Honestly

Having a conversation with someone the other day concerning the various sorts of backlash after our recent election night results, we both lamented the large lack of “fair and balanced” going on in both camps. Both cases are chock full of their own brand of irony.

The Right has the very phrase “fair and balanced” trademarked and marketed as their niche. The Left constantly pokes fun at that fact while claiming they are being anything but. We’re all familiar with how quickly such disagreements devolve into spitting matches.

It would, however, seem as if our president-elect, Donald Trump, has now brought us all together to be the same kind of idiot no matter how different our manifestations of that idiocy may in fact appear. The truth has indeed been stranger than fiction.

We’ve seen many examples of one unfortunate reality: that intellectual honesty is the first casualty in all of these culture wars.

Getting our definition straight

And what exactly is intellectual honesty?

It’s having the wherewithal and humility to notice when your ideas aren’t quite adding up to their supposed sum and reworking your math appropriately.

It is fighting tooth and nail against a willful blindness to your own internal inconsistencies; fending off the choice to harbor compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance in your mode of thinking rather than dealing with the incongruences found within your outlook, especially when they are pointed out by others.

It’s refusing to lazily accept a partial worldview rather than doing the hard work of nuancing your ideas and having the required conditional mechanisms in place to deal with the ethical slipperiness and vagueties that life so often presents us with.

It is, in short, doing the hard work of thinking, listening, and, in some cases, changing one’s mind. It’s not expecting to have your cake and eat it too when it comes to the marketplace of ideas.

One more flavor before we move on: it is being consistent in your ideas such that you extend your allowances to your opposition.

Tough stuff, right? Apparently so. Here’s a quick gander at some of the intellectual dishonesty that has been flying around the last few days and weeks.

Exhibit A

Liberals kept telling Conservatives to calm themselves down prior to the election. Conservatives were threatening violent riots and even blood. They were rightly told to chill and let democracy do the hard work it was made to do.

Upon a surprise Trump victory, however, many waving a leftist or progressive flag quickly decided to do the very same things they had rightly derided Conservatives for threatening to do just a few weeks prior.

Further, while not explicitly decrying a “rigged” system (like President-elect Trump and many of his supporters were preemptively whining about weeks prior to the actual vote), many liberals have begun to sign petitions calling for us to do away with the electoral college and even requesting the electoral college to vote for Hillary when the time comes. You know, to rig the election. But at least they’re being polite about it, right?

In other words, the system is apparently rigged now that their candidate of “choice” (where we find the only rigging that actually occurred) won the popular vote while still losing the electoral college?—?and thus the Presidency. Yet a large amount of liberal energy and outrage is pointed at Trump and his supporters, not their own party’s despicable undermining of democracy.

Exhibit B

Now we come at things from the other angle: Conservatives were in a complete hissy fit for weeks leading up to the election as they began to increasingly believe it would be rigged.*

They pulled no punches promising what America could expect of them if Trump were to lose. “We’ll party like it’s 1776” if Clinton is elected read one of the memes floating around. In other words, prepare for the next American Revolution?—?“give me liberty or give me death” was bastardized into “give me Trump or I’ll give you death.”

Yet, once Trump did in fact win, the stoicism portrayed by the Right is such as hasn’t been seen in at least the last two years (excepting Ben Carson’s perennially semi-stoic-but-mostly-drowsy demeanor). “Democracy worked!,” they shouted from the rooftops. You know, the very same democracy that was assuredly rigged just days ago. “The people have spoken, so shut up with any complaining or dissent.” It’s fascinating how un-rigged the election is when it goes your way.

Worst yet, Evangelicals crowded in to every social media post they could to tell #NeverTrump types to simply trust God and pray for their new to-be President.

And, while it’s tricky business to argue for what they would have acted like if Hillary had won, I feel we have a fairly accurate concept thanks to how the same group handled the last eight years of President Obama. Hint: it generally didn’t include submitting to the people’s choice (“not my president”), trusting in God (“he’s the antichrist”), or spending more time in their prayer closet instead of making and propagating slanderous memes (review at your leisure).

Becoming honest

Being so hopelessly entrenched in our in-group/out-group battle lines, how can we possibly dig ourselves out of this ditch?

For starters, we should recognize this isn’t a ditch we’re digging; it’s a grave.Our two options for this presidential election should be sufficient evidence of this fact given how many skeletons crawled from their closets.

Secondly, we must recognize that we cannot dig ourselves out by digging our heels in. This simply doesn’t work. Keeping with this analogy, we should rather put our shovels down and learn how to build ourselves up. It’s the only way to finally step out of the intellectual grave we’ve found ourselves in.

The first thing to remember then is that we’re all in this together. Things don’t ultimately get better for anyone—which includes ourselves—when we continue to contribute to this intellectual and thus cultural morass. Better for me requires better for you.

…this isn’t a ditch we’re digging; it’s a grave.

As long as I view my ideas as weapons with which to fight you rather than the means for generating our mutual human flourishing, then I won’t bother giving any weight to thoughts or ideas that fail at being destructive to your own. This type of zero-sum approach leaves us all bankrupted. Once more, this race to the bottom got us a Clinton and Trump ticket to begin with. We need not wait to gather more data as to the efficacy of this approach.

Secondly, we must realize that we’re shirking our moral and ethical responsibilities when we feed this mindless machine. For people of faith this should be more than enough reason to roll up their sleeves and get the job done. For the secularist, the move towards a greater societal ethic should serve as a huge, first-principles type motivator as it’s the most rational approach at our disposal.

But how?

For the religious

“Love your neighbor as yourself” by not using a straw man approach to disagreement. You don’t like it used on you and no one else does either. Ditto for ad hominem and a slew of other fallacies.

Be prepared to give a reason for your hope, St. Peter says. While he was certainly talking about a person’s faith, we must note that their civic life, flowing out of that very faith, should operate under the same principles.

St. Paul exhorts Timothy to be ready in season and out. Once more, the standards of one’s faith should without a doubt bear upon their secular interactions.

People of great faith then are to be people of great reason and thought. This is a great way to “love the Lord your God with…all your mind.”

And the secularist

As Voltaire is (mis) quoted as saying: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” And “prejudices [including being prejudiced against those who are prejudiced] are what fools use for reason.”

Or how about Burke?

To deliver an opinion, is the right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to consider

We could look at Emerson, Paine, Pascal, Watts, and plenty of other giant figures in philosophy to make our point here. The great philosopher’s had plenty to say about how we ought to approach one another so far as open dialogue and ideation goes.

We must learn to value asking the right questions more than having what we think are the right answers.

Intellectual honesty is the first casualty in all of these culture wars.

Let me go ahead and beg

Think about how all the data points of your thoughts form a coherent?—?or not?—?picture. If they don’t, then bow out of the chance to state your incomplete views and start busying yourself with much listening and still more thought. This is how cohesiveness begins to slowly take shape.

Realize that while concession does require humility, showing humility isn’t the same as conceding. Show humility, build an airtight framework of thought, and then get out there and interact with others.

Your opponent very well may be wrong, but your otherwise half-baked ideas aren’t going to ever help them figure it out. So please—please—start thinking before you speak. Think before and during and after. And then do it all again to make sure you didn’t miss anything.

Finally, for the sake of all of us (including myself) who may be wrong about any given topic, develop your ideas and test them by fire—each other. If you’ve got the right idea about something then I’d very much like to see you prepared enough to convince me to think the same.

Hopefully, when that occurs, I’ll have enough intellectual honesty built up to realize my folly, thank you, and think a little more like you.

* In their slight defense, Clinton is guilty of being complicit in the rigging of herown party’s election, which certainly adds fuel to their otherwise theory of conspiracy.

About the author

I very much like to write. From code to music to articles, I seem to have a lot to jot down. When I’m not busy enjoying my family or working at my baller job, I try to get ideas on paper and then on screen. I always appreciate anyone who has taken the time to read anything I put out there. Even more so when we can interact over it via comments or social sharing. Subscribe, recommend, share, and comment.

Here are some other posts you might enjoy: