There are a number of recent news items and comments to this site that don’t merit a full blog post, so today is a “potpourri” of several unrelated observations.
First of all, kudos to the College Board, which is evidently preparing to remove the AP label from classes in states that prohibit the accurate teaching of history or otherwise restrict what can be taught in the classroom. In a letter to participants in the AP Program, the Board reiterated its commitment to the intellectual integrity of AP classes and the principles upon which the AP Program is built. As the Indianapolis Star article reported, those principles include
“an unflinching encounter with evidence,” opposition to censorship and indoctrination and “an open-minded approach to the histories and cultures of different peoples.”
Should schools, presumably on their own at the behest of state or local government, violate these principles, the letter says they could lose their AP Program designation. It gives as an example the concepts of evolution.
In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, nearly 13,000 Hoosier students took and passed at least one AP exam.
Next, a recent report may explain why so many of our fellow Americans are receptive to propaganda, conspiracy theories–including Trump’s “Big Lie”– and various other simple-minded explanations of complicated realities. Okay, this is snark–but the Guardian recently focused on a study showing that over 170 million Americans who were adults in 2015 had been exposed to harmful levels of lead as children. That might explain it…
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, they estimated that half the US adult population in 2015 had been exposed to lead levels surpassing five micrograms per deciliter – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threshold for harmful lead exposure at the time.
The scientists from Florida State University and Duke University also found that 90% of children born in the US between 1950 and 1981 had blood-lead levels higher than the CDC threshold. And the researchers found significant impact on cognitive development: on average, early childhood exposure to lead resulted in a 2.6-point drop in IQ.
And that leads me to Item #3, my response to a question posed recently by several people who are regular readers and commenters to this blog: why have I not blocked a couple of recent trolls, or Todd’s increasingly unhinged posts?
Let me explain.
WhenI first began this blog, I established a very simple rule for commenters: civility. No ad hominem attacks. So long as regular commenters and the various trolls who visit here from time to time refrain from personal nastiness (or repeated efforts to dominate the discussion), I don’t block them, no matter how looney-tunes I may personally regard their various theories and accusations.
One of the significant downsides of the Internet is its enabling of “bubbles.” Blogs with a definite point of view–a category into which this one certainly falls–are especially likely to “preach to the choir.” That preaching has some value–it may illuminate issues in new ways, enable thoughtful discussions, and/or reassure people that others see the world the way they do.
But bubbles can also be blinders.
Most of us agree in the abstract that we should listen more carefully to those with whom we disagree. That’s in the abstract, however. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone–I tend to pay much more attention to people who express opinions and take positions with which I broadly agree–or at least regard as reasonably evidence-based– and dismiss the opinions of those I’ve categorized as ideologically rigid and/or irrational. It’s called confirmation bias, and most of us are guilty of engaging in it.
That said, it really is important that we recognize the extent to which many people on both the Right and Left desperately need to see the world in black and white, need to identify the “bad guys” who are responsible for their troubles and disappointments, and need to impose conceptual order of some sort on a complicated, shades-of-gray world. For many of those people on the Right, the “bad guys” are all people of color and/or non-Christians; for those on the Left, the “bad guys” are all rich people and corporate actors, a/k/a nefarious Oligarchs.
Reasonable people can have productive debates with folks who occupy a different place on the political spectrum, but who live in the real, shades of gray world. We need to recognize the difference between those people–with whom we can have principled and even heated disagreements– and those whose anger, fears and inability to tolerate ambiguity have permanently warped their world-views.
We can’t make those distinctions if we wall ourselves off and refuse to acknowledge their existence, or the distinct nature of the challenges they represent.
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