Several years ago I attended a day of “diversity training” sponsored by my employer. As I anticipated, we were told that we should respect beliefs that were contrary to our own. I responded with a question: “How can I respect a belief that is wrong and potentially dangerous?”
As you might imagine, I was immediately accused of being “arrogant” for thinking that my belief is right and opposing beliefs are wrong. I responded with a follow-up question: “are you sure that my attitude toward incorrect beliefs is arrogant?” My challenger answered quickly: “yes.”
It seems to me that the person who challenged me had committed exactly the same sin of which he accused me. That is, I think that it is okay to believe that certain ways of thinking or living are wrong. Ironically, the people who claim to be advocates for “respect” for all beliefs are willing to state that I am wrong for believing that.
My goal here is not to promote a point of view about the rightness or wrongness of one belief or another. I simply want to make the point that disagreement about the nature of things is a normal part of living in human society. In fact, such disagreements are necessary for human progress. There would be no new ideas or discoveries unless curious or adventurous people challenge the status quo.
In college I studied a topic called “systems design.” I learned that all systems have three basic components. They are often illustrated like this:
However, systems that can improve themselves have an additional component, called the “feedback loop.” Those systems look like this:
he feedback loop is the part of a system that examines the outputs to determine whether the process is meeting its objectives. It is sometimes called “quality control.” In its simplest form it provides yes or no answers to questions that we ask ourselves before we invest time and effort in constructing the system. For example, we ask ourselves, “What do I need?” We might respond, “I need 10 blue boxes every day. They need to be 5 inches wide, 10 inches long and 2 inches deep. They need to weigh between 10 and 15 ounces each. I can spend $11 a day to produce the 10 boxes.”
At the end of each day I will count, measure and weigh the boxes that the process has produced, and calculate how much money I spent to produce them. At that point, I will ask myself, “Did I get what I needed today?” If the answer is yes, I will conclude that my system works satisfactorily. If the answer is no, I will assume that my process does not work satisfactorily.
If I am rational, a “No” answer will be valuable to me, because I can modify my system in whatever way seems most likely to produce a “Yes” answer the next time I run it. Of course, if I have an aversion to negative feedback, or if negative feedback is prohibited by the context in which I work, I will either eliminate or evaluate the feedback loop so that it always tells me that the system is okay. It seems to me that this is what my employer’s diversity training was intended to provoke; all employees were supposed to tell each other that they were okay.
Common sense tells me that this will not work in manufacturing or society. If teachers are not permitted to tell students that their answers are wrong, their knowledge about truth will not improve, at least until they run into some other context that does correct them. If parents feel that they cannot tell their children that their behaviors are inappropriate, those children will have no reason to improve their behavior, until someone else tells them. If members of our society cannot tell one another that they think that certain beliefs held by others are wrong, those others will have no reason to continue to refine those beliefs.
There are significant forces in our society that are dedicated to promoting the idea that it is everyone’s responsibility to reinforce and nurture the beliefs of all other members of the society. On the contrary, it is our responsibility to attempt to provide an accurate feedback mechanism for the beliefs of others. It is their responsibility to provide feedback to us, as well. If we fail to do so, our social systems will fail, just like a manufacturing system with no quality control will fail.
Certainly, the interaction of individuals with other individuals will provide inconsistent and even contradictory feedback.This is simply a result of the limitations of human nature and observation. The same thing is true of manufacturing processes. Quality control measurements in manufacturing systems rarely produce perfect results, and manufacturing experts do not expect them to do so. Quality control in manufacturing is referred to as a “statistical process.” That just means that you keep measuring the outputs of a system and adjusting the system based on those measurements because you know that, over time and on the average, the process you are measuring will improve.
The Bible says “Iron sharpens iron, and in the same way one man sharpens another.” (Proverbs 27:17) This wisdom is telling us that the interaction of diverse beliefs make people stronger. For most of the time since the death of Jesus, Christian expectations were that they would be reviled and persecuted for their beliefs. We, however, live in a culture of “political correctness.” What we fear most is the possibility of being perceived as negative. We dislike conflict, so we accept dullness. Let me give you some illustrations:
- I once visited a home where I was invited to help prepare a meal. My job was to cut some vegetables. My host had a beautiful butcher block full of expensive knives. As soon as I began to cut, I realize that the knife I had removed from the block was very dull. I noted that there was a steel in the knife block, so I proceeded to use it to sharpen the knife. The hostess immediately shrieked and covered her ears. When I ask what was wrong she replied, “I can’t stand the sound of the edge of the knife blade scraping on that sharpener. It sounds so violent and I can’t get rid of the idea that you are ruining the knife when you do that. I never sharpen those knives, but I know they are dull and I guess I will have to buy a new set.”
- I taught courses in Learning Psychology to college students who were training to be elementary school teachers for several years. I was instructed several times to advocate the implementation of noncompetitive games in classrooms and on playgrounds so that there would be no winners or losers. I steadfastly ignored those instructions because I believe that learning about your strengths and weaknesses and learning how to deal with losing are two primary success principles in our society. I refused to advocate non-graded coursework for the same reasons. Later in my career, as a university administrator, I learned firsthand about the disdain that prospective employers have for educational systems that do not impart these principles.
- When Jesus was preparing His disciples for His departure, He told them, “By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35) One might suspect that this admonition would have eliminated any arguing or disagreement among them later on. I feel sure that Christian expectations were consistent with this idea. On the contrary, agreement about Jesus’ teachings was often forged in the crucible of rather public debate among Jesus’ followers. In Galatians 2:11-13 Paul publicly confronted Peter “to his face” about his behavior and accused him of not being “straightforward about the truth of the gospel.” Later, Paul carried his issue with Peter to a council of leading Christians in Jerusalem, who debated the matter before coming to a conclusion which has established Christian doctrine to this day. (Acts 15:1-31)
The concept of “respecting diversity” is a huge problem for orthodox Christians, because it is so difficult to figure out what it means. I can honestly say that I personally like diversity. I enjoy diversity in race, national origin, customs, culture and thought. I live in a very diverse city and its diversity is the thing I like most about it. It provides me with lots of opportunity to sharpen myself by interacting with and observing people who are different than me. On the other hand, I don’t feel any obligation to agree with people of other races, origins, customs, cultures or beliefs when I think that they are wrong. In fact, when it comes to matters that affect their well-being, either temporal or eternal, my own Christian beliefs compel me to disagree with them “to their faces” if necessary in order to expose them to what I believe is the truth. This is not arrogance; it is respect for their importance to society and to God. My understanding of truth is not the result of my superiority to other people, it is the result of the grace of God and people in my life who cared enough about me to tell me that my own immature and selfish understanding of the truth was wrong.
Does respect for people’s beliefs require us to allow them to suffer and die eternally in order to prevent possible conflict or discomfort for a tiny period of time? If I scream at and grab a man in order to pull him from the path of a fast-moving bus will he be angry with me because I frightened him? Perhaps, but I don’t think that relieves me from the responsibility toward him that my respect for his life imposes on me. Nevertheless, we live in a society that increasingly shepherds us into a kind of conflict- and risk-free life that is not really living at all. It is a society in which good relationships are measured by the absence of conflict and risk. It is a society in which we have learned to avoid speaking truthfully to one another.
In view of these observations, I urge us to beware that there are people who are not drinking from the communal cup of “Everything is beautiful in its own way,” and who are waiting to take control of the masses of people who have never learned to think, fight or disagree; that is, people who love their own false peace and safety more than they love one another. Christian expectations related to the end of the Christian era will certainly come to pass. Those who are adept at political correctness may think of themselves as “good” people because they never hurt anyone’s feelings. In response I will close with a quotation that is sometimes thought to be the most common quotation on the Internet: “ All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (Edmund Burke, English philosopher)
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