Thank you for sharing this column. I agree with Messerly: thinking does matter. His caveats honestly aren't even strictly necessary. The type of thought he's referring to—critical, structural,...
Thank you for sharing this column. I agree with Messerly: thinking does matter. His caveats honestly aren't even strictly necessary. The type of thought he's referring to—critical, structural, between-the-lines…—can indeed be more frightening or uncanny to people than his examples of "torture, cancer, or the death of their children." One could name any number of nationalistic, anti-scientific, or just generally self-interested movements that actively discourage genuine critical engagement with the world to the detriment of the loved ones of their adherents. Vaccine hesitancy, for example, is not necessarily incompatible with critical thinking, but vaccine denial very much is. Sometimes people just want to be right. It's an ego thing.
The author's remark here was just a one-off comment intended to preempt pointless criticism—Russel's quote describes generalized behavior and does not suppose that any given individual falls prey to every single quality listed—but the fact that he thought it was necessary is perhaps a little ironic. I was also amused by the sole comment on the blog, which simply writes: "Without Marx or Jesus." I'm neither a revolutionary nor an evangelical, but this immediate reversion to ideological preference in response to what is a rather open-ended philosophical statement is unfortunately characteristic of pseudo-academic online discourse. Tildes happens to be the sort of place that would defend the former but scoff at the latter, which I suppose is technically better than nothing, but is still representative of the broader issue of "selective critical consideration" that our society faces. It's not a zero-sum game.
Even the most abstract thinking affects the world. Non-euclidean geometry or symbolic logic are about as abstract as thinking gets—yet you can’t understand Einsteinian gravity without the one, or run computers without the other. Thinking matters to us, to others, and to our world. That’s one reason why we fear it so much—it shakes our foundations.
I'm occasionally irritated by the distance academic theorists create between themselves and the "real world," intentionally or otherwise, but this feeling is probably better directed toward those who misrepresent abstract thinking in pedagogical contexts. Many teachers don't attempt to explain the purpose of a particular abstract concept in an academic lesson, which is confusing and discouraging to students. Others justify it with the reasonable but somewhat unsatisfactory answer that it "teaches you how to think." This is true, but inevitably invites the response from students, "So do lots of things. Why don't we just learn about X [that I enjoy more, or that is more overtly useful in some very specific context in industry] instead?" I've always felt that a better framing is one like "When you learn, you are not just learning information; you're learning about a perspective that you can apply to problems in a number of contexts." That's ultimately not a very different statement, but the implication is on diversity of thought, not that "this specific abstract concept is important, and others may not be."
In an interdisciplinary curriculum, it quickly becomes obvious that any two random academic subjects have substantially more overlap than may be immediately clear. For instance, I've been continually surprised by the overlap between literary theory, linguistics, and computer science as I've learned more about each field; or biology and theoretical physics; or mathematics and music; or any other combination of disciplines. What we learn is definitely important, because it changes the exact approach we'll take when applying a particular framework to any other subject, but the most important part is indeed that we are learning something abstract to begin with, and further that we accompany it with other, complementary forms of abstract learning. It's the synthesis of grounded and abstract thought, each varied in their own right, that is truly valuable.
Thank you for sharing this column. I agree with Messerly: thinking does matter. His caveats honestly aren't even strictly necessary. The type of thought he's referring to—critical, structural, between-the-lines…—can indeed be more frightening or uncanny to people than his examples of "torture, cancer, or the death of their children." One could name any number of nationalistic, anti-scientific, or just generally self-interested movements that actively discourage genuine critical engagement with the world to the detriment of the loved ones of their adherents. Vaccine hesitancy, for example, is not necessarily incompatible with critical thinking, but vaccine denial very much is. Sometimes people just want to be right. It's an ego thing.
The author's remark here was just a one-off comment intended to preempt pointless criticism—Russel's quote describes generalized behavior and does not suppose that any given individual falls prey to every single quality listed—but the fact that he thought it was necessary is perhaps a little ironic. I was also amused by the sole comment on the blog, which simply writes: "Without Marx or Jesus." I'm neither a revolutionary nor an evangelical, but this immediate reversion to ideological preference in response to what is a rather open-ended philosophical statement is unfortunately characteristic of pseudo-academic online discourse. Tildes happens to be the sort of place that would defend the former but scoff at the latter, which I suppose is technically better than nothing, but is still representative of the broader issue of "selective critical consideration" that our society faces. It's not a zero-sum game.
I'm occasionally irritated by the distance academic theorists create between themselves and the "real world," intentionally or otherwise, but this feeling is probably better directed toward those who misrepresent abstract thinking in pedagogical contexts. Many teachers don't attempt to explain the purpose of a particular abstract concept in an academic lesson, which is confusing and discouraging to students. Others justify it with the reasonable but somewhat unsatisfactory answer that it "teaches you how to think." This is true, but inevitably invites the response from students, "So do lots of things. Why don't we just learn about X [that I enjoy more, or that is more overtly useful in some very specific context in industry] instead?" I've always felt that a better framing is one like "When you learn, you are not just learning information; you're learning about a perspective that you can apply to problems in a number of contexts." That's ultimately not a very different statement, but the implication is on diversity of thought, not that "this specific abstract concept is important, and others may not be."
In an interdisciplinary curriculum, it quickly becomes obvious that any two random academic subjects have substantially more overlap than may be immediately clear. For instance, I've been continually surprised by the overlap between literary theory, linguistics, and computer science as I've learned more about each field; or biology and theoretical physics; or mathematics and music; or any other combination of disciplines. What we learn is definitely important, because it changes the exact approach we'll take when applying a particular framework to any other subject, but the most important part is indeed that we are learning something abstract to begin with, and further that we accompany it with other, complementary forms of abstract learning. It's the synthesis of grounded and abstract thought, each varied in their own right, that is truly valuable.
Thank you for this meditate response.