A couple of examples spring
to mind. Suppose you meet someone who likes to go around preaching hellfire,
believing the majority of the world's population is damned to an eternity of
torment. What would be a reasonable concomitant attitude alongside that claim?
An obvious one would be deep sadness, another would be mournful regret - after
all, if you believe much of the world is currently going straight to hell,
surely that's about the worst thing imaginable, so why would you be anything
other than terribly upset and heartbroken about such a proposition?
Yet you'll
notice most hellfire preachers are not like that - they appear to exhibit a
smug satisfaction hardly consistent with the terrible news they are sharing,
which makes me think their view isn't reasonable. This extends more broadly to
any kind of Christian faith built around humility. How strange to find so many
people paying almost no regard to the biggest crisis in the world, people who
don't have enough food, drink and shelter to survive, yet obsessing all the
time about the so-called 'disgrace' of two people of the same sex loving each
other in a stable relationship.
Another example I find is green
people who treat fossil fuels as though they are comparable to some kind of
ghastly bodily secretion. Yes it's good when technological advances wean us off
the current dependency of fossil fuels for so much of our industry, but to be
so averse to these raw materials in the way that exhibits not even the faintest
appreciation for how important they've been in our achievements is a dead giveaway
that the person is probably not a reasonable one on this matter.
The reality is, we are not actually running out of
resources - the greens are making a mistake in their analysis (as I explain here
in this blog post). But even getting into the head of a green person and
pretending they are right about the imminent shortage of fossil fuels, a proper
attitude to this should not be what you usually find, it ought to be sorrow that
such a vital resource is in the last stage of its utility, gladness that humans
have been able to use this resource as such a vital vehicle for the
progression-explosion we've seen over the past 150 years; and appreciation for
how the free market of trade and competition is continually engendering more
and more efficiency in a way that resembles nature's law of least effort (most parsimonious
energy expenditure).
But generally greens evince none of these attitudes - they instead have a disproportionately doleful attitude to fossil fuels, focusing only on the comparably exiguous amounts of bad that have come from our increased progress, standard of living, and well-being.
So while I'm highly unlikely to make unbalanced blanket
claims about what is a peculiarly large number of people, it is at least
reasonable to consider that if the vast majority of these hellfire preachers
and greens have such different attitudes to the expected ones, we ought to be
suspicious not just of their motives, but of their conclusions too. Credible
attitude indicates credible conclusion is not an unimpeachable heuristic - but
it's one to which we are wise to give proper consideration when simple logical
and evidential correction won't quite do the trick.
No comments:
Post a Comment