There's a fine line between demanding tolerance for one's opinions and demanding immunity from criticism, but the line is there and it's important to draw it. I've seen, multiple times, the insistence that intolerance of other people's beliefs and opinions is a virtue, not a vice, because any opinion that can't be defended shouldn't be held. My thought regarding this has always been, "You can stand up for yourself. Good for you." The problem is that a lot of people have trouble defending themselves not because they don't have good reasons for their opinions but simply because they aren't good at arguing.
This is especially true for those raised in a very authoritarian environment. When you've let someone else tell you what the think, with no tolerance of dissent, for the first 20+ years of your life, you're not going to fare a lot better when you suddenly find yourself in a new community of people liberal-minded enough to allow you try to defend yourself before they then go ahead and insist you're stupid if you don't agree with them.
The problem is not that ideas or even people should be sheltered from criticism, it's that criticism is not a purely-intellectual affair. Criticism contains emotional components that can easily dominate the experience. Even a bright mind like Bertrand Russell once abandoned, or nearly abandoned, a train of thought because his friend and colleague Ludwig Wittgenstein coldly and firmly assured him it would not work — with no further explanation.
Criticism can also become an intoxicating experience for the criticizer, an exercise in power masquerading as an exercise in reason. The end result is the critic puts a lot of effort into becoming more effectively intimidating and little into actually understanding what it is they are criticizing. What started out as a devotion to truth becomes a devotion to winning arguments, and anyone who has had enough and walks away from this attempted-victimization is then accused of not caring about the truth. At best nobody wins in these mockeries of reasoned debate. Nobody has achieved any greater insight into their own opinions, because the winning strategy for the defense is simply to refuse to be dragged into the mud.
The examples of this behavior online and in the media are too numerous and varied to be able to represent fairly, and I doubt anyone reading this has not run across it. Every side of every issue imaginable has done it. And I believe it is a far greater threat to progress and reason in most avenue at the moment than is the insistence for immunity from criticism disguised as a plea for tolerance.
Sometimes this attitude is called "Intellectual Darwinism" (though sometimes that term is used differently) and defended on the basis that it promotes progress. But this is just one more example of conflating evolution and natural selection with progress. This is a fallacy. Every life-form currently existing on Earth has just as long an evolutionary history as any other. Our ancestors have all faced selection pressures determined by geography and climate. If success in the face of evolutionary pressures is really a measure of progress, then beetles are far more evolved than the higher mammals, since there are far more of them. What we normally think of as progress is achieved through evolution only accidentally.
In On Liberty, one of John Stewart Mill's arguments for freedom of thought and expression is that truth has no natural tendency to win in the face of political oppression. What we need is a further recognition that it has no natural tendency to win in debates, either, especially when one or more sides are dedicated to winning at any cost. Skill, far more than right, wins these conflicts, and just as those who call for political oppression of dissent in the name of truth are in fact enemies of truth, so are those who attempt to intimidate dissenting voices into silence in the name of reason.
What we ultimately need is to revive the lost art of dialectic and the commitment to being "intolerant" of others' opinions only after we have been tolerant enough to listen to them and understand what it is they think and feel and why, and to seek common ground before we move on to discuss our differences.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
Pragmatism and the Willfully Ignorant
Pragmatists are generally committed to what Hilary Putnam has termed “the primacy of the agent-perspective.” This is the idea that what is important to me is my knowledge and perceptions, what is important to you is your knowledge and perceptions. The knowledge and opinions of others, including the wisest of experts, is important to me only to the extent that I can integrate it successfully into my own knowledge-base, and the same for you.
Psychologist Carl Rogers expressed a similar idea when he said,
This insistence on the primacy of the individual's perspective reasonably raises a few eyebrows. What about fundamentalists? What about the roughly half of all Americans who doubt the scientific consensus about evolution and climate change? To be somewhat parochial about it, what about the willfully ignorant?
A partial answer is that these are political problems — indeed, some of the defining political problems of our time — but not necessarily epistemological problems. We cannot simply assume that because they reject our opinions they are truly being willfully ignorant; that assumes too much about both their epistemological situation and ours. Besides that, what is actually worrying is how much power these groups hold over our culture and political processes; we do not worry overly much about the opinions held by a few eccentrics, still less about those of uncontacted tribes.
Nevertheless this won't suffice as a complete answer. Certainly there are those who truly are willfully ignorant: intelligent, educated individuals who nevertheless cling to bizarre beliefs and who have even become adept at rationalizing such beliefs. We cannot entirely suspend judgment in such cases. As good fallibilists we must always admit that perhaps they are right and we are wrong. But we do not always have to admit that they are justified in their beliefs.
How, then, do we go about diagnosing such irrationality consistent with our pragmatism? I propose that we diagnose irrationality only when both the following criteria have all been met:
The first point avoids excessive parochialism and ethnocentrism. We may very well reject, even condemn, the beliefs of a Sufi mystic living in Pakistan or a Buddhist monk in southeast Asia, but to deem them irrational is to judge them by standards they may very well have no reason to seriously consider.
The second point is just the insistence on taking the agent-perspective as primary. Whether some belief you hold is irrational has very little to do with me and what I know or think I know, and nearly everything to do with you and what you know and think you know. Indeed, it has little to do, directly, with what is actually true. It is only the facts as we understand them that matters; a truth not yet conceived of cannot be a factor in anyone's reasoning.
As suggested above, we can still disagree with and even condemn a belief while admitting the person holding it may be rational to do so. Many who hold extremist ideologies and promote oppressive social and political goals do so with honest sincerity. We cannot say with confidence that they are irrational; nevertheless their beliefs ought to be condemned.
Western society since the Enlightenment has had a tendency to equate all mental vices with irrationality. We are vaguely uncomfortable with the idea that an erring mind may be rationally binding, and still more uncomfortable with Aquinas' insistence that this is true of an erring conscience. It is comforting to assure ourselves that we do not think or behave as someone else does not merely because we were fortunate enough to be born here and now, and socialized as we were, but because our beliefs and behavior express some deeper virtue that those we condemn lack.
It is, of course, possible that they do. It is hard to argue that there has not been a good deal of progress in our methods of inquiry and reasoning since Thales' speculations about the nature of matter gave birth to the genre of philosophy. But it seems prudent to be cautious here, to avoid assuming too much. The fact that we can tell a fairly compelling tale of progress for our own culture should not lead us to be overly dismissive of dissenters, nor accept simplistic comparisons of our culture with others.
Psychologist Carl Rogers expressed a similar idea when he said,
Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to truth as it is in the process of becoming in me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets — neither Freud nor research — neither the revelations of God nor man — can take precedence over my own direct experience. My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction.
This insistence on the primacy of the individual's perspective reasonably raises a few eyebrows. What about fundamentalists? What about the roughly half of all Americans who doubt the scientific consensus about evolution and climate change? To be somewhat parochial about it, what about the willfully ignorant?
A partial answer is that these are political problems — indeed, some of the defining political problems of our time — but not necessarily epistemological problems. We cannot simply assume that because they reject our opinions they are truly being willfully ignorant; that assumes too much about both their epistemological situation and ours. Besides that, what is actually worrying is how much power these groups hold over our culture and political processes; we do not worry overly much about the opinions held by a few eccentrics, still less about those of uncontacted tribes.
Nevertheless this won't suffice as a complete answer. Certainly there are those who truly are willfully ignorant: intelligent, educated individuals who nevertheless cling to bizarre beliefs and who have even become adept at rationalizing such beliefs. We cannot entirely suspend judgment in such cases. As good fallibilists we must always admit that perhaps they are right and we are wrong. But we do not always have to admit that they are justified in their beliefs.
How, then, do we go about diagnosing such irrationality consistent with our pragmatism? I propose that we diagnose irrationality only when both the following criteria have all been met:
- The person(s) or group being considered is a member of something reasonably like our own culture
- We have made a reasonable attempt to try to understand their position, to empathize with their particular perspective and reasoning, and failed
The first point avoids excessive parochialism and ethnocentrism. We may very well reject, even condemn, the beliefs of a Sufi mystic living in Pakistan or a Buddhist monk in southeast Asia, but to deem them irrational is to judge them by standards they may very well have no reason to seriously consider.
The second point is just the insistence on taking the agent-perspective as primary. Whether some belief you hold is irrational has very little to do with me and what I know or think I know, and nearly everything to do with you and what you know and think you know. Indeed, it has little to do, directly, with what is actually true. It is only the facts as we understand them that matters; a truth not yet conceived of cannot be a factor in anyone's reasoning.
As suggested above, we can still disagree with and even condemn a belief while admitting the person holding it may be rational to do so. Many who hold extremist ideologies and promote oppressive social and political goals do so with honest sincerity. We cannot say with confidence that they are irrational; nevertheless their beliefs ought to be condemned.
Western society since the Enlightenment has had a tendency to equate all mental vices with irrationality. We are vaguely uncomfortable with the idea that an erring mind may be rationally binding, and still more uncomfortable with Aquinas' insistence that this is true of an erring conscience. It is comforting to assure ourselves that we do not think or behave as someone else does not merely because we were fortunate enough to be born here and now, and socialized as we were, but because our beliefs and behavior express some deeper virtue that those we condemn lack.
It is, of course, possible that they do. It is hard to argue that there has not been a good deal of progress in our methods of inquiry and reasoning since Thales' speculations about the nature of matter gave birth to the genre of philosophy. But it seems prudent to be cautious here, to avoid assuming too much. The fact that we can tell a fairly compelling tale of progress for our own culture should not lead us to be overly dismissive of dissenters, nor accept simplistic comparisons of our culture with others.
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