Thinking

CARL SAGAN once wrote, I believe it was in his seminal book "The Demon Haunted World" that there is no shortage of intelligence in the United States or the world, in fact, there is a glorious abundance of perfecly intelligent people, but, what is lacking, is education. The book is an interesting study of intellectual history, the history of ideas and attitudes, about science, reality, and so forth. The point that Sagan makes is well founded. If you get out and around, you find that you often encounter people, many people, who seem to be very intelligent, their thought proceses seem to proceed rapidly,energetically, and vigorously, but, they make stupid comments, and harbor many patently, demonstrably false beliefs and assumptions, assumptions which , for their own benefit, should be corrected. Some of the most glaring examples of this are people who refuse to acknowledge climate change, people whow refuse to accept the fact of human evolution by natural selection, people to refuse to take vaccines...the list can become long. The internet seems to be a conduit and indeed amplifier for conspiracy theory nonsense, the sort of which the world has gotten, it seems, quite full. Freedom of thought and freedom of belief have gotten a twisted meaning, meaning that all beliefs are created equal, that no matter what you believe, no matter how unusual, how suspicious your beliefs and opinions are, you are entitled to believe it, entitled to your own separate, unverifiable reality, and nobody has the right toquetion or dissuade you. That's not intellectual freedom; that's intellectual recklessness, intellectual irresponsibility, abuse of the intellect. Not all opinions and beliefs are created equal, we merely have an equal right to believe them, true or false. But that does not mean that we should believe falsehood. But at least people who promulgate nonsense are promulgating something, at least they are thinking...of a sort....about something. What good is intellect, what good is intelligence, without thought? We improve our ability to think intelligently through education, which is training of the mind. Most people do not need more intelligence,; they need to use what they have. Like mother said: "use your head". The climate change issue is the perfect example. In order to really understand climate change, climate change caused by human beings who have been pumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere for decades, you have to do some thinking, and you have to know and understand a couple of things about nature, science, chemistry. Basically, the same is true of the evolution of species. Also, in both these cases, you must be willing to look around, examine the world a litle bit, and intelligently, accurately evaluate what you see. This means noticing such things as crazier, different weather patterns over time, cattle breeding, hybrid corn, things like that. And it measn thinking about them, figuring out what they all mean about reality. When people say things like "Did humans cause the last ice age too"?, or "God controls the climate",or, "the climate always is changing", or "If people evolved from monkeys, there wouldn't be any monkeys"..the problem is, they simply are not doing enough thinking. They are doing some, but not nearly enough. People get comfortable, content, and lazy, about proper exercise, diet, work, education, thought - you name it, we can overlook it. Then, we experience the consequences of our own laziness.