You’re wrong about something. That I can say with certainty. There are things I’m wrong about and I don’t know it; there are things you’re wrong about and you don’t know it. How are either of us ever going to find our way if we don’t challenge what we think we know, as often as possible?
This week I’m taking some time off from my usual writings on philosophy and religion to talk about something more general: what you should read, and why you should always be reading at least one book that you disagree with.
What I mean when I say “a book you disagree with” is a book that overtly supports one or more positions or viewpoints on one or more topics that are significantly different from the ones you already hold on those topics. It doesn’t have to be diametrical opposition, but there should at least be an aspect of disagreement, something that you would want to argue against, given the opportunity. Reading material that contrasts with other material that you’re already reading is especially beneficial: it gives you two points of view right next to each other for easy and immediate comparison.
Reading books you disagree with is a good exercise for building critical thinking skills. It might end up changing your viewpoint, and if your viewpoints aren’t shifting on occasion, you should call your critical thinking skills into question. You’ll find new arguments to support your own positions and reinforcements for the arguments you already have. And ultimately, like all reading, it can and should be fun.
Even before you’ve opened the book, you likely know something about the position of the author, and if you’re in a position of disagreement, then you’re primed to engage your critical thinking skills. If you have indeed chosen a work of strong rhetoric by an intelligent author, you’re going to have to make use of them, and you’ll be only too eager to do so because you’ll be directly confronting opposition to your own beliefs.
Before reading something you expect to disagree with, it might help to take an inventory about what you believe about the topic in question, and what you believe the author (and the author’s followers) might believe about said topic. If, after reading, at least some of your views haven’t at least shifted in both categories, either you haven’t been reading faithfully and honestly, or it’s an egregiously bad work that is still somehow representative of popular viewpoints on the topic, and I think it would be wise to weight your bias towards the former possibility.
It’s easy to fall into traps here, dismissing things out of hand without really considering them. Steelman everything: consider every argument in its strongest possible light. Go with Daniel Dennett’s advice on this (from his 2013 work Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking): “You should attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that your target says, ‘Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.’” If a position is truly wrong, there is no amount of steelmanning that will prop it up beyond the ability of a strong and well-constructed counterargument to defeat it.
While reading, underline, highlight, and take notes liberally in the margins. Find the key ideas and deconstruct them. See if the author’s support is really what it claims to be. When the author makes a reference, you don’t necessarily have to read it, but at least look in to it. I’ve occasionally found references to works that make the opposite claim that the author is making, but which contain quotes that can be construed to mean something entirely contrary. As an example, take Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). It’s not at all difficult to find creationist literature which quotes the following passage: “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” But of course Darwin’s book argues in favor of exactly that absurdity; he stated it in such terms so as to give weight to the magnitude of his discovery and to acknowledge that only remarkable evidence — which he indeed possessed — could convince him of the reality of evolution by natural selection.
If you read a paragraph and know in your heart that it’s wrong but have to do some work, practice some contemplation, perform some rigorous internet searches, delve into your own library, and have some conversations with others of various viewpoints, to really figure out why, all the while doubting that you’re right at all, you’re right in the sweet spot. If your view shifts at all toward’s the author’s in the process, you know you’re being intellectually honest with the material and with yourself.
This process will also help you build your own arguments. By reading strongly-argued books that you disagree with, you will be able to build more thorough arguments for your own positions, and will also be more informed, and more understanding, of the positions of others. The better you can steelman other positions, the stronger and more resilient your own arguments will be. And points of contention can be the scaffolding of your own arguments. Every proposition asserted implies the negation of its contradiction, and so arguments we disagree with give us things to negate in our own arguments. Nothing inspires me quite like a passage in a book that is well-written and well-argued but which I know — and which I can prove — to be incorrect.
Sometimes a position is wrong, but we write off its adherents on this basis of simple stupidity. This is more difficult to do when you see a well-constructed argument for an opposing position composed by a clearly intelligent person. The last thing we want to do in discourse is strawman opposing positions, turning them into trivial-to-defeat viewpoints that don’t accurately represent the actual views that people hold. Doing so is easy and accomplishes nothing except to prop up the ego. Some of the people you disagree with are smarter than you and better at rhetoric than you, but they’re still wrong, and their arguments are the ones that are the most important for you to understand in their best possible light.
And speaking of strawman arguments, it’s entirely possible that you’ve been mistaken about what a given position actually entails and what its proponents actually believe. Strawman arguments are ubiquitous on the internet, and you may have tacitly accepted some of them yourself as being the actual positions held by opponents of your own. Reading key literature from opposing viewpoints will clear that up, and it’s valuable to do so, because if you’re trying to argue against a position that nobody actually holds, you’re wasting your time.
This needn’t and shouldn’t be a chore. It’s fun to read good writing, and it’s fun to be right when you’re confident of your position. I think good writing entails ethos, and ethos entails telling the truth about things. Good writing and good rhetoric are almost, in that regard, synonymous, though even those who might be profoundly wrong about something or other might be strong at least in their prose. And there’s something exhilarating about reading a well-constructed argument and finding that it fails utterly to defeat your own, but that’s also where we need to be the most cautious. Don’t be satisfied with a superficial reading of the material. Double check it and steelman it. Delve into the notes and footnotes and into the bibliography (keeping an eye out for more reading material while you’re there). Use the Feynman Technique — google that if you don’t know it and read some guides, but very basically: understanding content through teaching it — to make sure you really know and understand it, to the point that you could make an affirmative argument for the position yourself if you wanted to.
This means you will likely have to spend time and money on things that you think you will find difficult, unpleasant, or even unconscionable. But if you’re not doing exactly that, you’re willingly buying in to your own personal echo chamber. We’re cognitively wired (confirmation bias) to find and accept support for what we already believe and preemptively reject support for what we don’t; we have to work to defeat that bias so that we can be confident in our understanding of the world.
But there’s a robust market for used books and I can’t fault anyone for purchasing new books that will be more supportive of one’s own views and sticking to secondhand sources for things one might find questionable. I often pay less for a used book than a small meal, and a good used book will feed me for a very long time. Their having been read before may even be beneficial: a used book may contain marginalia from previous owners, giving you more insight into beliefs you disagree with. Weigh that against aiming for more recent editions which may contain additional supplementary material that may address various arguments that have already been made against the content of the book.
This does not mean that it’s worth your time to read anything at all that you disagree with. Some books are simply garbage and will provide little insight into contrary points of view. But no matter which side you’re on, there are intelligent people making strong arguments on the other one, and you should be reading their works voraciously.
I hope you’ve found this helpful and I hope that you’ll respond to this story with what you’re reading that you disagree with it, why you disagree with it, and how your view has changed in the process. I hope you’ll take a look at my other stories as well, where I explore religions and their sacred texts through the lens of Satanism in order to reinvent religion for myself. Thanks for reading.