There is a paragraph toward the end of On Moral Fiction in which Mr. Gardner tells us about the kind of frustration which must have led him to publish his beliefs about art in this form.

… I've been in conversations where no one seemed to care about the truth, where people argued merely to win, refused to listen or try to understand, threw in irrelevancies—some anecdote without conceivable bearing, some mere ego flower. A thousand times I have heard some person—some casual acquaintance about whom I had no strong feeling—cruelly vilified, and have found that to rise in defense of mere fairness is to become, suddenly, the enemy. I have witnessed, repeatedly, university battles in which no one on any side would stoop to plain truth.

The strength of Gardner's argument comes from his conviction that this "plain truth" is before our eyes. It is...