Sorting the wheat from the chaff
If you could bestow one skill on another person, what would it be? I am not talking about making someone the world’s best, but gifting them a skill for which they could be reasonably described as highly competent. There are no right answers in an idle speculation like this of course, and it is fun to think about the possibilities; sporting ability, a great singing voice, the ability to play a musical instrument, being able to paint or draw or perhaps higher level mathematical prowess.
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, or engaging others to solve them for you or with you.
The perspective that recognises that complex issues are almost never “black and white”
The ability to see multiple paths to multiple solutions and to be able to weigh the merits of each from different perspectives
The balance of intellectual and emotional empathy that comes from seeing issues from multiple viewpoints
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. They would not be placed above reasoned argument.
That is not to say that the path to agreement would necessarily be smoother or that people would not still bring emotion to decision making, but at least compromise might be more easily understood and arrived at more constructively. (Naïve and ambitious I know, but it is a utopian world remember)
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 sound bite on the one hand and the “gotcha” moment on the other. News sites are increasingly overwhelmed with trivia or puerile nonsense. Policy seems driven by sectoral interests rather than structured reasoning and merit. Disenfranchised people are increasingly vulnerable to conspiracy theorists and political spivs. Populations of seemingly intelligent people seem to be imprisoned by their chosen ideology at the expense of what is rational.
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 that we and future generations will live in. Or even whether it’s still habitable in 100 years’ time.
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 the 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 between nations, unpick the fallacious arguments of an endless array of spin merchants and much more. We need these people to be clear thinkers. We need lots of them. We need our vocationally focused students to learn these skills too. We need to pass those skills to people that come from other countries to study in Australia. We need to invest in what is important and promote it accordingly.