What, Me Think?

Joys and agonies of trying to be a critical thinker.

Teaching critical and creative thinking (and mediating conflicts for a living) allowed me to spend countless hours embedded in other people’s minds. This intimacy helped me appreciate the complex ways in which people gather and process information, interpret it, reach conclusions, and make decisions. It also allowed me to vicariously immerse myself in other people’s feelings, aspirations, and anxieties- sometimes to the detriment of my own life and relationships. A lifetime of being a visitor in other people’s minds has forced me to rethink everything I know about other people- and myself. Most of all, it has changed my understanding of thinking itself.

Hence, these essays are not a neuroscientist’s treatise on the workings of the brain as much as they are a user’s pean to the brilliance and capriciousness of the human mind. I hope to capture at least a fraction of the exquisite challenges and joys that are there for our taking- if we are so disposed.   

“Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you're thinking to make your thinking better.” Richard Paul

I wrote this essay in 2018 in Washington DC, where I had arrived after a twelve-year stint in India. Coming from a chaotic nation fast descending into despotic illiberalism, I now watched helplessly as a far more developed one unraveled. Denied their first Female President, many Americans were already in a deep funk, made worse by the daily bouts of logorrhea (verbal diarrhea) emanating from the White House. Anxiety and fear morphed into anger, as personal relationships were strained, and hair-trigger sensitivities littered the civic space with landmines. Worse, my own peers in the democracy, diversity, and peacebuilding fields double downed on their tired tools and theories, acting as though they could best serve democracy by clinging on to their careers (and funding).

While the Indian professional class (one that I had precariously clung on to) had always been oblivious of their civic responsibilities, I was shocked to see the politically astute in the USA abdicating theirs. Years of self-flagellation about race, gender, sexuality (and a year of Trump derangement) seemed to have caused an epileptic quake of Vesuvian proportions that buried the national IQ- sinking it to moronic levels. Never before (I may exaggerate, but not by much) has a society’s collective intelligence been dumbed down as quickly, or as effectively.

In this multi-part essay, I intend to explore the hidden underbelly of thinking and the tragic consequences of poor thinking. I will make an honest effort to not dwell on some topics (race, gender, sexuality and Trump), because personal research has shown me that the mere mention of even one of them turns well-meaning, intelligent humans into blabbering fools.

Coming of age in the India of the late Seventies I was inspired by visions of freedom and rebellion. Like millions of my more fortunate counterparts in the West I, too, was besotted with music, free love, equal rights and overthrowing the military industrial complex. Why not? 

Unlike sensible folk who outgrow their teenage fantasies, I stumbled into adulthood even more entrenched in mine and determined to help create the perfect world. This is not the place to chronicle my quixotic misadventures except to say that in my thirties, wanting to improve the quality of public thinking in Bangalore, India- I started a non-profit venture (Alternatives) teaching critical and creative thinking. That I didn’t get run out of the city is a testament to the epic tolerance of Indians. If anything, my experiences were mostly positive and led me to believe that given congenial conditions and enlightened education, most individuals could become virtuous, brilliant and wise. From this assumption, it then followed that if a critical mass of people were thus educated, entire societies could become, well… Enlightened.

I was not alone- for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, philosophers and educators like John Dewey were unabashed about the prospects of creating a rational, creative, and compassionate world. After all, the intellectual fervor that heralded the Enlightenment (and separated the church from state) had liberated us from the constraints of custom, dogma and societal oppression. The scientific revolution and the advances in political freedoms had also made it possible to imagine the emergence of a new kind of human- one who could train her mind to transcend not just her ego and baser emotions, but social and biological limitations. In my own classes I had seen distinctly average or even dull students develop their powers of reasoning and imagination in astonishing ways- surprising even the students themselves.

Naturally enough, this interest in critical and creative thinking converted me into a passionate (and aggressive) supporter of free speech and free thought. To that end, I viewed the development of liberal, secular, democratic political systems and the expansion of universal human rights as critical to our evolution as a species.

Over the years, even when I discovered that liberal systems and institutions were clumsy, easily corrupted, and eminently fallible, I kept my faith. I told myself that evolution was a slow process and that even if the 20th century was far from perfect, things were moving in the right direction. The America I lived in, from 1995-2005, still held out hope that all people, everywhere, men and women, colonized and colonizer, gay and straight, black, brown and white, could strive for a more fair, dignified, and brighter existence. 

This optimism was not a turn of the century thing, and it was certainly not just American. Take the matter of India’s infamous caste system which I learned about at age ten or eleven, in my social studies class. My elders in the family and at school, while not particularly progressive themselves, were liberal enough to see caste for the abomination that it was. They reassured us that, by the time we grew up, this accursed system would disappear the way of the kerosene lamp and bullock cart. Yes, we were once optimistic about human perfectibility. 

Few are that naive anymore. Today, leaving aside the avaricious, the sociopaths, or the vacuous- even those who ‘self-identify’ themselves as ‘moral’, hide their enlightenment well. We had always been conscious of the Evangelical Right’s hypocrisies. Alas, the cultural and political Left (call them ‘Left’, ‘Woke’ or ‘Progressives’) those aggressive flag bearers of contemporary morality, have bested them. They have made tribalism, egocentricity and hatred (when directed at the enemy) respectable again. Seduced by righteousness and criminally ignorant of humanity’s painfully derived lessons, they have squandered their considerable energies on increasingly indulgent whims. This essay, then, is not a critique of the usual suspects, elites, dictators, oligarchs, and misogynists. This is my rant against ordinary citizens of democracies, those who would allow their biases and prejudices to destroy our ability to create a more humane world. Call it my last stand against willful ignorance, intellectual lethargy and wanton idiocy. 

Unlike ten or fifteen years ago, when my warnings about the weakening of democracy elicited scorns, now even starry-eyed Pollyannas speak the language of imminent collapse. And yet, many continue to hold out hope for magic in the form of another Messiah. Alas, there will be no Gandhi, Mandela, Roosevelt- not even another hapless Obama to save us with his soul-stirring rhetoric. We will not be delivered from tyranny, anarchy, or oblivion by saviors who have one eye on clicks, funding, or Peace Prizes.

So, here is my first boring (seemingly obvious) idea. A government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ is utterly dependent upon- wait for it…. the PEOPLE.

That’s it.

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