Fire and Knowledge

A large group of students were recruited for what they were told was a market research study by a company making high-tech headphones. They were each given a headset and told that the company wanted to test to see how well they worked when the listener was in motion…. All of the students listened to songs … and then heard a radio editorial arguing that tuition at their university should be raised from its present level of $587 to $750.

A third were told that while they listened to the taped radio editorial they should nod their heads vigorously up and down. The next third were told to shake their heads from side to side. The final third were the control group. They were told to keep their heads still. When they were finished, all the students were given a short questionnaire, asking them questions about the quality of the songs and the effect of the shaking. Slipped in at the end was the question the experimenters really wanted an answer to: “What do you feel would be an appropriate dollar amount for undergraduate tuition per year?”….

The students who kept their heads still were unmoved by the editorial. The tuition amount that they guessed was appropriate was $582 – or just about where tuition was already. Those who shook their heads from side to side as they listened to the editorial – even though they thought they were simply testing headset quality – disagreed strongly with the proposed increase. They wanted tuition to fall on average to $467 a year. Those who were told to nod their heads up and down, meanwhile, found the editorial very persuasive. They wanted tuition to rise, on average, to $646.

The simple act of moving their heads up and down, ostensibly for another reason entirely was sufficient to cause them to recommend a policy that would take money out of their own pockets….

One of the conclusions of the authors of the headphones study … was that “television advertisements would be most effective if the visual display created repetitive vertical movement of the television viewers’ heads (e.g., bouncing ball).”

–Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point (2000), p. 77-79

Within a few minutes of mesmerizing, sensitive patients would fall into a characteristic “crisis” taken by [Franz] Mesmer [1734-1815] as proof of his method. Bodies would begin to shake, arms and legs move violently and involuntarily, teeth chatter loudly. Patients would grimace, groan, babble, scream, faint, and fall unconscious.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “The Chain of Reason Versus the Chain of Thumbs” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 185

Significantly, when an Indian child was brought up in white ways, the education often failed to stick. “If he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” More significantly, the opposite was not true. White children raised as Indians demonstrated no desire, after visits to English settlements, to stay there. “In a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

–H.W. Brands, The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), p. 221

What is it that we need all this extra intelligence to figure out? That we need all this new computer power to do? That robots will be capable of that we aren’t? What is the task to which we must surrender so much?

–Bill McKibben, Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age (2003), p. 224

Unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed these decapitated [ancient repetitive elements in DNA] in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable. This kind of recent genome data thus presents an overwhelming challenge to those who hold to the idea that all species were created ex nihilo.

–Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (2006), p. 136-137

A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

–Henry David Thoreau

We live in a profoundly nonintellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and its dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information—all in short (and loud) doses of “easy listening.”….

We are a profoundly nonintellectual culture, but we are not committed to this attitude; in fact, we are scarcely committed to anything. We may be the most labile culture in all of history, capable of rapid and massive shifts of prevailing opinions, all imposed from above by concerted media effort. Passivity and nonintellectual judgment are the greater spurs to such lability. Everything comes to us in fifteen-second sound bites and photo opportunities. All possibility for ambiguity—the most precious trait of any adequate analysis—is erased. He wins who looks best or shouts loudest. We are so fearful of making judgments about ourselves that we must wait until the TV commentators have spoken before deciding whether Bush or Dukakis won the debate.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “The Dinosaur Rip-off” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 100-101

The perennial act of cutting-edge enterprise in reporting is to shove a camera or a microphone into the face of a grieving woman. But what is the qualitative difference between the man who cold-heartedly shoots another and the photographer who cold-heartedly photographs the corpse or grieving widow? Are they not simply two parts of the same epidemic failure of imagination, which is to say a failure of compassion and of community life?

Such exposures do not make us free, and the do not increase our knowledge. They only compound human cruelty by a self-induced numbness to the suffering of others and to our common suffering.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 87