Chapter 13
THE COOPER CONUNDRUM: GOOD LORD, WHO’S TOLERATING WHOM?
The characters of The Big Bang Theory are an eclectic bunch. Penny and her scientific neighbors have different tastes, social habits, cultural backgrounds, and interests, yet they are drawn together, and somehow, they make it work. When we live in a free society, we are expected to accept that people are different and that everyone should be free to live his or her life according to those differences (so long as we’re not harming one another). It’s a simple, perhaps heavy-handed, message of tolerance, and in some cases it’s easier said than done. What if my way of life deems yours so objectionable that we can’t get along?
Look at the Coopers. Conventional wisdom suggests that it’s easier for a scientist to be tolerant than it is for a religious fundamentalist. Mrs. Cooper believes that by faith one comes to know truth. Not the kind of truth that merely applies today or in this place, religious truth tends to be the capital “T” variety that holds for all times and in all places. In contrast, Dr. Cooper holds fast to the scientific tradition, which is tied to observable fact and as such must recognize its own limits and fallibility. Scientists once told us the Earth was flat; now we know it is round—well, actually not “round,” but you get the idea; even gravity is up for grabs these days. Scientists are aware that their findings are probably not the last word on a subject, whereas religious evangelists preach the Truth.
Does that mean, though, that scientists are better equipped to tolerate religious persons than vice versa? Is Sheldon more tolerant than his mother? Does that make Sheldon a better citizen in a free society? The answers are not simple and straightforward. In fact, The Big Bang Theory shows just how complicated the relationship is between a person’s worldview and tolerance. To observe this, let’s put Sheldon (the scientist), Mrs. Cooper (the religious fundamentalist), a couple of antirealist philosophers, and their concomitant worldviews in competition with one another. Remember the Physics Bowl in “The Bat Jar Conjecture?” Well, this is the Tolerance Bowl.
The connection between how we see the world and how we choose to organize ourselves politically is probably as old as politics, but we don’t have to look back that far to see what it might mean in contemporary political arrangements. In the late 1950s, Isaiah Berlin famously argued that liberalism, the view that individuals should be free from restraints placed on them by the state, is simply the best response to pluralism, a view that emphasizes the diversity of values that one might reasonably pursue.
Berlin argued that reasonable, rational people will develop very different ways of going about their lives. Given that people reasonably choose different goals and come up with different ways of achieving them, it is absurd to think that one person can make the right choice for everyone. As a result, individuals should be equally free from (illegitimate) coercion by the state or other citizens.1 Of course, in any society, some coercion is necessary. In a liberal democracy, for example, coercion that protects individual freedoms and equality can be legitimate.
The upshot is a free society, where Sheldon and his mother can have different beliefs, values, and ideas about what makes a good life. They both benefit by keeping their controversial values more or less private, because in doing so, they support the public value—namely, freedom—which allows them the opportunity to live their lives according to their own ideas. Even though it seems like a chore, they both have a good reason to exercise tolerance. Politically speaking, they agree that it is better to be free and live with deep disagreement than to live under the kind of tyranny that is necessary for agreement on multiple levels of association.
The idea that tolerance and tyranny stand on opposite sides of the freedom question is appealing but not without its problems, as this memorable moment from “The Electric Can Opener Fluctuation” shows:
Sheldon: I will spend the rest of my life here in Texas trying to teach evolution to creationists.
Mrs. Cooper: You watch your mouth, Shelly. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.
Sheldon: Evolution isn’t an opinion, it’s fact.
Mrs. Cooper: And that is your opinion.
At first blush, Mary gets a lot of tolerance points here because she says she won’t tolerate intolerance. In doing so, however, she is imposing a kind of tyranny on Sheldon, a tyranny that is meant to force him to move out of her house and back to California. Let’s call the relationship here, between tyranny and tolerance, the “Cooper conundrum.” It is an expression of tolerance that is functionally intolerant.
Mrs. Cooper believes that the world was created by God over seven days; Dr. Cooper believes the universe is the product of evolution over billions of years. Neither will be convinced that the other is correct. Indeed, Sheldon is seldom convinced that anyone else is right about anything, as he reminds us in “The Boyfriend Complexity”: “As usual, you’re all wrong.” Obviously, this approach costs Sheldon a few tolerance points, but Mary also loses some when she bulldozes through Raj’s ethnicity in “The Electric Can Opener Fluctuation” with comments such as “You know, at our church we have a woman who’s an amazing healer. . . . I bet she’d be willing to take a shot at whatever Third World demon is running around inside of you.”
Sheldon’s commitment to being right and his mother’s commitment to the truth of her own beliefs are not conducive to accepting the fact of reasonable disagreement—the idea that different people can have very different, perfectly reasonable, ways of looking at the world. As a result, the Coopers don’t seem to embrace what is fundamental to the liberal tradition, the pluralist approach to right and wrong. Why is that? Why do they find it so difficult to tolerate each other?
The scientist and the fundamentalist seem to be worlds apart, or, at the very least, they look at the world in completely different ways. For Dr. Cooper, scientific method reveals facts about the world; for Mrs. Cooper, God is a fact in the world. They live in the same world, observing the same physical reality, but they see the world in very different ways. Sheldon’s mother brings those differences into stark comic relief, for example, in “The Electric Can Opener Fluctuation,” when she says things such as, “Hold your horses, young man. Here in Texas, we pray before we eat. . . . This is not California, land of the heathen.”
Despite appearances, however, the worldviews of Sheldon and his mother may not be that far apart. According to the philosopher Donald Davidson (1917–2003), a conceptual scheme, like a worldview, is a package of beliefs, values, and concepts that are in some way linked to the way we talk about the world (our language practices) and the way we organize ourselves socially (our political practices). Davidson argued that the notion of radically different conceptual schemes (worldviews) is itself a paradox. The argument goes something like this: Different conceptual schemes make sense only in relation to an overarching conceptual scheme shared in common; however, the existence of a common conceptual scheme disproves radical difference between conceptual schemes. As a result, we cannot make sense of the idea that there is radical difference between conceptual schemes.2
Here’s one way to understand the paradox: Penny and Leonard come from different social worlds—waitress and wannabe actress v. physicist. Yet if they were radically different, they wouldn’t even be able to communicate. They understand how different they are only because they can appeal to what they have in common, an overarching scheme. They’re both Americans, they speak the same language, and so on. These similarities mean that their worlds aren’t so different, after all.
Davidson developed an integrated approach to problems of knowledge, action, language, and mind. So it’s not surprising that he argued that the way we talk about the world is closely linked with how we view the world. As a result, the language practices of a given group express, or reflect, the conceptual scheme of the group.
We recognize a language as a language on the basis of our own. So, if we came across a radically different language, it would not look, to us, like a language. If it is possible to employ the concepts of one language to make sense of another, the difference between them is not radical. In other words, if Klingon was radically different from English, it is doubtful that the speakers of English would recognize Klingon as a language. And what kind of a world would it be without Klingon Boggle?
What holds for the translatability of languages holds for the intelligibility of reasoning as well. If we encountered reasoning radically different from our own, we wouldn’t recognize it as reasoning. If we are able to make sense of it as reasoning, it doesn’t embody radical difference. The very idea that others might have a completely different way of explaining, organizing, and categorizing their experience of the world is internally inconsistent with how we explain, organize, and categorize experience. If we share the same world, then we share, for the most part, the same apparatus for making sense of it. Hence, if we can make sense of difference, it is because the contrast is not significant; understandable difference is only moderately different.
Davidson’s ideas are not without controversy, but at least they help show how much Sheldon and his mother have in common. Recall the following exchange from “The Luminous Fish Effect”:
Mrs. Cooper: Oh, well, that looks awful fancy, what is that?
Sheldon: It’s my idea of what DNA would look like in a silicon-based life form.
Mrs. Cooper: But intelligently designed by a creator, right?
Despite their disagreement, Mary and Sheldon share and deploy a plethora of concepts to voice that disagreement—DNA, life form, intelligent design. They understand each other because underneath the disagreement about which is the right way to view the world, they share a world in which different groups have different opinions about the world.
In a world with different opinions, we don’t have to look far to see that like attracts like. Mrs. Cooper says her normal kids are much easier to deal with. It’s easy for Sheldon to get along with Beverly Hofstadter and Amy Farrah Fowler, yet he finds the company of his own mother and Penny exceedingly taxing.
So, they’re still neck and neck in the Tolerance Bowl. They find it equally difficult to tolerate each other and people who think differently. That’s not to say that they’re not capable of being tolerant. In fact, Sheldon feels that his forbearance capacity is constantly tested, as he reminds us in “The Desperation Emanation”: “Leonard, you are my best friend. I’ve known you for seven years, and I can barely tolerate sitting on the couch with you.” So, why is tolerance such a burden for Sheldon? Does it have something to do with his way of looking at the world?
Surprisingly, Sheldon and Mrs. Cooper share more than just the same world and a bunch of concepts; they also share a particular way of looking at the world. They are both so committed to the truth of their beliefs that they often talk past each other, rather than to each other, as in the following phone conversation from “The Electric Can Opener Fluctuation”: “No, mother, I could not feel your church group praying for my safety. The fact that I’m home safe is not proof that it worked, that logic is Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. No, I’m not sassing you in Eskimo talk.”
Mrs. Cooper is committed to a fundamentalist notion of truth, and although Dr. Cooper does not subscribe to the same set of beliefs, he does appeal to the truth of logic. In other words, the way Mary believes and orients her life around God parallels the way Sheldon believes and orients his life around science. This sort of orientation falls under the umbrella of metaphysical realism. Roughly speaking, it’s the idea that there is an objective reality that exists independent of how we talk or think about it.
In contrast, Davidson argued that a worldview with that type of orientation is misguided. The idea that we cannot make sense of radically different worldviews, plural, he cautioned, does not mean that we can make sense of a worldview, a singular grand master scheme, either. The idea that there is one scheme out there somewhere is problematic. We cannot appeal to God or some sort of unified theory to justify the idea that one way of looking at the world is better than the rest. The mistake, according to Davidson, is to think that there is some sort of independent ground out there at all.
If there is no giant meter stick out there that we can use to adjudicate disagreement, then we are left with provisional understandings in a socially conditioned reality—the truth is, there is no truth. This antirealist paradigm is a worldview in which, simply, what we have is what we have, nothing more, and nothing less.
This issue is often couched as a created or discovered problem in philosophy. Do we create truth, social reality, human nature? Or are those things out there waiting to be discovered? Is it just our understanding of those things that’s incomplete? In the antirealist picture, there is nothing out there to be discovered; social reality is created.
Historically, Western civilization has been particularly guilty of justifying oppression on the basis of a natural order. The world, it was thought, simply dictated that some races were meant to serve others, and this discovery made it possible to enslave or otherwise take advantage of some races on moral grounds. Sheldon, of course, is quite comfortable with the idea of natural orders, lest we forget his quip from “The Financial Permeability”: “I think I’d be willing to be a house pet to a race of super intelligent aliens.” (No doubt, Sheldon would like to live in a world where his inferiors would similarly defer to his superiority.)
Most of us think differently; our social reality has changed. It is a fact that there are people of different races in the world, but the world does not tell us that one race is better than the rest, that one race deserves a better life than the others. Racism is not somehow “in” the world; it is created through social relations. In “The Boyfriend Complexity,” Raj asks, “Is that racist? It feels racist.” He’s asking, “What do we have here?” and Howard’s answer is his socially conditioned understanding: “Don’t be oversensitive. He’s calling you illiterate, not your race.” Through dialogue, they sort out what kind of comments are ethically contentious. In that, they’re building a shared concept of racism.
Giving up on the idea that the world can somehow ground or justify our opinions, it seems, makes it easier to accept that other people (perfectly reasonable people) can have very different (yet equally legitimate) worldviews. Yet Sheldon believes he knows more about what’s out there than anyone else. Recall an exchange from “The Work Song Nanocluster.” Sheldon mockingly asserts, “Penny, I’m a physicist. I have a working knowledge of the entire universe and everything it contains.” When Penny asks, “Who’s Radiohead?” he doesn’t know, so he must, in order to be consistent with his premise, reject the question (or, at least, its importance).
Both the Coopers would disagree with the antirealist paradigm. Whether they believe they have access to God or the unified theory of everything doesn’t matter; what does matter is that they both believe that there is something out there. In contrast, Davidson rejects the idea that there is any sort of independent ground out there, and as a result, the most we can say about the truth of a statement is that it is relative to the language in which it was spoken.3
Given Sheldon’s Spock-like commitment to logic, you might think Sheldon could happily agree with Davidson on this point, but that requires accepting the fallibility of his own beliefs. Sheldon’s scientism doesn’t seem to allow for that degree of fallibility. For Sheldon, the truth of string theory, although not proven, is not merely one truth among many, it is the capital “T,” Truth, which everyone, including Leslie Winkle, will come to accept—eventually. Dr. Cooper, it seems, is religiously scientific in “The Benefactor Factor” when he proclaims his purpose is “to tear the mask off nature and stare at the face of God.”
This sort of commitment to first, the truth of one’s beliefs, and second, the belief that an independent reality will ultimately prove those beliefs “true” doesn’t make sense in the Davidsonian worldview. Realists—be they religious, scientific, or metaphysical—are operating in a paradigm in which reality is revealed to them as truth. Truth is not relative to the language of the community. Truth is relative to an independent ground that can be discovered, and it is the standard against which evaluations of true and false, right and wrong, and good and evil are made.
In contrast, Davidson’s paradigm is less concerned with absolute right or wrong, and as a result, the fallibility of what is known or believed today is a given. I can still believe what I believe, but the idea that what I believe might change over time makes it easier to accept the idea that people can reasonably disagree. Acknowledging the ultimate fallibility of one’s beliefs encourages tolerance by getting around some of the obstacles thrown up by the Coopers’ realism. So, the antirealist outlook makes it much easier to accept pluralism. Different people, if they are free to do so, will have different views of the world, and that’s really all we can say. The differences alone are not enough to prove one worldview better than another. At this point you might think that antirealists, such as Davidson, are going to clean up in the Tolerance Bowl. Yet there is a kind of dogma lurking in the what-we-have paradigm, a dogma that functionally excludes the metaphysical realism of Sheldon and Mrs. Cooper.
If Davidson is right, realist reasoning (scientific or religious) about truth is not reasoning at all; it is so radically different from the what-we-have paradigm, it fails to meet the only features of reasonableness that can be known, those that represent reasoning in the what-we-have worldview. If Davidson is right, both Coopers are excluded from the realm of reasonable people.
Building on Davidsonian ideas, Richard Rorty (1931–2007) famously quipped: “The world does not speak. Only we do.”4 This suggests that the line between appearance and reality, what is made and what is created, is itself a creation—not a discovery. If all we have is what we have, then objectivity is a myth. We simply can’t step outside our point of view, our worldview.
If we cannot achieve any sort of critical distance from where we are, then we cannot see our worldview in relation to another worldview. We can only see alternative points of view from our own; we can only deploy the concepts from our own point of view to interpret the actions of others.5 This isn’t to say that we cannot, over time, learn new concepts and different ways of looking at things. We can expand the number of shared concepts between different worldviews. Penny comes to understand what the guys are up to in “The Bat Jar Conjecture” by translating their actions into her own terms. “Wow, so in your world, you’re like, the cool guys.” Howard: “Recognize.”
The process of recognition comes about, according to Rorty, because there is no objective criterion of “cool guyness” out there. Instead, what a cool guy is, is contingent on social conditions. To say that Dr. Cooper’s claims about evolution are made relative to a scientific worldview or that Mrs. Cooper’s comments about creationism are made relative to a religious worldview really isn’t saying anything about the difference between them, except to say they are different.
The implications of this idea present a significant challenge in modern political and moral arrangements because if Rorty was right, then no one can be shown to be wrong. Or more succinctly, to say “you’re wrong” is really only stating an opinion. Once again, both Coopers would be quite uncomfortable with such a loosey-goosey approach to facts or truth. So, once again, they are equally disadvantaged on the tolerance scale. Yet the antirealists, it turns out, don’t fare much better.
If, as Rorty suggested, we lose access to what makes evaluations of difference and disagreement meaningful, then we really are stuck with what-we-have—stuck with it in such a way that we cannot even account for the idea of genuine pluralism. If we can’t see the significant contrast between our own worldview and the worldviews of others, we have no good reason to acknowledge that different worldviews exist out there. We tend, in that case, to see our worldview as the only worldview and, in doing so, lose sight of the reason we need tolerance in the first place.
So, antirealism seems to offer a worldview that encourages tolerance through the recognition of fallibility but then loses any tolerance points gained because it cannot account for the level of diversity that makes disagreement meaningful in pluralist associations. Whether your way of looking at the world falls under the antirealist or the realist umbrella, believing that you’re more right, more reasonable, more in touch with reality than others makes it difficult to tolerate people who think differently.
So, who wins the Tolerance Bowl? Who’s more tolerant: Sheldon, his mother, or the antirealist philosopher? If we base the decision on worldviews, they all come out about even. We’ve seen how giving up on the idea that all of the answers we need to run a society come from correctly interpreting God or discovering a theory of everything makes it easier to be tolerant of others. Rejecting the idea that the world “out there” exists to justify some beliefs but not others makes it easier to accept that all of the worldviews in The Big Bang Theory—Jewish, East Indian, Texan, and Nebraskan—are equally reasonable and worthy of public recognition. Yet adhering to the what-we-have idea, as if it were the only right way to think, can make it just as difficult to acknowledge and tolerate different points of view.
So, if we can’t judge who’s more tolerant than whom on the basis of their worldviews, can we answer the question another way? As a scientist, Sheldon works in a tradition that is inherently fallibilist, yet his unyielding commitment to his own hypotheses makes tolerating others an annoying chore. Recall his crass admission from “The Cooper Nowitzke Theorem”: “The truth can indeed be a finger down the throat of those unprepared to hear it. But why should I cater to second-rate minds?” Similarly, Mrs. Cooper’s religious beliefs clearly color her view of the world—including who is ultimately responsible for her son’s acumen—as she states in “The Luminous Fish Effect”: “All that science stuff, that comes from Jesus.”
Despite the fact that they appeal to different meters, neither would be comfortable with the idea that what we have is what we have. Both Coopers, however, understand the difference between fact and opinion, and they both allow, perhaps more grudgingly in Sheldon’s case, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. In “The Hot Troll Deviation,” Sheldon is pretty clear that everyone is free to be wrong, “Yes, well, if we lived in a world where [insert statement he disagrees with here], then you’d be correct. Also, pigs would fly, my derrière would produce cotton candy, and The Phantom Menace would be a timeless classic.”
Ultimately, though, the Coopers must make room for the worldviews of others in order to have the space for their own. So, we’re left with the Cooper conundrum. Neither Shelly nor his mom can tolerate intolerance, and, as we’ve seen, that can be a complicated, even contradictory, idea. Maybe tolerance is a puzzle, the type that is never really solved; it’s just the type that makes us stop and think about who’s tolerating whom and why.6
NOTES
1. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1969), 122.
2. I owe the “worlds” versus “words” comparison to Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 184-89.
3. Ibid., 195.
4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2005), 6.
5. Ibid., 48.
6. My thanks to the webmaster at http://bigbangtrans.wordpress.com for episode dialogue.