For Intro or...? (on "progress" in the modern world)
[These 2 pages don’t yet get into specifics about some of the examples of fuzzy thinking and bad logic etc. that inspired them. So . . . follow up.]
Discuss the pervasive and perennial problem of fuzzy thinking, flawed logic, sloppy use of terminology, all combined with political correctness and endlessly repeated environmental cliches and misinformation, speculation, and assumption passed along endlessly to gullible, naïve students by loudmouth mountebanks and well-meaning but uneducated “educators.” [of course we will delete the snide caricatures]
(Give a few examples at some point, like the cliché about the erstwhile hills of California covered by green clumps of perennial “bunchgrass”—or better, a few pages devoted to all of the major such misconceptions that have been foisted on us over the past few decades, AND giving some better-reasoned and better-documented alternative pictures of the ancient California wild landscape and its ecology.)
Despite our civilization’s “advanced” technological and scientific achievements, most of us are still as naïve as our neolithic forebears, no doubt considerably more so when it comes to our knowledge (or better, conceptions) about the “natural” world and how it works. At least most of our ancestors had the advantage of lifelong direct and intimate contact with “nature” from which an increasing majority of us are now as insulated as laying hens in battery pens. We even wear shoes indoors! Just consider how many layers separate us from such a basic thing as the ground we (should) walk on, Earth. Dirt. Soil. Terra firma. Even in the space of a generation or two, and even from babyhood. Most of the time we are either indoors or in a car, which means how many layers away from the ground . . . socks, shoes, carpet, then, in the case of the average house, a wood floor over a cement foundation, and in the case of a car, a layer or two of metal, then air, then pavement. In either case, a minimum of five or six layers of material between us and Mother Earth. Imagine putting on a space suit with four or five pairs of impermeable gloves to touch your earthly mother (as opposed to Mother Earth)—it doesn’t exactly bespeak any great intimacy—or love. A lot of parents now don’t even let their toddlers toddle around barefoot, even indoors, much less on the lawn, much less—god forbid—on the (gasp) ground. It makes you wonder how are kids going to develop a natural immunity to anything.
Nor is it any wonder that most of us Americans are growing up so ignorant about the “natural” world, nor so indifferent to it.
But . . . back to the subject of sloppy logic . . . Despite the great advances that a few among us have made in fields that require a finely developed logical faculty—computer technology, mathematics, physics etc., it should not be assumed that the rest of us are any better off or farther advanced in this capacity than, as I said before, our neolithic ancestors. Or than the poor Indians who, seeing how much technological and military power the white people had, falsely assumed that it was their Christian religion and its symbols in the form of bibles, crosses, etc. that gave them this mysterious power, and so were convinced that this new religion could bring them the power too.
We might smile at such naivete, but how far have we come ourselves? How many times have you heard people put the stress on the wrong word (a flaw of logic) in a sentence like “Jack makes five hundred dollars a month, but Jill makes five thousand.” Or how many times have you heard people say something like “all southerners are not stupid” when they mean “not all southerners are stupid”? This sort of thing is an example of the simplest kind of logic, and yet even this goes over the heads of many (most?) of us. (By the way, if you still don’t get it, the real meaning of the first version is “no southerners are stupid”.)
Nor can we necessarily rely on intuition or “common sense”. Advances in quantum mechanics in the last century have made this abundantly clear. Any number of demonstrable scientific truths are uncomfortably counterintuitive. Even such a simple example as fire can illustrate the point. Until quite recently, it was universally accepted that fire is a bad thing, unredeemably destructive, and no cost was too great to put out any wildfire no matter the cause or the place. A few short decades later, and we are spending public money to start fires, because in the intervening time somebody found out that under certain conditions, fires can have ecological benefits that far outweigh the immediate damage they do, something our “primitive” predecessors here in California and in many other parts of the world were well aware of—and put to good use—long before Smoky the Bear was conceived.
We still view other natural “disasters” by the same deceptive light of intuition that we used to view fire during the Smoky the Bear era—such phenomena as erosion, floods, earthquakes, and even grazing—pretty much all still seen as enemies of man and nature alike . . . simply because we haven’t yet thought it through adequately. And some of our cures can be worse than the disease; at least we can waste huge amounts of money and trouble fighting against nature. War on Drugs?
