Since corona, we sometimes think that critics are standing in the way of solving major problems, says doctor and scientist Jona Walk. According to her, that is a dangerous misunderstanding.
I’m lucky enough to have nice, politically interested friends who shared with me their different perspectives on the conflict when the war in Ukraine broke out. But a friend recently expressed her concern about the group: “I hope we don’t fall apart because of disagreements on this subject.”
It had never occurred to me to think differently about my friends based on their opinions about the war in Ukraine, but I fear that her fear resonates with many people in the Netherlands. We’ve just been through two years of the coronavirus crisis and I’ve heard too many times about friendships and even family ties being torn apart by disagreements.
The problem was not limited to the private sphere. For the medical world, the pandemic was our biggest challenge in years, but we often proved unable to have real debate, including in politics. The Prime Minister of Canada spoke about unacceptable opinions and that sentiment was shared by several Dutch politicians.
Banning certain opinions
The increasing ban on certain opinions has long hindered free discussion. Now I fear that we will become a society in which even a conversation between two friends with different views is no longer possible because a different image has by definition become ‘unnegotiable’. Social media reinforces this because it teaches us to avoid dissenting people, losing our capacity to distinguish good and bad ideas through constructive debate.
But I think there’s more to it. Increasingly, we feel that society is confronted with existential problems, and we fear that critics will stand in the way of solutions.
However, that is absolutely the wrong approach. The danger today is that we become a society where people would rather adapt their ideas to those of the group than risk losing friends, family or a job. This unsafe situation not only leads to a curtailment of freedom of expression – which in itself would be bad enough – but also to the loss of social thinking and problem-solving capacity.
Learning from other views
The most unique quality of people is their gift to sketch different possibilities and to share them with each other. We learn from conversations in which we are confronted with different views. The democratic process depends on free debate prior to decision-making and cannot function if certain positions are by definition non-negotiable. The greatest scientific and technological progress occurs off the beaten track.
This disappears if ideas are censored before they can reach a wider audience, or if people do not dare to discuss them fanatically.
In order to make maximum use of our gifts, we – modern humans in the year 2022 – must learn to disagree with each other again. The science is never settled and in the real world, war is rarely black and white. The problems facing our society today in the areas of economy, health and the environment are unprecedentedly complex.
Learned and nothing more to investigate
And these problems can only be solved by bringing together different parties and diverse opinions. As a scientist, I fear the day when we all agree, because that would be the day when we are done learning and nothing can be researched anymore.
Give dissenters the opportunity to explain their points of view without immediate consequences for the friendship, the job or the collaboration. And trust that through open debate instead of censorship we really are able to distinguish good and bad ideas from each other.
Jona Walk is a doctor and scientist