Posted by
Andrews on Monday, August 18, 2008 12:48:40 PM
It should be the most intimidating moment of a college student's life, the moment he has to look at a respected authority's work and declare it wrong. Of course, given our fondness for iconoclasm of late, that is not the case. We have freshmen with the nerve to write essays declaring the leading lights of their field are completely off base. (I am guilty myself having written one of my best undergrad papers on why Morgan's theory that slavery grew out of indentured servitude was absolutely wrong. Oddly enough, I now think I went too far, and my paper was itself just as wrong as Morgan.) However, ideally, an honest college student, not caught up in the revisionism so fashionable these days, should be put off by the prospect of declaring a respected thinker wrong.
Part of the reason for this is that we have a natural inclination to believe that anyone who is intelligent must also be right. We simply have an instinctual abhorrence of the concept that one can be both brilliant and wrong. Which is why I am writing this essay.
You see, it is partly due to this instinct that we so often see claims, on either end of the spectrum, that the other side is populated by fools. Thus we hear the claims "All educated people are progressives" (meaning liberals), or "Only a fool would be a liberal". Of course, there is some arrogance at play here as well, the belief that one's ideas are so obviously brilliant that only a fool could think otherwise. But still, to give those speaking the benefit of the doubt, there is also the tendency, inherent in most humans, to think that it is just not possible that someone could be both intelligent and wrong.
If you want another example, look at how scientists are treated in political discourse. Rather than repeat the actual arguments of the scientists and judge the arguments on their merits, we simply repeat the conclusions and attach the scientist's CV, as if his credentials prove the truth of what he says. (Oddly, scientists themselves do the opposite, presenting papers without credentials, to ensure they are judged on the merits, as most scientists seem to realize even geniuses are wrong more often than they are right.) IN areas such a sglobal warming, the argument is carried out in terms of the number of PhDs on either side and then countered by the positions held by various champions, as if either quantity or quality of minds were a substitute for proof. The same is often true ine conomic debates, where rather than proof, we are told that the chairman of this department or this former economic advisor says X, and so we must believe it, regardless of proofs. Even in everyday life, we see the effect simple fame can have. For example, the common belief that vitamin C can fight off colds is founded solely on the renown of Linus Pauling, whose fame was great enough to allow this belief to persist to this day despite
a total lack of evidence in its favor.
And, on the opposite side, we see the belief in arguments, where it is not just enough to prove one's opponent wrong, one must also prove him a fool. We hear Obama rejecting Clarence Thomas not because they start from different premises or reach different conclusions, but because Obama claims Thomas lacks an understanding of the Constitution. It is not enough to show that one's opponent reached the wrong conclusion, or even started with faulty premises, we must show that the entire chain of reasoning was incorrect, that they were, in short, fools for ever disagreeing with us. You can hear this every day in those who characterize others as "sheep" or try to impugn the motives of those who oppose them. They simply cannot admit that another person could honestly hold an opposing viewpoint.
I think the time has come for us to admit that it is possible to be both intelligent and wrong. In fact, that even a correct theory can be undone by incorrect premises. That perhaps some of our foes are truly foolish, perhaps some are simply following a trend, but just as likely, many on the other side are quite honest in their belief. We can still argue that they are wrong, that their theories are flawed, or that their premises are incorrect, maybe that the data they use is mistaken, but can we stop insisting that everyone with whom we disagree is a moron?
POSTSCRIPT
Now, none of this is intended to argue that there are not fools, or dishonest individuals who twist arguments to meet their ends. When we encounter someone who believes in a an idea regardless of all the proof, or someone who is obviously lying, there is nothing wrong with pointing that out. All I ask is that we give up the silly assumption that anyone who disagrees with us must, by the simple fact of disagreement, be an idiot.