PERSPECTIVES: Windows on the World Beware the THINKING TRAP! |
Why this webpage? Here are some reasons:
REASON 1: Some quotes
We see things not as they are but as we
are.
- Anais Nin
He who decides a case without
hearing the other side ... though he decides justly, cannot be
considered just.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1st century)
A fool hath no delight in
understanding, they only want to tell others what they think.
- Proverbs 18:2
I have experienced many instances of being
obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change my opinions
even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be
otherwise.
-Benjamin Franklin
Of
all ignorance, the ignorance of the educated is the most dangerous.
Not only are educated people likely to have more influence, they are
the last people to suspect that they don't know what they are
talking about when they go outside their narrow fields.
-Thomas Sowell
REASON 2: David Brooks, The Problem of Political (Ideological)
Ghettos
Source: "Polarized age of
political segregation," in The Daily Bulletin 7/2/2004
One of the "thinking traps" includes that of "group-think." The risk here includes that of conforming to peer pressure; i.e., wanting to just go along with the majority to avoid tension or conflict, acquiescing for convenience sake, etc. When our social circles consist of people who think like us, there is also the risk that one might not be privy to all the relevant information on the matter. This is what might lead one into the trap of stopping to think for themselves.
The promise--the ideal--of college is to help us to think independently, to sort through the evidence and make up our own minds. But the practice does not always match this promise. In an article ("Polarized age of political segregation," in the Daily Bulletin 7/2/2004), David Brooks asserts that while highly educated people might fancy themselves independent thinkers, when it comes to politics "they tend to pick a partisan side and stick with it." He notes that "college-educated voters are more likely than high-school-educated voters to vote for candidates from the same party again and again." He maintains that this is because college-educated voters are more ideological. "Once you've joined a side, the information age makes it easier for you to surround yourself with people like yourself. And if there is one thing we have learned over the past generation, it's that we are really into self-validation." Brooks concludes that "people lose touch with others in opposing, now-distant camps. And millions of kids are raised in what amount to political ghettoes."
REASON 3: Daniel J. Flynn,
Intellectual Morons
Source:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GuestColumns/Flynn20040921.shtml
“There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought,” Stephen
Hawking told a group of shocked scientists this summer in
When Stephen Hawking’s theories came under attack, he rethought rather than retrenched. Hawking’s goal, after all, is not the promotion of Stephen Hawking or the idea of parallel universes, but the pursuit of truth.
The act of abandoning an idea when contrary evidence disproves it is hardly unusual in the hard sciences. Contrary evidence in the social sciences and the humanities often has the opposite effect: devotees tighten their embrace of the theory. As a result, their grip on reality loosens. When you tether yourself to ideology, you necessarily liberate yourself from facts. You become an intellectual moron.
Reflexive adherence to ideology negates critical thinking. It is the conceit of the intellectual, who believes himself so smart that he doesn’t need to think. Ideology provides for him a catchall response to ideas, individuals, and events. Ideology thus makes smart people stupid, creating the intellectual moron.
As illustrated by the mottoes of Harvard (veritas) and Yale (lex et veritas), the search for truth is the essential element of scholarly life. Stephen Hawking’s abandonment of his own theory in favor of truth exemplifies the scholar’s commitment to his professional creed.
REASON 4:
The
Parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant
Source: John Godfrey Saxe
Generally speaking, one can learn quite a bit when talking to someone you disagree with rather than one who agrees with you. This is because the former compels one to have to think through their ideas. The "history thinking machine" knows that we gain in understanding when we look at things using different "eyes." Perhaps this poem by John Godfrey Saxe says it best:
|
It was six men of Indostan To learning much inclined, Who went to see the Elephant Though all of them were BLIND, That each by observation Might satisfy his mind. The First approached the Elephant The Second, feeling the TUSK, The Third approached the animal |
The Fourth reached
out an eager hand, And felt about the KNEE: "What most the wondrous beast is like Is very plain," quoth he; "Tis clear enough the Elephant Is very like a TREE!" The Fifth, who chanced to touch the EAR, The Sixth no sooner had begun And so these men of Indostan -- John Godfrey Saxe |
ISSUE: How much of the elephant do you take into account?
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HISTORIOGRAPHY: a fight for people's memory between competing versions of past events.
Who controls the past, George Orwell wrote in "1984," controls the future, and who controls the present controls the past.
He was talking about thought control in a totalitarian state. A superstate with the power to rewrite history, or at least official history, in order to justify whatever it did in the past, does in the present, or will do in the future.
That's why the job of poor Winston Smith, Orwell's pseudo-historian in "1984," was to constantly update the past, so all good party members would know what, as orators at any party convention like to say, "History will show.."
History, of course, will show pretty much what the historian writing it wants it to. Which is why politics is at least one part historiography: a fight for man's memory between competing versions of past events.
The process of shaping that historical memory is a lot messier in free societies. For that matter, it isn't a snap in totalitarian states, either. Because their control of information isn't as total as the term Totalitarian would lead you to believe. See what happened in and to the happily late Soviet Union.
There is a factual core, an element of objective truth about the past that, no matter what the deconstructionists say, will out. Which is what poor Winston Smith believed, at least at the start of his interrogation. Before he was carted off to Room 101 to have his mind rearranged so he could love Big Brother.