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    In Defense of Nuance
    In Defense of Nuance
    In Defense of Nuance
    Ebook40 pages30 minutes

    In Defense of Nuance

    By Magnus Vinding

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    About this ebook

    We appear to find ourselves in a crisis of polarization and failed communication. What can we do about it?

    This essay argues that part of the solution may be to aspire for more nuanced and balanced perspectives, by engaging charitably with many different viewpoints. The essay then turns to some contentious issues — including sex discrimination, intersectionality, and political correctness — in an attempt to identify some ways in which greater nuance might help advance our views and discussions on these matters.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMagnus Vinding
    Release dateAug 30, 2018
    ISBN9781386502388
    Author

    Magnus Vinding

    Magnus Vinding is the author of Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015), Reflections on Intelligence (2016), You Are Them (2017), Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (2018), Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications (2020), Reasoned Politics (2022), and Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics (2022).He is blogging at magnusvinding.com

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      Book preview

      In Defense of Nuance - Magnus Vinding

      In Defense of Nuance

      ––––––––

      The world is complex. Yet most of our popular stories and ideologies tend not to reflect this complexity. Which is to say that our stories and ideologies, and by extension we, tend to have insufficiently nuanced perspectives on the world.

      Indeed, falling into a simple narrative through which we can easily categorize and make sense of the world — e.g. it’s all God’s will; it’s all class struggle; it’s all the muslims’ fault; it’s all a matter of interwoven forms of oppression — is a natural and extremely powerful human temptation. And something social constructivists get very right is that this narrative, the lens through which we see the world, influences our experience of the world to an extent that is difficult to appreciate.

      So much more important, then, that we suspend our urge to embrace simplistic narratives to (mis)understand the world through. In order to navigate wisely in the world, we need to have views that reflect its true complexity — not views that merely satisfy our need for simplicity (and social signaling; more on this below). For although simplicity can be efficient, and to some extent is necessary, it can also, when too much too relevant detail is left out, be terribly costly. And relative to the needs of our time, I think most of us naturally err on the side of being expensively unnuanced, painting a picture of the world with far too few colors.

      Thus, the straightforward remedy I shall propose and argue for here is that we need to control for this. We need to make a conscious effort to gain more nuanced perspectives. This is necessary as a general matter, I believe, if we are to be balanced and well-considered individuals who steer clear of self-imposed delusions. Yet it is also necessary for our time in particular. More specifically, it is essential in addressing the crisis that human conversation seems to be facing in the Western world today — a crisis that largely seems the result of an insufficient amount of nuance in our perspectives.

      Some Remarks on Human Nature

      There are certain facts about the human condition that we need to put on the table and contend with. These are facts about our limits and fallibility that should give us all pause about what we think we know — both about the world in general and about ourselves in particular.

      For one, we have a whole host of well-documented cognitive biases. There are far too many for

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