Rhetorical Outbursts

Surely, you’ve heard someone say, “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good argument.” Regardless of who said it to you before, Thomas Sowell’s latest column probably says it better, and he lays out the consequences rather well:

People who have made up their minds and don’t want to be confused by the facts are a danger to the whole society. Since the votes of such people count just as much as the votes of people who know what they are talking about, politicians have every incentive to pass laws and create policies that pander to ignorant notions, if those notions are widespread. Even institutions that are set up to pass on facts — the media, schools, academia — too often treat facts as expendable and use their strategic positions to filter out facts which go against their own preconceptions.

Perhaps his comments on academia are the most chilling:

Those who are in the business of teaching the young, whether in the public schools or on college campuses, too often see this not as a responsibility to pass on what is known but as an opportunity to indoctrinate students with their own beliefs. Many “educators” and the gurus who indoctrinated them actively disparage “mere facts,” which they say you can get from an almanac or encyclopedia. The net result is a student population that does not even know enough to know what needs to be looked up, much less how to analyze facts, so as to test opposing beliefs — as distinguished from how to gather information to support a preconceived notion that happens to be fashionable in the schools and colleges. Yet people are considered to be “educated” after they have spent so many years in ivy-covered buildings, absorbing the preconceptions that prevail there.

Ouch.

Quite frequently, I run across blogs written by both professors and students that sound just like those discussed in Sowell’s piece…