Truth is under threat today from two opposing impulses. The first is subjectivism, or relativism: the denial of the existence of objective truth or the possibility of ever attaining it. This proposition may seem abstract, but it has direct consequences for our civic life. Contrary to what one hears at cocktail parties or in freshman philosophy classes, relativism is the predicate not of tolerance but of repression.
The other impulse poses no less a threat to liberty: the refusal to reckon with our fallibility. All of us, at every conscious moment of our lives, hold in our head some false beliefs. Even when we do our best to be attentive, informed, judicious, and honest, we can still be wrong about profoundly important questions—questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny. We can, for example, be confident that we are on the side of justice, yet profoundly mistaken about what justice demands of us.
Fallibility is a feature of the human condition. Although we can’t eradicate it, we can make progress toward replacing many of our false beliefs with true ones. But to do that, we need to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility, open ourselves to challenges to our convictions, and rebuild our capacity for civil discourse. Genuine civil discourse recognizes not only that objective truth exists but that it’s often best pursued by engaging with people who are convinced we’ve got it wrong.
[Robert P. George: Universities shouldn’t be ideological churches]
Civil discourse is not mere politesse. It does not consist of listening patiently while someone articulates a view contrary to one’s own. Rather, each party considers the opposing argument in its most favorable light, sincerely entertaining the possibility that their own view is incorrect and should be abandoned. Their goal—a shared goal—is not winning a victory for their tribe; it is getting to the truth.
Achieving civil discourse is hard for us frail human creatures, particularly in our era of ideological partisanship, polarization, identity politics, and conspiracism on both the left and the right. It requires resisting the nearly universal human tendencies to embrace ideological tribalism and fall in love with our opinions. We often regard some of our beliefs—especially moral, political, and religious ones—as so integral to our identity that we experience even good-faith challenges as attacks on our very selves. In other words, we tend to wrap our emotions tightly around our convictions.
In a certain respect, this is helpful, even necessary. We have to be emotionally invested in our convictions if we want to accomplish anything, especially things that require strenuous effort, courage, and sacrifice. It’s important for even mundane matters too. A parent can have a bare belief in the usefulness of getting the kids up, washed, dressed, fed, and sent off to school in the morning. But the belief by itself—as any parent will attest—is not enough. Without some emotional investment, the kids aren’t getting to school on time.
We should aspire to be people of conviction—people who are prepared to act, take risks, and bear burdens for what we believe is good and true. And yet, we need to put some distance between ourselves and our convictions. If we wrap our emotions too tightly around our convictions, we lose the ability to contemplate the possibility that a critic of our view might be right. We then find ourselves descending into dogmatism, if not fanaticism.
Dogmatists and fanatics purport to uphold the truth, but in reality they jeopardize it. They undermine freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties—the prerequisites of truth seeking—because they see no reason to entertain challenges to their beliefs. They know the truth more or less completely, or so they suppose, and therefore have nothing to learn from those with whom they disagree. They regard their critics as enemies of the truth and thus forces to be defeated, even destroyed.
[Arthur C. Brooks: A gentler, better way to change minds]
Relativism may seem like the antidote to this kind of thinking, but it leads to the same result. Relativists claim that there is no truth to be attained, and therefore none to be sought; that there is merely “your truth” and “my truth,” but no such thing as the truth, at least about questions outside the domain of empirical inquiry. In this worldview, people have no good basis for respecting one another’s freedom of speech, thought, inquiry, conscience, or religion. Why should we try to reason with one another about our competing desires or perspectives when there is no truth to reason about or toward? When there is nothing to reason about, there is no rational warrant for civil liberty. There is only power. “Truth” becomes the rule of the strong.
People of goodwill—intellectually and morally serious people of many shades of belief—share a desire to know the truth and live by it, even if that means giving up comforting or cherished convictions that fail to withstand critical scrutiny. To honor this fact is to reject relativism and absolutism. It is to regard reasonable people of goodwill with whom we disagree as friends who can help rescue us from false beliefs and better understand the truth.
This near collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life. Restoring it depends on our capacity to practice civil discourse, which in turn requires us to acknowledge our fallibility—deeply, existentially, and not merely formally. Without such an acknowledgment, it is impossible for people to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility on which our civil liberty depends.
The post The Two Great Threats to Truth appeared first on The Atlantic.
