By Jim Heffernan
Our country is being torn apart by opposing ideas that sit upon uncertain foundations of fact and logic. Our collective consciousness is infected. I always have to wonder if I’m the sick one or is it you.
This new book by Andy Norman is a succinct and perceptive exploration of the topic
Andy Norman is a professor of philosophy and writes in the language. I kept my dictionary nearby as I read. One of the terms he uses often is “heuristic.” It threw me at first until the dictionary let me convert it to mechanic-speak for, “keep trying stuff until it works.”
Here’s an excerpt from page 94 that embodies a very central concept in the book:
The Way of the Culture Warrior
A culture warrior understands that ideas can be dangerous and works to combat the ones he or she deems evil. The aim is to defeat those ideas and make the world safe for beliefs that are good and true. Culture warriors typically locate the evil ideas in others and the good ones in members of their own tribe. We see this all the time in politics and where competing religious sects contend for dominance. It even surfaces in scholarly debates between rival schools of thought: between advocates of competing economic theories, for example. It’s easy to grow attached to an idea — the idea, say, that a free market is fundamentally just —and begin bending the facts to fit. Zealous culture warriors treat words as weapons of war: they use reasons to attack the ideas they take to be evil and defend the ideas they take to be good. They treat them, in other words, like sword and shield.
I think too many of us are “culture warriors”, despite the lack of success from our struggles. I also believe that too many of us are too willing to bend the facts to support our viewpoints.
The author describes his own shift from teaching in a “culture warrior” mode to a “middle way of inquiry” that had better results for him and his students. He makes a very good case for abandoning “culture warrior” roles and seeking a “middle way of inquiry”. proposes that we should try to abandon our roles as “culture warriors” and, instead explore a middle. Here’s an excerpt from page 104 that illustrates the point.
In the end, it was my willingness to learn from others that allowed others to learn from me. I let go of the pretense that I had all the answers, and my attitude and posture changed. Sensing this change, others opened up, and the answers came–not to me, but to us. This is the essence of the way of inquiry. It’s also essential for mental immune health, and the solution to our ideology problem.
Unfortunately, this “middle way of inquiry” is very seldom used with cable news and social media.
I think the best thing I got out of the book was the author’s comparison of our mental immunity being comparable to a plot in a community garden. Here’s an excerpt from page 122 that says it better than I can.
“Think of your mind as a garden. You could seed it indiscrimately, but that doesn’t seem wise. You could weed it indiscrimately, but that, too, seems unwise. Ideally, we try to seed our minds with good ideas and weed them of bad ones. All this is done with imperfect knowledge of which is which. Yet we know this much: if you neglect your mental garden, weeds will eventually overrun it. Now think of your mind as a plot in a much larger community garden. Neglect your plot, and the weeds run riot. When they germinate, weeds will spread into neighboring plots. Clearly, you have an interest in your neighbors weeding theirs; don’t they have an interest in you weeding yours. Good neighbors care enough to weed their mental gardens.
The point can also be put in immunological terms. Good neighbors care enough to keep their mind’s immune system in good working order. They screen out mind-parasites for their own sake but also for the sake of others. Cognitive immune health is a team sport.
The great coronavirus epidemic of 2020 is teaching the world a comparable lesson. Just yesterday, I came across a Facebook meme that said: “The coronavirus is an important reminder that health isn’t private. As a species, we live in herds. Everyone’s health relies on some extent on everyone else’s. Healthcare has to be public because health is public.”
The anonymous author of this meme was surely thinking of biological health, but the claim has got to be true of cognitive health as well. Shouldn’t the science of public health, then, be working to prevent outbreaks of bad ideas?”
I can’t say this book was an easy read (maybe if you’re a philosophy major it is an easier read). It is, however, a book that grabbed me. I am very glad to have read and I do believe I may read it once more to more fully absorb the contents. Go ahead and read this book with your dictionary handy. I think you’ll be glad you did.
421 pages,52 pages Acknowledgements and notes published May 18, 2021 – available at Cloud and Leaf Bookstore, Manzanita and Tillamook Public Library
