Part 1: “You’re Both Right!”

I’m meditating on the fact that I repeatedly see discussions on social media where my friends are taking directly opposing positions, yet I find that they’re both making legitimate points, ones worth considering. In a sense, they’re both right, even though their positions logically can’t both be true.

The Bible gives us reason not to be surprised by this.

According to the Scripture, humans are complicated; specifically, they’re characterized by a nature that’s in tension with itself.

• On the one hand, we’re created in the image of God (Gn 1.26-27). There’s considerable discussion about what that means precisely, but most would agree that it includes the abilities to think, feel, and decide, as well as an innate sense of right and wrong, and the ability to rule, to take dominion over the created world in various ways. We have the ability to seek truth and to discover it.

• On the other hand, we’ve been damaged by our sin, damaged in every corner of our being (Ro 3.23). Our thinker is busted and can’t be trusted; our feelings may misguide us; our decisions are not always based in truth.

We’ve all experienced this bifurcation; we want to do one thing—say, be kind to our extremely irritating neighbor—and we disappoint ourselves by snapping back at an unusually irritating remark from him. Even the Apostle Paul described this ongoing struggle in his own life (Ro 7.7ff): he wants to do one thing, but he does the other in spite of his good intentions.

Even more simply, we should expect that all of us are going to be right about some things and wrong about others. Nobody’s right all the time, and nobody’s wrong all the time, either.

But in public discussions we act as though that simple principle isn’t true. The other party’s guy is unremittingly and irredeemably evil, and I won’t give him an ounce of credit or an inch of slack. My party’s guy is unremittingly good, and everything he does can be justified. But this approach, based in utter falsehood, cannot bring good results.

I remember when this point was first driven home forcefully to me.

In 1983 Congress passed a federal statute making Martin Luther King’s birthday a federal holiday. Forty years later we don’t typically see that as controversial, but in those days the debate was heated. Opponents of the bill argued that King was characterized by low moral character; supporters argued that his accomplishments outweighed any imperfections. (I’m simplifying here.)

During the Senate debate, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC), an opponent of the bill, argued against the position of Sen Ted Kennedy (D-MA) by saying, “Senator Kennedy’s argument is not with the Senator from North Carolina. His argument is with his dead brother who was President and his dead brother who was Attorney General.”

Yikes.

I’m politically conservative; I believe in limited government and personal responsibility and a bunch of other ideas espoused by Russell Kirk and Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and, yes, Jesse Helms.

But that outburst is just inexcusable.

And I’m not going to be forced, because someone agrees with me on philosophical ideas that I hold dear and deeply, to justify things he does that are just plain wrong.

Coming back to the present. The fact that Rush Limbaugh held some views that I also hold doesn’t mean that he’s exempt from the biblical command to “be kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven you” (Ep 4.32) or to “let your speech be always with grace” (Co 4.6). On the other hand, the fact that he intentionally made people angry doesn’t mean that a person can’t appreciate the contribution he made to popularizing conservative philosophies like limited government or personal responsibility.

The fact that Ravi Zacharias was a moral monster does not mean that his apologetic arguments were invalid. But the fact that his arguments are helpful doesn’t mean that we minimize the horror of the damage he has done to women who didn’t encourage his reprobate behavior—or that people in position to know should have let him get away with that nonsense in the first place.

In short, we need to listen to one another rather than simply arguing. We need to recognize when people we disagree with are right, and we need to learn from them, even if we’ll never arrive at all their conclusions.

That’s sensible. It’s normal. It’s healthy.

It’s the only way we can have a society worth living in.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

Yeah, I meant to spell it that way, even though Mr. Gates puts a squiggly red line under it.

Almost 60 years ago now, Certs produced a TV commercial featuring identical twin sisters arguing over whether Certs was “a candy mint” or “a breath mint,” only to be interrupted by the omniscient announcer inserting, “Stop! You’re both right!” and then pontificating that Certs is “two, two, two mints in one!”

If it’s more important that a commercial be memorable than artful, this was one of the great ones, because the other day it sprang fully formed from the murky mists of my memory.

I’ve commented before on one of the pre-eminent features of our culture, The Outrage of the Day—something that calls to mind Orwell’s “two-minute hate.” Over the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed a mob invasion of the US Capitol, a disputed certification of votes, and an inauguration; an explosion of sewage from the life of Ravi Zacharias; a significant weather event across the nation, but especially noticeable in Texas, from which one of its senators escaped briefly to sunny Cancun; the death of the World’s Most Controversial Celebrity; and a bunch of highly controversial executive orders, which, despite the ease with which an incoming president can spay and neuter the previous set, seem to be the most popular way of governing in a democratic republic with a largely incompetent, ineffective, and self-absorbed legislature.

There—did I leave anything out?

There’s a lot we could say about the social commentary on all this—

• The psychological phenomenon of confirmation bias, in which we believe what we want to and explain away or ignore what we don’t;
• The long-lost art/science of evaluating the credibility and reliability of sources;
• The weird way everybody suddenly becomes an expert on whatever topic is currently under discussion;
• The compulsive need to comment publicly on matters we had no interest in yesterday.

Feel free to add to the list.

I’d like to give some attention here to something I noticed just the other day, on a couple of unrelated issues:

Even my commenting friends who are asserting diametrically opposed positions have something true and useful to say.

It’s counterintuitive. They’re saying opposite things, and yet they’re both right, in at least some sense.

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days, and I’ve ruled out a couple of facile explanatory possibilities:

• I’m intellectually infantile, and easily convinced by flagrant rhetorical fallacies, consequently agreeing with whoever was the last person to opine. I got good grades in school—punctuated by the occasional down-spike typically as the result of character failure rather than lack of ability—but there were always kids in my classes who were smarter than I was—I wasn’t the valedictorian in my small high-school class of 27. And these days I regularly have students who are demonstrably smarter than I am, though I try not to tell them that. :-) And in any case, I’ve learned over the years that academic smarts are not the most important indicator of success in life, and in fact are sometimes inversely proportional to that success. At any rate, I used to teach rhetorical fallacies to college freshmen, and I draw on that teaching all the time. Since I often recognize rhetorical fallacies in the social commentary today, I’m not inclined to think I’m falling for them in the case at hand.
• I’m reading arguments from my friends, and I like my friends, and I’m subconsciously trying to justify friends who disagree with one another; I’m a peacemaker. Well, I don’t buy that either, since I haven’t noticed a strong tendency to be a peacemaker in days past. :-) I’ve noticed when other friends are wrong, so I’m inclined to think that I’d notice in this case as well.
• I’m getting soft on moral absolutes, turning into a mealy-mouthed relativist. I don’t think so; feel free to ask my friends if I show any tendency in that direction.

So I’ve been meditating on this for a few days. Next time I’ll lay out a biblical and theological basis for the phenomenon I’ve described, and I’ll draw some conclusions and make an application or two.

Part 2

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