Listen up, my fellow champions of science, reason, and secular values: we’re doing it all wrong. That’s right, put down your copy of Why I Am Not a Christian and stop channeling your inner Hitchens, because it’s time we take an honest look at our tactics.
We thought we were doing our part to encourage rational thought and fight ignorance, superstition, and prejudice. The task was simple enough: present theists with scientific evidence against their supernatural claims, and their silly beliefs will evaporate like vampires in the sun. Show conservatives that their policies are unequivocally destroying our society, and they will collapse under the weight of reason. Beat them over the head with enough facts, figures, publications, graphs, statistics, and eye-opening documentaries, and eventually they’ll see the Truth.
It sounds reasonable enough, so why are they not convinced? Have they not received enough knowledge? Are they hopelessly ignorant? Gullible? Mentally impaired? Here’s a hint: replace “knowledge” with “grace” and exchange “ignorant” for “evil,” and you’ll begin to understand how backward our approach has been – we’ve become evangelists.
It turns out that all the debating and fact-checking and confrontation have done more damage than the anti-science/anti-secularism camp could have done in a generation. We’ve set up another religious dichotomy between the faithful and the fallen and appointed ourselves as the arbiters of all that is good, honest, and reasonable. The New Atheists are actually the New Priesthood, and we’re destroying our reputation as swiftly as crusaders in the Middle East.
But I can already hear the guttural cries of “Heresy!” I know what you’re thinking: Don’t you believe that science is the one true path to understanding the natural world? Of course I do. My criticism is not directed our message itself but rather at our style of communication and how we interact with people who disagree with us. It’s about process, not content.
If we ever hope to persuade other people that religion does not belong in the science classroom, that government is about protection rather than control, and that non-theists deserve their freedom from religious influence, we need to understand that we are having conversations with people and not with ideas. People will never react positively to ridicule, sanctimony, or public humiliation. They don’t like it when you ask them to discard their sense of identity or the culture that was handed down to them by people whom they love and respect. And they really hate the word “irrational.”
I know, I know. You are the kind of person who is invariably calm and respectful, and you even have a few friends who are conservative/religious/superstitious. But – here’s some more bad news – even if we restrict ourselves to a civil debate and refrain from alienating our opponents, we have at best made them a little less likely to believe that atheists eat babies, as commendable as that is. The real problem is not just that we are often abrasive and dogmatic but that we have been ignoring some very basic principles of human psychology.
People will never be as rational as we expect them to be because they do not structure their thoughts and behavior according to formal logic. Our beliefs and thought processes are largely unconscious, automatic, and determined by multiple, often conflicting motives. In other words, we often don’t know what’s going on in our heads, and consequently, our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are usually beyond our control.
Take some of the findings from cognitive science, for instance. The principle of cognitive dissonance explains why people find evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs to be highly aversive. When we are confronted with two conflicting beliefs, we are more likely to rationalize the position we already hold or discredit the opposing one. Another principle, the backfire effect, takes this resistance a step further: people actually become more certain of their beliefs when they are directly confronted with disconfirmatory evidence. And an emerging field of study called Terror Management Theory describes our tendency to entrench ourselves in our respective systems of belief and our group identities during periods of stress.
You'll notice that I've used words like "identity" and "culture" to discuss public attitudes toward ostensibly objective facts. Am I, as many New Atheists would claim, "accommodating" their backward views by providing them with an excuse to be irrational? In other words, is it okay to believe patently stupid things simply because everyone else in your social group believes them? The answer is no on both counts, although there is a grain of truth to their concerns: I am asking my fellow atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, and secular humanists to consider the human factors behind the beliefs. These beliefs are inextricably linked to our needs for identity, community, and meaning. That is why rational argument is insufficient as a means of changing them.
This is just a sample of scientific justifications for a new approach to our disagreements. If we want our conversations to end with “Wow, you’ve really given me something to think about,” rather than “That’s just what I believe,” we need to make our tactics more consistent with the findings of psychological science. In a later post, I’ll talk about a few ways we can make our arguments more persuasive.
Great post! I agree with most of this.
ReplyDeleteThis has always been my thought: "The real problem is not just that we are often abrasive and dogmatic but that we have been ignoring some very basic principles of human psychology." Cognitive dissonance is right on the head.
At the same time, though: I was a product of the confrontational New Atheist approach, so it is hypocritical of me to say it is the "wrong" way, you know? I really think we need both fronts. (Good cop/ Bad cop?)
But some atheists who completely lack social intelligence, and who try to emulate Hitchens, do annoy me. They are likely (or imagined by me, at least) to have been the outcasts growing up, and now they want to slap it back to the people who marginalized them.
Thanks for the comment, Ryan. I do think that rational argumentation can be effective for some people. These people tend to be better equipped for tolerating ambiguity and a state of uncertainty about their identity than the average person, and they are therefore more amenable to a direct and unsparing critique of their beliefs. Although, to be perfectly honest, logic and empirical evidence were only afterthoughts for my own path to atheism. I was motivated more by my outrage over the abuse of clerical authority than the logical incoherence of my beliefs.
ReplyDeleteIf you had confronted me with the kind of arguments used by Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, et al., I would have dismissed you as someone who was trying to invalidate my views for the glory of your own perspective or social group. While you would be trying to change my mind because you genuinely thought it would benefit me in some way, I would likely interpret this as an unwelcome assault. We too often assume that argumentation is objectively about analyzing abstract propositions when actually our opponent's subjective experience has prevented him from seeing it this way: to him, it's about maintaining a cohesive worldview, ensuring his connection to other people in his social group, and avoiding painful emotions like anxiety, humiliation, and self-doubt.
So, the issue is that we all need to be good cops in terms of tone (don't be abusive), but we can take the good or bad cop role in terms of style depending on the kind of person before us (e.g. argumentation versus persuasion). I'll be trying to elaborate on what I mean by persuasion in later posts, but in short, it calls for changing someone's mind through indirect means, by repeatedly exposing exposing them to contradictory experiences as opposed to contradictory facts or logical refutation. This may sound contradictory, but we are more likely to persuade some people to change their beliefs by framing our points in a manner that validates their worldview and avoids the one-size-fits-all approach of "you're wrong, and here's why."