I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said “I don’t believe the liberal media.”
I think it’s safe to say that a significant percentage of our population believe that everything they read in the newspapers or on TV is biased against their viewpoint (usually a very socially conservative viewpoint). These also tend to be the same people who believe that Christianity is under attack in the US, mostly because they can’t understand why allowing school-led prayer is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But I digress.
While it’s tempting to poke holes into the assumptions behind that rather broad claim of a liberal bias in our media, I for this post…OK, just one, because it’s so easy: Rupert Murdoch, arguably the most powerful media mogul on earth right now, could hardly be called “liberal!” That aside, the message of that bumper sticker is not the subject of this post; and its underlying evidence of the polarization of our society isn’t either. No, I’m thinking right now of a broader issue: what this says about how new information is evaluated by most people in our society today. How do we decide what to believe and what not to?
First, I think it’s obvious that, for virtually everyone, at least SOME information is simply accepted without much thought. We don’t question it. It probably doesn’t have a significant enough impact on our lives to matter.
And to be sure, that’s at least partly because there’s so much information coming at us that we just don’t have the time or ability to think much about it. I’ve heard a couple of times that the average Sunday New York Times contains more information than a person 200 years ago would come across in an entire lifetime. So we’re being virtually buried by mountains of information.
What this has led to, I believe, is that too many of us have stopped thinking critically. For some, it’s intellectual laziness; for others it’s a sense of overwhelm, and probably for others, a belief in fairness, which forces them to allow for others’ positions regardless of their merit. While I applaud any attempt to recognize opposing viewpoints as a means to arrive at a compromise (or simply to understand how someone else might think), the truth is that not every viewpoint merits rational consideration. For example, today, as we ramp up for another Presidential election season, President Obama’s birthplace is still questioned by a substantial group of people, in spite of the fact that there is no question by either party that he was born here in the US of A. So when some right-wing nut job “birther” brings it up (as the quintessential loon, Donald Trump did just a couple of days ago), it should rightfully be dismissed as nonsense. Yet there are people who, maybe out of a sense of fairness, allow for these bozos to “have their opinions” without challenging them to critically examine them.
So where is critical thinking? It seems that most people look at new information through a prism of their own biases and preconceived notions rather than any critical evaluation. Clearly we don’t have time to do so for everything we come across, but for those things that are important (meaning, having the potential to have a significant impact on how we live our lives), something more than a knee-jerk “that’s how my Dad believed, so that’s good enough for me” ought to be brought to bear.
Think about it.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
Thinking critically (part 1)
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said “I don’t believe the liberal media.”
I think it’s safe to say that a significant percentage of our population believe that everything they read in the newspapers or on TV is biased against their viewpoint (usually a very socially conservative viewpoint). These also tend to be the same people who believe that Christianity is under attack in the US, mostly because they can’t understand why allowing school-led prayer is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. But I digress.
While it’s tempting to poke holes into the assumptions behind that rather broad claim of a liberal bias in our media, I for this post…OK, just one, because it’s so easy: Rupert Murdoch, arguably the most powerful media mogul on earth right now, could hardly be called “liberal!” That aside, the message of that bumper sticker is not the subject of this post; and its underlying evidence of the polarization of our society isn’t either. No, I’m thinking right now of a broader issue: what this says about how new information is evaluated by most people in our society today. How do we decide what to believe and what not to?
First, I think it’s obvious that, for virtually everyone, at least SOME information is simply accepted without much thought. We don’t question it. It probably doesn’t have a significant enough impact on our lives to matter.
And to be sure, that’s at least partly because there’s so much information coming at us that we just don’t have the time or ability to think much about it. I’ve heard a couple of times that the average Sunday New York Times contains more information than a person 200 years ago would come across in an entire lifetime. So we’re being virtually buried by mountains of information.
What this has led to, I believe, is that too many of us have stopped thinking critically. For some, it’s intellectual laziness; for others it’s a sense of overwhelm, and probably for others, a belief in fairness, which forces them to allow for others’ positions regardless of their merit. While I applaud any attempt to recognize opposing viewpoints as a means to arrive at a compromise (or simply to understand how someone else might think), the truth is that not every viewpoint merits rational consideration. For example, today, as we ramp up for another Presidential election season, President Obama’s birthplace is still questioned by a substantial group of people, in spite of the fact that there is no question by either party that he was born here in the US of A. So when some right-wing nut job “birther” brings it up (as the quintessential loon, Donald Trump did just a couple of days ago), it should rightfully be dismissed as nonsense. Yet there are people who, maybe out of a sense of fairness, allow for these bozos to “have their opinions” without challenging them to critically examine them.
So where is critical thinking? It seems that most people look at new information through a prism of their own biases and preconceived notions rather than any critical evaluation. Clearly we don’t have time to do so for everything we come across, but for those things that are important (meaning, having the potential to have a significant impact on how we live our lives), something more than a knee-jerk “that’s how my Dad believed, so that’s good enough for me” ought to be brought to bear.
Think about it.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.