Beyond Feelings - Vincent Ruggiero [46]
WEIGHING BOTH SIDES
Another example of a quite common hasty conclusion is this one: "The overall effect of technology has been dehumanize people." Many arrive at this conclusion after reading an article or two lamenting the decline of craftsmanship or the rising rate of crime in cities. There is a wide array of additional evidence that can be used to attack technology – from the character of many of the tasks workers are expected to perform to the development of sprawling suburbs, the emphasis on objects rather than human relationships, the increase in personal mobility, and the resulting erosion of family life and the values traditionally taught by the family.
However, even this impressive evidence would not be sufficient to support the conclusion. Any judgment about the "net or overall effect" demands a weighing of both sides, the plus and the minus. Specifically what is needed, then, is the other side of the issue – the favorable effects of technological advance. If we were to look for such balancing effects, we'd find that technology has decreased the burden of extreme physical labor for millions of people. It has cut the fourteen- to sixteen-hour workday in half and given people time to invest in the finer human pursuits. It has given us electric lights and central heating and the means to travel long distances quickly and comfortably. It has conquered plague and famine. Any judgment of technology that does not weigh these and other advantages against the shortcomings is unfair and shallow.
Hasty conclusions are not just an affliction of the uneducated. They are also found among the highly educated – even among serious scholars. The reason is that hasty conclusions are a consequence of the human condition. In other words, they are made possible by our own natural tendencies and the peculiarities of certain normal situations.
CAUSES OF HASTY CONCLUSIONS
Some people's major concern in thinking is convenience. They are afraid of arduous analysis and rattled by complexity. As a result they will leap at the first conclusion that occurs to them. They may hear someone saying energy shortages are artificial, manufactured by the oil companies and corrupt government officials. And so they will accept that conclusion uncritically. After repeating it a few times, they harden it into an article of faith.
Compounding this tendency is the desire to sound authoritative. Feeling some insecurity and wanting to compensate for it, or wanting to make their conversation livelier, many people have the habit of escalating every statement to a higher level of generalization. "A teenager was behaving very boisterously in the supermarket yesterday" becomes "Today's teenagers are very boisterous." "Mr. Easel, the art teacher at the local high school, gave my son an unfairly low grade" becomes "Teachers aren't fair in their grading." In a thousand different ways, "one" becomes "many" or "all," and "once" becomes "often" or "always."
Even people who have managed to get beyond convenience-thinking to greater intellectual maturity cannot escape another normal tendency – the tendency to prefer, in certain matters, one idea over all others. People may be fully conscious of this tendency, even as it is exerting its pull on their thinking. Or they may be completely unaware of it. In the latter case, of course, they are more likely to be affected by it. But either way its attraction is powerful.
Many movie magazine and romance magazine readers fall prey to this tendency.