Tod’s Grade-A post on truth and Truth prompted my mind to return to a line of thought I frequently travel down but do not write about. The editor of my hometown paper used to frequently say “We all have a right to our opinion, but we must share the same set of facts.”
This is a lovely sentiment. Right up there with Love Thy Neighbor and Treat Others As You Would Like To Be Treated. But when the boots hit the ground, it is almost exactly backwards. Which is to say, our opinions given a certain set of known facts often differ far more than our evaluation of what is fact and what is not. I found myself traveling this path recently with the whole Martin/Zimmerman affair. If the facts actually were such precisely what has been presented by the Martin family and those outraged at the conduct of the Sanford PD, all but the most hardened partisans would be outraged. If the facts were precisely what Zimmerman is saying they were, all but the most hardened partisans would agree that it was a tragedy as much as it was an outrage. I’m not saying it’s all jambalaya* here, because it most definitely is not, but the difference of opinion regarding the same set of facts is not the issue. The issue, rather, are two different sets of facts that have been largely guided by opinion.
Of course, these facts are not fact-facts. Rather, they are assumptions we make. Before we get all high-and-mighty about not making assumptions, here too we must be realistic. We cannot function without assumptions. Otherwise, we cannot actually believe that the dinosaurs existed because we cannot assume that the evidence in the favor of them having done so hasn’t been fabricated. Not all assumptions are created equal, but assumptions are inevitable. And we call these assumptions facts.
It seems to me that a whole lot of the debate about what happened in Sanford, Florida, has revolved around assumptions far less supported than that of the basic existence of dinosaurs. The initial “facts” surrounding the Sanford incident were really quite damning. And if they were all true, any sort of desire to find nuance in the situation quite honestly can come across as a desire to excuse the murder of a harmless young boy for having dark skin. It’s honestly noteworthy, to me, that some of the initial pushback on the Martin narrative that I ran across came from people who really aren’t bothered by there being one less black teen out there. And so they discarded the “facts” of the Martin narrative and created their own. Then searched for support for their alternative narrative. And found enough support that they could posit a narrative of their own.
So from here, we have a series of competing assumptions. Some of these assumptions have been demonstrated to be false assumptions. Some are as close as we can possibly come (absent some large conspiracy) to being what we could say is “true.” But mostly? They’re ambiguous assumptions. We hear contradictory things, and we assume that the thing we are hearing that leads to the narrative we find more comforting is the true thing. And we treat them like they are facts. Like they are uncontested facts. And that people who are making different assumptions are ignoring the facts in favor of their biases.
So we’re dealing with contested facts. But we don’t always admit them as such. Because once we admit that a fact is contested, we’re treating both sides of the argument as though they are equal. Which, of course, they are not. In some discussions, the occurrence Holocaust is a contested fact. Now, it might be better that someone believes the Holocaust to be a joke than to be out-and-out supportive of the mass-slaughter of Jewish people (among others), but there does reach a point when someone is deploying what can only be referred to as strategic obtuseness. Which is to say, being unable to defend something knowing what we know, simply pretending not to know it. Muddying the waters with “we just don’t know.” He who admits to less wins – or avoids losing.
Which leaves us in a position where we are damned if we remain committed to the assumptions we have – assumptions that often turn out to be wrong – and damned if we simply chalk everything up to assumptions.
Now, my way of dealing with this is relatively simple. When I suss out someone’s assumptions and I find reality as they know it as being entirely at odds with reality as I know it, I simply choose not to engage. I can only do this, of course, because there are others that will do the engaging. My approach is not morally superior. Rather, it’s self-serving. I participate in discussions I think I will get something from**. And I hope beyond hope that the neutral observer will see the patent absurdity that I am seeing. And if not… well, what an idiot. An idiot who is ignoring the facts.
* – My spellcheck chose this word when I wrote “kumbaya”, which I liked and so I kept.
** – My threshold for reading is considerably lower than for engagement. I read people in pretty far off directions.
This seems somewhat pathetic to me, because I can see that I do things in accordance with my training on my job– pathetic because I often wonder if there might be some aspect of my life that my job doesn’t have complete control over. But here it is:
Broadly, I work in mechanical engineering (very broadly, although I am often referred to as a ‘mechanic’ by my co-workers for this reason), and less broadly (though broadly still) in process engineering (although I am never referred to as ‘process,’ for some reason). At any rate:
I grade the facts as they arrive.
Some are ‘hard’ facts, immutable, that will survive under any condition.
Other facts are conditional. It kind of depends on what’s going on at the time.
Then the inferences, which is where knowing the process comes in. Inductive and deductive suppositions are taken according to severity.
Knowledge of the process really comes first. If I have to learn the process along the way (and I’ve done this, working from a valve map), then some of the facts may shift in grade.
But generally, a framework must first be defined before tentative conditions can be evaluated.
I’ve learned that data is never complete.
If there is a fatal error in any part, you have to be willing to throw the whole thing away and start from scratch. You’re always going to run into new situations.
Gotta go.
I write this only because I know for a *fact* that you care, Burt, not because I myself care. Spellchecker notwithstanding, there is a “their” that you mean to be a “there” (fourth graf) and a “here” that you mean to be a “hear” (fifth graf) in there.
I completely agree, though – frequently our values are too close to sustain a perceived-necessary (or unfortunately, perceived-desirable) degree of tribal or other dispute, so we need to establish alternative sets of facts to make enduring conflicts quasi-comprehensible.
Here! Here! They’re is no “there” their! And Will ain’t Burt, but Truman he ‘ai!
Will gets the credit for this post, not me, and along with it the (very mild) embarrasment of responsibility for his own typographical errors.
Gah. I noted the typos only because we’d (Burt and I) previously exchanged on these usage slips and how, despite best intentions they creep in. I copped copiously at that time as being in no position to note others’ typos. This was just lame effort to humorously reference that, made lamer by my not glancing at the byline and concluding from the writing style that you were the author.
Will – I am in no position based on my writing to point out your typos. This post contains a great insight that I have long agreed with.
It’s all good, Mike. I am just glad that I found the ones that were entirely wrong (“path” was originally, inexplicably typed as “past”).
What is it with you and utterly implausible typos? Is it a spellcheck thing?
Spellcheck would help me notice and correct the goof-up, but why I word-substitute in the first place is a mystery. It’s like a type with a speech impediment.
The initial “facts” surrounding the Sanford incident were really quite damning. And if they were all true, any sort of desire to find nuance in the situation quite honestly can come across as a desire to excuse the murder of a harmless young boy for having dark skin.
Not as I recall it. Even from the beginning, I think, it was public that there was at least one witness corroborating Zimmerman’s story. You also had to account for any number of factors that could be counted on to bias early reporting on the issue:
1. Race-card bias: The media can be expected to play up the racism angle.
2. Anti-gun bias: The media can be counted on to discount the justified-killing angle.
3. Dead-kid bias: Anyone who dies young will be portrayed as the second coming of Christ.
All three of those were at play in this case. NBC doctored the tape, Zimmerman really was injured, and Martin turns out to have been kind of a punk. Among other things. Expectation of media bias had real predictive power in this case, and it’s worked pretty well for me in many other cases*. I really can’t remember the last time my media BS detector gave me a false alarm.
*One example: There was a story a few years back where a sorority had purged 2/3 of its membership, allegedly for not being pretty enough. The NYT reported that every black, Korean, and Vietnamese member had been kicked out. This struck me as bizarrely specific, and I immediately concluded that there must have been a member who was Asian but not Korean or Vietnamese had not been kicked out. Eventually I found a story on CNN’s site that confirmed this. Turns out the sorority had had exactly one Korean, one Vietnamese, one black, and one Chinese member. They had kicked out three of the four non-white members, which is as close to 2/3 as you can get without cutting people in half. The NYT reporter had fabricated the racial angle out of whole cloth.
I don’t think this is the right way to deal with “contested” facts. A fact shouldn’t be considered up in the air simply because someone disagrees with it. For example, it is a fact that there is no evidence vaccines cause autism; this is true notwithstanding that there are many people who choose to believe otherwise. It is a fact that evolution explains species diversity better than any other explanation that’s yet been provided. In the Zimmerman case, it is at the least a fact that Zimmerman deliberately followed a 17-year-old who had not sought out a confrontation with him, that the 17-year-old was unarmed, and that Zimmerman shot him; we can dispute other facts of the case. That Trayvon had used pot before is a fact; my interpretation of this fact is that it is utterly irrelevant to the case.
And so on. There are facts, and there are interpretations of those facts. We should be as clear as possible about which is which. But the simple existence of people who deny a fact does not make it cease to be a fact.
I don’t disagree (see paragraph #6). Being clear about which is which is mostly what I am driving at. There’s a difference between someone who simply does not believe the facts as reported (even if there is absolutely no substantiation for their belief) and someone that believes that it’s okay to do what people who ascribe to a particular narrative believe someone did. It could well be that the person contests facts that should be uncontestable for nefarious reasons, but that’s till not the same thing as stipulating to the facts and believing it’s okay anyway.
To go back to the Holocaust example, ignoring the existence of the Holocaust and the facts that overwhelming point to its existence is bad. It’s not the same thing as saying that it’s good that millions of Jewish people were killed. They may both be grossly immoral, but depicting someone who doesn’t believe that millions of Jewish people died when in fact they contest that it happened is an inaccurate depiction. That doesn’t mean that they’re not grossly anti-semitic, but it means “You deny the Holocaust because you hate Jewish people so much that you can’t believe they are ever the victim” rather than “You want Jewish people annihilated.” And the discussion, if you want to continue one, needs to be aimed at the overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust did occur rather than whether or not it was somehow justified.
“That doesn’t mean that they’re not grossly anti-semitic, but it means ‘You deny the Holocaust because you hate Jewish people so much that you can’t believe they are ever the victim’ rather than ‘You want Jewish people annihilated.'”
I see what you’re aiming at and I agree on the merits with how you are analyzing those claims. Where I tend to disagree, or at least see it differently, is that I suspect a non-negligible subset of the deniers would either like to see Jewish people annihilated or wouldn’t care so much if it happened. To make this claim, as I do, of course one has to go beyond the Holocaust denial claim and either find other evidence or do some psychoanalytic exercise to claim to know what’s in the deniers’ hearts.
Well, from my perspective, if they are denying it then they are implicitly agreeing that it would be wrong if it did. The best way to approach this is to probably ask: If it is true that millions of Jewish people were killed, would you agree that was a monumental moral crime or do you think it might have been justified? If they’re on the record as denying the Holocaust, I’m not sure they’re going to be dishonest in answering that question, as they apparently are not concerned with saying things that other people believe to be loathsome.
I’ve never spoken to a Holocaust-denier. I suspect that if I ran into one, my response would be that this is a person on such a different plane of reality that debate would not be fruitful. I might talk to them just to drill down and find out more information (“Why do you believe that?”). That’s my style, though, and I have respect for those that enter the muck and argue it out.
The closest I have come to this sort of situation are those from the South that believe that slavery was not the proximate cause of the Civil War and that the CSA would have abolished slavery in relatively course anyway. This is more speculative/opinion than whether or not a historical event occurred, but it’s still something that can be supported or not with the evidence available. I have asked these people if the CSA would have continued slavery for another fifty years whether the North still should have let them secede. The answer is typically “yes.” (Not because they approve of slavery, they point out, but because of the “real reasons” for the secession.)
I’ve never read any Holocaust denial that doesn’t boil down to “It never happened, and anyway, they deserved it.”
With all due respect Will, I think there’s some false equivalence on your discussion of the Martin-Zimmerman case. The default and most common position on one side (at least to begin with, before the usual game of telephone ensued) is “This case got dropped way too quickly. There needs to be a complete investigation.” In fact, this is exactly what the president said:
Obviously, this is a tragedy, I can only imagine what these parents are going through, and when I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together — federal, state and local — to figure out exactly how this tragedy happened.
The default and most common opposing position is that Zimmerman was telling the complete truth.
One of these things is not like the other.