Intellectual belief #1, Viewpoint diversity

This whole post is all easier said than done. Viewpoint diversity is an ideal to aim for, not a practice to perfect. It's something that I try to do, rather than something that I do perfectly.

Viewpoint diversity in a reasonably large nutshell:

Viewpoint diversity in a (reasonably large) nutshell means being open to competing ideas, even when those ideas frustrate you emotionally, seem stupid, go counter to your values, or even personal experience. Why do people believe and do strange things? In order to really discover why other people see the world differently, we must at least be willing to listen and attempt to understand their point of view. This is the essence of viewpoint diversity. It begins with a willingness to learn, and a personal admission that: "I don't know everything, even about topics that I feel most passionately about". Without viewpoint diversity, people tend to reduce their intellectual adversaries into emotions or euphemisms, as in: "Brexiteer", "racist", "bleeding-heart liberal", "upper-class", "terrorist", or "environmentalist".

Viewpoint diversity does not mean that all views are equal; it means that differing points of view should be considered in complex human affairs, like in politics or psychotherapy. It also assumes that integrating - or paying genuine respect to - differing viewpoints helps to build stronger, more robust arguments. In contrast, weak arguments are characterised by single minded, passionate, and committed viewpoints. Where there is no flexibility in thinking, people may personally identify and embody a point of view. This is the opposite of viewpoint diversity, as defined here. The hallmark of this is when an abstract argument offends you personally. And it's where the phrase attack the idea, not the person comes from, probably. Paying attention to one's emotions in a heated discussion is one way to cultivate viewpoint diversity.

The expanded explanation for viewpoint diversity follows:

Physical diversity and viewpoint diversity

Much time and energy today understandably focuses on the idea of diversity. It is increasingly treated as self-evident that people from different backgrounds are equal. Therefore they should be included regardless of their sex, gender identity, race, and so on. I call this physical diversity. Much less is said, however, about the inclusion - or at least the consideration - of different ideas. The consideration of different ideas is my first intellectual belief, viewpoint diversity (1, 2).

People are quick to dismiss the ideas of others instead of listening or attempting to understand them. We'll often hear about how people are "equal", but at the same time we'll hear that that other people are "racist", which has the effect of instantly shutting down their point of view. After all, it is presumed, why should we listen to someone who violates such a mundane and obvious cultural taboo (that racism is wrong and bad, which it is). It's true that people differ in their sex, in how they identify, and in the colour of their skin, but people also differ in the ideas that they bring to the world. As a society we have gotten much better at promoting physical diversity, but we also need to get much better at recognising, and encouraging, viewpoint diversity.

Why does viewpoint diversity help?

Viewpoint diversity is crucial simply because the world is complicated and individual humans are severely limited in their ability to understand it. To be blunt: humans have existential problems that we categorically don't know how to solve. By definition, existential problems are perennial, which is why writers throughout the ages discuss them (3). Politics asks: how to organise a society? Security asks: how can people defend themselves against the threat of others? Relationships ask: how can human beings live together harmoniously? In short, we don't know how to organise our politics, to keep our nations secure, or how to navigate our relationships perfectly. We don't know because they're inherently difficult things about existence, though we can and do make progress, (4). Progress or not, we need the competition of ideas to empirically test (and weed out) which ideas work in practice, and which ideas sound good only in theory.

Politics

There are various ways to be politically. There is autocracy, democracy, communism, and so on. The ancient writers Plato and Aristotle said words to the effect of: there are as many ways to organise politics as there is different ways to live (5, 6). That is, near infinite. It was true then; and it's true today. Each political system brings with it certain benefits at the expense of something else. We can have more or less privacy, more or less freedom, more or less equality. Humans have been talking about this issue since the dawn of writing (and probably before that, too). Given the fact that we don't know how to organise ourselves politically, it is baffling to listen to the confidence that people often assign one point of view (7). If only we could keep out immigrants, give people equal wealth, etc. Only then would things be better. Whatever truth does or does not lie in these statements, to someone that believes in viewpoint diversity, these statements have very little weight as arguments that would "solve" our complicated human affairs. History has demonstrated many examples of confident sounding "solutions" - which in fact had the perverse effect of creating worse problems than the original problem itself posed (8). In a phrase: unintended consequences.

Security

Europe received a shock when Russia recently caused the largest land invasion of one country against another since the Second World War. Once again, the perennial question of security was brought home to many in Europe. Can we secure peace by denouncing war with written agreements? Or maybe we do this by co-operating through trade? Or should countries invest significantly in their military defence so as to deter other foreign nations from attacking them first? The answer again is that we don't know. We don't know because war - to our knowledge - has existed for time immemorial, both in our evolutionary and classically ancient history (9). Lest we forget that wars around the world rage outside of Europe everyday, like in the Congo or in Syria. Might we benefit from listening to differing points of view when considering questions with no straightforward answer?

Relationships

Hopefully most people are aware unhappy figures for divorce in the Western world today. Marriages end in divorce much more frequently than we'd like to admit, though it's a complicated picture (10). Whatever the causes of divorce, it's hardly true that people in times gone by knew how to live in the perfect relationship. Gender roles and sexism generate much discussion today largely because 50% of human beings have for a long time been treated quite differently to the other 50% of human beings, to put it mildly (4). Whatever the specific reasons for this fact, it's true that we don't know how to navigate our relationships. We didn't in times gone by and we still don't today.

A note on "not knowing"

I'm emphasising our lack of knowledge in being able to understanding things. However, this does not mean that politicians, policymakers, and people in relationships have no idea about how to navigate their respective fields. Nor do they always make things worse when they want to make things better. Instead, it's more that we cannot know things categorically. That is, we don't have reliable answers that work in a simple, clear cut, and straightforward way. Humans, perhaps, have a tendency to "carve up" the world into nice and neat categories of their own making, offering simple and sometimes naïve solutions (11, 12). Politics, security, and relationships are messy. Which means they're complicated. And they probably always will be. This is why viewpoint diversity helps, rather than hinders, our human condition.

People and their perspectives

People have unique genetics that produce unique brains (13, 14). Biology aside, cultures differ (1). Widely. The nation England differs culturally from the nation Scotland, but urban and English Manchester differs from rural and English Norfolk, too. All of us tend to evaluate the world according to how our brains are structured and what we've learned through our cultural experience. We seek out and are drawn to ideas that confirm our point of view, rather than challenge it. This might be called ideational comfort; and we humans understandably love our comforts, physical and psychological (15). By focusing too tightly on specific ideas we blind ourselves to what we do not yet know, which is the birthplace for all our new knowledge (16). Socrates said words to the effect of: all I know is that I know nothing (17). And that's why whether wealthy or poor, rural or urban, educated or not, we need the diversity of human viewpoints to help us address our existential problems. Diverse viewpoints should at least be considered, rather than outright rejected.

What viewpoint diversity is not

Viewpoint diversity does not mean that all ideas are equal (18, 19). Nor does it mean "sitting on the fence". In practice, viewpoint diversity means weighing up ideas and arguments from different people who look at the world differently. It might mean integrating ideas from both the political left and political right to think more clearly about a heated issue, like immigration, mental illness, or education. Physical diversity rests on the admirable equal and democratic principle, that people should be treated equally despite their differences (20). It's obvious that the ideas of the Nazis were not equal to the ideas of the American constitution. But viewpoint diversity means being willing to listen to the ideas of other people, and to take their arguments seriously - rather than reducing them to emotions. The Nazis may indeed have been racist, but this label does nothing to understand why Nazism evolved out Europe's largest country.

As an extreme example, viewpoint diversity might be applied to Nazi Germany to discover why those ideas took hold and why people espoused them. Listening to others or attempting to understand them does not mean we need to agree with them or even explain away their actions (21). That is, just because we listen to why the Nazis ideas took hold does not mean that we agree with their ideas. On the contrary, viewpoint diversity holds that listening to Nazi ideas is useful to understand why people believed them and to answer a question like: under what conditions do ideas like that take hold? Analysis like this may help us in the present avoid history repeating itself.

As a personal note, in my working life as a therapist, I hear all sorts of things that I don't like, that I don't agree with, or that otherwise frustrate me. That doesn't mean that I agree resoundingly with what my clients say! But I still listen and try to understand the person who speaks, attempting to understand their viewpoint. Not everyone is a therapist and nor should they be - but people who engage in passionate arguments could learn the simple lesson of good therapy: listen and attempt to understand. And I'd hope that therapists are aware that they too, just like policymakers, are just as likely to fall into the "solutions" trap. That is, naïve and confident therapists may well be offering solutions that may make the lives of their clients worse, not better. Just because you are in a "helping profession" does not mean that you actually help people, a conclusion that follows logically from the premise of viewpoint diversity.

And that's viewpoint diversity. At minimum, it's an ideal to aim for; something to keep in mind in conversation. At best, it's a belief that helps me to think better about complicated things, whether in politics or psychotherapy.

References and further reading

1, 2) Discussed mostly in Jonathon Haidt's The Righteous Mind (2012) and Haidt & Lukianhoff's The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Also expanded on into Heterodox Academy, accessed at: https://heterodoxacademy.org/ The first book is especially profound (and readable).

3) Discussed in Mortimer Adler & Charles Doren's How to Read a Book (1972). Specifically, the idea of existential themes in human history. Writers have a tendency to talk about the same fundamental issues but in a new light. E.g., modern cognitive behavioural therapy is a variation of classical philosophy, and aims to solve the existential problem of mental distress. Many existential themes exist.

4) Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now (2018). Book that discusses progress and looks empirically at how and why progress occurs. And on why we tend to underestimate how good things are.

5) Plato's Republic, accessed at: https://librivox.org/platos_republic/

6) Aristotle's Politics, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3gVry2xoOE&t=5571s&ab_channel=KlaudioMarashi

7) I originally came across this phrase in Peterson's 12 Rules for Life (2015), however I'm sure it's a theme many writers agree with

8) Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society (2009), accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOWJSOz8SWA&t=40989s&ab_channel=ThomasSowellAudiobooks One of the best books I've read (listened to). A must listen for intellectually minded people because its a catalogue of traps that intellectuals fall into. Controversial at times, conservative, but sensible. Sowell always argue for the empirical tests of ideas, a view hard to disagree with.

9) Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature (2011). Easily one oif the best books I've ever read. Discussed violence at length. Issues of war, conflict, and secutiry are dealth with in the context of human nature, game theory, and much more.

10) Traci Pedersen's article called How Many First Marriages End in Divorce? Statistics and Facts accessed at: https://psychcentral.com/health/the-myth-of-the-high-rate-of-divorce

11, 12) This idea is discussed both in Taleb's The Black Swain (2007) and Taleb's Antifragile (2012). Both amazing books for understanding human beings and their ability to overestimate how well we understand the world around us.

13) Gary Marcus's The Birth of the Mind (2004). Accessible book on genetics, brain development, and mind.

14) Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene 40th Anniversary edition (2016). Accessible book on evolutionary theory and genetics.

15) Psychological comfort discussed in detail in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). Great book on a range of psychological details. Kahneman's experiments are physics-style; he is strictly empirical and specific. Very good to read.

16) I originally heard this phrase: "what we do not know is the birthplace of all our new knowledge in a Peterson lecture, accessed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKpqpBRVr8Y&list=PLYNhvBtnVUK6Y4D_HWApBC9ZpaES4eobl&ab_channel=JordanBPeterson if it was not said in this lecture, then it was said in the 2015 Personality and Its Transformations Lecture Series.

17) This phrase is widely spoken but I have not read it directly. As Wikipedia explains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

18, 19) This theme is discussed in Stephen Hicks's Explaining Postmodernism and Nietzsche and the Nazis, accessed sequentially at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQcNjHNXnEE&ab_channel=CEEVideoChannel and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2C90l7YlT8&ab_channel=CEEVideoChannel

20) Discussed in Will and Ariel Durant's The Lessons of History (2010). Short, informative, profound. I need to read this one again.

21) Discussed in Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate (2002). An essential read for psychologists or people interested in the idea of "human nature".