The Quest for Truth That Matters

This article is as good a summary of why it's important to look at both sides of an argument and not just pay attention to what your side is saying.

Today, conservatives and liberals can join vacation tours attended by only their side of the debate or join dating services to court only the like minded. At night, one side watches only MSNBC and the other side only Fox News. And when people are around likeminded individuals, one study found, their viewpoints only become that much more extreme.

And this:

We are ever more polarized today and so may be the conspiracies. The less each base understands the other side perhaps the more outlandish the theories become, in order explain the hold of the other side.

There was a good post up at Behavior Gap the other day about the folly of single-factor decision making. It applies here thusly: people are complex. This is easy to say, out of context, but oddly it's very hard to say when talking about people with whom you disagree strongly. Humans have a tendency to reduce the behavior we find distasteful in others down to one single characteristic: "oh, he's just a drunk", "oh, she's just a bitch", "oh, democrats just are stupid, they just want to take over the world with their socialist agenda". What's wrong with this?
Well, it takes away everything that makes a person a person, for one thing, their history, their family experiences, their religious beliefs, their lifetime of love, hate, hurt, anger, remorse, elation, and sanguinity.
He is not just a drunk. He's manic-depressive because he's gone through more crap in his life than you will ever dream about, and he can't handle it very well anymore. She's not a bitch. She's a single mother, insecure about her position at the company, and she wants to be liked, but she's afraid to be seen to fail lest she lose her job and have no money to feed her children.
As I have said before, the closer you get to someone, the harder it is to demonize them. Throwing stones only works when you stay at a distance. No one of us wants to be seen as one-dimensional. So why, just because you disagree with something someone else believes, would you reduce them to labels like "stupid", "power-hungry", or "elitist"? Because you don't want to take the time to get to know them more fully. Because if you did, you might find that they aren't easy to label at all. You might find that you will change your mind, or at least your attitude.

That's a pretty daunting concept, isn't it?