Whom Should We Dismiss?

I’ve previously given some popular tips (part 1; part 2) about how you should argue about politics, given that you’re doing so at all. But some people believe that, for certain political views, we should not have a reasoned dialogue at all; we should just condemn them.

This attitude appears more common on the left. E.g., don’t talk to Nazis; just condemn them, and maybe even physically attack them. (See video of someone punching white nationalist Richard Spencer on the street:

.)

Hard core leftists also tend to view a wide range of people as Nazi-adjacent—e.g., Trump-supporters. Note: “Trump-supporters” includes close to 40% of the entire country. So it is open to question whether one should even talk to 40% of the country, or just condemn them.

1. What to Shun

Here are some ideas about whom we might refuse to speak to and about what we might refuse to speak:

(1) “Don’t have debates where the debate itself would spread information that shouldn’t be spread.”

• E.g., don’t have a public debate about what would be the best way to kill a million people. I think anyone would agree with this, so there’s no need to discuss this one. But this isn’t really about shunning people, properly speaking.

(2) “Don’t debate extremely harmful or extremely immoral proposals.”

• E.g., don’t debate Nazism. Or Marxism, or meat-eating, or drug prohibition. Granted, prohibition isn’t nearly as bad as the holocaust; but if you’re refusing to debate very harmful things, it’s hard to say that the unjust imprisonment of millions of people is “not harmful enough” to qualify.

• Why would one propose (2)? Perhaps because debating bad ideas “legitimizes” them. When the masses see you (an obviously smart, authoritative, trustworthy person) debating evil ideas, the masses will conclude that you take those ideas seriously and therefore that the ideas are not obviously evil.

• Or maybe debating bad ideas “platforms” them, giving them a chance to reach more ears than they otherwise would.

• Reality check: There are many terrible ideas that are already mainstream or already taken seriously by huge numbers of people. Many people also already trust (e.g.) Joe Rogan a lot more than they trust mainstream media or other intellectual elites. So refusing to engage with bad ideas does not delegitimize those ideas; it delegitimizes you, in the eyes of the (perhaps benighted) masses. It feeds conspiracy theories about media suppression and encourages the conclusion that you are unable to rebut the bad ideas.

• On proposal (2), a huge range of discussion about crucial issues would be replaced with trading bitter denunciations. But bitter denunciations do not typically lead to progress.

(3) “Don’t debate extremely epistemically unjustified ideas.”

• On this view, we wouldn’t debate with Creationists, Holocaust deniers, or meat-eaters.

• This perhaps makes more sense than (2), since you may have to debate a terrible idea if the idea reasonably appears good. But why debate things that are obviously wrong?

• But there remain the problems mentioned above: Many extremely epistemically unjustified ideas are already mainstream. Refusing to debate them is ceding the ground to them.

(4) “Don’t debate ideas that are extremely harmful and extremely unjustified.”

• Then we wouldn’t debate, e.g., Nazism, Marxism, meat-eating, or drug prohibition.

• Same problem as above.

(5) “Don’t debate bad ideas that lack social influence.”

• This one differentiates between Nazism on the one hand, and Marxism, meat-eating, and drug prohibition on the other. The latter three all have clout in our society, so they could be debated while Nazism would not be.

• This suggestion has some logic to it: if an idea lacks clout, then there is no need to debate it, and indeed, debating it might have the effect of (slightly) increasing its clout and spreading awareness of the bad idea.

(6) “Don’t debate people who are not open-minded.”

• This is reasonable if you are having a conversation with a single individual. E.g., arguing with your racist, communist niece at Thanksgiving is probably a waste of time. I have verified many times that having good arguments is not enough to persuade another person; in addition, the other person must be open-minded.

• But (6) does not apply to public discussions or debates, because these do not aim at persuading your interlocutor. They aim at persuading the audience. Frequently there are many people in the audience who will appreciate your points, even if the person to whom you are directly addressing them doesn’t. Over the years, many people have told me that they were persuaded by my arguments on one issue or another.

2. Inherently Dismissible Ideas

For the above reasons, it makes sense to discuss and debate a wide range of terrible ideas. But this leaves open the further question: Which ideas are in themselves worthy of being dismissed without discussion, even if for instrumental reasons it is unwise to do so?

For instance, the theory that Bill Gates is having microchips injected into our bodies through vaccines is inherently dismissible — i.e., it’s so dumb that it is not worth spending any time looking into it. If you meet someone who tells you that theory, it would not be unreasonable for you to just refuse to engage with that person.

What about moral and political views that are dismissal-worthy? Here, we could list Nazism, Marxism, support for slavery, and support for meat-eating. Today, there are hardly any Nazi-sympathizers or slavery-supporters, but the other two are more common (indeed, the last one is held by almost everyone). These facts about popularity, however, are irrelevant to the present question. The popularity of a view does not mean that it isn’t absurd and horrible.

Contemporary progressives, however, tend to see a lot more ideas as dismissible than those just listed. Anything they view as “racist”, “sexist”, “transphobic”, etc., they tend to view as worthy of dismissal without argument. For example, you can just dismiss the idea of biologically based differences between male and female psychology. Or the idea of average IQ differences between races. Or the idea that “woman” is a biological category.

Why do woke progressives find so many things dismissible? Probably two reasons: one, they tend to be extremely dogmatic; hence, they tend to give very high confidence (or at least act as though they have very high confidence) to the core tenets of wokism, regardless of the actual evidence.

Two, at some level, progressives know that they don’t actually have (epistemically) good reasons for their beliefs; they just adopt certain beliefs because they think that’s what they’re supposed to believe, that’s what their tribe believes, that’s the belief that will make minorities feel better. These progressives are smart enough to figure out that, given this, the progressives are probably not going to come off so well in an open debate. Their best hope is therefore to avoid debate and try to silence critics. But of course they can’t say that the reason they don’t want to debate an issue is that they know they’re going to lose. So instead they make up stories about how they’re morally required to refuse to debate — because your ideas are so obviously evil, and they don’t want to “legitimize” or “platform” you.

3. Inherently Closed-Minded Beliefs

Above, I mentioned that it’s impossible to persuade people who are not open-minded. Are there some ideas that are so obviously irrational that one can conclude, just from the person’s holding that view, that they are not open to reason, and thus that you should not waste your time trying to persuade them?

Probably. Maybe if you meet someone who tells you that you need to vote Republican in the next election because the Democrat candidate is a lizard person from Arcturus in disguise who plans to assist the aliens in exterminating humanity, you should avoid engaging with that person.

But a surprising range of very bad ideas are compatible with a person’s being open to persuasion. E.g., many people are carnivores for many years, then convert to vegetarianism. Perhaps more strikingly, hardcore white supremacists have been converted through dialogue with members of the hated minority groups. Look at the case of Daryl Davis:

He is a black musician who has gotten many KKK members to leave the Klan and give up racism due to his patient engagement with them.

Or consider the case of Derek Black, who was once a rising star in the white nationalist movement. He was converted away from racism by patient dialogue with Jewish students at his college.

Often, it turns out that the things that seem so obvious to you that anyone who doesn’t see them must be dishonest are things the other person really just needs to have explained to them.

For another example, if you meet someone who thinks communism is a good idea, they may just not know the evidence against it. They might actually not know about the tens of millions killed by Marxist regimes in the 20th century, or the systematic reasons why planned economies fail, or the useful economic functions played by capitalists. Especially if they’re young, because our schools don’t teach these things.

4. Conclusion

Of course one should not have every debate that one can. But I think a very wide range of topics are debate-worthy, including many extremely bad and unjustified ideas. I mean debate-worthy in the sense that it might be good if someone debated them reasonably. I myself don’t much like debating extremely unjustified ideas, and I especially tend to not want to discuss extremely unjustified ideas that lack clout. But I don’t think we should generally shun people just for having terrible ideas.

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[ This is an expanded version of this post: https://fakenous.substack.com/p/whom-shouldnt-we-talk-to. ]