by Winthrop E. Sullivan III
Let’s start with this: I could be wrong. In fact, I most probably am – to some extent. How wrong is yet to be determined and hopefully can change as I learn more about the universe. I don’t say this because I lack confidence in my beliefs / opinions / assessments or in my ability to reason and decide about them. I do it because I am trying to be honest with myself.
I know that I don’t know everything. My opinions are based on some facts, some logical reasoning, a good deal of speculation and some wishful thinking here and there. I don’t think that I am unique in this. In fact, I am probably extremely typical. But by being able to admit this about myself, I open the door to learn new things. Sometimes that is hard because I don’t like being wrong or not knowing everything, but I have to accept that or I can’t move forward.
You can’t learn anything if you don’t think that you have anything to learn.
But this doesn’t mean that I have to be a pushover. If it took some effort to get where I am conceptually speaking, I shouldn’t waste that effort. This is where you have to be simultaneously open as well as resistant to new ideas. Open because you could be wrong. Resistant because you should put at least as much effort into replacing an idea or personal opinion as it took to form the previous one. Those that agree with the open part but don’t put much effort into forming their opinions are easily swayed and frankly, if they haven’t invested much in them, they aren’t worth that much to begin with. Those that disagree with the open part because they know that they are right are usually very resistant to new ideas. Arguing with these people is like arguing with a wall – they may do a lot of talking but not too much listening. They want to teach you what they know, not to learn what you can teach them.
So where am I going with this? I would like to see more of this attitude in our public discourses. I think that this attitude shift could help us all. I don’t think we are teaching this to our children – what is called “critical thinking”. This phrase embraces both the open and resistant nature of intelligent reasoning. It’s a skill that seems to be lacking in us and is reflected in our politics. We see argument as something to be avoided because it frequently gets ugly – or we encourage / enjoy it if we are into blood sports. Hence the popularity of Reality TV. I think that this is because we look at argument the wrong way – we think of it as a pissing contest, a battle of wills, rather than an opportunity to expose different points of view to get to the essential points of disagreement so we can work them out.
An essential ingredient here is mutual respect. When I engage in discussions with friends in which we start out with opposite points of view, we generally find that there are a lot of things that we do agree on once we dig into the reasons and/or assumptions behind our differing opinions. I always learn something from these discussions. If I am talking to somebody that completely shares my views, all I get is validation not education. The latter may be more satisfying emotionally but it doesn’t advance the ball. Critical thinking requires that you apply the same standard to all ideas and opinions, even your own.
And let’s stop assuming that if someone doesn’t agree with us, they must not be as intelligent as we are. This attitude is poison to respectful discourse but we see it everywhere. Stupidity doesn’t have a political party. And in my opinion, this attitude is basically a cop-out – I don’t have to listen to you because you are a moron. This is just one more opinion that requires some scrutiny – especially if we consider ourselves to be fair-minded. As one of the Car Talk guys (I think it was Ray) once said to a questioner who had made a self-deprecating comment – “You may be a moron, but we haven’t established that yet”.
There is also the idea of knowledge spaces. Intelligent people recognize three: “I know what I know”, “I know what I don’t know” and “I don’t know what I don’t know”. (The fourth logical one “I don’t know what I know” indicates brain disfunction – amnesia, senility or the like). With the first, I know both the questions and the answers (I think). In the second case, I just know the questions and in the third I don’t even know that. The more that you know, the more you realize that the third space is the largest one, followed by the second. This is exciting to some people and terrifying to others. Being in the first space is comforting – there is a feeling of control and mastery. The second space is our intellectual “to do” list, requiring either research or discovery. The third is the great unknown unknown.
The opposite of knowledge is ignorance. Some of us take this word as an insult, but let’s be honest, relatively speaking we are all ignorant in some way. Ignorance is not a sign of poor intelligence, although these tend to be correlated, and that is probably why people take umbrage with the word. That they misconstrue “ignorant” for “stupid” underscores their own lack of language comprehension. This may not be entirely their fault. Our educational system often emphasizes memorization over comprehension because its easier to test knowledge of facts then mastery of concepts. Memorization is often temporary and therefore ultimately useless and now with the Internet, basically obsolete. Learning how to think though is a skill that can last a lifetime. But we don’t seem to be teaching that!
The problem is that learning should be dispassionate, but the issues that we need to learn about are highly charged emotionally. Emotional attachment to an idea makes it difficult for us to disengage from it. Emotion is also more entertaining than reason – it makes for much better theatre. An an example of this, are the so called Presidential Debates which are of course nothing of the sort. They have degraded into pissing and quipping contests. The candidate with the most memorable zinger wins.
I think that we can blame Ronald Reagan for that – I don’t agree with many of his decisions but what you can’t deny is his ability to project a image of confident leadership – which is certainly a valuable asset for a President to have (sorry Jimmy). Those on the other side would say that this was just an image – he was by trade an actor after all. His ability to deliver the withering one-liner in a debate was impressive though. Political opponents would say that this was due to having very clever writers like Peggy Noonan behind the scenes so that he could use his acting skills to place the staggering – but pre-written – jab just at the right moment, and not to having the wit to think them up on the spot. But whatever the case, they were very effective and highly entertaining.
So is some of the pseudo-scientific malarky that we are fed by cable TV on channels like History or Discover that pride themselves as being educational. If they billed this stuff as what it is – entertainment and fantasy – fine. To call it anything else is nonsense. But we would rather be entertained than educated – often times myself included.
The Democratic Republic that we enjoy needs more from us though. We can’t blame the politicians for pandering to us – we are buying what they are selling. Critical thinking is one way to combat this. The messages from each party resonate with their voter bases – who are generally speaking decent law-abiding citizens regardless of affiliation (the mutual respect thing please). So in my view, this means that there is some validity to each platform. In most cases, the differences represent trade-offs or pros and cons that need to be considered and hopefully correctly balanced. But we have lost the ability for compromise so we lose that opportunity. We need to get it back. Bringing back true debate in its noblest form is one way. We should demand this when our political representatives debate each other, but we should start by practicing it ourselves.
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