Debate

In a relatively well-educated age, we seem to be getting stupider, or at least more credulous. Used to hearing well made, carefully and logically constructed arguments, people are more adept than ever at dressing up their own extreme views with all the same trappings, like a creme-egg with a turd at its centre.

This isn’t often done with wicked intent, and is often what the person actually believes. Arrogantly assuming we’re well placed to make sense of the deluge of often conflicting information that pours down on us daily, we use what chimes with us to buttress our own views, whilst picking holes in that which doesn’t, merrily going on our way without ever learning a thing. Worst of all, this effect is exacerbated as information is spun, rewritten, and re-presented, shorn of context, nuance, and accuracy along the way.

Imagine a study about drug use is published by a fraying, busy sociology professor, who as it happens enjoys spending a good deal of his time lost in a haze of opiates. He seizes upon a statistic in his findings to present legalisation of drugs in a positive light as he writes it up. This is then reported as gospel by various left-wing news outlets, and later taken up by columnists who blather on about rehabilitation, tax revenues and all manner of pro-drug idealism based entirely on the compromised study.

Suspicious right-wing pundits soon find out the professor is a raging smackhead, which discredits the information just a little bit in their eyes. Instead they suggest as a counterpoint statistics from Iran, showing that beheading is a pretty good deterrent against drug-taking, further fuelling their brand of harrumphing, ‘THROW AWAY THE KEY’ bullshit.

By the time the professor has been arrested for riding a spacehopper naked into a local primary school (“point to what you saw on the doll, Timmy”) and someone’s pointed out that the accuracy of police statistics and cultural situation may be slightly different in Iran, all search for answers has been lost. Instead all you get is a retrenchment of positions, as each side decides their information suggests something it might not, and begin to characterise one another as sandal-wearers and Hitler respectively.

If this sounds far-fetched, take economics as an example. People who’d have difficulty with basic algebra but nonetheless have a certain attachment to public services are suddenly quite happy to debate the nuances of Keynesian economics, based solely on a column they’ve read in the Guardian, whilst those who’re instinctively mistrustful of government intervention would have you believe they’ve grasped the perils of the complex and shifting relationships between international bond markets and government debt overnight. Before long it’ll have all boiled back down to the rich calling the poor lazy, and the poor calling the rich cunts. Standard.

The problem is that we instinctively think of ourselves as sensible, well-informed, proper-thinking beings, rather than know-nothing lumps of flesh subject to wildly irrational emotions and egos the size of a small moon. At the same time, we’re drawn to people who think the same way as us, making further remote any chance of having our views challenged. Almost all of us lack the ability to examine ourselves and our biases dispassionately. Even when you try to, you find yourself shot at from both sides, contending with such a seething morass of bias, prejudice, spin, cherry-picking, and just general anger that suicide quickly becomes preferable. Accepting and embracing your own ignorance whilst arguing with those on either side with entrenched positions isn’t just like banging your head against a brick wall, but being bounced between two of them, like a ball in an enormous, high-stakes game of Pong.

And so far this is just people who have the decency to attempt to think critically, not even taking into account people who’re happy to work their way through life doing and saying things that simply wouldn’t make sense if given a moment’s thought. My favourite pet peeve are the nebulously religious, those that are quite attached to the thought of an afterlife, but balk a little at all the self-sacrifice and rules. I like to think they’ll rock up at the Pearly Gates nonchalantly as if it’s a night on the lash, if only so I can imagine the looks on their faces when St. Peter grunts “but you’re not on the list” like the world’s surliest bouncer. This also explains the seemingly perverse (but actually just fucking retarded) messages of condolence some people left for Raoul Moat, reflecting a belief that they’d see him again in heaven. My grasp of theology isn’t what it was, but I’m not sure that’s quite how it’s supposed to work.

It seems to me like the search for truth, to phrase it somewhat grandly, is like an endless row across a choppy lake. You press on, battling the sapping currents, ever more certain you’ll arrive at the opposite side as the years pass, only to turn around and find you’re barely any further out than when you set off.  Sometimes it just feels like it’d be easier to abandon ship and lie on the muddy shore, basking in the warm, soothing sunlight of ignorance.

A shorter version of this appeared in Epigram 228.