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avevale_intelligencerIn Isaac and Ishmael, Aaron Sorkin's response to 9/11, Josh Lyman is asked (or rather asks Socratically) why Islamic extremists hate America so much, and his final answer is:
"We're a plural society. We accept more than one idea. It offends them."
This is a good answer, bound to make woolly liberals like me feel good about being American (well, I'm not, but you get the idea). Only trouble is, it gives rise to a question which I'm sure has occurred to everyone who has ever held strongly to any single opinion or worldview or faith.
What is the value of accepting more than one idea when one idea is obviously right and all the others are obviously wrong?
Let's for the moment just leave aside the question of validity of proof. Let's ignore the fact that view A has three centuries of scientific research and data behind it and view B just has some writing in an old book, and let's take it as a given that if someone believes something strongly they have proofs that satisfy them, because whether those proofs satisfy anyone else or not is supremely unimportant in this context. Let's assume they're not just pretending in order to annoy sensible people, and let's look again at the question in the knowledge that, to a devout Christian, Christianity is as obviously the one right idea as Islam is to a devout Muslim, as Scientology is to a devout Scientologist, as whatever the current theory of atomic particles is to a particle physicist.
What is the value of accepting more than one idea when one idea is obviously right and all the others are obviously wrong? What is the value (to paraphrase another quote from the same source) of a plural society? Why's it good?
The answer, to the devout Christian, to the devout Muslim, to the devout Satanist, to the conscientious atheist and the rigorous agnostic, is and must be; it isn't. There is obviously no value in accepting wrong ideas. Quite the reverse, in fact. Wrong ideas must be expunged and replaced with the one right idea. And that is the impulse behind all proselytising. It's the impulse behind the people who fought on both sides in all the Crusades, behind the persecution of the Cathars, behind the proxy baptisms of Jews by the Mormon Church. It's the impulse behind the bombing of abortion clinics, the mass suicide in Jonestown and the Jehovah's Witnesses who come to your door and want to talk about the Bible. It's the impulse behind Jack Chick's rotten comics, the war in Vietnam and the church jumble sale. It's the impulse behind 9/11, and it is the impulse behind The God Delusion. To replace a plurality of wrong ideas with the single right idea. Or rather: what you believe to be the single right idea.
Most of us who accept and value the idea of a plural society do so because we know that whatever we believe may be wrong. I've quoted Chesterton on what he called this "frantic and blasphemous statement" before. He had certainty. He would gladly have replaced a plurality of wrong ideas with what he thought of as the single right idea. So, I believe, would Richard Dawkins. The fact that their right ideas are diametrically opposed, the fact that Dawkins adduces science as his proof and Chesterton does not, is unimportant in this context. They are brothers under the skin, members of a vast tribe stretching across the globe and back through the centuries. To us who know that we may be wrong, who do not have proofs of any one idea that satisfy us completely, or that would satisfy someone else, they are intimidating, alien in some way. Where we see holes and parts and patches, they see a single shining whole. Where we hesitate and consider, they act from certainty. Where we allow for doubt, they have no need of it. And where we value the idea of a plural society, because it enables us to come together and pool our uncertainties and find common ground, they look at us the way Emily Deschanel would look at a doorknob if she were a cat and they can not understand how we can possibly be uncertain when it is so obvious that they are right.
And this is what links absolute good and absolute evil in the Buffyverse, and in B5 and every other film and telly series I've seen in recent years that deals with such things; their certainty of their rightness, that no matter what they do in the service of their one right idea it is all justifiable, is seen as a meta-evil in the same way that freedom is seen as a meta-good. Freedom, in this sense, is equated to uncertainty; to be convinced is to be confined, to make up your mind is to close it, to deny that the other guy might have a point is to cut yourself off from the commonality of uncommitted human beings. Plurality, even if it merely means that we are all equally wrong, is the essence of freedom. And thus we come full circle, because that is the value of a plural society, a society which rejects the possibility of one right idea.
And if that offends you, if you feel that the only true freedom for mankind is if they all think the way you do, then I'm sorry but I disagree.
"We're a plural society. We accept more than one idea. It offends them."
This is a good answer, bound to make woolly liberals like me feel good about being American (well, I'm not, but you get the idea). Only trouble is, it gives rise to a question which I'm sure has occurred to everyone who has ever held strongly to any single opinion or worldview or faith.
What is the value of accepting more than one idea when one idea is obviously right and all the others are obviously wrong?
Let's for the moment just leave aside the question of validity of proof. Let's ignore the fact that view A has three centuries of scientific research and data behind it and view B just has some writing in an old book, and let's take it as a given that if someone believes something strongly they have proofs that satisfy them, because whether those proofs satisfy anyone else or not is supremely unimportant in this context. Let's assume they're not just pretending in order to annoy sensible people, and let's look again at the question in the knowledge that, to a devout Christian, Christianity is as obviously the one right idea as Islam is to a devout Muslim, as Scientology is to a devout Scientologist, as whatever the current theory of atomic particles is to a particle physicist.
What is the value of accepting more than one idea when one idea is obviously right and all the others are obviously wrong? What is the value (to paraphrase another quote from the same source) of a plural society? Why's it good?
The answer, to the devout Christian, to the devout Muslim, to the devout Satanist, to the conscientious atheist and the rigorous agnostic, is and must be; it isn't. There is obviously no value in accepting wrong ideas. Quite the reverse, in fact. Wrong ideas must be expunged and replaced with the one right idea. And that is the impulse behind all proselytising. It's the impulse behind the people who fought on both sides in all the Crusades, behind the persecution of the Cathars, behind the proxy baptisms of Jews by the Mormon Church. It's the impulse behind the bombing of abortion clinics, the mass suicide in Jonestown and the Jehovah's Witnesses who come to your door and want to talk about the Bible. It's the impulse behind Jack Chick's rotten comics, the war in Vietnam and the church jumble sale. It's the impulse behind 9/11, and it is the impulse behind The God Delusion. To replace a plurality of wrong ideas with the single right idea. Or rather: what you believe to be the single right idea.
Most of us who accept and value the idea of a plural society do so because we know that whatever we believe may be wrong. I've quoted Chesterton on what he called this "frantic and blasphemous statement" before. He had certainty. He would gladly have replaced a plurality of wrong ideas with what he thought of as the single right idea. So, I believe, would Richard Dawkins. The fact that their right ideas are diametrically opposed, the fact that Dawkins adduces science as his proof and Chesterton does not, is unimportant in this context. They are brothers under the skin, members of a vast tribe stretching across the globe and back through the centuries. To us who know that we may be wrong, who do not have proofs of any one idea that satisfy us completely, or that would satisfy someone else, they are intimidating, alien in some way. Where we see holes and parts and patches, they see a single shining whole. Where we hesitate and consider, they act from certainty. Where we allow for doubt, they have no need of it. And where we value the idea of a plural society, because it enables us to come together and pool our uncertainties and find common ground, they look at us the way Emily Deschanel would look at a doorknob if she were a cat and they can not understand how we can possibly be uncertain when it is so obvious that they are right.
And this is what links absolute good and absolute evil in the Buffyverse, and in B5 and every other film and telly series I've seen in recent years that deals with such things; their certainty of their rightness, that no matter what they do in the service of their one right idea it is all justifiable, is seen as a meta-evil in the same way that freedom is seen as a meta-good. Freedom, in this sense, is equated to uncertainty; to be convinced is to be confined, to make up your mind is to close it, to deny that the other guy might have a point is to cut yourself off from the commonality of uncommitted human beings. Plurality, even if it merely means that we are all equally wrong, is the essence of freedom. And thus we come full circle, because that is the value of a plural society, a society which rejects the possibility of one right idea.
And if that offends you, if you feel that the only true freedom for mankind is if they all think the way you do, then I'm sorry but I disagree.
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 01:58 pm (UTC)And sorry, but if you really think any one "fact" is 100% certain: not 90%, not 99%, not 99.99999%, but 100%, then you're an idiot. A very intelligent idiot, possibly, but an idiot.
Of course, the assessment of those possibilities is also liable to error. There's bound to be options I haven't considered, things I don't know about. I do not yet possess all the knowledge in the universe, nor do I have the ability to process it if I did. (At least, it's highly improbable that I do... and, in my estimation, highly unlikely that anyone else does, either.)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 02:17 pm (UTC)As for 9/11, it wasn't just about a war of cultures. There were also historical/political issues. Bin Laden wanted US bases out of Saudi Arabia. His reasons for caring so much may have been religious, but I can also see not wanting another country's military bases in one's country.
Anyway, GW Bush gave in on that point, and I think it's hilarious that practically no one noticed it was complying with a terrorist demand.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-19 01:57 am (UTC)This. You can't make people stop being wrong. You can only kill them, or force them to pretend to agree with you, or tolerate them being wrong. There are many benefits to doing the latter, and on the whole really very few drawbacks.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 06:03 pm (UTC)But there you go; in that case any idea is as good as any other. So one person's "truth" is no better than anybody else's. And nobody has a right to go around trying to kill or brainwash people to reduce "wrong" ideas.
In reality of course, the killing and brainwashing is extremely rare, at least in areas where I've lived, and depending on how one feels about the indoctrination of children comparing to brainwashing.
There is quite a bit of *persuasion,* or at least attempted persuasion, going on, but why not? What is the point of having ideas if you're not allowed to try to transmit them? Indeed, what is the point of having language at all, if not to transmit ideas?
It seems to me that the point of difficulty is that there's a big difference between being certain you're right (about gravity, about the germ theory of disease, about God) and being certain that therefore anything you do to transmit the idea is okay. Richard Dawkins is sure he's right--but he's not going to kill anyone for refusing to "unconvert."
no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 12:53 am (UTC)Dawkins isn't going to kill anyone for refusing to acknowledge his truth, and neither are you, or Lil. But if you tell me that nobody who holds to that truth will ever think it worth a few deaths, or a few thousand, to save people from the horrors of wrong thinking, I'd say you were being over-optimistic.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 02:13 am (UTC)Let's ignore the fact that view A has three centuries of scientific research and data behind it and view B just has some writing in an old book
So we ignore the evidence... how is that different from pretending evidence is worthless?
different people have different conceptions of the single right idea...[which] conception is backed up, in that person's mind, by something that person considers to be unimpeachable evidence
So different people have different and incompatible ideas that they strongly believe are right...provided we ignore the real evidence that might settle the question, how is that different, from an outsider's perspective, from any of these ideas being as good as any other?
it follows from what I said that each person who has a "truth" must of necessity think it better than anyone else's, and may well feel duty bound to communicate that truth as widely and as forcefully as they think fit
Exactly what I was saying about people trying to persuade people to their point of view, yes. And what makes someone dangerous is not that they think they are right--Torquemada and Richard Dawkins both think (or thought) they are right--but the very different question of whether they think being right makes it okay to use violence to spread the idea.
Of course if an atheist were to kill people who wouldn't "unconvert" or a scientist were to kill people who wouldn't believe in the germ theory of disease, they would be just as bad as the muslim bodyguard who actually killed a politician for urging clemency for a woman accused of blasphemy. I wouldn't argue differently, and I'm pretty sure Richard Dawkins wouldn't either.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 11:05 am (UTC)Say I have five pounds in my pocket and you have three hundred, and we both go into a restaurant and order meals according to our ability to pay. (A breadstick. Yum.) Which would you prefer the waiter to do: ignore the financial disparity between the two of us (which is nothing to do with him), or pretend that both sums are equally devoid of value (in which case you are in a lot more trouble than me, but we're both going to end up doing dishes)?
That's how it's different. I'm trying to talk here about religion and secularism without it turning into "A is right and B is wrong," which is what always happens; trying to make it possible to consider these things side by side and look at their very real similarities without getting sidetracked into focussing on their differences.
So different people have different and incompatible ideas that they strongly believe are right...provided we ignore the real evidence that might settle the question, how is that different, from an outsider's perspective, from any of these ideas being as good as any other?
It depends on the outsider's perspective. While someone like me may indeed feel that there is some virtue in a plurality of ideas, that lots of different ideas may be as good from a practical, societal point of view as any single one (which is not the same thing), that's clearly not a feeling that either the Pope or Richard Dawkins would share. It's clear to anyone who looks around that however compelling the actual evidence may be, the question has not in fact been "settled" to everyone's satisfaction. So I'm trying, as I sometimes do, to talk about the disparity in views and the reasons for it without the usual accompanying antiphony of "they're stupid and we're clever/they're damned and we're saved/whatever." To take a true outsider's perspective, in fact, and make no judgment on the relative goodness of any of the ideas.
Exactly what I was saying about people trying to persuade people to their point of view, yes. And what makes someone dangerous is not that they think they are right--Torquemada and Richard Dawkins both think (or thought) they are right--but the very different question of whether they think being right makes it okay to use violence to spread the idea.
In other words, what makes someone dangerous is being dangerous. :) In that sense, the person who thinks it's okay to spread the word with violence is as dangerous as the person who thinks it's okay to steal my wallet with violence. Inarguably true, but not my point.
Which is that in anyone who holds to one idea, however right or wrong that idea may be, there is the potential for dangerousness, for feeling it right to impinge on the lives of others in the service of the idea, which is expressed according to the proclivities of that person. They may oppress millions, or write angry books, or plant bombs, or go up to people at bus stops and tell them they're saved, or engage in long arguments online, or whatever.
It's a particular view of the relationship between the self and the other, and just because the secularist cause has yet to find its Timothy McVeigh or its Osama bin Laden doesn't mean it won't. But even if I could imagine such a thing as a "pluralist cause," it's hard, in the current context, to conceive anyone blowing anything up for it.
And that is another reason why, I believe, it's good not to have one clear idea or one true way: not even the one true way that says there is no true way, that evidence is worthless and any idea is as good as any other. That isn't pluralism, that's nihilism. I'd rather celebrate diversity than chuck it all in the bin.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 01:21 pm (UTC)Believing one is right makes it possible for one to become dangerous, because one might possibly then also believe it is okay to use violence to spread the idea. Whereas if one doesn't believe one is right one will not use violence for the same purpose which makes one less dangerous.
The problems I see are:
1) there are whole clusters of reasons to use violence that have very little do do with idea-spreading, so the reduction in violence if people stopped believing they are right would be minor, and
2) the vast majority of people who believe they are right do not, in these enlightened times, commit violence to spread ideas.
3) in practical terms, I see no greater likelihood of persuading everyone to stop thinking they are right than I see of persuading everyone to stop breathing. If they like you very much and want to please you, they might be able to manage it for a minute or so, but no longer than that.
And it seems to me:
People hold more than one idea and attach different importances to the ideas they do hold--I care much more about women's rights than chocolate, though I'm certain I'm right about the wonderfulness of chocolate.
Believing you are right does not necessarily mean believing it would be good if everyone shared your belief. If you don't want chocolate there is more for me. Giving you my vanilla in exchange is no sacrifice.
So, to sum up; I don't agree that thinking one is right about something is a pernicious habit that one should give up. People who were sure they were right have done great evil at times in the past--but in my opinion the evil didn't come from being sure they were right; it came from being sure that therefore it was okay to do evil. And in the meantime, my life and the lives of others have been enormously improved by the kind of effort people only make when they are sure they are right--antibiotics, Abolition, the Civil Rights movement, Feminism, and the GLBT rights movement, to name only a few.
You are entitled to your opinion, and I don't imagine by now that I will change it, and that's okay. But this is what I think, and why I think it.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 02:30 pm (UTC)You're right in that there are many different kinds of ideas out there to be right about, and (expanding the scope of the discussion a little) the nature of the idea does make a difference. To become dangerous in the pursuit of an idea, it's not enough simply to be sure one is right; one must be equally sure that others are wrong and that this is a bad thing that needs remedying. Naturally only some ideas suit this approach. The only way I would feel that about the wonderfulness of chocolate (on which of course I agree with you completely) was if I were a manufacturer of chocolate, in which case presumably my dangerousness would take the form of innumerable annoying advertisements, possibly involving drumming gorillas.
The point about the violence that derives from such conviction being relatively minor is one I'm not so sure about; to my mind any reduction in violence is a good thing. It's good to know, though.
And you're right in that it's not as easy as saying "nobody should ever feel certain that they are right about anything." That would indeed lead to a general paralysis and the end of progress as we know it. Plus if nobody had any ideas they were sure of, that wouldn't be a plural society, it would be a nothing one. Nihilism again.
I think what I'm aiming for, what I would say to followers of the Pope and Dawkins and bin Laden and Fred Phelps and all, is that among the things one should be certain of is the truth of Josh's line with which I began the original post; that accepting, or tolerating, a plurality of ideas is a good thing, a way to keep talking to each other and gaining new perspectives and maybe changing some minds, and incidentally that not ticking each other off by dismissing the certainties of others as lies, or heresy, or blasphemy, or fairy tales, because their evidence doesn't seem like evidence to you (any more than yours does to them), may lead to a little more positive progress, a little less bad feeling and maybe a very little less violence. And in a world that seems to be drowning in violence of all kinds, even a little less has to be good.
I could, of course, be wrong about this...
no subject
Date: 2012-02-17 07:32 pm (UTC)I'd say "tolerate" rather than "accept". As a "wooly liberal" American atheist I do not accept any religion or faith, but I have no desire to kill those who do.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 01:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-18 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-21 12:46 pm (UTC)Person I don't know "I believe X to be true and this does not make me a bigot because God says so"
Wise Christian friend "No it does not. It is your assumption that your view is the only correct one that makes you a bigot."