Our Shallow Beliefs and Opinions
This video of an interview with a pitiably clueless Occupy Wall Street protester has been making the rounds as a judgment upon the protesters’ lack of thought and comprehension of politics and the economy, but it really speaks more to the usual basis of most everyone’s beliefs and opinions.
Most people form beliefs and opinions about complex matters not from countless hours of precise study and careful argumentation, but rather because they’ve heard someone they trust promote the idea, or because they’ve been told they should hold the idea as a member of a community, or because the idea sounds true or feels right.
Engage a random Catholic about the meaning of dogma, or a random abortion rights advocate about the content of Roe v. Wade, or a random American about the Constitution, and chances are you’ll get an incoherent and unsupported answer. Ideally, yes, we should thoroughly understand the beliefs and opinions we repeat, but no one has the time to do the research in support of every held belief and opinion. Even the young John Connor couldn’t explain to the Terminator why it was wrong to kill people. “You just can’t” was all the answer he could muster.
Now, having said all that, if you’re going to promote your ideas in a public forum, you really should have at least some stock arguments at your disposal. Otherwise, you look like an idiot and help your cause lose credibility.
Why do you characterise the Occupy Wall Street protester as “pitiably clueless” without also including Tea Party members as pitiable clueless? Who can forget the Tea Party poster “Keep your government hands off my Medicare?”
Dude, seriously? My whole point is that we’re all uninformed about at least some of our beliefs and opinions. I myself would look pitiably clueless if publicly challenged about some of my policy preferences and notions of how the world should be. I haven’t given ample consideration to every idea I feel strongly about.
Which is why belief is not based on some sort of airtight intellectual satisfaction (if you’re looking for that, you’ll never find it; it’s an unworkable epistemology). It’s ultimately a choice, and usually a choice to trust an authority. That’s how Faith works in Catholic teaching, for example.
It’s ultimately a choice, and usually a choice to trust an authority.
In public policy, anyway, I think that is the problem. Citizens picking an authority and trusting it is why we are in the mess we are in. Doing so is an individualistic action.
Better would be a revival of democratic, intermediary associations. With that we have not simply a trust in an authority — one we know from TV or the internet, or whatever. But have a participatory process. Be it the Party clubhouse, the union hall, the Jaycees meeting, the Knights of Columbus lodge, the NAACP branch, or the planning committee for the American Carpatho-Rusyn Federal Credit Union annual golf outing, all give the opportunity to start with the same silly statements, but also the opportunity to refine them and have a continuing dialogue between followers and the leaders they choose.
While I am aware of the shortcomings and limitations of what I propose, I think it is vastly superior to the devotion to a talk radio host or charismatic speaker we see today. And it is certainly superior to the fake “intermediary organization” of an organization formed by five undisclosed wealthy benefactors who then produce focus group tested “issues ads” to influence public opinion.
I hope my friend Darwin will respond to this, as I’m curious as to his thoughts.
“It’s ultimately a choice, and usually a choice to trust an authority. That’s how Faith works in Catholic teaching, for example.”
Mr. Sinner does not understand apparently that his description is a Pandora’s Box. All Catholics are required to believe in Thomistic philosophy, so sayeth Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical. But go to any Catholic parish in the world, and describe the parameters of “privatio boni” without naming its source, one of the centerpieces of Thomas’s metaphysics, and you will get more than strange looks. They will likely tell you that it is some weird modern nonsense. But this is the cryptic and de facto occult philosophy of the Church, which only those who have gone through the grind of seminary understand. It facilitates odd and, to the laity, incomprehensible church governance. But they never realize that it is part of their own theology. Surprise, surprise, ya’ll. Catholicism is in an intellectual pickle, for sure.
I agree that one should be as knowledgeable as possible when writing on a particular subject but blogging can also be like a journey which can be a great learning experience as people are learning philosophy, theology, et al., and I think we should encourage growth in these subject areas and be willing to give advice to those less informed.
I agree. Most people understand very little about most areas of knowledge. The very best most people can do is become an expert in a very narrow area of a single branch of knowledge. And for the vast majority of us, that area is not economics or political science. But that’s one reason I’m actually skeptical of universal suffrage: Most people really have only a vague idea why one economic or social policy is better than another. Their votes are won over by shallow sloganeering, if not outright falsehood. Or alternatively, they are raised with a particular value set and thereby form an instinctive bias towards one political faction or another. And this, of course, goes for both sides.
The thing that bothers me about the Occupy crowd is not the ignorance of a lot of them per se, but the fact that a lot of them seem to want to overthrow the current system without having a clue whether whatever replaces it in reality would be better or far worse. This seems to show that they lack not just knowledge, but also prudence, i.e. they don’t even realize how ignorant they are, and yet they think they’re ready to tear down and rebuild. Like a weekend handyman tearing down a wall without knowing what it holds up, and not even knowing that he doesn’t know.