I have been thinking a lot recently, but I don’t want to make a habit of it because it is such hard work. I started thinking for myself at the age of about twenty-five. Most young men don’t think at all before that age, as the crime statistics, traffic accident figures, and maternity statistics prove. Some men never think for their entire lives, as any woman will confirm.
Thinking is simply the coherent connection of one thought with another in search of the answer to a problem. What makes it so difficult is the discipline of keeping on track and not being distracted by stray images, thoughts, or emotions that drift into the mind. We need to be quiet and focused, and the whole of modern life is a challenge to being quiet and focused on anything. Crossword puzzles are a good example of what we might call recreational thinking. They demand a mental effort, but we assume that, as with physical exercise, the effort will be worth it. Not thinking, on the other hand, is easy, like watching television. It allows us to swim in the images and emotions of the moment, literally without a thought.
I’m sure that many, many people have been thinking more and harder than usual recently. There is an uneasy feeling that, sooner or later, we will not be allowed to think at all, at least not publicly. Already, certain words and ideas are banned, and higher education is under attack. Colleges and universities are where young people learn how to think critically, which means thinking subversively under the present regime. Education matters especially because it brings young people, possibly for the first time, into contact with people who can think at a high level.
Thinking is out of fashion, along with coherent language, logic, and science. Even education itself is out of fashion. This is a cultural disaster because these things have brought us a long way, all the way from barbarism to civilization, and from tyranny to democracy. Voltaire wrote: “When the population becomes interested in thinking, all Is Lost.” He meant that all was lost for the ruling class, and, in the eighteenth century, some philosophers believed that rational thinking would take us all the way to an ideal society. We seem to have fallen at the last fence. The future is in the past, back to the 1950s, or perhaps a couple of centuries before that.
People won’t stop thinking, of course. Everyone thinks all the time. It’s not just philosophizing but a way of answering all kinds of practical questions. The great difference is between thinking freely, without barriers, and thinking within some closed ideological or theological system. Open-minded thinking always includes the proviso “I might be wrong about this,” which saves us from a great many disasters.
Columnist David Brooks blames the failure of the education system and the mind-numbing impact of social media, and he’s probably right on both counts.
The ability to think freely and openly, and to express our thoughts, is an extraordinary privilege. We mustn’t lose it, just when we need it most.
