Philosophy / Pedagogy / Lesson Planning Inspiration

A version of this lecture was delivered May 2014 to graduating eighth grade students. What is printed here is the author’s director’s cut, with minor edits to for clarity. It’s the lecture the author would have liked to deliver, were time constraints not an issue.

For my final lecture of the semester, and as a way of reviewing key concepts we learned this year, I am going to talk about appearances. Particularly, things that have the appearance of truth, but are not really true.

Yesterday, we finished the video of an innocent debate between a billionaire and a fourteen-year-old girl, which we did not have much time to discuss. Going by our polls, the majority of you crowned the girl the winner. But in listening to bits of your group discussions on it, it seemed to me that most of you already had a negative view of GMOs [genetically modified organism] making you more sympathetic the fourteen-year-old, and less receptive to the other side.

For sure, the billionaire was hardly convincing. And I think the fact that he is so rich made him that much less credible. And for sure, the girl was impressive. She looked like the winner.

But I tell you looks are deceiving. That is the lesson in a sentence. There is a difference between seeming like someone won the argument and someone actually winning the argument. The person that can tell the difference is the educated person, which all of you should aim to be. Because if you know enough language tricks, enough rhetoric, enough understanding about how audiences react, you can cunningly make yourself look like you won the argument. And I think the less educated the audience, the less thoughtful and discerning, the more likely a deceptive arguer will get away with duping the audience. We know deceptive arguers by other names: politician, lawyers, salesmen, dads, etc. They are good at getting us to think that our arguments are bad, even though we are sure that the facts are on our side.

Remember the Bill Nye debate you saw in your science class earlier this year? He debated against a creationist and apparently lost in the eyes of the audience, even though the facts were on his side. And then you soon learned in your science class exactly why Bill Nye should have been the real winner of the debate. He just had a harder time explaining to the audience his concepts, which, as you know, are very complex. Yet he “lost.” The creationist “won” and had the appearance of truth without possessing it.

Back to GMOs: what is true and not true about it? Maybe the better question is, what seems true but really is not? Because what seems true to you is that GMOs are bad for you, bad for people.

There were an admirably brave few of you who came to this argument’s defense when I tried to explain why the claim was false. The example used was deformed vegetables. “So deformed vegetables aren’t bad for you?” one of you asked. But we all know that this was not a question so much as something that had the appearance of a question. It was more like a snide remark trying to pass as a question.

Then another one of you brought up the example of the fourteen-year-old’s experiment. She grew two carrots, one GMO, one “organic.” And it was argued that since the GMO one grew “weird,” deformed, it must be bad for people. But the bell rang! I did not get to explain, and maybe some of you left thinking I had “lost” the argument. (Indeed, some of you stayed here with me for lunch and had me explain the whole darn thing—lock, stock, and barrel!)

But let us back up and examine the argument, while at the same time reviewing the structure of an argument:

CLAIM (what are you arguing): GMOs are bad for people.

EVIDENCE (what tangible thing in the world supports your claim): GMO carrot grew “deformed,” while the organic grew “normal.”

WARRANT (what links your evidence to your claim): Deformed vegetables are bad for people.

Maybe seeing the argument outlined this way can help us understand it better.  Seeing it this way can maybe suggest concrete approaches to developing counter arguments. Could the argument be misinformed? That is, is the evidence un-factual or  something we check and reference? Or is the argument uninformed? That is, is the argument ignoring certain facts or other evidence that would automatically discredit its claim, without further explanation? Is the warrant faulty? That is, can we question the claim’s link to the evidence?

Of course you remember that this was how you had to format your arguments in the beginning of the year, when you first learned argument writing. You got so good that before the first semester ended we removed the labels, the training wheels, as I call them. Now you just write arguments, many very skillfully, including all the parts of an argument without the support of labels. And of course the ones you produce now are more complex. You employ multiple evidence and warrants in support of a single claim.

Your arguments will get more complex when you go on to high school. As they do and must, do not forget these basic element that should be present in every argument you writer, however complex.

Now, I should tell you that last night I tried to disprove my belief about GMOs. I think this is a good habit to have. New facts are always being discovered, while others are being disproved—this is the natural ebb and flow of legitimate science. The habit prevents me from looking like a fool or, worse, a deceptive arguer arguing for things that are not true.  

So, was I wrong about GMOs? I expected to at least do thirty minutes of research online. But the research took less than three. I took the usual route actually, one that I know is familiar to the great majority of us. I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Its entry on GMOs tells you that there is “general scientific agreement” that GMOs are not “riskier” than conventional food. Further research will confirm this.

Do you know what else has “general scientific agreement” in the legitimate sciences? That diets do not work. That climate change is happening. That we share ancestry with apes, as Bill Nye argued in his debate with the creationist. Science is a community, a collaborative enterprise, where people have to check each other’s facts, reproduce experiments, and many scientists have to independently arrive to the same results in order for something to gain general scientific agreement.

And us here we are a community of scholars burdened to uphold education’s tradition of looking into what is true and what is not, burdened to promote the truth, burdened to ignore what is not in the way we in learning institutions do not bother with astrology. You learn astronomy, a body of science that has general scientific agreement. Your science teacher would be dishonoring her duty as a teacher, for example, if she decided to replace your chemistry books with alchemy.

Let us think back to the fourteen-year-old “winner” of the debate. Her spectacle is exciting, even inspiring. We want her to secretly beat the billionaire, not just because he is rich but also because she is young and your age. But these things should not matter to us as educated people; what should matter is the substance rather than the appearance of an argument, peering into its basic elements; the weight of the evidence, not the soar of its eloquence, nor the beauty or feeling of the person delivering it. This is probably the hardest thing we have to do as learners. And if you are like me you simply cannot do it all the time, for every single argument the world throws at us. But we should because the ability to see through appearances has infinite uses.

As people we instinctively—maybe even primitively—believe what we see or perceive. And part of going to school is learning how to manage this instinct, in the same way we have to manage our instinct to procreate.

Again, not easy. Being educated is not easy, least because it requires lifelong maintenance. But the alternative to being educated is being easily fooled by appearances.

For sure, appearances convey a lot. But for sure, they almost always never tell the whole story. For example, there are people born with physical conditions that an insensitive person might call a deformity, suggesting that something might be wrong with these people because of their appearance. But the truth is, despite differences in our veneers, we human beings are biologically 99% alike. We are all virtually the same.

Do you know what else is 99% alike, but radically different on the outside? The GMO and organic carrots grown by the fourteen-year-old. They have the same genetic makeup, but are just grown differently.

In short, when we judge by appearances we miss 99% of the story.

To be fair, it does seem right that GMOs, because of its sci-fi unnaturality, are no good. Compare this with how we experience or perceive the earth: does it not seem right that the earth is flat, as many people thought thousands of years ago? Scientists, in science’s early stages, found it difficult to convey their findings because things they claim seem opposite to what our senses are telling us. Let’s take Galileo, for example. As he was trying to prove that the earth was revolving, spinning on its axis, a critic asked, “if the earth was rotating wouldn’t we feel it?” Which of course is less of a question than a snide remark, on par with “So deformed vegetables aren’t bad for you?” We know better now. And we know that Galileo perceived these truths not by appearances but by investigative and rational means of discovery, which you go to school to learn, practice, and ideally improve upon.

Why does this all matter? So our fourteen-year-old’s argument on GMOs is misinformed like most of us—what’s the big deal? Well, for one, this popular argument has threatened the health and wellbeing of peoples from third world countries.

Greenpeace, an environmental organization, for example, has employed misinformed arguments against GMOs. But for some Greenpeace activists, arguing is not enough: it must be combined with devastation against those who disagree. In the Philippines, Greenpeace activists have raided GMO farms, burning and ruining crops which serve as the main source of food distributed to malnourished populations. Many countries use GMOs to feed its starving people, in Africa, in Latin America, and in other agrarian countries.

These are just a few examples why this argument matters. But in general, as you move on to high school, where I promise that you will be much judged by your appearances, the more important lesson here is that it is beneath an educated person to judge people and things and ideas and carrots by their appearance, that there is 99% more to them that you will miss out on and oversimplify, at the expense of what is true, at the expense of being fair and thoughtful and humane individuals. Remember this when anyone succeeds in making you feel bad about what you look like, bad about who you are inside, bad about anything they choose to label as “deformed”. That there is 99% of you that these mean people are missing out on. Remember this wisdom and you will get through high school better than fine.

Thank you for a fun, challenging, and memorable year. It has been a pleasure teaching you.

SUGGESTED FURTHER READING

The Science of Agriculture: A Biological Approach by Ray V Herren

The Republic, Phaedo, and Gorgias by Plato

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

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