Critical thinking skills seem to be lacking in the U.S. ….the world really. There are many reasons for it. Way back in the 1960s it was thought to be apathy. It’s easier to let other people do the “hard” thinking for us. We were told to “Trust the Experts”, but the “experts” seemed to be flawed people, like paternalistic pastors and political types who told us to do things for our own good — that really supported them at our expense. Some of the experts are dismissed by the “experts” we trust like family, friends, community leaders and faith leaders. I remember this doublespeak stuff happening all the time I was going up. Later, as a teen, I found the George Orwell book, 1984, very compelling. The idea of saying one thing but intending the opposite is exactly what I saw happening.
Critical thinking starts with discerning what the facts are.
It builds with identifying good sources of information.
Critical thinking requires us to challenge our confirmation biases.
Critical thinking encourages intellectual curiosity.
Critical thinking requires doing homework without taking short cuts.
Critical thinking requires accurate determination of what we can do on our own and when we need help.
Critical thinking takes practice, practice, practice.
Critical thinking skills build over time and atrophy with disuse.
It’s no wonder why the majority of people have no problem delegating critical thinking to others — it’s easier in a busy life. The problem is that the trusted thinkers have an agenda that is often opposed to the delegator’s best interest. People of faith are conditioned from birth to respect and follow their faith leaders, no matter what. Look at the Catholic Church which is still run mostly by old white men who refuse to take their boots off women’s necks. The Evangelical community envies Catholic control over their flock and emulate this hideous misogyny and racism on steroids. My friends in Islam, Jews and other faiths (some jaw dropping stuff coming out of Scientology) tell me similar problems with their faith leaders. I can’t speak for those religions, but I can give you an example of what I dealt with on Sundays growing up.
We would go to church where we would spend an hour on the scripture of the day in Sunday School and then go to the sanctuary for the worship service. We would sing as the choir entered the sanctuary, sing another song, pray, sing again, drop our money into the plate while singing, pray and have communion, hear someone sing and then hear some variation of Matthew Chapter 5 where Jesus admonishes us to heal the sick, feed the poor, clothe the naked and house the unhoused. … or maybe how women should be silent or maybe.. something else no one had any intention of actually doing in their own, private life. I knew I would never be silent, ever. Then, we’d sing as we left the sanctuary to gather in the Narthex to pray again before we went our separate ways or maybe to a coffee hour in the Fellowship Hall below where everyone would comment on how uplifting the service was that day. The rest of the day was spent on “rest”. No shopping was allowed — except if we needed to stop and pick up cold cuts for Sunday dinner. Reading was ok, but no homework reading. A boring day for the most part, unless we went somewhere.
At some point, my parents decided my Mom wouldn’t cook on Sundays, so we’d go to a restaurant after church. Sunday evening was a make yourself a sandwich and have some potato or macaroni salad made the day before — Jello was always for desert. We’d watch Disney’s Sunday night whatever, maybe something after and go to bed. That was in late fall and winter. Spring, summer and early fall, sometimes we’d rush through church so we’d all pile into the car dragging a boat to the lake to spend a great afternoon in the sun and water. A much better day IMO.
The lesson I learned and the one my parents meant to teach were different. My parents were intent on not doing work on Sunday and to keep the Sabbath holy. What I learned was exhaust yourself on Saturday by doing the lawn work, fixing things, laundry, wash the car, get my homework done and prepare Sunday’s food (and maybe prepare the boat and everything needed for a lake excursion) on Saturday before I could see my friends on Saturday, but be sure to get home in time to get enough sleep to get up in time for Sunday School at 9 am and to do the ceremony listed above. All this and that, so we can be bored beyond measure for the rest of the day on Sunday. Any time I expressed my critically thought out arguments against over scheduling Saturday were not well received. Nor was my observation that if it was wrong for Mom to cook on Sunday, why was it ok to visit a restaurant on Sunday? Aren’t those folks working on the Sabbath? Isn’t this wrong? Why are we doing this, this way? Not well received at all. The one thing I never criticized were the great Sunday afternoon park excursions that usually ended with a visit to the ice cream cone shop on the way home. I wasn’t stupid, pointing out all the work we did for great Sunday afternoon excursions, would mess up my agenda which was make Saturday great again. I wanted a great 2 day weekend.
The lesson my parents taught and I learned was that critical thinking was only accepted when I came to the conclusions my parents had predetermined were correct. I learned early on to make change, I had to work around their preconceived determinations. Here’s the thing about critical thinking. People with an agenda won’t allow critical thinking to get in the way of their intentions. IMO this is what we are dealing with when talking to conservatives.
What I learned to do was frame my appeals in a way that would emotionally appeal to my parent’s religious views.
Using words like “wise”, “wisdom”, “A wiser course of action”, “The more wise thing to do is”, “not wise” worked better than smart, or not smart. Prudent, a big-time Biblical word, also worked better. Greed is a Biblical no-no, but it’s over used despite being one of the 7 deadly sins. That word bounces off the hard cases composing our current GOP. Avarice, lust, covet, lazy and envy work much better.
Critical Thinking as a skill isn’t highly prized among authoritarians, which, IMO, most if not all fervently religious observers are. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about Christian, Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Scientology (any religion’s) followers; if a sensible course of action interferes with a sacred belief, a well critical thought out position and action will be discarded to support the authoritarian religion.
What I have found effective with my religious GOP friends (yes, I have a few) is to refer to the current U.S. federal tax code as rewarding avarice. When I hear them complain about the cost of Medicaid and other safety net programs, I ask, “Why do you envy what little the poor have?” Sometimes, I’ll say I’m not bitter over giving people less well-off than me a hand out of poverty. I do refer to Matthew Chapter 5 when advocating expanding Medicaid in my state. Most people living in poverty are the most energetic and hard working people I know. They don’t live in sloth. They do collapse now and then due to exhaustion. The problem is society doesn’t adequately respect and reward their skills. I don’t “win” these arguments, but I do make valid points that stimulates pondering a wiser course. Similarly, when discussing public policy and I get a talking point thrown at me I will sometimes refer to taking an unvetted talking point as lazy thinking and counter with needing to verify the point before I would trust it. Trust, but verify, Reagan’s rally call to the GOP. Calling for verification before trust, works well, in my experience. At least, most of my GOP friends are still talking to me.
Take anti-abortion activity. Abortion was accepted by non-Catholic Christians all the way up to the 1976ish. Around that time, the evangelical community bought the Catholic view on all abortion is wrong. There is no nuance, sensibility or practicality to this position. It’s set in their stone hearts. These people have not read the 9th Chapter of Hosea in their life, or if they did; it has been purged from their memory. They have similarly blocked any recollection of how the Hebrews were instructed to slay the married women of their enemies by slashing them in the abdomen, but to keep the young girls of their enemies for themselves. [IMO: YUK!!!!!] They do not ever read the revengeful Psalms 137:9 “Happy is the one who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.” Clearly, talking to anti-abortionists using scriptural critical thinking will be summarily discarded, in my case because I’m a woman who dares to speak of their hogwash. If a man uses these same scriptures, his critically thought out arguments will be discarded for one reason or another. Bible quoting folk will cherry pick the scripture to “prove” their agenda is righteous and discard other scriptures as irrelevant to the point or it’s “out of context”. They will use “heresy” or any other coping device to discard inconvenient observations that don’t support their theology. Critical thinking be damned.
I’ve written about abortion before, but what I haven’t wrote about is the unhealthy preoccupation the hyper-religious have for other people’s sex lives. We are not going to stop people from having sex. What we can do is promote healthy sex and quite frankly, religion introduces a lot of sexual hang ups to their followers. Before birth control, unwanted pregnancy and inability to prove paternity was the underlying issue for all the scriptural sex dos and don’ts of which, none adequately address women’s consent to have sex. We have solutions for those issues now. Yet religions are still very much into at least the appearance of sexual “purity” and their prurient nosiness about other people’s sex lives. The creepy purity rings, the dismissal of women’s right to consent to sex, and the intrusiveness is a prurient past time. Forgiveness, a mainstay of many religions, is weaponized. I have heard from many a rape victim despair their loss of sexual purity — an awful double whammy dished out by our present day Pharisees. Gossiping about what other people do in their private lives is a back door way of exercising lust and being titillated by talking about sex without the body fluid exchange. Religious control of sex is highly associated with Religious Trauma.
Cult, cultish comes to mind. When dealing with someone who is devoutly religious, the metaphysical wins out against clear, analytical critical thinking most if not all the time. To break down these well established barriers, you have to appeal emotionally. Why feel this guilt when you can get rid of it? Why are we feeling this again? Wasn’t once enough? Forgive and forget is a fairy tale, but forgiving and being able to remember without resentment takes skillful work worth doing. Forgiveness is something people say, but rarely do. Forgiving ourselves is nearly impossible. Denial is much easier to do.
I read this interesting piece about Jamie Raskin using anti-cult techniques when talking to his right wing extremist fellow members of the House.
He said deprogramming experts have told him to be “as warm and affectionate and as personable as you can be with them and make them remember what life was like before they got into the cult.”
and, [more to the point]
“They’ve abandoned critical thinking skills,”
This is a significant observation. I would disagree, however, of this being a new phenomenon. They abandoned critical thinking skills long ago. Like, centuries ago if they ever prized them in the first place, which is doubtful. Think of all the trouble Galileo and Da Vinci had because they crossed the Vatican. Critical thinking was not encouraged then and it isn’t now among the religious elite. It’s not important to the religious zealot unless it supports the current theocratic thought — which changes over time. What was “normal” theology in 1776 and “normal” today is quite different. It was different then, then it was in 1500. This is why the establishment clause of the 1st Amendment exists. It was to protect us from zealots changing the religious views to gain control over the population. The synagogue, church, mosque and temple has been the obstacle of progress every step of our way. Abandoning critical thinking isn’t new at all. The difference is what the printing press, radio, TV, cable and social media has done for mass communications.
Discarding liberal thought from radio and television is also far older than we realize. Politico points to a group of conservatives lamenting the GOP 1952 convention “was rigged” when it nominated Eisenhower to the Presidential ticket. They wanted Robert Taft. This type of tribal GOP thinking was used every day in my life in Ohio during the 1960s. White was right. Women were… I don’t know what we were, but not important for anything other than cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children, certainly not for our thinking or speaking skills. The town was 98% white then and is 96% white according to the 2020 census. Our local radio station was well known for rerunning the radio serials from the 1930s and 1940s with complete replays of Amos ‘n Andy with all the misogynist and racist aspects of these broadcasts. This was acceptable, but they later censored rock and roll and never played Louie Louie or Three Dog Night’s Joy to the World. They were more than incensed when the local Leaning Tower of Pizza put a toilet in their front window with large photographs of Nixon and Agnew sticking out of the bowl in early 1974. They banned them from advertising on their airwaves and got the local paper to ban their ads as well, until the pictures were removed. ….they left the toilet there for the rest of the week. And, the photos and toilet came back after Nixon resigned in August 1974 with “I told you so!” also part of the display. The hoopla re-ensued. I never understood the conservative assertion the media was liberal. It certainly wasn’t at our local radio station or our local paper.
We have come to a point where critical thinking is done when it’s convenient and is discarded when it points out discomforting, inconvenient truths.
A convenient truth: President Reagan was right in saying “Trust but verify”. In context Reagan was talking about the Soviet bloc regarding nukes, but in the vernacular; it applies to everything.
An inconvenient truth: Vladimir Putin wants to restore the Soviet bloc using any totalitarian means at his disposal including war crimes and will get the consent of Western conservatives who envy authoritarian government over democracy and want that authoritarian government for themselves.
^^^^^^^^ This concept is way too complex to fit into a 10 second sound bite. It requires critical thinking to absorb it.
So, break it down:
Vladimir Putin took Russia from an authoritative government back to totalitarianism in 2 weeks time.
Vladimir Putin commits war crimes.
Vladimir Putin is against democracy.
Vladimir Putin wants Western conservatives to covet authoritarian power.
The GOP envies the authoritarian power that Vladimir Putin wields.
The GOP is arrogantly legislating greater authoritarian power for themselves and their “friends”.
The GOP favors authoritarian government.
The GOP is against democracy.
The GOP wants freedom of speech and freedom to vote for Republicans, but wants to suppress progressives from speaking or voting their positions.
The GOP stands for giving favors to their friends and punishing their political opponents.
The GOP is pro-Putin, a totalitarian war criminal.
Note the word, covet. It’s a loaded word among the religious. If you can figure out how to insert some variation of haughty, all the better. Stewardship is also a good word to use when making a point to the religious. Proving these statements will require some browser searches for Putin totalitarian, Putin war crimes, Putin against democracy, Putin courting GOP, GOP admires Putin, GOP against democracy, GOP against 1st Amendment rights, GOP voter suppression, which should serve up enough proof of these statements. Unfortunately, again, we’re asking people with an agenda, to exercise objective critical thinking skills. Their good standing with the GOP requires them to deny any critical thought whatsoever with regard to Putin. The best bet is to appeal emotionally by pointing out how these behaviors goes against Biblical teachings. What would your WWII vet family members say about Putin today?
Appealing emotionally to non-elite Republicans is how Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson have lied their way into the fearful conservative minds. They tell a lie meant to trigger a fear (replacement conspiracy theory, CRT, more) and then, give a solution that get’s their viewer to yell, “Right On!” with no need to think through any of it. So, flip the script. We can appeal emotionally, too. We want to trigger humor, horror at the lack of empathy, empathy for the falsely targeted and startle people with little known facts.
This is not an all inclusive list, but we can start with our life experiences and our observations. I’m sure you can come up with your own emotional appeals to encourage critical thinking.
Here’s my start on this idea:
Gosh, can you imagine what Dad would say about the Ukraine and Putin? (Dad served in the WWII Army Air Corps.)
It’s true that the U.S. will be a majority minority nation by 2050, but that doesn’t mean we should embrace white supremacy. Maybe we can win hearts and minds with our ideas and aspirations rather than our prohibitions?
I looked up the meaning of fascism today and found it’s a political system that’s based upon a homogenized national identity where the politicos reward their friends and punish their political opponents, even if they are within the same political party. Appearances matter more than substance. Enforcement is both capricious and arbitrary that have more to do with political expedience than the law. The U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights favors equity over unfair capricious and arbitrary regulations.
The English Bible is only as good as the English translation. Many English translations were translated from Hebrew to German to English for the old testament and Aramaic to Greek to German, then to English for the New Testament. Ever play telephone? Yeah.
I felt betrayed when I found out the English translation of the Bible exchanged the word for child molester with homosexual. We are on our 4th generation of Bible readers with this error in translation. Look what that’s brought us, Pizza Gate.
Every time I see or hear about purity rings I think of Lot and his daughters.
Focusing on a 10 or 13 year old’s sex life is … well inappropriate hardly covers it, it’s totally sick. 10 year olds don’t need to think about sex or marriage. Why are we placing these creepy rings on their fingers?
You know, that story about Lot doesn’t really hold up. Lot had to know what he was doing if he had drank that much wine, he wouldn’t have been able to get it up. I think he used alcohol as a cover.
A close friend of mine went to a Focus on the Family Associated mental health therapist after she had been raped. To her horror, the therapist insisted upon praying for her forgiveness for having committed adultery. To this day, she shakes every time anyone mentions Focus on the Family.
“It’s like they wanted me to die trying to have this doomed baby!” said a work friend when she came back to work after being treated for an ectopic pregnancy. She said it was a relief to come back to work as all her in-laws keep “forgiving” her for having had an abortion.
People like having sex. They are not going to stop having sex. It’s better to plan for healthy sex and use effective birth control and condoms to prevent STDs than not. So, if sex is a sin (and I don’t think it is) then, plan it. Go all in and have healthy, consensual, protected sex.
How is it acceptable to force a 12 year old girl to carry a pregnancy to term when she has no capacity to consent to sex? Why would we force her to carry a high risk pregnancy to term when it carries a much higher risk of killing her?
I don’t resent public spending on SNAP, Medicaid, or student loan forgiveness. It’s an added bonus to see my tax dollars doing God’s work.
Using less fossil fuels and going with renewable electric just means we are exercising good stewardship of the Earth.
When I hear the GOP’s Rick Scott talk about sundowning Medicare and Social Security, I hear his worship of Mammon.
In fact, any time I hear just about any GOP talking point about taxes or social spending I hear them worshipping Mammon.
When I hear people deny climate change, I wonder about their stewardship skills.
The current U.S. tax code rewards avarice.