Ideological Bedrock
‘We’ve found it sir. We know what makes them tick.”
“Good God. You mean…?”
“Yes sir, we’ve hit ideological bedrock.”
Ideological bedrock is a term I just made up to describe the absolute foundation upon which we build our world view. While people hold all sorts of wide ranging opinions, much of what we believe is determined by strongly held, general belief systems that don’t change greatly despite what information we encounter on a daily basis.
In the long history of people trying to have intelligent conversations, one frustration we endlessly run up against is the inability to truly change another person’s mind. All too often, arguments devolve into a rabbit hole chase where the eventual ‘winner’ is decided by who can take the argument far enough back without running out of points to make. Starting off a healthy Christmas day discussion with your Aunt about humanitarian problems in Gaza, you may feel you’ve approached the issue so thoroughly that she couldn’t possibly have a counter to your knowledge base. Three hours of screaming and broken family ties later, you realise that your Aunt already had an opinion on the wider issue surrounding that conflict, and your analysis of a single event within was not enough to convince her that the mental model she’d built was based on (in your opinion) a fundamentally flawed starting point. She was able to dismiss your argument without really engaging with it, because unfortunately none of your points hit home to the bedrock she had based her opinion on.
And that’s not so to say she was right. Or that you were. Mostly, when we run into these disagreements neither party can remember enough of the arguments that swayed them to their opinion in the past, they’re just sure that nothing they’re hearing now changes or refutes those points, whatever the hell they were. Since the argument was never able to get all the way down to ideological bedrock the result was always going to be disagreement.
Researching every strongly held opinion you have so deeply that you have an answer ready for each possible counterargument is the obvious solution to this dilemma, but it isn’t really feasible unless your quarantine furlough has been particularly long and boring. Even if it was, the mind is such a sieve, with so many pertinent but secondary facts slipping away after they’ve had their impact, that it still probably wouldn’t be enough.
The wiser path is not to engage with inflammatory topics unless you know for sure you’ve got the presence of mind to follow it back logically and to not get sidetracked by all the non-sequitters, whataboutisms and straw men that get more common the longer and more in depth a discussion becomes. And to let go when it becomes clear that your point is not being grasped, rather than succumbing to the urge to start getting insulting. A gracious exit will do more to convince than a stinging last word.
Which is far too much to ask of most, since arguing comes as naturally to us as talking itself, and the perceived faults in other people’s opinions drive us to distraction. Social media is a great indicator of how much we love to argue, as any quick glance at a Facebook or Twitter thread will show you, and it’s an even worse avenue for convincing others than the hypothetical Christmas lunch mentioned earlier.
Our phones and computers and the technologies that power them are incredibly intelligent; miracles of imagination and ingenuity developed by the finest minds over decades. And our brains are far more impressive. Unfortunately the way the two systems interface is not nearly as smart. It has been pointed out by more intelligent people than I that the data rate between ourselves and our devices is impossibly slow considering how quickly our own brains and our devices’ processors work. The simple fact of interfacing by touch, ten fingers at best and frequently just two thumbs, creates a bottleneck tighter than the stem of an hourglass.
When speaking in person, our data transfer speeds are also quite slow, but nowhere near as slow as when we communicate through text. Typing out arguments, waiting for replies, considering that reply and formulating the response means that we have more time to get into the minutiae of what we’re talking about, but removes the on-the-fly nature of conversation causing misunderstandings to arise and points to be missed or intentionally dropped by the sender or receiver. Frequently, the sheer amount of text that would need to be written to get anywhere close to the opponent’s ideological bedrock is simply too exhausting to contemplate, and the wise person sighs and buries their frustration, leaving idiocy unchallenged.
Which naturally means that those most likely to challenge it are the unwise; those who react on emotion, who may share the ‘correct’ opinion but lack even more the means to argue the point than those who gave it up as a bad job. Frequently, they are the ones who believe you can change people’s minds about grandiose concepts simply by arguing a single point, and they quickly become frustrated upon realising that isn’t going to be enough.
How many times have we come across such an argument playing itself out in which we agree with one side, hoping they will make the points that are so obvious to us, only to have them throw a personal insult or attack into the middle of the things, resulting in the opposite party being left with the glimmer of reasonableness? The discussion almost always devolves from there. It’s hard to stick to the facts when the ad hominem beckons, and harder still when we’ve run out of arguments and they’re all we have left. Who wants to leave the idiot on the other side of your screen with the last word?
The final nail in the coffin of online discourse comes in the form of character limits such as on Twitter (the holy grail of emotional backlash). With an increase from 140 characters to 280, those in the Twitterverse are now able to get up to perhaps a tenth of a thought per tweet, but the damage is deeper than a doubling of expression.
As mentioned earlier, these problems aren’t limited to online discourse. They are fundamental issues with human communication which have been with us since the beginning, and the nature of the internet only exacerbates things. Quite simply it isn’t enough to be right, and a righteous attitude towards debate will only alienate those who think you’re wrong.
So what’s the rub? Little, except that it would be good for us to carry the knowledge of these difficulties with us more closely. Too often we find reason to be furious with those who disagree with us, and usually demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of how they arrived at those opinions during the course of their decades on this earth, interacting with and absorbing information in myriad ways different to our own. Thus our ability to see them as people is clouded out. They become a cut-out representing reprehensible viewpoints, rather than a real life individual with genuine reasons for the way they think.
There is little doubt that some opinions are better than others. Little doubt that there are more and less intelligent people out there. Little doubt that in many cases people are justified in feeling frustration when their words bounce off people’s skulls without making an indent. But there is even less doubt that attacking the person, rather than doggedly chipping away at the foundations that their opinions stand on, is a great way to harden them further against you and whatever you were trying so hard to tell them.
“What do we do sir? The bedrock’s too tough to get through. Should we increase firepower?”
“No sonny, just take it nice and easy. Find the weak points, and we’ll crack it with precision.”
