Hey y’all. Long time no see. I’ve good reason: new house, new job, new teaching assignment(s). But I haven’t been completely buried; I’ve notes a’plenty, so stay tuned for a few words coming up soon.
In the meantime, I’d like to make a pitch for “clear thinking”.
Whaddya mean by that? Simple– the mind is so easily trumped[sic] by emotional, if not egoic, behavior, that it becomes very easy to spew illogical nonsense. Which is fine, really… if you’re at a bar with friends, but not if you’re in a leadership position, eg. publishing in an erstwhile ‘Respected Publication’.
In spiritual pursuits, many disciplines encourage a de-emphasis of the mind, calling it the home of the ego, ie that part of ourselves which believes “everything revolves around me”, & thus makes prettily-turned rationalizations of very self-centered pursuits. The “I meditate so I’m sooo cool” one was termed the ‘golden handcuff’ by Chogyam Trungpa, for example. Similarly, mind-body pursuits such as t’ai ch’i & acting often emphasize “get out of your head”, ie. re-identify yourself with your ‘heart’, if not ‘gut’, rather than ‘mind’. Or my favorite Yogi Berra’ism: “I can’t think & hit at the same time”.
All this is great if you tend to over-analyze (um, guilty). But! “Going with your gut” 100% of the time has its own issues… Essentially, a complete de-emphasis of Mind can sometimes be ‘throwing the baby out w/ the bathwater’, as it were. If nothing else, the mind is good at ‘making sense’ of things, parsing thru lots of different choices, & is pretty good at choosing the right words when you’re talking. Intuition, otoh, is better at ‘jumping’ to the right solution… but not great at explaining why, or helping explicate patterns, let-alone “how can I do that for myself”. IOW, a teacher who tries to completely de-emphasize their Analyzer will find themselves resorting to “just because” or “that’s the way I learned it”. Which is fine enough for many students, but will be lacking calories to those students who are seeking a deeper understanding of the material. Generalizing the larger case from a single example is the hallmark of inductive logic, & is an analytical endeavor… & one which isn’t very common, or rather– not very common using clear thinking.
So on to the story– I drifted over from NYT to WeeklyStandard & NationalReviewOnline.
Ugh! …& i’d thought NYT was ‘pretty liberal’, esp. in their op-ed’s… unabashedly hurling invective w/o rationale. Okay, you think Bush is an idiot. We get it. Now, why not give w/ some hard data to unravel his logic, if not explode that mythos of “My President is Always Right b/c I Am a Patriot!” It’s pretty hard to use logical argument for many neo-conservative stances; add “Texan Oil-Business” mores to Dr. Dobson & you have a refined, completely self-reflexive world-view impervious to outside influence. My philosophy 101 prof. Searle had a great argument against types like these: “you cannot call yourself rational, if there are no grounds under which your [thinking] could be wrong. If you were to say to a Freudian, ‘I’m not sure about Penis Envy’, s/he would reply, ‘You’re just repressing Penis Envy’”.
So, first step to clear thinking: have you considered the opposite case of what you say/think, & can you describe that perspective w/o resorting to invective or moral judgement?
Or here’s an easier determinant: Classical Fallacies.
So there I am at NYT: Op-Ed, Maureen Dowd, etc. And in an effort to see how the ‘others’ think, I slid over to neo-con central. Perhaps they would respect logic more? Egad– I spoke too soon: Inbred, self-aggrandizing, (even-more) over-analytical, & experts all in ‘attacking via irony’; ie. not attacking the character of the proponent, per se, but rather snidely ridiculing their thinking… usually copiously tarred with the ‘liberal’ moniker or its ‘hip variant of the day’ helpfully provided by Fox News.
Must all Op-Ed pieces (liberal, conservative, or whatnot) be oh so very much more satisfied w/ hearing [writing] the sound of their own words than with making a statement based on clear thinking? Or even– perish the thought, logical thinking?
It’s almost like both they & their audience, posit [& need] constant reassurance of their own superiority, both moral & intellectual. They have Spoken; you may agree, or else be ‘unthinking’.
What silliness.
I recommend:
- go with your gut, sure;
- follow your Path with Heart, of-course;
…but keep every-so-often testing what you hear vs. the standard list of logical fallacies. It’ll expose much more than you’d expected, both in bias, & in willfull ignorance.
Now excuse me while I go watch Iron Chef. Some things are simply self-evident, & as long as the Chairman picks a suitable Secret Ingredient, Clear Thinking (or at least Stomaching) will be arrayed for all to see. 
Tags: rant
Good points on clear thinking