The peril of selective reasoning

This piece was originally published in the News & Record on April 18, 2007.

I’d imagine I was far from alone in picking a well-worn Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., novel from my bookshelf upon reading his obituary Thursday morning. I opted to use Mother Night as my vehicle for mourning, re-reading my crisp, yellowed copy over the course of the next two days; Vonnegut was always a quick read due to deceptively simple language, short chapters and that quality that is most often summed up as being “a page-turner”.

Vonnegut was a master of cynicism hidden in humor, wild but somehow plausible scenarios that made readers laugh through injustice, suicide and even the end of times. It was only after laughing my way through my first reading of Cat’s Cradle that I realized the way it tapped into a feeling so applicable to today’s world: that we have somehow outsmarted ourselves right into extinction.

Mother Night includes some similarly timely ideas, one of which is most apparent as the protagonist, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., mused about the misfiring of the totalitarian mind with words that could easily be applied to any kind of extremist. In it, he likens the gaps in the knowledge of every human being to missing teeth in the gears of a clock. For extremists, the missing teeth were not always the result of simple omission but instead “[t]he willful filing off of gear teeth,” Vonnegut wrote, “the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information…” In short, those facts that do not support the belief are dismissed as false.

Psychologists speak of this processing of information in terms of cognitive dissonance: When our deeply held beliefs are threatened by new, contrary information, we must either reject the new information or change our beliefs. Care to guess which option we most often take? In this context, discarding information is most often the result of self-protective tendencies and not a desire to be ignorant.

While the “willful filing” can be seen clearly in most hot-button issues, it is in the movements on either side of the Iraq war debate that it is most apparent today. Each side denies that there is any validity in the arguments of the other side; each suspects the other of spreading lies and deluding themselves into believing those lies. And though the teeth were filed with the intention of strengthening their argument and therefore their side of the debate, each lost tooth tends to alienate the majority of Americans who work so hard to add teeth with every news program watched and every analytical book read.

I staunchly believe that we must leave Iraq, and I, like many, wonder why 64 percent of Americans agree and yet are still not compelled to turn belief into activism. Still, I can understand the ambivalence of mainstream America who, on the one hand, supports the anti-war movement but, on the other, is uncomfortable with many of the methods employed thus far. Perhaps they are seeking something more immediately effective than the change in Congress they pushed through in the last election, but with the restraint that allows communication between sides, that allows us to retain the ideals and, yes, rules, that define America.

When I wrote similarly about finding a middle ground in the abortion debate, I was accused of being naïve. But I would gladly bear that accusation so long as I, like Howard W. Campbell, Jr., can look back on my life with the knowledge that “never have I willfully destroyed a tooth on the gear of my thinking machine.”