Democracy’s Faustian Bargain: Never Facing Reality until…

[coberst]

Democracy’s Faustian Bargain: Never Facing Reality until…

The fundamental weakness of democracy is that it rests upon the deep fallacy of human propensities: we pamper our self with delusion as long as possible. We never make drastic changes until the abyss is tomorrow.

Quickie from wiki: “Something that is faustian refers to a wider interpretation of the events of Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In part one of Goethe's Faust, the central character's pact with the devil allows him to have energy, life and youth unless he becomes so entranced by the passing moment that he wishes that things will never change. When Faust stumbles unthinkingly into that wish, his world and his life are forfeit to Mephistopheles.”

St. Augustine’s plea: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

We use technology to paint our self onto the precipice and then rely on technology to save us from falling into the abyss.

“The religious believer assigns dignity to whatever his religion holds sacred—a set of moral laws, a way of life, or particular objects of worship. He grows angry when the dignity of what he holds sacred is violated.” Quote from “The End of History and the Last Man” by Francis Fukuyama

To what does the non believer assign dignity? If the non believer does not assign dignity to rationality, upon what foundation does s/he stand? If the non believer does depend upon rationality for dignity how is it possible that so few know anything about rationality?

Our schools and colleges are beginning to introduce our young people to the domain of knowledge called Critical Thinking. CT is taught because our educators have begun to recognize that teaching a young person what to think is not sufficient for the citizens of a democracy in an age of high technology. CT is an attempt to teach young people how to think. Like the adage about giving a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish, a youngster who knows how to think is prepared for a lifetime rather than for a day.

What about today’s adult? Today’s adult was educated in a time when schools and colleges never gave universal instruction in the art and science of thinking—rationality.

If today’s adult wishes to learn CT s/he must learn it on ‘their nickel’. I think a good read to begin with is this one:

20th WCP: Bertrand Russell on Critical Thinking

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by coberst

Democracy’s Faustian Bargain:...Our schools and colleges are beginning to introduce our young people to the domain of knowledge called Critical Thinking. ...

Bravo!

I'm not personally aware of any schools that are teaching "critical thinking" as such, but I would not be overly surprised. I believe it was Nietsche who said (paraphrase) that the typical human being is capable of believing anything, no matter how absurd it may be. The only "vaccine" to this human weakness is to specifically teach CT as a personal skill.

CT training has actually been around for quite a while. My personal experience with it was with The Forum training (currently offered by Landmark Education) -- the successor to "EST". I took 10 years of it, starting at the age of 42. Now granted, The Forum did NOT teach CT as applied to science or other technical endeavors. It taught CT as applied to attaining achievement and success in an individual's life.

I won't preach about The Forum (not here, anyway), but I can speak for the results that I obtained. Principally, I learned to address the issues and goals in my life through a number of processes that collectively can be called "critical thinking". The chief process (as far as I'm concerned) is the ability to analyze any conviction I may hold in terms of its belief intensity, rational plausibility, level of evidence, and degree of sentimental or emotional inertia. Pretty useful stuff.

The fact that this training has worked for so many people may be one of the reasons that it is finding its way into schools. Forty years of results lend a strong degree of credence to its validity as actual "skill" rather than just another fringe pseudo-science or cult deception.

Another source of CT is the writings of Alfred Korzybski (check my sig) -- that were eventially morphed into General Semantics -- which used to be taught in colleges all over America in the 60's and 70's.

The cyclic "non-popularity" of CT training (especially in this country) has a lot to do with the high respect that Americans give to "belief intensity". CT, at its core, examines and analyzes "belief", evaluating its plausibility and level of evidence, and there are many in this country who don't want to do that -- and who don't want OTHERS to do that either.

[coberst]

Pyrotex

I consider CT to be philosophy lite. I first took a course in Logic 101 about 35 years ago and found out about the effort to teach CT about 8 years ago. I read a book "Critical Thinking" by Richard Paul, which was written for teachers. I was very happy to find out that such a thing was going on. However, I have been preaching about the importance of CT on these Internet forums for 5 years and it appears that the teaching effort has not yet begun to show results.

I might suggest that you take your knowledge of this matter to the Internet via forums. God only knows this message needs to go forth.

Everyone thinks that they were born as critical thinkers and they go blank at any effort to entice them to go to the books about this matter.

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by coberst

...Everyone thinks that they were born as critical thinkers and they go blank at any effort to entice them to go to the books about this matter.

Amen to that.

The truth is, NOBODY is born a critical thinker. It has to be learned. And there are two ways to learn it. You can teach yourself, after a lifetime of experience and questioning and observation. Or you can take the short route and learn it from others. What I picked up in ten years cannot be learned by most people on their own in an entire lifetime.

The terrible danger of becoming facile with CT is that you may discover that your parents' strongly held political, social, religious, moral, historical or educational opinions were full of crap.

Can't have that, now, can we?