Sciolism

\SY-uh-liz-uhm\, noun:
Superficial knowledge; a superficial show of learning.

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We need be critical. For a moment, let’s ignore the role of media in our lives. Even in gaining knowledge from scholars, the wise and the learned, we need be critical. Knowledge does not pass from person to person unaffected by personal bias, with bias here meaning “the way in which we perceive”. To perceive in the first place requires that evidence be filtered through our own senses, our own internal logic machines, our own minds. No matter how wise the person who receives information is, in passing it to another human being it will be information altered from its neutral state and filtered through a person’s mind. Thus, though we can judge the reputability of our sources, we need always be critical.

Now, to put information through a sieve that is not only unwillingly biased, but pointedly so, is an even greater danger to a non-critical public. The more prolific the messages through this sieve are, the greater both the need for critical thinking and the ability to perform it become. We end up needing to be cynics just to get through an hour of news! It is such that nowadays there is far more to be skeptical about in common knowledge than there is to be credulous. Far, far more. So much so that, since the advent of postmodernism (and before, but explosively since), it’s been suggested continuously that there is no such thing as truth.

We’ve been lied to enough to doubt truth itself. This is indicative both of a lethargic state of mind (why fix my understandings if I can just deny understanding is possible?) and how bad it’s gotten. Human knowledge is necessarily biased, because nothing can merely perceive. Everything, human, computer, nonhuman animal—everything utilizes sensory perception and subsequent intellectual or emotional processing. This does not undermine the search for truth, I think, only re-institute that we are fallible receptacles for the universe. And as such, to have aggregates of corporate control filtering information as unbiased journalism is unfeasible. We need be critical.

But it’s not all evil—I hold to this fact rigorously. It may be that certain groups of individuals control all of the media. But we live in an age of media and population explosion—where there is more people, more prolific information, and a much more definite basis for the phrase “common knowledge” than ever before. We, as a species, have grown closer due to the proliferation of information, and we’re still grappling with the consequences.

I am almost certain the cure was found in the Age of Reason, hundreds of years ago, and has merely not found its proper application in common society. Rather than try and pick a leader to make the right decisions for all of us, rather than try and pick a media that will give us the right information, we must empower ourselves with the weapons of skepticism, critical thought, and rigorous investigation. These things sound esoteric—they are as natural as deducing from the smell in your room that your roommate has not done laundry, and then checking the closet to confirm. Logic is easy. We just need to use it in response to those things that make us happy—to question their foundations.

We need to want the truth. Democracy falls upon itself without a public that is educated. I posit that a public is only truly educated when its individuals strive to educate themselves. This is a radical and unlikely notion these days, I know, but if periods like the Age of Reason are any indication, the will of the public can flourish toward self-empowerment, and reasonably must (should their government inevitably become unsatisfactory). Science taught us how to ask. Its methods can teach us how to learn. Only we can teach us how to live. We need be critical.