Can Thinking Make a Comeback?

Human beings are the only species who can think about thinking. Animals can think instinctively to satisfy their appetites, but humans are blessed with the ability to reflect on the very art of reflecting, as I am doing now.

It’s hard to imagine a more urgent time to consider the act of thinking, at a moment when deep thought is decidedly under siege. On social media, we’re encouraged not to think but to react, to peck like little birds at our likes and dislikes. In politics, we’re way past the point of honoring deep thought, hypnotized as we are by the lust to crush our political rivals by any means necessary.

And in academia, that supposed bastion of free thought and open inquiry, we’re encouraged to think only to the extent that our thoughts will conform with the progressive dogma that has hijacked so much of our culture.

“The shaping of campus political rhetoric happens primarily through exclusion and drowning out of different voices,” sophomore Darren Chang wrote in the Cornell Daily Sun as far back as 2018. “Students who bring positions that don’t fit with the primary narrative of liberal progressivism are shouted down and insulted, as if their background and political orientation should be rejected prima facie.”

Of course, since Chang wrote that op-ed, things have gotten progressively worse. 

“Thinking for yourself has never been easy, but the question of whether it is still possible at all is of some moment,” philosophy professor Michael Ignatieff wrote this month in a must-read essay in Liberties Journal. “The key ideals of liberal democracy — moral independence and intellectual autonomy — depend on it, and my students will not have much experience of either if they end up living in a culture where all of their political and cultural opinions must express tribal allegiance to one of two partisan alternatives; where they live in communities so segregated by education, class, and race that they never encounter a challenge to their tribe’s received ideas, or in a society where the wells of information are so polluted that pretty well everything they read is ‘fake news.’”

The crux of the problem is that if we use our minds solely to serve an ideology, an ambition or an appetite, there’s really no need to engage in deep thought, especially if that thought may lead to truths that will disrupt the balm of our certitude and introduce that dreaded enemy called doubt. 

The crux of the problem is that if we use our minds solely to serve an ideology, an ambition or an appetite, there’s really no need to engage in deep thought, especially if that thought may lead to truths that will disrupt the balm of our certitude and introduce that dreaded enemy called doubt. 

It’s disheartening to think that human nature may partly explain this aversion to reflection. But Judaism, as we know, calls on us to do the hard work of transcending our natures in favor of higher ideals, such as the search for truth.

That’s why the Jewish community, whether right or left, religious or not, should be particularly concerned with the postmodern assault on the ancient art of thinking. If any act describes our tradition, it would be the act of asking questions, of “turning and turning” ideas in the constant search for deeper truths.

The Jewish community should be particularly concerned with the postmodern assault on the ancient art of thinking. If any act describes our tradition, it would be the act of asking questions, of “turning and turning” ideas in the constant search for deeper truths.

This art of asking questions lies at the heart of “Thinking Critically in College: The Essential Handbook for Student Success,” a new book by Louis Newman and the subject of our cover story this week. 

Newman, longtime Dean of Academic Advising and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University, takes a nonideological, pragmatic approach to the discipline of critical thinking. Instead of bemoaning issues like groupthink, he prefers to lay out practical advice for cultivating better learning habits, habits that he argues colleges are failing to provide. 

As he writes, “Colleges promise to teach skills that endure long after specific facts fade … [but they] aren’t delivering on that promise. According to a 2019 study from the Society for Human Resource Management, nearly two-thirds of employers surveyed indicated that it was difficult to find college grads with adequate critical thinking skills.” 

The value of Newman’s approach is that he takes critical thinking so seriously that he virtually turns it into a discipline of its own, like a carpentry class with rules and tools.

“All students need explicit instruction in these academic tools of the trade,” he writes. “Students will not become effective learners and rigorous thinkers by osmosis. If faculty aren’t highlighting these habits of mind, students are unlikely to acquire them independently.”

If I were head of a school, Jewish or otherwise, high school or college, I would seriously consider using Newman’s handbook to shape a mandatory class on critical thinking. It would probably be the only instruction these students would ever get on this quintessential human activity that we so often take for granted.

Considering that our thoughts permeate every aspect of our lives, and that the world around us is pushing us further and further away from that activity, it’s hard to think of a more critical class.