House of Eratosthenes

Prof. Sowell again says obvious things that, in spite of being so obvious, once pointed-out will cause you to question much that you might not have previously questioned:

It is always amazing how many serious issues are not discussed seriously, but instead simply generate assertions and counter-assertions. On television talk shows, people on opposite sides often just try to shout each other down.

There is a remarkable range of ways of seeming to argue without actually producing any coherent argument.
:
…[A] student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D. without encountering any fundamentally different vision of the world from that of the prevailing political correctness.

Moreover, the moral perspective that goes with this prevailing ideological view is all too often that of people who see themselves as being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil — whether the particular issue at hand is gun control, environmentalism, race or whatever.

A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas. One sign of this sense of moral monopoly among the left intelligentsia is that the institutions most under their control — the schools, colleges and universities — have far less freedom of speech than the rest of American society.
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The failure of our educational system goes beyond what they fail to teach. It includes what they do teach, or rather indoctrinate, and the graduates they send out into the world, incapable of seriously weighing alternatives for themselves or for American society.

As I’ve pointed out before: Thinking is about thought, and a thought is best & most accurately described after it has been categorized — fact, opinion, thing-to-do. The issue Professor Sowell raises has to do with conflicting thoughts, which we might define according to the above taxonomy as: pluralities of facts, some of which must have been assessed inaccurately since they offer different measurements of the same things; pluralities of opinions, some of which must be erroneous because they are mutually exclusive; and, pluralities of desires about what is to be done, some of which would have to yield to others. What do we do about such conflicts? Or more to the point, what is the next generation being taught about what to do with conflicts like these?

For all the reasons he offers, and many others he doesn’t mention, the answer appears to be — not a damn thing. We’ve seen that often enough in these pages, as the comment threads occasionally grow, Jack-and-the-Beanstalk like, twisting and turning and revealing all sorts of stuff.

The fundamental thought-concept of uncertainty seems to have become something of a relic from the past. People know there is global warming, it’s all man’s fault, China has a moral license to take a breather from stricter pollution limits that are to be imposed on the rest of the world…because it’s all about carbon emissions per capita, and the developed nations will have to learn to sacrifice, which they will. Not a scintilla of residual doubt about any of this, it’s discussed as if future events occurred in the past. But most distressingly, if the other side remains unconvinced, the thing to do is start repeating the same things over and over.

It doesn’t end there though, there are all these quirky maneuvers. We see it on television. Sarcasm, for example, which can have a legitimate function every now and then. On The Daily Show, that’s how pretty much all the “thinking” is done, with sarcasm. Nobody really wants to say The Daily Show is their primary source of news, or even that it’s one of many sources of news…but many who refuse to admit this, refuse to admit the opposite as well. They’ll start droning on about how Daily Show viewers are best informed, and Fox News viewers are the least informed. In fact, I’ve often observed that over the last few years we seem to have lost our sense of what a well-informed opinion even looks like: Our bar is so low, now, that about the best you can expect is “I saw Jon Stewart do a segment on that once, it was really good, I liked it a lot.”

Edmund Burke spins in his grave.

I mentioned above about conflicting thoughts, which are contradictions. This is a great example: The Daily Show is a source of news, or else it is not. An argument that maintains both of those to be the case, must fail, for it is encumbered by an unworkable internal contradiction. But many within the younger generation aren’t even slowed down as they press onward with exactly that: I’m more informed because I watch TDS…but that is not anybody’s news source, that is a myth.

So repeating things over and over, is not persuasive. And you can’t assert some fact while simultaneously asserting the opposite. There are other rules in place that nobody should have to write down…but a lot of people don’t seem to know about them…

An argument must fail if it pretends two things are the same, when they are meaningfully different things.

An argument must fail if it pretends two things are divided by some meaningful difference, when this is actually not the case and those things are identical for all intents and purposes.

Blogger friend Phil has made occasional reference to the “I laugh at it, so it becomes untrue” mystical power of modern arguing. Sadly, you haven’t long to wait nowadays to see examples of it in action. Wherever you see someone provide a “rebuttal” by way of this magical hocus-pocus, you are seeing a “thinker” bypassing thought. The tragedy is that he probably thinks he’s doing a wonderful awesome job of thinking about things. Giggle giggle.

An argument must fail, I would say, if it transgresses against any of the twenty things that are non-partisan, or darn well ought to be, that I wrote down.

Not that I claim to be any kind of lawgiver, like Moses, or anything. It shouldn’t be necessary. These are things that should be just self-explanatory. And would be, I think, if we lived in a more rustic society in which people had to solve basic problems on their own just to get to their classes healthy, whole and capable of learning, with fluids and nutrients in their systems. But as our society has become more advanced, the necessity of this basic-problem-solving has been slowly obviated. Which means once the students do arrive at that class, they rely on that class to teach them “how to think and not what to think,” as the saying goes…with a weight and sense of dependence that was not present in the previous generations of students. When they’re not being taught that, there, consequences must ensue. These consequences are felt not only by the student, but by the rest of society.

Well. To answer the Prof’s question, I think the answer is no; thinking is not obsolete, like a five-inch floppy disk or a film development darkroom. But that’s because, as I see it, this stuff goes in cycles. As quality thinking results in an improvement of the standard of living, for the individual as well as for society as a whole — you can take it to the bank that the “quality thinking” has worked itself out of a job, since the higher standard of living will partially result in a new allowance of sloppy, slipshod thinking. And we have enjoyed so much improvement to our standard of living, and as a result our society-wide ability to think things out has deteriorated so much, that we are overdue for a suffering. With the current recession that began around 2007, this is exactly what’s been happening to us. Maybe it’s just about done. Or, maybe it’s the dawn of a new era, and the licks we’ve already been taking are nothing more than a down-payment.

But I’m sure as the challenges get stiffer, people will adapt, as they are forced to, and we will eventually “rotate” our way out of the mess we’ve created for ourselves. In my exuberant optimism, I fantasize that we will not only have recovered these critical thinking skills that we left lying in the dirt in years past, like a spoiled child leaving his cherished new bicycle lying in the street waiting to be lifted — but will have produced a new wisdom from having gone through the experience.

And we’ll remember it all for generations.

Yeah…it is that last note of reckless optimism, in which I place the least confidence. That’s regrettable, because that’s the most important one. Critical thinking isn’t worth much if it doesn’t have wisdom to go with it, and wisdom doesn’t provide much of an assist over the long haul if you can’t hang on to it. But, I remain hopeful. What else can one do?

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Is Thinking Obsolete?Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Is Thinking Obsolete?
Wednesday, May 1st, 2013