Why Are Adversaries Expendable?

While reading Alan Jacobs’ book How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds this statement caught my eye.

When you believe that the brokenness of this world can not be just ameliorated but fixed, once and for all, then people who don’t share your optimism, or who do share it but invest in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia. (An “adversary” is literally one who has turned against you, one who blocks your path.) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable – indeed it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries.

I’ve seen this attitude in action where people who disagree with someone are demonized or “unfriended” to use a Facebook term.

Unfortunately I think Jacobs’ explanation doesn’t go deep enough. Why? Because I know people who firmly think they know the answers to certain problems but they don’t demonize and marginalize those who disagree. This means there must be another, deeper premise at work. Over-optimism isn’t the answer.

I think this difference comes back to objectivity. Can we objectively evaluate what others think and feel without automatically casting them as harboring the worst possible motives? Can we restate their position in the best possible light before trying to refute it? (Thereby using what is referred to as “steel manning” as opposed to knocking over a straw man.) In fact Jacobs refers to this approach in a later paragraph.

One of the classic ways to do this is to seek out the best – the smartest, most sensible, most fair-minded – representatives of the positions you disagree with.

If we don’t try to be objective it becomes all too easy (and tempting) to demonize people who disagree with us. It spares us from facing the possibility we could be wrong, not the person who disagrees with us.