Critical Thinking

The Art of Critical Thinking

In most public education facilities, kids are not trained or encouraged to practice critical thinking. Certain pieces of information are presented as facts and they are expected to memorize these facts and point them out on standardized tests to prove how much they have learned. We often think of criticism as a negative commentary that points out a person’s, idea’s, institution’s, etc., deficiencies or faults in an unkind manner.

The art or discipline of criticism is the ability to evaluate the merit of something, mostly artistic works, primarily literary, but such works are nothing if not explorations of ideas, beliefs, and morals—something decidedly needed right now to help us comprehend our fast changing world. Ideas now come in sound bites, two seconds of helpful information it is hoped the public swallows whole.

Examples of Non-critical Thinking

1. Guns don’t kill people, people do.

Any police officer will tell you guns help a lot. I hear many say that if more people were armed, there would be fewer fatalities at shooting massacres. Suppose you’re in a movie theatre, the screen blaring, the lights dim. You hear a shot. A black guy stands up two rows in front of you and draws a gun. A dark-haired, dark-eyed guy holding a gun runs up the aisle, a white guy holds a gun by the exit, and a woman—too dark to see what she looks like—is pointing a gun at each of the others. Who do you point your weapon at? Do you wait to see who fires first and at whom or just shoot and ask questions later?

People can easily obtain training to fire a gun, to learn firearm safety. Gun clubs and shooting ranges do not train in critical thinking to handle split-second decision-making, to objectively handle the fear and stress of such a moment. I suspect there would be a great many more casualties rather than less.

I find it very interesting that the general public will not be allowed to carry guns into the Republican Convention. If not there, where most political gun proponents will gather, why would they recommend it in other venues?

2. Vote out politicians who disagree with you.

  

Fifty plus Republicans and several Democrats funded by the NRA voted against gun-control updates to the law. Do you vote for a candidate based on one issue or their overall record? If your only alternative is the opposite party who maybe agrees with you on one or two issues but whose other policies you don’t endorse, you are unlikely to switch parties. Even if someone runs against the incumbent of the same party in a primary, they seldom disagree on core issues.

Perhaps insisting on law reforms regarding political funding and Congressional term limits might be more effective.

3. Deport all people who are in the country illegally.

Never going to happen, it is a physical and economic impossibility. The manpower required would alone bankrupt the country. We cannot legally deport their kids, born citizens. Who will pay to raise them if the parents leave them behind? Smarter, more manageable policies might include ways these people could make amends for their illegal entry such as paying a fine and their fair share of taxes.  

Critical thinking demands thoughtful, in-depth consideration of each problem by itself and as it affects other areas. Sound bites won’t cut it and just make the person issuing them sound ignorant. Politicians apparently don’t believe it, but we are smarter than that.

The Blame Game

The Blame Game

The shooting in Orlando came as I was reading Divine Mistress (wisdom being the mistress the main character was besotted by rather than a woman) by Frank G. Slaughter. The horrible irony of the name chills me as does the subject. Set in the mid-1600s, the main character, a morally upright physician, faces the Spanish Inquisition, charged with healing by the power of Satan when he uses scientific breakthroughs not condoned by the Catholic Church that are therefore heretical. In Spain at that time, it was considered sinful to touch dead bodies for autopsy or medical research.

We have not evolved far from the Inquisitors who lauded torture as an acceptable means to force sinners—those who disagreed with the Church—to confess and repent their heretical beliefs. Many today believe water-boarding, an ancient torture technique from that era, is an acceptable means to gain information from our enemies. And, obviously, too many think it is acceptable, even necessary, to shoot those we don’t like.

The History of Scape Goats

The Inquisition, the Salem witch trials where people were hung on the strength of accusations, mostly from young girls, often against those who had caused community upsets of one type or another, and where the majority of people, fearing being accused themselves, either said nothing against the injustice of the trials or made up their own accusations to push the spotlight away from themselves. The Communist witch hunts of another type in the fifties destroyed or at least derailed careers based on accusations, names often added to the list of the accused by those pressured by the authorities to save themselves.

Heretics, witches, Jews, Communists, Blacks, the Irish, the Chinese, Muslims, homosexuals—and this is here in the US—handy titles throughout history on which to hang our fears and insecurities. No jobs, feeling powerless? It’s their fault. If titles don’t apply, we settle for attributes—the nerds, the overweight, overly short, overly tall—take your pick. No one gets a pass. We all do or have done this, even if just momentarily and on a personal scale, against a spouse, a sibling, someone driving too slow or too fast. How much does it take to push us past looking down on someone on the personal scale to an entire nationality or widespread attribute?  

Repeating the Past

We have a natural preference or bias for what we grow up with, for the familiar, a benign prejudice, which in itself is harmless. These biases only become problematic when we fail to appreciate or respect the right of others to have different beliefs and biases, judge them unfavorably for not sharing ours, or use those differences as excuses to treat them as less than.   

Human nature tends to look for others to blame for the problems we see in our world—why, I suspect, some blame God for allowing the non-ending, violent power-grasping often justified as done in the name of the greater good, though usually about the personal power of those advocating this kind of action. Free will can be a bitter pill to swallow.

Anger, a byproduct of fear, clouds our judgment. Blaming others for our misfortunes gives us a target for all that anger and a perverse comfort. The condition of the world is not our fault, not our responsibility. What can one person do? is the historical cry for not becoming involved. Realistically, not everyone can be involved on a national or even town-wide scale. We all can treat our little corner of the world and the people in it as we wish to be treated ourselves. Take care of that one corner and, like ripples in a pond, watch it spread and grow.

Persevering Through the Doldrums

The Doldrums

I find myself down in the dumps lately and wishing not to open my computer for the day’s writing, which is unlike me. Usually, writing buoys me up and I lose track of time in the midst of creating a sentence, a paragraph. I’m not tired of writing, don’t need a vacation from it. I need validation, I guess, that this is the path I should be pursuing.

I’ve written a novel and am well into finishing the second in what I intend to be a trilogy. I’ve sent a query letter to just over twenty agents so far to see if they might be interested in reading the manuscript—nothing but formulaic rejection letters in return. This is hardly unusual or unexpected. J. K. Rowling went through over ninety before someone picked up the Harry Potter books. I don’t mind the process, though it takes quite a bit of time to research every agency and agent to make sure what I have to offer fits in with the types of books they like to represent.

The Other Steps to Publication

It’s the business and social media parts that give me conniptions. Network with other writers, they recommend and mean online. They want to see a social media presence that you can build on to gather potential readers. I am part of a local writer’s group, but we don’t have visibility outside of the group. Make sure your manuscript is ready for publication, which means it should be edited and polished, ready to go. I can’t afford one professional, let alone the team this requires—editing for content and proof reading are two different skills.

Publish short stories to build your audience. I’m not convinced this one is credible. People who gravitate toward short stories tend not to take the time to read novels, a growing trend, they say, in our fast-paced world. Have a good team of beta readers—preferably people with knowledge of skilled writing who read your manuscript and offer suggestions where there might be problems with the flow of the story, whether your premise comes across, etc. My writer’s group meets once a month. Each person reads something about six pages in length, not conducive to sharing a novel. Besides, no one can remember what you read the month before. Supposedly there are groups online where you can find beta readers, but not knowing the people, you take a chance sharing your material.

Perseverance

The other day I read that the vast majority of published writers will not get their first novel published, the idea no doubt being that it takes time and experience to perfect your craft. I’m starting this late in life, however, and feel the constraint of time. My first attempt at my novel netted 275,000 words, about the length of three books, so I had to start over and pare down the first book, now at 108,000 words. Long for a first novel, it is not out of the question for a fantasy, which requires more description of the world being built.

I hope going through that process counts as a second novel. I have other stories in mind and make notes for them as they occur to me, but I’m not ready to move on from this one until I give it my all. Guess I’ll give myself a day or two to brood and then get more involved on the internet and persevere.

What Muhammad Ali Taught Me

What I Learned From Muhammad Ali

I am not a boxing fan and don’t know the particulars of Muhammad Ali’s sports career, but I knew, even from a young age—I was ten in 1967—who this man was. His change to the Islam religion and identity and his refusal to go to war at first confused me then earned my admiration.

It was hypocritical for someone to refuse to fight in a war but have no compunction about fighting in a ring, my naivety argued. The idea that punching people could be a sport didn’t compute to me for some time. Completely lost on me was the fact that you don’t aim to kill people in the ring.

Critical Thinking

I suspect my first real knowledge of what the Civil Rights Movement meant came from Cassius Clay’s disillusionment with the treatment received by African Americans in the sixties and the media brouhaha over his conversion to Muhammad Ali. His outrageous political incorrectness kept him out of the category of bullied underdog to me yet people said such hurtful, unkind things. That he stuck to his guns and stayed true to his beliefs come what may impressed me and made me pay attention to the circumstances triggering his conversion.

I started listening more closely to others on the subject, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and slowly learned to look at my culture’s teachings with a critical eye. Criticism gets a bad rap as meaning unkind, negative feedback. The art or skill of critical thinking means to make a learned evaluation of something based on your own sincere efforts to understand it from multiple sources of information and outlooks. Often concerning artistic works, critical thinking can also be used in judging the value of any teaching, law, moral code, etc.

Standing Up Against the Current

Raised on the teachings of Jesus, arguably the most well-known pacifist, I found anyone who lived by that creed very brave. I knew then—and have never changed my mind—that not giving in to fear and angry outbursts at times takes a herculean effort of will as does standing up for what you believe when the rest of the current is against you and ready to knock you down. Muhammad Ali gave examples of doing both while often keeping his unique brand of humor intact.

Throughout elementary school I don’t remember being taught more than the basic facts of slavery or dates and battles of any war. The human toll and consequences never entered the conversation, and I can’t truly say that I learned more before college, but I can say that Muhammad Ali’s refusal to be drafted was talked about, mostly in a negative context. In later years, it helped me understand and appreciate other viewpoints, the possible repercussions of believing in or even talking about unpopular ideas, and the moral value of finding your own beliefs and standing up to be counted on important issues.