There Aren't Naive Views

Some people much smarter than you believe nearly every view

Lots of people are pro-Israel, believing the topic to be as close to a no-brainer as topics get, one in which anyone with even a basic education will come away strongly convinced that Israel is generally in the right. Such people’s views could not survive a five-minute conversation with a person who I won’t name—I’ll call him Ralph.

I’ve mentioned Ralph elsewhere—he is, without a doubt, the smartest person I’ve ever met. And he’s an extremely staunch critic of Israel, and has been ever since studying the topic a ridiculous amount—perhaps more than anyone else I’ve ever met. I took a class last semester on the conflict, and truly I tell you, Ralph knows more about it than the (very knowledgeable) professor.

Ralph doesn’t have a public persona. He’s basically a one-man vehicle of argumentative destruction, who can argue better than anyone else I’ve ever met. And yet despite this, he basically tows the Noam Chomsky party line on Israel.

The view held by many American Jews and various others is roughly that there are two tiers of knowledge about the conflict. In the lower tier, one has a vague understanding that the Palestinians are oppressed, but doesn’t know the details. In the higher tier, one understands that, while the Palestinian’s lives aren’t great, that’s only because, when offered peace over and over again, they’ve turned down magnanimous proposals, and launched violent intifada, to which Israel has responded defensively.

This belief that anyone sufficiently informed about the topic will agree with them is pure delusion. Having the pro-Israel position is not as simple as having a basic overview of the history. Noam Chomsky knows the history better than almost anyone on Earth, and yet he’s as anti-Zionist as they come—the same is true of my friend.

To be clear—this article isn’t about whether or not the Zionist narrative is correct. The same thing applies equally to those who think anyone informed about basic facts would be critical of Israel. My point is about the hubristic notion mirrored across almost every political issue that one’s position is universally held by those in the know. There are no political views held only out of ignorance—virtually every view, however implausible you find it, is held by smart people who can make a serious case for it.

Many people, in similar fashion, think that belief in God—especially the God of Christianity or Islam—is simply the result of not being sufficiently reflective, that anyone sufficiently acquainted with basic facts and the scientific method will quickly realize that the claims made in the Gospels and Quran are delusional fantasies. Lots of atheists crow endlessly about the alleged nonexistence of evidence for God, and act as if the only reason one might be a Christian or Muslim or believer in God more broadly is if they’ve been indoctrinated to believe it from a young age.

Alexander Pruss has an IQ of, by conservative estimates, 1 billion. And he’s a Roman Catholic (a friend of mine joked that Pruss is too smart to be a Roman Catholic). Many of the smartest and most philosophically convincing Christians—Pruss, Crummett, Wall, Collins, Cutter—could easily run circles around nearly everyone who holds the view that Christianity is held only out of delusion.

Religious people may very well be wrong, perhaps even in egregious ways. Perhaps their arguments are ultimately extremely unconvincing. But the notion that they don’t have any arguments that could convince a smart person is complete fiction.

This idea that people who hold certain views are thereby undeserving of serious intellectual consideration is quite widespread. Many capitalists think that socialists can’t know anything about economics, even as many economists are socialists (to be clear, I’m not a socialist). Paul Cockshott could run circles around almost all people who allege central planning to have been refuted by the calculation problem quite easily—not because he’s right, but because he’s smart, informed, and statistically competent.

I used to believe roughly that those who disagreed with me politically were ignorant. That was in the old days, in middle school, when I was very libertarian. I remember listening to Sam Harris express temperate support for a minimum wage or something and thinking he was just hopelessly naive and unaware of the basic facts. I thought the same thing about Israel several years ago, about utilitarianism before that, and about various topics even before that. It’s easy to become so convinced that you’re right that you start to think that one who disagrees must be mentally muddled. But as I’ve grown older and wiser (I’m now both very old and very wise), it’s become absurdly obvious that there are some unbelievably smart people on all sides of all issues. In fact, while I cannot prove this beyond pointing to lots of examples of smart people on both sides of various issues, it is one of those things that is hard to demonstrate conclusively, but one has begun to see it’s obvious correctness over time. Before you come to hold a view confidently, whatever the topic, you should hear what the other side’s geniuses—be they Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Alexander Pruss, or this Bentham’s Bulldog guy who is also, I hear, very handsome—have to say. And if you think there aren’t any, you have not grappled with the complexity of the issue.