Jason (the owner of the Democratic Hub) tells me that I joined this website exactly two years ago today on February 21, 2009.  Since then, I have made over 400 postings sharing/discussing/debating my views with others, none of whom I have ever met.  Some of you have disagreed with me, at least in part, and have provided an alternative perspective and insight for me to reflect upon.  In all of these discussions we have generally been civil with each other...those that haven't have been bumped off.

So today on this special occasion, which is also Presidents Day, I have chosen to write about a topic that I have mentioned in several postings and drives my passion: Critical Thinking, or more specifically, the absence of critical thinking in our political discourse, whether by our politicians, our media, our religious leaders, or just friends, colleagues, neighbors, family and relatives. I will not mock or demean those whose views differ from mine.  All I have ever asked is that your alternative views be based on real, and not imagined facts, and that you have some kind of a rational basis to back up those views.  I respect intellectually based discourse, even when we disagree.  And yes some of you have shifted or enhanced my opinions by sharing your experiences and providing more intellectual insights or facts that I hadn't considered....thank you Kaboom especially.

Continually challenging conventional wisdom and thought is what has made our Democratic society thrive ever since its founding in 1776 and the subsequent ratification of our Constitution in 1788.  But even with this wonderful, often cited document, our founding fathers recognized that blind adherence to the status quo would never be good enough. The 27 Amendments to our Constitution are a testimony to that fact.  The first ten Amendments embodying the Bill of Rights are well understood and accepted as the law of the land, but also noteworthy is Amendment 13 abolishing slavery, which wasn't passed until 77 years later in 1865, and Amendment 19 giving women the right to vote in 1920...132 years after our Constitution was ratified. Yes sometimes our democratic processes have moved painfully slow, but like the original Constitution each those amendments were made after considerable deliberate discourse by our elected leaders...and despite their many disagreements, they never lost sight of what the Constitution and its Amendments were all about: We the people.

Our civility and tolerance for each other has been tested many times since then...during the Civil War especially, but later in the streets of Mississippi and Alabama during the civil rights movement and on the campus of Kent State University during the Vietnam War. Today it is being tested in places like Arizona and Wisconsin and at Ground Zero in New York where intolerance and ignorance are at the forefront of the debate. And in the halls of Congress where agencies of tolerance and equality like Planned Parenthood are attacked by the ignorant and intolerant. In the past two years in this website we have shared our views on the underlying reasons for that intolerance...sometimes it's hate and loathing...but at times anger and fear...sometimes a "facts don't matter" pride in ignorance, in which intellectual debate is labeled "elitist." But also greed and a lack of empathy for our fellow citizens has too often been a subject of that discourse.

While I have often blamed ignorance as a contributing factor, the lack of a formal education, or a full knowledge of the facts, isn't really necessary to engage in that debate if one only engages in critical thinking. It is this absence of critical thinking that has polarized our discourse. The blind acceptance of the myths and "non-facts" put out daily by media pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck have poisoned the atmosphere of the debate and put our society on a dangerous course. 

I have used the term "fascism" to describe that course in several of my postings, and I assure you that I don't use that term loosely.  I have researched it carefully.  I have read history books by noted scholars that have addressed the causes and symptoms of fascism, and many of them are evident in our right wing rhetoric of today.  I won't get into those symptoms...you can read my other postings if you like.  But it is the absence of critical thinking that allows these people to control the pulpit in the first place. And my biggest worry for our society is how we have slowly shifted public opinion to the right...towards fascism. You can see it now being enacted in Madison, Wisconsin where a right wing Governor Walker is seeking to crush the public sector unions removing their right to collective bargaining. Governor Walker is only enacting out what he was "paid to do."  One of his "paymasters" during the election was Americans for Prosperity largely funded by the Koch brothers. What is disturbing to me is how many of the citizens of Wisconsin have blindly adhered to the "Walker Doctrine" which really isn't anything new.  Those same plays have been used again and again in history by totalitarian dictators seeking to control the thinking of the masses.

"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't think." -- Adolph Hitler

I recently finished Chris Hedges book, Empires of Illusion, The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, where he addresses head on the topic of critical thinking in our society.  He devoted his entire Chapter 3 to the Illusion of Wisdom focusing on academia. I admit to being taken aback and surprised when he wrote in this chapter about the "military-industrial-academic machine."  I had seen the term "military-industrial machine" used time and time again, but this was the first time I had seen the term "academic" attached to it.  Hedges is critical of academia for not promoting more critical thinking in our institutions of higher learning, but especially our elitist universities like Harvard, Yale and Berkeley for becoming too "corporatist" in their thinking as they solicit corporate funds for research. 

For example, Berkeley recently negotiated a deal with British Petroleum for $500 million that buys BP access to the university's research and technological capacity built on decades of public investment.  BP will receive intellectual property rights, which it can profit from, but more importantly it can direct and control the focus of much of that research.

Hedges also notes that students at these universities take internships at corporations where they "learn to placate and please authority, never to challenge it.  By the time they graduate, they are superbly conditioned for the drudgery of moving large sums of money around electronically or negotiating huge corporate contracts."

More and more absent from the curriculum is the arts and humanities.  Students pursue business degrees and in the process ignore courses that might broaden their thinking outside of their narrow disciplines.  Republicans in Congress for their part are proposing to gut funding for the Endowment of the Arts, yet it is precisely these courses in humanities and the arts that stimulate critical thinking. 

"At Boeing, innovation is our lifeblood. The arts inspire innovation by leading us to open our minds and think in new ways about our lives - including the work we do, the way we work, and the customers we serve." -- W. James McNerney, Jr., Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer, The Boeing Company.

The arts and humanities teaches us morality ,and broadens our horizons to think about how our work impacts society in general and not just the bottom line. I'll quote directly from Hedges, page 103:

"For Socrates, all virtues were forms of knowledge.  To train someone to manage an account for Goldman Sachs is to educate him or her in a skill. To train them to debate stoic, existential, theological and humanist ways of grappling with reality is to educate them in values and morals. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death. Morality is a product of a civilization, but the elites know little about these traditions.  They are products of a moral void."

Hedges theme throughout his book is reality versus illusion, and he touches all aspects of our society and not just academia.  His first chapter covers the illusion of literacy, but others cover love, happiness and finally "The Illusion of America,"  in which he leads off with the words, "I USED TO LIVE in a country called America." The bolding is his, but I will extract some lines from the concluding paragraph of his book that resonated with me:

"Our culture of illusion is, at its core, a culture of death. It will die and leave little of value behind.  It was Sparta that celebrated raw militarism, discipline, obedience, and power, but it was Athenian art and philosophy that echoed down the ages to enlighten new worlds, including our own. Hope exists. It will always exist. It will not come through nation-states, but it will prevail, even if we as distinct individuals and civilizations vanish. The power of love is greater than the power of death.  It cannot be controlled.  It is about sacrifice for the other - something nearly every parent understands - rather than exploitation....love constantly rises up to remind a wayward society of what is real and what is illusion.  Love will endure, even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains."

Thank you Chris Hedges for your thoughtful words.  I recommend everyone read his book and think critically about the events that are dictating our heated discourse today.  On this Presidents Day, lets reflect on the words of wisdom by our forefathers like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln rather than the vitriol that seems at times to consume us today. Let the debate continue...let's think critically.

Frank K.