So I’m returning today to thinking about higher education. I’m not thinking about students (I’m on sabbatical), and, in any case, they’re almost never the problem. My concern is educational experts and their silly studies that show stuff.
Here’s a professor who actually makes some good sense. He proposes “the virtue of BS” as an antidote to the omnicompetent pretensions of ”critical thinking.” He reminds me of Socrates taking on the sophists, but only to a point. If I had to choose between unironically embracing the method of critical thinking as the goal of my teaching and just shooting the bull, I’d probably choose the latter. His point here is to oppose the view that critical thinking is a virtue in itself, and so not a means serving the end of virtue. Another way of his putting his point is that, contrary to many experts, critical thinking isn’t the point of liberal education.
Critical thinking is branded as a methodical skill or competency — a “how”– dogmatically detached from any “why” or human content. It can be applied to any problem or any opinion. Why is the phrase “critical thinking” such a big deal these days? Well, Tocqueville said the Americans are Cartesians who’ve never read Descartes. That’s because he noticed that the Cartesian method — doubt — is also the democratic method. What’s mainly doubted is personal authority. If I defer to your authority, then I let you rule me. And so why should you listen to me when I tell you to read the DWM Descartes? I can doubt or be critical perfectly well without doing that. The good news, for a democrat, about critical thinking is that it proves nobody is better than me. The bad, of course, is that I can’t really show I’m better than anyone else or have any real personal significance. It detaches me from the relational world of persons, without having the power to locate me somewhere else.
Critical thinking, from one view, is redundant. What would “uncritical thinking” be? Certainly not thinking. But thinking is more than critical in the sense of being merely deconstructive or utilitarian. The goal of thinking is not the dizzying disorientation that Tocqueville found in the isolated or allegedly self-sufficient or unrelational mind. It’s the shared joy of knowing the truth in common, and that knowing is an irreducibly personal and relational characteristic. “Consciousness,” Walker Percy amusingly said that Descartes forgot, is “knowing with.”
The author actually points to a kind of mean between the two extremes of critical thinking and BS: Thinking about who we are and what we’re supposed to do with some confidence that such questions have answers we can (to some extent) share in common. A little managed BS about love and death and God and virtue can serve that goal. But not discussion so “freewheeling” that the distinction between those informed by the reading and those who are not disappears, not to mentionthe indispensable moral distinction between seriously trying to tell the truth and shooting the bull. It would be corny and only marginally misleading to say here that the model is the Socratic dialogue. Today’s classroom, for one thing, is a much “safer space.”
It’s another excess of democracy to think that the two human modes are critical thinking (and problem solving) and BS. That mistake is based on the dogmatic dichotomy between the head being for calculation alone and the heart being for (randomly or instinctually) valuing and loving alone. So we have the distinction between the sciences (that serve technology) and the humanities (or emo-relativism). Even the physicists, or at least the theoretical physicists, can’t rest content with that.
The author is surely right that the way to get over this false choice is to read a smaller number of texts with greater care, with the truth about the soul or the being born to know, love, and die in mind.