The loss of analytic thought

The following quote by Nobel Prize winning scientist, Peter Medawar, speaks ominously to this society at this time.

"The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought."

As a society, we seem to have substituted the boisterous babbling of bewildering balderdash and the relentless ranting of redundant rubbish for clear, analytic discussions.

As Medawar points out, we have many people who are educated and sophisticated in their tastes. However, something has been neglected in their education or in their personal intellectual quest. One thing that seems to be lost is the reflective gap between some event and the assessment of it.

For example, the recent protests in Egypt were immediately proclaimed by some as a great and noble revolution, leading to a new era of democratic government. Others immediately denounced it as an Islamist take over. At this writing, it is too early to tell, but it could end up as either of those, the rise of a new autocrat, a complete break down of government or perhaps some other alternative. The point being, these folks didn't take a moment to think it through before pontificating on the subject.

Take our current political climate. If you were to plot a graph with the political far right on one end and the far left on the other end of the X axis, and then plotted the amount of analytic thinking on the Y axis, once the American voters were each placed in the appropriate spot, I strongly suspect that we would end up with a bell curve, that is, as you move out to the extremes, the number of analytic thinkers drops off to nearly zip.

Perhaps we've learned to harness our thinking into 140 character tweets, or perhaps our educational system is focused only on preparing students to do something, rather than to think deeply about something. Whatever the case, we are inundated with the sound of many intelligent loose cannons.