Yesterday was a good reminder to me just how spoiled I am. I blame you, Ordinaries, fellow sub-Ordinaries, and the Readers. And I blame the judiciary.
At work, I present my ideas in the rarefied and structured forum of a court. There are rules of argument. Judges enforce the rules. One of the rules (which does not apply to judges) is that people do not interrupt one another. Another of the rules is that arguments must be succinct. Yet another one of the rules is that arguments must be related in some rational manner to the evidence and facts. Still another of the rules is that the method used upon which the conclusion of the conflict will be reached will be derived from a common corpus of principles, viz., statutory and case law. And still another rule is that a disposition will be announced by a neutral decision-maker within a reasonably prompt time after argument has closed.
Some of those rules get relaxed here in blogworld. But we still have rules and conventions here that arguments must be based on reason, they must be at least somewhat succinct, and thanks to the format of written exchanges, no one is interrupting at each other. It is obvious when a question has gone unanswered.
Yesterday evening, I went out with my freethinker group to a community event to seek out like-minded people to join up. We expect that seven out of eight people will be uninterested and indeed we didn’t bother passing out flyers to people we could identify as either wearing or bearing some sort of religious insignia. (For instance, the guy with the Madonna of Guadalupe tattooed on his shoulder was not deemed to be a very good prospect.) Now, we have to expect when we do this sort of thing that a small number of people who are religious will stop with an incredulous “What? You guys are atheists? What is it about God that you don’t understand!” and try to convert us. And sure enough we got some of that, but only at the end of the event.
As we were starting to tear down and put away our stuff, all of a sudden we somehow had a Latino guy in his twenties, an African-American guy in his thirties, and a white guy in his forties all standing there. The Latino guy was a little bit spaced out on Jesus, as in, “Man, you don’t understand. Jesus loves you, man, all you gotta do is return his love!” The African-American guy got confrontational, as in, “There is no evidence at all for evolution! All those skeletons in all those museums, they’ve proven they’re fakes, man!” (As might be expected, the identity of the “they” who had engaged in this spectacular scientific triumph was never elicited but who were we to question the authority of “they”?) The white guy kept his voice at a more reasonable level but was completely blind to the lacuna in his (often circular) reasoning: “It’s all there in the Bible, the Bible has been proven to be historically true, my evidence is the Bible.”
I mention their races because by comparison, we freethinkers were a pretty pale-skinned bunch. At this point, we had five white guys, a two white women, a man of Lebanese descent, and a Latino guy. All of the freethinkers who engaged the Christians in argument were white men. I don’ t know why it is that freethought groups can’t attract more diversity. The Christians had a definite advantage on us in that respect last night.
I think our arguments were significantly better (in that our arguments were responsive to theirs and we answered questions we were asked directly), but the quality of one’s argument in a forum like that simply doesn’t matter.
So, I lost my taste for the exchanges very quickly. I suspect most of them had been drinking or otherwise indulging in some sort of substance; particularly the young guy who slurred his words a little bit. But it seemed as though nothing I said even registered with any of the three interlocutors. None of them answered a single question they were asked. None of them seemed to hae the ability to do more that stay silent for about ten seconds at a time to maintain a pretense of a conversational exchange, but when they heard something they didn’t like, couldn’t restrain themselves interrupting and going back into their respective spiels, which were the same things over and over and over again.
And obviously when you’re in a situation like this, there’s no judge. There’s no referee or argument police. It was seven people in two groups standing in a public park arguing about the unknowable with the politeness of hogs jostling with one another at the trough. There is no referee or decision-maker and there was going to be no convincing of one another, no changing of minds, not even a concession or recognition that one side or the other had raised something of value. (Frankly, I don’t think the Christians were bringing anything of value to the table, just bald claims that the Bible is true and Jesus is wonderful, although I’m sure they didn’t see it that way.)
In my twenties, I loved street arguments like that. I got thrilled and pumped up and excited. And in retrospect, I was as inept at it as most of the street arguers were. But after seeing how productive arguments can be in court, and finding a haven where ideas are exchanged to test their merits, rather than the durability of one’s bladder, I’ve completely lost my taste for it. It left me feeling intellectually dirty, like I’d just finished a guest appearance on The Jerry Springer Show.
So I stepped away, helped my non-arguing colleagues complete the teardown of our booth, and made my peace with Spaced Out On Jesus Guy. “Here’s what, man. I see you have great faith. I’m kind of like that too. We’re not gonna change each other’s minds here, but I can respect you even if I disagree with you. Respect?” He said, “Yeah, I respect you, but you need to know that Jesus loves you. He’s always gonna be there for you. Respect.” And we shook hands and left it at that. That’s about as good an exit as could have been hoped for.
I’ve noticed the same thing about free thinking groups and pale skin. I’ve always assumed it was because people only want to be other people’s but-some-of-my-best-friends-are example in so many contexts.
If it would be helpful, I will try to make my blog posts even more poorly-considered then they already are, so as to better prepare you.
Haha.
Burt, I think you are spoiled but I’m glad to hear it. I have a sneaking unpleasant suspicion that you can almost never convince someone of something they’d rather not understand via reason — through emotional appeal, maybe; but never through reason — but your forgetting how most people treat “debate” has me optimistic about the chances of genuine listening in the future.
I find many of these debates, especially when it comes to the unproveables to be very much like a game of whack-a-mole. You think you finally answered the question to a point of finality, but after a few minutes, as though the topic had never been addressed, the question gets asked again, usually by someone else who didn’t hear the first exchange. It’s like zombies – they just won’t die.
I considered going to law school. Took the LSAT and all. Decided not to when I decided that I didn’t want to actually be a lawyer. A part of me wishes that I could go, though, for the same reason I might like to go back and major in philosophy or theology. The processes involved fascinate me. Debate with terms and meaning.
When I encounter someone who has such an opposing view to mine and who does not show himself or herself to be receptive to points I make in good faith (in the circles I hang out in, these people who are not freethinkers are more likely to be atheists than religious persons, although your mileage evidently varies), I believe that the best thing , in theory, is to do one of the following:
1. Sincerely try to learn from them. Ask “why do you say that?” or “why do you believe x, y, z?” and be as receptive as possible to the answer. Of course, if the answer is always “the Bible told me so,” there’s not much you can do or learn from them.
2. Ignore them.
3. Realize that in my own way, I am sometimes as bigoted and closed minded, even if I know better than to advertise my closed mindedness.
In practice, I often take the bait and get involved in an emotional “street argument” that I usually lose.
You can really learn a lot talking to people even when you know at the outset that you have no chance of convincing them of anything. These people are only too happy to share their worldview with you, even (or especially) if they know you to be a heretic. It can be hard to take, but it’s given me a much better understanding of a number of points of view, ranging from deep leftism to nativism. These people often say what more “reasonable people” are simply failing to articulate.
It’s sooo tempting to take on the debate, but I’ve found it to be a useless, frustrating and unsatisfying exercise 100% of the time. Religious zealotry isn’t based on logic and reason, but rather “faith” in ancient folklore and tenets, so it is impossible to debate it. It’s so fundamental to the person’s belief system, often implanted from preverbal infancy, that no form of argument can even touch it. I guess that’s why it’s called fundamentalism and why some people are willing to sacrifice their lives and kill others to do “god’s work”.
There but for the grace of reason go I….
Yeah, I am exceptionally lucky to be here and stuck with all y’all. I mean, if someone sat me down and asked me to come up with a website that would be *PERFECT* for me… I’d probably say that it would need to have the following:
1) It would need to have posts that I would want to read.
2) It would need to have posts that I would want to comment upon.
3) It would need to have commenters who would agree with me.
4) It would need to have commenters who would disagree with me.
5) It would need to have a plurality of commenters who were smarter than me.
6) Everybody, I mean *EVERYBODY*, would have to have a sense of humor.
7) They would have to have pictures of Freddy Mercury posted regularly.
I still have not found that website.
But I found this community and, goddamn, it’s close enough.