I have just read John Bos’s My Turn (April 9) that separates “Belief” and “Acceptance,” as a way to explain the divisiveness in American politics today. Belief becomes accepted, in the Le Guin/Bos argument, by the function of “evidence.”
It is an intelligent and passionate argument that I find persuasive. But my lifetime’s habit of having been a professor of sociology prompts me to offer this contribution to Mr. Bos’s excellent article: Mr. Bos assumes that “evidence,” mostly produced by general knowledge in science, will lead people to “accepting” the conclusion as “true.” But “evidence,” scientific or otherwise, rarely leads a mind to accepting the contrary belief.
Evidence works only if there is no “belief” already settled in the conclusion. In social life, there is no such thing as a mind that is not based on a set of beliefs, often called “ideology.” ‘Republicanism,” “democracy,” “socialism,” and other ideas that frame our social life in society, for example, are all beliefs and ideologies that are as ubiquitous as life itself.
All evidence is tautological in that evidence only proves itself, nothing else. If a traffic cop pulls you over and proves that you were speeding, he can only prove that you were going at a certain speed, but he cannot prove that you were “wrong” doing so. Proving that you were wrong is beyond the cop’s purview because it belongs to the moral dimension of society that created the laws of right and wrong.
Mr. Bos uses evidence to advance the idea that environmentalism is correct, or that racism exists, or that socialism has benefited Americans, and so on. But there is no evidence that can prove any of these ideological beliefs. The belief system in any society, trickled down to the individual, is shaped by the long, arduous workings of historical processes, sometimes spurred by revolution, but mostly as the grinding, unceasing steps of invisible historical and cultural machine. American society today is rife with evidence of all sorts. Google alone can produce an abundance of evidence to prove virtually any proposition, one way or the other. It is not for lack of contrary “evidence” that Republicans largely believe in election fraud.
Both Republicans and Democrats are social beings who argue over every issue in society — elections, environment, racism, socialism, QAnon, whatever — and no scientific evidence will make them change their minds. Only persuasion, that begins early in one’s life, could help. Then, where does the lion’s share of America’s persuasive mechanism come from? The media — the most powerfully persuasive “social” instrument we have in America — may provide the answers we seek for our current predicament.
Jon Huer, author of “Donald Trump, Made in the U.S.A,” is Professor Emeritus of the University of Maryland and a Greenfield resident.