I’m not an idiot.
OK, if you’ve seen me accidentally blow something up
or stand on a rolling, spinning office chair to reach something high, you may
disagree with that. Heck, I’ll be the
first to tell you that sometimes I do some boneheaded things with comedic
results, but in all seriousness…I am not an idiot.
To the contrary, I’m actually a fairly well educated
person with good common sense, excellent creative problem solving skills and an
IQ test score that simply must have been a mistake. (Lucky guesses on a lot of the questions.) Even so, if you and I have differing opinions
on any given topic, you may want to think I’m an idiot.
As a professor I spend my days with humans half my
age who are just dipping their toes into the pool of adulthood for the first
time. Generally speaking, these students
find themselves making their own choices about life, morals and values without
the direction of their parents for the first time ever. I’ll admit it’s entertaining to watch them
become so passionate about tattoos, politics and spirituality. They’ll be loud about it in class as well as
in their personal time and with relatively no life experience at this point,
they’ll even be quick to mock and ridicule the people around them with
different views. I’ve had 20 year olds
who looked down on my intelligence level when they found out I had strong
Christian spiritual beliefs. They just
couldn’t believe that I could be so naïve!
I smiled as they sat there so above it all knowing full well they had
never been put in a situation where they had to exercise real faith in
anything. It gives me hope to know this
is the beginning of their journey instead of the end. I guess if adolescence teaches us anything
it’s that the growing process is not always a pretty one.
I’m not sure if it’s modern culture or if it’s more
of an American thing but many of us have lost our ability to disagree with one
another and still have an intelligent discourse.
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to
entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle, Metaphysics
It
used to be the case that people would go to college not to get a job or find a
career, but to learn how to think.
College was the place where young adults learned how to engage in the
discovery of new ideas. Students were
encouraged to investigate observations and facts so that ideas and opinions
could be formed. Entertaining questions
and investigating opposing concepts was an active part of education. In a time when so many people go to college,
modern society is apparently filled with very uneducated minds, at least
according to Aristotle.
I
blame TV. Everything from prime time
programming to the local news is designed to evoke an emotional response from
viewers. We tune in and find ourselves
being asked to take sides. We pull for
sitcom characters as they bumble through the story. We are lured into wanting a particular
contestant to win on a goofy talent show because we are shown their emotional
backstory and now we don’t care if they are really the most talented performer,
their story was compelling so we call and vote for them anyway. If you think about what happens to us on this
level, perhaps it’s easier to see how we are manipulated by producers and
programmers. If, on a show based on talent,
we are compelled by the story to pull for a contestant who is not the most
talented….maybe you can see how the news media might use the same tactics to
evoke an emotional response from us regarding local or national issues? With the right angle and the right quotes,
the issue becomes less about the truth and more about the way the story is
told. And when we’re told on a more
national level that we must choose sides between two less than desirable
options, we may get caught up in the stories being told and forget that we have
very specific, individualized values that are not represented by either
available choice. We end up joining a
team that doesn’t really characterize what we believe.
Maybe
it’s not just TV. Maybe we share the
blame.
These
days it seems we raise our human offspring to be mental robots. As parents, we want our children to be
obedient. We want them to be like
us. And because we do not feel confident
in our reasoning or our decision-making, we certainly do not want our kids asking
us questions about how we arrived at our decisions. That would be embarrassing, right? If a kid simply asked why we held to a
certain moral value and we couldn’t articulate it with a logical argument based
in fact, we would look dumb. We just
can’t have that, so let’s not encourage questions from our kids and if they do
happen to ask a good question, let’s just say “because that’s the way it is”
and move on. Because if our kids start
to ask questions and think for themselves they might grow up to have different
opinions than us. And since we tend to
think of different as bad, we cant let that happen. So if our children fall in line, they mimic
our values and beliefs not based on careful consideration and experiential
learning, but because that’s what someone told them once.
What
kind of adult does that child become? I
think a quick glance across traffic will answer that for you. The car in front of you will have a political
endorsement sticker. But that sticker
will not just support one candidate, it will simultaneously insult another
candidate. As if to say, “only a
complete idiot could support that person”.
The car beside you will have a religious sticker. But that sticker will be carefully worded to
not just support a particular faith, but to also use guilt or pressure or even
political parties to back that faith.
And don’t even get me started on the college football goofballs who sit
at the ready at a red light to give the finger to the person in front of them
with the opposing local team sticker on their car. You like Clemson football? You must have a low IQ. Because one of those things has to do with
the other, right?
Trivial
things like football teams, temporary things like politics and important things
like core values all come down to personal belief. When I believe that the Cubs are my favorite
baseball team, I am saying that I have chosen to support this team. I am not saying they are the best team in
baseball on any given day/year (/century as far as the Cubs are concerned). All I am saying is that for fairly
unimportant reasons that are totally unrelated to rational thought, I choose to
hope this team wins. This does not make
me intelligent. This also does not make
me unintelligent. It is a choice I have
made and it reflects only a portion of who and what I am as a human. At the same time, if you choose to hope the
Yankees win, that choice does not mean you are a bad person. It does not give me any indication of your
intelligence level and it does not mean that we cant be friends.
But
what if you’re one of those Republicans?
Or even a Democrat? The same
facts apply. We should be able to have a
conversation and identify aspects of our belief system that line up with a
particular candidate’s platform without getting into an argument, accusing each
other of being dumb or comparing people to Hitler.
Intelligent
discourse and discussion of ideas is not easy.
It requires observation and careful gathering of facts. Think of these as the ingredients for a
recipe. A cook will gather the
ingredients first, carefully measure out each one and compare the recipe to
their own tastes, experience and current needs.
The cook may then follow the recipe or make adjustments for taste and or
quantity. The ingredients (or facts) must
come first. Then they can be combined
according to the directions to create the meal (or opinion). Gathering the right ingredients can be a
hassle. I know people who are quick to
make substitutions for ingredients they may not have. Some people just use off brands or lesser
quality ingredients than the recipe desires.
Others will leave out things they don’t like or they’ll cut the sugar or
use low fat substitutes. When we think
of gathering the facts some of us will allow technology to make us lazy. We’re already on Facebook anyway, so why not
just rely on what we see there as our factual information? That inflammatory headline that links to an
article about that terrible candidate?
Heck, I don’t even need to click on that one. I’ll just read the headline and file it away
with my “facts” about that person. I’ll
also wonder how anyone could justify voting for someone who kicks puppies like
the article said. Now you’ve used two
cups of saccharine instead of two cups of sugar. Your cookies are going to taste
terrible. Facebook, internet articles,
things we hear people say, these are all substitutes for real facts. These are all things that prevent us from
having intelligent discourse with those who may have different opinions.
Fact
checking is hard. Name calling is
easy.
It’s
also very easy to just put on someone else’s beliefs and wear them as your
own. That requires much less cranial
effort than investigating different ideas, researching facts through reliable
sources and synthesizing that information into your own beliefs. But you are not Fox News. You are not CNN. You are not the very opinionated dude on talk
radio and you are NOT Kanye West. You
are a human who was raised with a very specific set of values and beliefs acted
out around you as you grew through your younger years. You are a human who then grew old enough to
ask questions and began to figure some things out for yourself. You are a human who grew into an adult who is
expected to have their own set of values and beliefs based on a mixture of all
that history, research and that ever-important element: life experience. With all that very individual history mixed
up together, there’s just no way your values and beliefs line up exactly with
anyone else’s. You can’t cut and paste
your beliefs.
You
may also wish to consider the very real possibility that you may eventually
change your mind about something. I know
it seems so unlikely when you have such passionate allegiance to your ideas
right now. But that’s what life does to
us; it changes us. Remember, at one
point in human history we were certain that the sun revolved around the
Earth. We were also certain that the
Earth was flat. Heck, not so long ago
some of the greatest medical minds were convinced that if you were feeling bad
they just needed to cut you open and let you bleed out all the bad stuff.
From
this side of these archaic ideas, they seem silly to us. In the same way, at some point in your life
you will look back at what you believed in 2016 and you’ll laugh at how naïve
you were. You’ll discover that those
people you thought were idiots because of their beliefs are now your
friends. And they’ll seem a whole lot
wiser then.
We’re
not going to agree on everything.
Ever. Perhaps though, we could
decide to agree on this one thing: Let’s
agree to respect disagreement. Different
is not bad. Different is not dumb. Different is just different. And as I told my 10 year old last week, if
everyone was exactly alike this world would be a very boring place.
