Open Left

"Ideas" As Opposed To Thinking (4.00 / 1)

I remember a big bruhaha over the importance of ideas in the early Reagan years.  What it was really about was the amping up of the conservative/GOP message machine.

The "ideas" they had were things like "supply-side economics," which George H.W. Bush correctly pegged in his pre-pod-person-persona days as "voodoo economics."

It reminded me of something my sister observed in the early 70s, how, for a time, people carried around books like jewelry.  They didn't actual read them (unless they were, like the slowest readers in the history of the universe), they were just decorative and symbolic.

Now, Clinton's ideas weren't as bad as "supply-side economics," but that's hardly much in the way of praise.  They were all to often a form of mind-candy, something to satisfy an urge prematurely, to interrupt the real work, the real purpose of mind, which is to question and to quest.

The real battle should not be over ideas, but over vision, which definitely has a conceptual component to it, but is something much more than a product to sell people on.  Vision is, if you will, the conceptual articulation of fundamental values.

Vision is what the quest is all about.  And we need that, desperately, because, as Einstein put it, the level of thinking that created the problems we face is not sufficient to solve them.  We need to go one step beyond where we have been.

At the same time, however, it is absolutely vital to simply think clearly and critically. It's a fundamental discipline. Don't take any wooden nickles.  Don't buy a pig in a poke.  Don't fucking invade Iraq looking for WMDs that the weapons inspectors you've already got there can't find.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Tue Aug 21, 2007 at 23:48:06 PM CDT