Vantage Points

There is an online forum that I'm a part of where people can go and talk politics. As you might imagine, it tends to be something of a dumpster fire (on top of a landfill fire in the middle of a forest fire) due to a tendency towards posts that are cheap shots in search of easy partisan points. The recent election, of course, did absolutely nothing to mitigate against this, and the place was rapidly degenerating into flame bait on top of flame bait.

And then, someone asked a simple question: "Do the (American) Left and Right actually understand one another?"

Which prompted another member to issue something of a challenge: To lay out "the other side's" arguments from the point of view of someone who actually believed said arguments, and to treat them as a sincere person who honestly believes that what they are doing is right.

This is, as one might imagine, easier said than done. In large part because for many people, "the other side" is self-evidently wrong, and the best that can be said for them is that they're not intelligent enough to get it right. But this isn't a side effect of malice, or intellectual laziness; it's simply that not all people are open to the idea of relativism. And not just in the sense of "Proposition A might be 'right' for Alice, while Proposition B is 'right' for Bob," but in the sense that Alice's and Bob's worlds are different enough that they logically arrive at two different propositions.

I can never remember whether it was Saint Augustine or Thomas Aquinas who put this concept forward but the gist of it is that even if one allows for the Socratic idea that people do not voluntarily engage in knowing acts of evil, getting it wrong is itself a culpable act. And if Alice both lacks insight into Bob's world and believes that only culpable negligence would lead him to believe that Proposition B is correct, it's going to be difficult for her to take his point of view in a way that Bob would feel accurately represents him and the world as he understands it.

And this becomes the stumbling block to understanding; the idea that objectivity isn't what it's often made out to be, and doesn't apply to everything that one might believe it does. That, I think, is a heavier lift than people give it credit for.