Bridging the Divide with Honesty Intact
Like most in America, I have friends on both sides of our current political divide. After a brief nod to our varied psychological differences, I want to explore how we might, with honesty intact, communicate better, and perhaps find something resembling constructive common ground. (I acknowledge that the QAnon and Capitol Building invasion supporters on the right, And the promoters of communism on the left, can’t be persuaded, but I hope that most of the rest, from those who still speak of a stolen election, to those who find that incomprehensible, can still be thoughtfully engaged.)
Our basic differences aren’t about good and evil; they’re just differences. Conservatives tend to prefer the status quo over change; tend to focus on perceived immediate risks over more vague long-term ones; tend to prefer black and white clarity over nuance; tend to be okay with what they might see as ‘necessary’ concentration of power, emphasize discipline and punishment over rehabilitation and accompanying training and education; tend to want tight and clearly drawn circles of ‘us’, with ‘them’ being suspected, rejected, and fought. Liberals tend to like and sometimes promote change, and feel limited by what they may see as unfair status quos; they tend to be more concerned with what they see as ‘big picture’ long-term risks, and not feel the same stresses with what others see as immediate risks; they acknowledge and like exploring gray areas, don’t like concentrations of power, and prefer rehabilitation and training over punishment; they tend to like less tightly drawn circles of ‘us’, and prefer to grow that circle to include ‘others’ in various ways.
It is safe to say that if all cavemen had been strongly conservative, if they had survived they’d still be living the exact status quos of their times; it is also safe to say that if cavemen had all been strongly liberal, they’d have probably not survived because of disregarding the potential dangers of some new food, place, practice, belief, or people. We kind of need each other.
(If you wish to explore some of the basic liberal-conservative leanings, one starting point is: https://www.businessinsider.com/psychological-differences-between-conservatives-and-liberals-2018-2#research-also-suggests-shared-values-likely-matter-more-than-shared-politics-when-it-comes-to-who-we-vote-for-13)
That being said, can we gain insight about our tendencies, let history teach us some valuable lessons, and bridge this gap with honesty and wisdom intact and in use?
The first difficult question that must be asked is how, for example, educated people who seem to think, come to what seems like instantaneous conclusions like: 1. The election was fraudulent, manipulated, stolen, and must be overturned somehow; and, 2. The election was monitored, carefully and fairly executed, and ‘the most secure’ in our history?
It is obvious that we humans, often subconsciously, come to Trust certain people or groups or principles, and distrust others. We must consciously explore this. This trust, while not completely blind, does tend to be strong, and is most often not even realized, nor thoughtfully explored.
Exploring this on a personal level can be confusing and frustrating in today’s world of information overload, especially so when so much of this information in social media And in supposed ‘News’ sources has clearly become polarized, biased, and clearly far too frequently includes straight-up lies. How do we identify lies, or truth?
If it’s not hopelessly obvious, This Matters.
When 99.9999% of us are not real experts in any field, we really ought to consciously assess where we place the shades of gray in our ‘trust’ world. There are common answers in practice: Family/extended family; Church group; Neighborhood affiliation; Racial group; Political party, and more.
If any one of us pictures slipping into the shoes of a different person, in a different family, faith, culture, country, neighborhood, race, or political party, we can quickly realize that we’d likely have a different ‘trust’ zone/group. If we think that most of these ‘other’ people don’t have a good trust group, hopefully we can also realize that they suspect the same of us, And that the lack of persuasiveness of our trust group is likely well-founded if it’s primarily based on one of those shallow groupings of people.
So, is there any different and better way of placing our greatest level of always-conditional (never completely blind) ‘Trust’? In exploring this, I want to look briefly at an observation by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard: “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true. The other is to refuse to accept what is true.”
This is so obviously true that there can seem to be nothing to be gained in contemplating it. The significance emerges when we add this question: What has history shown to be humanity’s best tool for slowly but surely figuring out what IS true?
Various cultures/faiths have made the claim that their writings, ‘from’ their god, are the best source of what is true. We don’t even need to side-track into the weeds of interpretation; we can simply acknowledge that these various claims in different centuries and cultures, directly conflict in many ways, and don’t stand the test of scrutiny of verifiable evidence. That approach is, simply but clearly put, claims-based. And interestingly, that seems to be where our politics is right now. But just making claims about one’s perception of things does not make those claims true or trustworthy.
Does history offer us something better? Something that has stood the test of centuries? Something that stands up to scrutiny, that takes verifiable evidence as centrally vital?
Before the Scientific Revolution, our understandings of things were taught and learned based on assertion of authority, be it Aristotle, the medieval church, or other. What was new in this revolution was the very idea that questioning things was not only okay, it was good. At the same time we realized that questioning everything must include questioning our own assumptions/beliefs/claims, and that in seeking to answer these questions, we must gather the most objective evidence we can, let and encourage others to refute or verify it, and then respect the evidence (whether we initially like it or not) in reaching our always-temporary conclusions. This implied a willingness to change our minds, to recognize when a previous cherished claim turned out to not be well supported.
This science-like approach, applied to Everything, has been humaniy’s best tool for figuring out what IS true. Note that no-one claims that science is perfect; it isn’t. It’s simply the best we have, in very significant part because it has a track record of being self-correcting. When a new idea is promoted because it better explains the then-known evidence, that idea itself is later significantly modified or even tossed out when further verifiable evidence show that it must be. No other human endeavor has this track record.
Note further that this applies beyond the hard sciences; it applies to the social sciences and more. We extended this revolution into the Enlightenment, and questioned and then re-evaluated a multifaceted series of things: whether Kings indeed had some ‘divine right’ to rule; whether women should indeed not vote or get educated or have professional careers; whether slavery and racism were fine and good; whether child labor was ethical; whether monopolies were good; whether industry’s cheapest route to rid themselves of waste and pollution were simply their right; etc., etc.
To point out what might be missed even if to others it is obvious, central here is the idea of verifiable evidence, of facts, real facts. Any and all of us Should be able to recognize that when we resort to ‘alternative facts,’ we’ve begun to fool ourselves, and to attempt to fool others. A bit of personal honesty here should help us recognize that expecting others to take us seriously when we resort to claims, to alternative (not verified or verifiable) ‘facts’, is a real stretch. The vast majority of readers here don’t think the world is supported on the back of a turtle, that it is flat, that the continents don’t move, or that the sun goes around us. If we enjoy the technological products that make our lives easy and long, shouldn’t we respect the process of science, of respecting and demanding verifiable evidence, that has made this possible?
I accept that as a person who is left of center, I have a responsibility to challenge those who would promote communism, and I have and do. I would ask those who think of themselves as right of center, but not in QAnon or involved in advocating for your flavor of fascism, shouldn’t you be involved in calling out the nonsense common in denying the good of vaccines, in promoting chem-trails as real, in denying climate change, and in denying what the intelligence agencies and courts have verified as a secure election. Perpetuating theories which lack verifiable evidence simply adds more mud to the water when so many around us are already frustrated and confused.
Ask yourself: Is confusion your goal? What does that in itself say? As the documentary “Merchants of Doubt” lays out clearly, the tobacco industry spent decades (and many, many millions of dollars) simply spinning doubt, that we really didn’t Know if tobacco itself was addictive or harmful.
I submit that we can and should be better than that. We will still have political debates which necessitate compromise. Things like justifiable and efficacious tax rates, the best size for government, current circumstances considered, can and should be vigorously and productively debated, but these debates shouldn’t include contrived and evidence-defying lies.
We have recently downgraded facts, evidence, the very process of science, the very concept of truth, and the value of hard-fought consensus among those best-informed on many subtopics. These things matter. If we slide back into the pre-scientific era, we do so at our own peril, and worse, we place those severe risks on future generations who deserve better.
Having made a living in construction, commercial fishing, sales, research science, and management, besides a good number of years in science education, and then recently adding a very different 2nd MA in anthropology, I am a reasonably deeply and very broadly informed citizen… but I am far from being an expert in any field. I thoughtfully defer to experts in virtually every field. I simply don’t know better than they do. Because there are strong disagreements even among these experts, I can’t and don’t agree with them all. A tool I use is to check for multi-decade-long shifts in the consensus among the experts. Current debates are typically on the frontiers of our learning, our understandings. But a few decades of debate usually yield a consensus. I suggest that if I am going to disagree with a newly developed consensus which took decades to develop, I ought to have some very good and deeply understood reasons, with solid evidence, for doing so. I simply should not cherry pick my favorite ‘expert’ (or Representative/Senator) primarily because I like that he or she happens to be on my side of the argument, regardless of where the consensus has developed. At the bottom line, who am I to dismiss a painstakingly-arrived-at consensus?!
Again, this applies beyond the hard sciences. What kind of sense, and what contribution to informed debate and peacefully arrived at agreement, does it make for me — a common citizen — to dismiss a multitude of Judges (appointed by the whole spectrum of administrations) and Secretaries of State (from both parties) who have looked into and heard out the background details of the election, and determined through multiple means that it was secure and fair… but I don’t like their conclusion, so I insist that “I” know better?
Investigating evidence and grounds for changed consensus is indeed more complex than simply doubling down on any of ‘our’ trust-groups, but it is so much more honest, and has real potential for progress, and not simply the stalemate of a never-ending fight… and it is not impossible!
My friends, let us not flush evidence, process, actual facts, the best verified truths we can honestly determine, and the stability of our democracy, all down the drain. We don’t have a better place to hang our hats.
