I change my
mind. This happens relatively frequently, and for all kinds of reasons. My wife
hands me a dessert that is supposed to taste like chocolate but is made from zucchini
and something called goji berries. In my mind I tell myself, “This cannot
possibly be any good.” But I take a bite and, to my utter astonishment, it
tastes okay. It doesn’t really taste like chocolate, but it’s not bad. It’s
edible. It’s more than edible. So I change my mind. The concept “zucchini/goji
berry concoctions are bad” undergoes a transformation to something like “zucchini/goji
berry concoctions aren’t as good as chocolate, let’s not get crazy here, but
they’re okay.”
It happens. I
adapt. I change. So I’m wondering what the zucchini/goji berry equivalent might
be in modern American political discourse. Here is an article that argues for
intellectual humility. And here is a cogent and well-mannered sentence from the
article that serves pretty well as a thesis:
“We can
similarly view intellectual humility as the wisest balance between, on the one
hand, the belief that truth exists and is objective, and on the other, the
knowledge that our access to the truth is subjective and therefore partial.
Understanding this balance suggests that the search for the truth we revere is
best undertaken in recognition of our limitations and in collaboration with
others.”
Who’s going to
disagree with that? Not me. But when I drill down a bit, and when I try to
apply the concepts to present-day American life and culture, I get stymied. For
instance, I encounter on one side the contention offered by seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies and reported by The New York Times and The Washington Post that Russia
directly interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and on the other
side the contention offered by Donald Trump that Russia did not interfere in
the 2016 presidential election.
Intellectual
humility, or the sorry version of it that exists in my heart and mind, insists
that I don’t really know, that my access to the truth is subjective, colored by
biased sources and hampered by my own limited understanding. Also, it insists
on noting that I’ve been wrong before, about all kinds of things more important
than healthy desserts, and that I could be wrong about present-day American
life and culture.
Duly noted, my
intellectually prideful side tells my intellectually humble side. But try this on
for size, you quivering, prevaricating mass of spineless non-convictions: while you shrug your shoulders and whimper, there
are fundamental tenets of what it means to be an American, and what it means to
be an adherent of Truth with a capital T at stake. Seventeen, count ‘em,
seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies offer remarkably consistent testimony about
Russian interference. The New York Times and The Washington Post, winners of
multiple Pulitzer Prizes for journalistic integrity and excellence, report the
same findings. Against them you have Donald Trump, who literally lies about the
most silly and easily disprovable things, including the country where his
father was born, the size of the crowd that attended his presidential
inauguration, the notion that he won the popular vote in 2016, the belief that Mexico
is paying for a border wall, and that somewhere deep in the unrecorded and
hidden annals of U.S. history there was something known as “the Bowling Green
Massacre.”
It’s not a fair
fight. It’s not. I am all in favor of intellectual humility. I am not in favor of turning off one's brain. I am not in favor of denying what can be objectively verified. I am not in favor of calling truth lies or lies truth. I am against those things. I think they’re
bad ideas, and I always will think so.
I will try to
keep an open mind. Really, I promise. And zucchini/goji berries? Not bad.
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/08/28/ten-ways-to-defuse-political-arrogance/?fbclid=IwAR2zr1JgkAina6h2Sc5crFubRcljtwYwzhQXbWBBBtzhRCF7pkIlZbBnlHo
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