One more example.
Take the Vietnam War. In the stern retrospective glare of history, most people, including the secretary of defense at the time, Robert McNamara, admit the Vietnam War was a mistake. How did America make that mistake? How did the war happen?
Easy.
First, President Johnson deceived himself that Vietnam was important. He felt that if Vietnam became communist, all of southeast Asia would become communist, too. This theory was called the domino effect. The idea was that countries were like dominoes standing on end in a row in metastable equilibrium. Once one domino is pushed over, the others fall over, too. (We will discuss this error of thinking in chap. 4.) Briefly stated, the domino theory is an error in thinking because countries are not dominoes. Even if they were dominoes, they do not stand on end. They certainly are not metastable. Countries, strictly speaking, never fall anywhere because they have nowhere to fall. Their governments might fall, but the country itself remains where it always was. Furthermore, when one country’s government falls, or changes, other countries around it don’t necessarily change. And if those surrounding countries do change, they don’t necessarily change in the same direction. If they did, we would have had one world government long ago.
The Vietnam War was predicated on false reasoning.
p. 50 This is important. I am about to demonstrate how an exercise in correct thinking could have prevented thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of wasted money that occurred during the Vietnam War.
Once President Johnson had deceived himself about Vietnam, he then deceived the media, which then deceived the public. That was the real domino effect. Once the war got started, it seemed like nothing could stop it. Johnson kept pushing the buttons harder and harder while the American military machine overheated. In desperation, we dumped billions of gallons of Agent Orange into the rice paddies. We bombed the straw-hat markets to smithereens. Sixteen million Vietnamese died. Who cared? They were Asians. What mattered were the 58,000 Americans who died. They were not Asians. They were us.
President Johnson said, in effect, that if we did not go to war, Vietnam would become communist. The error was an overgeneralization about the future. If he had said that if we didn’t go to war, Vietnam might become communist or it might not, then he would have been within the realm of possibility and not overgeneralizing with certainty about the contingent future. That position would have left a lot of room for discussion and debate about what to do. It might have led to some reasonable discussion about the advisability of committing all those men, all that material, and all that national wealth to a contingent event in the future that might or might not happen. The defect in reasoning was even more egregious, for President Johnson believed that if Vietnam became communist, then so would Cambodia, and after that, all of southeast Asia, and then the world. The ideas, by themselves, are not wrong. But the absolute certainty with which they were proposed implies a knowledge of future events that just ain’t possible.
Real soldiers who served during the Vietnam War (myself included) are often speechless when asked about their experience. What they saw and what they went through is not only beyond imagination but also beyond description. Some movies like We Were Soldiers come close to showing in vivid detail why no nation should go to war except for very good reasons. An error in thinking like the domino theory is not a good reason.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the p. 51 genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. . . . This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower[4]
Eisenhower is right. War has a gigantic negative side. That is the harsh reality of war. And thus did the harsh realities of war come crashing down on our heads in Vietnam, crashing down on us. Thus did we pay the price for our error in thinking, in our failure to understand the reality situation. In the harsh stern retrospective glare of history, we saw that we lost the war. Furthermore, in the harsh glare of history we saw that after Vietnam fell, southeast Asia stayed pretty much the same. The domino theory proved wrong. In fact, after the war was over, not even Vietnam became communist—not entirely. Vietnam is now a trading partner of America and maintains a mixed economy, as do most countries of the world.
Principle: The future is contingent, not determined. Therefore, the future cannot be predicted. It certainly cannot be predicted accurately.
From which follows:
Lesson: Suspect anyone’s absolute prediction of a future event. Chances are the prediction is wrong.
It is true that certain things like the next eclipse of the sun or where the planet Mercury will be on August 12, 2026, at 4 PM, can be predicted with relative accuracy. The gravity of the moon and the sun affect large water systems, causing the water’s surface to rise and fall (tide) and water to flow in and out (tidal current). Since the moon and sun cause tide and tidal current, their effect on any place at any time can be predicted. The tide tables and the tidal current tables, published each year, predict tide and tidal current movement, day by day. Such information, while generally accurate, is sometimes way off, as most mariners know. Even tide tables can be wrong either because of wind or adverse local weather or other factors as yet poorly understood. If we can’t predict even the tides, how can we be certain that if one country goes communist all of its neighbors will go communist, too? How can we be sure p. 52 that lowering interest rates will revive the economy? How can we be sure that free world trade will result in general prosperity? How can we be sure? By now, you should realize the stark truth: We can’t!
A good general rule is that the more accurately a thing can be predicted, the less human interest there is in the prediction or in the thing predicted. About planetary positions and tides, few people really care. The important human problems, our uncertain precarious existence, concern us more. I want to know what the Dow Jones average will be on that date, whether EMC or Amgen will be the better investment or whether my granddaughter Callie will be married, and so on. I want to know the important things, and unfortunately, it is those things that can’t be known precisely. The future’s the future still. This is today.
A more reasonable, and therefore more believable, statement that President Bush could have made might have gone like this: “We will make a gigantic effort to capture or kill bin Laden, but we can’t predict when or if we will be successful.”
Such a statement may play poorly on TV and in the popular press. It sounds wishy-washy and tentative. But it happens to be closer to the truth and I believe closer to what President Bush actually meant when he spoke.
Principle: Blanket assurances about the future, or, for that matter, blanket assurances about anything, are likely to be wrong.
From which follows:
Lesson: Don’t believe any blanket assurance. Don’t act on any blanket assurance.
By the by, much confusion arises because people fail to distinguish between “all” and “some.” If someone tells me that nobody likes Al Gore, I can prove that wrong by saying, “I like him and I am somebody.”
Failure to qualify the term nobody was the reason that the statement was so easily refuted. Many statements, especially in advertising, imply “all” when they mean only “some.” The slogan (which was seen throughout Ireland the last time I was there) “Guinness is good for you” suggests that this dark stout porter beer is always good for you. That statement is untrue if you are trying to lose weight, if it has gone p. 53 bad, or if you have already had seven pints and are about to drive. Guinness can’t be good for you if you fuel your automobile with it or apply it as a hair tonic.
Proverbs, too, are usually half-truths that require qualification. “Slow and steady wins the race” is in some circumst
ances excellent advice but would not work so well for Olympic athletes attempting to break the world record in the sixty-meter dash. This does not preclude well-reasoned proverbs that remain correct at all times. For instance, Patten’s Law of Novel Writing states that novels that never get started never get finished. This is axiomatically true at all times because something must be started to get finished. Or how about Euclid’s axiom: Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. No question about it. If one thing is equal to a second, and a third thing is equal to the second, then all three are equal to each other. In the realm of novel-writing advice, of logic, and of geometry, some things can be absolutely true. That is the reason educators have such an affection for such disciplines. That is the reason such disciplines are overemphasized in the education of our youth. Geometry and mathematics have the additional educational advantage that the problems on the tests have definite and usually single (and simple) answers, giving children the illusion that a similar situation might pertain to their lives.
Think back to your school days. What did curiosity do to the cat? What happened to the kid, like Question Quiggley in Angela’s Ashes, who was always asking questions? Did you ever hear the teacher say, “We don’t have time for all these questions? We have to get through the lesson plan?” Socrates was always asking questions. For his trouble he was forced to drink hemlock.
I don’t know about you, but I started my school career with an almost insatiable curiosity. I soon learned that the answers were considered more important, much more important, than the questions. I soon learned that the educational system doesn’t like ambiguity, nor does it support question-asking skills. Rather, the skill that is rewarded is getting the “right answer,” which, regrettably, is usually the answer held by the teacher who was, regrettably, usually operating under the mistaken belief that there was in fact a correct answer, one right answer, only one right answer.
The authority-pleasing, question-suppressing, rule-following approach will serve you well in getting through grammar school, high school, college, and professional or graduate school. No question about p. 54 it—follow the dogma works. The same attitude will provide society with fine assembly line workers and bureaucrats, but will it do much to prepare you for the harsh realities of life? Will it do much good to prepare our society for the future?
A closely related difficulty is to think that there is only one cause or only one solution of two possible solutions to a problem. This error in thinking, which I consider part of the overgeneralization error (because it is an overgeneralization), needs a name. Stephen Jay Gould in his book The Mismeasure of Man calls this error dichotomization. That’s a mouthful to denote our inclination to parse complex and continuous reality into divisions by two (smart and stupid, black and white, good and bad, etc.). We know what he means. But let’s help ourselves by calling this error that of black-and-white thinking.
Principle: Black-and-white thinking is an error because it simplifies a complex idea or situation.
From which follows:
Lesson: Avoid black-and-white thinking.
If people tell you there are only two courses of action or only two possible solutions to a complex problem, don’t believe it. If they tell you there is only one course of action, that is wrong for sure. Black-and-white thinking is usually wrong. Black-and-white thinking prevents us from viewing the complexity of a situation and therefore hurts our ability to arrive at alternative solutions.
The Nazis (some Nazis anyway, not all) thought that if they killed the Jews, Germany’s troubles would be over. They thought the Jews were responsible for all Germany’s problems. Just on the surface, a thinking person would know that that was absolutely impossible. There is no way on earth that all the Jews or any other racial or religious or political group could be responsible for all the problems of Germany or of the world or of anyplace. The Jews or other groups might be responsible for some of the problems, some of the time, but that would have to be proven with evidence involving the specific problems and the specific cases. Evidence, incidentally, is, by definition, any sign that points to the truth. There are many kinds of evidence, but the best kind is physical, which we observe ourselves. That way we know for sure that the p. 55 evidence is real. As there was no evidence that the Jews were responsible for all Germany’s problems, that idea is wrong. Furthermore, the idea is an overgeneralization about the Jews because it assumes that each Jew is exactly like every other Jew. That can’t be true. Jews are individuals, as are we all.
Is the gold standard necessary for America’s prosperity? Believe it or not, many people thought that America’s prosperity depended on the gold standard. Some, despite the evidence to the contrary, still think it does. Others think unemployment would be abolished if welfare were abolished, if jobs were created by the government, if everyone were given short shifts, or if the government made everyone who needed a job work on the road. And so forth.
Juvenile delinquency? No problem. It’s caused by lack of religious training. Or does delinquency boil down to our being soft with children? What the kids need these days is a good thrashing. “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” What does that actually mean? Does it mean we should spare the rod and spoil the child, or does it mean we shouldn’t spare the rod because if we do spare the rod we will spoil the child? What evidence supports what position? Which is correct? Can the statement remain correct for all children under all circumstances?
You get the point.
Sweeping generalizations such as these either/or statements are seductive because they often contain some truth but never the whole truth, for the whole truth requires consideration of the facts and evidence and quite some thinking about complex issues, not thinking about a simplified version of a few of them, or part of them.
Principle: The key to correct evaluation of complex issues and problems is analysis of evidence.
What’s the evidence? Three little words and a question mark that weigh several tons. What’s the evidence? Always say that to yourself (if you want to be reasonable) whenever you hear a quick solution to any general problem. What’s the evidence that anything is true? How do we know that for sure? Questions like that usually expose the complexity of the problem and the simplistic nature of the proposed solution. The questions help us understand the need for more thinking and more understanding of the problems before we take action that may be helpful or avoid taking action that may not be helpful.
p. 56 For instance, concerning the spared rod and spoiled child problem. Some children are spoiled. I have a granddaughter who is, but I love her anyway. Callie Patten is spoiled. So what? There is little evidence to suggest that spoiled children are more likely to commit crimes than those children who are neglected. Spoiled children often feel loved and happy and may grow up to have an entirely happy life. Look at me.
In fact, neglected children may cause more trouble when they become adults than do the spoiled. But that is neither here nor there because we are not interested in the fact per se, but in the reasoning behind the statements from which we can take a step further.
There may be children who respond to no appeal but fear, and the bully, who is at heart a coward, may well benefit from a dose of his own medicine. But to argue that indiscriminate beating would always be effective ignores that some children (boys especially) are quite unmoved by beating, and others are in fact encouraged or trained by it to do the same.
The point is that no punishment can possibly be suitable for all situations and all miscreants. Juvenile delinquency takes many forms and has as many complex causes as Mott’s has applesauce. The most that anyone could say is that using the rod might be suitable in some cases. Limited statements like that, however, lack appeal, especially to dogmatists, who think that one must have courage of conviction, even where the evidence warrants nothing but skepticism.
Sometimes overgeneralization is used as a trick to win an argument.
What may happen is that your statement might be simplified
and extended by the other side so that it becomes stupid or untenable. Such extended and simplified arguments, as you know, are much easier to refute.
Do you really think that Hitler can be dismissed as a cruel, oppressive, and tyrannical figure, unredeemed by a single compensating virtue, whereas Churchill and Roosevelt were paragons of excellence? Human beings are too diverse and complex in fact to fit into such rigid categories. It defies experience to insist that anybody is entirely without fault or entirely without merit. Furthermore, no person in this wide world is entirely consistent. The murderers at Buchenwald fed starving birds during cold weather. Yes, they were kind to animals, a practice that in no way mitigates their foul crimes. These little remembered acts of kindness and of love nevertheless prove that even the most evil of humans are not utterly without compassionate feelings. Complicated facts do not lend themselves to simple judgments, nor do complicated humans.
p. 57 Recently, an atomic scientist of Chinese heritage, expressed sympathy for China and the fact that in China the wealth is more evenly distributed. He immediately came under suspicion, was arrested, and temporarily lost his security clearance and his job at the atomic research center at Los Alamos.
Chinese communism is a complex and complicated creed that has, I imagine, something to say about myriad human activities. However perverse, it would be unlikely that the Chinese were wrong on all issues at all times. It would be unlikely they would be wrong about everything. But the question here is more specific: Are the communists wrong about common ownership? And if they are, should we prevent an American of Chinese origin from expressing his admiration for a small part of the Chinese way of things in current practice?
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 6
