| I can imagine no more terrifying thought than the one expressed here: If men were ever in a state in which they did not want to know or could not perceive truth, facts or evidence, . . .* Here is an excerpt from a July, 2014, New York Times column by Paul Krugman about facts and evidence: |  Woodburn Hall, Indiana University |
On July 6, The Times published an article by the political scientist Brendan Nyhan about a troubling aspect of the current American scene: the stark partisan divide over issues that should be simply factual, like whether the planet is warming or evolution happened. It’s common to attribute such divisions to ignorance, but as Mr. Nyhan points out, the divide is worse among those who are better informed about the issues.
The problem isn’t ignorance; it’s wishful thinking. Confronted with a conflict between evidence and what they want to believe for political and /or religious reasons, many people reject the evidence. And knowing more about the issues widens the divide, because the well informed have a clearer view of which evidence they need to reject to sustain their belief system.
*The half-sentence was written by J. R. R. Tolkien and published in Tree and Leaf, 1964, in a essay entitled ‘On Fairy-stories.’ The sentence is concluded as follows: “. . . then Fantasy would languish until they are cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy would perish, and become Morbid Delusion.”
The fate of Fantasy as a literary genre does not concern me at all compared to the implication that both the U.S. and Canada are in rapid devolution into medieval, pre-scientific societies.
The problem isn’t ignorance; it’s wishful thinking. Confronted with a conflict between evidence and what they want to believe for political and /or religious reasons, many people reject the evidence. And knowing more about the issues widens the divide, because the well informed have a clearer view of which evidence they need to reject to sustain their belief system.
*The half-sentence was written by J. R. R. Tolkien and published in Tree and Leaf, 1964, in a essay entitled ‘On Fairy-stories.’ The sentence is concluded as follows: “. . . then Fantasy would languish until they are cured. If they ever get into that state (it would not seem at all impossible), Fantasy would perish, and become Morbid Delusion.”
The fate of Fantasy as a literary genre does not concern me at all compared to the implication that both the U.S. and Canada are in rapid devolution into medieval, pre-scientific societies.
RSS Feed
