{"id":843,"date":"2013-05-12T21:39:37","date_gmt":"2013-05-13T01:39:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=843"},"modified":"2013-05-12T21:39:37","modified_gmt":"2013-05-13T01:39:37","slug":"clear-thinking-and-good-citizenship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2013\/05\/clear-thinking-and-good-citizenship.html","title":{"rendered":"Clear Thinking and Good Citizenship"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Sowell recently wrote an article in which he suggested that \u201cthinking\u201d is an activity whose time has come and gone.\u00a0 Yet if he is right\u2014and I believe that he is\u2014then it isn\u2019t only the intellectual virtue of analytical rigor of which we deprive ourselves.<\/p>\n

The 17th<\/sup> century French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote that \u201cthought\u201d is \u201cthe essence of morality.\u201d\u00a0 Thinking is no different than any other activity inasmuch as it requires both lots of practice as well as the self-discipline that it takes to commit to all of this practicing.\u00a0 Yet self-discipline, in this context, demands the cultivation of virtues, not just of the mind, but of the thinker\u2019s overall character.<\/p>\n

Courage is one virtue that is indispensable to clear thinking.\u00a0 It takes guts to examine one\u2019s own preconceptions, to follow an argument to its logical term\u2014regardless of whether this means the doom of one\u2019s own cherished beliefs.\u00a0 It probably takes even more guts to subject the ideology of the mob, the conventional wisdom, to this same withering interrogation.<\/p>\n

Courage, though, is a virtue that in any number of activities can and does co-exist with vice.\u00a0 In war and in sports, say, a man\u2019s courage needn\u2019t prevent him from acting unjustly.\u00a0 But the courageous thinker has an acute sense of justice, for there is no idea, regardless of how silly, popular, or offensive it may be, to which he will refuse a fair hearing.<\/p>\n

There are more character excellences that clear thinking breeds.\u00a0 However, these two virtues alone are enough to commend it.<\/p>\n

Courage and justice are goods worth possessing on their own account, but they are also essential to good citizenship\u2014especially when the citizen is supposed to be a self-governing <\/i>agent.<\/p>\n

Lest the individual citizen have the courage of his convictions, the courage to challenge the consensus of \u201cthe majority,\u201d the latter promises to reduce itself to nothing more or less than a mob.\u00a0 Ditto if individuals lack justice.<\/p>\n

How different matters would be if our culture held thinking in as high esteem as it holds, say, Honey Booboo.\u00a0 <\/i>Consider the Benghazi case in light of an America obsessed with thinking clearly.<\/p>\n

Democrats are laboring inexhaustibly to convince the public that this whole thing is an issue only because Republicans insist upon \u201cpoliticizing\u201d it.\u00a0 In a culture in which clear thinking is endemic, no Democratic politician would even conceive of peddling this line, much less attempt to do so.<\/p>\n

To the clear thinker, it is a no-brainer that a murderous attack against the American government, an attack about which the latter conveyed what we now know was gross misinformation, is nothing if it isn\u2019t a political <\/i>event.\u00a0 In other words, it is self-politicizing: it became \u201cpoliticized\u201d long before anyone could have deliberately set out to make it so.<\/p>\n

The clear thinker also knows that even if it is true that Republicans are interested in Benghazi only for the sake of punishing Democrats, this is neither here nor there.\u00a0 Knowledge of a person\u2019s intentions is indispensable to determining his character\u2014not the rightness or wrongness of his actions.\u00a0 For the wrong reasons, one may do the right thing, and for the right reasons, one may act wrongly.<\/p>\n

Whether or not the Obama administration is guilty of a cover up of epic proportions is a question worth asking in its own right\u2014regardless of who is asking it, or why.<\/p>\n

White House spokesperson Jay Carney suggests that the events that unfolded in Benghazi are immaterial because they \u201chappened a long time ago.\u201d\u00a0 The clear thinker realizes that regardless of when Benghazi occurred, time is no more relevant to moral value than is size or color.\u00a0 Unless this was true, it would be pointless for us to discuss anything or anyone from the past.<\/p>\n

Like anything else worthwhile, clear thinking is hard work.\u00a0 Yet its benefits\u2014both for the individual and the citizenry\u2014more than compensate for its costs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Sowell recently wrote an article in which he suggested that \u201cthinking\u201d is an activity whose time has come and gone.\u00a0 Yet if he is right\u2014and I believe that he is\u2014then it isn\u2019t only the intellectual virtue of analytical rigor of which we deprive ourselves. 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