StickWithANose

In light of my recent turn toward raw pessimism over our current state of affairs here in the banana republic of the USA, I was intrigued when I came across this op-ed originally published in the Dallas Morning Star that appears to be channeling the Frankfurt school of political philosophy and [as far as I'm concerned] simply hits the nail on the head in regard to the dysfunction that surrounds us.*

I was sure I’d heard the high school teacher wrong. He told me the biggest problem he has with his students — many of whom end up in America’s top universities — was that they didn’t know how to read. ”Oh, they’ve cracked the alphabetic code,” he clarified. ”What I’m saying is they don’t have the ability to sit still with a text and read it for comprehension. Even worse, when they come across something they disagree with, they think it isn’t true. I’m not talking about opinions; I’m talking about facts.”

What troubles the teacher is not that his students are reaching wrong conclusions. What troubles him is that they don’t grasp that they should make the effort to reason at all.

He’s right to worry. If the best and brightest have lost faith in the power of critical reasoning to illuminate the way forward, we’re in trouble.

Whether they realize it, ordinary people have become more comfortable with the idea that truth is relative and that emotion is a reliable and sufficient guide to finding it. For many of us, what’s true is whatever is pleasing and useful.

I remember telling an old friend one time that I was pursuing a higher degree specializing in sociological theory and political philosophy to which his response was simply: Why? My answer to him was because he asked the question.

We can make fun of incurious and un-knowledgeable public figures all day. However, in doing so, we are really making fun of ourselves. Public figures like G.W. and Palin are manifestations of the American zeitgeist in which we are all complicit. They are personifications of popular consciousness in which we find ourselves gazing into a collective mirror seeing ourselves writ large in caricature. If it weren’t so very dangerous to human liberty and self-determinative life it would be funny. But, of course, it is dangerous.

* I would caution the reader against reading too much into the false dichotomy between Truth and the specter of relativism. For the interested, look up John Dewey’s concept of warranted assertions. </philosophy>