This is an absolutely lovely piece. I was thinking it was likely that the Dalai Lama thing was going to have an OK explanation but I hadn't googled around to find out what it was ... and for that alone I need to thank you for writing this.
I feel like we need a term for this ability to see the "obvious" conclusion and yet at the same time to doubt that it is the end of the story. I don't remember who coined it, but the term "bullshit detector" is pretty good. Everyone needs one of those, and some people have much better detectors than others.
A different term that I like very much is "moral imagination."
Reading books, especially great books from or about other epochs, is a way of expanding our moral imagination. It's no surprise to me that someone with as deep an interest in history as yourself would be good at processing news without jumping to the worst conclusions. I've never been a big history reader but I have read many novels from other time periods and other cultures, as well as philosophy and theology from down through the ages, and those are the resources that come into play - automatically, it seems - as my bullshit detector goes beep beep beep at the latest stupid internet pile-on.
What do you mean by moral imagination? That some people imagine that they have good moral standards?
Like gossiping about private things can make you feel good about your own morals? Or listening to the gossip, but failing to see your own role as a listener is part of the problem?
The idea of moral imagination, I think, is that it's the ability to figure out what is right or wrong, good or bad, by using your imagination. You look at a situation and you can *imagine yourself* in the situation. You can look at it in different ways, from different points of view, and apply a variety of different moral ideas that all have some validity. Doing all this, you can find a morally reasonable way forward that would not be obvious to you if you didn't have this ability.
Someone who lacks moral imagination might look at the Dalai Lama situation and just say "if I did that, given my background and education and social class and so on, it would have meaning X, so that's the only meaning it can have." If you have moral imagination, you know that this is not the only possible description of the situation, and you may be able to imagine others, to find an explanation that is true to what the Dalai Lama actually did and intended, what it meant to him. And even if you can't find the right explanation, you have a sense that *such an explanation probably exists*, and so you don't leap right away to condemn what he did.
Another great piece. Reinforces my belief that learning the fundamentals of CBT (jumping to conclusions being one of the classic cognitive distortions) could have broad benefits beyond mitigating specific mental health issues and perhaps should be taught starting in elementary school.
I also think there’s something to the reverse CBT theory as written up by Haidt and Lukianoff (and Yglesias)…
Why do so many people have access to so much information, and yet fail to connect even the most obvious dots. And are dead wrong on many key issues. It's the information paradox. TMI.
This is an absolutely lovely piece. I was thinking it was likely that the Dalai Lama thing was going to have an OK explanation but I hadn't googled around to find out what it was ... and for that alone I need to thank you for writing this.
I feel like we need a term for this ability to see the "obvious" conclusion and yet at the same time to doubt that it is the end of the story. I don't remember who coined it, but the term "bullshit detector" is pretty good. Everyone needs one of those, and some people have much better detectors than others.
A different term that I like very much is "moral imagination."
Reading books, especially great books from or about other epochs, is a way of expanding our moral imagination. It's no surprise to me that someone with as deep an interest in history as yourself would be good at processing news without jumping to the worst conclusions. I've never been a big history reader but I have read many novels from other time periods and other cultures, as well as philosophy and theology from down through the ages, and those are the resources that come into play - automatically, it seems - as my bullshit detector goes beep beep beep at the latest stupid internet pile-on.
What do you mean by moral imagination? That some people imagine that they have good moral standards?
Like gossiping about private things can make you feel good about your own morals? Or listening to the gossip, but failing to see your own role as a listener is part of the problem?
The idea of moral imagination, I think, is that it's the ability to figure out what is right or wrong, good or bad, by using your imagination. You look at a situation and you can *imagine yourself* in the situation. You can look at it in different ways, from different points of view, and apply a variety of different moral ideas that all have some validity. Doing all this, you can find a morally reasonable way forward that would not be obvious to you if you didn't have this ability.
Someone who lacks moral imagination might look at the Dalai Lama situation and just say "if I did that, given my background and education and social class and so on, it would have meaning X, so that's the only meaning it can have." If you have moral imagination, you know that this is not the only possible description of the situation, and you may be able to imagine others, to find an explanation that is true to what the Dalai Lama actually did and intended, what it meant to him. And even if you can't find the right explanation, you have a sense that *such an explanation probably exists*, and so you don't leap right away to condemn what he did.
Another great piece. Reinforces my belief that learning the fundamentals of CBT (jumping to conclusions being one of the classic cognitive distortions) could have broad benefits beyond mitigating specific mental health issues and perhaps should be taught starting in elementary school.
I also think there’s something to the reverse CBT theory as written up by Haidt and Lukianoff (and Yglesias)…
https://www.thefp.com/p/why-the-mental-health-of-liberal
Why do so many people have access to so much information, and yet fail to connect even the most obvious dots. And are dead wrong on many key issues. It's the information paradox. TMI.
Fantastic read