Balance--and Bias

On this question of balance: Almost anyone, if he will let himself, can bring himself to seeing only one side of a subject the side he wants to see. Debaters, for example, may at first approach a question without prejudice, but as they concentrate on the side they are assigned to, their vision can become almost as if someone had placed blinders upon them, and they see only the evidence that favors their side and fail to see (or fail to give due weight to) the evidence that favors the other side. And soon they have built, what is to them at least, a convincing case. And others who are assigned to defend the opposite side can become equally convinced in an opposite direction.

This is only one illustration of how men may become overbalanced if they confine themselves to restricted facts or disregard evidence which seems to them to be pointing away from where they want it to point.

This brings us again to the hazard of extreme specialization, and again to the question of what could be called “educated illiteracy.” Will Rogers once remarked that “there is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in,” which was merely his homely way of suggesting that because a person is an expert in one field he is not necessarily an expert in others also. It is not safe to assume that because someone knows one thing well he knows all things well.

And this brings us again to a point of advice to young people: that in their studies, in their pursuit of understanding, in all their activities, they do not put blinders upon their eyes and look only down narrow lines, and assume that the tangent they are on encompasses the whole sphere of eternal truth.

There are so many unanswered questions. There is so much that none of us knows, that all of us together do not know. And one of the great and invaluable lessons of life is to learn to live a well-balanced life, and to learn to know that when we have seen a small segment of something, we haven’t seen everything there is; and that when we have followed one little line of evidence, we haven’t yet found a fullness of understanding. There is danger in presuming to arrive at final conclusions with insufficient facts.