What is Worth Arguing About?
I have touched on this topic before, but advancing age and the the finitude of life has caused me to think about this again. A few months ago my post “On Belief and Skepticism,” elicited this response from a reader:
… I too am a dedicated skeptic, but find it difficult sometimes to “disagree without being disagreeable.” Many people I disagree with most fundamentally are the ones I love most profoundly. Do you maintain close relationships with people holding drastically different beliefs? It’s hard to separate the person from the ideas they hold especially when there is so much vested emotionally in those ideas. I hate the idea of “agreeing to disagree.” I’m not going to dance around the issue; We are adults and honesty is important. How do yo approach these relationships?
That comment elicited another post from me, “How Far Should We Go in Agreeing with Others.” There I distinguished between insidious and trivial beliefs. We should argue with those who would kill all those of a certain group because of that group’s supposed inferiority. As for beliefs about who won last year’s Super Bowl, that is trivial. Next I considered disputes about relatively settled scientific issues. Here is an excerpt:
Now suppose I encounter a gravitational, germ, or evolutionary theory denier. In such cases I should be willing to enter into a polemic because any educated person knows these are well-established scientific ideas. Furthermore to deny them might entail someone’s jumping off a building and thinking they’ll fly; not washing their hands before handling food, or counting on last years flu shot to work this year. (Yes viruses evolve quickly.) Of course you probably won’t change their minds since so many persons are willfully ignorant.
Now suppose you encounter a climate change denier. You can tell them that the intergovernmental panel of climate scientists now claim with 97% certainty that humans are the main cause of global climate change. But you probably have to leave it at that. The fact that they are mistaken when they don’t believe in it, (and arrogant to think they know more about the subject then the world’s experts), probably doesn’t matter that much. True you might convince them not to vote for a climate change denier, but one vote isn’t that significant anyway and their mistaken view is unlikely to change anyway. And again that’s because you rarely change people’s minds because of the emotional attachment they have to those ideas as you mentioned earlier.
In retrospect I’m not sure why I thought you should let some false beliefs about a scientific consensus slide and not others. Like many things it probably depends on the circumstances. My deceased mother believed that lighting candles in a church influenced events miles away. Such beliefs one lets slide. But when I teaching I felt obligated to correct students if they were uninformed about basic scientific ideas. (In a future post I hope to address the source of many false beliefs–cognitive bias.)
Conclusion – I find that disagreement about abstract issues less important as I age. Perhaps we should just be resigned to the world’s fate, inasmuch as there is little we can do about it. But then who are we, if we are not willing to enter into a polemic when we feel the truth is being distorted? This is in large part the paradox of life. If we engage in it, if we are active, we fight a seemingly unwinnable fight. If we disengage, if we are passive, we might as well not exist at all. I just don’t know the best course.
I do know that as I age I find myself, as Thornton Wilder said, being weaned away from life. If is implies ought then perhaps this is for the best. And while we do our best until the end, new generations must sustain the endless fight for truth and the justice.
