Help This Man Find Honest Work – Part Deux

Having thoroughly dissed the Times Magazine’s Chuck Klosterman in yesterday’s posting, let me say this: it is of no great moment whether the author of “The Ethicist” is Klosterman or someone else. I don’t really care because it’s not my problem. And neither is it important whether I agree with the viewpoint expressed. Whoever the author may be, and whatever the comments s/he happens to write, “The Ethicist” does a great service by getting people to think ... assuming that they will.

What sets me off, though, is that Sunday's entry (“Foul Ball”) is typical of much public discourse today: full of blustering opinion and short on fact. Opinions are not facts, no matter how well informed they are. They are like noses: everybody has one. And they are often based on nothing but blind faith, what the Bible calls “the assurance of things hoped for; the conviction of things not seen.”^[1]

It’s because opinions are not facts that we don’t permit witnesses (other than experts) to give opinion testimony in court. It’s because opinions are not facts that my mother hated discussions of religion or politics, both being matters of belief and hope, not provable truth. It’s because opinions are not facts that I refuse to dispute with people on subjects that one or the other of us hasn’t researched carefully.^[2]

 

Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” – T. Paine   

It’s a sad fact that intellectual discourse has suffered in the age of 24-hour news cycles, sound bites, and social media. Biases, preconceptions and anger tend to trump logic. Critical thinking skills disappear. People forward tripe over and over again on the Internet assuming it to be true. Politicians play to their so-called “base” while stating partial truths or out-right falsehoods.

To counter this type of creeping mendacity, in public affairs especially, “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.”^[3] But apparently being intellectual is not to the liking of some politicians. Former senator Rick Santorum, for example, said college is for snobs. And after the last presidential election another former candidate called an audience of intellectuals a “death panel.”^[4] I assume she was trying to be funny, but who knows? 

Click to enlarge

To be an intellectual today is to be un-American, apparently. But this is actually nothing new; ignorance and anti-intellectualism have plagued us since the first days of the Republic.  (See quote at right.) 

The best argument against democracy “is a five minute conversation with the average voter,” Winston Churchill once said, and he's right.

None of this should prevent people from voicing their opinions, of course, or from voting on the basis of their (uninformed) beliefs. They are within their rights to do so. But unless gullible, ignorant voters make every attempt to get better informed, the situation will only get worse between now and November 6 ... and beyond.

Maybe Chuck Klosterman should write about the ethical implications of that someday instead of worrying about foul balls.

_____

[1] See post of Nov. 1, 2010 concerning faith and the Casey Anthony verdict.

[2] See, e.g., posts of Oct. 19-20, 2010 regarding the Breakfast Bloviator’s opinions on health reform.

[3] Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” N.Y. Review of Books, Feb. 23, 1967.

[4] Sarah Palin, Gridiron Club Dinner, Washington, DC (Dec. 5, 2009).

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_______________________________

“There is not one human problem that could not be solved 

if people would simply do as I advise.”

- Gore Vidal 

(1925-2012)