It is a great advantage in a debate to know where one’s opponent is coming from. Of course, that advantage is often merely tactical, and at times it may be illusory. As human beings there is always a great deal of bias that we attach to our thoughts and behaviors. We may exaggerate progress (or decline) based on our worldview, or whitewash either the past or present, based on our present state as well as the nature of our memory. As beings we have great barriers to understanding truth–barriers that are related to the fallibility of our memory, our capacity for rationalization, and our tendency to avoid pain at any cost. We must all be aware of our own limitations, a task which is more difficult as our resources are greater and therefore less often tested.

One of the most troublesome illusions to our understanding is the illusion that we understand where someone else is coming from. It is a very difficult thing to know where someone else is coming from, and there are so many ways that we can overestimate our capacity at really understanding where someone else is coming from. Given that I am a person who has a fair amount of personal experience in miscommunication, I would like to use some personal examples, some of them errors that I have made and other errors that others have made with me. Let us remember, of course, that we are immune to none of these errors, and therefore we all ought to be humble (even if it is difficult for some of us to appear humble to others) in the face of our ignorance and predilection for folly.

There was a time that I liked a girl (okay, there have been many such times) and I thought that our shared personal history would be enough for us to be able to properly understand each other better. Unfortunately, this proved to be a spectacular miscalculation on my part, especially because I failed to take into account a particular aspect of our personal history that differed. This particular aspect made me extremely suspicious of authority and tended to make me rather more egalitarian in my dealings with others, and it made her extremely mistrustful of male peers and extremely interested in manipulating authority figures to help preserve her own security. Again, my own dreadful miscalculation resulted from a false feeling of similarity that recognized an extreme sensitivity without recognizing that any action taken to respond to that recognized sensitivity would exacerbate that sensitivity and would provoke action on her side that would exacerbate my own sensitivities. This was obviously a worst-case outcome for both her and me, as neither of us truly desired any harm for the other, and both of us ended up feeling horrible about the situation that resulted.

The solution to this sort of difficulty is to expand one’s understanding of a given background and to include more relevant factors in one’s analysis. When one views there being too few relevant factors, one is likely to ignore both potential similarities and differences, depending on the sort of conclusion one wants. It is, of course, possible that one can include too many factors that are irrelevant to the case at hand, but it is much more common for human beings (myself included, as seen above) that one can fail to include sufficient factors to understand a given situation because of the difficulties of trying to account for more factors that is absolutely necessary. Ironically enough, this is a lesson I should know better than most (however difficult it is to practice) given my understanding of Design of Experiments and the difficulties even of finding enough computational power in statistics software to account for the relevance of too many factors. We have a bias toward simplicity that can lead us astray when we forget the importance of context, even when it comes to the context of traumatic experience. This is a bias that we must actively work to avoid, because the costs can be immense for failure, as they have been for me personally in this area.

A far less serious misunderstanding, but one that is far more common, has resulted from the persistent tendency of people with whom I frequently debate to falsely consider themselves as understanding where I come from given my religious worldview when that is not the case. In this particular case the error is multifaceted. One of the errors is an error of fact, in assuming my own particular belief system to be entirely based on the teachings of one Herbert W. Armstrong. Those who are more aware of my own personal history and writings are aware that my own feelings are considerably more nuanced and complicated and that I have a great deal of criticism for the man and his behavior as well as a great deal of respect and wholehearted agreement with his ideal of achieving a biblical worldview and many of his specific doctrines (like the family of God and the importance of the Sabbath and holy days). One of the errors is an error of motive, where those who behaved in a given way out of fear and then were deceived into believing differently falsely believe the same motive of those who believe as they once did when that is not often the case. A false opinion of the belief of others and the congruence of motives tends to lead to a dangerous overconfidence in one’s ability to understand where others are coming from and the result of that is constant and ferocious and largely inconclusive argument.

How does one deal with this sort of penchant for error and misunderstanding? For one, one must begin a given debate or handling a situation with an awareness of the possibility that our similarities with others or our ability to relate to their background and successfully convey that identification are likely to be limited. This will alert us both to the danger of our task as well as give us greater humility, which is likely to spare us from the reality of overconfidence, even if our appearance is more limited. Additionally, we must seek to understand as much as possible about the background of others. Any information that allows us to recognize areas that we do not know is likely to increase our caution and respect for others, as well as our recognition that we simply do not perfectly identify with them, which provides at least some ground for there being reasonable grounds for their own disagreement with our characterization of the behavior and motivations of others. This mutual understanding of reasonable grounds for disputing our own harsh characterizations of those with whom we are in conflict is likely to lower the temperature of debates and to lead to greater mutual respect and appreciation of the difficulty of their own circumstances. And anything that leads to greater respect and that lowers the level of conflict between two people or two groups is likely to be a good thing, so long as all people involved are people of decency and godly moral conduct. Life is hard enough without making unnecessary conflicts or waging unnecessary wars against unnecessary enemies. There are enough necessary conflicts and enemies to begin with.