A Rational Conservative?
Cal me crazy but I think that the New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks may be the last rational Conservative with a voice.
His recent piece titled "Tools for Thinking" in which he explores some fascinating concepts of human thought -- a subject that seems nearly extinct in the current world of tea partiers, religious zealots and the many mouthy undereducated who represent the Republican party.
Here Brooks takes off from a question posed by the controversial cognitive scientist and Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
It seems that some 164 thinkers contributed suggestions, including Columbia University linguist John McWhorter, who cautioned that often 'something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice."
Many words to explain such things as the "qwerty" keyboard -- originally invented because the type bars on the old manual typewriters tended to jam. So the order of letters on the keyboard were changed to slow the typist down. And voila, no more jamming and although we haven't had type bars to contend with for years, we still have that same odd letter arrangement.
Brooks goes on with a lot of good stuff and even more in a follow-up piece. He also tells us why we should delve into the Edge Symposium that elicited all of this great thinking ... "Let me just recommend that symposium for the following reasons. First, it will give you a good survey of what many leading scientists, especially those who study the mind and society, are thinking about right now. You’ll also be struck by the tone. There is an acute awareness, in entry after entry, of how little we know and how complicated things are."
Check out all of it here, plus new On the Edge blog posts.
Positively,
Carolan
His recent piece titled "Tools for Thinking" in which he explores some fascinating concepts of human thought -- a subject that seems nearly extinct in the current world of tea partiers, religious zealots and the many mouthy undereducated who represent the Republican party.
Here Brooks takes off from a question posed by the controversial cognitive scientist and Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker: What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?
It seems that some 164 thinkers contributed suggestions, including Columbia University linguist John McWhorter, who cautioned that often 'something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice."
Many words to explain such things as the "qwerty" keyboard -- originally invented because the type bars on the old manual typewriters tended to jam. So the order of letters on the keyboard were changed to slow the typist down. And voila, no more jamming and although we haven't had type bars to contend with for years, we still have that same odd letter arrangement.
Brooks goes on with a lot of good stuff and even more in a follow-up piece. He also tells us why we should delve into the Edge Symposium that elicited all of this great thinking ... "Let me just recommend that symposium for the following reasons. First, it will give you a good survey of what many leading scientists, especially those who study the mind and society, are thinking about right now. You’ll also be struck by the tone. There is an acute awareness, in entry after entry, of how little we know and how complicated things are."
Check out all of it here, plus new On the Edge blog posts.
Positively,
Carolan
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