Mike Gallagher is a popular radio talk-show host. I’ve long had a cordial relationship with him, and I’ve appeared on his program many times. But Gallagher and I sometimes occupy very different rooms within the conservative mansion. He usually has me on when we disagree on something, and Thursday was no exception. He took issue with my piece on the killing of Eric Garner by Officer Daniel Pantaleo.

One of the arguments Gallagher made is that the shooting of Michael Brown, who, the preponderance of evidence showed, assaulted and attacked Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, was very nearly the same as the Pantaleo-Garner incident. This strikes me as bizarre. As Andrew McCarthy, the outstanding former federal prosecutor, wrote, “there is a difference between resisting arrest by not cooperating, as Garner was doing in Staten Island, and resisting arrest by violent assaults and threats of harm, as Michael Brown did in Ferguson.”

But I want to focus on another exchange we had. In this instance, Gallagher accused me, Charles Krauthammer, and Bill O’Reilly of “throwing the other side [liberals] a bone.” We decided to “feign disappointment with the grand jury decision to just show that we’re just trying to spread around the love a little bit here.” There was “a little bit of a contrived reaction on this issue.”

My response was that this kind of ad hominem criticism doesn’t really advance serious public debate. And there’s no end to this. To illustrate the point, I told Gallagher it’s the same thing I (or anyone else, for that matter) could do with him: go on his show and accuse him of putting forward views he can’t possibly believe for ratings, in order to play to his right-wing audience. You can see how frivolous and adolescent this can get. To slightly amend the philosopher Sidney Hook, before impugning an opponent’s motives, answer his arguments. (To be fair, Gallagher did back away from his claims a bit in the show.)

But there’s a deeper point to be made here. The reason Gallagher made this accusation against Krauthammer, O’Reilly, and me is because he simply can’t comprehend why we would hold the views we do. Gallagher considers his views so self-evidently right, and ours so self-evidently wrong, that the only explanation he can think of to make sense of things is that our views are inauthentic and manufactured.

This puts the spotlight on a widespread malady we find in several disciplines, including theology, philosophy, and politics: (a) the belief that I possess the whole truth; and (b) the inability to even entertain the idea that those who hold views different than mine might have some validity. In this case, to believe that a New York cop might have used too much force against Eric Garner is completely irrational and illogical; no conservative could believe such a thing. Hence the charge that our views are contrived.

I’m not naive; I know a variety of motivations can drive people to say and do all sorts of things, and sometimes individuals need to be called out. But as a general matter we should attack people’s motivations only in cases where there’s a fair amount of evidence of bad faith. Too often these days this is done reflexively, as a substitute for serious arguments. It’s a manifestation of lazy thinking.

All of us who are in the commentary business believe our views are right and those who hold views different than ours are wrong. Certitude comes with the territory. But there is such a thing as gradations, of where we fall on the continuum; and it does seem to me we live in a time characterized by unusual dogmatism and absolutism. Too many of us haven’t learned what is certainly one of the hardest things in life to learn, which is a certain epistemological modesty, the awareness that my understanding of the world isn’t fully accurate and that other people see things through a different lens than we do. That may make them wrong; it doesn’t make them dishonest or dishonorable.

My guess is that Mike Gallagher got caught up in the moment, which we all do. But it is a cautionary tale, precisely because what happened is so common these days. We really are better off without it.