The truth doesn’t always win

‘The truth will out’. It’s a simple, very appealing notion – and it’s perhaps one of the most pernicious fallacies in contemporary political discourse. Wherever there are people with wrongheaded ideas, from members of the BNP to climate change deniers, you can bet that sooner or later there’ll be someone (or more likely quite a few people) who pops up to argue that the best way to respond to bad ideas is to engage with them through debate. After all, everyone should be allowed to have their views heard, and if someone’s in the wrong then that should be easy enough to demonstrate, right? You see this sort of reasoning all over the place. A good example is in the recently-released emails between then-Spectator editor Matthew d’Ancona and recent Third Estate interviewee George Monbiot. After Monbiot attacked the Spectator for printing a sympathetic interview with the author of a book which denied global warming was occurring, D’Ancona attempted to persuade Monbiot to take part in a debate about climate change with Ian Plimer, the book’s author. D’Ancona writes:

I accept that you see taking on Plimer as a bit like taking on flat earthers or devotees of the view that the moon is made of blue cheese. Why would you bother? The answer is that – like it or not – his ideas do appeal to some members of the public, and they need to be taken on if only to be flattened.

Now, the cynics among you might be inclined to suggest that the editor of the Spectator is unlikely to be entirely impartial on an issue like this, and you might well be right. But his argument does sound enticingly reasonable. The underlying assumption here is that to refuse to engage in debate (as Monbiot ultimately did) is a sign that there’s something deficient in one’s own argument; that if you’re telling the truth and your opponents aren’t then you’ll win the debate. But it isn’t as easy or simple as that. Being in the right is one thing; convincing others that you are is another. And while it’s certainly possible to convince people by reasoned, well-supported argument, we can also be won over by any number of other things: snappy soundbites, an aura of authority, humour or wit (particularly at an opponent’s expense)…and that’s leaving aside the distorting effect that our personal prejudices can have on how we treat different arguments.

Face-to-face debates such as the one d’Ancona was proposing are particularly problematic because of their immediacy. As Monbiot points out in the email exchange linked to above, it’s very easy to get away with factually dubious claims when there isn’t any means to show that they’re wrong. Face-to-face debate about empirical questions is worse than useless for this reason – without any means to back up disputants’ claims, the only possible way to be convinced by one side or the other is non-rationally. This is why Monbiot was right to refuse d’Ancona’s request to debate without Plimer providing the sources for his claims that Monbiot requested, and why Richard Dawkins, for all his faults, is correct to refuse to debate with creationists.

Even with non-empirical questions that are best settled through argument, face-to-face debates are often a pretty poor way to settle them. This is why, contra Liz Stephens on this very blog, putting Nick Griffin on Question Time isn’t going to allow the BNP’s policies to be ‘engaged with in a respectable environment so they can be compared to mainstream politicians – and completely annihilated’. It won’t happen because Question Time doesn’t favour the kind of quiet, well-reasoned discussion that would best show up the fundamental problems with the BNP’s policies – that doesn’t make for good television. The people who thrive on Question Time are sloganeering populists like Griffin, regardless of the actual substance of the views they express. The same is true of most face-to-face debates.

This is not about suppressing freedom of speech. Nick Griffin, Ian Plimer, and anyone else with whom I disagree should be free to say what they like, just as we should be free to call them on their errors or lies. But when someone makes assertions that are not just wrong but also harmful, it’s important to remember that engaging with them can increase that harm as well as mitigating it.

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, this looks like it might be an interesting read. I haven’t read it, but it seems to be getting decent reviews.