What Does it Mean to Follow the Argument Where it Leads?
Following a dogma without understanding it is to live with the results of other people’s thinking
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Time is limited. Wasting it living someone else’s life, imprisoned by dogma, results in living with other people’s thinking and allowing the noise of other’s opinions to drown out your inner voice.
The thing about dogma is that dogma is impatient. Dogma is impartial. It does not feel. It does not react. It is not reflective. It does not leave space for others. It is not self-effacing. It keeps a long record of wrong interpretations.
Because, like everyone, what I say is a product of where I stand and the influences that shape my attitudes and perspectives, I begin with my own experience.
For many years, I felt I had lost my levensperspectief, a Dutch word that refers to the sense that there is something to live for. Years ago, I was in therapy. For a long time, I embraced the therapeutic process anew with each new doctor, adopting my doctors’ philosophy and rewriting my life story to fit their theory of the mind.
I had consulted them on every decision, even those involving diet and home renovations, but eventually, I lost faith in their judgment. As a result, the transmission of information was sufficient for me to replicate and steered down a narrow road. In the process, I lost my identity and was still unsure if I was following the right path.
Eventually, through deep self-evaluation, I learned to explore questions with an amenable attitude instead of a dogmatic one. I adopted a different kind of dogma, one with diverse opinions based on personal experience backed by research and personal experience.
In Western philosophy, the Socratic objective of ’following the argument where it leads’ has employed a powerful attraction.
But what is it to follow the argument where it leads? And what if it also seems that someone falls short of following the argument where it leads because they are too distracted or too lazy to investigate a body of evidence or argument that would be treated as a good reason to change minds?
I have noticed a startlingly widespread dogmatism in American society.
The most glaring and more pervasive dogmatism is one born of the increasing allergy of many people to the hard intellectual work of dealing with complexity and nuance, resulting in an appetite for simple answers. It breeds a discourse by slogan and a powerful civic dogmatism.
Most of us, at times, can be overly opinionated. We think we are correct, that our perspective is the truth, and therefore, we can act boldly and not even entertain the idea that perhaps we are wrong.
From where I stand, I see danger. In a globalized and miniaturized world, it is alarming that the number of utterly uninformed individuals in our information age is astonishingly high — a disturbing pattern where some people live in boxes never designed for them.
Viewed superficially, we could celebrate our time as a heavenly era of information. The internet is a revolutionary tool that provides the latest basis for such a belief; however, it works not only for but also against the ideal of a learned and intellectually curious public.
It does make it possible for the previously passive and powerless to grow into actors and interactors in the evolving drama of public discourse. Still, even as it empowers and informs vast numbers of people, it is also a tool for fabrication and false attacks, polluting the dialogue with an apparent undisciplined knowledge base.
When there is no room in your reality for any beliefs opposite to yours, when you truly believe that all opposite or contradictory beliefs are evil, dangerous, and must be destroyed, you know you are trapped in dogma.
When you react to an opinion or an idea that contradicts your truths not only with denial or anger but with distaste or outrage, when you find statements that are contrary to what you believe not only wrong but dangerous, perverse, and evil, when you see any statements that contradict your truths as something that has to be stopped, eliminated, something that shouldn’t exist, something that no one should ever think or believe, then you know you are entombed in dogma.
But challenging dogma comes with a price. The critical question becomes what beliefs are worth questioning and which are not. The limitation of dogma is not that it is wrong, but rather dogma limits our thinking.