Dead End in Understanding
by Joseph Rowlands

One of the major problems with explaining anything by attributing it to a god is that it permanently severs the need to look deeper. If thunder and lightning are the products of an angry god, then you never need to look for natural causes. You have an 'answer' that tells you nothing, and suggests that any more detail is out of the question. How does the angry god perform these acts? By magic. In what situations does it occur? By his whim.

The god theory is a way of treating ignorance as if it were knowledge, while shutting down the possibility of future knowledge. It doesn't explain anything. It doesn't provide new an useful insights. It only shuts down the conversations and places that question beyond your reach.

The same kind of thing happens when you find yourself disagreeing with someone and deciding that they are just stupid or evil. Much of today's political discourse is dominated by this approach, leaving it impossible to actually understand why people believe what they do. By suggesting that they just aren't capable of seeing the truth, or that they are intentionally dishonest, the dialogue ends and you will have no reason to pursue it further. They become permanently unreachable.

Maybe you just aren't interested in the reasons they support the positions that they do. That's fine, just as its fine not to study meteorology if you're not interested. But the correct alternative is to say that you don't know why they hold the ideas that they do, and admit you aren't interested enough to pursue it. But by using the stupid or evil excuse, you transform it from a difficult problem into an impossibility. You treat it as if you already have the answers. You pretend ignorance is wisdom.

Take a position like promotion of altruism. You might tell the altruist that he is wrong, that his belief is arbitrary, that it leads to self-sacrifice, and many other arguments to show why he should not accept it. If he is unwilling to accept your arguments, you may be tempted to find a way to dismiss him. You might claim his unwillingness to accept your argument, even though he can't argue against them, is proof of his fundamental dishonesty on the topic.

An alternative approach is to try to understand why he finds it as attractive as he does. Perhaps he believes that selfish desires must be restrained or chaos would ensue. Perhaps he has a lifetime of experience seeing altruistic people behaving better than selfish people. Perhaps he just can't see the full ramifications of a morality of rational self-interest, and thinks that it would be dangerous to accept a morality that common sense tells him should lead to disaster without definitive proof that it could work.

There are many, many legitimate concerns and reasons for disagreement. And even some of the illegitimate concerns may appear perfectly legitimate without more knowledge and a lot of time to integrate that information and digest it all. For instance, he might think that the world is zero-sum because of the finite resources. You might have a ready response, and even counterexamples, but without a solid understanding he may just think to himself "It can't be that easy".

But you can't grasp any of these obstacles if you assume that only stupidity or immorality could possibly explain a disagreement. That shuts off analysis and relieves you of the responsibility for the inability to communicate your ideas.

Perhaps that's one of the reasons this approach is so widely used. Instead of the communicator having to say that he failed to communicate his ideas, he can simply blame the other person. The nice part about these particular excuses is that they rule out the possibility that you could ever communicate your ideas to the other person. He either lacks the intelligence to ever be able to grasp what you are saying, or he can grasp it but intentionally evades or otherwise practices dishonesty. There is no failure on your part!

It's not clear why this is needed. Communication is hard, especially when your deal with significant subjects like in philosophy. There are countless reasons why someone might accept a mistaken belief, and that means he may have many supporting arguments for his position. And since philosophy often deals with worldviews, he may believe that he has a lifetime of supporting evidence for his beliefs.

And even if you can present a reasonable case for your position, he may be doubtful that it will actually make sense or work out. Often in order to learn something, you have to accept that it might be true and start analyzing things from that perspective. Only after you've tried it for awhile can you see how useful it is. If you say that all decisions can be made on the basis of life as the standard, they might agree that some decisions are like that, but all of them? Only by practicing it and trying it out for themselves can it ever be really convincing. There's no way you can present an argument that performs that function for them.

So communications is hard. It shouldn't be thought of as a fault if you aren't able to convince someone, even if the idea is obvious to you. If you try to convince someone and fail, you can accept it as a likely consequence of such an aggressive goal. If you want to learn from it, you can ask yourself if there is another approach you could take. Or you can try to determine what he believed in so strongly that your arguments didn't have any impact.

Of course, you aren't obligated to argue with people or try to convince them one way or another. It is perfectly fine to walk away. You don't need to excuse it by saying they are impossible to reach. And if you aren't interested in pursuing it further, even to try to understand why your efforts failed, that's also perfectly fine. But blaming them isn't fine. It doesn't explain anything, it stops your from understanding, and it fakes reality by saying that you did nothing wrong and there was no way to do better.

This approach of writing people off as too stupid or evil to deal with also creates a malevolent view of other people. Writing them off as stupid creates the impression that they are dangerous animals. Writing them off as evil or dishonest ascribed evil intentions to them. In both cases, you end up viewing the world as hostile. The more you do it, the more isolated you feel.

In contrast, if you keep open the idea that there are reasons why they disagree with you, and that they may even think those reasons are good, the world looks far less evil and inhospitable. Instead of being malicious and dangerous, they are simply confused by admittedly complex subjects. Instead of being fundamentally unreachable, they just need to be approached in the right way. That doesn't mean it is easy. It may be incredibly difficult. But they aren't enemies deep down. Deep down they are good people acting on bad premises without really knowing it.

What about really dishonest people? What about Marxists, or post-modernists, or skeptics, or subjectivists, or anti-realists, or any number of other philosophical positions that seem like they must be corrupt for corruptions sake? Perhaps there are some people who really are dishonest, but most positions, even bad ones, can be accepted because they appear to offer something of value.

For example, skepticism may be accepted as a kind of methodology intended to counter dogmatism. It may not really be accepted as true, but maybe just accepted as a way we should 'try' to view the world so that we don't get caught up in dogmatic certainty. Or totalitarian communism might be supported under the idea that the problems we have today are due to selfishness which is inherently promoted in our system, and only a radical change of society has any chance of remedying it. We may disagree with this, or we might disagree with the premises, but these aren't inherently dishonest. There are reasons why people might accept these positions.

How about someone who is taking a dishonest approach? One example is if you are arguing with a religious person about God, and he offers his reason why he believes in God. You point out why his reason is flawed, and he immediately jumps to some other reason. Is this dishonest? Not necessarily, or at least not entirely. He may have many reasons for believing, and he may have doubts about your rebuttal. Jumping from one argument to another isn't really proof of dishonesty. He may be legitimately trying to defend his position.

Of course, there are real dishonest people. Sometimes people don't believe what they're saying and are saying it for some other reason. Maybe they're arguing for the sake of arguing. Or to prove their mental superiority. Or perhaps their real position needs to be hidden because it would be unpopular, as racists sometimes argue in terms of statistics and culture, but with an eye on treating all people with the same skin color as identical.

It makes sense that when you're in a discussion, you should determine whether or not there is any reason to continue with it. If someone is dishonest, they aren't trying to communicate, and may be trying to prevent communication. It's perfectly reasonable to say you've had enough and walk away. But even here you can leave open the reasons or motivations for why he is acting that way. Maybe he can't be reached, but maybe he just can't be reach through this approach. Maybe his dishonesty is simply a method of defending his beliefs. Maybe a less aggressive approach would work better.

The problem with stupid and evil as excuses are that they permanently rule out any possibility of success and shut your own mind down. You can never hope to understand more where they are coming from. They aren't real explanations.

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