The limits of critical thinking

Doubt is just one of the intellectual virtues

People who are rightly concerned about indoctrination in schools and universities often insist education should be about teaching young people ‘how to think, not what to think’. It is a noble sentiment, but I’m not convinced it makes sense. For a start, if it were not contrasted to ‘what to think’, would teaching people ‘how to think’ really sound so benign? On its own, being taught how to think sounds just as sinister. Whether it is actually sinister or not I’ll discuss below, but the way we think is not so easily separated from the conclusions we reach.

In a more banal sense, we all know ‘how to think’ without having to be taught. Don’t we? A cynic might suggest most people don’t think much at all. But, smartass posturing aside, most people are perfectly capable of reasoning when they put their minds to it. Education should certainly improve the way we think, if only from practice, but perhaps it’s here that cynicism is more justified. Are highly educated people notably better at thinking than everyone else? Yes, but.

Even a half-decent education involves gaining knowledge and some experience of processing it in a particular way. In some cases, that includes sophisticated techniques that the uninitiated don’t understand at all. Those who study advanced maths and foreign languages, for example, certainly acquire new ‘ways of thinking’. But does this make them better at thinking about the kinds of things we worry about people being indoctrinated in? About politics and questions of morality? Probably not.

(In Sir Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy, a wealthy merchant is amused to hear his clerk explaining the ‘golden rule’ in arithmetical form: “Let A do to B, as he would have B do to him; the product will give the rule of conduct required”. It is doubtful whether it gives him a deeper understanding of this basic moral principle than anyone else.)

What about those who study politics or philosophy? (Or PPE, expressly designed to prepare people for government?) They should certainly be more familiar than most with the nuances involved in contentious questions, and the various approaches that have been taken in the past. One of the skills they ought to develop is the ability to understand opinions they don’t hold and to articulate arguments with which they disagree. That’s useful, but it really just involves ordinary reasoning applied in different ways to a range of political and moral issues. If anything, what people learn is not so much a more rigorous kind of thinking as greater empathy for other points of view. In any case, if students struggle to ‘think’ before embarking on such a course, they will not get very far.

To the extent that students of these subjects do learn ‘how to think,’ it is by embracing a particular school of thought. To think like a utilitarian is different from thinking like a Marxist or a conservative, for example. And it’s not that any particular school is the ‘right way’ of thinking, the one all educated people should adopt. One’s preference involves cultural assumptions as much as empirical knowledge and moral convictions as much as intellectual ones.

Another way of putting it is that learning how to think in this sense is more like indoctrination into a school than the acquisition of a generic skill. That sounds bad, but I don’t mean it to. It’s possible to be indoctrinated with your eyes open, and in full awareness that there are other schools of thought. Indeed, someone who is exposed only to one way of thinking will surely never master it.

It is a mark of someone who has been successfully indoctrinated in this benign sense that they don’t expect everyone else to share their way of thinking. They can argue with people who think differently, not by asserting the authority of their own doctrine, but by finding common ground and reasoning towards their own position from shared premises, even if it means taking ‘the long way round’. This enables them to argue with anyone – to ‘think with’ anyone – including those who share neither their doctrine nor their education.

The elephant is ambling into the room, nonchalantly laying waste the furniture. It is a mark of ‘woke’ thinking that its proponents do expect others to share their way of thinking. That they believe all educated people must by definition agree with their point of view. One reason the term ‘woke’ is so controversial (and perpetually draped in scare quotes) is that its proponents do not regard it as a particular school of thought at all. It is simply what all educated, informed and decent people believe. Why should it have a label?

From the belief that ‘transwomen are women’ to voluminous claims about the extent and effects of systemic racism, people adopt woke ideas not because they are intellectually compelling but because they have cultural cachet. In influential circles, these are ‘of course’ beliefs. It is a bad look even to question them, and those who vocally oppose them carry a moral taint that might be infectious. 

The result might be called ‘malign indoctrination,’ except that it doesn’t even involve a proper doctrine. Valid and sometimes important points jostle with incoherent theories, disingenuous assertions and even demonstrably untrue claims. No wonder some critics see the rise of woke as an indictment of our education system, and advocate for lessons in critical thinking. But what if the problem is not an inability to think critically so much as an unwillingness to think at all?

In a widely shared video clip, a teacher gets a student to think through his claim that ‘JK Rowling is bigoted’, with the result that, having realised it’s without foundation, the student drops it completely. This does indeed seem to be a case of someone being taught to think for himself, but it’s not that the teacher is passing on some clever technique. He is simply giving the student permission (and a nudge) to think past what he’s been told. What’s at stake is not cunning but courage.

The intellectual virtues and the appropriation of tradition

As valuable as critical thinking undoubtedly is, serious thought cannot be reduced to critique, to seeing through false claims and debunking bogus arguments. Indeed, these things imply a belief that there is a truth and a willingness to pursue it. Why bother? At the very least, critical thinking must be supplemented by more positive commitments, including to truth itself. The belief that it’s wrong to malign someone falsely, for example. Maybe even a fondness for intangible properties like beauty and goodness, wit and wisdom.

Then there are the qualities required to pursue these commitments. The philosopher of education Michael Oakeshott enumerates just a few of what he calls the intellectual virtues: ‘disinterested curiosity, patience, intellectual honesty, exactness, industry, concentration and doubt’ (1). This is not exhaustive and nor is it a list of components that stand alone. Honesty without exactness can easily lead to confusion. Doubt without curiosity leads to sloth rather than industry. Like all true virtues, the intellectual ones form a complex of mutually reinforcing qualities.

I would add that courage is a crucial intellectual virtue (and one implied by honesty), because it enables us to think not just critically, but also independently. After all, it’s easy to join a ‘critical’ bandwagon and enjoy the approval of one’s peers, while it takes courage to demur from a culturally sanctioned critique and make the case for whatever is being criticised.

In his recent book, The War on the Past, Frank Furedi identifies what he calls ‘uncritical criticism’, a kneejerk tendency to condemn the conduct and practices of past generations (2). This is characteristic of the woke outlook, and is at least as thoughtlessly one-sided as the allegedly rampant nostalgia it purports to challenge. Uncritical criticism entails sweeping condemnation of the Enlightenment, for example, as irredeemably tainted by racism.

To focus on one key figure, Immanuel Kant undoubtedly expressed ideas about race that were empirically and morally wrong. He also developed a sublimely subtle way of thinking about human experience, subjectivity and responsibility. It’s easy to understand what’s wrong with the former; it’s hard work to appreciate the full depth and moral implications of the latter. It’s understandable, then, that some seize on Kant’s racism as an excuse not to engage with his philosophy, or to do so with hauteur. If you insist on reading anyone from a position of moral superiority, though, you are unlikely to learn very much.

In fact, all careful reading involves a certain provisional credulity. You cannot effectively criticise any argument or idea until you have assimilated it. That means reading sympathetically in order to follow the argument, allowing yourself to be ‘indoctrinated’ for the moment even if you do not share the author’s assumptions and commitments. You cannot do that if you’re mentally preparing a line-by-line rebuttal even as you read.

Only when you properly understand a particular argument or doctrine will you be able to make sense of and appraise subsequent criticisms of it. In doing so – whatever your own commitments, and in however modest a way – you can begin to participate in a dialogue that echoes through the generations.

In her book on the philosophy of Michel de Montaigne, Ann Hartle explains, ‘The education that Montaigne recommends is the formation of judgment, not the purely destructive practice of “critical thinking.” The formation of judgment actually requires the appropriation of the tradition in the formation of one’s character’ (3).

In a similar vein (Hartle makes the connection), Oakeshott argued that, while education is not simply about absorbing ready-made ideas, ‘it is learning to look, to listen, to think, to feel, to imagine, to believe, to understand, to choose and to wish’ (4). What an excellent sequence of verbs! And a student cannot learn these things in the abstract any more than an orchestra can play music without playing any music in particular. Genuine thinking, critical or otherwise, means engaging with ‘an inheritance of human understandings and activities’.

In a previous essay (In praise of our moral inheritance), I discussed CS Lewis’ argument in The Abolition of Man (1943) that our cross-cultural literary, philosophical and religious inheritance is part of what makes us human. That inheritance includes a tradition of critical reflection that has driven progress, but we can only judge change to be progress in terms of certain moral ‘platitudes’ that are essentially beyond critique. As Lewis put it: ‘An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy’ (5).

One of those ultimate foundations is an instinctive respect for inheritance itself. A willingness to be shaped by that inheritance to a greater or lesser extent (and always with our eyes open) might be considered an intellectual virtue in its own right. While such respect can be excessive, leading to a stultifying conservatism, a dearth of respect is self-defeating, because it leaves us with no solid ground to stand on.

That’s why Oakeshott warned that it’s not enough simply to pass the accumulated wisdom of the past onto the next generation on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis. The transaction will be fatally inhibited, ‘unless there is a contingent belief in the worth of what is to be mediated to the newcomer, and unless this conviction is somehow also transmitted’ [emphasis added]. If the custodians of our inheritance instead pass on a belief that it is worthless or harmful, ‘the apprenticeship of each new generation to adult life’ becomes ‘a ceremonial rejection of what it would be corrupting even to inspect’ (6). Written in 1972, this is surely a succinct description of today’s movement to ‘decolonise’ education.

The greater danger today is not indoctrination into any way of thinking worthy of the name, but a doctrinaire unwillingness to be indoctrinated in the old-fashioned, literal sense. That is, to learn.

References
1) Oakeshott, Michael. ‘Learning and teaching’ in The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989)
2) Furedi, Frank. The War Against the Past (2024)
3) Hartle, Ann. What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project (2022)
4) Oakeshott, Michael. ‘Education: the engagement and its frustration’ in The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989)
5) Lewis, CS. The Abolition of Man (1943)
6) Oakeshott, Michael. ‘Education: the engagement and its frustration’ in The Voice of Liberal Learning (1989)