Beyond Feelings

48 PART ONE The Context
We may not be able to express our knowledge in words. The best we may
be able to say is “I just know, that’s all” or “I know because I know.” Yet
these replies are feeble and hardly satisfy those who wish to verify our
knowledge or acquire it.
Testing Your Own Knowledge
Following are some items of “common knowledge.” Determine how
many you already know, and then decide, if possible, how you came to
know each. Complete this informal inventory before continuing with the
chapter.
1. Women are nurturing but men are not.
2. African Americans had little or no part in settling the American West.
3. Expressing anger has the effect of reducing it and making us feel better.
4. The Puritans were “prim, proper, and prudish prigs.”
5. Before Columbus arrived in the New World, Native Americans lived in
peace with one another and in respectful harmony with the environment.
6. Alfred Kinsey’s research on human sexuality is scrupulously scholarly
and objective.
7. Employers import unskilled labor from other countries to save
money.
8. The practice of slavery originated in colonial America.
It would be surprising if you did not think you knew most of these
items. After all, many writers have written about them, and they are
widely accepted as conventional wisdom. But let’s look a little more
closely at each of them.
1. Barbara Risman became curious about this idea and decided to
study it further. Her findings challenged the conventional wisdom.
Apparently, men who are responsible for caring for children or elderly
parents display the same nurturing traits usually associated with
women. She concluded that these traits are as dependent on one’s
role in life as on one’s sex. 1
2. The facts contradict what is known. For example, 25 percent of the
cowboys in Texas cattle drives were African American, as were 60
percent of original settlers of Los Angeles. 2 The reason these facts are
not more widely known is probably because of scholarly omission of
information about African Americans from the history books.
3. Conventional wisdom again is wrong. After reviewing the evidence
about anger, Carol Tavris concludes, “The psychological rationales
for ventilating anger do not stand up under experimental scrutiny.
The weight of the evidence indicates precisely the opposite: expressing
anger makes you angrier, solidifies an angry attitude, and establishes