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.
Such anti-thinkers are a sad reflection on our culture and education. But then, we Americans have seldom welcomed deep or abstract thought. This differentiates us markedly from our British and Continental friends, whose respect for serious thinking reflects intellectual flexibility, depth, and sophistication. (Their coffee and pastries are better too.) That’s why they have popular philosophy magazines in addition to academic journals, and we do not. And for them, “intellectual” isn’t a dirty word or a token of a sham elitism.
Drilling down on this point, I would suggest that critical thinking is deep (or at least deeper) thinking. I’ve compared it elsewhere to “philosophy on the fly”: critical thinking is philosophic thinking in the here-and-now, in a particular context, about this situation or that problem rather than in general. And that’s not a deep logical chasm.
What makes American so resistant to thought? Clearly not a lack of intelligence, energy, or innovative talent. We are justly proud of our pragmatism and practicality; our so-called pragmatic philosophers (Josiah Royce, C.S. Pierce, John Dewey, Richard Rorty and others) have left a formidable legacy. Their roots are in the likes of Henry David Thoreau and the Founding Fathers. Yet most Americans have no idea who they are.
Perhaps it was the exigencies of conquest, and the sheer abundance of land, resources and opportunities, that led the American mind to focus on more immediate experience: the challenges of raw nature and a raw continent, of dominating native peoples and enslaving Africans while plowing westward with grim resolve to remake the New World as our own.
It is perhaps an inevitable result of this process that philosophizing has never found highly fertile soil in North America, despite our strong links to the European continent and its scholarly traditions, and particularly to the great British and German universities. You can see it in the contrasting writing styles of American philosophers to those in Britain and Europe: sparer, more direct, more business-like, less elegant. American thinkers are certainly more self-conscious, aware that they are farther from the cultural mainstream than their British or Continental counterparts. (I want to add, however snarkily, that British philosophers can write and think rings around most of the Continentals.)
The core idea we’re talking about here is abstraction. And abstraction is simply seeing patterns and commonalities across vast swaths of humane experience. It doesn’t exist without the human mind, and it’s a powerful tool of the mind. Those who disdain it disdain thinking, full stop. They need the safety of the empirical, of immediate experience, the intellectual stream of which is called positivism. Classic Americana.
We all need to pay attention to immediate experience; it’s the soil in which we live, and from which great poetry grows, not to mention our food. Abstraction doesn’t challenge or supplant immediacy or concreteness. It supplements, organizes, and contextualizes those perceptual virtues. Abstraction isn’t “free-floating” or “in the clouds” or “airy theorizing.” Rather, it’s the mental toughness and flexibility to grasp experience in larger as well as smaller bites, to distinguish “form” from “content” (and many other logical polarities) without dividing them into separate realms. It’s the capacity to see this life, this dirt and daily existence, in larger, more complex, and more interconnected ways. And in its methodological dimension, abstraction is the essence of all rationality, which is what got us this far since the Greeks, accounts for the liberal arts, and given us, for better or worse, the tools to learn and know and talk together as a civilization. “To reason is to generalize,” as the philosopher Renford Bambrough says.
If this were not a blog post, I would argue at length that abstraction is also biased toward complexity, and complexity is biased politically to the left. That’s why academia – and the liberal arts in particular – are, relatively speaking, an island of liberalism in a deeply conservative country, along with K-12 teachers, government and public service workers, union members, the so-called knowledge professions such as media and law. Positivism and atomism, the denial of relations and interconnections and the “privileging” of immediate experience, lead the mind toward a simpler and more right-leaning worldview. Metaphysically it’s a toss-up; but I’m in the former group, and I don’t mind the company.