Surrounded by people “educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought”
[Via Scholars and Rogues]
I read a lot of books, which means I also read a lot of book reviews. And some are classics. They’re essays of a certain type, after all, and there are great essays, so why not great book reviews? John Banvilles’s take-down of Ian McEwan’s Saturday in The New York Review of Books several years ago is already legend. Going back further, it’s hard to imagine a better piece of essay writing than Paul Fussell’s review of The Boy Scout Handbook (to be found in the collection of essays bearing that same name). And perhaps topping the list of all-time classics is Peter Medawar’s well-deserved destruction of Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (collected in a book of Medawar’s essays, Pluto’s Republic), back when people actually read, or claimed to read, Teilhard, in 1961.
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An interesting essay that I think hits an important point – lots of the people being given positions to make large public statements via the media are completely unable to simply think in any kind of critical fashion.
Facts, data, even reality are not as important as saying what they think is right. No matter how wrong it is.
I’m not so sure it is a problem of too much education but of not providing one that actually trains them to use the tools of their education. A big part of a classical education was to learn how to think critically and properly analyse what was said and written.
We no longer do anything like that, educating people without giving them real knowledge or wisdom.
Maybe we will do better soon.
February 13, 2012 at 5:30 am
My, my. Two liberal, progressive, anti-Republican writers are going to tell the rest of us that we are not logical (see definition of insane) and have no wisdom because we disagree with their logic and wisdom. I weep for them.
February 13, 2012 at 8:37 am
The original quote came from a critique of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s followers, who were generally liberal. The original article mentions conservative writer Daniel Larison in a positive light (which I agree with) and liberal writer Roy Edroso in a negative one (which I don’t agree with). I never mentioned political parties at all.
There was no attempt by me to universalize this to all people I disagree with or to conservatives. It was discussing a population of people – some quite public – for whom facts do not matter. There are data I have talked about that show that in many cases the more educated some people are, the more tightly they will believe things without any facts (creationism is such a belief.)
SImple disagreement is not the point. Being unable to debate someone because they use facts that are not true is the problem.