Sorting the wheat from the chaff
If you could bestow one skill on another person, what would it be? For mine, it would be the ability to think clearly. There are several dimensions to the ideal gift of clear thinking: the ability to critically analyse the arguments of others and to assess their strengths and weaknesses; the ability to distil problems to their most fundamental components as a path to solving them; the perspective that recognises that complex issues are almost never “black and white”; the ability to see multiple paths to multiple solutions and to weigh the merits of each from different perspectives; the balance of intellectual and emotional empathy that comes from seeing issues from multiple viewpoints; and the humility and pleasure that comes from being open to the ideas and elegant reason of others.
In my utopian clear-thinking world, faulty and fraudulent arguments would be identified more quickly and public discourse would lift and become more issues based. Ideology and theology would face more scrutiny, at least to demonstrate that they do no harm.
Paradoxically, while our world has never needed clear thinking more, our commitment to it, and capacity to demonstrate it, seems to be diminishing. Public debate has become a form of combat where no concessions are to be made and logic is often scant. The demands for “click bait” and punchy Twitter postings leads to polarising language and positions. Media interviews are generally a competition between the desire for a sound bite and the “gotcha” moment. Policy seems driven by sectoral interests rather than structured reasoning and merit. Disenfranchised people are increasingly vulnerable to conspiracy theorists and political spivs.
My argument is that clear thinking is an apex skill and that the human race needs to invest more in the pursuit of it. This is not just about making a pithy point at book club; it’s about doing a better job of making the big decisions that will determine what sort of world we and future generations will live in.
Which brings me to how clear-thinking skills are acquired and maintained. Clearly the families we grow up in and the conversations had at the dinner table are a major factor, but that is not a public policy issue. Next in line is education. Our own federal government seems intent on the promotion of STEM subjects in our universities at the expense of humanities subjects that focus on clear thinking and the bigger questions of life. Ironically, this strikes me as a failure to think clearly.
Yes, we need engineers, scientists, medical professionals, computer programmers and many other professions. They are essential. But we also need people who will wrestle with how we improve the quality of our democracies, allocate resources in a reasoned and balanced way, encourage constructive cultures in public and private institutions, address social and economic injustices, set public policy around the environment, deal with rising geo political tensions and unpick the fallacious arguments of an endless array of spin merchants. We need these people to be clear thinkers. We need lots of them.