“Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, wisdom, and understanding will come to you that way.” – Christopher Hitchens
Iraq today under ISIS is in the throes of orgiastic and depraved violence. However, in medieval times, Baghdad was a centre of learning. Under the Abbasid and Fatimid Dynasties, the Middle East experienced a Golden Age of learning and discovery. The Bayt Al Hikma in medieval Baghdad and the Dar Al Hikma in Egypt were two of the greatest libraries the world had ever seen – rivalling even the magnificent Library of Alexandria that flourished under Ptolemy.
Today we have the Internet: an incomparable digital repository of unimaginable information, data, facts, and knowledge. No library, no athenaeum, and no bibliotheca from either the past or the present can hold a candle to the vast and seemingly unbounded sea of information available to anyone with a smart phone and access to the World Wide Web.
Millions of people now have unparalleled access to online courses offered by the best universities, with the ability to instantly download millions of Google books, and read the works of the best minds in all of human history. We could be forgiven for thinking that a new age of enlightened thinking will soon be upon us and that we may all revel in a glorious age of exalted discussion and intellectual discourse.
Unfortunately, that is not what we are witnessing. Stephen Fry advises us not to read the comments section of a blog or newspaper article. He points out that there in the comments section is just vileness abounding – suppurating, boiling seas of acid where if you just so much as dip a toe you’ve lost your limbs. People don’t just want to be heard they want to offend. They want to tear, lacerate and wound the sensibilities of anyone who disagrees with them – bruise them beyond measure.
Those are the trolls lurking under the internet bridge. And they are legion.
On the other hand, we also have mountains of superstitious nonsense on the Net from New Age quacks, charlatan-gurus, and mountebank-politicos; there’s a new conspiracy theory every hour; and pseudoscience reigns unchecked and unbridled over vast unpleasant vistas of the Internet.
Why is this?
The reason for this is fairly straightforward: the majority of people haven’t been taught to think. Simply furnishing a literate population with a sea of information (as found on the Internet) is not enough. We’ve got to teach our citizens to evaluate that information, to sift out misinformation, to identify disinformation, to be vigilant against propaganda, and to be constantly on guard against a host of personal cognitive biases.
The Owl is a symbol of wisdom. This is because the owl is associated with Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of Wisdom. Her sibling was the sun god Apollo. The temple of Apollo in Delphi was most famous for its oracle – the infallible Pythia priestesses who uttered prophecies that were deemed sacrosanct. One of the Delphic aphorisms that the modern citizen would be advised to consider is Gnothi Seauton, Know Yourself. This was also a phrase that Plato employs often through the voice of Socrates in his dialogues. When the Oracle at Delphi was asked who the wisest man in Greece was, her response was “Socrates.” When Socrates was informed of this, he replied that this was perhaps because he knew nothing.
It is good to be circumspect about how much we know. (Though there are some people who are more aware than others of just how much of nothing they don’t know.) But it is by understanding oneself that one may better understand others.
What we need to embrace, as did Socrates, is self-doubt. H. L. Mencken, the journalist and satirist, points out that it is not their willingness to believe that makes men civilised; rather it is their ability to doubt. His contemporary, the philosopher and mathematician, Bertrand Russell pointed out that the problem with the world is that the foolish are cocksure while the wise are full of doubt.
So the first cognitive enhancement we need to endow ourselves with – the first tool in our thinking kit, if you will – is Scepticism – to be less sure about what we know and to constantly seek evidence for our opinions. Hitchens the renowned journalist points out that it is Scepticism rather than credulity that is the highest principle that the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.
The Royal Society took as its motto the phrase, Nulius in Verba: “Take no one’s word for it.” Ultimately, science and societies based on the scientific method triumphed because of this desirable focus on evidence and reason. From primitive times, through the Bronze Age and down to medieval times, humanity was driven by cruelty and superstition. Things began to change – and change quite dramatically – during the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.
The word Enlightenment derives from the French, Lumières – a brightening up – a celebration of reason, logic, science, and understanding – in contrast to the Dark Ages, with its emphasis on superstition and witch hunts and blind belief. The phrase Sapere Aude (Dare to know) captures the essence of what the Enlightenment was all about: making an effort to learn, seeking new knowledge, basing one’s opinions on facts, reasons, and evidence, and not being afraid to disagree with or challenge authority – in essence, showing intellectual integrity and cognitive courage.
But what does that mean – intellectual integrity? It means being consistent in one’s beliefs and opinions and being wary against hypocrisy in thought. It’s closely aligned with a few other desirable traits like intellectual autonomy (to have command over one’s own thinking and not be swayed too easily by the thoughts of others); intellectual empathy (being able to understand ideas from the perspective of someone else); intellectual courage (to be true to one’s beliefs even in the face of pressure to conform); and intellectual humility (being aware of the limits of one’s knowledge).
Of the above, intellectual humility is a particularly useful trait. Scientists display this best. They are willing to admit that science doesn’t have all the answers. But that will not stop them from seeking those answers, discovering solutions, and coming up with verifiable explanations. Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. It involves basing opinions on reason and evidence and withholding opinions when reason and evidence are not forthcoming. As the cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson points out, “Science is the best tool we have to make sense of reality.” That’s because the human mind is fallible and can be easily deceived. Common sense doesn’t always give us the right answer (as we’ve discovered with quantum physics or when people believed the earth was flat). As the saying goes, one is entitled to one’s own opinions, but not to one’s own facts.
All this is in sharp contrast to the pseudoscientific and superstitious mind that revels in mystery and celebrates quackery. The world of Facebook is replete with memes, posters, links, and articles that lay bare the explosive numbers of people who are untrained, unread, and scientifically illiterate but are not afraid to voice their views on all sorts of science-related issues.
This is possibly explained by the Dunning–Kruger effect, which is a form of cognitive bias in which unskilled and incompetent individuals suffer from an illusion of superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is may well be due to a metacognitive inability of the incompetent to recognize their ineptitude. In effect, the stupid are too stupid to realise that they are stupid.
We must all guard ourselves against the Dunning-Kruger effect in ourselves. But also against a host of other cognitive biases that we all too readily identify in others but could quite easily be laboring under ourselves: confirmation bias, bandwagon effect, focusing effect, frequency illusion, gambler’s fallacy, anchoring, and so on.
A robust educational system would include a structured approach to thinking. Cognitive Studies ought to be a mandatory subject from Middle School onwards in all countries of the world. It will teach children to guard against the numerous biases, fallacies, illusions, and misconceptions the human mind is capable of making and in consequence would allow them to evaluate, interpret, and assess information as they go through life in a much more rational and consistent way.
David Deutsch, the quantum physicist, points out that knowledge is unbounded, and we now stand at the beginning of infinity – and always will. With the invention of the alphabet, the Indo-Arabic numeral system, and binary coding, we are in a position to generate, learn, and store infinite knowledge. This is an exciting and heady proposition. It’s all the more important and urgent that people are given the tools to think clearly and rationally in their daily lives, when interacting with people online, and when confronted with new knowledge or information.
The last word goes to that phenomenal public intellectual, the late great Christopher Hitchens, who once said, “I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet. That I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
