Quite an interesting day on the Great Big Orange Satan, with much-discussed articles from Greg Palast and Cindy Sheehan, both of them hailing the intellectual purity of their arguments and questioning the humanity and the motives of anyone who doubts them. One is respectful and one isn't, so I hate to lump them in together. But both of them speak to what, to me, is the single most valuable point I have learned in my years in the blogosphere.
A central role of a citizen in a free society is to question absolute belief masquerading as absolute truth.
And it doesn't matter where that absolute belief comes from, be it Cindy Sheehan or George Bush. Nobody is so perfect that their argument can be divined from heaven Itself and sent to the rest of humanity bestride white horses in the Ideal Platonic form. Nobody is immune to inserting their own belief systems into a fact-based environment and drawing conclusions from both sources. And there's nothing wrong with that as long as it's acknowledged.
We in the blogosphere, particularly on the left, are hung up with being part of the reality-based community, relying on the buildup of facts and data and empirical knowledge. And that should always be the goal. But we should understand that, while noble, it is unquestionable that data can be molded to make arguments, that empirical knowledge is often subtler and shaded than first glance. It is true that Sheehan appears to have been thrown away by many on the left when she outlived her usefulness as a megaphone against George W. Bush and started criticizing Democratic leaders as well for their failure to stop this war. That is shameful. It is also true that Sheehan's nobility isn't a cloak of immunity, that it's vital for people to question her beliefs on the futility of war and the two-party system from a pragmatic perspective so that she can defend them and sharpen her argument. You simply cannot respond to legitimate questions about the strategic way to go about stopping the occupation of Iraq, for example, with "I'm right and you're wrong." Reason and logic DEMAND that you challenge all assumptions and arrive at conclusions based on a full display of evidence and experience.
This is 100 times the case for Greg Palast, who dismissively and rudely dispatches with legitimate criticism of his methodology by claiming that his critic is a Karl Rove plant. I don't care where your political beliefs lie, it is simply debilitating to rational discourse in this country to brand anyone questioning your argument as an operative for the other side. It is true that the recent revelations of "caging" used by Tim Griffin during the 2004 elections raise troubling questions about how voter rolls may have been purged to benefit Republican election attempts. But those questions need to be backed up by an open and deliebrative examination of the evidence, not "buy my book you teenager in your pajamas." This is the exact "argument" the traditional media uses when dismissing criticism; why would we celebrate it when it's employed by someone who is supposedly on "our side"? When an investigative reporter acts like a four year-old whenever challenged, and can't stop mentioning his very important investigation and investigation teams and his impeccable British cerdentials, the issue he's investigating somehow loses steam, don't it?
Jerome Groopman has written a very important book called How Doctors Think which should be an object lesson for everybody who reads and participates in the political blogosphere. In an excellent review in the New York Review of Books, Richard Horton lays out the various traps that doctors sometimes fall into when making their diagnoses and treatments. If you replaced "doctors" with "bloggers" I think that it's perfectly applicable to the current situation I am trying to describe:
There is a rich and rather disturbing variety of human weaknesses to considr when watching a doctor at the patient's bedside. Physicians can easily be led astray by seeing the patient from only one - and often very negative - perspective, independent of what the clinical findings suggest. Patients might be stigmatized if they are thought to have a mental health problem, or caricatured if they are judged to have engaged in self-harming behavior, such as alcoholism. This kind of mistake is called an "attribution error." "Availability error" occurs when a doctor makes a decision based on an experience that is at the forefront of his mind but which bears little or no relation to the patient before him [...] The ready availability of his own specialized experience in his assessment of what is wrong with a patient can seriously bias a doctor's judgment.
"Search satisfying error" is yet another source of misshapen medical thinking. It takes place when a doctor stops looking for an answer to the patient's problem as soon as he discovers a finding that satisfies him, albeit incorrectly. He gives up too soon. "Confirmation bias" intrudes when the doctor selects only some parts of the information available to him in order to confirm his initial judgment of what is wrong. "Diagnostic momentum" takes over when the doctor is unable to change his mind about a diagnosis, even though there might remain considerable uncertainty about the nature of a patient's condition. And "commission bias" obstructs good clinical thinking when the doctor prefers to do something rather than nothing, irrespective of clinical clues suggesting that he should sit on his hands.
I think we're all guilty of these errors far too often, on all sides of the political debate, and in many ways it's what Al Gore is getting at in his book The Assault on Reason, even if he isn't specifically citing it. We give our beliefs and assumptions more leeway, more of the benefit of the doubt, and therefore filter out contradictory information, stop when we've reached a familiar conclusion that seems plausible (the dark side of pattern recognition), and use selective information to make our points. This is no better than an Administration going to war by picking and choosing and inventing the evidence and deliberately blurring the distinction between those who attacked on 9-11 and those in the same general vicinity who had nothing to do with it. We must hold ourselves and everyone around us to a higher standard; at stake is the factionalizing and dissolution of the political blogosphere as a whole.
I write here because I feel that I have a strong voice that I try to back up with research and fact. I don't arrive at conclusions without some manner of examination at all facets of an issue. And yet surely I am guilty of errors in judgment due to a lack of rigor at questioning my assumptions. I respect and WELCOME those who would disagree with those assumptions and would make a worthy counter-argument. That process always results in a better solution than what is immediately divined with the intellectual shortcuts we make. We have a responsibility to respect countervailing information and opinion backed up with reason, otherwise we become no better than the forces we are working so hard to overturn. An argument is only as strong as the challenge it can withstand. Nobody owns a monopoly of truth, and I recoil from any attempts to colonize it, whether the imperial truth-taker is a conservative Republican or a liberal Democrat. I try to never forget that, and would hope that you would consider it as well.