Think About It

When Socrates pointed out that “the unexamined life is not worth living”, it was probably not his intention to disparage mindless life styles in the twenty-first century.  But he foresaw how, as passive clingers to thoughts that others imprint on us,  we allow ourselves to become victims. Political parties, for example,  instruct us how to think about crucial issues that affect our everyday lives.  Religious institutions instruct us how to think about morality and the hereafter.  Businesses spend billions telling us how to think about what we consume. Radio talk show hosts inform us whom to fear, whom to hate, and which simplistic solutions to embrace.  Our peers signal us which races, what conduct, which social practices, aspirations, conversations, and even thought patterns are acceptable. 

Vast numbers of us live essentially unexamined lives, feeding off  “truths” that others have drilled into our heads. The simple act of thinking for ourselves and demanding evidence for everything  could go further to improve our lives than all of the platitudes from all of the institutions mentioned.  But beware – their central belief is that we are fools. And they despise us when we achieve independence – the reward that comes with thinking for oneself.

Socrates chose death over submission.  Our choices are not so stark, but nearly as important. We have the great honor of living in a nation founded by courageous advocates of intellectual and political independence.  Let’s not disrespect their efforts by letting others do our thinking for us.

Gut Check

Your gut is totally trustworthy in letting you known when you’ve –consumed too much food or alcohol, when mealtime is drawing near, and when to take heartburn pills.  As an adviser in matters political, spiritual, intellectual, or social, however, it is poorly engineered to help guide your choices. Although revered by many as a decision making tool, the gut cannot reason, analyze, research, weigh evidence, or perform any of the functions vital to arriving at valid conclusions. It knows nothing of skepticism – is somebody trying to pull the wool over my eyes – or critical thinking, a kind of mental self-discipline that underlies all processes directed toward getting at the truth. 

For those in a hurry who can’t be bothered about the results of their actions and wish not to be weighed down by facts and evidence, the gut is at least as reliable an adviser as the big toe or an ear lobe, so stick with it. This approach may require considerable shouting and blustering about the correctness of your decisions to help prove how sincere you are. It’s good preparation for holding center stage at a tea party as well. The only down side is that gut reactions to issues make you an instrument of someone else’s (usually a thinking person’s) will. But if you don’t mind being used and exploited, then it could work for you.

Rush to Judgement

When Limbaugh goes ballistic, sliding over from vacuous venom to unintelligible gibberish, he is driven by an irresistible force – his profound conviction that someone who should know better has strayed from the set of universal truths accepted by all sentient beings. Truth, as he and millions of dittoheads perceive it, is embodied in the insights of men with Mount Rushmore-sized heads who long ago decided all of the great issues, and whose judgements must be honored and obeyed.

This might appear comical were it not for the fact that true believers, from religious evangelists to political extremists like Rush, worship their own ossified positions. All such positions are based on the principle that heavy thinking is best left to our predecessors who were, for reasons never explained, better equipped to examine the nature of truth than today’s mediocre thinkers.

In life we can think for ourselves or we can abandon that effort and leave our thinking to others. Since the latter appeals to extremists, it poses a danger for the rest of us.  While certain values constitute existential truths – the sanctity of life and the need for objectivity come to mind – the list of eternal verities is a short one. Thus the need for individual thought arises.

Radical conservatives and radical liberals, for all they contribute to the public discussion, should probably hop the next bus to a nearby black hole.  Their positions on every important issue are not only known, but invariable.  We don’t need to talk to them, since we know in advance what they will say.  Their minds are steel traps where nothing new can get in and nothing useful can come out. If you or a loved one sense a desire to recover from extreme religious or political views, begin by putting forth the effort to think for yourself.

Sophistry is Unsophisticated

In his April 25, 2009 Washington Post column, Eugene Robinson used a word that is often practiced but seldom spoken. His word,  sophistry, is a form of rhetoric or argumentation. Although originally derived from the Greek word for “wise”, sophistry is now viewed as specious and intended to deceive. The term describes a broad range of practices in today’s political climate and deserves far more attention than it gets.  Sophistry is in play, for example, when a Texas governor suggests that his state may secede, but then provides himself cover by disavowing secession.  Ad Hominem arguments are a favorite appeal of sophists.

Sophistry is the weapon of South Carolina’s ambitious governor as he argues against accepting federal education funds when education is his state’s greatest need. Sophistry is at work when glib politicians with infinitesimal knowledge of economic science proclaim their simple solutions, or their father’s,  superior to those of  Nobel prize winning economists.  Sophistry may well be indicated when a cable news channel promotes its views by cleverly convincing citizens that they themselves thought of holding mass meetings to protest tax increases for obscenely wealthy Americans.

Finally, while it shares an etymological root with “sophisticated”, sophistry lives at the other end of the intellectual spectrum. When we fall victim to sophists, they are using us to promote their own ends.

 

Tea Party Terror

Like the rest of us, the Tea Party would like America’s problems to be simpler than they are. But unlike the rest of us, the self-proclaimed “patriots”  are convinced that their simplistic, gut-driven slogans (“take back America”) offer realistic solutions.    Parroting  meaningless epithets rather than thinking through complex challenges and proposing workable approaches achieves no goals except those of Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh. Rather than rise to the challenges facing America, Tea Partiers’ minds appear to snap shut at the point of problem identification.  They complain endlessly about the bank bailout, but financialstability.gov says that the “Treasury currently (April 2010) estimates that its programs aimed at stabilizing the banking system will earn a profit...”

I agree with Partiers that government is dysfunctional and out of touch with the people it serves.  But they seem  misguided in promoting name calling as an essential part of political dialogue, in favoring religion over reason, and by harboring the conviction that only their vision of the truth matters. Socialism, a system they despise,  works no better than communism, as President Obama says in enough different ways that anyone listening should understand his point.  Capitalism and market forces are the only economic system that results in expanding economic prosperity, as he often emphasizes. But today big business is as culpable as big government in leading us toward the abyss, so we can’t look there for the solution.

Do the Partiers have a point? Undoubtedly. America’s spiraling debt spells the demise of our great nation status if it continues unchecked. Do they have solutions? None they’ve shared. Is healthcare the problem? So far we’ve spent almost no money implementing the healthcare bill, while we’ve spent $1 trillion in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Is it possible that military and diplomatic overreaching by conservatives helped create the indebtedness that so enrages the ultra-conservative Tea Party?  If so, it they have yet to mention it.

Social Security, defense, unemployment, Medicare, and Medicaid comprise 75% of government spending in 2010.  Unless Tea Partiers have concrete, legislatively acceptable answers to how to draw down these costs, they have little to contribute to the political dialogue. Their rallying cry, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gong to take it anymore”, helps them vent, but that’s the end of its usefulness.  Kicking out incumbents as do-nothings might be justified, but it leads nowhere if they are not replaced by strong legislators who can actually turn ideas into laws. Rand Paul, Tea Partier extraordinaire, demonstrates how befuddled educated people can become when they cater to our child-like desire for simplicity.

The Fox is in the Hen House

Who’s making up your mind? If Fox News is your primary source of information, it’s a geriatric Australian billionaire who became an American in order to legally purchase our news media. Rupert Murdoch, union buster extraordinaire,  then hired a devotedly reactionary staff for his primary American broadcast outlet. If you prefer tabloids featuring multi-headed Martians for your news source, then there’s a high probability that Murdoch, a prolific marketer of rag-style publications, is doing your information gathering for you. If you choose sober publications like The Wall Street Journal, then you too are a devotee of Murdoch thought. If you’ve little time for reading but are of a business bent, then Fox Business News may well be your information provider. And even if you’re traveling to New Zealand, Italy, Germany, Australia, England, China or almost anywhere else, you won’t have to forego your favorite source of media input.  Mr. Murdoch’s reach is extended by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal who owns a 7% stake in News Corp - the parent company of Fox News - making Alwaleed the largest shareholder outside the family of CEO Murdoch himself.

Journalism, while not always objective, reaches its highest potential when it strives to reveal facts and truths that we might otherwise miss.  Broadcast journalists like Edward R. Morrow, Eric Severeid, and Walter Cronkite  set industry standards of professionalism around the notion that the only useful news is objective news.  During the second half of the 20^th century, most aspiring reporters followed their example. But today that principle is subsumed by a commercial one: What should a station broadcast to gain the widest possible market share in order to maximize advertising revenue?

Fox answers this business approach to the news by pandering to America’s unwashed.  By asserting that the baseless blather Fox broadcasts is information available only to the chosen, Fox wins the hearts and minds of those who long for educated people to tell them they’re not as wacky as they fear they might be. By featuring reporters from the P.T. Barnum school of journalism, Fox deceives the ignorant into believing that their gut feelings are equal in validity to facts others derive from research. In so doing Fox drives a wedge between those of us who think everyone is entitled to his opinion and those who feel deeply that only their own gut feelings, confirmed and often suggested by Fox, have merit.

By virtue of his hold on the minds of an important segment of the American electorate, Murdoch induces greater fear among Republican Congressmen than even Limbaugh or Palin. Not one, regardless how moderate or courageous, dares to point out the manipulation and mendacity of Fox News.

The great irony of all this is that the man cultivating our mutual suspicions for his personal enrichment is not, essentially, an ideologue. Yes, he has strong opinions, but what he cherishes is not hearts and minds, but his next $6 billion. Yet the power he wields is more intimidating than that of Joseph McCarthy.  McCarthy was one man.  Murdoch is an international conglomerate with no roots in the society he has turned into a pressure cooker with explosive potential.  If you lack the confidence to form your own opinions, that’s not a problem. Murdoch’s minions are paid to relieve you of the burden..

Adieu, Afghanistan

Our schools fall further behind, our infrastructure sinks into the mud, our ability to produce jobs plummets, immigration becomes more corrosive, our debt roars past the $13 trillion mark, poverty reaches all-time highs, and proponents of the dumbing down of America celebrate their achievements. No politician questions whether we are in decline, yet we continue to spend $2 billion a week to fight a war in Afghanistan on our way to our next war in Pakistan.

When last I looked, neither the Taliban nor Al Qaida owned an attack aircraft or a warship. Neither had a general or an admiral.  Neither claimed an armored vehicle or a long-range weapon. Neither had a ballistic missile program or a delivery system. Neither has the wherewithal for an organized assault on a foreign country. While both may get access to nuclear materials from Iran or North Korea or those rolling around loose in Russia, we are not militarily engaged in those countries.

Al Qaida will certainly hit us if they can, but do we solve that problem by fighting 13^th century guerilla warriors belonging  to a force whose most potent weapon is a bomb strapped to their bodies or one buried at the edge of a dirt road? In Iraq we spent nearly $1 trillion to kill one man.  In Afghanistan our expenditures will eventually reach that same level, but our goals lack even the pathetic target for which we so recently sacrificed 4,000 lives and America’s prosperity. President Obama asked General Petraeus whether Afghanistan was necessary. Have you ever been asked whether your job is necessary and replied “no”? We must focus and begin to serve our own national interest if our government can’t figure it out.

With more than 200,000 employees, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Defense, is responsible for protecting us against the zealots. Their $55 billion budget is spent largely on intelligence and their mission is to interdict attempts to inflict terror on the U.S. They are good at what they do and getting better. We must learn to rely on them.

While America is a republic and not a pure democracy, the voice of the people in these matters can make itself  heard so forcefully that we have the power to stop these pointless and futile wars.  If you doubt this, read Lyndon Johnson's memoirs.