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"The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
That's said to have been said by Thomas Sowell. I have no reason to believe he didn't say it, except that the really good quotations always seem to get misattributed. Often you can't even find who originally said something, and yet the saying persists, and the false association with whomever somehow informs the statement, lends gravity, and makes it more meaningful. That person ought to have said that thing. Let's pretend they did, as it gets at something that feels true.
Sowell is right to suggest that literacy extends to being literate in how to think straight, but the turbulence of unexamined emotions should not be confused with an acute instinct. The body and the unconscious are continually collecting information to which the conscious mind is not privy.
Absent a civilised education, without culture or knowledge, a person would be right to trust their gut. With an education, a person may be inclined to disregard their instinctual reactions, as their brain provides chemical rewards for unintuitive conclusions.
The educated are right to think through the first reaction to bubble up into their awareness, but if their belief structure can't accommodate the instinct, it will be tossed away as unreasonable, or perhaps immoral. The ignorant rabble are right to know in their bones that two hundred thousand years in the wild, and ten thousand in town, have established certain patterns of predictability that can almost be depended on. It's just too bad that the pace of social and technological change have accelerated past what we're naturally equipped to instinctively understand.
Truth is a thing that can be measured and marked down in different registers. The objective aspirations of logic and empiricism are usually preferable, especially in any effort to establish a common understanding, but they are subjectively less true than a flash of anger or experience of grace. As long as reason and science are an imposition that require mental work, an unsexy enterprise that can't be known by instinct, it is necessary for the thoughtful people to be aware that their objective accuracy is irrelevant.
Johnny has a feeling. It feels true. We think about it. We think it's false, but that feels true too. The same machinery is ultimately activated, but Johnny got there quicker. He might even be right. For all our highfalutin logic and evidence, we might still be wrong. And Johnny knows it.
That's said to have been said by Thomas Sowell. I have no reason to believe he didn't say it, except that the really good quotations always seem to get misattributed. Often you can't even find who originally said something, and yet the saying persists, and the false association with whomever somehow informs the statement, lends gravity, and makes it more meaningful. That person ought to have said that thing. Let's pretend they did, as it gets at something that feels true.
Sowell is right to suggest that literacy extends to being literate in how to think straight, but the turbulence of unexamined emotions should not be confused with an acute instinct. The body and the unconscious are continually collecting information to which the conscious mind is not privy.
Absent a civilised education, without culture or knowledge, a person would be right to trust their gut. With an education, a person may be inclined to disregard their instinctual reactions, as their brain provides chemical rewards for unintuitive conclusions.
The educated are right to think through the first reaction to bubble up into their awareness, but if their belief structure can't accommodate the instinct, it will be tossed away as unreasonable, or perhaps immoral. The ignorant rabble are right to know in their bones that two hundred thousand years in the wild, and ten thousand in town, have established certain patterns of predictability that can almost be depended on. It's just too bad that the pace of social and technological change have accelerated past what we're naturally equipped to instinctively understand.
Truth is a thing that can be measured and marked down in different registers. The objective aspirations of logic and empiricism are usually preferable, especially in any effort to establish a common understanding, but they are subjectively less true than a flash of anger or experience of grace. As long as reason and science are an imposition that require mental work, an unsexy enterprise that can't be known by instinct, it is necessary for the thoughtful people to be aware that their objective accuracy is irrelevant.
Johnny has a feeling. It feels true. We think about it. We think it's false, but that feels true too. The same machinery is ultimately activated, but Johnny got there quicker. He might even be right. For all our highfalutin logic and evidence, we might still be wrong. And Johnny knows it.
