Facts, truth, and changing one’s mind
Fred Barnes seems to be channeling neo-neocon in his latest Weekly Standard article.
Towards the end of his piece describing Iraq’s recent progress towards reaching those benchmarks we used to hear so much about, Barnes asks some of the same questions I do in my post on the same subject—why are the Democrats so silent in the face of these new facts on the ground? Then Barnes adds:
Facts are stubborn,” Hillary Clinton said last month, “and I know it’s sometimes hard to keep track of facts. But facts matter.” Indeed they do. But with Democrats, the warning of former Harvard dean Henry Rosovsky may apply. “Never underestimate the difficulty,” he said, “of changing false beliefs by facts.”
It seems that Rosovsky may be channeling me as well—“a mind is a difficult thing to change” and all that.
Hillary makes a good point; it can be hard to keep track of facts. You have to be motivated and you need to make sure your sources are varied enough so that the MSM filter isn’t operating to block important facts. Then you must retain enough critical thinking to objectively evaluate what you are reading and to reject facts that seem unsupported by proper sourcing and inclined to rumor.
That’s a very tall order, and we all probably err in attempting it. But attempt it we must if we are ever to be well-informed.
And then, of course, there’s the last step, the most difficult of all: if enough new and persuasive facts are assimilated, we need to be open-minded enough to change our point of view.
There’s an old saying that illustrates the arduousness of this process, and the resistance to it, “Never let facts get in the way of a good argument.” There’s yet another one that elevates ignorance of facts to the level of something of which to be proud: “Facts are the enemy of truth.”
Where did this latter saying originate? Seems to have been the 1965 musical “Man of La Mancha,” an old warhorse that tells the story of the idealist Don Quixote. Librettist Wasserman put those words into the Don’s mouth; as far as I can tell they do not appear in the Cervantes original.
It’s probably no accident the sentence appeared in the 60s, origin of so many instances of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. And it’s also no accident it was placed in the mouth of a fictional character so out of touch with reality as to be insane, and yet the quintessential idealist. In the novel, Quixote’s insanely inflated idealism leads to much trouble. Without the steadying realism—and attention to facts—of his squire Sancho Panza he would not have lasted even as long as he does.
Critics of the Iraq war and reconstruction efforts have sometimes considered those who believed in the possibility of success there to be investing in some sort of “Impossible Dream” themselves. When evidence comes that the quest may not be so very impossible after all, those critics find it hard to believe or accept. It can indeed be difficult to draw the line between reality and fantasy when striving for a goal that is difficult rather than actually impossible, but emerging facts cannot and should not be ignored in distinguishing between the two.
[NOTE: And speaking of impossible dreams, when I went back and actually looked at the lyrics to that old chestnut from “Man of La Mancha,” I found that it takes little imagination to see some the words as an anthem for the jihadists, especially the phrases “to fight the unbeatable foe,” and “to be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause.”]
I think Iraq will have to turn into Switzerland before some of these people will change their minds.
Man of La Mancha does have a certain adolescent appeal not found in Don Quixote. We chose “The Impossible Dream” as our graduation theme song in 8th grade, I recall. There is rather an American cult of Follow Your Dream, as if that in itself were a noble act, regardless of the content of said dream, or the cost to yourself and others of getting there. Not to mention dreams that are never going to be fulfilled, leading to years of misery by those who won’t accept that: athletes and entertainers of merely average talent, spouses of sociopaths…
neo,
I wonder if … the constant necessity of making choices based on imperfect information … is partly why it is difficult to “change false belief by facts”?
Could the someone have an instinctive expectation that more facts exist to back their belief, if only they could get to those facts?
Could a politically correct dulling of our logic muscle: of our skill at constantly asking ourselves “true or false?”, “right or wrong?”, contribute to an over-reliance on our instincts?
I think Iraq will have to turn into Switzerland before some of these people will change their minds.
You mean we have to teach them to yodel?
The problem is that too many people think that picketing the local USMC recruiting office is “marching into hell.” If they only knew what the Marines know, and what each new generation of Marines learns, they would change their minds. Yes, there are a few veterans of Korea, Vietnam, and even WWII among the moonbats, but somehow they forget that the price must be paid again and again.
Bug:
Oh yes, and they will have to wear those funny little pants too.
Many people place themselves into a political category which they cannot deviate from even if they know the reasoning behind a certain policy is wrong. How can a liberal, for example, suddenly praise American policy in front of his peers? Impossible for many. Unfortunately it usually leads to complete hypocritical behaviour and reasoning.
Egad…
“Follow your dream”?!??
“Who knows what visions appear during the sleep of Reason?”
“Facts are the enemy of truth.” This was the motto of Dan Rather and CBS News when they tried to foist the alleged Texas Air Natl Guard memos on the public, no, when they attempted to elide over the inconvenient fact of forged memos in order to damage GWB.
And the quote Charlie above refers to I think is this:
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/goya/goya_sleep_of_reason.jpg.html
Zhombre:
You are correct…I looked it up in Bartlett’s.
Us old folks still use Bartlett rather than Google and its ilk.
Time Marches On, though
Assistant Village Idiot Says:
February 19th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
“Not to mention dreams that are never going to be fulfilled, leading to years of misery by those who won’t accept that”
Now that people are living longer (70-80 easy) I’m guessing they’ll blow their 20s doing that kind of stuff and grow up by 30….
From a poster at Despair, Inc.:
Get back to work. You aren’t being paid to believe in the power of your dreams.
Neo,
Man of La Mancha was a horrendous — though, alas, hardly unique — bastardization of a great work. If all anyone remembers from Cervantes’ classic is a deluded dreamer “tilting at windmills” they’re sadly missing a brilliant, complex, and unbelievably rich story — of which “impossible dreams” play a minor and largely metaphorical role.
As for some implication that the book itself might give succor to jihadists, consider the following self-referencial quote:
“If there is any objection to be made about the truthfulness of the history, it can only be that its author was an Arab, and it’s a well-known feature of Arabs that they’re all liars; but since they’re such enemies of ours, it’s to be supposed that he fell short of the truth rather than exaggerating it.”
‘Don Quixote’, Part 1, Chapter 9
(… and check out those semicolons — not to mention those uses of “its” and “it’s”!)
Charlie, I’m one of the old folks too and have a copy of Bartlett’s on my shelf. But I’ve adapted to Google. And one thing about Cervantes I like to point out to the folks who are gaga over alternative energy sources like windmills, is that Don Quixote didn’t tilt at internal combustion engines, which is to say wind power was a great technical innovation during the Middle Ages and some current alleged progressive thinking about energy is really quite reactionary.
Been a while since I read the novel, but I definitely remember it as a satire. Seems like the doddering old DQ got filtered through the Romantic age and emerged as an individualistic hero.
How about this cliche?
“My mind is already made up, don’t bother me with the facts”
Number one, thank you for correctly attributing the quote to Dale Wasswerman and not Cervantes. Two, for an additional perspective on ‘The Impossible Dream’, see the quote from Wasserman in . Three, I don’t agree 100% with the facts/enemy proposition; I say rather that facts and truth are not the same thing. Truth is made up of facts, just as a cake is made from eggs, flour, sugar, etc. If you have the raw ingredients, that doesn’t mean you have truth. Just a cake needs preparation and portion and baking, truth takes the ingredients of facts and applies context, experience, knowledge, understanding, and more to formulate truth. Maybe I’ll blog about that someday.