Tag Archives: social science

Thinking Critically

As a trained philosopher I have always thought critical thinking essential to any well thought-out educational system. It’s what I pursued in all of my classes when I taught so many years ago. Unfortunately, the term has been used and misused so often of late that it seems to be empty of meaning. Early in these blogs I sought to clarify the term somewhat and I repost that piece here. With an election coming up this post seems particularly timely. This post has been somewhat updated.

According to Arthur Koestler, who should know, there exists in the Grand Scheme of Things a hierarchy of truths. At the top there is mathematics and theoretical physics whose claims are easily corroborated and verified by mathematicians and physicists around the world, regardless of race, creed, or color. At the bottom (and here I interpolate) there are the headlines of the latest National Enquirer that scream at us from the checkout lanes of our local grocery store: “Hillary is a racist, bigot, and criminal!” And then there are, of course, the innumerable false claims of our sitting president. We need to know how to differentiate among the types of claims — for they are all claims, some of them well-founded and others outrageous.

The sciences range downwards from physics to the biological sciences, geology, anthropology, the social sciences that rely on probability theory and therefore pass themselves off as exact sciences, to philosophy, history, and the like. Again, we need to know where we are on the hierarchy because each of these disciplines requires a different approach and different types of corroboration. History, for example, relies on first-hand testimony, written documents and independent corroboration from different sources, all regarded as reliable. The key is “corroboration.” The sciences and social sciences, even philosophy, require independent corroboration by others in the field to check on the accuracy of the claims being made. Did Caesar cross the Rubicon? Who says? What evidence is there to corroborate this claim? Thus the historian proceeds to provide us with an accurate picture of what has occurred in the past. The expert seeks to show that the claim is false. If it cannot be shown to be false after thorough study, we can accept it as true. Then he asks his fellow experts to duplicate his efforts and test the claim for himself or herself.

When the National Enquirer makes its outrageous claims we should (but seldom do) ask the same sorts of question: how can those claims be corroborated? Who makes the claims? Are those sources reliable? Can they even be tested? If so, how? These are the types of questions the lawyer asks in a trial when a person is facing possible felony charges and perhaps time in prison. We should all be so circumspect, equally suspicious and demanding of the truth and not satisfied with what are merely empty claims or false  accusations.

This is the job of critical thinking and it should be taught in all our schools and certainly in all our colleges and universities. We all tend to accept as true those claims that fit in nicely with our closely held beliefs, our”belief-set” as I call it. But the critical thinker will allow the possibility that a claim that does not fit in nicely with his belief-set might still be true. Those who lack critical thinking skills (whose numbers grow daily from the look of things) will believe whatever they are told on Fox News or read in the Enquirer. The problem is that those who believe whatever they hear or read without subjecting those claims to the tests of corroboration and verification are most likely to be lead astray by someone who, say, might want to steal their vote in an upcoming election, or sell them farmland in the Everglades. They fail to realize that something is not true simply because they want it to be true (it fits in nicely with their belief-set) or because the guy up there with the funny hair and the small hands says it is true. The fact that he said the opposite yesterday is lost on these people because they lack the critical filters that would weed out the falsehoods and lies and recognize the inconsistencies.

Critical thinking teaches us to have a healthy skepticism. Not that we will doubt all claims, but that we will suspect that those that seem outrageous might well be so. We will accept as true only those clams that can be corroborated and verified, like the scientist. We will also recognize among those claims that are scientific but outside our small field of knowledge that claims made by experts in the field, say scientists who have studied such things as climate change or the evolution of species over the millennia, are making claims that we ought to accept as true until or unless they are later shown to be false. We ought not to simply reject those claims because they don’t fit into our belief-set or because they make us feel uncomfortable.

In the long run, it pays to be critical and suspect that many, if not all, claims that are designed to sell us something (or someone) are probably not true, or at least that they demand further investigation and thought. Does the speaker or writer have a hidden agenda? They should not be accepted simply because we read them in our favorite newspaper or heard them on the News. That skepticism is healthy and it is what critical thinking is all about: making sure that we will not be mislead into accepting as true what is blatantly false — or electing a fool, once again, as our president.

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Indifferent and Irresponsible

 

I am reposting here two essays I wrote in 2013 that strike me as pertinent today. They seem to share a certain perspective regarding the loss of personal freedom — though from different parts of the world at different times. Please excuse the length.

The following characterization of the rise of autocratic political societies was written by the Japanese political satirist Nakae Chomin in 1887 attacking a stubbornly despotic government in his country.  As our country becomes increasingly autocratic, run by the few power brokers who are gradually and with fixed purpose neutering the voting population, who couldn’t care less, I was struck by the sober truths in this passage.

“Even in this case another and even more dreadful source of disease arises. What is it? People support themselves by their labor, submit part of their income to the government, and consequently feel their duties to the state are completely fulfilled. They grow indifferent. Scholars think only of perfecting their writings. Artists think only of polishing their skills. Those engaged in agriculture, industry, and commerce think only of high profits and become indifferent to everything else. Under these circumstances, the function of the brain gradually shrinks, and the complete human being is reduced to a mere digester of food. In other words, the scholar’s writings, the artist’s skills, the works of those engaged in agriculture, industry, and commerce eventually become sediments at the bottom of a barrel, without vitality or change. The entire nation becomes a mere lump of slimy, jelly-like flesh.”

It’s not only the autocrats who would like to run the world and deprive us of our freedom, it is also the presumed “experts.”

In a most interesting chapter of that most provocative book, The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch has a careful analysis of the cultural phenomenon I call the “parental paralysis. ” I speak of the apparent inability of so many parents in this country to simply rely on their own intuitions in raising their children because a host of so-called “experts” have convinced them that they (the experts) know so much more about raising children than do their parents. For some reason parents have bought into this nonsense. The experts, whom Lasch calls the “helping professions” consist of social workers, teachers of “domestic science,” academic experts on “marriage and the family,” marriage counselors, family therapists, psychologists, and other social scientists of their ilk.

(It is curious that we tend to ignore the legitimate expertise of bona fide scientists who continue to warn us about the warming of the planet, but we will buy into a bunch of malarkey put out there by a host of social scientists with questionable credentials promoting doubtful procedures regarding child-rearing.)

In any event, Lasch traces the development of parental paralysis back to the 1920s and calls the first stage of the take-over of the family by these experts the “behavioral” stage, when behaviorism was the prevailing arm of psychology and popular books written by such folks as John Watson and Arnold Gesell began to undermine the confidence of parents in their own abilities to raise their children and persuaded them that the kids were so much better off if their parents simply listened to the authors and raised the kids “by the book.” Of course, there were a great many books by Watson and Gesell and people like Ernest and Gladys Grove who promised kids “freedom from emotional bondage to their parents.” Seriously.

The second stage came in the late thirties and forties. The growth of the progressive movement in education (which was “child-centered” rather than “subject-centered”) coupled with “debased versions of Freudian theory, [resulted in] excessive ‘permissiveness.'” During this stage, the child and his or her “rights” became the center of the home and parents were warned not to thwart their child’s development by punishment and discipline — words that began to take on pejorative meanings in the social sciences and among parents and teachers as well. Coincidentally, the role of the state began to expand as the courts asserted their right to take children away from their parents if there was evidence of abuse — evidence that was at times questionable at best. During this stage the man at the center was Dr. Benjamin Spock who has been widely mistaken for the chief proponent of permissive child-raising because of his warning to readers of the damage parents could do to their offspring by an excess of strictness. However, the good doctor also attempted to warn against excessive permissiveness, but his message was somewhat cloudy and confusing to many parents. In any event, during this stage, the parents were increasingly targeted as the main element in the deterioration of the family unit. In the view that had become orthodox among so-called “experts,” parents were the “problem” that required solution if the children were to be saved.

This brought about, in the 1950s, what Lasch calls “the cult of authenticity” in which parents were told to “let it all hang out” and be honest with their children whom they were told should be treated like adults. Children were not to be restrained in their various modes of self-expression, since all feelings were legitimate and parents were admonished to befriend and discuss problems with their kids rather than attempt to correct them. Punishment, especially corporal punishment, was definitely taboo. Whatever authority the parents might have once had over their children was by this time a thing of the past: the child was now the center of the family and the parents were supposed to be incapable of raising them on their own. After all, parents were regarded as unable to distinguish right from wrong, as were all folks in what was becoming an increasingly relativistic age — except the “experts, of course, who were still regarded as those who knew best.  Note, please, that parental love never seemed to enter into the equation at any stage, even the final one. Perhaps this is because love is not quantifiable or reducible to behavioral terms.

The fourth stage, which is the one we have reached at present, resulted from

“rising crime rates, juvenile delinquency, suicide, and mental breakdowns [which] finally convinced many experts, even many social workers, that welfare agencies furnish a poor substitute for the family.”

Unfortunately, the damage had been done; a great many parents remain convinced to this day that the books written by the experts map a clear road to successful child-rearing and the courts remain able and all-too-willing to take kids away from parents who are regarded as unfit for many reasons — not all of which are legitimate. As Lasch points out,

“The state can now segregate deviants [i.e., children] for no other reason than that they or their parents have refused to cooperate with the courts, especially when refusal to cooperate appears as prima facie evidence of a bad home environment.”

In a word, as the confidence of parents in their own abilities to raise their own children has waned, the power of the state has grown exponentially in its ability to remove children from what may well be loving homes, based on the testimony of the ‘helping professionals” who may or may not have children of their own and who almost certainly have learned what they know about appropriate child-rearing techniques from books written years ago that are still erroneously regarded by many as the last word in sound parenting.

If Lasch is to be believed,

“the deterioration of child care has been at work for a long time and many of its consequences appear to be irreversible.”

Parents have been listening for so long to those who claim to be experts, they have forgotten that love of their children, coupled with consistent and coherent discipline, are paramount (and natural)  and, while they will assuredly make mistakes, parents should trust their instincts — which for so many centuries have seemed to be a fairly safe path to follow.

Parents? Citizens? Whither your freedom??

One More Time

I shall once again refer to Lionel Trilling’s excellent novel The Middle of the Journey because it raises a fascinating question, one that so many of us have forgotten to think about. I refer to the problem of human freedom and responsibility. Rather than accepting blame for our many mistakes we have become used to making excuses, prodded on by the social sciences (or the “pseudo-sciences,” as a friend of mine would have it) that insist we are the product of social causes, environment, education  (or lack of education), economic pressures, the “character pattern imposed by society” (as Trilling puts it). This leaves us no room whatever for human freedom and when freedom disappears so also does moral responsibility. We buy into this tripe because it is an easy way out. After all, if there is no responsibility for human beings then since I am a human being I bear no responsibility whatever for anything I may happen to do — including taking the life of another, or inciting others to do the same. How very comforting!

Trilling raises this question toward the end of his novel when a small group of friends is gathered around following the death of a young girl who was slapped by her father and died because she had a weak heart about which he knew nothing. The question is whether the man deserved to be published. The liberal view, the view of the social scientist, the view shared by the majority of the small group, is ready to make excuses for the man, though the most vehement member of the group wanted to have nothing more to do with the man, despite the fact that he could not have known his daughter would die from his slap. In a word, she didn’t hold the man responsible yet she can’t forgive him. These are human beings after all, albeit fictional ones, and they are as full of contradictions as are the rest of us.

In any event, Trilling insists that this woman, despite her strictly deterministic viewpoint, cannot forgive the man. Moreover, he has the former leader of the group, Gifford Maxim, the former card-carrying member of the Communist Party who has found God and left the Party at considerable risk to his own life, reply to the notion that there cannot be any responsibility — or forgiveness. Maxim makes a series of points to counteract the view of the social scientist who would blame “society” rather than individuals:

“I can personally forgive [the father of the little girl] because I believe God can forgive him. You see, I think his will is a bad one, but not much worse, not altogether different in kind, from other wills. And so you [who cannot condemn the man because you blame society] and I stand opposed. For you — no responsibility for the individual, but no forgiveness. For me — ultimate, absolute responsibility for the individual, but mercy. Absolute responsibility is the only way that men can keep their value, can be thought of as other than things. . . .”

Now whether or not we buy into the religious aspects of this point, it is worth pondering. It is so because the notion of human responsibility can be rescued only if we insist upon the fact of  human freedom — if we reject the notion that we are products of society, simply. We might be forced to admit that society, broadly speaking, plays a role in the formation of who we are. Doubtless it does. But to insist, as so many in the social-sciences do, that we are totally the product of our social conditioning — poor potty training, angry baby-sitters, or a third grade teacher who hated us — a claim that cannot be proven, is to leave no room for responsibility whatever. As Maxim points out, there can be no forgiveness because everything is pre-determined.

But the point that strikes me as the salient one in this discussion is near the end of Maxim’s comment above, when he notes that “Absolute responsibility is the only way men can keep their value, can be thought of as other than things.” This, of course, is the heart and soul of Kantian ethics as it is of the Christian ethic, and it is a point that cannot be denied without reducing, as Maxim says, human beings to things. In the end human freedom can be rescued from the snares of the social scientist by virtue of our own felt-experience; the fact that no logical proof has ever been devised to prove that we are not free; and even Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which shows that activity on the sub-atomic level is in principle unpredictable. Accordingly, human beings can be held responsible. And they can be forgiven, or condemned as the case may be — depending on the degree of their culpability.

 

Other Cultures

I have been rereading Yasunari Kawabata’s Beauty and Sadness and came across the following description which made me think. It comes early in the story about a middle-aged man, Oki Toshio, who has been sitting by the window reflecting on his first love from whom he separated 20 years since:

“He looked out of the small French window of his study. At the base of the hill behind the house a high mound of earth, dug out during the war in making an air raid shelter, was already hidden by weeds so modest one barely noticed them. Among the weeds bloomed a mass of flowers the color of lapis lazuli. The flowers too were extremely small, but they were a bright, strong blue. Except for the sweet daphne, these flowers bloomed earlier than any in their garden. And they stayed in bloom a long time. Whatever they were, they could hardly be familiar harbingers of spring, but they were so close to the window that he often thought he would like to take one in his hand and study it. He had never yet gone to pick one, but that only seemed to increase his love for these tiny lapis-blue flowers.”

This passage, like so many in this novel, reflect the main theme of beauty and sadness. The description of the beautiful flowers almost hides the reference to the air-raid shelter that harkens back to the Second World War and makes the reader recall the terrible effects of the fire bombings that destroyed an estimated 40% of the population of the 64 major cities in Japan toward the end of the war, coupled by the dropping of the Atom Bombs that killed another 129,000 men, women, and children. The end of the war was followed by a seven year allied occupation by 300,000 men that brought about the Westernization of Japan, with its sports, music, movies, clothing, fast-food restaurants, and love of money. The older Japanese, like Kawabata himself, struggled with the loss of pride coupled with transmogrification of their culture from the old ways to the faster, more frenetic new ways. His novels are filled with references to this struggle within himself and in the hearts of his countrymen.

But what struck me powerfully was the fact that we can read passages like this in a novel written by  a man in another culture and “relate” to it, because we share a common humanity. We have lost  sight of this fact in our preoccupation with  the differences in cultures stressed by anthropologists and social scientists like Margaret Mead who started the movement toward cultural relativism that lead us, wrongly I insist, to the conclusion that we are not in a position to judge what folks do in other cultures. From the undeniable truth that we can never fully understand what people in other cultures feel and think we draw the unwarranted conclusion that we can not sympathize with them at all. But this flies in the face of the human sympathy that the moral sense theorists in the eighteenth century brought to our attention that allows each of us to sympathize with other human beings, all other human beings. In stressing difference we have lost sight of our fundamental similarities.

We can read passages like that above, read poetry, hear the music, watch their dances, view their art, and we can feel many of the same things those people feel — not all, but many to be sure. We are not all that different. And, as a result, when we read about Suttee in India, or the stoning of adulteresses in the Middle East, or clitoridectomies forced upon young women in Africa, or the denial of fundamental rights to women around the world, we can judge these things to be wrong because we do know better. Values are relative to cultures to a point, but that point is reached when a violation of fundamental human rights are in question. We know this because we feel it deeply and because our reasoning capacity tells us that if it were us we would not stand for it.

In a word, there its such a thing as “human nature” and it is something we share with the world at large and which, even though many of those in power and those who posses great wealth seem to have denied, defines all of us as human. But why is this discussion significant? Or even of interest? I can do no better than end with a quote by one of the finest minds I have ever encountered, Hannah Arendt, who tells this in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“If the idea of humanity, of which the most conclusive symbol is the common origin of the human species, is no longer valid, then nothing is more plausible than a theory according to which brown, yellow, or black races are descended from some other species of apes than the white race, and all together they are predestined by nature to war against each other until they have disappeared from the face of the earth.”