Francis Bacon. (The Jacobean Philosopher, not the 20th C Painter)

In The Advancement of Learning, Bacon wrote:

"'The first distemper of learning' is denounced as that by which 'men study words and not matter.'"  He further argued that "men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reasons and conceits."  He added "this kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen, who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator*) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or of time, did out of no great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books ... cobwebs of learning admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit." (1)

*Aristotle had taught, and many generations of his adherents had accepted, that an object of low weight would fall more slowly than an object of greater weight.  Galileo actually tested this theory and found it to be wrong, and Isaac Newton agreed with him, but by then, Aristotle was long gone and could not personally be corrected.

I know what you're thinking.  WTF, Fred?  Where are you going with this arcane and seemingly self-stimulatory nonsense?

Well, here's the thing.  I've been there myself.  I might even have perpetrated this fault on a bad day or two.  It's not hard to get so lost in your own thought process that you forget how insular and distorted it can become.  You can substitute theorizing and imagining for real reasoning, and even observation, and it leads to very wrong conclusions.  Now it's true that I may never have had a real gift of gab, as some people do, and maybe I didn't succeed much in persuading people to buy into some of the ideas of which I had convinced myself, but I won't lie here.  I did, on occasion, work myself around to distinctly faulty conclusions, paint myself into an untenable intellectual corner (which turned out not to be true), and communicate my brilliant, but wrong, bottom lines and underlying "reasonings" to other people.  Yup, I've done that.  And I'm not the only one who's done it.  Francis Bacon thought there was a whole system of learning and teaching, over centuries and millennia, that did that.  I suppose that if anything, I should be glad that I wasn't more successful in "baffling with bullshit" when I would have told myself I thought I was "dazzling with brilliance."

But, I try to do the right thing, and I know not to get too carried away with myself if truth and reality are the aims, which they are.  Although it's tempting to latch onto statements, postures and systems of reasoning that seem to be engaging to other people.  Everyone wants to be liked, right?

Take, for example, the matter of annexation of "over there" by BP.  I wrote a whole clever and wise-assed blog post explaining what a bad idea it was.  The date of that post was 10/3/12, and I called it "Prostitution."  (See how clever and wise-assed I was?)  Francis Bacon would have used that post as a perfect demonstration of the power of imagination and rote over reality.  By the time I wrote another mostly anti-annexation post on 11/13/12, I was still poised against, but I was starting to entertain questions, maybe even some early doubts about my resistance.  As I learned more, I came to see I had made a mistake, and the posts of 6/12/13, 7/12/13, and 10/30/13 were pro-annexation.  I even included the fact that I had changed my mind as part of one of the titles.

Likewise with outsourcing sanitation.  I'm proud, and a bit embarrassed, to say that in last year's election campaign for Commission, in the Candidates' Forum, I was the only candidate to receive applause for something I said.  The question was about outsourcing Village services, and I sweepingly said "I wouldn't outsource anything."  Boy, did that resonate with people in the audience.  But the subsequent process of learning more, and having to deal with facts instead of just my own fantasy life, led me to realize the error of my approach, and to change my mind and my position.  Bad, bad, bad.  But correct, correct, correct.  You might be thinking my change of position was like the line about the operation that was a success, but the patient died.  I'm thinking the opposite.  I could have performed a "successful" operation by upholding the stated wishes of a group of my neighbors/constituents, but I know this would have hastened the real death of the Village.  (Although, as it was alluded to by Bob Anderson, it's extremely likely that if we had not outsourced sanitation this year, we would probably have done it next year or so, just at a greater loss to the Village.)

Bacon was right.  When you confine yourself to what you tell yourself, or to what you and a close group of like-minded people agree to, you don't learn, and you don't function in reality.  If all you want to do is theorize, it's OK to be wrong.  But if there are practical and functional consequences, you can't afford to be wrong.  Not unless you're OK with the adverse consequences.  I wasn't.

(1) Rebellion: the History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution, Peter Ackroyd.  Thomas Dunne Books.  2014