Maggie's Farm

As a graduate of Columbia University, back in 1951 in the days when it had a genuine core curriculum, I'm grateful now for the courses which at the time I was resentful of having to take. My own focus was always liberal arts and English Lit, because even then I planned to become someone who wrote words for money. But looking back, I am grateful for the science courses I had to take, most particularly Biology, and Logic and Semantics -- Logic, because at that point in time I was facing the future in a much more free-floating emotional way, and Logic forced me to read and reason more carefully so that what I wrote would be founded upon fact. Semantics was another valuable course, so valuable, as a matter of fact, that in my 30s I took a night course at the University of Wisconsin to further expand my understanding of it. There is no better way to learn quickly how your fellow humans think than to tackle a logical problem with a team of strangers. In an odd way, you get to know these folks better in a few hours than you know friends you've been acquainted with for years. And you can generalize from working with this team how opponents or allies think, how they can gloss over facts they don't want to accept, how they can jump to conclusions without sufficient evidence. Most folks are like Lewis Carroll's White Queen [or Red Queen, I dis-remember] who said "a word means what I want it to mean," and they feel the same way about facts. That's where brilliant commentators like Charles Krauthammer can use logic to show how often people tangle up themselves in wishful thinking, failing to reach a reasonable conclusion from a set of assumptions.

Many of today's educators [and journalists] don't want to be troubled with the 'scut-work' of fact-finding and fact-relating before they reach a conclusion. Journalists today seem focused on following agendas rather than following facts objectively. There is a certain studied disrespect of the readers in this approach. It's as if they are saying, "don't bother trying to reach a conclusion about this story. We'll tell you what it all means." This is off-putting, to say the least.

I seem to have gotten off-topic. Oh well. It's a rant, and I'm tired.

Marianne