{"id":2450,"date":"2021-08-12T12:19:50","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=2450"},"modified":"2021-08-12T12:20:11","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T16:20:11","slug":"critical-thinking-character-and-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html","title":{"rendered":"Critical Thinking, Character, and Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most people, failing to recognize it for the temporal and cultural-specific conceptual construct that it is, confuse the prevailing paradigm of reality, the conventional wisdom, for self-evident reality itself. \u00a0This is just the way it is and has always been.<\/p>\n

And this is because most people do not invest the time and energy, the proverbial blood, sweat, and tears, cultivating the intellectual virtues, the mental habits that are sowed during countless hours spent in the pursuit of knowledge.<\/p>\n

Nor do most people nurture the moral excellence of courage, <\/em>the courage to dare\u2014the courage to be, <\/em>come what may.\u00a0 Courage or fortitude is that trait needed to so much as consider just the very possibility<\/em> that what the majority has been led to uncritically accept as unmediated reality is nothing of the kind. Courage is all that much more indispensable if one is to engage in the often lonely and painful process of actually exposing<\/em> the illusions, lies, and flagrant contradictions of the conventional wisdom, for it most emphatically is <\/em>a lonely <\/em>road to travel.<\/p>\n

Thinking is hard.\u00a0 It is painful<\/em>, as USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour, founder of Warrior Flow Combatives<\/a> and my own Senior-Master instructor stresses.<\/p>\n

Indeed.<\/p>\n

It is painful in more ways than one.\u00a0 Rather, it is painful in all possible ways that it is possible for a human being to experience pain.\u00a0 Because the human-person is a unity of mind and body\u2014because the mind is infused throughout the body, the latter being \u201cthe subconscious<\/em> mind,\u201d as some neuroscientists refer to it\u2014the development of one\u2019s critical thinking skill set can be as physically laborious as the development of those skills required for the perfection of athleticism in any other activity.\u00a0 Admittedly, critical thinking is not about to leave one saturated in perspiration, huffing and puffing, barely able to pull oneself up from a dojo floor, or burdened with muscle soreness.\u00a0 Yet the mental <\/em>exhaustion that one experiences upon burning the midnight oil in study is, <\/em>ultimately, physical<\/em> exhaustion (just as physical exhaustion leads to mental exhaustion).<\/p>\n

It is labor-intensive.\u00a0 This is also in part due to the fact that for as intelligent or otherwise analytically fit a person may be, if a person\u2019s efforts aim only to strengthen the conventional wisdom, he won\u2019t have to work nearly as diligently as one who is seeking to transcend it.\u00a0 If a person lacks the ability and\/or the will to undermine that dominant collective conception of reality, then for however much time he spends thinking (writing, researching, discussing, and debating) about it, he will always and only ever be doing it on relatively flat land, so to speak.\u00a0 Sure, there may be some hills, but scarcely ever any mountains, that he will have to surmount.<\/p>\n

The person, though, who dares to challenge the claims made on behalf of the Cave or the Matrix must descend.\u00a0 <\/em>He must dig his way, as if with a spoon, straight through to the center of the Earth, as it were, so as to seize the roots of the worldview of his peers and upend it.<\/p>\n

The figure who embarks upon this enterprise is, quite literally, a revolutionary.\u00a0 He is a revolutionary, though, in the sense in which the likes of Socrates, the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Saint Paul, Galileo, and Copernicus were revolutionaries.\u00a0 Just as these great men would no more have thought to deny that there are continuities between dreams and waking reality, neither did they deny that there were continuities between the dream of the worldview from which<\/em> they sought to liberate their contemporaries and the waking reality into which<\/em> they sought to deliver them: The former, after all, is based upon the latter\u2014even if it is a gross distortion of it (Lies, or at least the most convincing of lies, always contain some truth, after all).<\/p>\n

The point, though, is that the critical thinker is a revolutionary in that he doesn\u2019t seek to reform or conserve the status quo but, rather, to supersede it.\u00a0 There are two ways to do this.<\/p>\n

The first is an internal critique.\u00a0 A paradigm (theory, worldview, system, etc.) can endure internal tensions, apparent paradoxes, and\/or subtle inconsistencies.\u00a0 It cannot survive fundamental contradictions.\u00a0 If it lacks the theoretical resources to resolve these, then it threatens to implode in upon itself.\u00a0 The critical thinker is one who recognizes these contradictions.\u00a0 This part is easy (for him<\/em>).\u00a0 What isn\u2019t so easy\u2014what is extraordinarily exasperating\u2014is discovering what a thankless task it is trying to draw others\u2019 attention to the logical chasms in whatever the Narrative happens to be.<\/p>\n

It can be at once astonishing and discouraging for the critical thinker to learn that most people, however intelligent or erudite with respect to other subjects they may be, simply but sorely lack the very skills that he can all too easily take for granted.\u00a0 They don\u2019t think, and couldn\u2019t care less about thinking, critically when it comes to the pronouncements of those who they\u2019ve been conditioned to regard as \u201cthe Experts.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s at this juncture that, for the sake of his own well-being, he must remind himself that critical thinking does indeed consist of skills, <\/em>habits that, like all habits, must be developed and perfected over time.<\/p>\n

Critical thinking, as was noted above, also demands fortitude, for heterodoxy has never been known to receive a warm welcome from the orthodox.<\/p>\n

The second way to revolutionize the Zeitgeist is to assume a meta<\/em> view of it, to force its self-styled guardians (politicians, bureaucrats, media propagandists, corporate CEOs, academics, entertainment celebrities, ministers, doctors, gurus, comprehensively, its \u201cExperts<\/em>\u201d) to defend the very presuppositions upon which it\u2019s grounded\u2014to reveal, in other words, that it is, from start to finish, a tissue of untruths, an artifact, a construct, a matrix<\/em> designed to enrich its architects, the Experts, while mesmerizing the masses into thoughtless acquiescence.<\/p>\n

This latter course of action is even more formidable than the former, though both require Herculean strength.<\/p>\n

Critical thinking is, increasingly, a conspicuous rarity.\u00a0 Neither the overall culture nor the educational system, from kindergarten straight through to college, truly encourage it.\u00a0 Quite the contrary: The rhetorical homage that educators pay to the importance of individuality and free thinking is wildly at odds with the institutional practices that they promote, practices that are patently designed to apologize for whatever the status quo happens to be (The \u201cpoliticization\u201d of academia is so-called only because academia, to an undoubtedly greater degree than any other cultural institution, reinforces the political-social status quo by supplying it with its intellectual rationalizations).<\/p>\n

One need not pursue a formal<\/em> liberal arts education in order to acquire critical intelligence (in fact, nowadays, a formal liberal arts education, i.e. college, is all but certain to preclude<\/em> the formation of critical intelligence!).\u00a0 One can, and should, study on one\u2019s own.<\/p>\n

A real education makes available to its students those virtues of head and heart that the English schoolmaster and poet William Johnson Cory once identified in his characterization of a liberal arts education.\u00a0 Students, he said, \u201care not engaged so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, education exists for the sake of \u201cdeveloping arts and habits<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 These are \u201cthe habit of attention<\/em>,\u201d \u201cthe art of expression<\/em>,\u201d \u201cthe art of assuming at a moment\u2019s notice a new intellectual position<\/em>,\u201d \u201cthe art of entering quickly into another person\u2019s thoughts<\/em>,\u201d \u201cthe habit of submitting to censure and refutation<\/em>,\u201d \u201cthe art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms<\/em>,\u201d \u201cthe habit of regarding minute points of accuracy<\/em>,\u201d and \u201cthe art of working out what is possible in a given time<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

An education breeds \u201ctaste, discrimination<\/em>\u201d and \u201cmental courage<\/em> and mental soberness<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

And all of these \u201carts and habits\u201d develop simultaneously with an ever-dawning \u201cself-knowledge<\/em>\u201d that would have otherwise been impossible if not for the education delivered (italics added).<\/p>\n

Critical thinking skills, then, are not limited simply to mastery of the rules and principles of logic.\u00a0 The critical thinker is not a logic-chopping machine.\u00a0 Rather, the arts and habits that he possesses enable him to empathize<\/em> with others to a greater degree than would be thinkable had he never acquired these skills in the first place, for between the intellectual and character excellences there is less space than is commonly assumed.\u00a0 It was this insight that Hannah Arendt grasped when, upon observing the capital trial of Adolph Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, she remarked upon his \u201ccurious, but quite authentic, inability to think.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 This trait, she was quick to note, was by no means peculiar to Eichmann.\u00a0 Rather, it is shared by most people.<\/p>\n

Between thinking and morality, she would then argue, there is an intimate relationship: Critical thinking, in supplying the critical thinker with some measure of immunity against irrationality, immunizes him against conforming to the thought(lessness) of the majority\u2014and, with it, the cruelty, bigotry, and other evils to which the herd mentality all too often leads.<\/p>\n

So much for this summation of the importance, the benefits and the costs, of the development of critical thinking skills.\u00a0 In the next article, we will examine more closely this subject as it pertains to\u2026the martial arts<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Most people, failing to recognize it for the temporal and cultural-specific conceptual construct that it is, confuse the prevailing paradigm of reality, the conventional wisdom, for self-evident reality itself. \u00a0This is just the way it is and has always been. And this is because most people do not invest the time and energy, the proverbial…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nCritical Thinking, Character, and Reality<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Critical Thinking, Character, and Reality\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Most people, failing to recognize it for the temporal and cultural-specific conceptual construct that it is, confuse the prevailing paradigm of reality, the conventional wisdom, for self-evident reality itself. \u00a0This is just the way it is and has always been. And this is because most people do not invest the time and energy, the proverbial…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2021-08-12T16:19:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2021-08-12T16:20:11+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jack Kerwick\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Critical Thinking, Character, and Reality","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Critical Thinking, Character, and Reality","og_description":"Most people, failing to recognize it for the temporal and cultural-specific conceptual construct that it is, confuse the prevailing paradigm of reality, the conventional wisdom, for self-evident reality itself. \u00a0This is just the way it is and has always been. And this is because most people do not invest the time and energy, the proverbial…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html","og_site_name":"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture","article_published_time":"2021-08-12T16:19:50+00:00","article_modified_time":"2021-08-12T16:20:11+00:00","author":"Jack Kerwick","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html","name":"Critical Thinking, Character, and Reality","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#website"},"datePublished":"2021-08-12T16:19:50+00:00","dateModified":"2021-08-12T16:20:11+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/6832222998cc14717ded1849531201c5"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/08\/critical-thinking-character-and-reality.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Critical Thinking, Character, and Reality"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/","name":"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture","description":"Beliefnet Voices - Jack Kerwick","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/6832222998cc14717ded1849531201c5","name":"Jack Kerwick","description":"I have a Ph.D. in philosophy from Temple University, a master's degree in philosophy from Baylor University, and a bachelor's degree in philosophy and religious studies from Wingate University. I teach philosophy at several colleges in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania areas.","sameAs":["http:\/\/www.jackkerwick.com"],"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/author\/jkerwick"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/399"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2453,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2450\/revisions\/2453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}