Atypical Guy

I realized several years ago that one of the primary points of frustration for me occurs when dealing with people who are irrational.  I also learned that it’s futile to attempt to address an irrational idea using rationality.  If people don’t understand the power and value of logic and reason, it’s not a problem that I can solve.  At least in the United States, the political and social climate has clearly empowered the irrational members of the country.  Those are the people who openly choose not to elect a “smart” President and that feel that it’s OK to impeach a President for lying about his private life while letting an alleged war criminal run the nation, no questions asked.  It often seems that the inmates are running the asylum.

So where do these ideas come from?  The topic of morality is one that is often thrown about in the media.  It doesn’t matter if people are criticizing Britney Spears’ latest escapades or if it’s an issue of imprisoning and torturing hundreds of innocent people.  There are many who suggest that morality comes from religion, but all research points the in the opposite direction.  In fact, most thinking adults would be aghast if they only read books like the Bible (especially the Old Testament) or the Koran. 

The New York Times posted an article earlier this year that attempts to explain the basis of morality.  Steven Pinker writes in The Moral Instinct about the basis of these ideas.  For example, how can people respect the ignorance an suffering peddled by Mother Theresa while overlooking actual humanitarians?  The article is very long, but I found it to be thought-provoking.  Pinker often cites studies and thought experiments which are both entertaining and information.  Here’s an excerpt:

All this brings us to a theory of how the moral sense can be universal and variable at the same time. The five moral spheres are universal, a legacy of evolution. But how they are ranked in importance, and which is brought in to moralize which area of social life — sex, government, commerce, religion, diet and so on — depends on the culture. Many of the flabbergasting practices in faraway places become more intelligible when you recognize that the same moralizing impulse that Western elites channel toward violations of harm and fairness (our moral obsessions) is channeled elsewhere to violations in the other spheres. Think of the Japanese fear of nonconformity (community), the holy ablutions and dietary restrictions of Hindus and Orthodox Jews (purity), the outrage at insulting the Prophet among Muslims (authority). In the West, we believe that in business and government, fairness should trump community and try to root out nepotism and cronyism. In other parts of the world this is incomprehensible — what heartless creep would favor a perfect stranger over his own brother?

The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.

Of course, there’s a strong current in modern thought that seems to imply that we should “think” with our guts rather than with our brains.  If something feels bad, we should avoid it.  And, if we can somehow rationalize it (e.g., to attack a country with no evidence or reason), then it’s OK.  Towards the conclusion of the article is another example:

Though wise people have long reflected on how we can be blinded by our own sanctimony, our public discourse still fails to discount it appropriately. In the worst cases, the thoughtlessness of our brute intuitions can be celebrated as a virtue. In his influential essay “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” Leon Kass, former chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics, argued that we should disregard reason when it comes to cloning and other biomedical technologies and go with our gut: “We are repelled by the prospect of cloning human beings . . . because we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. . . . In this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done . . . repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

There are, of course, good reasons to regulate human cloning, but the shudder test is not one of them. People have shuddered at all kinds of morally irrelevant violations of purity in their culture: touching an untouchable, drinking from the same water fountain as a Negro, allowing Jewish blood to mix with Aryan blood, tolerating sodomy between consenting men. And if our ancestors’ repugnance had carried the day, we never would have had autopsies, vaccinations, blood transfusions, artificial insemination, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization, all of which were denounced as immoral when they were new.

If only we would invest more time and effort in actually learning about human nature rather than trying to defend absurd, illogical, and irrational conclusions, the world would be a far better place.  I’m not holding my breath for a positive change, but it would be a pleasant change from our current culture of ignorance.

Whenever you’re in the mood for a good laugh, you need look no further than the United States educational system.  A nation that can spend trillions on a manufactured war puts so little into (and gets so little back from) it’s educational system.  As a case in point, a post from Bad Astronomy helps outline the sad state of affairs.  From That’s it. Texas really is doomed:

Well, it’s truly official: Texas is doomed.

Why? I’ve talked before about the guy that’s the head of the State Board of Education. His name is Don McLeroy, and he’s perhaps the least qualified guy on the planet to head a BoE. He’s a creationist. He thinks science is evil. The list of his disqualifications to be in charge of a BoE would be so big… well, it would be Texas-sized big.

I predicted nothing but doom and shame for the BoE this year, and it brings me no joy at all to say I was right. McLeroy’s latest antic — though I would call it the first shot fired in a war, a war on reality — was over, of all things, the English standards. According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, teachers and experts had worked for two and a half to three years on new standards for English. So what did McLeroy do? He ignored all that work entirely, and let “social conservatives” on the board draft a new set overnight.

Overnight? Think that’s better than Standards teachers and experts spent nearly three years on?

…

We know where McLeroy stands there. Texas is actually and seriously looking down a cliff of educational repression that will doom the children there for the next decade. I really can’t be more serious about this. If I were a parent of a young child in Texas right now, I’d move out rather than let her be educated there.

The result?  The Board approved the measure, 9 to 6.

Well many might laugh at this (and we really should, at least a little), the truth is that we’re breeding even more ignorance in this nation.  On a side note, many of the comments for the post offer some interesting views on the issue.

Personally, I find that one of the biggest challenges facing the United States is our complacency.  In recent years, we have undeniably fallen behind the rest of the world in education.  Our debt levels are staggering, our economy is sinking, and we have a President that wages war for now reason.  Still, any criticism seems to be greeted with hostility.  We tend to think that if people don’t support our violent or arrogant ways, they’re against us.  We should, instead, try to learn from the rest of the world.  Most of the planet has learned how to make healthcare fair, yet we continue to make futile attempts to “tweak” a system that is fundamentally flawed and serves only private interests and profiteering.  Education, in my opinion, is a potential solution.

The Wall Street Journal recently posted an interesting article titled What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?  From the introduction:

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don’t start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world’s C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they’re way ahead in math, science and reading — on track to keeping Finns among the world’s most productive workers.

And an interesting anecdote / “case study”:

Finnish high-school senior Elina Lamponen saw the differences firsthand. She spent a year at Colon High School in Colon, Mich., where strict rules didn’t translate into tougher lessons or dedicated students, Ms. Lamponen says. She would ask students whether they did their homework. They would reply: ” ‘Nah. So what’d you do last night?'” she recalls. History tests were often multiple choice. The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write. In-class projects were largely “glue this to the poster for an hour,” she says. Her Finnish high school forced Ms. Lamponen, a spiky-haired 19-year-old, to repeat the year when she returned.

Lloyd Kirby, superintendent of Colon Community Schools in southern Michigan, says foreign students are told to ask for extra work if they find classes too easy. He says he is trying to make his schools more rigorous by asking parents to demand more from their children.

You can also access a chart that shows the results from the survey.  The U.S. is pretty far down on the list (behind Croatia, Iceland, and many other nations).

Hopefully we can learn something by some of these teaching techniques.  Certainly, no system is perfect, but Americans can benefit tremendously by learning about what does work in other areas of the world.