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.