Think You Know?

Madame M:

Can we trust ourselves?  A question that not enough ask.  In fact, to be rock sure, unexaminingly sure, is instead the basis of much of the populace of this fractured and defensive society.  Add to that the problems global-wide with all this:

“Will humans the world over succumb to growing levels of ennui, anomie, and alienation (from each other and their governments)?  Will they become more atomized, distrustful, and uncivil? Will their expectations of government continue to rise dramatically, and will governments show themselves increasingly ill-equipped to fulfill these heightened expectations? Will there be growing levels of civic indifference, disengagement, and strategic illiteracy? And will humans and governments maintain their preternatural aversion to risk and resistance to change? The answer to all of these questions will assuredly be yes.”  From “Civil-Military Relations: The Postmodern Democratic Challenge,” Gregory D. Foster, World Affairs; Winter 2005; 167, 3; Research Library, pg. 92.

We need citizens and humans to think, think, think, and do that broadly, widely, and through to second and third order effects.  And we have been deficient in that and need to get dramatically better.  We keep choosing “leaders” who are our “representatives” who do not display these.  What does that say about us?  And if it is “the system” of choosing that is the problem, what does that say about us that we don’t move to change THAT?

We have seen a “grand evolution of war that has taken us from a prolonged historical period of ‘hot war,’ dating to antiquity, in which the actual use of force was the central element of statecraft.  From there, we moved to a highly compressed period of ‘cold war,’ in which two overmuscled behemoths, more alike than not, sought the nonuse of force through the untethered accretion of military might and tacit threatmaking. Currently, we find ourselves in a period of ‘new war,’ where nonmilitary instruments of power and nontraditional uses of the military promise the best results abroad, even if intellectually calcified decisionmakers remain largely ignorant of the efficacy of such measures.” Also from page 92 of Foster’s piece.

The above addresses “war,” but our “wars” on many “things” have been afflicted with the same lack of clear thinking.  We have muddled along, in selfishness, denial of reality, and evasion of responsibility, from addressing the central threatening issues and foreseeable catastrophes of our time.  Only to find those problems all the worse the next time we (briefly) look at them.  We cleave to unthinking ideologies, and the continued legacies of a past that no longer exists in the present, and then fight over ill thought out pseudo-solutions that either are doomed to fail, or are merely selfish deceptions and evasions designed to serve plutocratic masters or other parochial interests.

Many say we need to get smarter, and that’s true.  But we far more need to get wiser.  Or we perish.

My father once told me: “Do not fear the intelligent, the intellectuals.  At least they think.  Fear the near-intelligent—those who think they think.”

My father saw the seeds of decay—and the warning signs—in this society before most could even foresee the possibilities.  And yet he questioned his own thinking frequently, and rarely felt absolutely confident in it.  At the time, I thought it merely because he felt he didn’t have an advanced education.  Now I recognize it as the discerning wisdom of a man who knew better than to be unthinkingly sure of anything concerning the outcomes of his own thinking.