2012-The Very Long Year-Introduction
Election
years in the United States typically feel long, and 2012 is shaping
up to be a very long election year. Indeed, one could even say it
began as soon as the last polls closed on November 4th,
2008. This post was originally
intended to be a one-off, however, like so many other posts, as I
wrote it, I was constantly saying to myself "If I cover this
fact or concept here, I also need to mention that supporting (or
contrasting) bit from over there"‒and the whole thing
snowballed from there. The original impetus for the stand-alone piece
was the blow-up over Rush Limbaugh's juvenile, schoolyard bully-style
attacks on the character of Georgetown University law student Sandra
Fluke following her testimony before Democratic members of a House
sub-committee. The subject of her testimony was contraception
availability and the impact it has on women's reproductive health.
Not surprisingly, as I noted above, instead of challenging the
factual claims made in Ms. Fluke's testimony, something far beyond
the pathetically limited scope of Limbaugh's intellect (not to
mention that of his target demographic), the best he could do was
resort to name-calling. The specifics of Ms. Fluke's testimony,
Limbaugh's contemptible comments and those of his Right-Wing
Authoritarian (RWA)i
sheep, will be covered in a later post.
In
this
post, I throw down the gauntlet and lay out my ground rules for any
discussion or debate that purports to deal with the world around us.
The gloves are off. I am through coddling social, religious,
and political conservatives (and when I encounter people on the left
that are equally ignorant, I will be just as intellectually brutal
with them too). Let this be fair warning‒from
now until I revert back to precisely the same the state of non-being
I was in (suffering no discernible harm by the way) for the entire
13.7 billion years from the Big Bang to just prior to my birth‒I
will no longer remain silent when confronted by confident assertions
made by people who have failed
to do their homework.
I always take considerable care in fact checking myself, in what I
write and in my every day conversations with others. As a culture, we
have little sympathy (for the most part) for a kid that blows off
their homework in favor of playing video games and then embarrasses
the hell out of themselves the next day in class when they try to
bluff their way through a classroom discussion of the assigned
material. Most grown-ups would consider such embarrassment their
"just deserts" that would (hopefully) be a powerful
motivator not to get caught with their intellectual pants around
their ankles in the future, a valuable lesson in the journey toward
maturity.
Paradoxically,
upon reaching what can be loosely called "adulthood," the
desire to avoid publicly embarrassing oneself or look like an
ignoramus seems to undergo a curious inversion in some individuals.
In the classrooms of our childhood and adolescence, those that
pretended to know things they clearly did not were soon exposed,
providing ample reasons to get our facts straight, have our ducks in
a row, to dot our i's, cross our t's, and to
do our homework.
One would think
that as adults, we would hold ourselves and others to a higher, not
lower, standard of intellectual honesty than we hold children. As
adults, we would certainly not want physicians that bluffed their way
through medical school treating our loved ones or ourselves. Nor
would we want auto mechanics working on our cars that were given
passing marks for their ASE certifications and training merely
because their instructors felt sorry for them. Lawyers that have not
done their homework that dare appear in front of a judge are
ruthlessly criticized and will have few clients and should we, as
private citizens, ever find ourselves in a courtroom, whether civil
or criminal, we have every right to demand that the attorney
representing us has
done their homework.
If
our child were suffering from an unknown illness, we would demand
that the treating physician leave no stone unturned or allow no
assumption to go unquestioned in identifying the malady and how to
treat it. In our daily lives however, when it comes to politics,
social policy, etc., whether in conversations with family, friends,
co-workers, or in the mass media, it is not the person that is, not
to put a too fine a point on it, “talking out their ass” that is
shamed and embarrassed, but rather it is the one that dares to call
them on it that is vilified. By way of comparison, if you
enter into a conversation with someone that has a mania for the
minutiae of some subject or activity, whether it be Star Trek
or NASCAR, they will soon know whether you are merely a dabbling
dilettante or if you "know your stuff." If they determine that you are
a mere pretender, few will hesitate to dismiss you as a "wannabe"
or its equivalent.
As
citizens in a democracy, one of our most consequential acts is going
to the polls. The intellectual effort, the due diligence, the
conscientiousness with which we educate ourselves concerning the
facts of the issues before deciding who or what to vote for, are
every bit as essential to the continued health of our representative
democratic republic as the rigorous studies of a physician or surgeon
are to the health of their patients. Paradoxically, our political
discourse, at the level of individuals and in society as a whole, is
rife with examples of people holding opinions that have no basis in
actual
facts. In the words of a 19th
century humoristii,
"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us
into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so." In
my office, there is an older co-worker that has one of those 8 ½ by
11 inch line drawings, like countless others in circulation in
offices throughout the country when photocopying and fax machines
were still a novelty. The picture depicts the face of an "old
lady" holding a coffee mug, telling folks "Don't believe
everything you think." I think that little "poster"
should be placed outside every voting booth in the country. As
Altemeyer observed in The
Authoritarians2,
based on subject
responses to other survey instruments, he was able to predict that
certain people will reliably fail a simple test of inductive
reasoning. What the results showed is that as long as those that
actually failed the test thought the conclusion
was true, they were utterly oblivious to the faulty reasoning used to
arrive at the conclusion (or they thought it did not matter). This is
why many mathematics teachers require their students to show their
work and why some give partial credit‒because the point is to learn
the complex steps involved in solving certain kinds of math problems.
Once a student has the steps down, then they can concentrate on the
silly mistakes we all make, like forgetting a negative sign or some
such. The importance of being able make a logically consistent
argument, and, not co-incidentally, know what a poorly constructed
argument looks like, are a primary reason that Euclidean geometry is
still taught in high schools. It may sound a bit lame or lacking in a certain "rigor," but a university I once attended even allowed
students to take a course in formal logic to satisfy a core math
requirement–because the goal was to teach logical thinking.
As
a relatively uncontroversial (hopefully) example that illustrates the
interplay between opinions and facts, and which I will later apply to
more controversial ideas, is from the history of the Second World
War. There have been those that maintain that Franklin Delano
Roosevelt (FDR) was in possession of what we would today call
"actionable intelligence" of an impending attack on U.S.
forces in the Pacific. In one sense, it did not require a genius to
predict that the United States cutting off exports to a resource-poor
and ruthlessly expansionist Japan would not go over well and that
open conflict would be the likely result. Given that the principals
involved are now dead, as a practical exercise it would hard to
interrogate those that were in a position to know. Regardless of how
"impractical" it may be to ascertain, 70 years after the
fact, who in FDR's administration knew what, if anything, and when,
or if, they knew it. The only thing that, even in principle,
could ever possibly decide the matter would be evidence.
How one feels about the New Deal, the Lend Lease
program, FDR, any other aspect of the politics of the time, is
irrelevant.
The
most contentious and divisive topics in the areas of public policy
arise largely because of differing ideas of the real
purpose of laws and government institutions in a society. Right-Wing
Authoritarians (RWAs) are able to get away with many of the things
they do in setting public policy because, as individuals and as a
group, their feet are seldom held to the fire and pressed for their
true motivations for supporting the policies they do. When I say
"holding their feet to the fire" I mean something like the
climatic scene in A Few Good Men3,
where Lt. Kaffee relentlessly presses the self-righteous Col. Jessup
until he tells the truth‒that he ordered the "Code Red,"
convinced the whole while that he had done nothing wrong.
The
idea of "doing one's homework" when forming our beliefs and
opinions is part of the more general (and very rare) virtue of
intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty not only requires that we
be willing to defend our opinions and beliefs, but that we are also
obliged to honestly acknowledge the motivations and assumptions
underlying them. It seems that on some level, RWAs seem to
instinctively know that to come right out and say the actual reasons
why they take the positions they do regarding certain subjects will
expose them to public ridicule. Aside from the ravings of
anti-vaccination nut-jobs, most folks, RWA's included, recognize that
promoting public health through vaccination programs, fluoridation of
water, etc., is a legitimate area of concern for governments‒until
the public health concern in question has any connection, however
tenuous or remote, to sex. In developed, liberal democracies
throughout the world, it is generally acknowledged that unwanted
teenage pregnancies and the unchecked spread of sexually transmitted
diseases (STDs) have significant economic, social, and public health
costs and are no less a legitimate public health concern than
preventing flu pandemics. There would be near-universal outrage if a
government were to mandate the use of a particular treatment for a
specific disease for any other reason than that it actually works.
If
a society, or a government that claims to act in the name of its
citizens, is serious about reducing the human suffering, misery, and
deaths caused by smallpox, the only legitimate criteria is: do the
vaccines in question actually work as advertised? If anyone were to
propose an alternative, we would require that the alternative is more
effective, period. Before spending tax dollars on an ad campaign
to educate consumers to properly handle and cook meat in an effort to
reduce food-borne illnesses, we would demand that the precautions
advocated are actually effective. Proposed solutions to societal ills
that seem to have little to do with whether or not the solutions in
question are actually effective in fixing or mitigating the problem,
should set off all sorts of alarms in the minds of all intelligent,
thoughtful, and honest human beings. In my next essay, I will expose
the moral pretensions of RWAs by looking at one of the hot button
issues of the upcoming election
iDr.
Robert Altemeyer has been researching the authoritarian personality
since the mid-1960's. When the horrors of Hitler's "Final
Solution" started to dawn on the rest of humanity, many sought
to understand how people‒otherwise
decent, normal, educated folks‒can
so totally surrender themselves to a charismatic leader with a brutal
ideology. Novelists like George Orwell and Kurt Vonnegut explored
these questions through their fiction. While some “social
scientists” indulged in various forms of moral relativism (I will
spare the reader a rant against “post modernism”) other social
scientists felt it essential to understand what combination of
individual and societal factors make it possible for the citizens in
a modern nation, solidly a part of the "Western Tradition,"
to go along with the Holocaust, indifferent to the enormity of what
was done.
Serious social scientists like Phillip Zimbardo
(The
Stanford Prison Experiment) and Stanley Milgram (The
Milgram Experiment) explored situations and contexts in which
people surrender to “authorities” and can be goaded to commit
moral atrocities they would not if left to their own volition.
Altemeyer 's contribution was in identifying two distinctive types
of “authoritarian” personalities. Obviously there were
“Authoritarian leaders,” e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Franco
(Spain)‒they
are easy to spot. All by themselves they are merely a frustrated
demagogue, to be dangerous, they need followers‒lots
of them. This was why much of the research into the "authoritarian
personality" following the Second World War focused on
authoritarian followers.
In Altemeyer's research, he
defines "Right-Wing Authoritarians" to be (in part) those
that submit to established authorities and rigidly adhere to
conventional ways. "Left-Wing Authoritarians" would be
those that submit to those that would overthrow the established,
traditional authorities‒think
1960's hippie radicals‒a
rare breed in the United States today. Keep in mind that while on
the conventional "left-right" political spectrum, Soviet
or Chinese-style Communism (note the capitalization‒when
you see it I wish to make a distinction between socialism/communism
and a specific instantiation of it the same way that we would
describe the United States as being a democratic
republic)
is deemed to be the far left end of the spectrum, but for someone
living under such a system, that Communism is the established
authority. A zealous supporter of conventional ways and the "party
line," whether in the United States or in Soviet Russia, would
be a Right-Wing Authoritarian (RWA) follower.
iiAmong
late 19th century American humorists, Mark Twain (1835-1910) is the
most famous. However, on the quotation sites I consulted, no
instances attributing the quote to Twain provided a title of the
containing work. Geoff Colvin in this book Talent Is Overrated:
What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else,
quotes a contemporary of Twain's, Josh Billings (his real name was
Henry W. Shaw, 1818-1885) as: "It ain't so much the things we
don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that
just ain't so." Elsewhere, Billings is quoted as (at:
http://www.qotd.org/search/search.html?aid=3945&page=4):
"It ain't what folks know that's the problem, it's what they
know that ain't so."
The 1876 book, The Complete
Works of Josh Billings, p. 286 contains the following quote: "I
honestly beleave it iz better tew know nothing than two know what
ain't so."[sic] The careful citing of sources seen today
was not all that common in the 19th century‒except
perhaps in scientific circles. Attempts to correct the "loose"
spelling (by modern standards, not for the times it was composed) of
Billings' phrasing neatly accounts for the many variations in
phrasing of the sentiment expressed as later writers “cleaned up”
Billings' very astute observation to make it less jarring to more
modern readers.
References
1. Colvin, G. Talent Is Overrated: What
Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.
(Penguin: 2010).
2. Altemeyer,
B. The Authoritarians.
(2006). at <http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/>
3. Reiner, R.
A Few Good Men. Film.
(1992).
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