*
Short answer, because there is nothing to underpin modern discourse.
One-step reasoning is scaffolding cantilevered over an abyss of nihilism: so there is no incentive to point out this fact.
*
By one-step reasoning I mean that a question posed in modern discourse carries the expectation that it be answered in its own terms, briefly (preferably in a single sentence), conclusively, and without reference to any other mode of discourse.
To question the discourse is to demolish it. Therefore:
It is not permitted to re-frame the question as ill-formed or prejudiced;
It is not permitted to refer to transcendental values ('the good' or evil; truth, beauty or virtue).
Hence the shallowness, rhetorical trickery, emotional manipulation of all modern public discourse.
*
Hence we simply get several or many incommensurable answers to any particular question from the discourses of politics, law, economics, the media, education, science, 'ethics', religion...
Which discourse prevails in a specific instance is simply a matter of which one is successfully imposed.
And there is no possibility of principled compromise, because there is no underpinning value (whether general or specific) which might be optimized by a compromise.
So, instead of compromise, we get horse-trading, deal-cutting, carve-ups and trade-offs.
*
But nothing can be done about it. Everyone is as bad as everyone else: and purportedly 'in-depth' analysis is merely distally incoherent at the third-step of reasoning, instead of at the proximate second-step.
*
We have now arrived at Ralph Waldo Emerson's desired state when he asks: "Let us having nothing now which is not its own evidence"
- that is to say, self-evident within an already-established mode of discourse.
No more to be said: nothing to say.
*
