The “Two Sides” Argument

On January 19, 2008 the New York Times reported the Choteau School District No. 1 (Montana) cancelled a talk to students about global warming by the lead author of the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. The reason given was that some parents objected that both sides of the issue were not presented.

One of the most insidious arguments used by the Far Right, especially when they have no evidence for an assertion, is that there are to sides to every story. This is such a strong cliché in our society that it is deemed transparently true. Thus the Far Right needs only to invent another side to stymie any well-founded proposal. For our culture, steeped in democratic egalitarianism as it is, this is a profoundly enervating cliché. We cannot get a toe hold for dealing with reality. We do not, as is so often observed, become outraged at the transgressions against out Constitution, at the arrogant abrogation of the Geneva Conventions and our agreement to abide by United Nations protocol, at the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afghanistani civilians and their children and the violation of our sense of decency occasioned by mass torture and unjustified incarceration. These are consequences of the “two sides to every issue” mantra. Thus does acceptance of this argument not only stymie truth, it trivializes the agony and destruction of all the above afflictions to nothing more than discourse.

As I have said before, there is a way out of this enervating morass. It is to recognize, focus on, and promote reality and its servants reason and evidence as arbiters of disagreement. Humans can differ over any phantasm that may occupy their minds, but reality, the third and critical element in any disagreement, is independent, indeed disregardful, of the fantasies of humans.

As an example, Americans often indulge the fantasy that they are an exceptional people. Truth, in allegiance to reality, notes that the Europeans who came to these shores had a continent full of resources to exploit while much of the rest of the world had to make do with resources exploited by centuries of dense population. Such a windfall explains far more than do hard work and enterprise. At the ideological level the nation began as an exceptional country based on the concept of the people as sovereign, but we let a passion for wealth divert us from the path of improving mankind’s opportunities for social and self improvement.

Part of this pathetic outcome I attribute to those who subverted the goals of FDR. When Winston Churchill expressed his intention to reconstitute the British colonial system once World War II had ended, FDR rejected the notion. He argued that one of the benefits of a war that cost so much in human bloodshed should and would be the recognition of people’s right to self determination. Hence, the British Empire was not reconstituted after the war. However, after Truman became president, when Ho Chi Minh sought United States aid in resisting the French effort to forcibly reconstitute its South East Asia empire, United States leaders sided with the French and took over that conflict when France failed. This despite the fact that the Vietnamese 1945 Declaration of Independence begins with the lines taken from our own Declaration of Independence namely, “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” We rejected these long-suffering people struggling against colonial domination. How had our values become so twisted? I suggest, in part, that the distortion began with our domination and manipulation of South and Central American countries under the Monroe Doctrine. With that declaration we became imperialists. Of course, we got in the habit of taking what we wanted in our dealings with America’s indigenous peoples. All this flowed, in part, from a fantastical interpretation of our own history, to wit, that we had an exceptional devotion to liberty, never questioning whether our liberty was bought at the expense of other’s loss of liberty. Fantasy is very dangerous if used as a basis for understanding and decision making. Reality is the only check on it. Anything that purports to take its place such as there being two sides to every issue is therefore equally dangerous.

Imagine, in FDR we had a president who understood our industrial society, who understood corporations and who declared in his 1941 Four Freedoms speech to Congress,

“In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want -- which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear -- which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-- anywhere in the world.”

Can you but wonder how different the world would be if the United States had used its wealth and power for these purposes? With these guidelines we, unlike the USSR, could have gone to the oppressed people of the world with a message not only of anti-colonialism, but of individual freedom and economic justice. This is why Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro believed they had a friend in the United States until they were so brutally disabused. This is why I have such great disgust with the mini-minded Democratic Leadership Council and the Clintons for whom the corporations come before the people of this country. There are very substantive issues on this planet and the grotesque charade of the current presidential campaign is profoundly sickening, especially when we know what could have been.

It should be clear from this that the democratic virtue of hearing all sides of an issue is no substitute for the search for truth. Reality has its own demands beyond human consensus. This is why science is different from politics. The Far Right has deliberately sought to substitute the democratic virtue of hearing all sides for the evidentiary virtue of truth. There is an ongoing, pernicious effort to subvert human understanding and “The two sides to every issue.” is a primary form of it.

Bob Newhard