On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Alan Rudy wrote:
> I've not had an experience this intimate but run into it quite regularly
> with my students. Somewhere between a Progressive reliance on Experts
> and CB's accusations about the lists superiority complex must lie a way
> of dealing with delusional anti-parties. What I am least prepared to
> deal with is folks - that you've just described on the "right" and Doug
> has described on the "left" - for whom history, data, complexity and
> structured arguments hold no sway.
All persuasion has emotional as well as logical components. Who we identify with and against, who we accord high status and low, is always a big part of getting us to part with convictions we are attached to, or not.
So it seems when logic plays an asymptotically small role, if you want to persuade, you have to focus exclusively on your emotional powers. In your case, you are a professor. And so for most students, you have a certain parental charisma even if they hate you.
And so IMHO, if you feel compelled to try to make a dent on such a person, the only tack worth trying is to communicate, as kindly but as firmly as you can, as if it were an undeniable fact, that this is all nonsense, a case of mass hysteria such as happens all the time, from witchburnings to the housing bubble, where masses of people believe things that just aren't true by revving each other up. (As a sociologist, maybe you can get them to come up with lists of such phenomena and treat them comparatively :-)
If they react angrily or want to argue, beg off as kindly as you can that well, it must be that you don't get it.
You won't win the "argument." But the fact of simple complete dismissal from a person with intellectual authority will put a pebble in their shoe that will bug them a little, no matter how much they believe. Nobody wants people they respect to think they're an idiot. And the less fired up you are, and the more you can say it as if it were simply a fact, the more it will worry them. And maybe over time, they'll wonder.
And to be be fair, even supremely rational argument usually works like this in part. Most arguments where friends have convinced me to change really fundamental beliefs, the concession has taken place days, weeks or months after the argument when I can't get it out of my head and start arguing both sides -- and slowly watch my argument collapse in the sheltered privacy of my own head, where it feels like a relief and a personal achievement rather than shameful public defeat. (And I think I'm someone who concedes error more readily than most.)
So I wouldn't worry so much that people don't change their beliefs right in front of you. The nice thing as a teacher is that you get to monitor them over time.
But I would certainly say that the key to change anyone in this mode, if for some reason you feel you need to, is simply through disapproval. Engaging the factual points is self-defeating. The whole point is that this is not how rational thought works. That whenever they see ideas that seem too crazy to be true, they probably are. And learning to take that stance...well, that's not something you can teach logically.
Michael