The Loss of Critical Thinking
there is a direct relationship between its decline and the rise and persistence of Trump
For those of you who didn’t catch it, I heartily recommend this post from Marc Friedman:
Marc writes a brilliant dialogue between Socrates and a Greek citizen. The subject is our presidential election. Socrates helps lead his initially skeptical conversationalist toward an understanding of why he might choose to vote for Kamala Harris. It is engrossing and illustrative of the best sort of critical thinking in which we once engaged.
This would been taught in philosophy and logic in decades past. You won’t find much of that in our educational system today. We have abandoned such learning. Barring the courts stepping in, philosophy will be replaced in many states by Bible studies. Already, great books are being banned. This isn’t to say that critical thinking is completely dead, but it is taught largely in institutions that are affordable only to the wealthy.
Today, we hear a cacophony of lies, fabrications and misleading commentary from the Republican Party, amplified by the corporate media. A disturbingly large sector of the public is ill-equipped to evaluate the veracity of the information that inundates it on a daily basis, especially during a hotly contested general election the results of which will carry such profound implications.
We have all seen the mindless opinions offered up by Trump supporters. Whether they are brainwashed or obtuse, the fact remains that they have abjured their obligation to think logically. Taken to its extreme, you get Kellyanne Conway positing that there are “alternative facts.” The inability to understand that there can be no such thing is a danger to democracy and freedom.
The effects resonate in all facets of our lives. In the political realm, rational discourse is replaced by outrageous sensationalism and outright lies bought wholesale by voters who can’t tell the difference between reality and the fiction that it is the currency of Donald Trump. Voters end up making uninformed choices. It is a manifestation of Andrew Shepherd’s comment in The American President that “they drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.”
Media coverage descends into the horse-race, with corporate media chasing clicks and money. Little critical coverage of lies and misinformation is offered. Instead, it is amplified. Without the ability to think critically, citizens are left on their own to make sense out of what they hear, with the disastrous and near-disastrous results of the last two presidential elections.
Civic engagement becomes nearly non-existent as people lack the desire to read policy analysis and in-depth investigative journalism (to the extent the latter is on offer at all anymore). Misinformed by charlatans and outrageously dishonest political ads, people grow increasingly disengaged and cynical. Difficult issues are reduced to sloganeering.
Lacking an electorate capable of comprehending nuance, the most robust democratic republic will eventually wither and die. The Roman republic turned to despotism and tyranny largely because the citizenry became disengaged and allowed the unscrupulous to take control of the levers of power. We are facing that same challenge today, and the outcome is uncertain.
How to deal with this? It all starts with education, but nothing will change there until we elect Democrats who will take religion out of schools and replace it with curricula that foster critical thinking. It is maddeningly circular. It is hard to elect Democrats in enough numbers to make a difference when the electorate is unable to make rational choices. Without electing Democrats, there is little hope of reversing creeping religious influence in our schools, book banning and propaganda that crowds out the teaching of unvarnished history.
The immediacy of the election by necessity crowds out such issues. But if Democrats emerge victorious, educational reform must be a priority. Otherwise, we will be fighting an uphill battle in the face of ignorance while the future of the republic hangs in the balance. Critical thinking is not a luxury. It is mandatory for our future viability as a free society.
If half of them did any thinking at all, critical or otherwise, this would be a landslide a la Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
I have been saying this all along. The root cause of Trumpism, book banning, and the anti-woke movement, is failure of our public educational system to teach critical thinking! We have mistakenly taught WHAT to think … and not HOW to think.