It’s often hard to know what people disagree about when they disagree about Charlie Kirk.
I live and work in Arizona, but before the assassination, I knew of Kirk only vaguely. After the shooting, a conservative friend told me that Arizona—including the university campus where I teach—had become ground zero for memorial events. Not knowing the answer, I asked my friend, “Did you like Kirk?” My friend hadn’t paid much attention to Kirk until last year, he wrote, but he found Kirk’s style appealing: “There are clips of him where he’s more aggressive, but way more of him where he’s kindly discussing issues with people who initially come at him with incredible anger. He wins them over with kindness, even if they leave still disagreeing.”
In divisions over Kirk, it’s as though the contentious issues form a set of nesting dolls, one on top of another, on top of another. What do you think of Kirk himself? What do you think of free speech and the suppression of those who are openly critical of Kirk? Do you think Kirk brought violence upon himself with his words or demeanor? Was he an example of how to debate humbly, or was he a sophist for an age of algorithms and viral ragebait? How should you engage with people who disagree with your answers to these questions?
I quickly realized that my friend and I thought differently, though we were of one mind that violence was unjustifiable.
The weekend that Kirk’s memorial service was held at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, I was just twenty-five miles down the road in Tempe, hosting an academic conference on the theme of intellectual humility. A group of a hundred scientists and philosophers had gathered to discuss new research projects illuminating the dynamics of humble, open-minded truth-seeking.
I am a philosopher who has been researching intellectual humility for over a decade. It might seem natural for someone like me to have insights about how to navigate disagreements. But I struggled to know how to react to my friend. Though I study how to disagree humbly, I wasn’t sure how to apply the lessons to my own disagreement.
Most research on intellectual humility begins with the assumption that humility is a character trait, much like extraversion or openness to experience. It’s the type of character trait that adjusts our natural motivations---pushing down motives for what we want to be true and pumping up motives for getting in touch with reality. More simply, a humble person inquiring into a question cares less about herself and more about the truth. Think about cases where you’re committed to a view due in part to your identity or self-interest. Humility reduces the degree to which your ego controls your motives or clouds your judgment, because it makes you more motivated to focus on facts and evidence. In contrast to the arrogant or dogmatic person, someone who’s intellectually humble will try to recognize and address their limitations as a truth seeker.
But at the conference in Tempe, we were examining humility from a different angle. On the one hand, there’s humble character; on the other, there are activities and processes that support humble inquiry. Our main question wasn’t “What does it mean for a person to have humility?” but instead “What activities and processes are involved in humble inquiry?”
Conference participants shared a wide range of insights. Inquiry is often humble or not, depending on the situation in which it occurs. Indeed, even people who lack humble dispositions can behave humbly when the circumstances are right. For example, inside scientific communities, blinded review of research prevents evaluators from knowing authors’ identities and can thereby curb biased evaluations; when research teams share their data openly, that can increase accountability and reduce overconfidence; and when adversaries collaborate on the design of new experiments to test controversial hypotheses, that can sometimes break a scientific deadlock.
Well-designed situations can help us inquire more self-critically. Two psychologists who were at the conference, Eli Gottlieb and Sam Wineburg, describe how “collaborative fact-checking” can make people behave more humbly online. In experiments, when two people with different opinions on a topic are tasked with examining together whether a particular claim is true, they tend to evaluate information more accurately than one person working solo or a pair working in tandem who agree with each other. “A reading partner can act as a kind of Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder,” write Gottlieb and Wineburg, “reminding you to work harder than you might otherwise do to assess a source’s credibility.”
Despite my intellectual engagement with research on intellectual humility, when my friend and I fell into the topic of Kirk, I wasn’t sure what to do. But the twinge of ego was unmistakable: I didn’t want to listen to him.
One lesson I’ve learned about humble inquiry is that it’s supposed to pull ourselves back, to subtract ourselves, somehow. When a photographer tries to take a photo of her whole body in a mirror without the camera showing, she will have trouble. The camera gets in the way. Similarly, in disagreements, our judgments about who’s misinformed and biased (the other person) and who’s clearheaded and logical (us) easily get in the way because the conflict involves us.
At some point over the weekend, I noticed a shift in my thinking toward my friend, a kind of new curiosity. Who is this person who sees the world differently than I do? What feelings lie hidden beneath his expressed thoughts and judgments? How might his picture of the world be no less internally coherent than mine, even though I still think he’s mistaken about some important facts? I want to listen, hear, and make better sense of my friend. And the situation that allows me to try to do that is, of course, a friendship.
When I mentioned that I wanted to write an essay about our conversation, my friend told me he was happy to share comments on a draft. I decided to give him the last word: “I’ve noticed that Kirk habitually sets down his microphone when someone else speaks. That’s something I can learn from, both as an inquirer and friend.”
Nathan Ballantyne is a philosopher who teaches at Arizona State University. His research focuses on questions about open-minded thinking, biases, and expertise. He is the author of Knowing Our Limits (Oxford University Press) and co-editor with David Dunning of Reason, Bias, and Inquiry: New Perspectives from the Crossroads of Epistemology and Psychology (Oxford University Press).
