The near-universal hypocrisy in what Americans do in private versus what they say in public about schooling is not an isolated example. Instead, it reflects the currently widespread assumption that there should be two completely divorced realms of thought:
- In the lower sphere of private life, we figure out how to make mundane decisions like where we'll buy a house using all the information and intuition available to us, such as our awareness of racial differences in academic performance and crime rates.
- In the higher sphere of public discourse, however, where public policy is discussed, much of this useful knowledge is simply off-limits. As Larry Summers, then the president of Harvard, discovered, there is much in the human sciences of which we are never supposed to speak.
This bifurcated mental model is strikingly similar to the dysfunctional conceptual map Renaissance natural philosophers, such as Galileo, inherited from the Ancient Greeks. According to Aristotle's still-dominant cosmology, there was a fundamental divide between the grubby "sublunary sphere" where we humans dwelled, and the higher celestial realm -- where, by definition, perfection reigned.
The sun and the planets revolved around the Earth embedded in crystalline spheres, the circle being the most ideal of all shapes. To make the observed data fit the presumption of circularity, the Alexandrine astronomer Ptolemy elaborated a baffling system of "epicycles," with smaller spheres embedded within larger spheres.
The Ptolemaic system is strangely reminiscent of the various Rube Goldbergian explanations popular today to explain away the racial test score gap. One example: Claude Steele's theory of "Stereotype Threat." Steele hypothesizes that stereotypes make minorities so scared of scoring badly on tests that their discomfort makes them score exactly as badly as the stereotype predicted they would! It's almost as unfalsifiable a theory as Ptolemy's was for 1500 years.
In the conventional wisdom of 1600, the moon, like all heavenly bodies, had to be a perfect sphere. It just had to be, even though it looks imperfect to your lying eyes:
"The dark spots on the moon that been visible to man throughout the ages were explained away as parts of the moon that absorbed and emitted light differently than other parts -- the surface itself was perfectly smooth."
When Galileo pointed his new telescope at the moon in 1609, however, he observed changing shadows that could only be cast by mountains. He announced:
"The Moon certainly does not possess a smooth and polished surface, but one rough and uneven, and just like the face of the Earth itself, is everywhere full of vast protuberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities."
This, and much other new evidence discovered with his telescope, caused Galileo to doubt that the celestial and sublunary spheres were fundamentally different. Adopting the heliocentric theory of the solar system, Galileo began to develop a theory of mechanics (one eventually brought to near-perfection by Newton) that, unlike Aristotle's, would work for both the heavens and the earth. [More]