The simple inherit folly,
but the prudent are crowned with knowledge. | Proverbs 14:18
Kids tend to grow up with a strong sense of right and wrong. For some kids this is around the issue of justice: that’s not fair! For others this is about morality: Johnny said a bad word! For me, this sense of right and wrong was always about facts: who is right?
This obsession with being right in every argument on any issue can be a good thing; it drives a person to carefully search out truth and challenge any assumption. It also has a negative side: it alienates you from people. I was not always well liked, because unlike everyone else, I could not just let things slide. Truth was more important than being accepted.
It was easy for me to justify this, because how could being right ever be wrong? Then I got married. I found myself in a lot of conversations where I proved the rightness of my position, but ended up doing damage to the relationship with my wife. All of a sudden, the price of always being right was in front of me. It wasn’t that this was the first time I had hurt someone in the process of being right, it was just the first time that I was able to see it. With my wife, the hurt of proving her wrong affected me.
When we make being right the main thing, we can easily de-humanize the person holding the opposing position. They become defined by an ideal or a position, and when we crush their argument, we are effectively crushing them. Even in our own minds, other people can easily become nothing more to us than a categorized set of belief statements and political opinions. It is a dangerous thing to interact with one another on this level. I have watched people close to me destroy relationships over being right on issues that are simply not important enough to divide over.
For anyone who knows me, you know that I still care about truth. This is not going to become an article about how being wrong makes us right. What I have learned is that being right isn’t the only thing that matters. It is one aspect of the complexity of human experience. There are times when we must argue and fight and defend truth; there are many other times when we just need to put our weapons down and ask: is this worth the damage that it is causing? Is winning this argument worth months/years of built trust? Is proving this point going to matter a year down the road when I am still doing the work of rebuilding a friendship?
Sometimes it is. Some things matter enough to defend to the death; as I counsel and mediate, I have found that we allow far too many things to be relationship-destroying lines. Relationship should have a bearing on HOW we pursue truth, because relationship has a bearing on how we perceive truth.
One of the things that I have witnessed, is how the damage caused by pursuing rightness (whether it be factual, justice-based, or moral/ethical) in a dehumanizing way can blind us to actual truth. Once we are hurt by someone, we build a defensive approach to them. This tends to make us unwilling to consider their position with the same openness that we would from someone we like and trust. The more defensive we get with them, the more extreme their ideas seem to us. It isn’t necessarily that their positions are moving further from ours, but that we are actually drifting further from our original position in order to distance ourselves from them. This may sound crazy, but I have often sat between a husband and wife who are convinced that they are miles apart on an issue, only to discover that there is a small disagreement that has created the perception of great conflict. They either assume a difference that doesn’t exist, or create distance in order to position themselves from the other.
Seeing this in relationships that have a great deal of capital (marriage), has opened my eyes to how often this happens in much shallower relationships (friends, co-workers, acquaintances). With much less to lose relationally, we dig our heels in on an issue, characterize the other person, and fail to give them and their argument the benefit of the doubt. In this, we miss out on what they have to offer us.
This blog is not about setting aside the pursuit of truth, but asking the question: is the way I am pursuing it hindering me from finding knowledge? That is a question that you have to answer for yourself; I will leave you with a quote from the book that I am currently reading, called: How to Think, by Alan Jacobs. He approaches this as an issue of prudence:
Prudence doesn’t mean being uncertain about what is right; it means be scrupulous about finding the best means to get there, and it leads us to seek allies, however imperfect, in preference to making enemies. And all this matters if we want to think well.