schweblog

I try to regularly skim over the offerings at the Arts & Letters Daily, as I’ll usually stumble upon a thought-provoking and enjoyable piece to mentally chew on for a little while. Today I found an article worshipping critical thinking and its role in our lives. It addresses the benefits, methods, and values entailed in a critical worldview, as well as an illustration of our failure to apply it via sociology textbooks.

The article was articulating a lot of things that I could identify with and I made a mental note of directing people to it: it essentially highlights what I classify as a “method of philosophy” in a much more direct way than I am capable of articulating. The author sums up the barebones “virtues” of a skeptical/critical approach to the world better than I ever could. In short, I really liked the article.

Until the end. In a wonderful oversight, the author begins listing off the benefits of living the skeptical life. Brushing aside the personal perks, he immediately cites the benefits of critical thinking in a democracy. While I no doubt agree with him that critical thinking is the last, best hope for a functional democracy, I question his seeming dedication to democracy as inherently good. Democracy–and the strengthening “of its crucial underpinnings”–seems to be the primary benefit of critical thinking that he cites.

Ironically, he continues this oversight in analyzing our own society’s intellectual habits. Claiming that “within a democracy, the social world remains a deceptive place-for the sophisticated and the innocent alike”, the author then introduces “shibboleths”–ideologies that paint the advocate as a good guy. These are, he argues, some of the greatest culprits in undermining critical thinking.

What he fails to recognize is that democracy itself is a shibboleth. If we cite something as democratic, we associate it with a positive good. But it is not always so. The tyranny of the majority is ever-present in a democracy, ignorant or no. The author suggests that the solution to this problem is more critical thinking–an almost universal shift in thinking that venerates skepticism over dogmatism.

But is that solution plausible? His final paragraphs, highlighting society’s inability to incorporate critical thinking into the “cultural consciousness”, suggest that the solution is impossible given the constraints of contemporary life. In light of this impossibility, is the adherence to critical thinking as the panacea for society’s ills rational? Is it scientific? Is it intelligent? Most importantly, is it constructive and beneficial?

Methinks not. It’s high-time that people start coming to terms with the truth: our psychological functions, nearly impossible to overcome on any sort of significant societal scale, dictate a certain amount of unreason in living life. When you grant those people the vehicle to carry that unreason to an institution of governance via democracy, you don’t contain the plague of ignorance–you spread it through mandate by law and advocate it through representatives.