“This nation is at war with Islamic fascists.” The President actually said this to describe our opponent in his war on terrorism. It appears to be a GOP talking point. Now, what would most Americans think if those intent on bombing civilians described their enemy as "Christian fascists?" How about "why…
It is because we tout ourselves as the smartest animal on the planet we are oh-so-vulnerable. As one can read in Proverbs 16:18, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
Human cognition is an unwieldy and fallible bag of mental tricks. Anyone who has seriously studied human cognition knows this. As Leda Cosmides and John Toby wrote:
“The mind consists of a set of adaptations, designed to solve the long standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter-gatherers.”
Many people think, however, that they know how they think; they have faith that conscious common sense is always accurate and on target. Common sense fails consider Freud’s rock solid finding: conscious awareness is only the tip of the cognitive iceberg.
Common sense seduces us with powerful illusions, illusions that look like “uncontestable facts” to those of us who believe we can merely sit around and think in order to figure out how we think. Although common sense has led us well us for eons, it often leads to errors. The Sun does not circle the Earth. Our ears do not operate like microphones and our eyes do not work like cameras. “I” am not really a little person who seems to dwell in my head. Science has shown that what the “thing” that constitutes me is a complicated and often self-contradictory bag of skills and strategies. For many good examples of how we are often misled by the same heuristics on which we usually depend, see the …
[Note: I wrote this piece in 2003, shortly before the U.S. invaded Iraq].
The trouble with writing these opinion pieces is they require such intense emotional energy to write. It’s a very exhausting business. But then, so is life these days. We all go about our lives quite admirably, but the low hum of threat, the “war and rumors of war” is wearing on us all.
The intense emotion that I’m experiencing these days is sadness, produced by the news, produced by the innocence of so many of our students who are willing to fling themselves into the fray in the name of God, president and country. It’s all too reminiscent of those equally innocent boys who threw themselves, during my parents’ lifetimes, into the defense of God, king and country. One way or another, those boys were not innocent for long.
What amazes me is how surprised some of us are by all this, and I’m including myself in the “us.” I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, my parents survived two world wars in Great Britain and described the horrors of the second in vivid detail. I think, though, it’s only been since September 11, 2001, I’ve truly understood what my parents experienced. The stories they told me when I was a child enthralled me, kept me spellbound as they recounted them to me. But I, too, was innocent. The stories were family saga, not reality, shrouded in the mists of mythology for me.
My parents described the adventure …
The Associated Press reports this recent development in the American military's effort to keep America safe. A decorated sergeant and Arabic language specialist was dismissed from the U.S. Army under the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, though he says he never told his superiors he was gay and his accuser…
9/11 has been a winning card for Bush, so it shouldn't be surprising that he's pulled it out once again: Monday's speech was the one where the president tied Israel's fight against the armed Lebanese group Hizbullah to the events of September 11. The president said: "The current crisis is part…