Dissent and Relativity

during the seventeenth century, the philosophers of the day – most notably Descartes – made a number of fundamental moves away from the foundational beliefs of the Renaissance and the humanism entailed in that era.
First, the seventeenth-century philosophers moved from an oral mode of argument for making judgments to a written form of proof that could be judged in terms of formal logic. Rhetoric as a means of questioning the conditions and the circumstances in which arguments carry conviction was dismissed as a way of assessing the rational merit of argument. In such circumstances, the value of people arguing for and against ideas was dismissed. By extension, the role of dissent went as well. There was no place for the dissenting voice in the rationalist pursuit for truth.
Second, the seventeenth-century philosophers moved from a concern with the local, transient and particular aspects of life and language to a preoccupation with general, abstract principles that would apply across time and place. This set of moves took modern philosophers away from particular, practical problems to the search for abstract and timeless methods for deriving general solutions to universal problems. Implicit in this search for principles was the belief in the idea of certainty. If you applied the right methods, then you could be assured of the certain, right answer. This drive for certainty also militated against a role for dissent. It’s just not acceptable to laud the role of dissent, when it is believed there can be once certain universal answer. - Robyn Penman, "Making a Place for the Practice of Dissenting," Dissent and the Failure of Leadership, pp. 210-211.

My essential problem with this account is that seems to dismiss out of hand the written “voice” – just because rationalist arguments were being written did not inherently eliminate the “voice” of dissent: written dissensions of popularly held beliefs were commonplace among humanist philosophers and thinkers. In fact, one could argue that the advent of written (and printed) dissent made it all the more possible and commonplace, rather than arguing that it was eliminated.

Furthermore, the idea that there is a truth does not detract from dissent in the process of attempting to find that truth. Scientific thinking – which is what is being described in the second point – does not revel in the elimination of dissent; Penman here seems guilty of ascribing too much value not to dissent, but to relativism – to dissent for dissent’s sake, rather than to dissent as a vehicle for the improvement of knowledge, ethics, or society.

Michael Shermer, in Why People Believe Weird Things, points out that one can, in fact, be too skeptical: "The flaw in pure skepticism is that when taken to an extreme, the position itself cannot stand. If you are skeptical about everything, you must be skeptical about your own skepticism" (16). It seems that Penman has reached this point in her argument about dissent - that one must dissent even to one's dissent, or one is stifling dissent. But this isn't productive. There is no need to dissent simply to be the dissenting voice. To dissent a proven fact, for example, is non-productive, and could actually become harmful.

While in principle, I do agree with Penman's essential argument that dissent - and the opportunity to do so - is a good thing (I've certainly been a dissenter often enough), there comes a point when constant dissent undermines its own value. If the dissenting opinion is always put forth - even when absurd or fruitless - it has a similar detrimental effect to the oppression of dissent; in both cases, dissension becomes meaningless and useless, undermining its own position as a valuable check on our ideological paradigms.