Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Why Your Political Opponents Are Crazy

The longer I live, the more puzzled I am by the following poser. It seems axiomatic that people’s judgments about the world are based on observation and reason and that, as the abilities of human beings to observe and reason increase, there should be greater agreement in their judgments. In other words, people who are well-informed and highly intelligent should pretty much agree on everything.

Only, that’s not the case. We need go no further than the famous Simpsons episode, "They Saved Lisa's Brain." Here, by a twist of fate, Springfield’s MENSA members and the smartest people in town – Lisa Simpson, Comic Book Guy, Dr. Hibbert, Principal Skinner, Professor Frink, and Lindsay Naegle – become the leaders of Springfield. They see that they now have the opportunity to create an ideal society. But the entire project fizzles because they end up disagreeing about everything (and they also have bad ideas). An angry mob puts an end to their rule and they escape with their lives only through the last minute intervention of Stephen Hawking.


Of course, I see the same sort of thing. I know any number of people who, at least as these things can be measured, are most likely better informed than I am and probably a lot smarter, but their ideas are completely lunatic.

Anyway, here Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, takes a stab at the issue: Are Your Political Opponents Crazy?

2 comments:

James R said...

Sigh…I read the first few comments (true, not a good sample, but it allows me to be ironic) and clearly the readers are not leaving their idealogical 'pictures' to consider specific exception-clauses. I'll invoke an exception clause here, however, just so I don't fall into the same category, and say that typically when one makes a comment one doesn't have the space to give a detail exception-clause, so I won't criticize the readers.

Big Myk said...

I must admit, I didn't read the comments before posting. But, yes, clearly these guys just don't get it.