A little learning is a dangerous thing
by George Jonas
CanWest Publications
December 30, 2004
If one asked politically sophisticated people during the last days of the American presidential elections, Sen. John Kerry had it in the bag. After all, he won the debates, and the exit polls were giving him an edge.
Politically unsophisticated people thought President Bush would squeak by, though most couldn't say why. They were relying on their gut feelings. They knew little about exit polls. Many haven't even bothered watching the debates.
How could political sophisticates be so wrong? Easily. It's their stock in trade. In Canada they displayed it at Meech Lake (1990) and Charlottetown (1992).
I'm not trying to defend instinct against learning. I'm only defending instinct against a little learning. The British humorist George Mikes used to say that to find out what a country is all about one should either spend three days in it or 30 years. Anything in between, and one is likely to miss the point.
The verbal caricatures Mikes drew of Britain, the U.S., Germany, Israel, or Japan were often more revealing than collections of earnest studies. Nothing touches 30 years of exhaustive analysis of a subject, but three days worth of impressions often beats fact-finding missions of six months.
Impressions and instinct are no match for knowledge and experience, but they tend to be more reliable than the usual smattering of information imparted by college courses or field trips. Frequently people with the worst misconceptions about places like China or Cuba are those who visit them as part of a delegation or group holiday. Far from opening their eyes, their superficial travel experience only set their ignorance in stone.
When systematic thinking takes over, instinct goes to sleep. Thinking requires time and effort of which people are often in short supply. They arrive at their conclusions in that mental twilight zone where thought has not yet matured but instinct has already begun to nod. That's why smart people often make dumber decisions than fools.
This is also behind the syndrome known as "beginner's luck," where people of no experience outperform people of moderate experience. My old fencing master used to say: "Practice hard, and you'll have no opponent to worry about, except one who practiced even harder than you, or one who has never had a sword in his hand."
A shrewd guess beats a poorly programmed computer. Pilots are taught to rely on instruments in cloud rather than on their kinetic senses, but if an instrument is suspected of malfunction, the drill is to promptly cover it. It's better to fly by the seat of your pants than by a faulty instrument.
People who flew by the seat of their pants thought Bush would win in November. People who relied on faulty instruments opted for Kerry.
Not all problems are open to instinctive solutions. A doctor would hardly want to rely on his instincts about a surgical procedure. But even in science a good hunch beats a miscalculation. The sorcerer's apprentice gets into trouble because he knows a little magic. If he knew none, he'd have no problem; nor would he have a problem if he knew enough.
The big fallacies of our times have rarely affected untutored people first. It isn't high school dropouts who fall for the deadliest trends, but university professors and students, along with their peers in the media and the arts. Fascist or communist fashions spread from the educated (or semi-educated) classes to the uneducated, not the other way around. People of inquiring minds are more at risk of error than dullards.
The parable of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden teaches a lesson. There's no need to close all schools to heed it, or to avoid spending more than three days in a country if we cannot spend 30 years. All we should remember is that whenever we learn a little we take a chance, which we can only reduce by learning a lot more.
Take dropping in on a mass murderer, as Paul Martin did on Col. Muammar Gadafi the other day. It's the kind of thing that takes a little learning. A person of less sophistication than Canada's Prime Minister wouldn't understand that Libya's dictator is turning over a new leaf, while a person of much more sophistication wouldn't think that it mattered. As a result, neither would validate mass murder with a neighbourly visit. This, I think, is why the poet Alexander Pope suggested that a little learning is a dangerous thing.