Think Critically and Merry Christmas

Not actually me, though similar costume.

I still recall the first time I approached a scene, examined the evidence, thought critically and challenged the information I was given. It was long before I met John Douglas, long before I became a professional writer, and it is a Christmas memory.

I was in the second grade – or maybe it was third – and I was cast as the dog in our school Christmas play.

The storyline of this play was that all of the animals who had attended the Baby Jesus at the Nativity were given the gift of speech for one night every Christmas Eve. And what I remember of the play is that all the animals were reminiscing about that time in the manger. As the dog, I guarded Jesus. The sheep provided warmth, the dove sang, the cow gave milk (I don’t think breastfeeding was on our intellectual horizon at that point) and so on.

Okay, I was fine with that. If animals can speak as a result of divine providence, that worked for me. God can do anything; so be it.

But here’s what raised my critical hackles, such as they were. The owl said something to the effect that he’d enjoyed 12 Christmas Eves with the ability to speak, and I think the sheep had had nine.

“And I, five,” I was then to say. I still remember my line.

But hold on! If we were all being divinely recognized and rewarded for our part in the Nativity, then how could the owl have been doing this speaking thing for 12 years and I only five? It made no sense. If we were all there, then we’d all have to have had the gift for the same amount of time.

I presented my logic to the teacher in charge. “Just say the line, Mark,” she directed. “Don’t overthink it,” or words to that effect. The line stayed as it was, the parents and other kids liked the show, and that was that.

But as we see, the line and the story stayed with me because of their total lack of logic.

Almost as illogical, in fact, as an Italian court concluding that Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito killed Meredith Kercher in a spontaneous orgiastic sex game, but that Amanda brought the kitchen knife murder weapon with her in her handbag.

Almost as illogical as believing Jesse Miskelley’s coerced confession that he, Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin had murdered three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, as part of a satanic ritual even though he got all of the key facts wrong.

Almost as illogical as the Boulder, Colorado, Police Department believing that Patricia Ramsey struck and killed her six-year-old daughter JonBenet even after the medical examiner’s report clearly chowed that the little girl died of ligature strangulation.

Almost as illogical as the good citizens of Salem Village believing their community was infested with witches because several teenaged girls were behaving strangely.

The only differences in the last case I cited was that it happened more than 300 years ago, and those overseeing the witch trials quickly came to see the errors of their ways. In the more modern cases I’ve cited, that has not been true.

Daniel Kahneman, the Princeton psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, wrote, “When people believe a conclusion to be true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.”

That may be okay for second grade Christmas pageants. It’s not okay for legal proceedings where truth, justice and lives are at stake.

In the immortal words of Charles Dickens, always pertinent at this time of year, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,” said Scrooge. “But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!”

Let us try to remember that throughout the year.

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!

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