Tired of Arguing (2)

I’m short on time, so this week I’ll just ramble a little bit about a much earlier post. I posted this on Facebook in June 2017:

I used to argue with people with opposing ideologies. Christian proselytizers, subjectivists, Randian objectivists, Marxists, positivists, other victims of scientism. Now I generally don’t.

For instance, in graduate school, I wrote a long essay on my disagreements with Ayn Rand (http://owl232.net/papers/rand.htm). I wouldn't do that now. Too bad I didn’t get around to writing about all those other ideologies, because now I'll probably never do it.

Why? I think I know why I don’t do it anymore:

1. I’m not going to learn anything. I know these ideologies. It is highly unlikely that the next Marxist I meet is going to say something importantly different from all the other Marxists. If they do, it’s still highly unlikely that I’m going to find it interesting or illuminating. I’ll probably just find it confused or irrational. Unless they’re an established scholar, there’s a pretty good chance that I will actually know more than they do about their own ideology, and I’ll have to teach them what ridiculous thing they’re supposed to say at a given point in the conversation.

2. They’re not going to learn anything either. I have a fair chance of being able to tell, say, the positivist subjectivist something relevant that they don’t yet know. But it is extremely unlikely that they’re going to use it to improve their belief system. They’ll just try to make up an excuse for disregarding it.

3. I find it tedious to struggle with people to convince them to open their mind.

Now I’m not sure why I ever did it. Maybe it helped me develop my own views; now that my views are long since developed, it’s only boring. Maybe in the past I had more energy and patience. Maybe I had more faith in humanity. Now I tend to assume by default that a person cannot be moved on any ideological question, and that they can’t say anything interesting on the subject either.

My current comments:

• The above was too pessimistic about the prospects of changing people’s minds. After the original post, some people on FB commented that I had in fact changed their beliefs with some of my arguments. They hadn’t told me that at the time; they were lurkers or anonymous readers.

• Peter van Inwagen once commented on charges that his argument for incompatibilism “begs the question.” (I’ve discussed that argument in another post.) Roughly, the objection was something like, “A committed P-believer wouldn’t accept all your premises. So your argument against P begs the question.” Van Inwagen’s response was that you don’t present an argument to persuade the most committed partisans of the opposite view. Of course a committed partisan can and will just decide to reject one of your premises in order to avoid having to accept your conclusion. That’s true no matter what your argument is, as long as there are committed partisans on the other side.

  You present an argument to convince uncommitted people in the audience. So to avoid begging the question, you need only present premises that would seem plausible to most uncommitted people, not premises that your “opponent” would admit.

  Persuading these audience members is much easier than persuading the people who have been publicly advocating for the opposite view. That’s what I forgot in my point 2 above.

• Be that as it may, point 3 above still holds, and I am also still lazy. I like to explain things to open-minded people; I don’t like to struggle with closed-minded people to try to surmount their biases. When I meet closed-minded people, I leave them to their own devices. They can believe what they want; their false beliefs are (usually) not my problem. (These people are also free to tell themselves that I’m not engaging with them because their points are so great that there’s no answer to them; that’s also not my problem.)

I still don’t know how many engaged yet open-minded viewers there are. I don’t know if it’s a small minority or a huge majority of people. Such people tend to keep quiet. Dogmatic partisans talk the most, giving an exaggerated impression of how partisan the country is.

So, despite my 2017 post, I am still arguing against some false ideologies.

My next book, btw, will be predicated on the assumption that there are many politically-engaged yet open-minded people. It will address a series of “Progressive Myths” — empirical beliefs, widely held among progressives, that appear to strongly support progressive ideology, but that are objectively, factually false or radically misleading. My assumption is that that some significant number of people adopt progressive beliefs, not due to irrationality, but due to their hearing what appear to be powerful pieces of evidence for progressive ideology.

Note: Once someone has held to an ideology for many years, it becomes too late to get them out of it, even if their original reasons for adopting that ideology are refuted. The ideology sets, like concrete. So the key is to get to people early. My hope is that I’ll get my Progressive Myths book to open-minded people who are only just starting to be converted to progressivism but who care about the objective evidence. Stay tuned later this year or early next year.

Of course, it might be that there are very few such people, and my book will only be read by right-wing people who like having their own beliefs reinforced.

A possible cover design