Confirming What We Already Think

NOTE: I began this post a number of months ago (as you'll be able to tell), set it aside, and return to it here because of current events ...

Human transformations are pretty rare--so rare as to be remarkable. We remember Saul on the road to Damascus; we read James Joyce about epiphanies (changes are more common in youth, aren't they?).

Other changes can occur because of humiliation or fear. Corrupt politicians and death-row inmates find Jesus; straying spouses discover Fidelity and Sex Addiction Therapy; abusive, predatory men (caught in the web of #metoo), declare it's time to listen.

There are other reasons. Back in the 1970s when Firestone screwed over my father-in-law (he had worked for them his entire adult life), he transformed from a lifelong conservative to a political liberal, fiercely pro-union. He actually said to me something like this: "Those hippies on the TV have some good points." That is not something I would have heard from him before the company tried to finesse him out of his pension.

But most of us--barring some kind of Road-to-Damascus or other lightning-bolt-to-the-head experience--are fairly rigid in our thinking, especially in our political and religious thinking.

I was thinking about this recently while reading the book The Moral Arc (2015) by Michael Shermer. In that book (as I've mentioned here before?) he describes what psychologists have called the "confirmation bias." As Shermer puts it, "[W]e look for and find confirming evidence for what we already believe and we ignore or rationalize away disconfirming evidence" (386).

This is very easy to do in our highly polarized political world. As everyone knows, you can watch the news channel that spins things your way, read the newspapers that do the same, visit the websites, share the memes, etc. You can go all day without ever encountering--seriously--the views and evidence of the other side. (And even if you do, you can ignore it--or sniff in disdain and disgust.)

By the way, there's nothing new about this. I reviewed a book some years ago about 18th-century American newspapers. You talk about polarized.  Papers were openly partisan; you bought the one that made you comfortable and found comfort in its lies and distortions.

Anyway, I think--in a democracy--we have to fight this tendency in ourselves. We have to be skeptical. To look for evidence. To make sure our opinions are based on facts (or, at least, on the best available evidence) instead of on that turmoil boiling in our viscera--on those beliefs already lodged firmly in our minds.

Let me give you an example--with the warning that I am no saint in this regard. I don't really like hearing "the other side" any more than most other people do. But I try to try ...

Because of some recent shootings of policemen, there has been some concern about a War on Police. I find this horrifying. A beloved uncle was a lifelong cop. Early in his life, my father worked as a cop on the Portland (Ore.) waterfront. Some former students are involved in law enforcement. I'm especially friendly with a Hudson cop I often see in the coffee shop (no, he's not buying donuts). His wife's a teacher.

I need to say this, too: I have never lived in a dangerous place. I've felt safe my whole life. I'm a white male in America, and I know that the White Male Team has been in charge here since Jamestown. (Things are changing, of course--and this is good, but it makes many uneasy.) So I have no firsthand knowledge of the tensions between police and the poor, between police and nonwhites. I know only what I read. And what I read, of course, isn't good.

The other night we were watching via DVR an episode of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, a show with powerful lefty leanings (I'm a moderate lefty). On the show, he reported that the shootings of policemen are actually down during the Obama administration. (And the show ridiculed Fox News for its recent War on Police features.)

Is this true?

So I went to some neutral websites--the FBI and others--and checked. Take a look at the chart at the bottom of the page (assembled from FBI statistics and available on NPR's website). What's different now, I think, is the amount of attention the media give these horrible incidents. The numbers, however, clearly reflect a drop--though until the number reaches zero, no one should really feel good about it.

I see some problems, though. In the line of duty, the chart says. What about those who are off-duty, like Darren Goforth, the Texas sheriff's deputy, gunned down last year? Well, we need to look for other data.

The point I'm trying to make remains--we need to check, not simply share biased memes on Facebook and unfriend everyone who disagrees with us, leaving us lying in a warm bath of self-regard, muttering amid the bubbles about how awesomely right we are.

In recent days, of course, another school shooting--and gun debates are flaring again. On Facebook (my window into the world!) I see polarization sharpening. I see memes ridiculing kids (how dare they speak their stupid minds!) and gun-owners (how could they possibly think that more guns are the answer!). I read bizarre analogies, all, of course, tilted to confirm the firm beliefs of the one who's posting them.

And I grieve, again, for the division. Oh, I'm not naive: I know it's always been there--Left v. Right, etc. I was a young man in the turbulent 1960s, so I've seen it flare beyond even what we see now.

But there is no hope in division. Only despair. We must find the plateau where Reason dwells, and we must listen to those who struggle to journey there, too, even if their ideas don't precisely coincide with our own.

I think, for example, that almost everyone agrees that we will not be safer if everyone is walking around with a firearm (or two ... or five). It wasn't called the Wild West because it's alliterative! 

I don't want to live in the Wild West. I want to live in a place where people attend to Reason; where people work to eliminate, not increase, danger; where people adhere to fact, not preference; where people listen to one another; where ... Aw, hell, you know ...

Meanwhile, I can only watch in horror at how we're behaving and grieve for the world into which my grandsons are growing ...