A Pet Kitty, and Progress through Conflict (published ~early 2012)

a post from my 2012 blog: exact publication date unknown

Over Christmas my family began heaping vitriol upon me at the dinner table because I wanted a pet kitty. For a cluster of minutes, I sat listening to them as they listed a myriad of reasons why cats suck. More than a couple times they informed me that I must not under any circumstances purchase a cat.

Cats are mean, they said. Cats were naturally predispositioned to hate my family. They would thus not visit my apartment if I got a cat, I was told. Cats are so mean, they claimed, that the beasts actually very frequently eat the faces off of babies or at least suck the milk out of a baby’s mouth until it suffocates, or something like that. I listened to an anecdote about how a cat almost murdered my sister when she was a baby. Actually, if we’re going to objectively reconstruct this event, it was about a cat looking at my sister while she was lying on a bed – nothing more, nothing less was seen by the witness. But this naked fact was interpreted by all through the “cats are evil” narrative, and it thus became a story about a cat that came this close to killing Kenzi. The facts vanished, submerged and reinterpreted by myth.

Soon, the whole table except for me seemed to believe in this story about my sister’s near-death experience. No one really demanded evidence or questioned it. It fit the narrative that cats are vile, so everyone accepted it, because of course cats would kill babies; that’s just like them.* Some of those present even gasped aloud, horrified by how close my sister came to being consumed alive by my mom’s friend’s cat.

Finally, I stepped into this tornado of garbage and went on the offensive. My family has a dog and I mentioned the one time that it bit my mother’s hand rather ferociously and made her bleed. I tried to count all the times it had pooped all over the carpet, but keeping an accurate tally of this would have been almost as difficult as conducting a census in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I pointed out that the dog constantly tries to escape the house only to run into the neighbor’s yard, giving the family grief as they attempt to catch him before he trots into the street and gets his brains smeared all over the pavement by an SUV. Talk about stress.

No one responded logically to my arguments. Instead, I, the heretic, was immediately accused of rudely disrupting harmony at the table. People blamed my outburst on my natural inclination for debate and controversy (the existence of which I am proud and hope to always expand). They said I would just disagree with anything and loved to argue. I was told that I need to learn more respect, and that it’s very unpleasant of me to contradict everyone like that. Some members of my family looked very genuinely disappointed in me.

I am glad to say I had no apologies for anyone, because I owed them none. Later, they conceded the absurdity of the situation.

In his excellent and short book, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Christopher Hitchens mocks the idea that social harmony, agreement, and that terrible word consensus are desirable things, moral goods in and of themselves. He lists two reasons for his critique. Firstly, “human beings do not, in fact, desire to live in some Disneyland of the mind, where there is an end to striving and a general feeling of contentment and bliss.” And secondly, as a species “in life we make progress by conflict and in mental life by argument and disputation.”

I unfortunately slightly disagree with him on the first point. Those who do not desire to live in an intellectual Disneyland are numerous and I am fortunate to call many of them my friends, to be sure. But in his brilliant book The Believing Brain, scientist Michael Shermer argues that many humans probably have a natural, evolved inclination to respect authority and hierarchy, while conforming quickly to the opinions of those around them and thereby avoiding social conflict. This tendency goes a long way toward explaining why the human mind is so susceptible to believing extraordinary doctrines that contain no evidence but are socially accepted.

As Shermer explains, it is easy to imagine how this tendency would emerge in a highly social species like ours where group cooperation and unity was for countless thousands of years essential to our survival and successful reproduction. It’s easy to imagine non-conforming contrarians in the early days of linguistic man being banished as freaks, or threats, or later as “heretics” by their tribes, villages, and later “civilizations.” There is probably both a naturally selected and a socially constructed force inclining many of us to value consensus. Hence, horror that I would disrupt the peace, even when everyone around me was indulging in ludicrous, unbalanced proclamations – and it’s easy to imagine the more harmful effect this human habit of valuing harmony has when the topic of conversation is something serious like politics.

But where Hitchens is indubitably right is on the second point. Despite this natural inclination in Homo sapiens to be lured into “group think” and harmony, our intellectual and moral progress as a species depends on conflict. And this, too, comes naturally for us – we may instinctively value harmony, but we are also individuals with our own unique brains, tastes, predispositions, viewpoints, and feelings. It would certainly be a waste to not allow these free play against each other.

Now, I do not wish to say that I contributed to the progress of humankind by defending my potential pet kitty from such vile attacks upon its dignity.

However, this is only because I would be belittling the people who have defied the tendency to harmony when the consensus has been particularly disgusting. They have spoken out against eugenics despite the scientific consensus once existing in its favor, against hatred for homosexuals despite the harmony of church communities who condemn them as sinners, against happily unified fundamentalists who teach their children they will burn in Hell if they forsake the faith.

But aside from these grand causes, and many grander ones of the past, I agree with Hitchens that argument is valuable for its own sake, even if it does not succeed in completely changing the parties’ positions. As he points out, after an argument, both combatants can emerge with their positions at least slightly changed, improved, and refined. Even if further hardened into their opinions, both have at least been given something to think about and must argue differently next time. This can thus be a pot-holed yet nevertheless worthwhile road to clearer, truer, and more accurate thoughts – and these thoughts about grand ideas and policies, when properly nurtured, can help humankind progress.

So fuck harmony. It’s far better, in my view, to raise contrary points to someone when you disagree with them, rather than to sit complacently and nod, simply in the name of peace. You might not change their mind, but you will certainly make them think harder about what they’re saying – and they, too, will make you think harder about your own claims by forcing you to verbalize and carefully explain them, and then defend them, and, yes, perhaps change them. Intellectually, all involved can profit, as does society and the progress of our species as a whole.

*I have no doubt that both cats and dogs, and many other animals, have killed babies at various points in history, either by accident or on purpose. But: A) I can’t imagine it’s particular to cats; B) extremely isolated incidents in history do not prove (or even suggest) that the particular cat looking at my sister was even remotely likely to kill her; C) regardless, no baby should be left alone with any animals, cats or other.