Connection: Rejecting and Global Warming

I was perusing other blogs and one of them reminded me that at the beginning of the year, Mr. Allen asked us to ask ourselves "To what degree do I understand that which I am about to reject?"

Now I, like most of you, assuredly, had completely forgotten about this question.  I also had a project in chemistry with a few other people where we had to prove that the United States should continue to use fossil fuels, as opposed to renewable energies such as solar, wind, nuclear, and geothermal.  A large part of the project was debating and clashing with other team's arguments, which meant we had to answer the main arguments against fossil fuels.

Obviously, one of the biggest arguments against fossil fuels is that they lead to global warming.  I tasked myself with coming up with answers to this argument.  The best response to it, in my opinion, was that global warming doesn't exist.  Without any further thought, I went found an abundance of articles, people, and journals that disproved global warming.  I had no conception of what the other teams arguments would be.

And that is about to run is into real trouble.  We presented fossil fuels yesterday.  Today, our main opponents, solar and wind power, will be presenting.  If they have a strong, well-researched argument for global warming, there is a strong possibility that we will lose.  Why?  Because I did not understand the argument I was rejecting.  I did not understand all of the nuances and caveats that come with the global warming argument.  For example, it's not really global warming, it's climate change, and they have ways of measuring global warming that take into account the urban heat island effect.

I know that Mr. Allen meant the question in more of a "don't be so quick to reject it" sense, but it definitely applies here.  Knowing the other sides arguments, particularly in a head-to-head debate, can only help.  And if you know their arguments better than they do, people will notice it, when you embarrass them.

It Matters: Hegel's Dialectic Approach to Problem Solving

Hegel's thesis was that for any problem, you could take the best parts of each side, and combine them to form something that will satisfy everyone.

This approach does not seem to be working for health care.  Obama has spent nearly a year pushing for a major health care overhaul.  In his latest push, he's trying to start a bipartisan summit on the issue, which would give him a chance to use something like Hegel's concept of synthesis.

A major obstruction in Obama's path so far has been the apparent lack of unity.  Republicans are ideologically opposed to any health care reform, and now that they have sufficient votes to filibuster, this is a major problem.  Combine that problem with blue dog democrats who are opposed to government spending, and it's next to impossible for Obama to compromise.  

Structural differences meant that the house was able to pass a health care bill that contained more of the provisions that democrats liked.  The Senate bill did not contain key provisions that were in the house bill, such as the public option.

This is really an example of Hegel's process of synthesis.  Both parts of congress do the process on their own.  The house has debate and creates a synthesis of the ideas of the two opposing sides, and so does the house.  Then, they both get together, and do the process over again, using the product of house and senate discussions as the starting point.  This is the part that has our current congress stuck; Pelosi can't convince enough democrats in the house to approve the senate bill, and the Republicans have too much power in the senate to pass anything more than they did.

Hegel's dialectic approach to problem solving would work great in the example above, except for the fact that votes are ideologically based, not logically based.