Ever prayed for a magic mind-changer in the middle of an
argument? A remote control that could zap the brain of the ignorant one who
discounts all your carefully researched facts as fakes and refuses to listen to
common sense. Problem is in their neanderthal cave, they’ll be thinking exactly
the same in reverse.
Starting from the
optimistic assumption that we are all fair-minded souls keen to expand our
knowledge base and find the answer to puzzling dilemmas, there should be a way
to reach a consensus. It shouldn’t be this hard. And yet it is, even tossing to
one side those of malign agenda with something to hide, or those so paranoid
their optics are warped.
Families are pulled
apart by the pro and anti-Trump argument, or in the UK, Brexiteers shouting down Remainers, never mind the Scottish/Irish independence versus unionists
hostilities; climate change deniers and proponent - the list goes on. At an individual level, marriage counsellors
must find their heads spinning trying to cope with two completely disparate takes
on the same unhappy story. Different football match played on a different
ground altogether, according to the warring spouses.
Bitter polarities
magnify once you move, at your peril, into science arguments. Opponents of
accepted theories who step forward with new insights can be destroyed by the
vehemence of attacks on their credibility. Forget the naive notion that
scientists are on an open-minded voyage of discovery. They hang onto the status
quo with the desperation of drowning men fighting off sharks.
Why so? What is so
threatening about opening your mind to an alternative viewpoint? Progress is
about knowing more, not sitting paralysed in same old same old. Arthur
Schopenhauer, the 19th Century philosopher was clear about the tortuous process
of expanding and changing minds. “All truth
passes through three stages. First, it
is ridiculed. Second it is violently
opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." What’s worse, the protracted battle for
acknowledgement that ‘hey, they might have something there’ doesn’t win the argument
on its own. Depressingly, Max Planck, the physicist, pointed out, “A new …
truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the
light but rather because its opponents eventually die, a new generation grows
up that is familiar with it."
Forget trying to
batter sense into a blockhead, just wait till they keel over. It’s a miracle
that humanity has survived as long as it has. Though it may explain millenia of
violent conflict in which victory depends on the destruction of your opponent.
The raison d’etre
behind all this numbskullery in our supposedly advanced species appears to be
that our mind don’t work they way we think they do. My picture was of the mind
as a capacious jug with elastic sides which expands as we learn more; or given
that skulls are solid bone, perhaps we just access more of the brain’s unused
data space.
Not so. It appears,
to reduce it to a literal analogy, to be more like a balloon, which will
enlarge. But how do you get in? The answer is you don’t without dismantling the
balloon, accumulating more content and growing a new balloon. Therein lies the
rub. People rightly resist the process of dismantling their protective
psychological cover for fear that the whole house of cards will tumble, leading
to implosion.
Information which
is not familiar is threatening, thereby leading to the confirmation bias. We
cherry pick what reinforces our beliefs and blank out the rest.
Some stalwart souls
do have an epiphany along the way which flips their politics from hard left to
right; even one scientist who was a fervent campaigner against genetically
modified crops until he studied deeper and found there was no proof for his
previous stance.
Humiliation, of
course, play its part in preventing a climb- down to admit the hated other
might be right or partially right. We are all emperors within our own little
bubbles, so any suggestion we might be wrong brings cracks in our grandiose
delusion and with it corrosive shame.
There’s no real
conclusion to all of this except to hop back to Schopenhauer – dig in for a
long war and don’t give up. I just like to know the reasons why – makes the
irritation easier to bear.
Follow
me on:
BUY my new crime thriller BY the LIGHT of a
LIE at: www.marjorieorr.com
No comments:
Post a Comment