One afternoon when I was eight years-old, I was watching a TV show and becoming increasingly confused with each passing minute. Three men, none of whom looked like anyone I would want to know, were slapping each other's faces, along with twisting each other's ears and noses. Why were they doing that? I couldn't make heads or tails of it.
Suddenly, I noticed that my nanny, Opal -- who was watching with me -- was laughing harder than I'd ever her her laugh before. But I couldn't figure out why she was laughing. There wasn't anything funny going on. Not on the TV, not elsewhere in the room.
To make a longer story short, I eventually came to grasp on that day that not everyone has the same sense of humor. Some people 'get' jokes other people cannot fathom are funny. Cannot even begin to.
Up until that afternoon, I had assumed that when someone didn't get a joke, it was because they were 'dumb'. But that afternoon, I realized there was more to it than that. Sometimes 'dumb' had nothing to do with it. Instead, there were sometimes real differences between people in the sort of jokes each of them found humorous.
Agreed so far, and I'd suggest there are a lot of factors in this. Not just individual factors, but cultural, life experience, etc. When I lived in Papua New Guinea, physical humour (particularly slapstick or funniest home video style) was by far the most prevalent and most laughed at form. I wondered if that was due to very low education rates, or the massively diverse number of languages (800+ in a country of 4 million!!).
There was a clear trend though.
This morning, the thought has occurred to me that -- maybe -- some ideas, some concepts, are like jokes not everyone gets. It's not that those people are too dumb to get the concept. It's that they just don't. They are like me and slapstick humor. I could ponder slapstick for decades, and --- if I am lucky -- I might at last come to grasp it on an intellectual level, but I doubt I would get it even then. Get it well enough to find it funny and laugh at it.
Interesting. I tended to think about the same thing in the opposite way, although I never tried generalising the concept. So, to me, slapstick is an example of something that gets less funny the more you think about it. Trying to 'get it' might lead to some sort of superficial understanding of why people react to it in the way they do, but I never thought it would lead to me finding it 'funny'.
Do some people not get conservatism? Do others not get liberalism? Are there people who just don't get libertarianism? What about the theory of evolution? Or mathematics in general? Are there people for whom those things make no sense, just like slapstick makes no sense to me?
But I think all of those things can be learnt. Some people will have an affinity, or find the concepts agreeable, whilst others won't. And there are obviously depths and nuance to all of them which some won't be able to learn, due to intelligence, education, life experience, etc.
But I would equate them with finding slapstick humorous. Actually, the concept that leapt to mind when first reading the OP was more around something like 'attraction'. Imagine a celebrity many find attractive. Sometimes I totally get it, sometimes I can intellectually get it, and sometimes it makes absolutely no sense to me, and I wonder if the world has passed me by.
I might ask a friend 'What? Her/him? Why?'
And their explanation might move me from feeling like the world has passed me by to intellectually getting it. But whether I find that person attractive or not is probably not something I can control (or at least, not directly) in the way I can control knowledge about something.
I would simply ask myself 'Is it possible to be willfully ignorant of this?'
So yes...for something like modern libertarianism in the US, I can easily enough keep myself ignorant about it. Or invest enough time to intellectually understand it.
But if someone speaks about it, whether I find them humorous, or attractive, are much more instinctive reactions than knowledge-based ones.
I am not talking here of people who are 'too dumb to understand' those things. I am talking of people who might very well understand those things -- but who just don't get them. And, consequently, might be fated to always on some level feel there is something profoundly wrong with, say, liberalism, or with the theory of evolution, or with mathematics.
I'm struggling to see where the line is between 'agreement', or at least acknowledgement that an idea has validity, with 'getting it'.
Here's a challenge for you. Search yourself for a concept that you feel you understand, but just don't get. A concept that you can see the truth of, or at least come close to seeing the truth of, but that still somehow, on some level, doesn't feel 'right' to you. Quantum mechanics, anyone? The concept of expressing thoughts and feelings poetically? Slapstick humor? Contemporary art?
@SalixIncendium's fashion sense?
Yeah, but...perhaps showing a massive level of over-confidence...I believe I could learn about any of those. And the ones I might not 'get' are highly subjective and instinctive. Something like fashion or art might be the closest to the line you are talking that I can see, but...
I can certainly educate myself on either topic, on trends and on history. This will give me a better appreciation and understanding of what I am looking at, and...
I suspect a lot of people who talk about fashion and art don't 'get it' any more than an ignorant person does, but they are much better informed about what's considered on point, and why.
Now, I am not so ridiculous as to suggest that anytime anyone has 'issues' with this or that idea, it is because they don't get it. There are tons of other reasons someone might have issues with an idea. They might not have tried hard enough to learn it. It might be a bad idea to begin with. They might be willfully ignorant. Or even, they just might not be smart enough. All I'm suggesting is, that maybe sometimes, a person has issues with an idea because they do not get the idea, in much the same way they might not get a joke, or a genre of humor.
Do you suppose there might be some theists who just don't get nontheism, and some nontheists who just don't get theism? Why or why not?
I think it's an absolute certainty. To understand something as someone else does, we would need to be that person. So we understand all things in our own way. Let me pose a question back to you in a slightly different way. If you take two people who 'get' atheism, do you think they get it in the same way? Do you think they would necessarily agree that the other atheist has truly 'gotten' it? To me, everything we understand, even when we share what we'd call 'common understanding' with others, is actually uniquely understood by each person. The level of variance in how they understand it changes, and at some point the views are quite distinct.
What about people who get their own religion but no other religions? Or who get Abrahamic religions, but not Dharmic?
I think there are places where we draw lines, but I don't think the lines really mean much more than ready labels. So yes, it's possible to get one religion and not others. It's possible to get monotheism but not polytheism. All those things. My view would be that you can intellectually 'get' almost anything, but whether you connect to it requires more than mere knowledge and understanding of the rationale.
Over-simplified example, but I study a fair bit of Christian history, particularly first millennial.
I also have very close Christian friends, was raised Christian, etc.
On some levels, and for some forms of Christianity, I think I have a very good understanding. More than some Christians.
As a hypothetical, imagine I decided that theism was a force for good. That belief helped people be better versions of themselves. I would now have understanding, and I would have reason to believe. I would 'get it' at that point. But I would have no connection to God.
In much the same way, if five friends told me a girl was particularly attractive, and rattled off a bunch of reasons (let's say she's kind, smells nice, and has a ready smile) I might look and see exactly the same things, and even agree that she is attractive in an intellectual kind of way...but feel no attraction.
That doesn't strike me as analogous to a body of knowledge. But I agree you can understand a concept and not agree with it. Colour me unconvinced if there is something between understanding and agreement called 'getting it' when it comes to knowledge based concepts. I read the thread with interest though, since I would say my opinion on this is loosely held, and it's an interesting thought bubble.
By the way, don't look now, but your fly is open!
Sorry, it's deliberate. The air conditioning bills were getting onerous.
