The Loss of Intellectual Humility

It’s amazing how unwilling people are to reconsider their beliefs, even in light of persuasive new evidence to the contrary. Here’s one answer of why.

One of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov’s most beloved short stories, “The Darling,” describes a young woman who readily adopts the opinions of the people around her. When her first husband, a theater director, bemoans the public’s lack of refinement and desire for vulgarity in performances, it is not long before she parrots the same beliefs. When she marries a veterinarian after the theater director’s death, she pontificates about tuberculosis in livestock and foot-and-mouth disease until her husband, in a fit of embarrassment, grabs her by the arm telling her, “I’ve asked you before not to talk about things you don’t understand!”

“The Darling” speaks to a rather common phenomenon. Many among us seem to be disproportionately influenced by whichever speaker’s lecture we have most recently attended or by the author we happen to have most recently read.

But Chekhov articulates just one of the many follies that tend to inhibit productive dialogue. Another is the tendency to sculpt evidence to fit what one already believes. Instead of entering a conversation hoping to arrive at the answer most true, we grasp only at those facts that support our preconceived beliefs.

Those who claim that modern discourse is in a bad way observe that we rarely make progress in converting those on the other side to our view during debates over the appropriateness of assisted suicide, compulsory vaccination or gun control.

G.K. Chesterton, in his essay collection “Heretics,” writes: “The economists of the Manchester school who disagree with Socialism take Socialism seriously. … The man who understands the Calvinist philosophy enough to agree with it must understand the Catholic philosophy in order to disagree with it.”