The Covid-19 is shopping and will reshape human society in adopting the process of survival. Surviving through corporate and business as the mean requires critical abilities. Covid 19 is pressing employees of businesses and organisations elsewhere in the world to demand critical skills. Let assume that post corona survivor must have to have the critical skills the core of all skills. Thus, critical thinking ability will enter all domain of work, learning, motivation of each and everyone who wants to work future world.
Through this discussion let us develop a think piece and the guidelines for surviving with critical thinking. I have already done some groundwork, but needs a global view. Dear friend all contributors to this discussion will be acknowledged by mentioning them in the list of contributors in the publication.
This has become a discussion that is impossible to have without it becoming political. This new age of woke political correctness, has changed the way we are allowed to think and express ourselves, especially publically. Anyone who dares to be different (ie thinking and expressing one's views critically) is placing themselves at grave danger of being sidelined (cancelled), demoted in position, fired, refused employment, research grants etc etc. examples are everywhere and social media is the new thought police. Try posting a video with a controversial point of view on covid, or gender, on YouTube or facebook, and see what happens to you.
It is sad that the breeding ground for this new form of censorship and fascism is universities and academics in general. Simply put: you dare not speak your mind, or think critically, unless it conforms to what your peers think, or what social media allows you to say or think. Even areas such as mathematics are under attack for being fundamentally racist. This is seriously limiting our ability to debate openly and share controversial ideas that may be in the best interest of humankind (you dare not say mankind anymore). For this reason the "west" is slowly annihilating itself. Societies less tolerant of wokeness will become superior and dominant in future.
John Heath it's more than just wokeness (this term has little meaning outside the miasma of US political discourse). "Wokeness" is just one manifestation of intellectual dishonesty cloaked in Puritan morality that could easily be labelled as a form of religious belief. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be in US university administrations have piled onto the woke bandwagon because they think it protects their bottom lines. It could just as easily have been something else (and given time, will surely be something else). It has little to do with any political tradition (except in method - resembling the Trotsky-Stalin conflict..or the Chinese Cultural Revolution).
Critical thinking must be taught. People must cultivate it. The problem is that our societies have decided that we would rather let creative and critical thinking wither because it seems to serve little purpose when the main purpose of education is to make money, not educate. Critical thinking is also a group activity, but those who make educational decisions keep us all separate, in competition. Wokeness is part of that, and politically has much in common with authoritarianism of the right (the racialism, id-pol, etc.) and the authoritarian left (thought-crime, moral crusading). In some ways, I think we are reaping the whirlwind of decades of religious and financial fundamentalism, where honest intellectual discourse has been suppressed by "market forces". Wokeness is hopeless virtue signalling designed to keep up the cash flow.
In other parts of the world (e.g. my area: Europe), the sickness manifests itself as a general propensity to claim belief in religion, old national myths or defeated ideologies (paleoconservatism, fascism, naziism, etc.) or a retreat into batty conspiracies. Thankfully, though, there is much less of the puritanical attitude. For now, civil discussions are possible with most people.
I was in academia for many years, but left as the accountants, lawyers and MBAs were invading the Academy. What is left now seems to me a hollow shell driven by influence metrics, grant funds and Taylorian performance reviews. What circle of Hell involves academics drowning in administrative paper and endless proposal writing? Does studying Classical Greek and Roman literature have any meaning anymore? Shut it down! It brings in no research funds! Physics! Shut it down! This is the Corporatization of the University that began in the 1970s in the US (read the Powell Memo) and is now infecting the rest of the world. My only hope is that the pendulum might swing back to the point where the University might re-assume its ancient purpose, and, by extension, critical thinking (and speaking), becomes more common. Critical thinking should be a core skill - like the Scientific Method!
Thank you John Heath!
For your critical insight on a very simple issue but difficult to handle. I appreciate for your contribution. Let us collect more opinion on this issue through discussion.
Wow George Slade thoughtful response and I agree this concept must be facilitated, cultivated as part of life from the very young, from the way we teach, to our own way of life........the critical thinking phenomenon is a living breathing entity that has to be fed.
Critical thinking in pandemic times? Here is a step-by-step guide. Step 1: If you don't have a bookshelf, get one. Step 2: If you don't have Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed on your bookself, get it. Step 3: Read/think. Step 4: Listen to others. Step 5: Act individually (notice how step 5 comes only after steps 1 to 4 have been done). Once step 5 has been fully exhausted -- which can take a while -- proceed to step 6: Speak your mind, maybe (notice how this step is optional). Step 7: Recommend a policy, maybe (notice how this step is also optional and comes only after steps 1 to 6 have been done). Step 8: Stand ready to revise your beliefs if it is revealed that the facts are against it.
Welcome!
Wonderful comment by Marc Champagne. I like your contribution. Let us join hands with simple mind to critical thought and mind game.
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Marc Champagne your steps are certainly a start down the path, but I do not think it is so easy to define a set of steps. The key is in teaching the ability to formulate probing questions. I think the ancient Greeks understood the problem well (Plato's Cave allegory comes to mind) as well as the Buddhists (The Blind Men and the Elephant). It is easy to think that appearances are reality, and to get stuck into a mindset because most of the facts seem to fit..with a couple of inconvenient exceptions, which confirmation bias leads us to ignore. The education system today does not train people to look beyond appearance and first impression, because - as all philosophical traditions indicate - the search for truth is hard. How do you instill the desire for the long slog to Enlightenment in your students? How do you get them to start asking the necessary questions?
The early modern French philosopher Michel Montaigne famously remarked "Que sçay-je?" - "What do I know?". This enlightened skepticism is the starting point for all critical thinking! Not the unthinking reaction to political shibboleths, fashionable political ideas or how we might fix a "factory-farm" education system whose main goal is just keeping kids off the street and glued to a monitored telescreen.
If we delve into political ideas, critical thinking is likely to be most tolerated in small "l" liberal democratic societies. The balance between individual freedom and collective responsibility is much more dynamic than in any other political system. Personal mobility (the ability to leave an unsuitable life situation) is also critical (and was critical for the rise of Europe as an economic power from 1500-1914). Any society that strives for a "utopia" risks ossification and, ultimately, totalitarianism (i.e. Marxists, Fascists, Jim Jones cult, etc.), because the only beneficiaries of utopia end up being its ruling class and true-believers. The remaining undesirable "excess population" is either deported or exterminated. (Hannah Arendt discusses this at great length in her treatise on totalitarianism.) Libertarians would fit in here as well, because the end-game of their utopia consists of a tyranny of a protection racket and "user-pays" anarchy that strongly resembles a "mafia state" e.g. the Warlord Era in early republican China, Somalia or to present-day Mexico's cartel wars.
You want some books on the Bookshelf? Here are some, in no particular order, that I have read and you may find interesting:
1) Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan
2) Plato - Republic
3) Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince, Discourses on Livy (Governance, in a nutshell - not much has changed!)
4) Michel Montaigne - Essays (Montaigne has much to say on 16th century education that is still relevant!)
5) Hannah Arendt - Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Men in Dark Times
6) Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching
7) Sun Tzu - The Art of War
8) Tom Holland - Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind
9) Seneca the Younger - Letters to a Stoic: Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium
10) Marcus Aurelius - Meditations
11) Thomas More - Utopia
12) Gaius Valerius Catullus - Poetry, Epigrams
13) Jared Diamond - Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
14) Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
15) Richard Feynmann - The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
16) Noam Chomsky - Manufacturing Consent
17) Edward Snowden - Permanent Record
George Slade, your observation is wonderfull. I appreciate it for clear explanation.
One of the major blindnesses of contemporary culture, and so contemporary education, I think, is the OVERvaluation of thinking as a cognitive ability. As Howard Gardner and others argued long ago, there are MANY types of "intelligence"--musical, manual, technical, mathematical, emotional, physical, linguistic, social, imaginative, etc. If our educators spent as much time and effort nourishing ALL of these types of intelligence, or if necessary, one or more of these types of intelligence as they emerge, selectively, in their students, society, I think, would be much better served than emphasizing thinking and overlooking its complement. Thinking is certainly important! OMG yes. But human experience, and so human behaviors, relationships, economies, religions, psychologies, political commitments, etc., are much larger, and OTHER, than thinking alone can engage/explore/manage/encourage/develop. For instance, many insightful commentators have argued that much of the pathology of political discourse these days is not political at all, but RELIGIOUS, and so driven by unsatisfied, and so misplaced, emotional energies created by the collapse of our interactions with nature, the land and sea, our relationships, our marriages, our families, our churches, and our face-to-face interactions in our neighborhoods and local communities. Those who have such unsatisfied, bottled up, and misplaced, emotional energies are not in a position to think much at all, much less think critically, and so, for them, political positioning becomes more a matter of FELT worship and animosity, deification and demonization, rather than discussion.
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