[W]hat we do need -- and what will define the educated person in the knowledge society -- is the ability to understand the various knowledges. What is each one about? What is it trying to do? What are its central concerns and theories? What major new insights has it produced? What are its important areas of ignorance, its problems, its challenges?Thankfully, Drucker speaks of this “knowledge of other knowledges” concept not only in the context of economics and business management, but also in the realms of education and politics.
Without such understanding, the knowledges themselves will become sterile, will indeed cease to be "knowledges." They will become intellectually arrogant and unproductive. For the major new insights in every one of the specialized knowledges arise out of another, separate specialty, out of another one of the knowledges.
This lack of knowledge of other knowledges is what is crippling this country. Not arguments over whether Obama is right and Bush is the devil incarnate. Or vice versa. Unfortunately, we’re practicing what a commenter posted on a Time.com story about this weekend’s Glenn Beck rally in response to criticisms from the left on the intelligence of Beck, other rally speakers, and rally attendees:
I guess it’s ok to be stupid if it’s the right kind of stupid.
That kind of thinking, that kind of discourse, is going to get us nowhere. And it applies to the right as well as to the left, as well as to those who, like me, sag in the middle.
Want to understand why people attended Beck’s rally, why they like Sarah Palin, why they worry about religion being left out of our society? Get to know them personally. Not through the crap filters of the media, or the crap filters of your own moronic biases. Actually get to know them. Put aside preconceived notions and actually shut your damn mouth and listen to them. Try to understand where they’re coming from. Don’t react. Just listen. And think. You might learn something.
Want to understand why people are aghast at climate change deniers, why they like Barack Obama, why they worry about religion encroaching too much on society. I’ll repeat: Get to know them personally. Not through the crap filters of the media, or the crap filters of your own moronic biases. Actually get to know them. Put aside preconceived notions and actually shut your damn mouth and listen to them. Try to understand where they’re coming from. Don’t react. Just listen. And think. You might learn something.
Get off the I guess it’s ok to be stupid if it’s the right kind of stupid bandwagon. Right now.
I’m just sick of the smug from both sides of the spectrum.
I’m just sick of the lack of curiosity about what the other guy thinks and why he thinks that way. This applies to the left as well as the right. The left like to paint themselves as the right’s intellectual superiors. But the left is just as full of derp as is the right, because there are just as many on the left unwilling to understand the way their opposites think as there are similar thinkers on the right.
2 comments:
I think you're right that a major problem is a lack of curiosity and not wanting to understand. I think Ross Douthat's most recent column pointed to what I see on all sides: all politics is identity politics. Political leaders have to get to the real business of policies from time to time, but otherwise politics is all about affirmation, not conversation. "Now more than ever, Americans love leaders who seem to validate their way of life."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opinion/30douthat.html
That's why I'm a committed independent and look at party and related affiliations with distaste. They all appropriate the structures of religious discourse, and I'm not looking for a second church.
He writes a nice column. I guess my problem is I'm not necessarily looking for leaders who validate my opinions. I'm certainly at odds with LDS Church hierarchy on gay marriage, though I don't let that bother my church affiliation. I often think about how I would have felt and reacted before the church's 1978 announcement on the priesthood. I'd be in the same boat as I am today. Whenever someone tells me what I ought to think or what I ought to believe, I'm increasingly asking "Why?" It kind of hits on what I heard Englishman Stephen Fry say once, in remaking on the differences between the English and Americans in general -- he says the English are empiricists, always asking why. We need to do more of that here.
Post a Comment