On Learning to disagree without being disagreeable.

In the Evolution Debate, Not Listening Happens in One Direction, Not Two

David Klinghoffer

 

An eloquent post from Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal theater critic, might as well be a commentary on Doug Axe's observations this morning ("Public Opinion Is the Ultimate Peer Review"). Teachout (whom I had the privilege of working with at National Review long ago) laments the divorce between cultures symbolized by Red and Blue states. He recalls a time before half the country was so fiercely committed to regarding itself as Enlightened while dismissing the other half as Benighted, hopelessly so, or worse. Anyway that's how I would characterize it.

Many, perhaps most Americans of my generation (I was born in 1956) lived in places whose residents included people who read, liked, listened to, and thought all sorts of things, and who voted differently, even unpredictably, on election day. As a result, we learned to get along with one another, and sometimes we even learned from one another. At the very least, we learned -- up to a point -- to be reasonably tolerant of each other's crotchets.
More and more, though, we don't live together and we don't listen to each other. As a result, the modest but real tolerance of the past is increasingly giving way to attempts at outright repression, or (more often, at least for now) [a] sniggeringly dismissive attitude...

He refers to a Washington Post story deploring a prominent person's well-known appetite for fast food:

This "news" story is, in its minor but nonetheless revealing way, illustrative of the condition that now increasingly prevails in American society, which is that those who disagree no longer have anything to say to each other. Fact-based argument has been replaced by reflexive contempt. Nor should this be in any way surprising. In a totally polarized political environment, persuasion is no longer possible: we believe what we believe, and nothing matters but class and power. We are well on the way to becoming a land of jerking knees.
Never before have I felt so strongly that Americans are talking past instead of to one another.

The dividing line extends from food to faith, from politics to science. Oh, most certainly it includes science. Doug Axe, in his post, responds to a Caltech commencement address by Atul Gawande, the surgeon and New Yorker staff writer. To someone like Gawande, these sentences by Dr. Axe are a counterintuitive shot across the bow: "People aren't stupid. Science is a public enterprise, and public acceptance has always been its most significant seal of approval."
The theme of Axe's forthcoming book, Undeniable -- How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, is the validity of ordinary intuition as a tool in judging science. That idea is anathema to Americans on the other side of the worldview divide that Terry Teachout describes. For them, people -- "mere people," as Axe puts it ironically -- are indeed stupid.
In fact the deplorable stupidity of half the population is a pillar of faith for the Enlightened. The Benighted show their benightedness by trying to have a conversation with the Enlightened, not realizing that their "conversation" partner isn't even listening. For the Enlightened, it often seems, "nothing matters but class and power."
We see this in the discussion, such as it is, of intelligent design versus unguided Darwinian evolution. In this debate about an ultimate question, the mystery of human and biological origins, for one side "Fact-based argument has been replaced by reflexive contempt."
I would only offer this addendum to Terry's observations, from our experience in the context of the evolution controversy. Scientists open to evidence for design offer abundant "fact-based arguments," only to be greeted by a "sniggeringly dismissive attitude." They are not talking past us. By that I mean, design advocates genuinely register and understand, even if they reject, arguments from the other side. The "reflexive contempt" does not operate equally in both directions.