We are nearing what’s shaping as much as be one of the crucial contentious elections in our nation’s history. For those deeply invested within the well-being of this country, the swelling cultural unrest only adds to the sense of urgency. Nevertheless, the supreme command for those of us who follow Christ stays to like Him with all that we’re after which to like our neighbor as we love ourselves. In this two-part article, we would like to supply what we hope will likely be a helpful approach to salvaging relationships within the midst of a really divisive time.
With this in mind, consider this basic schematic within the hope of putting these conflicts into perspective. At the danger of oversimplification, let’s break human ways of the world into 4 categories: opinions, ideas, beliefs, and core convictions. By examining each of those, we’ll find a way to take a more holistic have a look at our interactions. In this primary article, we’ll be considering opinions and concepts.
As with physical anatomy, these parts are distinguishable but inseparable, with each interpenetrating the opposite. Though all play an integral role in a given personality, each category increases in depth, moving us further and further into the human personality. Thus, opinions pertain to matters of taste; ideas play out within the lifetime of the mind, giving rise to thoughts; beliefs mix thought with motion; core convictions constitute an individual’s fundamental commitments and deepest intuitions. Because core convictions go to an individual’s very heart, they can not be modified without changing the person themselves. A change of opinion or ideas can bring its share of non-public upheaval, but a change of core convictions never leaves an identity untransformed. Persuading someone that G.K. Chesterton is true concerning the culinary revelation of Stilton Cheese is one thing, but convincing someone to reconsider their views on sexual ethics is tantamount to asking them to vary who they’re. Generally speaking, many of the issues that divide us (religion, sex, politics) touch on an individual’s core convictions. This doesn’t mean that we avoid these subjects, after all, but it surely does mean that we want to navigate them with care and sensitivity.
One necessary caveat: this breakdown is supposed to operate mainly as a heuristic device to stimulate occupied with our interactions during times of great disagreement. It goes without saying that the complexity of human vision exceeds these 4 neat categories. It’s our hope, nevertheless, that they are going to impart a measure of understanding for those difficult conversations that unfold in our kitchens and living rooms this election season. That said, let’s take a more in-depth have a look at each category.
The Subtle Power of Persuasion in Shaping Opinions
To say that opinions are largely matters of taste shouldn’t mislead us into pondering of them as inconsequential. The human personality, with its mad flurry of intuitions, gifts, quirks, and habits, constitutes the ambient background of opinions. We’re starting with them not due to their superficiality or insignificance but due to their relative flexibility. That is, they might be modified without drastically altering an individual’s character. Imagine you will have a friend who’s a real cineaste, as my friend, Dr. Kenneth Boa, happens to be. Let’s say you and Dr. Boa share enthusiasm for the work of Alfred Hitchcock. While the final critical consensus is that Vertigo is Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Dr. Boa thinks that honor should go to Shadow of a Doubt. If Dr. Boa manages to influence me of the prevalence of his selection (unlikely), I remain largely unchanged within the deepest sense. I’ve modified a specific point of taste, but not my very identity. It goes without saying that if Dr. Boa tried to vary my opinion by attacking Vertigo, the likely success of his project could be slim indeed. As a general rule, opinions can’t be modified through attacks. If we would like to vary someone’s opinion, we want to aim at persuasion.
Bridging the Gap Between Idealism and Reality
Ideas are largely theoretical within the sense that their abstract nature means they haven’t necessarily collided with the hard partitions of reality. I actually have a friend who works for a big engineering company, and he regularly faces challenges when he deals with the individuals who design the machinery for his factory floors. The discrepancy between the designer’s ideal setting for the machinery and the actual conditions on the factory floor is usually somewhat pronounced. The solution is to have the designer leave the “ivory tower” of her office and take a tour of the facilities to make sure that realism beats out idealism.
Their abstract nature notwithstanding, ideas still retain a better degree of inflexibility than opinions. The designer I discussed above could have a really perfect setting in mind, but personal taste alone can’t dictate the development of business machinery. A rigid algorithm have to be followed. Ideas could also be idealistic, but changing them still requires a readjustment of how an individual thinks the world works. Think of the starry-eyed college student who leaves the world of urban social theory to face the tough realities of being a teacher in an inner-city school. When it involves the world of ideas, theory have to be balanced with practice. It’s the explanation medical students are required to finish a residency. Similarly, if we would like to challenge people’s ideas, we want to balance theory with practice and do our greatest to indicate that the concept we’re critiquing fails to make full contact with reality. Once again, if persuasion is the goal, we would like to pursue the conversation in a respectful manner, making an allowance for that a change in ideas is tantamount to a change in a single’s view of how the world works. We’ll sneak in a fast plug for nice stories here. Though this hardly exhausts the thrill of reading a effective novel, skillful writers balance theory with practice by putting flesh and bones on ideas and marching them into the world. A treatise on the risks of revolutionary politics may bury its urgency in a heavily conceptual language, but Dostoevsky’s searing vision of it in The Demons offers a holistic account that’s as vivid because it is appalling. If you should change into a skillful interlocutor, read great novels.
In the subsequent article, we’ll turn to the 2 deepest categories, namely, beliefs and core convictions and consider how an understanding of each can reshape our future conversations.
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Kenneth Boa equips people to like well (being), learn well (knowing), and live well (doing). He is a author, teacher, speaker, and mentor and is the President of Reflections Ministries, The Museum of Created Beauty, and Trinity House Publishers.
Publications by Dr. Boa include Conformed to His Image, Handbook to Prayer, Handbook to Leadership, Faith Has Its Reasons, Rewriting Your Broken Story, Life within the Presence of God, Leverage, and Recalibrate Your Life.
Dr. Boa holds a B.S. from Case Institute of Technology, a Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, a Ph.D. from New York University, and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in England.
