Debate in culture [Interview]

The philosophy is not necessarily my own, but it is an interesting commentary on debate in society.

There's a great unwillingness to be rude in intellectual debate. I'm afraid I belong to the seventeenth-eighteenth-century tradition in which if you're not rude in intellectual debate, then you're probably not debating — you're just patting each other on the back. The fact of the matter is that we're all in the business of working with words. As I put it, we're the devil: we're getting people to eat the apple.

You can find the rest here:
The End of Rationalism, an interview with John Ralston Saul.