Dear Friends,
How is it possible to know anything? In a relentless 24/7 news cycle with drastically competing narratives pushed by very motivated ideologues, the task of discovering the truth about events thousands of miles away can sometimes seem completely hopeless. But it isn’t impossible.
Take the events of October 7 when Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and slaughtered men, women, and children. So overwhelming was the evidence that this took place—Hamas even live-streamed many of their own atrocities—that the only “debate”to be had was whether they had beheaded all the babies or only killed them and beheaded some of them. I wish I was making that up. But, no, that was a real debate that took place. Real, living, breathing human beings thought that a morally significant distinction.
Yesterday was another master class in competing narratives. A nighttime explosion at a hospital in Gaza. Hamas almost instantly claims that Israel bombed the hospital with an airstrike and killed 500 people. Newswires carry this news around the world in seconds. The New York Times reports it in their headline. Israeli airstrike hits hospital and kills 500. To their credit (but too late) they later changed this to “blast.” Israel denies targeting or bombing the hospital. Instead, they claim that a rocket fired in a barrage from Gaza failed mid-air and fell onto the hospital and exploded.
So who to believe? How do we sort out these competing claims? It is sadly the case that most people will simply interpret the event according to their prior commitments about the various combatants. If you’re pro-Hamas or pro-Palestinian (there may be a distinction between those things; a true “pro-Palestinian” would be anti-Hamas, but that isn’t the way this usually works) you will simply accept Hamas’s report that the Israelis are to blame. If you’re pro-Israel, you will think that Hamas blew up their own hospital to gin up outrage and international support for their cause; or you will conclude that Israel did strike the hospital because Hamas headquarters their combatants in hospitals all the time.
Those seem to be the options. Facing a conundrum like this, a responsible person would probably withhold judgment until some actual facts or evidence becomes available. For example, I am fully supportive of Israel’s cause defending their country from its (obviously) very real enemies, but I certainly do not find it beyond the realm of possibility that they dropped a bomb on that hospital building. I have my prior commitments, but the intellectual and moral task is to not allow those commitments to predetermine my conclusions about a particular event. If I do that, then I will end up manipulating facts to fit my own narrative—no contrary fact will ever be able to shift or change my views. We all ought to resist that kind of intellectual “closure.”
Nevertheless, for a massive segment of the media world all it takes is a press release from Hamas HQ and they run the story. For a much smaller segment of that world, all it takes is a press release from the IDF denying any involvement, and they run the story.
Now, notice that I said that the task is to not let one’s prior commitments “predetermine” one’s conclusions. That does not mean we do not have prior commitments or that they do not help us determine our conclusions. None of us is a tabula rasa, a complete “blank slate,” interpreting facts in front of us with no prior beliefs, intuitions, inclinations, gut feelings, experiences, backgrounds, and worldviews. In fact, prior commitments are inescapable when trying to interpret facts. Not only are they inescapable, they are incredibly useful. What we know from the past helps shape how we interpret the present. That fellow who once scammed you out of money? He’s got a new pitch to make you rich. Would it be an intellectual or moral virtue to ignore what you already know about the man? You would not be “objective” or wise; you’d be a fool.
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