Is Thinking Obsolete?
By
Thomas Sowell
While it is not possible to answer all the
e-mails and letters from readers, many are thought-provoking, whether those
thoughts are positive or negative.
By contrast, another man simply denounced me because of what was said in
that column. He did not ask for my sources but simply made contrary assertions,
as if his assertions must be correct and therefore mine must be wrong.
He identified himself as a physician, and the claims that he made about
guns were claims that had been made years ago in a medical journal -- and
thoroughly discredited since then. He might have learned that, if we had
engaged in a back and forth discussion, but it was clear from his letter that
his goal was not debate but denunciation. That is often the case these days.
It is always amazing how many serious issues are not discussed seriously,
but instead simply generate assertions and counter-assertions. On television
talk shows, people on opposite sides often just try to shout each other down.
There is a remarkable range of ways of seeming to argue without actually
producing any coherent argument.
Decades of dumbed-down education no doubt have something to do with this,
but there is more to it than that. Education is not merely neglected in many of
our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological
indoctrination. Moreover, it is largely indoctrination based on the same set of
underlying and unexamined assumptions among teachers and institutions.
If our educational institutions -- from the schools to the universities --
were as interested in a diversity of ideas as they are obsessed with racial
diversity, students would at least gain experience in seeing the assumptions
behind different visions and the role of logic and evidence in debating those
differences.
Instead, a student can go all the way from elementary school to a Ph.D.
without encountering any fundamentally different vision of the world from that
of the prevailing political correctness.
Moreover, the moral perspective that goes with this prevailing ideological
view is all too often that of people who see themselves as being on the side of
the angels against the forces of evil -- whether the particular issue at hand
is gun control, environmentalism, race or whatever.
A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas. One sign of
this sense of moral monopoly among the left intelligentsia is that the
institutions most under their control -- the schools, colleges and universities
-- have far less freedom of speech than the rest of American society.
While advocacy of homosexuality, for example, is common on college
campuses, and listening to this advocacy is often obligatory during freshman orientation,
criticism of homosexuality is called "hate speech" that is subject to
punishment.
While spokesmen for various racial or ethnic groups are free to vehemently
denounce whites as a group for their past or present sins, real or otherwise,
any white student who similarly denounces the sins or shortcomings of non-white
groups can be virtually guaranteed to be punished, if not expelled.
Even students who do not advocate anything can have to pay a price if they
do not go along with classroom brainwashing. The student at Florida Atlantic
University who recently declined to stomp on a paper with the word
"Jesus" on it, as ordered by the professor, was scheduled for
punishment by the university until the story became public and provoked an
outcry from outside academia.
This professor's action might be dismissed as an isolated extreme, but the
university establishment's initial solid backing for him, and its coming down
hard on the student, shows that the moral dry rot goes far deeper than one
brainwashing professor.
The failure of our educational system goes beyond what they fail to teach.
It includes what they do teach, or rather indoctrinate, and the graduates they
send out into the world, incapable of seriously weighing alternatives for
themselves or for American society.
No comments:
Post a Comment