Do Americans Suffer From an "Allergy to Thought?" [View All]

[Roland99]

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/2010/03/do_americans_suffer_from_an_al.html

This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers talked with New York University president John Sexton for a wide-ranging conversation about religion, the role of higher education in a globalizing world, and the troubling disintegration of civil discourse in today's society.

Sexton suggested that America increasingly exhibits what he calls an "allergy to thought" and that universities are the key to restoring nuance to public discourse:

"This is a pattern that I see: an allergy to thought, to complexity nuance - a kind of collapse into an intellectual relativism where opinions become fact... It's a dangerous thing... I think there's a growing hostility to knowledge in this country... Our national progress is being retarded because we have fallen into this discourse by slogan. We have fallen into this relativism where it's a conversation to stop and say, "Well, that's your opinion. my opinion...' Go back to the Athenian idea of political speech - it was a search for good answers. We're so far from that today that it's almost ludicrous for me to bring that up, but I want to remind us... We don't listen well as a society. When we listen, we listen in feedback loops to people who are likely to say what it is we think is right... We're in the process, it seems to me, because of this allergy to complexity and nuance, of devaluing the importance of education... I think universities are the last, best hope for pushing back against this because what we do is complexity and nuance."

I liked one of the comments in particular, here's a portion:

In the first sentence of Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote, “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.” It is not an ‘allergy to thought’ that we suffer. It is blind devotion to custom, which leads to partisanship, prejudice, and intolerance. It was blind devotion to Capitalism, not an ‘allergy to thought,’ that blindsided the Fed, and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, during the recent financial crisis.