The Problem With Group-Think

Yesterday I waded into the controversy surrounding Dr. James Holsinger's nomination to be U.S. Surgeon General. In that post I expressed both my disagreement with Holsinger's views on homosexuality and gay sex, and my deep conflict over his nomination. While I used to attend worship with him, I could never be mistaken for a big fan of his.

However, reading Max Blumenthal's views at the Huffington Post and the reader comments that followed it, I was reminded of what, far more than a kind of blind religious ideology, is wrong with the nature of public discourse in this country. Simply put, we so rarely really speak collegially with people who fundamentally disagree with us and our cherished values, that we have forgotten how to be charitable toward our "enemies."

While Blumenthal made some excellent points (especially in his criticism of Holsinger's involvement with a church that supports gay conversion therapy) he never considered any of the readily available evidence that Dr. Holsinger might not be the slave to a conservative evangelical ideology that his critics would have him be. As noted in my previous post on the subject (and in a Louisville Courier Journal article) in his previous positions of secular leadership Dr. Holsinger has supported expanding the public funding available for stem cell research and developed a reputation for treating people fairly without regard for sexual orientation. As the Courier Journal notes, "as chancellor [of the University of Kentucky's Chandler Medical Center], he once faced down two conservative state senators who threatened to withhold funding from a lesbian health-care seminar at UK in 2002."

I certainly have many reservations about James Holsinger. I am deeply concerned about his views on homosexuality, and have long lamented his (in my view) negative and reactionary impact on my denomination. But when his critics refuse to engage - even for a fleeting moment - any evidence that might paint a more complicated picture of him, they do neither their cause nor the broader cause of decent and reasonable public discourse any good.

I wonder if people like Blumenthal refuse to consider Holsinger's behavior in his previous positions of secular leadership (at the University of Kentucky and with Kentucky's state Cabinet for Health and Family Services because of some biased caricature of my home state. Perhaps it is simply assumed that everyone in Kentucky is a conservative evangelical homophobe, so Holsinger's ability to comport himself well in secular leadership in the state of Kentucky has no bearing on his ability to serve a national position. I don't know. And, perhaps I'm defending Holsinger - whom I've never seen fit to defend before, having vigorously opposed his influence on my denomination - out of some need to defend what remains of the dignity of my home state.

In any event, regardless of Holsinger's opponents motives in overlooking evidence that complicates their caricature of him, or of my own motives in defending a person whom I neither like nor support, this simple fact remains: when we only dialogue with people who already agree with us, we lose our ability to engage our ideological opponents with charity. That impoverishes our public discourse, and keeps us from being able to reason together.

This is most evident in the comments that follow Blumenthal's lopsided opinion-piece. Calling into question Holsinger's impeccable medical credentials, calling him names like "batsh*t crazy a$$hole" and "freakazoid;" these don't do anyone any good. They only mirror that which I hate about most neo-cons and conservative evangelicals, a willingness to believe the worst about their opponents, and to dismiss them with the wave of an unsupported ad hominem.

I don't know that Dr. Holsinger is fit to serve as U.S. Surgeon General. I have some serious misgivings about that. But I do know that as a human being, a doctor, and as a professor and administrator, he is worthy of some respect. And, as a nominee, he is worthy of reasonable consideration. It may well be that such reasonable consideration would find that he has no business being Surgeon General. But if our decision making process is so fraught with such unreasonable discourse as is coming from bloggers and others trying to apply pressure to Senators to dump a nominee for Surgeon General before they've even met with him, we will never be able to make reasonable decisions that benefit the public. We will simply have the same sort of government we've had for the duration of the Bush administration, with the only change being the name of the party controlling the House and Senate, and the content of the ideology being imposed on the public without a concern for well-reasoned public discourse.

Juxtapose These Posts

A couple of days ago I read this post by Dagoods at Debunking Christianity. While he is an atheist and I am a Christian, I often finding my self saying a quiet Amen! after reading some of his posts. He and I, you see, share a pet project: bringing charity back into conversation.

In his most recent post he laments the lack of charity that Christians (and probably other theists as well) bring to their conversations with atheists. He rightly notes that when a Christian asks, "Why are you a atheist?", they are, rather than actually asking a question as an appeal for information, simply opening the conversational door, so that they can inform the atheist of the real reason for their position, their true motives.

Just as I attack broad, overarching functionalistic theories of religion - whether it be the evolutionary approach of E.O. Wilson, or the psychoanalytic approach of Freud, or the sociological approach of Durkheim, or any of the others - he is offended by that same trend in Christian (and probably other theists) approaches to his own atheism. What each of these approaches have in common is a refusal to treat a phenomenon as it presents itself. Rather, they must seek to insert that phenomenon into their broader world view. While to a certain extent we must all do this - we each organize the data presented to us by our sense perceptions, fitting it into some larger narrative so that we can then understand us; this is the nature of reflection - we must also remain aware of the limitations of this approach. It is quite possible that a new piece of information may not, in fact, fit into the narrative we use to describe our experience of the world. Phenomena not only confirm our world view; they sometimes discomfirm it.

Being open minded means understanding that your beliefs are not always right. It means constantly testing your beliefs against the available information. This is important when conversing with others, especially when they don't share your most basic assumptions.

This morning I read this post by Asbury Theological Seminary's Ben Witherington. In it he attacks the "Angry Apostles of Atheism," a marvelously alliterative phrase that also describes a real and distressing development. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and their ilk - the advancing public face of atheism - understand very little about religion, yet feel qualified to pontificate wildly on the dangers of it, explaining the real reason people are religious with the same arrogance that religious people use to try to explain away atheism. At no point do they ever attempt to apply any sort of interpretive charity to the subject. The phenomena of religious belief and devotion are not a part of the mental narratives of their lives, so they must, of necessity, be stupid, foolish, and dangerous. They are, as such, incapable of noticing the wide variety of religious experiences and expression, nor can they bring any nuance into the discussion. They are simply dogmatists, attacking religion with the same fervor that fundamentalists attack the evils of "secularism."

Witherington identifies certain hypocritical problems in this form of aggressive atheism - a form of atheism that I see all too often in the comments at Debunking Christianity, and in posts by some of the bloggers there. (This is by no means to say that everyone at Debunking Christianity participates in this problem, or I wouldn't waste my time going there almost every day!) However, I'm afraid he fails to notice some of the same tendencies in himself.

When he builds up constructive arguments for the value and validity of religious experience, when he demonstrates that not all Christians are ignorant fools, or when he attacks the arrogant dogmatism of certain atheistic assumptions, Witherington offers us a valuable service. However, much like those who frequently ask Dagoods why he is an atheist, only to answer their own question, when Witherington offers his own sweeping assertions about the nature of atheism he not only fails to distinguish between the many forms of atheism, but he also exercises some serious intellectual hubris.

When he says things like

Yes, friends you see, fundamentalism is not in the end a position on the arc of the religious or theological spectrum. It is a mindset that can be embraced by conservatives or liberals, true believers or atheists. It is what Bloom complained about when he bemoaned 'the closing of the American mind'. It has to do not merely with the lust for certainty, though that is a crucial component, but also the actual belief that you have found that absolute certainty such that faith is no longer required, it has become unassailable knowledge.

He is dead on, not only instructive but even helpful. However, when he says

But at the end of the day, it does seem probable to me that atheists like Dawkins are in denial about God, because they are in fact in denial about their own nature and condition-- created in God's image. It is of course galling to human pride to discover that one is not a self-made person. It is galling to learn that one owes one's very existence to another outside of the oneself. And it is most galling of all to learn that that Person is not merely one of one's parents, but in fact one's heavenly parent, the Creator. It has been said that one cannot know who one is, unless one knows whose one is-- 'little lamb who made thee' asked William Blake. And here in lies the rub for atheists. They cannot truly learn who they are, and the very nature of human existence without knowing their Maker. When one learns whose one is, one learns who one is.

he assumes that the atheist position comes from a kind of existential dishonesty. While this may be the case for some atheists - each of us, to a certain extent, is guilty of a little existential dishonesty, a refusal to believe the truth about ourselves - many atheists that I know personally are, far from being in any kind of denial, actually a great deal more honest with themselves than many religious people.

Atheism, from the atheist perspective, doesn't come from extreme hubris or a willingness to deny the most fundamental truths about one's self and one's position in the universe, any more than religious belief and devotion, from the religious perspective, comes from ignorance, superstition, or the need for cosmic paternalism. If we are to truly understand each other, and as such live in a peaceful society, we have to meet each other where we are, quick to listen, slow to speak, and especially slow to become angry or assume the worst about another.

New Sidebar Item, Plus Additional Tagging

The more I visit blogs like Debunking Christianity, blog devoted to debating a single topic or set of topics, the more thankful I am that by and large this blog has been free of the sort of rancor which characterizes discussions in our culture, and especially in this strange artificial social environment we call the blogosphere. So often, both in "real life" and in this virtual milieu, conversations are decidedly polemical, with two definite sides, the "right" side and the "wrong" side. Of course, who is right and who is wrong depends in most cases entirely on perspective. Since we so rarely share the perspective of the "other," our foolish, stupid, misguided, deluded, or just plain evil debate partner, they must a priori be "wrong," just as we undoubtedly seem equally wrong.

This sense of our being "right" and the other being "wrong" as I said is a priori, in that it starts even before the discussion begins. Before any dialogue on any subject, all parties generally begin with a list of beliefs or statements that are "right" and a list of statements and beliefs that are "wrong." Discussion, rather than the meeting of minds and the melding of ideas, becomes both a test and a battle ground. A test, in that each partner in the discussion is looking for particular statements and replies, which signal agreement and acceptance or disagreement and rejection. A battle ground, in that, in the event of disagreement, conflict ensues. This conflict is not a wrestling against yourself to make sure that you fully understand what the other is saying; rather it is a wrestling against the words of the other, which are a priori seen as "wrong."

I say this not to say that all beliefs or ideas are created equal, and have an equal measure of merit, worth, and especially truth-value. Some claims are true, some claims are false. Some ideas are helpful, some ideas are harmful. Rather, I say this to lament the quality of our exchanges, and to lament the arrogance of our clinging to our perspectives. Just because some ideas are true does not mean that my idea, prior to any critical engagement, is necessarily true. Just because some ideas are harmful does not mean that they ideas which contradict my own, by virtue of my disagreeing with them, are necessarily harmful.

Discussion, real discussion, when it happens, serves to expand my perspective. It serves to help me understand other views, and see that not all of my intuitions are universal; not all of my ideas stand up to scrutiny. It also serves to let me know that people who do not share my deepest assumptions are neither evil nor stupid; they are simply not me. But, like me, they also value both the truth and the good, even if we do not always agree what those elusive qualities might be.

Because of the persistence of rancor in blog debates - debates which should be discussions but instead devolve into partisan bickering and polemical warfare - I've added a new section to my sidebar, titled Ground Rules for Discussion. In it you will find a link to my post, A Note on Charity. In the event that a polemical debate ever makes it way to this fair blog, that should prove a useful resource.

On a totally different subject, meme tagging is increasingly like Congressional subpoenas: just because you were overlooked in the first round does not mean that you will escape it. I've decided to issue a new batch of subpoenas - oops, I mean tags - for the Best Contemporary Theology Meme. The whole cast of Habakkuk's Watchpost, consider yourselves tagged. Especially Tyler, Ben, and Kyle. I can't wait to see what you guys come up with.