Neil Postman | The Direction of Intention

Water, Water [David’s blog on DR Thursday]

Posted on April 25, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

‘For in the end, he [Huxley] was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” ~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death

The water rises.

Last week, at dinner, disconcerted by the headlines, 20 asked if I could explain the politics of our day. “Entertainment,” I thought, but did not say. We – the community – talk about politics – the news of the day – as if it was serious business – because we want it to be – we need it to be – but we seem mortally blind to the emptiness of the chatter. Song and dance. The purpose, after all, is not to inform us but to keep us hooked.

“Water, water, everywhere. Nor any drop to drink.” ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Thirst. Purpose.

It’s not an insignificant question to ask, “What is the reason for being?” We seem puzzled by our purpose or at least conflicted, as made apparent by our insatiable division. My theory is that our division is a distraction, it’s an old colonialists trick, baked into our national dna. A magician’s sleight of hand. There’s no better way to control a populace than to divide them. A people united – and not distracted – demand purposeful and responsible governance. Honest discourse. They demand it of themselves, too. They live from and in-service to a cohesive and shared narrative. The deep root of integrity. Purpose, after all, when clear and meaning-full, is always about others; it is always about service to the community. The betterment of all.

“You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.” ~Paulo Coehlo

read Kerri’s blogpost about WATER WATER

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Filed under: DR Thursday, Identity, Metaphor, Perspective | Tagged: addiction, aldus huxley, amusement, Amusing Ourselves to Death, artistry, Brave new world, Coleridge, community, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discourse, division, entertainment, integrity, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, narrative, Neil Postman, news, Paulo Coehlo, politics, purpose, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, story, studio melange, the melange, thinking, thought, unity | Leave a comment »

Stand Out [David’s blog on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on January 30, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

Yesterday, in our basement reorganization shuffle, I moved my paintings. It is not a small task to move the remains of a life’s work. At this point, I’ve moved them hundreds of times: between studios, into and out of shows, within a studio space to make more space. Paintings take up a lot of space. Besides my clothes, my unsold paintings have been the extent of my possessions most of my adult life. During this latest painting-location-change I realized what an oddity I must sometimes seem. It sparked some random recall and minor revelation.

It’s not always easy to be a sore thumb, the one one that sticks out; the one doing life a bit differently than the expected norm. The lone tree in a vast field.

I read this quote this morning from Robert Pirsig‘s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade…Originality on the other hand could get you anything – from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it.”

One of my favorite activities to do with teachers comes straight out of Augusto Boal and the Theatre of the Oppressed. Each teacher “reenacts” for their peers the simple ritual of preparation they do each morning for the upcoming day. The revelation was always the same. “I’m preparing to control my students,” a wide-eyed teacher gasped when the penny dropped, “It’s the opposite of what I want to do.”

We live in the church of the individual yet the message we actually preach is conformity.

I had the opportunity to create a school-within-a-school and I followed the popcorn path suggested by Neil Postman. He wrote that “learning” in our system conditions students to suss-out what teacher wants and regurgitate it. It was possible to kickstart their original impulse toward curiosity but it would require a bloody battle of about six weeks. Hold the line. Don’t fill in the blank for them. And one day, in a fit of anger and defiance, one student would take the brave step and say, “This is what I want to learn!” Support the step of the defiant one and the rest of the students would follow. They would dare to speak their truth and follow their passion. Postman was right! The battle was bloody. It took exactly six weeks.

This is the ubiquitous misunderstanding about originality: it requires the removal of boundaries, the absence of control. A free-for-all. The opposite is true. The most disciplined people I’ve ever known are artists. Their discipline is internal, not imposed. It was the seed of the question I’d ask the teachers after their uncomfortable revelation: “What would it look like if each day you prepared to unleash the student’s curiosity? What, then, would you have to control?” It was an uncomfortable question. It would require them, probably in anger and defiance, to take a brave step. To stand out. To do something different. To expect their students, through the pursuit of their burning questions, to control themselves.

Everyone has a unique star to follow. Sometimes they simply need help to see it.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE LONE TREE

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Filed under: Art, Creativity, Education, Flawed Wednesday, Possibility | Tagged: artistry, conform, conformity, control, curiosity, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discipline, individual, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, meaning making, Neil Postman, originality, passion, revelation, Robert Pirsig, story, studio melange, teachers, teaching, the melange, truth, zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance | Leave a comment »

Babble [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on January 5, 2024 by davidrobinsoncreative

This could be a Jackson Pollack splash painting or an x-ray of arteries, veins and capillaries. A winter sun attempting to reach through the cover of clouds and trees.

If I believe the forecast, as hard as it tries, the winter sun will not reach us today.

I’m paying attention to language a bit more than usual. Looking up through the veins and arteries of the tree, I ask myself: What could it be? What could be? What is “it”? I shiver and am reminded of a quote I used in my book. It is appropriate for our times:

“One must be leery of words because words turn into cages.” ~ Viola Spolin

Language Matters. A double entendre. One of my favorite. It’s right up there with my favorite double entendre title of a book: The End of Education. Classic Neil Postman.

The question is, in our day-and-age, amidst the torrent of words and the easy belief-systems that words construct, how to stay out of the cage?

It’s a question with roots back to The Tower of Babel. A human race united by a single language builds a tower that reaches into the heavens. It is a threat to Yahweh. To protect his status, he confounds their speech and scatters them around the world. Language is the barrier against unity.

A bramble of branches to a Pollock painting to the inner working of life-blood to a weather report and landing at last in the Tower. An epic journey in just a few words, reaching through metaphor and pattern.

Language can be a cage. It can also set us free. Language Matters. A double entendre.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora and iHeart Radio

read Kerri’s blogpost about WINTER SUN

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Filed under: KS Friday, Language, Metaphor, Seeing | Tagged: artistry, beliefs, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, division, human race, Jackson Pollock, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, language, language matters, limiting beliefs, meaning, meaning making, metaphor, Neil Postman, pattern, speech, status, story, studio melange, The End of Education, the melange, The Seer, tower of babel, unity, viola spolin, words | 2 Comments »

Aim The Magic Lens [David’s blog on KS Friday]

Posted on September 15, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

“That men do not learn the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” ~Aldous Huxley

You may be as amazed as I to learn that Dogwood is not Doll’s Eye. They have a similar creepy Seussian stare but are not kin. In this brave new world, all we need do is aim Google Lens at the question, “What is that?” and, voila! An answer!

I delight that I am living in the time of easy access to information. I could not write as I do without instant access to synonym and antonym, the lighting fast check-of-fact or spelling, the interesting variations-on-a-theme that pop up the minute I jump down a thought-rabbit-hole. Technology has made it possible for me to be a writer. Were I confined to pen and paper my output would be minimal and certainly impossible to read.

Easy information means easy misinformation. It means easy mass-misinformation. If I were the wizard of the universe I’d provide everyone with a Google Lens for information. All we’d need do is aim our magic lens at a pundit, news-bit or politician and, voila!” Accurate or Absurd or somewhere in between! It would make it fairly impossible to toss a lie into the commons and get away with it.

It’s not that I am enamored of just-the-facts. I’m not. I write stories so I prize a good dose of imagination. But in our time, knowing the difference – or caring about the difference – between fact and fantasy – is tantamount.

One of the great challenges of our brave new world is the intentional passing of fantasy for fact. For instance, Florida. If you are a student of history you’ll recognize in Florida (and, now, sadly, other states) the resurrection of the Lost Cause narrative, a history bending education initiative driven hard by the Daughters of the Confederacy at the conclusion of the Civil War. White supremacy sweeping its dark-side under the rug. Lipstick on a history pig.

I’m capable of imagining that my magic Google Info-Lens would put a stop to the cycle of non-sense but it’s starting to dawn on me that Aldous Huxley had it right: at this moment in history, we have the capacity to check every story, to look up every assertion, to scrutinize every source. It may not be as lightning fast as my imagined Lens but it’s close. We simply choose not to use it. It’s so much easier to believe without question than it is to question a belief.

“Huxley feared the truth would be drown in a sea of irrelevance.” Well.

Today on the trail I learned in a nanosecond that a Dogwood is different from a Doll’s Eye. I know it is possible to assert that slavery was on-the-job-training but it takes a dedicated-head-in-the-sand – and a heart full of ugly intention- to drown the truth of history in a sea of utter non-sense.

No lessons learned. No questions asked. Oops. Here we go again.

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora and iHeart Radio

read Kerri’s blogpost about Dogwood

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Filed under: Education, KS Friday, Perspective | Tagged: Aldous Huxley, Amusing Ourselves to Death, artistry, belief, Brave new world, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, fact, fantasy, Google Lens, history, imagination, information, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, lie, Lost Cause narrative, misinformation, Neil Postman, nonsense, questioning, questioning a belief, questions, story, studio melange, the melange, truth, white supremacy | 3 Comments »

Join The Kerfuffle [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on July 25, 2023 by davidrobinsoncreative

Rob and I have been having a text conversation about AI. For him, an Orwellian curtain is descending. For me it’s a pattern: progress that pushes people into the unknown always ignites a kerfuffle.

Months ago Skip suggested that I jump into the dialogue raging around phrase engineering for AI. Basically, people learning better ways to ask the technology for more efficient and effective results. As a visual artist and a writer, he believed I might be able to stand with a foot in both evolving camps. Cross disciplines. I thought about it. Read everything I could find. I decided against. As an artist, someone who’s taken his artistry into the wilds of organizations, education, change initiatives, DEI, intercultural communication, coaching, software start-ups…a cross-pollinator – I’ve shouted my perceptions at the top of my lungs but rarely found ears that would or could listen. Why should an engineer listen to an artist? Why should a CEO give credence to a theatre artist? There are many many reasons. The notion of doing the same old thing in the same old way in a new context made me…tired.

What is a new way?

I’ve read that the mission of the industrial age was to create technology capable of sparing or lessening human physical labor. The mission of the information age is to create technology capable of sparing us from the rigors of thought. All in service of making life easier.

My last exchange with Rob led me back to Neil Postman’s short forward to his book Amusing Ourselves To Death. “Huxley feared we’d become a trivial culture…” Rereading the forward I thought, “Spot on”. Among the many upsides, having something or someone else think for you definitely has a downside.

Perhaps our AI era will hold up a mirror so we might better see ourselves as part-of rather than separate-from. Perhaps all the space we gain in our brainpans, as we are spared the rigors of thought, will open new frontiers. It always has in the past. In a miracle of biomimicry, one of Skip’s creations in our start-up was a social network view: a visual of personal connectivity, an active map of all the people a user communicates with. The lines of connectivity were profoundly meaningful to me. The ability to see the thriving network active in my working life was a revelation. A pulsing flower, a wild carrot of interconnectivity. I appreciated my peers – my support system – in new ways because I could see them. My social network view made it undeniable: nothing I do, nothing I think, is independent of my community. We create.

Growth and learning is always in the direction of the unknown. Whether we realize it or not, even amidst the greatest kerfuffle, we take these bold steps together.

read Kerri’s blogpost about WILD CARROT

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Filed under: Metaphor, Seeing, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: AI, Aldous Huxley, Amusing Ourselves to Death, artistry, biomimicry, connectivity, cross pollinator, culture, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, information age, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, Neil Postman, Orwell, phrase engineering, social network, story, studio melange, technology, the melange | 4 Comments »

Jump Out Of Your Chair [on KS Friday]

Posted on January 14, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

If I want to think clearly – or clear my thinking – I walk. Sitting still has always been and continues to be an invitation for thought-log-jams. It was a problem when I was a student. Classrooms come with desks and an expectation that the learner will sit still. I became a master of the controlled wiggle, not because it broke the logjam but because it helped maintain my sanity. For me, sitting still is like a hair shirt with an itchy tag. Sitting still makes my IQ plummet several points. Sitting still interrupts my synapses.

Tom Mck told me that the alternative schools were populated by artists. I intimately understood his observation. Artists need to move to think. They thrive in an alternative to still-sitting.

I’ve made sure that my work throughout my adulthood included movement. Directing plays. Painting big paintings. Facilitating workshops. Even as a teacher I cleared the room of desks. This morning I saw a headline in Forbes Magazine declaring that children learn more through play than through guided instruction. It was curious to me that this was a headline. Sugata Mitra’s been shouting the news for decades. Neil Postman spent his life reading the research and advocating for what the research implied: turn little people toward a passion and get out of the way. Curiosity and desire are an unbeatable team. They will move faster than you might imagine. Move, move, move. Dance. Paint. Sing. Construct. Act. Play. They will let you know when they need you.

I’m learning the lesson again. My work places me squarely in front of a computer for hours each day. Flow. Eddy. Logjam. Wiggle. Move. Sigh, as the synapses start firing up again. Repeat. At this advanced stage of earth-time, you’d think I’d have grasped the full understanding that, for me to be effective, I have to move around. Each morning I review the previous day’s work and immediately know whether or not I found a movement/sitting-still balance.

When we stepped on the trail and entered the woods in North Carolina, my mind was chock-full-of-thought-logs. Like everyone else, I stare at the screen and lose track of time. A day can pass me by and I never leave my swivel chair. I swivel for survival. For months, I’d been swiveling and forgetting to stand up and dance my ideas. Fifteen minutes into our hike, the jam broke free. My mind cleared. I could see the subtle landscape inside and outside. I breathed a deep breath. The forest was gorgeous. My mind was spacious and flowing! I resolved, once again, yet again, to attend to the necessity of movement that keeps my mind and heart flowing. Wiggling is maintenance, merely. Swiveling is not a solution. The real game, the full flow, is only available when I jump out of my chair and move-it.

read Kerri’s blog post about THE FOREST

Kerri’s albums are available on iTunes and streaming on Pandora

Filed under: Art, Body, Creativity, Energy, KS Friday, Pattern | Tagged: artistry, curiosity, dance, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, education, forest trail, hiking, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, learning, movement, Neil Postman, North Carolina, painting, play, story, studio melange, Sugata Mitra, swivel, the melange, two artists, walking, wiggle | Leave a comment »

Discern [on Flawed Wednesday]

Posted on August 11, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

“For in the end, he [Aldous Huxley] was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public Discourse In The Age Of Show Business

Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death in 1985. Cassandra, sounding the alarm to a community too distracted to listen. Were he alive today, he’d think – but would not say – “I told you so.” All the quotes in this post are his.

I read in my daily-news-horror-trawl a quote from a Wyoming man who believes he’s protected from the pandemic because of the color of his hair. It might sound wacky until you consider that his staunch belief in the virus’ preference for hair color is just one of the many misinformation narratives currently being fed to the angry and easily led. He is, without question or thought, breathing the gas of a political party that wants to keep him distracted, fearful and high.

If you are not choking on the fumes of excessive gaslighting, then you are among those whose eyes are burning from the corrosive air it produces. Are you as tired as I am of reading accounts of deathbed appeals for the vaccine? It is too late, in your final moments of life, to realize you’ve been duped. It’s a tragedy. Are you as disgusted as I am, having been witness to the undeniable violence of the insurrection, of listening to the blatant denials? Despite what your eyes saw, it was just another day of tourists wandering through the Capitol. Gaslight tears.

During the first year of the pandemic an acquaintance latched onto a comorbidity table lifted from the CDC website and circulated as “proof” that COVID was less dangerous than the common cold. It was, of course, taken out of context. A quick visit to the CDC website (seriously, less than 30 seconds), viewed in context and with an understanding of the meaning of the word “comorbidity,” easily debunked the claim. Our acquaintance, enraged, doubled down on his claim of “proof” – though he could not be bothered to spend 30 seconds to check the poison gas that he was gulping.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

The legal defense has been successfully used to defend both Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow: the courts ruled that reasonable viewers should know the difference between news and opinion. This is news. This is not.

Do we have the ability to differentiate between public business and a vaudeville act? The evidence is not hopeful.

The court’s ruling, then, is likely based on a faulty premise: that people are able to differentiate. That the audience is reason-able or values reason. Able-To-Reason. Reason is the power to think, understand and form judgments through a process of logic. In order to be reasonable one must value reason. One must want it.

Logic and reason, both assume the inclination and capacity to question. Curiosity, real curiosity, does not seek agreement or group think. It seeks to step into the gap between what is espoused and what is lived. It seeks solid ground to build upon so must recognize sand when it sees it.

And, what if “reason” long ago fled the coop? Or, what if “reason,” has never been a dominant trait in the coop in the first place? What if discernment dies in the presence of so much gas?

“Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

read Kerri’s blog post about IT DOESN’T KNOW

Filed under: Flawed Wednesday, Perspective, Rants, Uncategorized | Tagged: aldus huxley, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Brave new world, cassandra, CDC, covid, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, discernment, gaslighting, insurrection, irrelevance, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, knowledge, Neil Postman, noam chomsky, pandemic, propaganda, rant, relevance, studio melange, truth, vaccines | 2 Comments »

Start Thinking [on DR Thursday]

Posted on February 4, 2021 by davidrobinsoncreative

“As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, ‘failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”‘ ~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death

Any day now I’m going to watch the 1976 movie, Network. It’s the film equivalent of a crystal ball to our current predicament. A veteran news anchorman loses it on air, threatens to kill himself, but instead goes on a full-blown rant. The network’s ratings skyrocket. An ambitious producer recognizes and exploits the opportunity by creating more and more outrageous programming. Fact falls prey to profitable fiction sold as truth. Ratings imperatives eclipse the north star of accuracy-in-reporting. Roger Ailes created his Fox News Network on the same premise; no veracity necessary. People like a good train wreck, just ask Jerry Springer. It is why the nation is so divided. The blues use news to sort out the lies; the reds use lies to siphon off the truth.

“Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley [Brave New World] and Orwell [1984] did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley‘s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” ~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death

Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves To Death before Facebook and Twitter were glimmers in their inventors’ eyes, before the internet hit the personal computer, before multiple channels on cable networks. We have, as Postman wrote, an infinite appetite for distraction with nary a need for honesty. And, as we are witnessing, distraction has arrived in the halls of Congress. We’ve now a party in government that actively shuns verity and raises funds on peddling fallacy.

We are a nation that finds itself at risk. In my post yesterday I wrote that I no longer wonder how a society can willingly and knowingly take itself down. We have front row seats. And yet, the road to our recovery is as simple (and as difficult) as a collective valuing of the truth over ratings or poll numbers or bubbles. We worship at the wrong altar. We are inundated with info-dross. We would be better off if ratings plummeted every time a pundit ranted, a politician bullied, or a commentator lied. We’d be better off if thinking, if fact-checking, was a prerequisite to posting or tweeting or speaking. We’d find ourselves in a shared center, a place of possibility built on a generous commitment to probity.

“For in the end, he [Huxley] was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in ‘Brave New World’ was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” ~ Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death

read Kerri’s much more positive post on LEARNING FROM TV

Filed under: DR Thursday, Edges, Education, Identity, Perspective, Possibility, Uncategorized | Tagged: 1984, Aldous Huxley, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Brave new world, culture-death, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, distractions, George Orwell, honety, Jerry Springer Show, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerri sherwood on itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, lie, Neil Postman, Network, probity, Roger Ailes, thinking, truth, verity | Leave a comment »

Recognize The Divine [on KS Friday]

Posted on September 11, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

“To say that life is destabilized by weakened institutions is merely to say that information loses its use and therefore becomes a source of confusion rather than coherence.” ~ Neil Postman, Technopoly.

“Regularly throughout conversation in Gaelic, ” John O’Donohue writes, “there is explicit recognition that the divine is present in others.” Social fabric is tightly woven and made strong by the recognition of value, divine or otherwise, in all members of a community. During my travels in Bali I was moved again and again by the interconnectivity, the deep assumption of coherence that wove together daily life and community. “If two cars crash, “Budi told me, “the driver’s first thought is not that the other is to blame, it is that they are supposed to meet.”

And when the devaluation of others becomes a national pastime as it has in these once united states, pushing down the head of an other in an attempt to elevate the self – the preferred action of all drowning people – saves no one. It only delays the drowning of all involved. That sound we hear is the rending of our social fabric, the breaking apart of the ship. Those shouts of triumph and scorn coming from the top deck will be short lived. Confusion is a lousy organizing principle and guarantees a watery grave for all on board.

We are awash in information and so we are also awash in an assault on information. Misinformation is our Achilles Heel. So weakened by gaslighting are our public institutions that the single most damning confession of our lifetime, a president admitting for all to hear that he knew and lied about the deadly virus, is shrugged off. “Yeah, well what about Nancy Pelosi’s hair!” I shuddered when I read the inane defense. We flatten. Our values fade as fast as our perspective. Thousands died who did not have to – heads were knowingly pushed under. Thousands will die who do not have to; an estimated 410,000 by the new year. Disposable people.

Neil Postman wrote, “What makes science possible is not our ability to recognize ‘truth’ but our ability to recognize falsehood.” Replace the word “science” with the word “community’ and the statement rings just as true. A community that cannot recognize falsehood is in trouble. A community that will not deal with truth is destined to drown in its own willful confusion.

We will not find our way through this paralysis until we can step out of this car crash and, instead of pointing our fingers and blaming, we step toward each other with wonder at what brought us together, until we are willing to ask, “Why did we meet?”

CONNECTED on the album RELEASED FROM THE HEART is available on iTunes

read Kerri’s blog post about CONNECTED

Filed under: Identity, KS Friday, Seeing, Uncategorized | Tagged: achilles heel, Anam Cara, connected, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, devaluation, divine, falsehood, gaslighting, information, John O"Donohue, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerri sherwood on itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, misinformation, Neil Postman, released from the heart, Sacred, Technopoly, truth, values | 2 Comments »

Learn To Question [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on May 4, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

agree to disagree copy

There’s something about opinions that needs saying. It is simply this: not all opinions are created equal.

Neil Postman wrote that “In the development of intelligence, nothing can be more ‘basic’ than learning how to ask productive questions.”

Hearty opinions, opinions worth holding, are generally sourced from a deep well of questioning. If you are, like me, of a certain age, you’ve seen the promise of the age of information warp into the age of intentional misinformation. Knowing what and how to question is not only a necessity, it is the only protection we have, inundated as we are, with so much malignant hooey.

An opinion – a perspective – worth holding is not afraid to be questioned precisely because it is the product of questioning. It is not rigid or defensive because it is an open-ended inquiry. It invites questions, challenges and more information. A worthwhile opinion strives to see more, not less – another quality of a developing intelligence. A solid opinion need not shout down opposing points-of-view or belittle a challenge or bully a questioner because it is not fearful of the light. It need not hide behind “alternative facts” or conspiracy theories or rely on deflection when revealed as ridiculous. It practices stepping outside of the echo chamber to check the veracity of the information upon which it is built.

A dulled intelligence is a choice. It is a closed fortress, leaving the inhabitant trapped inside, self-righteous, indignant and afraid of challenge, clarifying data, and fact. Protecting the fortress, whipping up anger and multiple specters of invasion, is the function of an information echo chamber. Refusal to step outside the fortress, take a look around and ask productive questions of information sources – unwilling to consider whether or not the vaunted opinion is worth the energy to hold – is a tip-off that the thought-house is built on nothing but the softest of sand.

Everyone is, after all, entitled to their own opinion. We can agree to disagree and we will remain on opposite sides of the crevasse forever. Common ground is infinitely available – and will return for us – when stoking anger is less important than embracing the ‘basic’ and learning how to ask productive questions – of ourselves and of the information we are being fed. Until then, all things will be stagnant, the narrow mind will proclaim itself victim to confirmed facts and relevant questions. Pathological lie, division and deceit will be called virtuous by those too angry and unwilling to step back and care enough about their hard opinion to ask a simple question.

read Kerri’s blog post about AGREE TO DISAGREE