Readers of this blog are a hearty breed. You already have one of the main prerequisites for being a critical thinker: a tolerance for deeper thinking. Others would say that my head is in the clouds (where I must say I have excellent company, philosophical and otherwise). But these critics always remind me of the doltish New York Times reporter who sneered at President Bill Clinton for “airy theorizing” when Clinton talked about the decline of the nation-state. 

As a self-styled independent scholar, I do a fair amount of reading (despite being a slow, plodding reader). It’s mostly a gleaning process, and the result is a  vague balance of what one consciously learns or remembers and what somehow gets absorbed unconsciously into one’s frameworks and factual understandings. It’s the rare book or essay that is memorable as a reading experience. 

Despite everything we are seeing in the news, the concept of truth (and “the truth”) is central to critical thinking, to liberal learning, and to democratic citizenship. And despite all my past efforts to suggest how complicated the concept of truth is, sometimes it isn’t. Some things just are, or are not, the case, and it degrades the very idea of truth to debate them. Who won the 2020 election, for example.