Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [9]
Perhaps you have a duty to let your friend keep his opinion. This seems most likely what he meant. He thinks you’re obligated to not change his belief with argument and evidence because it is his belief. But your possession of such a duty is hardly obvious. As Whyte points out, I am not obligated to let you continue to believe that no cars are coming if you are about to unknowingly step in front of one. Why? Because you care about knowing whether or not you are about to be hit by a car. “If someone is interested in believing the truth, then she will not take the presentation of contrary evidence and argument as some kind of injury.”16 Only if eliminating your friend’s false belief were doing him injury would you have a duty to avoid doing it; and if he cares about having true beliefs, he cannot consider it harm!
But this exposes what is at the heart of your friend’s response. He takes your presentation of argument and evidence contrary to his belief as harmful because, in fact, he is not concerned with truth. And it’s for this reason that he thinks you have a duty to cease and desist presenting evidence against it. If you don’t stop, he will have to give up his belief, and he doesn’t want to! He isn’t interested in truth; he is interested in believing what makes him intellectually comfortable. He thinks you have a duty not to make him uncomfortable with “new ideas.”
Colbert recognizes the discomfort that new ideas can bring.
Let me ask you this: Why were you happier when you were a kid? Because you didn’t know anything. The more you know, the sadder you get. Don’t believe me? By the time you finish reading this chapter, over a hundred dogs and cats in animal shelters around the nation will be euthanized. Bet you wish you could erase that knowledge. But it’s too late. You learned a New Idea, and it made you sad… . Look at the story of Adam and Eve. Their lives were pretty great—until they ate from the Tree of Knowledge… . God’s point: Ignorance isn’t just bliss, it’s paradise. (I Am America, pp. 120, 122)
In his usual mocking way, Colbert is making fun of those who, like your friend, reject knowledge because of the discomfort it brings. But Colbert stops there. He’s happy just making fun of them.
But I’m not happy stopping there; I want to press further.
The fact that your friend would be made uncomfortable by your changing his belief hardly gives you a duty to not change his belief. Only if he had a right to be intellectually comfortable would that be the case. But no one possesses a right of intellectual comfort. A right to life? Sure. A right to property? Okay. The right to watch that crazy Jon Stewart? Why not? But a right to intellectual comfort? Come on! If that’s a right then, if global climate change is happening, Al Gore violates our rights when he points out the evidence for it. If that’s a right then, if we’re running out of oil, James Kunstler violates our right when he reminds us that we are.17 If that’s a right, Colbert violates our rights when he points out that, according to a full page ad by Exxon in the New York Times, no percentage of the price of gas goes to corporate profits.18 If that’s a right, as Colbert suggests, the media actually was doing us a disservice by reporting on NSA wiretapping and secret prisons in Eastern Europe.
Those things are secret for a very important reason: they’re super-depressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good—over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want