Learn to ask questions wisely

I could be a national hero. I could introduce a new philosophy that would solve the problems… I could be a national hero. I could introduce a new philosophy that would solve the problems currently plaguing the world.

Now if only I could get out of bed the first time my alarm goes off. If only I could write an argument that didn’t degenerate into name-calling. Now that I think about it: I don’t know any great leaders, or at least any leaders I’d want to be, that rely on generalizations, minimal use of facts and liberal application of leaps of faith like I do.

It would be a pretty terrible existence if it weren’t for all the students who are similar to me in those respects, who I find to be comfortable companions. We were the ones who marched to the ticket booth in the union when we heard that Karl Rove would be speaking because we were going to bring him down. We were the ones who sat in philosophy class and believed it when philosophers claimed there was no way to prove the world really existed.

We’re the gullible ones. It only recently occurred to me that if I had been less willing to simply believe a lot of things, I could have accomplished a lot more. I’ll admit, it’s nice to dream about doing great things, and it’s nice to have a different understanding of the world opened up by learning something new. However, this becomes a big problem when we imagine that no one before us has tried what we’re doing now.

That tired workhorse of college student canon, “South Park,” offered an illustration of this dilemma when college students swarmed the town for a concert. Befriending the two chief protagonists, the students offered them knowledge that was like, totally awesome.

Which could really change the world, man. Pumped up on dogma, they didn’t see any necessity to approach any situation with a line of skeptical questions. They instead operated on intuition and good feelings alone.

As it was pointed out in a column in The Pitt News on the day of Rove’s visit, students asking questions of him should have acted like journalists. That means asking questions based on known facts and building up to an answer that might not be earth shattering but would rather be another weight that could tip the scales.

That means calm and level-headed questions that must be grounded in as many stabilizing practices as possible, such as research. And research doesn’t mean looking up Karl Rove on Wikipedia, reading an article about him in The New York Times and calling it a day.

We knew there was some other way to go about it, but there were a lot of questions we were all just itching to ask. As a friend put it, everyone who went up to the podium was thinking to their self, “I could be the one to take down Karl Rove!”

My knowledge of my own gullibility was given another dimension when a professor pointed out how often students accept what philosophers like Descartes argue at face value. We’re willing to claim that we can’t prove that the world around us is real, since if it really wasn’t real there would be no way to tell.

Think of it as something like the Matrix: If we were in it, could we tell that we were in it or that it was different from reality? When my philosophy class ended, many students would leave the room wearing glum expressions, feeling hopeless because they couldn’t tell whether or not our existence was real.

I could easily fill this entire paper with arguments stemming from the one above, but my real point is, why believe that this world might not be real in the first place? Why be so willing to accept such a crazy idea? I was able to accept this world just fine for 18 years until I came to college, and I discovered all the solutions to the world’s newly discovered problems.

So the next time a fellow student enlightens me by yelling that freedom of speech is everything, I think I should reply calmly that it’s worth very little if there isn’t anything intelligent to say. And if I feel the desire to shout a mantra of my own, I’ll ask this very simple and unassuming question: What do I know about what I’m saying?

It’s no good to operate on the belief that we’ve found that one universal answer and that the only trick is to show it to everyone else. In retrospect, it seems silly how easily I believed I had found the one answer to anything, when a healthy amount of skepticism would have saved me a lot of trouble.

Now, with a question that I’m sure is part of a budding tradition: If only I’d known that when I was a freshman.

E-mail Dan at dmv17@pitt.edu.