How to Talk to a Seeker
You know what I mean by a ‘Seeker,’ right? Not a believer; not someone who has committed to a certain ideology or religion. Someone who’s still looking. They might be an aunt with hair that smells of incense who wants to ‘have a go’ with a new tarot deck she’s just ordered from Amazon. They might be that friend who, when you ask him if he really thinks extraterrestrial reptiles rule the world, will grin and shrug.
I met my Seeker at Toastmasters, a deeply uncool but effective public speaking club. We, as women under thirty five, were in the minority. Most people were there to improve their presentation skills for that big important work meeting. But not us. I could tell because like me, my Seeker was dressed in the creative entrepreneurs’ uniform of leggings and an oversized sweatshirt.
I’m not good at small talk. Approaching a potential new friend is fraught with anxieties. Luckily Cat, as she introduced herself, is not good at small talk either. We immediately fell into deep conversation about psychology, art and hiking. I gathered the courage to suggest we meet for a drink and our friendship grew from there over much red wine and coffee.
It was over coffee that I first realised Cat was a Seeker. We’d kept our unspoken pact of avoiding smalltalk and always jumped straight into the deep shit. One day at a hipster coffee shop she introduced the topic of the afternoon: Astrology.
Oh no.
What I haven’t mentioned yet is that I’m a Skeptic. Not a grumpy contrarian or cynical nihilist but a Proper Skeptic, by which I mean I am committed to using reason and evidence to understand the world. I’ve even written a book about it. This approach didn’t come to me naturally. I spent my teens and early twenties infatuated with and distressed by the supernatural, the spiritual and the paranormal. But since then I’ve worked hard to understand how human brains work and the common mistakes we make. I’ve accepted that my intuition is often not a reliable guide and instead turn to the scientific method to help make decisions. I also hate confrontation, especially with interesting new friends, but thanks to my perhaps excessive commitment to speaking the truth as I understand it, I had to tell her what I think: astrology is bullshit.
I didn’t say it quite like that, but I still expected her to get defensive or angry or dismiss my objections as closed-minded… and she didn’t. We had a productive discussion in which we laughed a lot and both shifted somewhat in our beliefs. After a few more conversations on other esoteric topics we realised we were doing something pretty unusual, and something that might be of interest to other people. We’d found a way to have fun while disagreeing, but we were also getting closer to the truth by reflecting on a subject from two completely different perspectives.
So we decided to start our podcast, The Seeker and the Skeptic. Since then we’ve gone on hallucinogenic journeys, attempted to speak to the dead and hung out with our local coven. But the most exciting thing we do is get together in front of our mics and work out how to talk to each other about what we believe and why.
I feel like throughout this process I’ve learnt a few things about how to talk to my Seeker. Perhaps you’ll find these strategies helpful next time you visit you aunt or find yourself sharing a beer with the guy who’s just asking questions.
Be Self Aware.
When you feel that desire bubbling up inside of yourself to text or tweet or blurt out ‘you’re wrong!’ think about where it’s coming from.
As a Skeptic I spend a lot of time worrying about consumer protection. That sounds pretty boring but it’s actually an important issue. People are ripped off, injured and sometimes killed because a product is advertised as having benefits that it does not. In the world of alternative and natural medicine there are many offenders. When your Seeker brings up a medicine that you think has no evidence base to support its efficacy or begins espousing a health fad that you think might have harmful effects, you get scared. We care about our friends and family, we even care about that random guy down the pub. Maybe that desire to knock the tincture from their hands is coming from one half of the Skeptic’s core values: compassion.
The other value intrinsic to Skepticism is a respect for reason and evidence as tools for getting as close as possible to the truth. If your Seeker is espousing some bizzare theory that they’ve reached via a disorganised or whimsical chain of pseudo-logic, it grinds your gears. We Skeptics care about methodology because, in the words of Skeptic advocate Matt Dillahunty, we want to ‘believe as many true things and as few false things as possible’. The best way to ensure that outcome is to be rigorous when examining claims made about the world. That means checking your beliefs are backed by sufficient evidence, making sure you’ve assessed any biases that might be misleading you, and checking that you haven’t made any logical missteps.
Reason and compassion, or what I call Truth and Heart, are the Skeptic’s core values. If your desire to exclaim “You’re wrong!” comes from either of those places it’s worth saying, and it’s worth saying right.
If, however, on introspection you find that the desire stems from an urge to impress onlookers, to embarrass your Seeker or demonstrate your superiority over them, then I suggest you refrain.
Of course it’s never a simple case of good intentions versus dubious intentions. When we want to tell someone they’re wrong we are often motivated by a confusing mess of emotional, rational and social urges. Giving yourself a moment to try and unpick them will make you a better communicator. The best expression of your commitment to reason and compassion is to engage with your Seeker respectfully, ask questions of your own and explain why thinking clearly about these issues is important to you.
Be Curious
Hopefully once you’ve purged any impure motivations, or at least acknowledged them and made an effort to quell their influence, you will start to experience a genuine desire to figure out what your Seeker believes and why.
The beauty of having these conversations with Seekers (rather than believers) is that they are on the same journey as you. What does a Seeker seek other than the truth? They probably have a different methodology for finding truth than you. They may have their own unacknowledged motivations: a desire for comfort, or for security or to be fashionably unconventional. But at their core I’ve found most Seekers want what we want: to find the truth. After all, hasn’t the refrain of Seekers all the way back to Fox Mulder in 1993 been: ‘The Truth is Out There’?
When you’ve been skepticing as long as I have it’s tempting to fall into rote phrases and comebacks: ‘correlation does not equal causation’ just trips so easily off the Skeptic’s tongue. People make mistakes all the time — from odd turns of phrase to a massive logical fallacies — and Skeptics get good at spotting them. But leaping on each mistake and declaring ‘gotcha!’ Is not going to endear you to your Seeker, or anyone else.
If your response to that realisation is ‘I don’t care if they like me’ then I suggest you go back to the beginning and reassess your motivations: what do you care about? If you want to help someone you will need them to listen to you. People don’t listen to people they don’t like.
Don’t pull out your logical fallacy bingo card when I say, if many people believe it there must be something to it. In fact, don’t ever pull out that bingo card it’s a sure way to alienate your Seeker. People don’t believe in gods, ghosts or UFOs for no reason. Their reasons may not be perfectly logically coherent but they do exist, and they’re as individual as the Seeker themselves. Beliefs fulfill psychological or practical needs. They demonstrate allegiance to a group or are worn as a signifier of a person’s identity. Get curious about why your Seeker believes what they do and be prepared to explain why you believe what you do.
You’ll probably find that both of you have biases and misconceptions that influence your beliefs. Having a conversation about those biases will be much more illuminating and respectful than playing logical fallacy whack-a-mole.
Ask Why
What people believe is boring. You’ve heard it all already, from Bigfoot to the Bermuda Triangle. If you want to know about any of these things I recommend Wikipedia. If you want to have an enriching conversation with another human being, I say don’t talk about beliefs, talk about epistemology.
I know it’s not the most inspiring word, but epistemology really is the most exciting subject to broach with your Seeker or indeed with anyone you encounter (although I beg you, please leave people who work in retail alone). Epistemology is a fancy philosophy word that basically means ‘how we know what we know’. My journey from Seeker to Skeptic was the journey of realising I had an unreliable epistemology (I basically believed anything that ‘felt’ right) to a more reliable epistemology (I provisionally believe anything that I have found sufficient reliable evidence for that is logically consistent with my understanding of reality). Your Seeker may be on the same journey, or they might be convinced to take that journey if you can make it interesting and fun for both of you.
The simple way to shift into a conversation about epistemology is to ask why? Not, Why do we have fossils of dinosaurs if the earth’s only 7000 years old? but Why do you believe in creationism? Do you have evidence that supports your belief? If not, what other means are you using to determine its veracity?
Seekers are not yet committed to any particular belief. They are sampling the buffet. As I’ve discovered making The Seeker and the Skeptic, sampling different beliefs is interesting and fun. It can teach you a lot about yourself and the world. I never would have expected to be enriched by the philosophy of David Icke, but I came away with insights I never would have reached without attending his lecture. Because Seekers are still experimenting with different beliefs, it’s all the more important to encourage them to reflect on their epistemology. My Seeker embraces the positive aspects of spirituality that she finds useful and rewarding but rejects the parts she finds unpleasant or frightening. It’s not a bad heuristic, but it relies on a near superhuman ability to predict how each belief will affect her perception of the world and her life. She may be more adept in this area than me, but I don’t think anyone knows themselves or the world well enough to consider this a reliable method for forming beliefs.
The truth, by which I mean the veridical objective state of the physical world, can sometimes hurt. But at least it’s stable. An epistemology based on reason and evidence is the best way humans have found for apprehending the truth. For seekers of truth, the skeptical epistemology really is the best tool. It should be an easy sell to Seekers.
Be Honest
Often the most honest thing I can say when faced with a question from my Seeker like ‘if they really went to the moon, why have they never gone back?’ is ‘I don’t know.’ Being honest about the limits of your knowledge is essential if you want to gain their respect and trust. We Skeptics don’t (or shouldn’t) pretend to have all the answers. All we can claim is that we have the most reliable method for working out what the answers might be.
It’s tempting to misrepresent, dissemble or outright lie to impress others or to win an argument, but when that temptation arises I force myself to go back to the beginning and asses my motives. Dishonesty is a strategy to make people believe things that aren’t true… that’s pretty much the opposite of our mission as Skeptics. Charlatans can give definitive answers to any question because they are playing by a different set of rules to Skeptics. We have to hold ourselves to a high standard of honesty because lying contravenes both of our core values, it is disrespectful to the truth and to the people we care about.
I’m not saying that as Skeptics we should blurt out every mean or bizarre thought that we have, but that we should consider before speaking whether what we are about to say, in the words of Sam Harris in his book Lying, is ‘true and useful’.
Seekers will encounter lots of people telling them what to believe. Together Cat and I have been encouraged to believe that a Swedish man can channel the Archangel Michael and extraterrestrials from the star system Pleiades, that there are invisible energy currents running across the surface of the earth discovered through divination, and that demons are menacing us in our sleep. It’s easy to spin your Seeker another story, one where the great Goddess of Science has handed down all the facts you will ever need from on high. It’s harder but much more rewarding to introduce them to the method of skeptical inquiry and let them figure stuff out for themselves. They will probably reach different conclusions to you and that’s a good thing. By being honest about what we believe and why we give ourselves the opportunity to be questioned, corrected by other people and move closer to the truth together.
Accept Defeat
You can’t win them all. In fact if you are winning them all then that should be cause for concern. Chances are you’re not right about everything, so if every conversation you have with your Seeker ends up with them admitting you were right all along then they are either humouring you or you are an unknowing bully.
I didn’t change my beliefs and hang up my crystals, athame and pointy hat after one conversation with a Skeptic. It took many conversations, a lot of reading and much quiet introspection to reassess my epistemology. That’s because beliefs aren’t just something we have, they are part of who we are; abandoning them is destabilising and painful. If you’re a Skeptic who has never been through this process and just happened to be born with flawless epistemology and a completely accurate appraisal of truth, well, you’ll just have to take my word for it: changing your mind is hard, and changing someone else’s mind is impossible.
You can’t reach into someone else’s head and substitute their ridiculous beliefs for your sensible ones and even if you could it would be incredibly presumptive and rude. You can encourage someone to think about their epistemology ask them thoughtful questions and create a non-judgemental atmosphere to allow them to think clearly but you can’t make them think differently or adopt different beliefs. They have to do that for themselves, they have to change their own mind.
I expect to have many disagreements with my Seeker about the nature of truth, and I don’t expect her to eventually become a duplicate of me or even a Skeptic at all. I mean, that would ruin the premise of our podcast, wouldn’t it? I see my role as a Skeptic and as a friend to model what I think the best way to think about the world is, to be honest about why I believe what I believe and to be prepared to reassess my beliefs based on any new evidence our conversations or investigations bring to light.
You might not be sitting down with your Seeker, a pair of microphones and a bottle of wine. They might just be a twitter account with an obscure handle and a profile pic of a sausage dog that you type at. Interacting this way is easier in some ways and harder in others. You will find it harder to build a relationship of mutual trust and respect but maybe easier to reflect objectively on their beliefs. Without the context of a personal relationship you may be able to challenge them more insightfully but find it harder to be respectful and kind. Having conversations publically whether it’s on social media or on a podcast also changes the dynamic. Humility is harder when you know hundreds of strangers will see or hear you admitting you don’t know something or that you were wrong. While you talk to your Seeker you might despair of ever changing their mind, but if your conversation is a public one there may be other people watching who are subtly and silently shifting their perspective. By being transparent, reasonable and honest you can only hope to provoke someone to start the process of reconsidering their beliefs.
How I reason, behave and express myself are the only things I can control in my conversations with my Seeker and life in general. To concern myself with things I can’t control would be irrational and a recipe for heartache.
Though it’s useful to brand a podcast I’m not sure it’s helpful to think of ourselves as Seekers or Skeptics at all. By defining ourselves by our beliefs, or even our epistemology, we commit ourselves to a certain way of apprehending the world. Periodically re-evaluating our beliefs is an essential habit for anyone who is committed to understanding the world. Perhaps I’d find it easier to reconsider my worldview if I didn’t have this ‘Skeptic 4 life’ tattoo emblazoned (for now metaphorically) across my chest. A more useful way to think about skepticism might be to see it as something we practice rather than something we are.
The other unfortunate thing about labelling ourselves as Skeptics is that we’ve backed ourselves into an ideological echo chamber. Of course I love hanging out with other Skeptics, they are on the whole interesting, eccentric and thoughtful people. The first Skeptics conference I attended felt like a homecoming. Although every Skeptic I met had a different set of conclusions we’d all reached them by application of the same method, this was thrilling. If I disagree with another Skeptic I don’t have to talk epistemology, we already agree that reason and evidence are the way to go now we just need to look closely at the different evidence we’ve encountered and examine each others chains of reasoning, it’s a breeze! Well, at least it would be if Skeptics weren’t the same shambolic mess of biases that all human beings are. Skeptics aren’t perfect reasoning machines, but it was refreshing to be in a room full of hundreds of people trying to base their beliefs on reason and evidence, trying to prioritise reason and compassion, trying to live up to the label of ‘Skeptic’.
By talking to each other at conferences, on blogs and podcasts we refine our reasoning skills, gain knowledge and we become better Skeptics. But we also rarify our identity as Skeptics and in some ways this makes it harder to communicate with the outside world. Seekers, believers and other non-Skeptics might be turned off by our terminology or our in-jokes. We might start thinking of ourselves as us and them as, well, them. This kind of tribal identity construction makes it harder to question our own beliefs and harder for those not in our in-group to consider our critiques or questions seriously.
We all have conversations with non-Skeptics everyday of course, but friendly good-humoured public conversations between people who disagree with each other are a rarity. I don’t think Cat and I have invented a new experimental form of dialogue, we are doing what all friends do: hashing out our differences, challenging each other and occasionally descending into mild snark or sarcasm. We achieve this unremarkable feat because we have a basic respect for each other. So when I tell my Seeker that I think astrology is bullshit she knows that I’m taking aim at the ancient pseudoscience of planetary divination, not her. I think she’s great.
