughly abandoned: even now, when there is no response or reaction and only deflections, the arguments still exist, and we reader-referees still have access to them. The real disaster will come when no one finds the effort worthwhile anymore, and no one pushes back against the hollow ones who, undaunted as ever, will go right on talking and imposing their will.