April 09, 2007

“Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.” C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups), p.70

It is widely conceded that there is a problem with “critical thinking” skills in our society and most educators will agree. Ironically, it is the educational system itself which inculcates students with a deep-seated mental confusion that renders legitimate critical thinking functionally impossible.

The quote from C.S. Lewis (which was uttered by a “good guy” who was later murdered for his dangerous beliefs) contains an implicit assumption that allows me to illustrate the problem. Specifically, the quote assumes that the matter at hand (regardless of what it was) has a concrete and provable answer.

Of course, some questions have such answers and others do not. If we are contemplating a beaker of liquid in the laboratory and we ask “does this liquid burn?”, we are asking such an objective question. On the other hand, if we ask “does this liquid have a pleasant smell?” we understand that any possible answer will be, like the question itself, a subjective thing that cannot be regarded as correct or incorrect in any absolute sense.

For most of human history, this distinction between the objective and the subjective was implicitly understood and agreed upon in most matters of debate. Either the thing being debated has a concrete answer or it does not. All further thought and discussion, if it is to be sensible, hangs upon correctly making that assessment.

Nowadays - for the purpose of advancing ideologies, agendas and pet beliefs -this simple distinction is often clouded, confused, blurred and intentionally exploited. And this has gone on to the point that many people are totally unaware of the need for such distinctions as an essential component of rational thought. In fact, some have been trained to regard the very making of such essential distinctions as “judgmental” and “narrow-minded”.

We see this in the dogged insistence of ideologues of all stripes that their core beliefs - which are really no more than unsubstantiated subjective opinions - are actually objective truths. Gun control advocates, for instance, typically have views about economic, sociological, psychological, criminological and even biological matters that that they hold themselves - and present to others - as facts, but which really have no more objective basis than one’s personal tastes.

On the other side of the coin, we see real facts - beliefs that meet the most rigorous of classical evidentiary proofs - written off as mere opinions time and again because they are inconvenient. Settled economic reality is perpetually denied because it is not in keeping with ideology. Blatantly obvious and clearly true explanations of human behavior, and even of biological reality, are discounted and denied because they do not fit with the view of the universe that the ideologues want to be true.

Now, I think that most of us are somewhat familiar with this phenomenon and its manifestations. But I am not sure if we have fully considered the origin of this intellectual confusion or how deeply it cuts to the core of people’s very ability to think sensibly about virtually anything that comes before their minds.

To see this, let us consider what happens in the educational environment. Students at all levels attend “hard” classes where they are (or, at least, should be) told that real answers exist to certain questions, that these answers can be discovered through a process of intellectual reasoning and that the answers, once discovered, should be believed in a very concrete sense. Mathematics, geometry, physics and chemistry should teach students that there are some things that can be really and truly thought out, proved and then believed.

But consider what happens when these same students attend “soft” classes. Here is a true story:

A certain English teacher tells her students that James Joyce is the best author of his time, period. She spends a couple weeks in “proving” this to her students via a process of “reasoned” argument. The English teacher herself does not see the fundamental intellectual error in holding such a subjective belief with objective fervor. She certainly does not appreciate that a demand for her students to do the same may be grievously damaging to their broader intellectual abilities. When this is pointed out to her, or if it is suggested that a chemist’s beliefs about sulfuric acid may be of a somewhat “harder” nature than her beliefs about James Joyce, she concludes that scientists are intellectually arrogant because they regard their beliefs as “superior” to hers.

The same students may also attend a history class where they are told that “history” is synonymous with “factuality”. However, in addition to the objective facts, they also receive a subjective perspective on the facts that is in keeping with the ideology of the history teacher; and no distinction is made between the facts themselves and the associated perspective. On subsequent tests, students may be graded for their agreement with the perspective as well as for their understanding of the facts. In this process, the history teacher himself may not even be aware of the message he is sending because he is simply telegraphing what was impressed on him at the university.

In courses on everything from sociology, psychology and criminology to art appreciation, nutrition, economics and physical education, the same general message is delivered. Unsubstantiated systems of belief, often derived more from desire than from reality, are presented as objective facts even though they have no more grounding in factuality than preferences in food or music.

Lest this sound unfairly biased against certain academic studies, consider another fact: Back in the “hard” classrooms, students (hopefully) get hard, objective truths presented as such. But they may also get the subjective opinions of the teacher (both political and otherwise) delivered with the same objective certainty.

Of course, not all of these messages are strictly speaking “political”. But whether politically motivated or not, this perpetual exposure to sheer mental sloppiness produces students that are unable to execute the most important aspect of critical thinking, which is an honest assessment of whether the matter at hand is ultimately objective or subjective. A person who cannot make this fundamental distinction correctly cannot think critically. Period.

The existence of these distinctions, their importance, and the need for making them honestly and in an unbiased fashion should be the central focus of any efforts to teach critical thinking. But what we see in our modern educational system is the exact opposite. These distinctions are ignored, confused, downplayed, avoided and suppressed in an effort to advance pet beliefs, ideologies and agendas. Even worse, they are often actively discouraged. Students are trained to regard such assessments as “judgmental” and “narrow-minded”.

It is thus ironic - and perhaps a bit offensive - to find these same educators bemoaning the widespread lack of critical thinking skills. It is rather silly, but not at all surprising, to see these same people trying to improve critical thinking through programs, policies and “novel teaching methods” that belabor the raw mechanics but that never address these deeper fundamentals.

Of course, the fact that we should be offended is not the important point. The important point is that every aspect of a successful life (regardless of how one defines “successful”) demands critical thinking. Every job requires it. Civil and sensible “interpersonal relationships” insist on it. You need it to tell the difference between a proper medical treatment and a scam, or to tell the difference between a legitimate investment and a con. Anything that erodes people’s ability to think critically jeopardizes every aspect of human function.

It would be refreshing if those who tamper with the foundations of thought itself for the selfish purpose of advancing their pet beliefs would reflect a little more on the true scope of the collateral damage caused by their games. But I guess if the goal is to produce a population of mentally helpless dependents who must rely on their intellectual betters to tell them “what to think”, it is not such a bad thing after all. If that is truly NOT the goal, some REAL educational reform is indicated.

Such reform would be amazingly simply to implement. But it would also threaten pet oxen from across the political landscape. As such, I am not holding my breath. But I do hold to the first step of the scientific method, which is to “state the problem”.

Tim Thorstenson is a chemist who lives in Bismarck, North Dakota. He is currently exploring the relationship between reasoning and the gun rights debate in a series of articles for American Handgunner magazine. Tim can be contacted at timthorstenson- at -yahoo.com.

See Tim's other articles at www.americanhandgunner.com.

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