Say it with me, like an awkwardly long athletic cheer:

“Disputation of fact is not a personal attack.”

Humans are gross, all things considered, but the grossest thing about them is their tendency to form outrageously inefficient cliques. In an environment of scarcity, banding together under even the flimsiest pretenses did indeed up one’s chances for survival. But we have created an environment of dangerous overabundance, and the part of our culture that is most out of step with this new reality is the identification of group membership with shared belief.

“Oh, this bar is for Yankees fans.” No it isn’t. ”We’re a congregation of Presbyterians.” No, you’re really not. ”We’re the party of family values.” That one doesn’t even mean anything! ”I stand with Gaza.” Sorry, that has to go, too.

I think I’d better offer up a couple of definitions: let’s pigeonhole all declarative sentences into Nonsense, Expression, Fact, and Belief. Now a nonsense statement is easy to recognize: ”The midtempo duck permeates all extinct copies of F-Zero” is grammatically pristine, but it makes just as much sense to an English speaker as it does to a cat. Just because words fit together doesn’t mean they convey any information.

Expression is limited to, and encompasses all, statements regarding one’s own sphere of influence. ”I don’t like milk,” or “My hands are cold,” or “I care about my children.” Not “I stand with Gaza,” though, because Gaza is a name for something much more complicated, and also here the speaker is attempting to indicate group membership, not individual expression.

Fact and belief are very similar, indeed indistinguishable to many humans. For the purpose of this blog, a fact is a statement which 1) can be tested and 2) does not require a human to run at least one test. Example: ”If you jump out the nearest window, you may be injured.” There is no need to believe this. Should you choose to test it, go jump out the window.

A belief, then, is an aspiring fact which either is untestable or specifically requires a human (or other sentient being, if you can find one) to confirm or deny the success of all potential tests. Example: ”Joe Biden is currently President of the United States.” This sounds like a fact, but it’s a tall order even to prove the United States exists, other than in the minds of humans. And we’re finally getting at why some “facts” are so divisive.

Disputation of fact is not a personal attack.

But, boy, disputation of belief sure is! Without any way to objectively compare beliefs, and with the age-old once-useful tendency to identify with “the group” – any reasonably proximate group – based on something so flimsy as a belief, any critique of the belief becomes an attack on the group, hence on the individual who so desperately clings to the group. On the other hand, if you were to come up to me and say that 2 = 1, I’d ask you give me two Benjamins in exchange for one, and I wouldn’t care whether you did it or not. And that’s a fact.

We are finite creatures, dwarfed both in size and capacity for comprehension by the wider universe. Belief, at heart, is really just a continuation of our inevitable ignorance. What happens when we die? Nothing, of course — but I require your consensus to convince you, so no wonder we exasperate one another when you say otherwise. In fact, we don’t know because the assertion is untestable, except by death. ”X happens when we die” actually is testable, provided communication with the dead is possible. But “nothing happens when we die” can never be proven.

Note, by the way, that an untestable statement may well actually be true; such claims are forever condemned to be beliefs, even though they are 100% correct. That’s the deepest fact regarding our limited capacity for comprehension. Another species with a better brain could, in principle, do better.

Disputation of fact is not a personal attack. It’s one thing to correct a student who says that one plus one is eleven. It’s quite another to berate the errant being as “an idiot” or “stupid” or something similar; now the person with access to the facts is going out on a limb with a harmful (and likely false) belief. But let’s face it: all beliefs are stupid, seeing as they’re extensions of factual ignorance. It’s even stupid to hold a true belief! And this is why “your belief is stupid” is equally enraging to almost everybody, even though some beliefs are definitely stupider than others.

There’s a scene in the 1997 movie Contact (absent from the significantly superior novel) in which Palmer Joss tries to explain faith to hardcore scientist Ellie. She defends her non-belief in God by citing a lack of evidence or proof. Palmer asks her, “Did you love your dad?” The dad in question is long dead, yet Ellie’s voice still chokes as she replies “Yes. Very much.” And Palmer plays his best card: ”Prove it.”

BOOM! See, by making that loud noise I’m trying to cover up how insane his belief that he’s just made a good point is. And now that you’ve read this, you should immediately understand why his implication is Nonsense — if you believe me.