Feelers vs. Thinkers
By James D. Miller
http://www.techcentralstation.org/100305C.html

Bill Bennett's recent abortion comments exposed the divide in America between thinkers and feelers. Bennett said "If you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose -- you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." But Bennett then immediately added that doing so would be "an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do." No thinking person listening to Bennett would believe that he ever advocated aborting black babies.

But Bennett's abortion remarks did conjure a horrible image of the mass killing of unborn black children. Feelers, those who believe emotional reaction should trump all else, naturally were horrified at Bennett's comment. A feeler would find this image very painful to bear. A feeler, therefore, might feel that Bennett would have presented listeners with such a word-picture only if he himself was not bothered by the idea of killing black babies. Thinkers, however, have been defending Bennett because they believe that intellectual rigor often requires deliberately confronting painful images to get at truth.

Besides attacking Bennett, feelers have also gone after Larry Summers, Bill Maher and John Roberts. Harvard President Larry Summers recently suggested that researchers should look into whether genetics could explain why there are so few women scientists. Feelers immediately condemned him. Summers suggested something intensely painful for some feminists to hear. His feeler critics assumed that he would put them though such an emotional ordeal only if he hated them. For feelers Summers' comments were so horrible in part because deep down these feminists probably think there might be a genetic cause for the dearth of female scientists.

Bill Maher, the former host of Politically Incorrect, got in trouble with feelers when he said that the 9/11 hijackers were not cowards. A thinker would have to concede that those who deliberately give their lives for a cause, regardless of how horrid the cause, don't fit the conventional definition of cowards. A feeler, however, would violently reject associating any positive qualities, including bravery, with the 9/11 hijackers. A feeler would believe that Maher would have done this only if he sympathized with the terrorists.

Dianne Feinstein recently made herself the Queen of Feelers when the senator announced she was voting against John Roberts because he wouldn't answer questions as a son, husband and father but just as a dispassionate lawyer. She objected that Roberts gave only "very detached response[s]." Senator Feinstein clearly believes only feelers are qualified for our Supreme Court.

Schools, with their focus on raising students' self-esteem, are doing everything possible to raise our children as feelers. U.S. students do horribly on international math tests but get top marks in mathematical self-esteem. Anything that makes a person or group feel bad is considered a sin by the educational establishment. One educationist even frets over "the damage done to [students'] self-esteem by the dominant culture's fetish about reading and writing." Another consequence of the triumph of educational feelers is the prevalence of speech codes at many colleges which are designed to prevent favored groups from having their feelings hurt.

James D. Miller writes The Game Theorist column for TCS and is the author of Game Theory at Work.

[Joe] The point is that Bennett was employing a logical disproof device known as a reductio ad absurdum argument, wherein one extrapolates extreme and absurd consequences of accepting or taking a particular contention seriously in order to demonstrate that one cannot in fact do so (that is, that one cannot accept or take the proferred contention seriously).  One who was indeed a racist would NOT have chosen a racially discriminatory if/then as an example of absurdity because, to the racist, such a contention would not be viewed as absurd -  but Bennett did exactly that, and immediately thereafter, so NO rational or reasonable non-ideological-axe-grinder could mistake either his purpose or his intent, furthermore explicitly condemned the absurdity he had just used in the reductio ad absurdum, an assertion that had the added advantage of stamping a Q.E.D. on his logical disproof of the assertion he had just, via his absurd counterexample, just ridiculed.  But those who psychologically WANT or NEED to believe all sorts of things, including but not limited to things about others, whether these things are religious, socio-cultural, or ideological/political, will tend to do so whether or not there is in fact evidence to support such beliefs, and even when the evidence that exists would seem to undermine them - especially when their self-identity has been invested on the other side of an us/them divide from the one in which they place speakers whom they will then (wish to) willfully and negatively misconstrue (and, indeed, if their self-identity has been invested on the same side of such a divide as where they place speakers, they will then (wish to) willfully and positively misconstrue them).
Bill Bennett is anti-abortion, a position I vehemently do not share, but he at least attempts to keep his opposition to abortion on ethical (he values possible future life of the fetus more than he values the actual present freedom of the woman, and here he and I disagree) rather than pragmatic grounds.  His response was directed at an anti-abortion interlocuter who had asserted that abortion had cost the government tax revenues, and thus was a negative; he countered that selective abortion, by cutting crime, could be seen as a positive.  It is another form of a riposte to the argument that abortion had perhaps terminated the next Gandhi in utero; the riposte being that there was just as much of a chance that it had done the same to a future Hitler - an argument with which, I daresay, we are all familiar.
I think that what enrages many people about Bennett's remark was its unspeakably un-PC truth; there is, universally, more of the murder/theft/assault/rape kind of crime in the lower socioeconomic brackets, and these brackets are indeed, in the US, disproportionately comprised of blacks, so such selective abortion would indeed be likely to reduce the rate of such crimes, however execrable, reprehensible and itself criminal such a genocidal action might be.  But - and this is the point - such an action is NOT unthinkable, for something not even conceived cannot be immediately rejected, as Bennett did, as evil and horrid in the extreme, thus proving, by reductio ad absurdum, his point that the abortion debate should remain on the level of (future possible) life vs. (present actual) liberty, and not be dragged down into the dangerous morass of policy-directed financial or law-enforcement expediency.  But the PC police wish to censor free speech, even when it is employed in the pursuit of a logical point; they do not wish such a distasteful truth to even be expressed, even when it is expressed as a means to defeat a position by means of appealing to the undeniable fact that acting upon such a truth in such a way would be to act in a manner that can only be characterized as one comprised of as pure and unadulterated an evil as can be conceived of in our morally relativistic age.
Do not mistake me here; Bill Bennett has many problems, the hypocrisy of a compulsive gambler masquerading as a moral arbiter figuring prominently among them.  However, if one wishes to burn the brand of racist upon his furrowed brow, one cannot use this particular statement in order to do so, for if his statement is read as it has been transcribed, it would, in fact, tend to indicate racism's absence, rather than its presence, in its author. 

Mermaid, I apologize.  I actually had dared to hope that, for once, you might actually concede your debating position to a superior logical argument, one the merit of which any honest logician would be forced to acknowledge.  But that would assume that you had the capacity or desire to comprehend it.  Instead, you revert to another indulgence in a conclusively logically and linguistically refuted and banal instance of a name-calling slur, one which Bill Bennet's own statement conclusively belied.  But that context does not serve your condemnatory purpose, so you dismiss or ignore it, and that is the laughable thing.  The Rorshact to which I earlier referred has, by means of your own responses, indeed categorized, not Bill Bennett, but you.  The truth to which I referred is that there would be a lesser aggregate CRIME RATE if the crime rate of the black population were removed from the aggregate crime rate than if the crime rate of the black population were removed from the aggregate.  This evidentially indisputable fact may be uncomfortable for some.  However, it is not due to any differeing genetic predispositions between the groups, but due to their differing socioeconomic strata.  Whether the group populations are even or 10: 1 does not matter as to the direction that the increases or decreases take, only to their degree, and the same may be said of whether a group commits precisely twice as much crime as another or merely some other higher degree, just as it is equally true that three is greater than two and that thirty is.  But (and I should have learned this lesson long ago) there is no convincing the willfully noncomprehending.  I now know that I am faced with someone who would internimably assert that 2 + 2 = 5, and indeed in a way has done the logical equivalent of this, if it validated their own personal prejudices with regards to the person under discussion.  I am through with this particular debate, and leave it to the viewers of it to ascertain for themselves who did and did not prove their position.  If they possess both honesty and logical acumen, I harbor no doubt as to their judgment in this matter.

If you can furnish the school quote to which you keep referring, I would like to see it - with internet-accessible references; otherise I will be forced to conclude that it is merely another attempt at spiteful and false character assassination.