Universalism: don't shoot the message

Universalism: don’t shoot the message

The well-known advice “don’t shoot the messenger” is actually good shorthand for the reasons why we want to protect and encourage dissenting ideas. Plutarch’s Life of Lucullus provided an early, literal example: the king of Armenia got advance notice that Lucullus’s troops were approaching. He killed the messenger for delivering that message and, henceforth, messengers stopped reporting such intelligence. Obviously, if you don’t like the message, you shouldn’t take it out on the messenger.

The Mertonian norm of universalism is the converse. “Truth-claims, whatever their source, are to be subjected to preestablished impersonal criteria.” It means acceptance or rejection of an idea must not “depend on the personal or social attributes of their protagonist.” “Don’t shoot the message,” for some reason, hasn’t gotten the same historical or literary attention, but it addresses an equally important decision-making issue: don’t disparage or ignore an idea just because you don’t like who or where it came from.

When we have a negative opinion about the person delivering the message, we close our minds to what they are saying and miss a lot of learning opportunities because of it. Likewise, when we have a positive opinion of the messenger, we tend to accept the message without much vetting. Both are bad.

Whether the situation involves facts, ideas, beliefs, opinions, or predictions, the substance of the information has merit (or lack of merit) separate from where it came from. If you’re deciding the truth of whether the earth is round, it doesn’t matter if the idea came from your best friend or George Washington or Benito Mussolini. The accuracy of the statement should be evaluated independent of its source.

I learned an early lesson in my poker career about universalism. I started playing poker using that list of hands my brother Howard wrote on a napkin. I treated this initial advice like a holy document. Therefore, when I saw someone playing hands off-list, I immediately labeled them as a bad player. When I saw such a player subsequently execute a strategy I didn’t have as part of my game, I dismissed it. Doing that across the board (especially when I was labeling these players as “bad” based on one view of a sound beginner’s strategy) was an expensive lesson in universalism. For so many things going on at the table in the first years of my poker career, I shot the message.

David Letterman admitted a similar mistake in a conversation with Lauren Conrad. He spent a long time assuming people around him were idiots before considering the alternative hypothesis, “Maybe I’m the idiot.” In poker, I was the idiot.

As I learned that Howard’s list was just a safe way to get me started and not the Magna Carta scrawled in crayon on a napkin, I developed an exercise to practice and reinforce universalism. When I had the impulse to dismiss someone as a bad player, I made myself find something that they did well. It was an exercise I could do for myself, and I could get help from my group in analyzing the strategies I thought those players might be executing well. That commitment led to many benefits.

Of course, I learned some new and profitable strategies and tactics. I also developed a more complete picture of other players’ strategies. Even when I determined that the strategic choices of that player weren’t, in the end, profitable, I had a deeper understanding of my opponent’s game, which helped me devise counter-strategies. I had started thinking more deeply about the way my opponents thought. And in some instances, I recognized that I had underestimated the skills of certain players who I initially thought were profitable for me to play against. That led me to make more objective decisions about game selection. And my poker group benefited from this exercise as well because, in workshopping the strategies with each other, we multiplied the number of playing techniques we could observe and discuss. Admitting that the people I played against had things to teach me was hard, and my group helped me feel proud of myself when I resisted the urge to just complain about how lucky my opponents were.

Nearly any group can create an exercise to develop and reinforce the open-mindedness universalism requires. As an example, with politics so polarized, we forget the obvious truth that no one has only good ideas or only bad ideas. Liberals would do well to take some time to read and watch more conservative news sources, and conservatives would do well to take some time to read and watch more liberal news sources—not with the goal of confirming that the other side is a collection of idiots who have nothing of value to say but to specifically and purposely find things they agree with. When we do this, we learn things we wouldn’t otherwise have learned. Our views will likely become moderated in the same way judges from opposite sides of the political aisle moderate each other. Even if, in the end, we don’t find much to agree with, we will understand the opposing position better—and ours as well. We’ll be practicing what John Stuart Mill preached.

Another way to disentangle the message from the messenger is to imagine the message coming from a source we value much more or much less. If we hear an account from someone we like, imagine if someone we didn’t like told us the same story, and vice versa. This can be incorporated into an exploratory group’s work, asking each other, “How would we feel about this if we heard it from a much different source?” We can take this process of vetting information in the group further, initially and intentionally omitting where or whom we heard the idea from. Leading off our story by identifying the messenger could interfere with the group’s commitment to universalism, biasing them to agree with or discredit the message depending on their opinion of the messenger. So leave the source out to start, giving the group the maximum opportunity to form an impression without shooting (or celebrating) the message based on their opinion of the messenger (separate from the expertise and credibility of the messenger).

John Stuart Mill made it clear that the only way to gain knowledge and approach truth is by examining every variety of opinion. We learn things we didn’t know. We calibrate better. Even when the result of that examination confirms our initial position, we understand that position better if we open ourselves to every side of the issue. That requires open-mindedness to the messages that come from places we don’t like.