Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

The Return of the Know-Nothings – Part 2

I wrote earlier on Professor Geoffrey Stone’s rather appalling article in April 30’s Chicago Tribune, "Our-faith based justices." In his article Professor Stone comes close to accusing the five justices who upheld Congress’s ban on partial-birth abortion (or "intact dilation and evacuation," if you prefer) of doing so because they are Catholic and they let their religious beliefs control over the law.

I understand that Professor Stone is very upset at the Supreme Court’s decision, but I wonder if he has fully thought through the implications and possible consequences of what he is saying. The charges he made are not only very serious but also very dangerous.

The problem is that Professor Stone’s article at least borders on bigotry, if it is not bigotry, pure and simple. Bigotry is one of those things that is, sadly, part of human nature. Humanity has struggled for centuries to overcome its tendencies towards things such as this. Progress has been slow, and uneven at times, but we have progressed. Still, too often it seems only a thin veneer of good manners and civilized behavior separates us from these prejudices and biases that are part of our dark side.

Because this veneer is, in places, so very thin, we must be careful to guard it and protect it. Those of us who should know better, and that would include professors at law schools such as the University of Chicago, have an especial duty to avoid appealing to those base tendencies that would break through this veneer.

Once one side in a dispute makes a charge such as this, the other side will feel justified in replying in kind or even worse. Back and forth this goes, as matters spin out of control. Once our fears and base emotions are unleashed, it is hard to know what will happen, but there have been too many examples throughout history of what can happen.

Abortion is one of those issues where we need to be particularly careful to avoid appeals which could incite the extremists on either side. Terrible things have happened in the past. We should not tempt those parts of our nature which could do such things again in the future. I would hope that Professor Stone did not fully realize the risk he was taking, for all of us, in saying the things he did in his article. I would hope that because it would be even worse if he knew it and said them anyway.

Truth and the Right to Be Wrong

Julian Baggini in the Guardian of April 14 discusses what he, and others (including those as different as the British Ministry of Defence and the Vatican), see as the clash between "pragmatic relativism and dogmatic certainty." Mr. Baggini says

"the MoD [Ministry of Defence] believes that ‘the trend towards moral relativism and increasingly pragmatic values’ [is] causing more and more people to seek ‘more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism’."

Baggini asks

"[h]ow did we get to this dismal Hobson's choice? The finger of blame has to be pointed largely at academics and intellectuals who have been so keen to debunk popular notions of truth that they have created a culture in which the middle ground between shoulder-shrugging relativism and dogmatic fundamentalism has been vacated."

Baggini says that many left-leaning intellectuals think

"that denying objectivity and truth is politically important, as a way of liberating people from the ways of seeing the world promoted as the Truth by the powerful. However, it turns out that [they have] seriously misjudged what happens if intellectuals deny truth stridently and frequently enough. Far from making liberal openness more attractive, such denials actually make it appear empty, repugnant and weak compared to the crystalline clarity and certainty of dogma."

Baggini concludes that "[u]nless we can make a convincing case that the choice is not between relativism or dogmatism, more and more people will reject the former and embrace the latter."

I am not a philosopher, and I do not want to get into all of their debates on "Truth." However, I do think there is a real world position between what seems to many to be a principle-less moral relativism and the kind of dogmatic certainism that leads its believers to try to subject the world to its rules. That position is "the right to be wrong."

I believe that some things are right and that some things are wrong. But my certainty does not make me think I have the right to force my beliefs on others. Even though I believe, even though I know, I am right, I do not think I have the right to force others to do or to believe as I do – because I think we all have the right to be wrong.

Obviously, there are limits on a right to be wrong. Some things, such as stealing something just because you want it or driving 120 mph on city streets, must be prohibited. Other things should not. I can think it is absolutely clear that government-run health care is a bad idea for the United States today, but I would not pass a law making it illegal to support that idea. I know that Wrigley Field is the best baseball park in the world, but I would not require all ballparks be made to look like the Friendly Confines. The reason I would not do this is not because I think I might be wrong. I do not. I am sure I am right and other people are wrong. I just believe that other people have the right to their opinions even though they are wrong; i.e., they have the right to be wrong.

It is important to emphasize that saying a person or a country has the right to be wrong does not mean that I think I might be wrong or that he or they might be right. It just means I am not going to use force to make them believe or act like me.

Drawing the line between where a person or society has the right to be wrong and where they do not is not always easy. However, that does not mean all things are relative and nothing is right or wrong. Just because something is not prohibited does not mean it might be right. Things can be legal and wrong. There is truth. We just do not force it on others.

Now some people may think "the right to be wrong" is an obvious thing, a superficial idea that it is nothing more than a cute little turn of a phrase. It may be a nice phrase, but it does have real meaning, and it requires two things. First, you have to actually believe that what you think is right is right and that, this is the hard part, what somebody else believes is wrong. This is difficult because people do not want to be confrontational. They do not want to say that they are right and somebody else is wrong. They would rather just say that you can believe what you want and I will believe what I want. But that, on a society-wide basis, is just another form of moral relativism. To have a right to be wrong, you have to first believe you are right and the other person is wrong. You do not have to be obnoxious about it, but you do have to clearly believe you are right – and they are wrong.

Second, once you believe there is a right and a wrong, you then have to agree that other people can do what they want, within appropriate limits, even though it is absolutely clear they are wrong. For example, even though you know (as we all do) that cigarettes are dangerous, you have to let people smoke them. Similarly, people must be allowed to build houses which do not fit the style of the other houses in their neighborhood even though their neighbors do not like it. People must be permitted to believe in whichever god they want or that there is no god at all, and to meet with other people to worship their god or to talk about the fact there is no god, even if the majority of society believes differently.

While these may seem obvious (they do to me), they are not obvious to many people. There are places where government tries to make it against the law to do "wrong" things. Some times it is done to protect people from harming themselves. Other times it is to because one group has more votes than another. And some times it is just because it can. There are plenty of people in the United States who would like to ban cigarettes. There are rules in some communities prohibiting new architectural styles or architectural styles that do not "fit" what the community thinks is right (rules that, if they had been in place in the past, would have stopped some of our greatest architects in their tracks). In Saudi Arabia it is against the law to worship any but the official god. The right to be wrong, however, means that people must be allowed to do and believe as they want.

One final point: Some will object to my concept of "the right to be wrong" on the ground that I am disrespecting them and their beliefs when I say they are wrong. That is not true. In fact, I am giving them the ultimate respect: I am defending their right to believe what they do even though I know they are wrong.

"The right to be wrong" is the proper middle ground between a moral relativism that accepts everything while believing nothing and a dogmatic fundamentalism that would force everybody to believe and do as it says. In spite of what some philosophers may say, there is truth in this world. The point of the right to be wrong is that I have no right to force others to agree with the truth as I know it. They have a right, subject to proper limits, to believe as they do, even though I know they are wrong – because they, like all of us, have the right to be wrong.

Tolerance and "The Right To Be Wrong"

Here are some initial thoughts on a topic that has been of interest for a while:

The problem with tolerance is that it is too often confused with approval. But that is not what tolerance is or means, and by confusing tolerance with approval, one gets two things wrong. First, one establishes too narrow of a scope for tolerance. Second, one raises the stakes on tolerance too high

Tolerance is not the "right to do" a certain thing. Rather, tolerance should be viewed as allowing other people "the right to be wrong." This is important distinction. What it means is that we do not have to approve or accept or agree with what is being done to be tolerant of it. We can know with absolute certainty that what somebody is doing is wrong and still allow them to do it, to be tolerant of what they are doing, because they have the right to be wrong.*

We tolerate people doing what they want not because they might be right or because we do not know what is right or what produces the best results. We tolerate what a person does or thinks, even though we know for a 100% certainty they are wrong, because each person has the right to be wrong. It is not because a particular view or act might be right in the future or better in the long run that we tolerate it. We tolerate it, we allow a person to do it, because each person has have the right to be wrong.

Viewed this way, being tolerant becomes much easier. If tolerance does not mean acceptance or approval, then it is easier to be tolerant. I can tolerate something even though I know it is wrong because people have the right to be wrong. It is much harder to be tolerant if tolerance is based on the possibility that what somebody is doing might be right. If that is the basis for tolerance, then an act can be prohibited, in fact, it should be prohibited, if a majority is 100% sure it is wrong.

If only things that might be right or which cannot be proved wrong are tolerated, then the fact something is tolerated means it might be right. That is a problem because it means the mere act of tolerating something becomes an acceptance of the possibility that it might be right. And it is not a very large step from that to saying tolerance means something is right.

This is where the problem comes in. If toleration means something is right, or at least not wrong, then we have raised the stakes on toleration because if somebody really believes something is wrong, then they cannot tolerate it.

On the other hand, if one has the right to be wrong, then tolerance only means accepting that a person has the right to be wrong. When tolerance does not mean or imply approval or even the possibility of approval, then tolerance becomes easier, and people can more easily tolerate what other people do or think, because, after all, they have the right to be wrong.

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* Obviously, the right to be wrong does not include the right to harm other people or interfere with the rights of other people. Rights do not extend that far, but even the idea of "not harming other people" must be narrowly drawn or the exception becomes the rule, and we are right back where we started.