only human

[NOTE: I will eventually update this post with specific examples to illustrate the point]

Maybe I have unrealistic ideals and standards, but I find it really disheartening (although not surprising given human limitations) to witness well-educated, experienced, and otherwise reasonable scientists and scholars allow preexisting ideology to cloud their judgment and imprison their minds; to see academics shift from being “cool as a cucumber”, in one area of inquiry, to stunningly closed-minded in another area of inquiry. And not merely closed minded, but also irrationally emotional – resorting to derision/mockery/sarcasm/etc. as substitutes for critical thinking, making glib hand-waving dismissals without even attempting to engage in deeper analysis, and being deliberately ignorant of the issues (i.e. refusing to look beyond the surface of an issue). Ironically, those stuck in unreasonable and irrational modes of thinking often proclaim themselves to be more reasonable and rational than their interlocutors. From their perspective, they’re being perfectly reasonable and sensible, and it’s everybody else who needs to wake up.

Of course, it’s disappointing when anybody is like this, but extra disappointing (at least for me) when it’s a veteran academic. Similarly, it’s gut-wrenching when an innocent person is murdered, but it’s extra gut-wrenching (at least for me) when the killer is a police officer. Reasonable people can and do disagree with each other without having emotion cloud their judgment. However, many academics do have foggy judgment and you can see it in the literature and speeches on atheism vs. theism, evolution vs. creationism, consciousness studies (especially when it comes to some of the more taboo areas within that field), competing theories and drugs in medicine, “in-house” debates among religious scholars who are broadly on “the same side”, etc.

For me, delving into those issues is a powerful reminder that nobody is a dispassionate fact-calculating machine; we’re all raw human beings with complex and nuanced needs, motivations, and reasons for thinking the way we think. I never want to be unknowingly trapped in a bubble of selective irrationality, oblivious to flaws that are obvious to everyone else. Reflecting on this inspires me to scrutinize my ideas more intensely than my toughest critics would.