You might be wrong, part 3: Conviction of superiority makes you become what you despise
This is the third installment of what unintentionally has become a series on my contention that we should assume anything we fervently believe might be wrong.
Assuming our own fallibility helps us remain humble, I think. It gives us a willingness to listen respectfully to people who disagree with us. It helps us learn and grow.
I keep writing about this because readers keep raising meaningful objections to my argument, objections that are worth wrestling with publicly.
To my second column on the subject, a reader who identified himself as a Presbyterian minister posted this on Facebook: “What about when those points of disagreement are over the worth of our neighbors’ lives? Should we seek a ‘middle’ ground then?”
A University of Kentucky professor emailed me a lengthier response.
Some facts are scientifically established and simply not open to debate, he said: “whether or not the earth is round, DNA is a 2-stranded molecule, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, etc., etc.”
Thus, if someone wants to continue believing the Earth is flat, the rest of us shouldn’t feel obligated to humbly agree that, well, of course we could be wrong about its being round. Objective, verifiable facts do exist.
Similarly, the professor continued, our political battles are now filled with debunked false claims, outright lies and wacky conspiracy theories, including “the belief that the Democratic party … is also infiltrated with cannibalizing pedophiles who worship (Satan) and are plotting against Trump.”
Evidence matters, he said, and on such issues there are objective rights and wrongs. Saying we might be wrong in these situations can undermine the cause of social justice. It can make all beliefs appear equal, even the most loathsome and dangerous ones.
These points are well-taken. Admitting “I might be wrong” can lead to uncomfortable problems of its own—especially if, say, the person on the other side of the argument is wearing the robes of the Ku Klux Klan.
Fortunately for me, someone else sent me a copy of Chris Hedges’ recent essay, “The contradictions of ‘cancel culture’: Where elite liberalism goes to die.”
Among other things, Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, retold one of my favorite stories from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, that of the Rev. Will Campbell.
Campbell may have been the most significant white person involved in the civil rights struggle. Early on, he lost his job as chaplain at the University of Mississippi due to his calls for integration.
“He escorted Black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School,” Hedges wrote. “He was the only white person that was invited to be part of the group that founded Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He helped integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and organize the Freedom Rides.”
He survived death threats. He was a true hero.
Simultaneously, astoundingly, Campbell also served as a pastor to the Ku Klux Klan. He performed Klansmen’s weddings, buried their dead. He knew these poor, white Southerners up close, well enough to recognize that they were, in their own way, victims of a deck stacked against them.
“He steadfastly refused to ‘cancel’ white racists out of his life,” Hedges noted. “He refused to demonize them as less than human.”
As Campbell himself recalled in his autobiography, “Brother to a Dragonfly,” he was once asked to speak to an assembly of left-wing activists.
“I’m Will Campbell,” he told the group. “I’m a Baptist preacher. I’m a native of Mississippi. And I’m pro-Klansman because I’m pro-human being.”
Pandemonium broke out, Hedges said: “He was shouted down as a ‘fascist pig’ and a ‘Mississippi redneck.’”
Campbell’s memory of that speech gone awry gets to the heart of the crowd’s reaction:
“Just four words uttered—‘pro-Klansman Mississippi Baptist preacher,’ coupled with one visual image, white, had turned them into everything they thought the Ku Klux Klan to be—hostile, frustrated, violent and irrational. And I was never able to explain to them that pro-Klansman is not the same as pro-Klan. That the former has to do with a person, the other with an ideology.”
For me, the issue isn’t whether some beliefs are more correct than others. Of course they are. The world is round. We’ve got the pictures to prove it. Racism exists and is bad, period.
But there are other principles to keep in mind.
One is that a lot of matters aren’t as clear-cut. There are gray areas in life, and subjects for which facts remain in dispute. Occasionally there are situations in which the facts appear settled and confirmed—but it turns out they really aren’t. We should always proceed with caution before climbing on our high horses.
A second is that, as Campbell recognized, even when a person is obviously wrong, dreadfully wrong, he’s still a person, a breathing, multi-dimensional child of God with a history and fears and dreams. He has value and shouldn’t be mocked or hated.
In such cases, if we’re not careful, we might find ourselves right about the facts, yet dead wrong about the truth, wrong in our estimation of the person or of the forces propelling him or of our own pure hearts. When we find ourselves feeling superior, we’re in trouble.
Still another reader included me on an unrelated group email that included these words from author Robert D. Kaplan, writing about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
“It is self-righteousness that lies at the heart of most tyrannies: the belief that only you and your side are moral and on the right side of history, making your opponents immoral, and therefore not only wrong but illegitimate.”
That’s what I’m talking about.
Wherever you find people convinced of their own intelligence and goodness—people on the right or left, religious people or irreligious—they’re on their way to becoming whatever it is they despise and believe themselves superior to.
Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.
This story was originally published February 25, 2021 at 10:35 AM with the headline "You might be wrong, part 3: Conviction of superiority makes you become what you despise."