Perusing the Sunday comics this morning, my wife called out to me. "You're going to like Doonesbury today."
Oh, yes, she was so right. I've copied in the strip below.
As he so often does, Garry Trudeau encapsulated the United States' biggest political and cultural problem in just a few cartoon frames:
Gullibility
Too many people will believe anything, if they want to believe it. Reality? Truth? Evidence? Irrelevant.
At the moment it's the Republicans and right-wingers who are playing the most games with American gullibility.
In PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" section, where the most egregious lies are documented, nineteen out of twenty of the most recent vintage are from conservative Obama haters.
One is from Obama himself -- his claim that the number of Muslims in the United States makes it one of the largest Islamic countries in the world. Not true. But also not a big deal.
On "Meet the Press" today, I heard David Axelrod (an Obama advisor) asked how the administration lost control of the news about his speech to America's school children on Tuesday, which has been widely branded as an attempt to indoctrinate kids into socialism.
This, of course, is one of those Pants on Fire lies. How can you control idiocy like that?
Just one way, as the Doonesbury strip says: the Reasonists who believe in an evidence-based world have to assert themselves and become more numerous.
Reality, after all, is a terrible thing to waste.
People are generally reliable about the practical things concerning them but seldom acquire much intellectual rigor. Only so many have the innate ability, even fewer have the inclination, and for those it remains a struggle, similar to maintaining a rich vocabulary — it takes maintenance.
Personally, I think that among the smarter people there is still a misunderstanding of how reason operates, which results in a another kind of credulity. "Rationalism" can mean different things, but the rationalism at the focus of many of the philosophical debates of the last few centuries is more theoretical than empirical (i.e., "evidence-based").
Posted by: Anthony | September 07, 2009 at 07:19 AM