By Jim Downard
Our steadfast Tracy posed the question to us all: Why we think “Dialoguing through our Differences is important, how it can be done better, how we’re doing it well, etc.?”
From my perspective as an atheist and someone who believes one of the best paths to figuring out the way things actually are is to pay attention to what primary sources and dataset are available and how those are being used (or not) in the course of discussion, it is a no-brainer that society benefits from honest and open inquiry and debate.
An idea worth having is one worth defending, openly and honestly. And the flip side is that bad ideas are worth opposing, equally open and honestly.
The scholarly methods perspective provides a frame for discourse (it’s the drum I bang away on in my #TIP project at www.tortucan.wordpress.com). How cogent can an argument be if its defenders can’t remember where they got their information from, or showed any inclination to fact check any of it, before repeating it with such confidence and certitude? From a methods perspective, any argument that depends on so sloppy a foundation is questionable, and it’s one of the duties of civil discourse to try and work out what a non-sloppy foundation would look like and nudge the argument along to that better path.
But differing viewpoints are more than just a pile of data points. There are many fundamental differences in philosophy involved by necessity in religion and politics, and which no amount of empirical fact-finding can resolve. This is the theme of another of my essays here at SpokaneFAVs (and reprised & expanded at #TIP) on “NOMA Revisited”.
Atheists may regard the Universe as itself an Uncaused Cause, while religious people pencil in their deity of preference onto that card. But their wrangling over such ultimate causation will never be settled by appeals to science or evidence. That’s because it is a deep unresolvable issue of fundamental assumptions. A methods perspective recognizing the differing domains of decidable versus undecidable propositions allows those issues to be approached with a little more clarity as well.
At root though is the context of civility and respect. However much we may disagree on, fundamentally and intractably (and there will be that) it doesn’t mean people need to raise tempers or reject the fundamental dignity of the individual human mind to freely believe what they will (even as we dispute whether those beliefs are cockamamie or not).
The current fuss in many academic institutions here and abroad about not allowing certain views to be presented in a lecture context, lest someone be “offended” shows how thin the ice can be when it comes to keeping the scholarly discourse sled on course in bitter political weather.
And need we even mention Donald Trump? (Wither but for the grace of methodological providence goeth we all?)
All ideas can be discussed in a civil and scholarly away. All. And they jolly well better be, if we’re to avoid the head-chopping insanity of the ISISes of the world. So the more such open discussions occur, bringing in more voices while cleaving to the rule of civility, the better the chance of moving beyond wagon-circling to mind-nudging thought.
And maybe in the process of that discussion, people will learn more about what common needs and desires inform even seemingly opposed views, and maybe—just maybe—improve their own understanding of the ideas they hold nearest and dearest.
An idea worth having is one worth defending.
