Truth-seeking and defensiveness

“Defensiveness: excessive sensitivity to criticism.”
- Princeton Wordnet site

“Bruce: They were so many. I just gave them all what they wanted. God: Yes. And since when does anyone have a clue about what they want?”
- Bruce Almighty

 

 

 

In a recent training activity I went through for my job, the following statement was made about the significance and barrier defensiveness can bring to our conversations with others:

“Defensiveness occurs when we take a combative stance in conversation. When an argument turns into a personal either-win-or-lose “word war,” we are not concerned anymore with solving issues rationally. When we become defensive, we concentrate more on defending one point of view than openly evaluating other views. Instead of opening our minds, defensive attitudes prevent us from gaining new insight and understanding…”

Let me make two points, one about defensiveness and ther other about truth-seeking, and then try to draw them together.

Point #1:

We all have opinions. Often our opinions differ. What makes one opinion better than another is the correspondence between our opinions and the way things really are. The way we know an opinion matches up with the way things really are is through reasons, or evidence. Through evidence we come to see the connection between our opinions and the real world. Genuine truth-seekers strive to proportion their beliefs to the evidence.

This is all good and true in the abstract, but when is the last time you had an emotion-less, passion-less, purely objective, well-reasoned, conversation with someone whose views were utterly different from yours which revolved around one of the following issues?

1) Religion
2) Politics
3) Ethics

Point #2:

In “The Problem of the Criterion”, Roderick Chisholm makes the following observation:

Skeptics believe less than they know
Dogmatists believe more than they know

If reasons are not the fundamental driving force behind the beliefs of the skeptic and the dogmatic then what is? In the absence of external constraints, there must be some underlying psychological reason that drives a person to either doubt everything or trust everything. The skeptic, for whatever reason, is cognively limited by a psychological inability to trust. The senses can’t be trusted. Other people can’t be trusted. My own conclusions can’t be trusted. But such a view, if taken to the extreme, cannot stand on its own because the more skeptical one becomes about anything, the less able one is able to be certain of one’s own skepticism. Along similar lines, the domatist, in a desire to trust and hope in what one desires is true, grasps on to anything that will bring a sense of emotional security in the midst of intellectual insecurity. I’ll leave the details to the psychologist, but I think something like I just described fairly describes the psyche of these two types of individuals.

What emotion can tell us about our intellectual honesty:

From a ‘fight of flight’ perspective on human survival, whenever we engage in an intellectual discussion over a ‘hot topic’ and we find ourselves or others overwhelmed with emotion (e.g. anger, frustration, fear, etc.) it is good to stop and consider the following question: “Why do I feel so threatened by this issue?” Consider the statement ‘12 x 12 = 143′. This statement is false. But, does this make us upset or arouse anger or bittnerness within me? Probably not. The reason is that the truth or falsity of the statement has little significance to me on a personal level. Does 12 x 12 being 143 or 144 threaten my way of life? Of course not. So why do ‘hot topic’ issues arose in us such emotional intensity? Here are two closely related explanations:

1) We want our view to be true
2) We want another’s view to be false

Why do we want some things to be true and others false? Because there is a part of us that wants to center our life around what we desire, rather than what is true. In other words, we want what we want. We have too much of our life already wrapped up in a particular outlook and we want to continue to enjoy the benefits of this lifestyle. We want to be right because being right feels good. We don’t want to be wrong, because being wrong can be embarrasing. We don’t want to think because thinking is difficult. We don’t want truth, because truth is sometimes painful.

How to be a truth-seeker:

Let me give two suggestions for how we might become better truth-seekers:

1. Strive to identify and remove the obstacle of defensiveness so we can see more clearly.

To continue the quote made at the beginning:

“…Consider one helpful test for detecting defensiveness: When the other person is speaking, are you listening in order to find strong points in the reasoning, or are you trying to think of a “comeback” response that would devastate the other position and demonstrate clearly that you were right all along? If you are only seeking victory over an opponent, you are being defensive. In addition to this unwillingness to listen, other signs of defensiveness are communicated simply by the tone of a voice: irritation, condescension, ridicule, and disgust. More explicitly verbal signs of defensiveness include continual interruptions of someone’s attempt to argue or plain insults that attack a person or a person’s ideas.”

2. Learn to desire truth.

By learning to think one learns the value of truth, by valuing truth, one’s worldivew and in turn one’s desires begin to shift away from personal desires to the desire for truth. It’s not easy. But, I’ve seen honest truth-seeking modeled in the lives of others; others I have met who have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of truth.

The upshot of all this is that it takes a certain amount of emotional courage and even “faith” to become a truth-seeker. What reason do we have to think that there is truth out there waiting to be found, or that what we might find is worth finding, or that we’ll ever succeed in finding what we are looking for? The reality is that deep down inside, we all value truth to some extent. After all, without truth, we have nothing to appeal to in defense of our cherished beliefs. Finally, without truth, life is nothing but the desire for our desires, and one of the greatest paradoxes is that seeking after happiness for its own sake is the one way that happiness will never be found.

WPF