Do Americans lack the faculty of critical thinking?

Well, Ron Paul may be respectable(as long as you don't let his craziness get to you) but he's still a firm believer in intelligent design.
How's that for religious nutjob?

Considerable number of Americans are being cheated by the media.
Critical Americans are aplenty but without power.

Read this and form your own views please.

"Dear Dinesh D’Souza,

I write to you not just as an Indian to an American, but also as one who shares many of the memories that run in your veins, the colour of the skin over that, and the respect for a good life and democratic freedoms that nestle somewhere in between. I write to you specifically because everyday events frequently remind me of the enormous role the United States of America plays in the lives of distant mortals, and because of your unquestioning love for your chosen country that is reflected in the title of your book which has no question mark: What’s so great about America.

No, I don’t hate America. I can’t. Because I was nurtured by T.S. Eliot and Pete Seeger, by Ella Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath. Because I need Charlie Brown and Alfred E. Neuman in my life. And Audre Lorde, Miles Davis, Paul Simon… How can I shut out Broadway or Hollywood, or, I admit, turn off my television when Friends is on?

But Allen Ginsberg howls in my head: America why are your libraries full of tears? What I thought were ghosts no longer seem so moth-eaten. Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia: millions killed for flimsy reasons. Angry bombs lobbed at Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon and, for years, at Iraq’s “no-fly zones”: on suspicion, or even as mere distractions. Governments, many elected democratically, destabilised, attacked or compromised: Chile, Nicaragua, Guyana, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, Greece, Indonesia, Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, East Timor, Haiti.

The whole operation, newspapers say / supported by the CIA.

Why does a country perpetually proclaiming the primacy of democratic freedoms repeatedly violate precisely these? Could it, then, be the other way around: because it has such a history of undermining democracy, freedom and human rights in other lands, the United States needs to advertise its virtues so much? We know the supremacy of repeated auto-suggestion over lesser ways of manufacturing consent.

No, I don’t believe America is evil. Partly because every wrong in my McDonald-and-Coke-deprived Indian childhood was blamed on the CIA and its agents, till I almost blamed them for my homework. Partly because it is a nation founded on splendid principles. And partly because of my friend PD in New York. In 1991, he was in an advanced stage of Aids. We cried, we prayed, we cursed our fate and his sexuality, we braced ourselves. Thirteen years later, PD is still teaching students and passionately shooting off letters against “Israeli and American aggression”. He is alive and active only because of America’s excellent healthcare system and social security.

But my gurgling gratitude for America fades into other memories: of America pushing expensive America-made Aids drugs in impoverished African countries reeling from the pandemic, and trying to prevent them from buying cheaper generic options that would save thousands of lives.

And I remember Maria, of Angola. Beautiful Maria with her eyes brimming with dreams. She was born into the thirty-year civil war funded by the United States that destroyed her home, killed her father and crippled her country. But she dreamt on, with the unshakeable confidence of a 22-year-old single mother. Then her 4-year-old daughter died. In her bullet-riddled, caved-in family home I saw Maria’s eyes dry up, and the dreams shy away from the dark night of the soul.

But the horror of 11 September 2001 hushed even America’s harshest critics. Until the “preventive” war against Iraq, based on bogus propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s complicity in 9/11 and his indiscernible WMDs. Amazingly, Saddam is being tried for crimes spanning thirty years, mostly committed when America was his fast friend. America had even helped hush up the Halabja massacre during that period, blaming Iran instead. Reminds you of when America invaded Panama and nailed Noriega – and most of the crimes he was charged with dated back to when he was a close US ally.

I turn and burn./ Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Then suddenly, you have cases like “Rasul vs Bush” and “‘Hamdi vs Rumsfeld” in the Supreme Court. Man to man, about Guantanamo Bay. And magnificently, the court upholds civil liberties over executive arrogance. And we rejoice.

It’s this Janus-faced America that I write to you about. I would like you to recognise what it is like for us non-Americans to face the truth of the downside. America may be great, as your book so affectionately explains, but does it not also need to be good? Don’t you think that to talk about what is great about the US without talking about what is wrong will inflate the country’s most damaging qualities and ultimately hurt it also — though not as much as the rest of us?

Take Afghanistan. A country destroyed because America fought its cold war with the Soviet Union on its soil and in the process created people like Osama bin Laden as it funded, trained and nurtured the Mujahideen.

As you know, back here in your birth country India, these Mujahideen – backed by Pakistan and once glorified by America as “freedom fighters” – have killed about 40,000 people in Kashmir. Curiously, when such “freedom fighters” attacked America they swiftly morphed into “terrorists” who needed to be “smoked out of their caves”. My friend Pradeep Bhatia – talented photographer and proud father of a newborn – who was killed in Kashmir before 9/11, would be happy to know that he had not, after all, lost his life in the course of a freedom struggle but had really been murdered by terrorists.

For decades, America has waged wars, funded insurgencies and trained mercenaries, apparently to ward off the great communist conspiracy that threatened freedom and human rights around the world. Now, it is the conspiracy of Islamic militancy. How long do we lean together, headpiece filled with straw?

Fortunately, not everyone in America is leaning together. There is space for the severe dissent of Noam Chomsky, for the criticisms of Joseph Stiglitz. People like them and other honest professionals – and not the guns-blazing uncle in his top hat – make us admire America once more.

Forty years after the Civil Rights Act, this is the America I would rather see, America as a just nation that lives the democratic freedoms it preaches. Every day, around the world, millions like me pick out fragments of this America – a poem, a song, an argument – from the angry snarl of broken promises and shameless aggression, to embellish our personal worlds. And we remain indebted to an America that is fast becoming invisible.

If it disappears altogether, don’t you agree that the America it leaves behind will be just a shell, a hollow greatness emptied of the integrity and fairness that once recognised moral equality with other countries? Shouldn’t your next book be called What is fair about America – I won’t use a question mark either.

Sincerely,

http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-letterstoamericans/article_2047.jsp

This was the editor's note in 2004

There were over eighty national elections in 2004, including thirty presidential contests.

But I just typed “Elections 2004” into my Google search engine and in the first twenty results, only one didn’t refer to the race for the White House.

Many described the 2004 US presidential election as “The World’s Election”. It wasn’t (the world didn’t vote; the more “American” candidate triumphed), but at times it sure felt like it. The global media saturated us with up-to-the-minute coverage. Our conversations brimmed with “This is the most crucial contest since Lincoln-Douglas” and “The world’s future is in the hands of a few hicks in an Ohioan bowling alley!” There was no escape. The long shadow of Bush vs Kerry cast itself across Planet Earth. Come 2 November, it was just a relief to get the darn thing over with.

The election transpired at a time when, as me and my colleagues put it, “the consequences and implications of US power are subject to intense and global arguments.” With about 30% of world economic output, more than half of all military expenditure, and a seemingly limitless cultural reach, America is the “universal country”, the “superduperpower”, the “colossal Empire”. The American president is ordained “the world’s most powerful man.”
The human race is infatuated with America. Some love it, some hate it, the majority appear to do both. Just how important is this age of American hegemony we cannot yet judge. History will make and remake its judgment and keep selling us its revisionist must-reads, but one thing I think we can say for certain: at the very least, the presidency of George W Bush has amplified the potency of global feeling towards America. Clinton felt our pain, but that’s not interesting. Bush is judged to either cause our pain or heal it, depending on your persuasion – and that is interesting.

Bush’s appeal to 51% of the American electorate is the reason he doesn’t appeal to (roughly) 99.99% of non-America (and vice-versa). Because the world doesn’t like Bush’s Americanness (talked of both by himself and his detractors as a “Texan swagger”), it’s hard not to think the world doesn’t like America. Whatever else he’s done, Dubya has heightened all of our sentiments about his country.

So how to get beyond simplistic and emotive criticism of the USA? As American voters sizzled in the heat of an increasingly fiery campaign, openDemocracy undertook the “My America: Letters to Americans” project with precisely this aim in mind.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-letterstoamericans/article_2282.jsp

If critical thinking were a man we'ed send him to Guantanamo Bay.

Perhaps that will be the ideal place for innocents to get the lovely Torture .

Nope

Consider the debate among four Democratic presidential candidates on ABC News last Saturday night. In the previous week, the price of a barrel of oil briefly touched $100, unemployment hit 5%, the stock market had the worst three-day start since the Great Depression, and the word "recession" was in the headlines and in the air. So when ABC debate moderator Charlie Gibson announced that the first fifteen-minute segment would be taken up with "what is generally agreed to be... the greatest threat to the United States today," what did you expect?



As it happened, he was referring to "nuclear terrorism," specifically "a nuclear attack on an American city" by al-Qaeda (as well as how the future president would "retaliate"). In other words, Gibson launched his version of a national debate by focusing on a fictional, futuristic scenario, at this point farfetched, in which a Pakistani loose nuke would fall into the hands of al-Qaeda, be transported to the United States, perhaps picked up by well-trained al-Qaedan minions off the docks of Newark, and set off in the Big Apple. In this, though he was surely channeling Rudy Giuliani, he managed to catch the essence of what may be George W. Bush's major legacy to this country.

Imagining how a new president and a new administration might begin to make their way out of this mindset, out of a preoccupation guaranteed to solve no problems and exacerbate many, is almost as hard as imagining a world without al-Qaeda. After all, this particular obsession has been built into our institutions, from Guantanamo to the Department of Homeland Security. It's had the time to sink its roots into fertile soil; it now has its own industries, lobbying groups, profit centers. Unbuilding it will be a formidable task indeed. Here, then -- a year early -- is a Bush legacy that no new president is likely to reverse soon.



Ask yourself honestly: Can you imagine a future America without a Department of Homeland Security? Can you imagine a new administration ending the global lockdown that has become synonymous with Americanism?



The Bush administration will go, but the job it's done on us won't. That is the sad truth of our presidential campaign moment.
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16190

Americans have the ability to engage in critical thinking, but most (in general) are not inclined to exercise that ability because doing so takes time and effort and it might steer them away from their comfort zone. Unless a specific issue affects an individual directly and adversely, the typical individual simply doesn't care enough to expend the effort. In general, individuals are content to assume the role of sheep who blindly follow the shepherd to slaughter. So long as these sheeple are rewarded with an acceptable share of the grass in the pasture, they do not care to open their eyes to see the slaughterhouse in the distance. In other words, most people do not care to see beyond the end of their own nose other than on occasion to express a close-minded, uninformed opinion representative of the herd mentality. After all, opening one's own mind and educating oneself sufficiently to express an informed opinion takes time and effort that is more comfortably spent grazing in the pasture.

"As a Russian who supported and appreciated America’s support of freedom in my country and its determination to liberate my people from the tyranny of the Soviet Union, it is only natural that I find much to admire in your country.

America’s success as a system of political, social and economic organisation is unrivalled. Citizens of the United States enjoy the highest standard of personal freedom in the world and have a standard of welfare people in most countries can only dream about. As perhaps the best working democracy in the world, the United States has a strong, dynamic, hi-tech economy that is the motor of the global economy, promoting and aiding the development of many countries. Hundreds of millions of workers and businessmen across the world rely on the strength and stability of the American market.

In the 20th century, the US was the country that carried the torch of freedom. America resolutely resisted the main totalitarian calls of the century: Nazism, communism, Islamic radicalism. The US spent billions of dollars promoting ideas of freedom and democracy, financing numerous programmes across my region. People of my generation cannot imagine life without the Voice of America and Radio Liberty, both financed by the US government.

But despite all these virtues, as a player on the world’s political stage, the US is at best inconsistent, at worst treacherous.

Roughly and selfishly, the US imposes on others its own understandings of democracy, economy and culture. American hegemony – so evident in its cultural power – is like McDonald’s: very harmful, but very popular and very profitable.

America must take responsibility for the development of the modern world, for its peace and its safety. This is the role it has created for itself and this is the role it has an obligation to perform, with the support of its allies, including Russia. The struggle is between civilisation and chaos. America must not undermine the world’s civilised nations. Through the framework of international organisations and international law, America must help build democracy and work with Russia to help make our world safer and fairer.

America must learn that the American way is not the only way, and that countries that are different to America can still be strong allies and good friends.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-ukraine/article_2196.jsp

The great majority of voters do want to change George W Bush for almost any alternative president. But to understand the way in which they will vote, the criteria by which they will judge candidates, and therefore the candidates they will ultimately choose, it is necessary to ask: what kind of change do they want?

It is clear enough that most Americans want change in Iraq. But do they want some kind of victory? Or do they want to withdraw? How many of them draw from the experience of Iraq the idea that perhaps the world has not ceded to the United States a right to decide what governments shall rule everywhere? Or how many simply wish that it had been possible to overthrow Saddam Hussein and by that act remake Iraq in the image of the United States?

The unexamined nature of the desire for change is, if anything, even clearer and even more urgent in domestic politics. Many Americans can now see that the Bush administration's stewardship of the American economy has been pathetic.

The United States has become more dependent on imports of energy. Inequality between social classes, specifically between the rich and everyone else, is greater than since the 1920s.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/democracy_power/elections_time_for_change

I believe this question of whether there is a supposed lack of critical thinking is not what it appears to be. I base this on the fact that a large percentage of the U.S. population has been in the U.S. for over four generations. What that means is many, many (a majority of) families have a very personal history where their respective families struggled in this country to survive hard economic times, and the divided history of this nation, not to mention diseases that have since been eradicated.

So, for example, if there is a very religious population in this country, I believe that religiousness may reflect to some degree their respecting their family that struggled 100, 200, 300 years ago in this fledgling country, so today they can live a life of relative comfort by their ancestors' standards. Ancestors that were not criticized for being very, very religious!

I think what is more important, than supposed "critical thinking" in the U.S., is that the U.S. doesn't devolve in riots every time something happens politically, as in some developing nations.

And, no one questions the masses of adherents that chant and parade on holidays for a god that resembles an animal in a country with over a billion people (or close to it?).

My point is simple, the people (and their respective ancestors) that supposedly may not utilize critical thinking, they have made this country a very comfortable country for many people to live in. Also, safe by standards seen elsewhere. To question whether there is a supposed lack of critical thinking seems to me to reflect a degree of ingratitude to this country.

It also strikes me as audacious to be critical of someone else's beliefs, considering they are not trying to proselytize those beliefs, with the aim of having their beliefs reign over a theocracy.

Actually, critical thinking is a very subjective concept. I believe to think that one's criteria for critical thinking are objective criteria is not critical thinking at all. I would call it hubris of one's own thinking.