I sat at dinner with my friend the other night. We wet our toes in the discomforting waters of politics and accomplished, at most, the amazing feat of concluding the paragraph of conversation without a single curse word.
What haunts me is that we, two relatively more intelligent than average bears, accepted the exchanges we made as if they were substantive. The subject was the legalization of marijuana. I, being the tree-hanging, heroin gulping, female substitute-little-pink-flags-for-bullets, left of your right cortex liberal that I am, would like to see the national discourse (if not quite yet the ballot ) swing intelligently in that direction, was for the proposition. My friend was against it.
Here is where things went wrong: the reason my friend was against is that he had had two friends in college (some 40 years ago) who had tried what we then so lovingly referred to as "dope" who had both gone on to meet tragic ends, one of whom, he vaguely remembered, had experimented with "harder drugs" and then at some point had died in an automobile accident (drugs or possibly no drugs involved, or possibly alcohol involved). But you see the great arc of his reasoning: experimenting with marijuana => tragic end. Therefore,
marijuana.
Here, of course, is the heart of my ghost of the conversation: that reasoning, based on a single observation [let us momentarily pretend it was a substantiated single event] informs the entirety of my friend's approach to the question, "Should marijuana be legalized in America?"
The word I used in the paragraph above was "reasoning". That word is incorrect. My friend believes he is reasoning, but he is not. He is opining.
One simply cannot take a single instance of anything and extrapolate to an entire population.
However, I would wager next month's income on the probability that in certain populations of people, I could tell my friend's story and 90% of those populations would agree with my friend, based on his opinion, that marijuana should not be legalized in America. Moreover, they would have no idea that they were agreeing with an opinion based on anecdote.
Anyone who is still with me either:
1. already clearly understands the definitions of the words "opine", "extrapolate", "anecdote" v. "antidote"; or
2. has a neurotic relationship with his dictionary.
...which leads me to my thesis: my friend is quite intelligent but he is not educated in the science of reasoning (which requires more than a college course in philosophy). Reasoning requires a thorough understanding of The Scientific Method, an acquaintance with basic statistical methods, a working knowledge of algebra and geometry (if for no other reason than to force a three-dimensional model of existence into the inside of one's brain).
These are tools that can be acquired in American high schools...that could be acquired in American high schools if enough Americans understood they are necessary tools for us to be able to reason our way through discussions rather than believe that our opinions on any given matter are of any significance whatsoever. They are not!
And yet, our national news wastes precious time getting the opinions of your man on the street regarding the most pressing issues of the day: opinions likely gained from anecdotal experience rather than from dispassionate discourse or even the reading or viewing of dispassionate discourse based on carefully gleaned and analyzed data from studies of large populations plus the insights that arise from thoughtful consideration and analysis of the issues.
The apex of this disturbing phenomenon is the fashionable reprise, "Data can be interpreted any way they want." Data can only be so interpreted if they are manipulated, the operable word being "manipulated". When "your man on the street" has no idea what "p is significant at the 0.01 level" means, he is a sucker for manipulated data. Asking "your man on the street" to know that much about statistics and why they are useful to the gathering of data is not asking too much of a knowledgeable citizen, although I suspect many a citizen will believe that acquiring such knowledge is beyond his duty to his country...another reason to make the acquisition of this information mandatory in American high schools. Then your average citizen can discern for himself, if he chooses, whether, say, the OMB or a political party is playing fast and loose with the facts. He can look into any given study by any given Administrative agency to see if their methods are in the Scientific Ball Park (the FDA alone would be stopped in its tracks if more people actually read its research, or more specifically, the withholding of its research, which is, in many cases, highly competent).
The most obvious (and, when viewed from the world stage, embarrassing) example of American opinion having conquered American reasonable thinking is the determination of the Religious Right to blindly throw away scientific work reaching back to the Renaissance, in order to hold fast to their opinion of Biblical inerrancy. I have spoken personally with some of these “believers” whose capacity to discount en masse the sciences of geology, archeology, anthropology, and genetics is chilling. They throw away the theory of evolution knowing essentially nothing about it. When they deride it as theory, they are saying, in effect, that they know nothing about the scientific definition of the word, “theory”, as in the “theory” of gravity. These people are incapable of reasonable discourse; as such, they are as great a threat to the forward progress of America as any external threat.
If ever there were a time when we as a nation must be nimble on our feet, it is in this time in the history of the world, when history is flying out from under us at an exponentially increasing rate. We can only be nimble on our feet when we are nimble in our minds, and that facility requires, absolutely, the ability on the part of every one of us to be able to turn each issue about and view it from all its aspects: a facility which in turn requires the capacity to think about the issue, tear it apart and rebuild it, consider it from every vantage point. If, after all that, we each come to an opinion on the issue, I say, “Well done!”
Or, as is my life’s motto: “Anyone who has an opinion on the matter hasn’t considered all the facts.”
