Greg Krehbiel
The freedom of an “I don’t need to defend everything” attitude
by Greg Krehbiel on 28 July 2010
I was having a little back and forth with some folks in a parallel universe about a position that I would say is defensible (just barely) if you already believe it, but if you didn’t start off believing it (or didn’t have some other reason to believe it) you wouldn’t be very tempted to start.
For example, if you had some independent reason to believe that the pope is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra on faith and morals for the whole church, there isn’t a lot to be said to dissuade you. A reasonable defense can be made.
But nobody is going to be reading the various emanations of the popes and notice, “Hey, these two where he speaks ex cathedra on faith and morals for the whole church are infallible. Wow!”
In fact, if you didn’t already start with a belief that there has to be a doctrine of Petrine infallibility that works some how some way, you wouldn’t be tempted to come up with all the caveats. Furthermore, if you didn’t already start with such a belief, you’d be tempted to think that all the caveats were a rather poor way to insulate the idea from critical inquiry.
ISTM there are loads of things that are like this. If you already believe it, it’s easy enough to make a respectable defense. E.g., people who have already made up their mind to believe in or disbelieve anthropogenic global warming are not going to have a hard time maintaining that belief. Defending a belief is just too doggone easy.
I think this is a small part of the reason why liberals and conservatives and Baptists and environmentalists all tend to believe a certain set of things. They tend to trust people who are like them, so ideas from thought leaders in their little clique come into their brains with a sort of “right until proven wrong” trajectory. And it’s terribly easy to defend most ideas if you already believe them.
The hard thing is to step outside that bubble and try to look at things as if you’re not already persuaded. And most groups exert various kinds of pressure to keep you from doing so.
“Oh, all those people outside are ” … take your pick — greedy corporate polluters — resisting the Holy Spirit — racists — liberals — homophobes — crazed sex addicts … whatever.
So first you have to believe that it’s possible for someone to disagree for honest reasons. They’re not just making things up to justify their evil ways. Then you have to allow yourself the luxury of looking at things from that perspective. Then you find that you’re not so worried about defending things.
2010-07-28 » Greg Krehbiel
28 July 2010 @ 9:06 pm
Hmmmm. Well I find that there are just too many things which I personally believe which are quite different after having examined them all by myself. So when that process is illuminated by the arguments of others it is reasonable to expect that there would be plenty of changing going on. But to walk through doors and have normal conversations (in other words to just function normally), we can’t examine and defend every little thing we believe. So I won’t be embarassed to say, sure there are things I just believe. And see no reason to worry over them. But I try to keep that list short, reasonable, and not too rigid
28 July 2010 @ 10:32 pm
I’m not saying that there’s something wrong with “just believing things.” There are plenty of things that we all believe without much proof — although most people are blissfully unaware of all the things they assume that they can’t possibly prove.
But you’re right. We should try to keep the list short.
29 July 2010 @ 9:03 am
But what shold we say, I suppose, about positions that are defensible but not necessarily persuadable – maybe not well put, but that is what you are getting at, right?
Well, first of all their very existence should give us good reason to be humble when disagreed with, and unlikely to persecute those who oppose us. But does this translate straightaway into the popular approach of “if it works for you” and the insistence that the only real truth is that no one may assert one?
29 July 2010 @ 9:32 am
ISTM the solution is to realize that arguments resonate with different people in different ways for very deep and mysterious reasons.
We caricature those reasons with pat sayings, like “he believes because he needs the comfort,” or “he doesn’t believe because he’s too proud,” or whatever. But we don’t know what we’re saying. We don’t even know why we believe things, much less why anybody else does. We like to pretend that it’s because of some set of reasons and arguments, but that’s often just bosh.
So, does that translate into “if it works for you”? Yes and no. Yes in terms of practicality, but no in terms of truth.
IOW, I can admit that so and so believes some weird thing for reasons I’ll never understand, but that make sense to him. It just fits with his personality, or biases, or whatever, and I can just shrug and say “I guess that’s what works for you.”
But I don’t have to say that it’s “true.”
29 July 2010 @ 10:35 am
As I grew older and hopefully more mature, I appreciate more and more story about the blind men and the elephant.
Each has a different perspective, and none of them comprehends the entire elephant.
Some people have a perspective which is based on faith, some have a perspective based on the scientific method. Let’s imagine for a moment that we can represent the person who lives by faith as having a whole on the tusk of the elephant, and let us represent our scientific friend as someone who has a different perspective, for example, he or she may grab the elephant by the leg or the tail or the ear.
Our scientific friend may say, “you say that the elephant is like a spear, but I have conducted numerous experiments and I can assure you that this elephant is nothing whatsoever like a spear.”
It seems to me that it is evidence of our ignorance and our arrogance and our foolishness to believe that our own point of view is somehow complete, and that anyone with a different perspective is foolish or naïve or mistaken.
29 July 2010 @ 10:36 am
You are starting to sound like an apologist for the Calninists, and for the Doctrine of Reprobation, although in a very strange way o_O ;o)
29 July 2010 @ 10:39 am
Well said, Dave. Though in internet arguments it takes a whole lot more typing to be clear every time that, after all, I am the person with all the most incriminating evidence about myself that I am often wrong and wrong-headed!
29 July 2010 @ 10:42 am
Reprobation is the extreme case where a person can’t tell right from wrong. But all of us have biases that lead us to believe one thing and disbelieve another. You can present exactly the same arguments and evidence to two different people, and they will respond very differently.
Dave — I don’t have any doubt that our perception of reality is biased by our point of view, and the blind men and the elephant story is a decent illustration of that.
29 July 2010 @ 10:47 am
The thing that bugs me is this. What if a particular belief requires a certain point of view? What if, for example, Zoroastrians know perfectly well that their belief system is self-referential. If you’re inside it, it makes sense. If you’re outside it, it doesn’t. So if you’re inside, and you want to stay inside, you have to choose to continue to think that way … or else you’ll fall away.
If the person on the inside really gets this — if he sees that all his arguments and reasons depend on some grand self-referential circle — what’s he supposed to do?