CSotD: Thomas Aquinas meets the Buddha

Deflocked comments on something or other. I'm taking a break this weekend; you figure it out.

Today's strip fits in with a stupid, pointless argument I got into on Facebook the other day. Facebook isn't supposed to be for arguing, but there are a few folks there who set up their pages more like Usenet, complete with True Believers and out-and-out trolls.

So the topic was Voter ID laws, with my contention being that it's kind of ironic for people who claim to want smaller government and less spending to be proposing new laws and a new bureaucracy in order to solve a problem they can't prove even exists.

Challenged to produce an example of actual, in-person voter fraud, the head antagonist reeled off a list of links that proved to be supposition and anecdotes, together with an example of absentee ballot fraud. And then he defended it as "proof" against people who pointed out that he had failed to come up with a single concrete example of actual, in-person voter fraud.

Which, as too often happens, raised the question, "Is he deliberately lying, or is he actually that stupid?" or, to put it in more classical terms, "Is he a knave or a fool?"

But I honestly think he didn't see that he hadn't made his point, and not because he is "stupid" but simply because he doesn't get it. Like Mamet in today's cartoon, he lets a perfectly good brain sit idle.

Which brings to mind an intellectual cliche that graduates of halfway-decent liberal arts colleges encounter freshman year, when the professor holds out a book or his pencil or a piece of chalk, and asks "If I let this go, will it fall?" and then challenges them to argue their case without resorting to the claim that prior experience is a definitive predictor of future events.

And all the freshmen have their minds blown. And, if that didn't do it, a little Rousseau or a trip to Plato's cave will do the job.

Now, I tend to side with Samuel Johnson — and I should add here that, while Johnson is fun to quote, it seems that, on the whole, like Mencken and some other people who are fun to quote, he was kind of an asshole, but we'll get to that in a minute — who, when someone said that Bishop Berkeley's theory that you couldn't prove the existence of reality was irrefutable, said, "I refute him thus!" and kicked a large stone, hurting his foot in the process, but making his point.

We weren't being assigned all that Aristotle to see how much of it we'd plow through before we realized he was full of balloon-juice, but the point of our curriculum was not to get us to regurgitate all this stuff on demand, either.

It was to teach us to step outside our comfortable frames of reference — Roman Catholicism, being an American, living in the 20th century, living in an industrialized country, being white, being male — and learn to reason.

Kicking the stone is reason, as long as you aren't simply doing it to deny a theory you haven't bothered to think through or in order to take a superior, contrarian pose. (See biographical note on Johnson, above, and related video clip, below)

So, how do you "prove" that the book/pen/chalk will fall if released? 

You don't.

It's the western equivalent of a koan. Thomas Aquinas meets the Buddha.

But here's where today's Deflocked fits in: Most people's brains have an awful lot of untapped potential.

Okay, maybe not as much as in this strip. 

But you don't have to be a genius to be able to step outside your comfort zone. 

You just need to be willing to give up the easy answers, including  "everybody knows that" and "that's the way it's always been," as well as (he said, kicking a stone) "nothing can be proven."

You  have to walk away from the childish black/white position that, if this position is wrong, then that opposing position must be right. Maybe they're both wrong. Maybe each contains an element of truth. 

And you have to do that without simply adopting the laziest, most transparent crutch of the faux-genius, "they're all liars/corrupt/incompetent/wrong."

That's not it, either. Come on — You can do better.

But you won't, unless you're willing to put aside your assumptions, take each idea apart and examine it critically.

You don't need Aristotle to teach you how to do that. 

When the boys were little, I used to force them to think by pretending not to know the way home, and then taking their instructions literally. If they said "Turn here," I'd pull into someone's driveway, and, amid a great deal of giggling, they learned to say, "When you get to the corner, turn right."

It's not difficult to learn to think, but, at some point, you have to be challenged, because, otherwise, well, you'll just sit there watching "The Real Housewives of Hoboken."

 

'Oh, don't go on like that!' cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair. 'Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you've come to-day. Consider what o'clock it is. Consider anything, only don't cry!'

Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. 'Can you keep from crying by considering things?' she asked.

'That's the way it's done,' the Queen said with great decision: 'nobody can do two things at once, you know. Let's consider your age to begin with — how old are you?'

'I'm seven and a half, exactly.'

'You needn't say "exactly",' the Queen remarked. 'I can believe it without that. Now I'll give you something to believe. I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day.'

'I can't believe that!' said Alice.

'Can't you?' the Queen said in a pitying tone. 'Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.'

Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said 'one can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."