By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
Pacific Daily News
Last week I wrote about an emerging culture of intolerance, characterized by an increasing tendency of debaters to clutter discussion with insults and replace thoughtful discussion with a demonization of one's opponent."Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated," said Coretta Scott King. Chinese philosopher Confucius counseled, we must "cultivate our personal life, ... set our hearts right." Professor Jonathan Haidt's research looked for "ways to transcend 'culture wars,' ... to foster more civil forms of politics." His Civic Politics.org Web site begins with the question: "Can't we all disagree more constructively?"
Diversity and disagreement are healthy in a democracy. When 1,000 critical and creative thoughts bloom, a society has the opportunity to probe, to seek to understand, and to generate new ideas among a long list of options to advance humanity. However, unrestrained free expression invites licentiousness, found in the state of nature, that threatens human rights, freedom and survival.
Opinion is not to be confused with thought. As Tim Hurson -- founding partner of a firm that provides global corporations with training, facilitation and consultation in productive thinking and innovation -- posits, "truly focused thinking" includes mental activities such as "observing, remembering, wondering, imagining, inquiring, interpreting, evaluating, judging, identifying, supposing, composing, comparing, analyzing, calculating, and even metacognition (thinking about thinking)."
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