My Personal Foundation for Discussion

"It is only when we are in the habit of recognizing our opinions as a partial experience seen through our stereotypes that we become truly tolerant of an opponent. Without that habit, we believe in the absolutism of our own vision, and consequently in the treacherous character of all opposition. For while men are willing to admit that there are two sides to a 'question,' they do not believe there are two sides to what they regard as a 'fact.'" Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

Hat tip to Vulgar Morality for the quote.

After numerous discussions of varying informative and enjoyable content, I've come to feel that I should better explain just how I feel about engaging someone in debate, or expressing my opinions in any manner and through any medium.

To simplify things, I'm going to break up my understanding of the art of discussion into easy to access sections:

1. Access to Information
2. Methods of Interpretation
3. Attitudes Towards Criticism
4. Why Discussion is Important
5. Postscript: Where I Am Coming From
   

Access to Information. Walter Lippman put it better than I ever have; our experiences and the information that we have access to is always partial, because we are only human.

Even when we focus nearly all of our energies on a particular specialized category of information, we can never get the complete story. First off, there is an unknown, yet undoubtedly vast quantity of undiscovered information. Secondly, the nature of information dissemination makes it impossible for us to have access to everything that any human being has discovered.

Countless other people are gathering information at any given moment, and it may very well be that some have found something that could be considered relevant to your specialty. It is also possible that the researcher isn't aware of this relevance, and in any case it takes time for information to reach the public or even the experts. There are even cases where scientists uncover some new or strange data but are unable to draw any conclusions from it, and so the results of the research are buried in a filing cabinet somewhere.

The point is that we can never have more than a few pieces of the puzzle, due to the limitations of being human and the sheer enormity of the quantity of information that exists.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave is not far off the mark. Any one person at any given moment can only shine light on a tiny little corner of the gigantic cave that we live in. Pretending that from this we can draw a concrete understanding of the endless corridors of the cave in its entirety is simply absurd.

Methods of Interpretation. However, I do not believe that we should give up trying to understand. We just have to take the information that we can get on the subjects that we care about and then interpret reality as best we can from there.

We don't have to start from scratch here, either; there exists an abundance of traditions which provide us with an understanding or a philosophy of the way things are, and it is from the context of these traditions that we attempt to understand any new information.

For example, there are some superstitions that we are all familiar with regarding spirits, demons, aliens, or what have you. Not all of us put a lot of stock in these, and some of us do not think about them in any detail particularly. However, they provide a framework in which many people react to certain events--a strange noise that cannot be accounted for, things that seem out of place such as a sudden chill in a warm room, or a fast-moving object or creature that cannot be indentified. There are some who decide that there isn't enough information available to support any theories about any particular strange event that they experience, and are content in acknowledging their ignorance. It cannot be denied, however, that it is after creepy scenarios such as the above described occur that many people begin to believe in very old superstition that they might not have taken seriously before.

Then there are those that would argue that such conclusions are irrational, and that a perfectly logical reason exists for these phenomenon that undoubtedly fits comfortably with current scientific theory.

Which brings us one of humanity's most fascinating traditions--Science.

Within this community, seekers of knowledge are trained to understand the prevalent theories of their day, and then encouraged to go out, form hypothesis of their own, collect data, and publish their results. The ideal of this model is that good information and good analysis will be rewarded, whether it adds to, alters, or altogether disproves the more established theories of the particular field that the research is being conducted in.

There is a certain pride for those who put stock in this method--science is the pursuit of facts, many believe, and even its established theories are vulnerable to new information. We can do away with irrational things like faith, which only serve to get in the way in our pursuit of knowledge.

The reality is a little more complicated.

One of the standards that the scientific community holds itself to is the requirement that any experiment that a theory is based upon be designed in a way that can be copied by anyone who wishes to check the results for themselves--you may criticize what we consider to be established fact, the elder scientists might say, but by doing so you will be leaving yourself vulnerable to embarrassment should repeated attempts at recreating your experiment come up with different or inconclusive results. Only when critics, proponents, and the ambivalent alike have found that the experiment can be duplicated, and that the results are consistent, will a new theory be granted any degree of credibility.

It is a wonderful ideal, is it not? It creates a certain feeling of security; anything that comes out of the scientific community will be thoroughly scrutinized before it is accepted on any level.

Yet I challenge my readers to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of the current established theories underwent that process of fact-checking. If not to me, then to yourself.

To be clear: I believe that this has occurred. I believe that I have this computer, my television, my car, and endless other technologies and comforts to thank for this process. I believe that a good deal of flimsy experimental data has been rejected because it could not be reproduced by anyone.

But that is a judgment call that I have made based on the little information that I have. It is a call which ultimately rests on a faith in the scientific tradition.

If we eliminated faith from science, all progress would come to a screeching halt. I have no reason but faith to believe that my TV works for the reasons that I'm told it does. Were I a scientist, rejecting faith would mean wiping my mind of all of scientific history, because I lack a rational justification for using any of those theories as a starting point. Unless, of course, I were to take the time to go through and experimentally test every single theory relevant to the problem I was attempting to address.

The point here is not to devalue science, but rather to emphasize that without context it is impossible to find meaning or draw conclusions from anything. Context is provided by the various Methods of Interpretation that people draw upon, and these methods, in turn, are firmly embedded in the traditions that spawned them.

Before moving on to the next section, I would like to look at the parallels between Freudianism and Marxism, because unlike the Scientific tradition, they provide a very narrow and specific context into which the vast amount of pertinent information must be squeezed.

In the case of Freudianism, everything about a person is determined by events in their childhood, usually having to do with a powerful father figure (or a lack thereof) and various degrees of sexual repression which are imposed on them by family and religion.

In the case of Marxism, everything must be explained in terms of exploitation and class warfare.

In order to get into the consequences of adopting such Methods of Interpretation, we will turn to our next section.

Attitudes Towards Criticism. Having taken a look at the various ways of drawing conclusions, I'd like now to turn to a few types of reactions that people have when their conclusions are challenged. We begin by turning to the two traditions which provide only a very narrow context that I described above.

When a worker feels as though he is doing his job because he wants to make a living, and so that he can purchase things that he enjoys, he might find himself uncomfortable with the notion that he is being exploited. In certain countries, he might have chosen to quit jobs in the past because he didn't like how he was being treated, and found more pleasant work elsewhere. Not only that, but there exists a clear potential for promotion and social mobility, so the idea of a rigid class identity seems foreign to him.

Marxists have a two-word response to this brand of criticism: False Consciousness. In brief, this is an idea akin to Stockholm Syndrome, where someone is so abused and exploited that they begin to rationalize their situation by buying into whatever explanation their abuser has given them. In other words, for the Marxist, any criticism from the "working class" they proport to represent the best interests of can be written off as the delusions of a peoples so victimized that they've forgotten how to be free. And naturally, if they are ever to be free, they need a Vanguard Elite that understands their condition better than they do to come to their rescue.

Freudianism is not so dissimilar. Should a psychoanalyst proclaim that it is clear a patient has been hiding a sexual attraction to his mother, and the patient find the notion so foreign to him as to be absurd, the doctor can write off this perplexed reaction as simply denial.

The point here is not that Stockholm syndrome and denial are nonexistant, but rather, that using them and similar notions to explain away criticism is the death of open discussion. It is deeply at odds with the scientific tradition of accepting the possibility that new information might not fit cleanly into old theories, and that when enough discrepancies occur, progress demands that the theories be altered some way, rather than resorting to ignoring anything inconvenient to established beliefs.

This attitude is something that can be applied within the context of many traditions, as I will make the case further down.

Beyond abstract philosophies, people react to criticism on a very personal level. As my father recently put it, tell someone that you think they're looking at something the wrong way, and they won't hear the content of your criticism. What they will hear is an insult to their intelligence.

This reaction can be explained, I believe, by a belief many people have, whether thought out or simply accepted as "common sense", that enough research and enough time spent looking at information around a subject will yield the discovery of the obvious truth.

From this perspective, criticism is taken as an accusation of ignorance. The distinction between the depth of a person's research and the interpretation of the information found in that research is here not taken into account. So if you tell someone that you would draw different conclusions than they, you might accidentally insult them--if they interpret your criticism to mean that they don't know what they're talking about.

We would all be better off if we gained a clearer understanding of the distinction between ignorance and the margin of error involved in any human interpretation of the facts.

But I digress. Onward to the final section, the main event.

Why Discussion is Important. So some people will write off criticism as a symptom of something wrong with the critic, and some will take personal offense to criticism. How, then, is discussion even possible?

With patience, with luck, and with a humble attitude such as the one described in the Walter Lippman quote at the very beginning of this post.

In other words, the possibility of discussion is entirely up to you. If you lack the confidence to talk about certain subjects, then you will miss out on opportunities to get information from people you disagree with who are none the less knowledgable. If you lack the patience to deal with snippy comments, you may find it difficult to talk with people you disagree with who are passionate and faithful in their beliefs. If you never go out on your own to find information, many people may feel like you have nothing to add to a discussion. And if you don't engage in discussions on a regular basis, you might find yourself with underdeveloped tools when one comes your way.

All of these things can be dealt with, if it is important enough to you.

If you accept the notion that we are all going on only partial information, then you should not feel self-conscious when you engage someone who is far more well-read or well-researched than yourself. For if you admit to the relative lack of information that you have on the subject, it is my experience that people will be more than willing to share what they know. And when this occurs, it is even possible to disagree with their conclusions. One should be very polite, of course, for they had the curtosy to share in the first place. Phrases like "I told you that I don't know nearly as much as you do on this, but from what you've told me, it seems more like..." can be employed. It is my belief that both parties will benefit from such an engagement--you will obviously benefit from having talked to someone with so much more information, and they will have benefitted from being exposed to a different perspective.

As for passionate or outright insulting people, well, with a great deal of patience and a little thickness of skin, I think that it's possible to engage them in discussion and to benefit from it, too. Your focus, however, must not be the issue on which they are disagreeing with you--rather, it should be on their condescending attitude. I find that this kind of person is often a flipside of the example I used earlier, in which someone takes criticism of interpretation as though it were an accusation of ignorance. On the other side of this coin are the people who feel that the information they have seen has shown them an obvious truth, and so disagreement with their conclusions undoubtedly stems from ignorance. The best way to deal with this sort of person is to ask them what they hope to accomplish by being so brash. After all, if it were their intention to persuade you, then they would have put the effort into better explaining their position rather than resorting to childish name-calling. And if their intention wasn't to persuade you, then why did they bother talking to you on the subject in the first place? Was it simply to make it known how superior they were to you, maybe? To try and put you in your place for having committed the double-sin of being ignorant and outspoken?

More often than not, I have found that with persistence, presenting these sorts of questions to the more condescending and insulting of people can cool their heads, or at the very least, inspire them to drudge up information to use as evidence for their arguments. Even if they continue to be insulting, it is possible that both of you will have benefitted; you from the information they got (even if the motivation for getting it may well have been spite, or to smugly demonstrate how stupid you are) and they from allowing themselves to engage in discussion with someone whose perspective they had probably thought could only be adopted by people who had something wrong with them.

That requires a lot of patience and a thick skin, and is not necessarily always the best option, depending upon your own temperament.

But beyond the sorts of people you encounter, there is also the matter of your own personal responsibilities.

If you want to learn, in any fashion, then you should regularly seek out information. This could mean anything from delving deeply into a passion or hobby of yours that you want to know more about, to spending a half hour or so every week thumbing through the news. In this era of openness and technology that has revolutionized communication, information of any kind is so easily accessible that there really is no excuse to not to get in the habit of reading something every once in a while.

Beyond that, if you only look at things written by people who believe what you believe, you risk insulating yourself and thus limiting the range of information available to you. Engaging in regular discussion gives you the opportunity of seeing how real people who are coming from a different perspective actually defend their point of view, and lessens the chance that you will simply build up a strawman in your mind. In other words, if you find yourself thinking "how on Earth can someone actually believe this or that?" the best thing to do, at that point, is not to sit around and pat yourself on the back for having the only beliefs that make sense, but rather, to try and read books or articles or blogs written from another perspective, or to find someone who disagrees with you and talk to them about it.

The bottom line here, as I hinted earlier, is humility. If you are a secularist with strong ties to the scientific tradition, then you should ask yourself: do I really have all the facts? If you a Christian, or a Jew, or a Muslim, you should ask yourself: do I, one insignificant mortal in a creation full of people just like me, really have the monopoly on the one, true interpretation of God's will? Is it not hubris to suggest such a thing?

The point is, no matter what tradition you put your faith in, there is no excuse to act as though the very fact that you believe in whatever you may believe in makes you better than anyone else.

So why is discussion important?

I can only give you my own reasons for believing that it is.

First, I believe that while a humble attitude is important, it is also to the benefit of everyone that you make a habit of gathering the information you have available to you, and presenting your interpretation in the most honest and persuasive way that you can. It may not persuade anyone, or it may persuade everyone (and most likely neither extreme will be the case), but it will put out the limited information that you have based your opinion on and provide one possible context to take it from.

The best discussions involve analyzing that kind of information and providing a combination of arguments on how it could be interpreted differently along with extra information that could be seen as outright contradicting the conclusions of the person you are criticizing.

Obviously, the ideal discussion rarely takes place. But it is my belief that the methods described above for engaging with individuals of various backgrounds and attitudes can yield some very good things for everyone involved and for anyone who did not participate but has access to the discussion in some way. For the end result will be articulations of different perspectives by actual people who believe in them, and the citation of a good deal of information that people might not have known how to access before.

And that is why discussion is important to me. Because I believe it to be one of the best tools for learning, if you are willing to come at it with patience, humility, and a willingness to risk sounding stupid by indulging in suggestions/interpretations thought up on the spot. The benefits, in my opinion, far outweigh the unpleasantries.

Postscript: Where I Am Coming From