By DOUG SHAVER
November 12, 2020
In her victory speech, Kamala Harris said the Biden administration was determined “to root out systemic racism . . . [and] to unite our country.” I have problems with that. One is that I don’t think systemic racism is a real thing. The other is that while I would welcome reconciliation, it isn’t quite the same thing as unity. We don’t have to be like each other to get along with each other.
When Mary Tudor was crowned queen of England, her nation was badly divided between Catholics and Protestants, each of whom perceived the other as an evil heresy. Mary, a Catholic, was resolved to unite her realm by rooting out Protestantism. Whether she thought there was anything systemic about English Protestantism, I have no idea, but her feelings about it were not unlike the left’s feelings about racism. And if she had succeeded, then England would indeed have become united, because any Protestants who were not killed would have converted to Catholicism. She was called “Bloody Mary” for a reason.
Of course we need not fear that the woke left is going to be executing its political enemies, but it has no problem with figurative witch hunts and metaphorical burnings at the stake. We should be very afraid of any faction that equates dissent with disunity. Joe Biden said he doesn’t do that, and his personal history seems to back him up. He was never woke left, and the woke left didn’t really want him to be president. But the Democratic National Committee did want him, and the DNC wants to keep the woke left as happy as it can. The Biden administration’s tolerance for dissent will have important limits. It is unlikely to pay much attention to real conservatives.
Our national problem is not that we are divided. The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was divided, but the major factions were not accusing each other of being evil. They might have called each other stupid, naive, ignorant, misguided, maybe even dishonest. But not evil, so far as I can tell from the accounts I have read. And they did establish a more perfect union. It was not actually perfect. The founders knew that was impossible. But it was better than its predecessor, and it was capable of further improvement. And over the next two centuries, further improvement did happen.
The improvements now seem stalled, at best, and threatened with reversal, at worst, because of something everyone is calling polarization. What can we do about it? Nothing, so long as both poles remain convinced of their own intellectual and moral infallibility.
Among the subdisciplines of philosophy are ethics and epistemology. Ethics, also called moral philosophy, is the study of right and wrong and our attempts to distinguish between them. Epistemology is the study of knowledge, the attempt to discover what we know and how we know it. Conflation of the two has always characterized certain religious and political ideologies, whose advocates assume that anyone’s ability to perceive certain truths is correlated with their moral character. One of the more explicit expressions of this idea is the claim by certain evangelical apologists that disbelief in Christian doctrines is due solely to the skeptic’s unwillingness to comply with God’s commandments.
I used to be one of those apologists. I belonged to one Protestant sect that believed members of every other Protestant sect, as well as Catholics, were going to burn in hell. The church I attended had about 20 members, in a city of about 20,000 with dozens of other churches. We 20 thought we were the only ones on our way to heaven.
What got me out of that sect was the discovery that I could not defend it without presupposing my own infallibility. And it was a discovery, because I was not aware of any such presupposition. I was aware only that I was trusting certain authorities who were properly qualified to render certain judgments about some matters of historical fact that I could not investigate on my own. But then I was confronted by people who believed that those authorities actually were mistaken, and when challenged to explain my conviction that that was not possible, I could not. It was just my own judgment that those authorities’ judgment was not to be questioned. And so, without even being tempted to claim I was infallible, I had been reasoning as if I thought myself incapable of error.
I sometimes encounter people who lament the difficulty, when looking for information online, of figuring out which sources to trust. “Who am I supposed to believe?” they wail. That is the wrong question. The right question is “Why should I believe anything that someone is telling me?” And the only right answer is: Because they offer sufficient evidence. Evidence, in this context, is any reason to believe, but there is good evidence and poor evidence. Good evidence is a good reason, poor evidence is a poor reason, and if there is no evidence, there is no reason. If we have no evidence, we should not believe. Our wishing that something were true is never a good reason to believe it. I don’t agree with those who say we can believe anything we want to believe. Belief is not an act of will. But it is true that a desire to believe something can incline us toward credulity. We can learn to resist this inclination, at least up to a point. And we do need to set ourselves straight before trying to set others straight. We need to critique our own beliefs as rigorously as we ask others to critique theirs. It is an offense against both ethics and epistemology to tell anyone: You must think it possible that you are mistaken, but I know that I cannot be mistaken.
This is not an argument for the symmetry of contrary worldviews. Nor is it endorsing the platitude that the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Sometimes one worldview is more defensible than its alternatives, and some worldviews are just totally indefensible. But no worldview is entitled to just presuppose its superiority. It has to defend itself in a free and open rational debate, conducted in good faith. Good faith may seek to persuade, but it first seeks to understand. As long as we think it some great mystery why half the nation would disagree with us, we’re not there yet.
The president cannot make reconciliation happen. No president can. We the people will have to reconcile ourselves to each other. It will not be easy, but we will not keep our republic if we don’t do it. We are in a situation very analogous to the one in which Abraham Lincoln said to Congress in December 1862:
We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. . . . We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.