Prudence - i.e., knowing and acting on what is true - is the first virtue.

An ignorant population gets an ignorant leadership and ignorant governmental policies.

Most Americans believe that the homosexual percentage of the population is larger than the Protestant percentage, which strangely accords with a media and government that shows more concern for homosexual issues than those of concern to the majority Protestant population.

Via Get Religion:

A few months ago we looked at a survey that showed that the vast majority of Americans have no idea whatsoever what percentage of the population is gay.

Mainstream studies indicate that percentage is somewhere in the low single digits, but Americans believed — on average — that 25 percent of the population is gay. Yes, 25 percent. This includes data showing that 35 percent of Americans think that more than 25 percent of the population is gay.

I’ve long wondered why it is that Americans are so wrong on this, but I can’t help but think that the mainstream media plays a significant role.

I was reminded of that study when I read this Religion News Service report showing that Americans are way off when estimating the percentage of Americans who belong to various religious groups:

The typical American underestimates how many Protestants there are in the U.S., and vastly overestimates the number of religious minorities such as Mormons, Muslims, and atheist/agnostics, according to a new study.

Grey Matter Research and Consulting asked 747 U.S. adults to guess what proportion of the American population belongs to each of eight major religious groups: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, atheist/agnostic, believe in God or a higher power but have no particular religious preference, and any other religious group.

The average response was that 24 percent of Americans are Catholic, 20 percent are Protestant, 19 percent are unaffiliated, 8 percent are Jewish, 9 percent are atheist or agnostic, 7 percent are Muslim, 7 percent are Mormon and 5 percent identify with all other religious groups.

Respondents were correct on Catholics — 24 percent of the country is Catholic. But according to the 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 51 percent are Protestant, 12 percent are unaffiliated, 2 percent are Jewish, 4 percent are Atheist/Agnostic, less than 1 percent are Muslim, 2 percent are Mormon and 4 percent identify with all other religious groups.

The article quotes Ron Sellers, the president of the research firm, theorizing that the word “Protestant” might have thrown people off. But this was the part that got me interested:

Sellers also mentioned that with Mitt Romney running for president as a Mormon and the current emphasis on Islamic-American relations, “smaller faith groups also may be getting disproportionate media coverage.”

This is undoubtedly true. But do we take this to an extreme? No one would claim that Mormonism and Islam or various tiny religious groups shouldn’t get disproportionate coverage at times — but I am sometimes surprised at the lack of good reporting on the majority of religious adherents in the coverage. If the coverage is disproportionate to the point that it is negatively affecting people’s understanding of the real world, that might be an argument for a bit more evenly distributed religious news coverage. Particularly since there are gobs of stories that go under-reported as it is.

If people knew - really knew - that homosexuals amount to less than 1% of the population, would there be as broad support for gay marriage as there seems to be?

Would Christian symbols and concerns be treated with such disdain if people knew - really knew - that 80+% of Americans are Christian?

Public Discourse and the Virtue of Prudence.

The foundation of every virtue is prudence because every virtue is an habit, and every habit is an act, and every act is a moment when the will makes a decision in the concrete and particular facts of the situation. According to Joseph Pieper, "The meaning of the virtue of prudence, however, is primarily this: that not only the end of human action but also the means for its realization shall be in keeping with the truth of real things. This in turn necessitates that the egocentric "interests" of man be silenced in order that he may perceive the truth of real things, and so that reality itself may guide him to the proper means for realizing his goal." (Josef Pieper, the Four Cardinal Virtues, p. 20.)

This Washington Examiner article provides a nice insight into how true self-knowledge plays a role in our knowledge of the truth, which, in turn, plays a role in the virtue of public discourse. The article examines the recent study by "partisan liberal" Jonathon Haidt which statistically demonstrates that not only are liberals deluded about their ability to understand the views of other people, but that conservatives actually have such an ability:

"A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said in an interview last year. "We don't think it's right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. ... The other side has dogmatic views."

Is this true? Are liberals like Krugman more open-minded than their conservative counterparts? Do they understand conservative views better than conservatives understand liberal views? University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt has actually studied these questions, and the answers appear to be "no." In fact, the exact opposite seems to be the case.

In his new book, "The Righteous Mind," Haidt describes a study in which more than 2,000 Americans were asked to fill out questionnaires asking them how much they agreed with statements like this one: "I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing."

One-third of respondents were asked to fill out the questionnaire according to their own views. One-third were asked to fill it out as they thought a "typical liberal" would. And the last third were asked to fill out the survey as if they were a "typical conservative."

Haidt found that moderates and conservatives could accurately predict how liberals and conservatives would judge each statement. But liberals were far less capable of mirroring their ideological counterparts' thinking. Those describing themselves as "very liberal" did worst. Apparently, contra Krugman, the more liberal you are, the less able you are to understand other people's beliefs.

And:

Haidt, who was raised by liberal Jewish parents near New York City and has voted as "a partisan liberal" in every presidential election, later explains how this moral blindness can affect us all.

Liberals, Haidt argues, fail to appreciate the "moral capital" that successful societies have built up over years of cultural evolution. "Moral capital" includes the values, virtues and institutions in a society that "enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible."

When liberals passed the well-meaning welfare programs of President Johnson's Great Society, they failed to anticipate how the new system "increased out-of-wedlock births and weakened African American families."

This blindness is not confined to American liberals like Krugman. Lord John Maynard Keynes, the intellectual father of liberal economics, said the following of himself and his college friends: "We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience, and self-control to do so successfully. ... We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions, and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists."

And in case you thought Keynes might have gained some humility as he aged, he later added: "I remain, and always will remain, an immoralist."

Keynes and Krugman are just the latest in a long line of thinkers that suffer from what Haidt calls the "rationalist delusion," or the belief that one can simply deduce all moral truth through reason alone. "The rationalist delusion is not just a claim about human nature," Haidt writes. "It's also a claim that the rational caste (philosophers or scientists) should have more power." Or in the case of Keynes and Krugman, that economists should have more power.

Not that conservatives have any kind of monopoly on moral truth. Haidt believes that although conservatives "do a better job of preserving moral capital," liberals are better at noticing "certain classes of victims" and fighting corporate power. But conservatives who understand that such positive qualities exist in liberals should not necessarily expect reciprocation.

And that last part ties directly into the failure of public discourse in our culture. Without prudence - which is nothing more than "knowing the truth" - the virtues of justice and tolerance and temperance cannot properly function.

Via Mark Shea, who opines:

It certainly comports with my experience here in ultra-violet Blue Seattle. I suspect there are Mississippi Klansmen more open to new ideas and the blandishments of reality than some of the Lefties I’ve worked with at the University of Washington. I remember one woman handing me a book catalog full of stuff like the Federalist Papers and the writings of the Founding Fathers and her sole concern was not the actual content of the books, but simply whether or not the publisher was “conservative”. She had an absolutely primitive and visceral fear of contracting ritual impurity if The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was purchased from a publisher with the wrong tribal allegiances.

His caution to conservatives not to by into tribal allegiance is dead on.