By Edwin Cooney
Too many of us these days take pride in our beliefs! Even worse, too many more of us take pride in
our opinions.
The danger is that our opinions are primarily little more
than reflections of stale information rather than the product of new experiences
and observations. As President Kennedy once
observed, “too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion rather than the discomfort
of thought.”
That’s not true of my friend (I’ll call him Mr. Wisdom.) who
writes a “blog” as I do. Aside from being a friend of mine (which has to be
something of an emotional, intellectual and spiritual rescue mission), Mr.
Wisdom is a powerful thinker. He
recently identified a malady which we, who are prone to beliefs and opinions, invariably
possess. He calls it “a sense of assumptive superiority.”
Assumptive superiority, as Mr. Wisdom points out, has an
upside and a downside. The upside is
that it energizes people like the two of us to write columns or blogs. The downside is that it tends to limit our
appreciation of what others have to say, not due to the meaning or substance of
the message, but rather because of whom we project the person to be.
Not long ago, Mr. Wisdom saw a bumper sticker on the back of
a 2000 Honda Insight. Because that
particular car gets excellent gas mileage, the bumper sticker read, “al-Qaeda
hates this car.”
Believing that al-Qaeda hates America not because of who we
are but rather because of what we do, Mr. Wisdom experienced a flash of anger
at the driver of that “goofy looking” 2000 Honda Insight. In his frustration, he even gave the driver a
name: “Honda Harry.”
As Mr. Wisdom digested this experience, he realized that he
was projecting his own tendency toward assumptive superiority onto Honda Harry. That realization caused Mr. Wisdom to examine
the nature of his own capacity for assumptive superiority. What he came to realize is that as energizing
and useful as assumptive superiority can be, it must be controlled and restrained
as it inevitably gets in the way of healthy emotional, intellectual and
spiritual growth.
Two especially negative components of assumptive superiority
are projection and ad hominem thinking.
We are most guilty of projection when we transfer an emotionally or intellectually
based outlook, attitude or action onto someone else. Ad hominem thinking is when we reject an
argument, not on its logic or value, but rather on how we feel about the group
or individual who makes the argument.
Mr. Wisdom asked himself if he might be guilty of projection and ad
hominem thinking. Deciding that he occasionally
might be and after cringing a bit, he had the courage to share his scary tendencies
with us so that we might identify and govern them from within ourselves.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, hatred of “World
Communism” was considered a patriotic and moral requirement -- as if there’s
anything moral about patriotism! However, was Communism ultimately defeated
because we hated it or because it didn’t work?
As far back as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993
and certainly since 9/11, Americans possessed enough legitimate reasons to
despise al-Qaeda. The question is
whether despising al-Qaeda was sufficient to our future well-being!
The truth is, Middle America has much in common with both its
former and current political and moral enemies, Soviet Communism and al-Qaeda! Among other things, Americans, Communists and
al-Qaedans hate abortions, love capital punishment, do a lot of hand wringing
over high marital divorce rates, wince over anything regarded as “sexual
perversion,” and despise social disorder.
We mutually treasure such things as national security, economic
stability, materialism, and cultural purity. All three of us have a tendency to
hate change, especially progressive change if it costs money or a sense of
social uncertainty.
Our ultimate safety and security aren’t threatened by our
perception of who another people are, but rather by what they do. Nine-eleven was an act of war on the part of al-Qaeda
and needed to be met. However, that
doesn’t mean that all al-Qaeda stands for is worthy of the resentment, anger
and hatred that fuels our sense of assumptive superiority!
Opinion stimulates reaction but seldom explains. Its value lies in the perceived significance
and integrity of its source. The closer
or dearer the source of any opinion may be to its recipients, the greater its effect. Nor do opinions offer solutions to the
problems they invariably outline. Any opinion’s
greatest ultimate value is its capacity to stimulate thought and perhaps alter another’s
outlook.
Mr. Wisdom, a man of considerable intellect and powerfully
expressed opinion, recognizes that opinion is easy. His ability to constructively turn his
capacity for critical thinking inward onto himself is what separates him from
many of the rest of us.
In the final analysis it’s possible that Mr. Wisdom is more
than likely right when he asserts two things: First, the root of al-Qaeda’s
hatred for us really is based on what we’ve done rather than on who we are.
Second, al-Qaeda probably really and truly does hate Honda Harry. After all, Honda
Harry probably is as guilty of assumptive superiority as al-Qaeda!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY
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