Knowing you're right

Having started this blog 2 years ago, and not made much progress since, I have finally been inspired with an idea for a new post - this might have to become a biennial tradition of making a post on Christmas Eve, even if it is probably the worst time of year to get people to read it!

It's been an interesting couple of years since my original post:  

http://goodwillpursuivance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/goodwill-and-peace-to-all-men.html

What I said then still seems to me to be just as relevant, if indeed not more so.

It has been particularly dismaying for me to see the way in which Remainers dismiss those who voted Leave in this year's referendum as xenophobes and "low information voters". Does it really take such effort to understand other people's viewpoints? It is such a shame that more people are not aware of John Stuart Mill:

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion... Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them...he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form."

Anyway, I came across this on someone else's Facebook page (a friend of a friend), maybe a couple of months ago:

"I'd like to suggest that the failures of progressive liberal democracy to capture the public imagination around the world can be blamed at least partly on the perils of knowing you're right.

The danger of knowing you're right is that it can relieve you of the responsibility to argue your point of view. If you're right, then surely you just have to state your position clearly enough and people will realise it's the correct one. It would be unseemly or even dishonest to have to resort to selling your point of view to the public.

More dangerously, if you're so obviously right, then any reasonable person would agree with you. A corollary is that anybody holding an opposing view must be either evil or stupid; so there's no need to try to understand their viewpoint, let alone engage in any kind of debate. So you can sit in your Facebook echo chamber, sharing stories about how nasty the other lot are and feeling smug that they are wrong and you are right.

Unfortunately, voters do not take kindly to being told they are stupid. When vast numbers of citizens decide that their interests are best represented by populist right-wing politicians and start voting in droves for Brexit and UKIP (or Trump or Wilders), it is not good enough to dismiss those politicians as simply evil and, by implication, dismiss their voters as mean, selfish or half-witted. To do so merely confirms to those voters their view that the "liberal elite" is totally out of touch with their lives. Of course, no one person can directly understand the experiences of everybody in a country: we all live in our bubbles of varying sizes. But the least we can do is to acknowledge that other people's bubbles look very different from our own, and what seems an obvious choice to us does not necessarily seem obvious to everybody.

This is not to say that being right isn't important: it is vitally important, but it is no longer enough."

I heartily agree with this, but I'd like to amplify on it - and take it in a slightly different direction.

Knowing that you are right is in no way a good thing. 

It is, of course, a ridiculous point of view. It is simply impossible to be sure – the world is far too complicated a place for anyone to be able to have anything even approaching sufficient knowledge; you only need to look at complete inability of macro-economists to predict the future to see that. 

In fact, the sensation of knowing that you are right is a trick that your brain plays on you – we are all psychologically predisposed to believe in our own righteousness. To make matters worse, we are all subject to confirmation bias – we interpret facts so that they are consistent with what we already believe, and then ignore the inconvenient ones that conflict.

In my view, this actually means that those people who believe they are right are more likely to be wrong – they stop questioning their underlying assumptions, which might well prove to be erroneous. Idealists are particularly bad in this regard – you are more likely to arrive at the truth by being pragmatic. 

Unfortunately, it seems that people want to be proved to be right much more strongly than wanting to arrive at the truth – which is why we have such current problems in political discourse, which I guess is the point that the author of the text I've quoted above is trying to make.

My own theory is that things are getting worse as Western society becomes more and more post-Christian – those with a Christian upbringing are admonished against self-righteousness, and are thus more inclined to be able to see the points of view of others, and being able to do so makes the world a much more civilised place!

On that note, I'd like to wish all my readers Peace and Goodwill - not to mention merriment - this Christmas and a hope that New Year will see more people behave pleasantly towards those with whom they disagree.