Critical Thinking- Use It Or Lose It

A friend recently emailed re my invitation to view this blog:

“I'd be careful about inviting people to 'be generous' with comments unless you mean to agree with you a lot.Which I will if that is what you want -- like I tell students, tell me what you want -- and if all you want is a 'well done' I can do that now and we'll both be happy-- otherwise I'll spend time and expect the same.”

Well, I love to hear “well done”, and any other wonderful things you have to say to me…. But that’s not something I expect or demand from friends or anyone else. I also like questions, and even answer em, as you can see under post comments. I answered this particular email:

“……what I'm asking for is honest feedback about my ideas and practice- presumably based in YR ideas and practice- I DO prefer evidence-based remarks unless yr referring to yr own feelings and ideas. Frinstance, statements like "thousands of people die each year from badly cured compost" just aren't evidence-based. Well, not in this or the last century. "Thousands of people die each year from water-borne disease, including those which are transmitted through contact with untreated sewage" would be accurate and verifiable, and we could have a discussion based in documented evidence..... anyway, would you really be happy doling out feel-good lies-on-demand to me, yr students, or anyone else? Not me.”

And there it is. I think that many of us hold our tongues - even bite em- because we don’t want to upset the other or ourselves… and that’s often at the expense of a free exchange of ideas and observations; always at the expense of honest expression, which may or not be a very high priority, given any particular conversation. But inhibiting a free exchange of ideas, for whatever reason, inhibits our ability to See and Understand ourselves and our world; our often mistaken assumptions go unchallenged and we believe them to be Fact.

When we don’t ask why something is true, or if it even is true, we’re at risk of accepting “common knowledge” and “the way things are” as simple facts that need no thought or examination. If we accept “ because it’s dangerous…” or “because it’s yucky…” or “because people don’t do that…”, etc, those unreasoned attitudes seem to be legitimate arguments for unreasoned behaviors and practices. Questioning commonly held assumptions seems like stupidity, disloyalty, or just plain silliness in that mode; intellectual curiosity gets damped down and recycled as ignorance. We regularly challenge the legitimacy of political ignorance- I say let's challenge our OWN, and help each other do it!