Against Debate

A couple of days ago Dr Sam Wells of St Martin-in-the-Fields read a Thought for the Day considering certain people being banned from certain social media platforms, and why it was fundamentally a Bad Thing. It was a classic liberal defence of the power of reasoned discussion, of debate and the exchange of ideas shining light into dark places, the kind of reasoning a reasonable person might advocate.

As we live in an age of polarisation some of the most interesting thinking at the moment tackles how people fall into unreason. A little while ago (also, inevitably, on Radio 4) Sarah Dunant described how she’d seen her hairdresser for the first time after the Spring lockdown and discovered that during the time shut up at home he’d transformed from someone who evinced no interest in politics to a teeterer on the brink of QAnon and other fringe ideas, beliefs which he didn’t swallow whole, but felt there was something to. Not so long ago I had to do Prevent training as chaplain to the Air Cadets locally; like everything else at the moment it consisted of watching a couple of videos and answering a multiple-choice quiz you’d have to be remarkably inattentive to fail, but at least it discussed the various circumstances which might propel individuals to fall into extremist ideologies either of Islamism or the far-Right, the common factors which, quite apart from the actual belief in question, lead someone to view these overarching explanations of what was wrong with the world and with their lives: how they become committed to them as essential constituents of who they are.

One of the relevant articles a friend shared via LiberFaciorum asked why Christians are prone to conspiracy theories. Among the broader reasons why such theories take hold, the writer reckoned, was narcissism: the feeling that, by subscribing to the non-mainstream truth you are privy to superior knowledge and understanding, which makes you superior to non-believers. Perhaps Christians, as well as people who think they are marginalised more generally, are primed for that sort of thinking. In fact, as we know, not all Christians go down these rabbit holes and I do wonder whether they are really statistically more likely to do so even if atheists might see an exact parallel between, say, the unreason of QAnon and the unreason of believing in the Resurrection. I think, rather, that Christianity is, to an extent, inoculated against grand, maximalist narratives of unreason partly because the Lord himself is notoriously hard to pin down ideologically, focusing instead on human relationships, states of mind, and standing with God, but more importantly because the Faith rests on such a small, single, self-contained event: what happened to one man two thousand years ago. You can believe he was raised from the dead, and this does not require you to form any opinion about who runs the world, or why, or who should do. It does not unproblematically map onto other beliefs, though it can.

Recently I was sent almost a full set of the Instructions of the great Anglican spiritual director, Fr Reginald Somerset Ward, and have been reading through them. In the most recent one I’ve read, he discusses the distinction between opinion and conviction, using the story of the Blind Man in chapter 9 of the Gospel of John, whose conflict with the authorities moved him, says Somerset Ward, from an opinion about Jesus to a conviction:

An opinion is a view held as probable but based on grounds which are short of proof. A conviction is a settled belief so final that it is accepted as absolutely true by its owner. … We are constantly observing facts and people around us and trying to work them into some logical scheme … These opinions seem to us probable although we cannot prove them. We do not in practice give very great weight either to our own opinions or the opinions of others; we are ready to lay them aside or to alter them under the pressure of events or feelings … In contrast to this, convictions have the highest value in any life; we are prepared to sacrifice almost anything in preference to them; we expect them to be recognised by others as unalterable; they dominate our actions and colour our whole view of life. … We can change our opinions without any sense of guilt, we can even act in a manner contrary to our opinions without feeling that we are doing wrong … In the case of convictions we believe that the highest spiritual authority of our lives in in question … to deny them is a high treason of the spirit, a breaking of the law of life. … There is always some form of struggle before a conviction takes shape, an intellectual struggle or an emotional struggle … It was in this manner that the Blind Man attained his conviction [about Christ].

Reason is the proving-ground of opinion: individuals can debate and perhaps shift each other’s views when they don’t have the whole of their identity at stake. But reason can do little with convictions in Fr Somerset Ward’s sense. Those represent deep decisions which the individual has taken long before any debate happens, and to deny any aspect of them will deny a profound element of who they are. So Trump supporters, or Brexiteers, or Haute-Remainers for that matter, are absolutely impervious to detailed arguments refuting this or that aspect of their position: they can always find an alternative explanation, one which comes not from a place of reason but from the basic commitment the person has made, like reinforcements sent to remote outposts of a battle line from the fortress far, far in the rear. People like this need engaging with on a far more intense and deep level (which, for all its faults, is what the Prevent initiative recognises).

Timothy Snyder, professor of politics at Yale, was also on the wireless this morning making three points about all this: that fascism can happen anywhere and longstanding democratic institutions are no guarantee that it can’t; that the collapse of truth is the first stage in the rise of fascism; and that the bigger the lie a malign politician tells, the deeper it draws in the people who have identified with that figure – the less amenable to reason they become because the more reality they have already discounted.

So don’t be deceived about what free speech can, and can’t do. Shine a light onto a rock and it remains a rock; if the rock is a problem, you either have to smash it or cast it into a place of darkness – which is only one of the reasons I don’t think of myself as a liberal anymore.