On Not Becoming Cathy Newman
Newman displays a callous disregard for two of the very most important things in all of creation: other people, and the truth.
Jordan Peterson’s interview with Cathy Newman, published on YouTube just two weeks ago, has already risen to near legendary status. It’s become symbolic of every futile attempt at conversation in today’s deeply divided world. It stands for all the failed dialogues in which there are “people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening.”
Thus over at The Atlantic last week, Conor Friedersdorf asked, “Why Can’t People Hear What Jordan Peterson is Saying?” It’s a great question. Friedersdorf, too, sees it happening everywhere, mentioning “Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and various Fox News hosts.” He doesn’t seem to recognize that other news hosts do it, too. More important than that, though, was that he offered no answer to his own question.
The Journalist Is Not Interested — And Hasn’t Been in a While
It would be easy to blame all this on today’s deeply divided culture. It’s been going on a long time, though. Paul Simon penned the lyrics to “Sound of Silence” (quoted in the first paragraph above) more than fifty years ago. I don’t know anyone, though, who has stated the problem as well as Dorothy L. Sayers did in the preface to her 1947 classic, The Mind of the Maker.
False Characterizations Everywhere You Go
Take the Intelligent Design controversy. ID is a theory stating that what we know about nature leads us to believe it’s more likely the natural world came from an intelligent designer, rather than mindless processes like Darwinian evolution.
Reporters, bloggers and social media commenters keep reading that “ID people say we don’t know enough about nature to explain it through science, so therefore God did it.” Somehow “what we know” gets turned into “what we don’t know,” and presented as what ID proponents say about their views. No, actually, it’s the opposite.
And that’s just one of a few hundred thousand instances we could come up with. But we’d probably disagree even on the examples. Some people would find fault with the way I’ve just characterized ID — even though all I’ve said was something to the effect of, “If you want to know what proponents say ID is, you’ll do better by asking them than by telling them.”
Some people would rather tell than listen, it seems.
She told of an article she’d written, outlining what Christians believe. “Every newspaper that reviewed this article accepted it without question as [my] profession of [my personal] faith.” One called it “a personal confession of faith by a woman who feels sure she is right.”
Now, what the writer believes or does not believe is of little importance one way or the other. What is of great and disastrous importance is the proved inability of supposedly educated persons to read. … There was not a single word or sentence from which [my] personal opinion could legitimately be deduced, and for all the article contained it might perfectly well have been written by a well-informed Zoroastrian.
Cathy Newman showed she didn’t know how to listen, which is simply another version of not knowing how to read. And why is that? Friedersdorf had no answer, but for Sayers it was simple: “The journalist is, indeed, not interested in the facts.”
We could condense that further yet: “The journalist is not interested.” Not interested in finding out what the person really thinks. Not interested in the person, actually. Not interested in knowing the truth.
It comes down to a callous disregard for two of the very most important things in all of creation: other people and the truth. No wonder Sayers called this tendency “disastrous.”
Easy Shortcuts Bypassing Truth
There’s a further factor in play along with this. We’re overloaded with data. (One thing that really has changed since 1947 is the mountain of information we all have access to, and which we now have to manage.) When flooded with data, humans have a well-known tendency to use shortcuts to manage it all. Psychologists call these shortcuts “heuristics,” but “shortcuts” says it just about as well.
One common shortcut is to categorize data into helpful little piles: relevant vs. irrelevant, trusted vs. not-trusted, coming from “my people” vs. “their people.” If it doesn’t land in a pile we think is worth attending to, then we don’t attend to it.
The result, unfortunately, is to solidify the barriers between us.
Another shortcut is to keep on believing what we believe, no matter what. Life is so much easier if you never spend the effort to consider new possibilities. Especially if changing your mind might mean changing the way you relate to your peers and friends.
Suppose Cathy Newman had said to Jordan Peterson, “Wow, I didn’t expect this, but suddenly you’re making a lot of sense! This gender pay gap really isn’t the simple evil that I’ve always thought it to be.” My guess is she’d have a whole lot of hard explaining to do with her colleagues back in the studio employee lounge.
Caring and Listening: Difficult But Necessary
Change is hard; caring might be even harder. Life is easier when we just ignore people we don’t agree with. It’s easier if we cast their beliefs into the “not worth listening to” pile. It’s easier to distort their beliefs, so that we can continue thinking what we’ve always been used to thinking about them.
But that’s not the worst of it. It’s easier if we sort people as individuals into the “not worth listening to” pile — if we just write them off. The people, that is. The result, unfortunately, is to solidify the barriers between us, building the walls taller, thicker and even less penetrable. Just as we’re seeing happen, week by week.
That’s a lot easier than caring, listening and seeing people as having worth, even if we disagree. The harder thing is to love, in the way Christ would have us love. The alternative, though, is to live in a world full of Cathy Newmans. To be Cathy Newmans ourselves.
She’s done us the favor of showing us what we don’t want to become. We really ought to heed the lesson.
