Understanding and Using Perspective

Some people may find it confusing distinguishing between critical thinking and perspective.  Both employ a rational thinking process, but one has to do with accuracy and the other with the appropriate reaction.

For example, when we see a cartoon roadrunner hand an anvil to a cartoon coyote hesitating in midair after stepping off a cliff, we know it’s inaccurate.  Galileo showed that objects of different weights fall at the same speed.  The anvil makes no difference.  That’s critical thinking.  Knowing this we don’t immediately sit down to write an irate protest letter to the company demanding an apology for exposing our children to anti-science material and threaten to boycott their sponsors.  Perspective helps separate the trivial from the important.

But we get caught in slightly less silly perspective traps every day.

As another example, suppose people could wear a pair of lenses that allowed them to see normally, but also to see every germ crawling around them.  It would be a challenge for many people to walk by the kitchen counter or bathroom without stopping to mop something up or dab in a corner.  Such an invention would be a curse.  Those who today overuse hand sanitizers would be found dead in their houses, not from germs but from the inability to do anything else but clean!

But today we have the equivalent of those germ-glasses and don’t even realize it.  They come in the form of the news media and some environmental movements.  We think the condition of the country and the world are much worse than they really are because we see every day, sometimes far more often than that, stories about crises, epidemics and disasters.

Does anyone think that as long as there is a single shooting in the United States, only one natural disaster anywhere in the world, one person starving or one brutal conflict; that the news media won’t have reporters on the scene to tell us about the horrible tragedy? Of course not, their livelihood depends on stirring us up. Moreover they will draw it out for all it’s worth if it reinforces their political beliefs. 

Does anyone think that as long as there is a single speck of dust in the air that some organization would not tell us that we face a serious pollution problem, that we are exposing our children to a potentially toxic environment and that something must be done about it immediately?  Of course not, their livelihood depends on stirring us up.  Moreover they will show us pictures of the direst situations with the saddest looking children to elicit our moral and financial support. 

That feeling of being stirred up is the reaction that perspective should help us deal with. It causes us to stop to see what the situation really is. How widespread is the problem? How dangerous is the situation to us personally? Are those sharks really poised off our favorite beach waiting for a snack? Is that virus that affected 18 (or 318 or even 3018) people out of 330 million really an epidemic? Are the air and water not clean enough?  Is the chance of an accident or occurrence that is less likely than being struck by lightning worth protesting or demanding a new government program?

These are questions that are often never answered, but are important to our personal physical, mental and financial wellbeing, and also to the progress of America.  We need critical thinking to research the facts and perspective not to overreact.