The art of courteously disagreeing is becoming sorely neglected. The most minor misunderstanding or disagreement can result in explosive verbal spats. Although aggression is now exclusively associated with men, women can be particularly aggressive in the realm of civil discourse (or uncivil as the case may be). Rare is the woman equipped to handle difference of opinion without blood pressure skyrocketing, palms growing clammy, and pitch rising to a bludgeoning shrill.
Our culture frequently promotes the fallacy that the degree of passion you display reveals the veracity of your position. If you feel strongly about something, it must mean it’s true. In fact, arguably the reverse is true. If you are trying to convince someone to accept some perspective then perhaps you don’t really believe it. All that is true will stand and does not rely on your defending it. We, the imperfect mouthpieces, fallible, nearsighted, selfish and vain as we are, are not very good defenders. If it is up to us, truth is going to have a rough time.
Thankfully, the force of reality supersedes our limited strength and does not rely on us to exert itself. Truth is perceptible from many vantage points and is available to those with eyes to see and ears to hear. Why, then, do we feel such a pulse-racing urge to shout down anyone who questions our personal “truth.”
The reason for the panic and paranoia of would-be truth defenders in our day and age is the mistaking of Truth with factoids. All observable reality has been digested in the minds of many to datasets and figures. Science is the paragon of “truth,” but science disturbs us with its vastness and counterintuitive, sometimes evolving claims. The layman’s quantum mechanics is nothing if not 10 years behind the latest research.
There’s also vast histories of thought rendered inaccessible to us because they do not neatly conform to our data mania. The result is not chastening and recognition of the limitations of our way of thinking. Rather, this is generation that ridicules the founders of the most prosperous nation on Earth because they didn’t have novelties like zippers. How could they anticipate the splendors of the 21st century? many are tempted to think.
From another perspective, the age of science and data divorced from cosmic vision leaves something to be desired. With all the splendors that surround us, ours is a culture that struggles to convince the young and healthy not to kill themselves. That would seem to bode ill as an omen of our age.
Willa Cather explored this contrast (without the teen suicides) in her novel The Professor’s House. The protagonist, Godfrey St. Peter, a jaded intellectual facing changes in life and existential despair says:
“I don’t myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins-not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance-you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”
The quote is worth reproducing in full because Cather’s words are a treasure trove. The theodrama of exist brings our small, seemingly insignificant lives into grand light, but beauty and truth do not depend on us for their defense.
