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• Sunday, March 16, 2008 07:41 PM

  There used to be this thing called 'critical thinking'

  The rub is that not everyone finds the same things significant, so even if we're watching the same event, you and I might see different things. What you notice in a photograph or a video is a function of a personalized calculus -- an idiosyncratic, unconscious filter, built up over a lifetime, that you apply to all that you take in.

  Gosh, it sure sounds like truth has become an impossibly anachronistic notion! We had best get used to just agreeing to disagree about reality, huh?

  Except that Farhad Manjoo never gets around to making the obvious point, which is that we have (or used to have) at our disposal — as skeptical, thinking human beings — the ability to critically examine our own selves and our own assumptions. We can (or once could), in other words, become conscious of our unconscious filters.

  To assist us in the effort of critical self-examination we have access to a wide variety of tools — principles of logic, philosophy, and rhetoric; statistics; the precepts of skeptical self-inquiry. Unfortunately, after thousands of years of honing these tools our civilization has literally started forgetting how to use them, and thus we see Manjoo's trend emerging.

  So "9/11 deniers" come along, instinctively distrustful of a government that they know to be deceitful and underhanded, and skeptical about the official account of an unprecedented and personally terrifying event.

  But due to poor training in tool use, they're epistemologically incapable of making a distinction between skepticism on a particular point (say, Bush's claim that "we could not have foreseen this") and skepticism in general. Once they take a dive down the rabbit hole, in other words, pretty much anything and everything becomes equally plausible.

  The shame of well-behaved mainstream thought is that the opposite principle applies as well. For every conspiracy nut out there, there's a serious, modest, sober-minded New York Times-reading citizen who must accept everything he receives from authoritative sources — because to question any of it, no matter how absurd, is to open the possibility that everything is equally subject to dispute.

  In point of fact we're surrounded by good ideas and bad ideas in equal measure — fact and fiction, truth and lies, straight talk and spin. A truly rational person may doubt the motives of high officials and question the veracity of official reports without thence concocting elaborate global conspiracies or questioning the Holocaust.

  What's a shame about "9/11 deniers" is that they don't understand that you don't need to imagine Mossad, secret rockets, cruise missiles, stealth fighters, demolitions teams or anything of the sort for there to be a lot of very disturbing unanswered questions about the Qaeda attacks, what the White House knew and should have known, and why it sat idle for nearly a year beforehand. And these aren't questions that involve photographic evidence — just a little skepticism in the face of what are inarguably extraordinary claims by our government.

  Yet because of chauvinistic attitudes like Farhad Manjoo's own tendency to dismiss any deviation from official history as psychic white noise, there are very few critical voices still asking those questions in the public sphere. The "9/11 narrative" has been fixed — a terror organization that was predictable, well documented, and well understood circa 2000 had somehow become an unknowable and unforeseeable threat by 2001.

  And the man who failed in his responsibility to stop their attacks has escaped, unscathed and unquestioned.

  —Amity Read Amity's other letters
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