Stupid. Moron. Evil… Spend a few minutes observing any side of a heated debate and you’ll be led to believe that only idiotic and cruel people hold the opposing view:
Pro-lifers are misogynists who hate sex and women’s freedoms. Pro-choicers are evil murderers who hate babies. Circumcisers don’t love their sons, intactivists can’t mind their own business, and virtually everyone on a Mommy blog is a terrible parent! Believe in God? You’re a fool! Atheist? You’re a fool! Everyone who doesn’t agree with me is an idiot, right?
It’s an easy thought pattern to fall into. After all, if I regard myself as a thoughtful, intelligent and decent human being, it seems to follow that the person who supports that which I vehemently oppose cannot possibly have a mind and heart like mine. If I tell them the facts and they still disagree, the problem must be with either their intellect or with them as a person.
In truth, human beings are a LOT more complicated than that! We are all the products of a lifetime of information and experiences, all of which that have formed our current understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. As such, we’re biased to automatically reject new or contradictory facts that come our way. We enter a state of psychological discomfort, commonly known as cognitive dissonance, when we’re confronted with new information that doesn’t line up with our current convictions. Unwilling to accept that our reasoning might in fact be flawed, we’re inclined to return to a state of mental comfort by rejecting the new information as being the one that is flawed. So someone who disagrees with my facts doesn’t need to be stupid or evil in order to disagree with me. He or she need only be a human being who is comfortably convinced of their current understanding.
More to the point, viewing my ideological opponents as evil or stupid ignores the fact that we can all point to at least one example of something we once believed but no longer do. As far as we know, we had been wrong back then. We weren’t evil or stupid. We had merely lacked the facts, were blind to our flawed logic or bad reasoning, or we had had emotional reasons to resist a change of mind or behaviour at that time. As I explored in How Not To Change Someone’s Mind, most of us did not change our mind by being accused of evil intent or of having low intellect!
I have met brilliant scientists and philosophers who are Christian while I myself am atheist. I think they’re wrong on a lot of their facts, reasoning, and conclusions, but I don’t think they’re stupid for coming to different conclusions through their own reasoning. Similarly, I have met kind hearted people who genuinely believe that fetuses aren’t human beings and that abortion is therefore the kindest thing one can offer a struggling pregnant woman who lacks the resources to parent. I think they’re wrong on all counts, but in most cases, I really don’t think they are selfish people who hate babies.
This may shock many of my prolife friends, but given the opportunity, I would love to have lunch with Cecile Richards, director of Planned Parenthood! I’d love to know who she is as a person. What’s her favourite kind of music? Does she enjoy camping? Board games? What was her childhood like? Yes, I think she’s dead wrong on abortion. But human beings are more than the sum of our ideologies!
If we’re ever going to find common ground on this generation’s most divisive issues, we’ll need to stop seeing one another as enemies, and start admitting that smart and decent people disagree with us. While many people follow the crowd and haven’t reasoned their way to their conclusions, many more have interesting and thoughtful reasons for disagreeing us. Let’s give one another the benefit of the doubt. Most of us aren’t morons or sociopaths!
Perhaps we’re all a little bit right and a little bit wrong. Either way, I’m sure we all have at least something to gain in genuinely trying to understand one another’s strongest arguments.
I don’t agree with this post. I’m not doing activism wrong by recognising the intentions of my opponents, which are more often than not, nefarious. Why should I assume that my opponents are coming from a place of nobility? Especially when they display characters that are odious? Anti abortion activists constantly shame women who get abortions. ‘Cognitive dissonance’ is yet another nonsense term coined by psychologists to patronise people.
I can’t say that this isn’t ever the case, but I think more often than not, most people are good and they approach their positions from a place of wanting to do the most good. Opponents of abortion hate seeing women have abortions because they see abortion as an act that kills children. We may be wrong in our claim that abortion ends human lives, but that doesn’t mean we come to that conclusion in order to hate and shame people.