Question your assumptions

It is always good to question our assumptions. This is the key to critical thinking, meaning really giving a critique to our thinking.

Critique: evaluate (a theory or practice) in a detailed and analytical way: the authors critique the methods and practices used in the research.

It is common to point out that just because everyone agrees something is true, doesn't make it so. Some example is often cited from the past to make the point. It is ironic that the most common example people use to make this point demonstrates that the user doesn't take his own advice. That example is that people used to think the world was flat, and now we know it is round. Even though all the experts thought this, they say, it still wasn't true. When I hear people use this example, and it is terribly common, I cringe out of embarrassment for them. For this is in fact a belief about the past that is almost universally held and repeated that is not so. Those who use this as a paradigm example of everyone once thinking something that wasn't true, commit the very error they are lecturing about. For they see no reason to question this assumption. After all, everyone today agrees that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat, don't they?

Well in fact, no one in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat. All scholars believed it was round, because they had inherited this knowledge from the Greeks. The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras even determined the diameter of the spherical earth somewhere between 500 and 430 B.C., though the theory that it is round is older, dating at least to Pythagoras. All the Medieval philosophers accepted the sphericity of the Earth, and relied on Anaxagoras for their calculations of its circumference.

Upon learning this, many give the common cheeky reply that while it might be true that educated people in the Middle Ages believed the world was round, regular people probably thought it was flat. Who can say what regular people in any age think about things that are scientific? They mostly don't think about such things. But there is absolutely zero evidence that 'regular people' in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat, because there are no writings from non-scholars and priests left to us from the Middle Ages, since common people didn't know how to write. Hence there is no basis for this trope about the beliefs of illiterate people in the Middle Ages. It is simply an inept save of an ignorant belief by one who doesn't examine his beliefs. It is better to develop the ability to say to oneself when alone, 'I wonder if I'm wrong about this. Maybe I should question this assumption, look into it, see other points of view and more facts and weigh them.'

Another tart witticism people use to soften the sting of admitting the facts about the flat earth myth is to point to the Flat Earth Society. The Flat Earth Society was formed in the 1950s by modern people, and has nothing to do with the Middle Ages. It is based on a strange reactionary response to the seemingly counterintuitive nature to modern science, based on admitting how things look. Again, question your assumptions.***

Now I want to give some examples of assumptions that I've noticed largely go unexamined (uncritiqued) by most people. I have a saying: 'By the time everyone agrees something is true, it usually isn't anymore.'

Take the commonly repeated maxim that war is good for the economy. In reality, this cliche came about as a result of WWII, where the US economy was lifted out of the Great Depression by the frantic building of military equipment following Pearl Harbor. This put great numbers to work in war factories. Now the reasons that this was beneficial to the US economy (mostly noticeable after the war) were several. One is that the US and Canada were the only nations that had the safety and resources to build the enormous amounts of equipment necessary to launch an invasion of Europe. Obviously the European nations, fallen to the Germans, could not. And England had to focus on its survival against German bombing. The US and Canada alone were in this position. Secondly, the type of war that WWII was required large battle ships, and thousands of tanks and planes. This meant the creation of enormous amounts of jobs. Battle ships went into mothballs a long time ago. And very limited numbers of large equipment, relative to WWII are today produced. For example, the B-2 bomber (our most sophisticated bomber) took 40 years to develop in secret. Yet only 21 were ever produced. Only 230 F-35s, the most advanced US fighter plane, have ever been produced. Compare that to thousands of planes built during WWII and flown over Germany and Japan. Also these planes are not being built by 'Rosy the Riveter' (common people rushing to grab up millions of jobs) but by limited numbers of high-skilled workers and robots in a few secure locations. They do not produce lots of jobs for common people with High School diplomas as weapon building did in WWII.

Now how were these millions of jobs paid for in WWII? By the US issuing government bonds, many of which were purchased by the British.

Now this brings us back to our claim that wars help economies. WWII devastated the economies of Europe. That is why there was the Martial Plan after the war to help get them back on their feet. And this is not simply the defeated who ended up broke. England's economy was so decimated by the debts incurred to build that army with US and Canadian help that it was forced to sell off its empire.

The reason that Isabella and Ferdinand gave Columbus three ships to discover the New World was because their war with the Muslims, which ended in 1492, left Spain so broke that they were looking for a miracle. The French were so broke after aiding the colonists in the American Revolution, largely to spite their rival the British, that it contributed to the French Revolution. War is bad for economies generally and historically. Rome was toppled by too much war.

Sorry to wax so long on this assumption, but it's interesting for just how wrong it is. Modern military adventures bring profits to only a tiny circle of corporate elites, money made on the back of the economy and not for it, and leads to deficit spending and general harm to the economy. Consider the recession that followed the first Gulf War, and led to George H.R. Bush's defeat by Clinton in 1992. In fact the winning slogan adopted by the Clinton campaign was 'It's the economy stupid.' The second Gulf War led to a swift rise in oil prices and was marked by increased deficit spending and debt from which the US has not recovered. Post-WWII the US had the greatest trade surplus in its history. After the two Gulf Wars it had its greatest deficits. The decline in deficits between the wars, in the 1990s, had to do with the digital revolution, and nothing to do with war spending.

So the next time someone informs you that war is good for the economy, ask them to stop and question that assumption.

Let's now take another example of a common statement that goes unexamined.

History is written by the victors.

This has a ring of truth because it seems to be a tautology, something true by virtue of the words in it. These are often used as a kind of joke. In the role-playing video game Skyrim, one loading screen has the caption, "The best techniques are passed on by the survivors. -- Gaiden Shinji, 1E 490." Do you get the joke?

History written by the losers, the Babylonian captivity in Jewish art

But is history really always written by the victors? One of the oldest maintained histories ever written is the Jewish Bible (recorded in the Old Testament). The Jewish Bible is mostly the history of the Jews, at least beginning with Exodus. It was obviously written by Jewish scribes. What does it tell us? A string of defeats. This 'was' the history of the world to people for millennia in the West. Yet the Jewish Bible is almost all 'then this terrible thing was done to us by the victors, then that terrible thing.' In fact, the Jewish Bible (the earliest recorded western history, written and gathered by the Jews over 900 years) is largely a story of defeats. Its pages decry their military defeats, prophets ponder what they did wrong from God's point of views to deserve them, and swearing to one day have their own glory days once again. Examples of Jewish defeats recorded in the Bible include the enslavement by the Egyptian pharaoh, the conquest of Israel in 720 BC, the destruction of Solomon's temple and capture of the Jews by the army of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC, and the trauma of the Babylonian captivity. The Old Testament ends with the release from that captivity in 438 BC, but the Jewish historian Josephus in 70 AD records the destruction of the second temple by Rome, which began the second Jewish diaspora. Josephus, a Jew, does not sugar-coat his description of this atrocity by the Romans, and his is the most detailed account of it we have, Josephus himself having been a witness. Roman records, the history of the so-called 'victor,' don't mention the event. So much for history being written by the victors.

Now we come to the 20th century. The Jews have done more than anyone to record the history of the Holocaust, and work diligently to preserve it. Visit the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. financed predominantly by Jews. The Jewish motto about the Holocaust is 'Never forget,' the defeated again careful to record the crimes against them.

As we can see, the victors in these tragic 'conquests' hardly recorded the events if they did at all. Babylonian history (Iraqi history) makes scant mention of Nebuchadnezzar's conquest of Israel. Events are often more vivid and memorable to the traumatized survivors than the so-called victors. And the history of these events often come down to us from them.

The truth of the matter is simple. History is written by those who have writing, and consider it a good thing to record history. It has nothing to do with victors. Hebrew was one of the rare written languages of the years of its recording, and Jews are obsessed with their history. Most of the sacred holidays of Judaism commemorate some event in Jewish history, which is virtually what Jewish religion and its Bible are composed of. Incidentally, while Cuniform was a form of writing that predates and coexisted with Hebrew, it was mostly used to keep financial accounts and calendars, and not for history. These kinds of factors, writing and what a people emphasize as important, determine who writes history -- not who wins battles. Take the Vietnam War. The US lost the Vietnam War. It left having not achieved its objective. Yet the US history of the Vietnam war is massive.

Now for another example.

There is a constantly repeated adage that things are going faster and faster, and progress is still increasing its rate of climb technological. Some people have been so sure of this, and their imaginations so taken in by the image of this axiom, that they have hypothesized a zero point where the progress reaches infinite. This is absolutely crazy and unsupported by facts, but shows just how -- by the time most people agree on something it usually isn't true anymore.

I will show that things are slowing, and have for a long time, and explain the illusion that they aren't.

By the end of WWII in 1945, nearly everything that people used in their daily lives up to 1995, was already invented. And what was seen as 'improvements' were relatively minor. Some of these existed on paper, but the principle invention existed. Let's go through some.

1. Color Television. England has had television since before WWII. BBC Television was launched in 1927. It had to be discontinued during the war over concern the broadcast created a beacon for German bombers. Scottish inventor John Logie Baird made the world's first color broadcast on February 4, 1938.
2. Telephone. Some of these like the telephone are too obvious to explain they existed by the end of WWII, but I include many because these were the common accessories of homes in 1995.
3. Nuclear Bomb and Nuclear Power. The bomb existed in fact, and the power plant on paper. Electricity was first generated by a nuclear reactor in 1948 at the X-10 Graphite Reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
4. Washing machine. The first domestic automatic washing machine was introduced by the American company Bendix in 1937.
5. Jets, rockets. The Germans had developed the jet engine by the start of WWII, though it never introduced jets into the war. Its V-2 rocket was developed during WWI at the Peenemünde Army Research Center in Germany.

German WWII V-2 rocket

This should be enough to see that phone, televisions, and common household items and energy sources used in homes in the 1990s existed since 1945.

Now take a really good example of something we use today, the airplane or jet. As explained, jets existed in Germany since 1939, thought they were top secret. Now how far have jets advanced since then?

Boeing 747, 1978-2017

Well the most advanced passenger jet ever made, the largest with the greatest seating capacity, is the Boeing 747. It was first introduced in 1978. That is four decades ago. In fact the 747 was already on paper half a century ago. And recently it was decided to use the 747 for the new Air Force One. That's the plane specially outfitted to carry the US president.

In other words, airplanes reached their zenith half a century ago. There are countless examples like this. Except for fuel injection, cars run pretty much as they did at the end of WWII. The gas burning internal combustion engine, first developed by Mercedes-Benz, is in fact more than 150 years old.

Now everyone will be clambering to bring up computers. And especially the digital age. It is this that has given us the illusion of lightning progress. But we will see the illusion in it.

First of all, computers existed in WWII. IBM already existed during the war, and was instrumental in it on both sides of the conflict. In fact the Germans even had semiconductor chips.

Left: German Klystron tube of 1940-1941. Right: German semiconductor chips.

Now here is why digital technology was slower in coming? Computers are driven by logic, on logic boards. Logic was not very advanced prior to about 1913 when Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell completed their landmark work on logic Principia Mathematica, which greatly advanced logic and put it on the front burner of 20th century thought. Further advances were also required to make our digital computers and devices possible, including modal logic that evolved only in the 60s and 70s. Temporal logical, another relatively recent development, was also required for complex algorithms governing functions in a timeline. These developments in logic were what delayed the introduction of the digital revolution until the mid 1990s, and why we got a feeling of sudden outburst.

An invention that is deeply tied to digital logic, and came quickly on the heals of computers, is the LCD screen. This bright back-lit screen is what gave us the flat screen and finally the touchable screens of today that still seem to Wow us. It is perhaps due to the hypnotizing effect, and futuristic glow (seemingly inexplicable by normal intuitions developed from looking at analog devices) that we think of things as so futuristic today.

My daughter is 21. The internet became a public commodity the year she was born, a product of the logic-based digital revolution named above. When she was about 3 DVD players replaced analogue VCRs. Yet for all intensive purposes a DVD then is as good as one now. Few can notice the difference in Blue Ray. CD's reached their peak in the 1980s. They compress and play music at the level of perfection the human ear can discern. Any further development of digital high fidelity sound is lost, as no one can hear the difference.

The digital camera is about 25 years old, and what has increased is dynamic range and the number of megabytes a photo can record. But both of these have long outstripped any difference to the human eye under normal conditions. Until recently, giant highway billboards were blown up from photos taken on low ISO Kodak and Fuji film, pre-digital, yet no one could possibly tell the difference between visual quality of those and new ones shot in digital today. The distance from the Highway simply impedes any differentiation.

So in other words we are maxing out, reaching a place perhaps God intended us to reach, or even what is reachable. The one technology I think is possible, and that could amount to the final cap on all technological development, is fusion power, and there are signs we are within a decade or two of it. This would antiquate all previous forms of power with a perfectly clean, inexpensive, and potentially limitless power for all these wonderful devices.

There was an expression in the 1990s when computers were new on the consumer market, that processor speeds were doubling every three years. However, this may have once been true for a couple of years, but is not anymore. A processor on an Xbox (a highly popular gaming system by Microsoft) has about the same processor speed that one had ten years ago. Again, this is a case that by the time people are repeating something as 'obvious,' it's no longer true. To hide this slowing down, Sony and Microsoft add storage space to their Xbox and Playstation consoles, and trumpet the improvement. But such storage is old. To trumpet a terabyte of storage only veils to the consumer that this is not 'speed' but storage, a kind of false shell game to preserve the assumption that you 'must' get the latest technology, and what you had 'must' be out of date.

Anyway, in short I think that things are in fact slowing down, and that a very natural plateau is being reached in technology. I think the future advances will be spiritual and metaphysical, not technological and instrumental.

There are so many places where we can reconsider our assumptions about how things are, especially when we find ourselves repeating old yarns. War is good for the economy, history is written by the victors, things are getting faster and faster -- these are things we hear people say on a regular basis. I have used them as mere examples where we can reconsider what usually passes examined.

Anyone who reads this blog has noticed that I hardly ever state something that is a common assumption. Whenever I write anything, I stop numerous times to check myself. I naturally make mistakes. To err is human. But I try always to question not just the assumptions of others, but my own.

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Footnote ***

If one wishes to use an excellent example from history to make the point of virtually all scholars agreeing on something that was wrong, there is one that is really good.

For 2000 years, from the Greek philosopher Aristotle in the 4th Century BC to the Polish priest Copernicus in the 16th Century AD everyone agreed that the Sun orbited the Earth, rather than the other way around as we know it today.

The notion that people thought the Earth was flat was invented by Washington Irving (author of Rip Van Winkle) in the 19th century, and it somehow made it into text books. Possibly this got confused in people's minds with the planetary orbits, which really was misunderstood for centuries.

Another example that may also be getting confused with the flat Earth myth is the notion, also carried down from Aristotle, that the orbit of the heavenly bodies (planets and stars) have to be perfectly round. It wasn't until the early 17th century that Johannes Kepler realized these orbits were elliptical (oval shaped).

Both of these assumptions, that the Earth was the physical center of the Universe and that heavenly bodies moved in perfectly round orbits, were in fact believed by everybody, both in Greek and Roman times and the Middle Ages. So if you want to give a paradigm case, either of these will do. There are others, such as that belief 'animal spirits' coursed through the veins, and other misconceptions about human physiology, that lasted from Roman times until recent ones.

So when you want to say something to make the case about everyone being wrong, say something like, "Well people all thought the Sun orbited the Earth for 2000 years, and they were all wrong!" Of course, like everything, there is an exception. Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek philosopher who lived shortly after Aristotle rejected Aristotle's geocentric model for a geocentric one, but was shot down as a lunatic. He had to flee Athens for his impiety.