I was accused yesterday of not “respecting other people’s views enough”… well more specifically I heard “you only respect them if they meet your standards.”… Some other choice phrases include “normal people are not writing a university paper, we don’t care about proof or facts – our opinions are valid anyway.”
Of course… I had to decide how I feel about such an accusation. There is some truth to it, I expect people to think critically, to question things and base their opinions on facts, in other words, to be informed. The question was – is this a fair expectation ? The claim being made is that I do not show enough respect to the opinions of those who (and this was indeed a real example of a disagreement with the person who ended up making this accusation) believe in astrology for example.
But should I respect such opinions ? I state then when something is provably false, believing it is by definition stupid. The kind of people who push such believes are charlatans bent on harming or exploiting others. Not very respectful I know, but then I admit it freely – I do not deem these views worthy of respect. I believe in free speech and free thought. That means the right ot hold your opinion, a right I would die to protect- but nowhere does it say I have to respect your opinion.
There are a lot of people on this planet who hold the view that the way to assert their authority over another is with rape, that human life has no value, that the suffering of anybody different from them is a good thing, that conformity (or as they call it “purity”) is a noble goal, that war is a worthwhile endeavor, that torture can be justified, that eating the flesh of your enemies gives you blessing from the gods.
The person said “I can see where they are coming from”… well yeah, so can I – but I still don’t approve. None of these views are worthy of any respect. The moreso because these views contain within their very structure the complete and utter rejection of not just the views but the entire humanity of somebody else ! How can you demand respect you do not give ? Why should I respect the views of people, when those views are that my views don’t matter ?
But even without that – ignorance is an incredibly harmful force in the world. Most of the suffering we see in the world is far greater than it ought to be – mostly because of ignorant opinions. I do not condone ignorance. I do not respect it and I cannot ever start to.
By this I am not saying I’ll go and beat my opinion into people – fundamental to science is the acceptance that you may very well be wrong, that you should be open to evidence contrary to your theory and be prepared to change it, but these ignorant views don’t hold that openness. No evidence will convince them. They take statements of “authority”, “common sense” or “instinct” as undeniable fact, and will flat-out reject evidence to the contrary – that is ignorance, more than that it is willfull ignorance. Not merely being unaware of evidence, but actively rejecting evidence that do not suit your preconceived idea.
I do not respect that. I cannot, because it deserves none – and I reject them equally and without prejudice. Homophobia, racism and astrology are just different sides of the same curse afflicted upon humanity by the very force that gave us the power to become humanity in the first place. Memes, the capacity to share ideas and for them to spread. At it’s best, it shares our knowledge, our curiosity, gives us technology and lets us study and understand our world, but when meme-theory was first proposed the author rightfully said “meme’s are viral in nature, and parasitic – they don’t care if they are good or bad, destructive or constructive to the mind – all they care about is being in one more mind”. Meme’s spread and want to spread, harmful or good does not enter into it.
The critical thinker can study the meme, and reject those that are harmful. The ignorant are slaves to them. Unfortunately by their very nature the harmful memes are more emotionally appealing than the good ones. The good ones do not attempt to please us, they are not eastheticcally pleasing. This is because they are based on truth, and the universe has no sense of aesthetics. The bad ones, they “feel right”, they “sound good”… they stick in minds that do not question them very easilly, they are bad because they feel so good, because they make so much sense. They do this by not being in any way right.
The real world doesn’t make sense (at least, not the common kind), it follows rules we can express with mathematics, but it’s structure is emergent, chaotic and almost impossible to predict. It’s filled with randomness where any perceived pattern is simply a result of our brains’ hard-wired and continous pattern-seeking.
You cannnot predict the lottery by studying past numbers, it has no memory. It “feels” like numbers that have popped up several times would be rarer in future (but for some people, it feels like they would be more common) – but neither has any validity. Lottery machines are random, there is no pattern, our brains are wired to recognize patterns in chaos because it lets us survive, but they are not wired to distinguish real patterns from imaginary – in fact so strong is the inclination to finding patterns that we find them in absolutely everything.
This is what created astrology, racism and so many other bad things. Not reality, nothing resembling it – just our desire for anything complex to be patterned. Just a biological drive. We seek patterns like we seek food, to survive – but patterns don’t teach us about the world. They just help us not die. To learn about the world we have to study it, look for evidence and facts and test our conclusions over and over again.
That is how ignorance becomes rationality, how humanity evolves and may actually earn the sapience in our species name one day. Everything else is, sooner or later, destructive and harmful – and you just need to look at history to see that. Yep there are patterns in history – it does repeat itself, because humans seek patterns and follow them – no matter how harmful, unless we actively question our notions.
We don’t need to be slaves to our memes. I don’t respect ignorant views because I think holding them harms you, me and everybody else including the person who holds them. An ignorant view can kill. Mary Malone would not believe in the notion that one can carry a disease without actually having symptoms. So she refused to take precautions. That was an ignorant view.
Mary Malone went down in history as Typhoid Mary. Why do I not respect your ignorant views ? Because if she had just once been willing to accept the evidence before her very eyes -that everywhere she worked, people died, she could have taken basic precautions – saving their lives and sparing herself decades locked up in quarantine.
That’s what ignorance does. That’s what refusal to question your own world-view does. It can, in the blink of an eye – turn any one of us into a Typhoid Mary. I don’t respect that, I cannot. What I will continue to do – is question ideas before just accepting them, especialy the ones that seem “obvious”, and insist that people do the same. For the sake of a species which, for better or worse, I happen to be a part off and thus feel I have no choice but to care about.
