Why Would Those Who Say They Love Freedom Pledge Allegiance to an Authoritarian?

One way to think about critical thinking is to see it as premature thinking. It is highly unlikely that we would ever possess more than a tiny magnitude of relevant information when we form beliefs, conclusions, and decisions. If you agree with that frightening statement, humility should be our omnipresent associate.

Consequently, narcissists and solipsists would strike us as especially dangerous counselors. Authoritarians would be the last people we would allow to shape our future. Their specialty is controlling information, thereby precluding the effort to share conflicting perspectives as we seek wisdom.

So, what is going on in so many sovereign countries now. Democracy is under attack. To illustrate, a popular politician in the USA says if elected, he would unleash the military to assassinate opponents and imprison those who protest his mandates. He shouts that if something so unimaginable as his losing an election should be alleged by his opponents, they are ipso facto rigging such an election.

And what is so bizarre in a relatively literate nation, roughly half of Americans are excited about having such a person be their leader.

If you are like me, this development is other worldly. But roughly 70 years ago two books provided an explanation for the popularity of authoritarians even in countries where it would seem they would be rejected the first time we noticed their love of violence, misinformation, disinformation, and fetid blathering.

Both books remind us that human wisdom is not restricted to the thoughts of our contemporaries. We do ourselves major damage when we ignore the wisdom of our predecessors.

I hope you will take a look at Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer and Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality.

Wake Up, America

Trump is telling us what he has in store for us. What should people hear? What do we think it means when a person refers to dictators as "strong" and "super bright"?

Without the Essential Eleven, a mind is at a distinct disadvantage when encountering Trump. When people hear someone say something, our default assumption is that what they are saying is more or less true. The Explosive Eleven serve as a filter that deciphers whether that default is justified. Trump lies as a standard communication device. He is a walking/talking specimen for the danger of an educational system that does not focus on critical thinking.

The January/February Atlantic Magazine is must reading. Imagine how wonderful it would be for every voter to read these articles, supplemented with the Essential Eleven.

IF TRUMP WINS

The staff of The Atlantic on the threat a second term poses to American democracy.

FOR THE ATLANTIC’S JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2024 ISSUE, 24 CONTRIBUTORS CONSIDER WHAT DONALD TRUMP COULD DO IF HE WERE TO RETURN TO THE WHITE HOUSE. TRUMP’S SECOND TERM, THEY CONCLUDE, WOULD BE MUCH WORSE.

View More

This page will be updated as more stories publish.
Read an editor’s note from Jeffrey Goldberg.

David Frum on autocracy
Anne Applebaum on NATO
McKay Coppins on the loyalists
Caitlin Dickerson on immigration
Barton Gellman on the Justice Department
Sophie Gilbert on misogyny
Zoë Schlanger on climate
George Packer on journalism

Hard Talk

For years I have been wanting to write a book called Friendly Critical Thinking. The tone and psychological baggage associated with any conversation where one or both parties are risking the possibility that in some fashion their thinking is sloppy will destroy the possibility of a huge audience for something called “critical thinking.” It is just so rare for any of us to seek an opportunity that reminds us that humans are bundles of mistakes in most regards. Sometimes the mistakes are explicit; other times they are in the hidden realm of our rush to make decisions with inadequate information.

Imagine with me the units of joy at a Taylor Swift concert or a University of Notre Dame football game. People push, shove and pay outrageous fees to embed in those crowds. Now suppose we invite someone to a conversation in which we will apply the many attitudes and skills that are collectively called “critical thinking.” How much excitement would you have about being the centerpiece of this event?

The major point of this book that I keep postponing is that any such conversation needs to occur slowly with many deposits of trust and shared vulnerability for it to accomplish the growth experience it is designed to create. We are simply too fragile to look forward to a bright-light examination of our reasoning. However, my book spells out numerous suggestions that could make critical thinking a gift to everyone involved in a conversation flavored with critical thinking.

But the point of this post is to point out that the claims I was trying to make above are not universally accurate. Part of the fun of critical thinking is the realization that wisdom or accuracy are often matters of context. Even our most beloved decisions would be a disaster in certain circumstances.

I am writing this post to share an experience where critical thinking flourishes, but the person whose statements are being evaluated is strong enough to desire being in that position.

Stephen Sackur is a brilliant interviewer. He is often fond of the people he interviews, but he does not hesitate to raise questions about the quality of their reasoning. My biggest critique of his behavior is that he sometimes interrupts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/QrrcWR1vSGDbwZ45JLhNg2/stephen-sackur

His show on BBC, HardTalk, is such a refreshing alternative to the Wolf Blitzer model of repeating whatever the last person said and then acting as if his repetition is the deepest level of analysis or Fareed Zacharia’s (whom I generally appreciate) frequently fawning quasi-interviews. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/n13xtmdc/episodes/player

When you accept an invitation to HardTalk, you know in advance that you will get not a single softball question. And yet his interviewees line up to be on the show----very impressive. But I think you will agree that most people receiving an invitation to HardTalk would have a previous engagement. We DO need to make our critical thinking friendly.

Critical Thinking: The Paradox of a Largely Neglected Universal Educational Goal

You are driving down a road, staying on a particular side of that road. Everyone on the road has made a similar commitment. They want to be on that road.

Suddenly one driver exits their car and heads over a hill to the left. Now something very strange happens. Everyone gets out of their car and heads to the left apparently signaling that this Pied Piper knows best where to head.

If there were a contest for what educational objective is most often mentioned in educational promotional activities, “critical thinking” would probably be the gold medalist. Schools at all levels, business leaders, and teachers swear their loyalty to pursuing “critical thinking.” However, except for a few courses in philosophy, the visible curriculum contains no explicit training in critical thinking.

And those “critical thinking” courses are usually logic courses that are more akin to the certitude of training in calculus than the rough and tumble complexity of practical informal logic.

How can a universal goal be assigned so little space in educational ventures?  Why is there no Department of Critical Thinking populated by students required to practice the attitudes and skills of critical thinking.

I have often been asked when consulting with universities, corporations and government agencies, “Where can I send my sons and daughters to a school that emphasizes critical thinking by explicitly teaching it?” I do not know what to say. The best I can do is point out that most schools have some excellent courses in statistics. In addition, there are some parallels between the scientific method and critical thinking. Consequently, science programs often provide the closest thing to critical thinking that schools offer.

I am curious how you would explain the paradox of expressions of affection for critical thinking side by side with widespread neglect of training in critical thinking. The best I can do is a phrase often used in analyses of failures of the human community to address environmental decay. Everyone’s business often becomes no one’s business. In other words, Because the environment is so fragile and universally significant to our way of living, there is no need for me to be paying attention to its problems for others will surely be on duty guarding its integrity.

To be a teacher is to have multiple pressures and responsibilities. Peer reviews, students with different learning capabilities, research expectations in our most acclaimed universities, grading responsibilities, and loyalty to our individual specialties combine to leave little room for anything other than a laser focus on the specific curriculum of existing specialties. In short, teachers are busy and they have little remaining time to teach anything else.

By the way, never suggest to a university professor that they rarely teach critical thinking.  They will aggressively insist that the accusation is false. In fairness, any teacher occasionally does things that fit in a critical thinking framework. But I must wonder how many of them would like to see their pedagogy judged by how well their students perform on the Watson Glaser Test of Critical Thinking or the California Test of Critical Thinking?

Washing Our Hands and Polishing Our Minds

Most of us understand the importance of personal hygiene. While we may or may not wash our hands with regularity, brush our teeth a couple of times each day, and avoid coughing on others when we are ill, we know that unwelcome infections are lurking in our environment, ready to pounce.

The CDC warns us that poor hygiene can cause unpleasant encounters with athlete’s foot, body lice, chronic diarrhea, pinworms, scabies, and ringworm. We are taught by most parents at an early age to protect ourselves by a few healthy hygiene habits.

But what about the threats to our beliefs, conclusions, and decisions (BCD’s) when we allow habitual mental flaws to govern our thinking? Neither physical nor mental health occur automatically. Somehow, either from coaching or modeling we need to learn threats to our effective functioning.

Critical thinking is a form of polishing our minds and then applying a sealer on top of what we have learned so that we protect ourselves from pervasive self-deception and error.

Critical thinking is the antidote to clean the mind of clutter and omnipresent scams, manipulations, and misinformation.

The Problem of Fundamentalism Is Not Limited to Religion

Fundamentalism and dogma are intellectual cousins. They are opposed to openness or habitual questioning. To flourish with those beliefs, one must tape other people’s mouths shut as well as building a wall between believers and heretics. While many restrict discussion of fundamentalism to religion, some economists label themselves market fundamentalists and some legal scholars see themselves as Constitutional fundamentalists.

To be a fundamentalist is in some sense to be very lucky. Fundamentalists are not troubled by options, choices, pragmatism, matters of degree, or context. They rest comfortably at night content with possession of the one and only correct understanding of dilemmas that haunt those not so lucky as to possess objective, unvarnished truth.

(Thanks to Linda and Craig Barkacs for making me aware of Bobby Azarian’s important essay, A Neuroscientist Explains How Fundamentalism Hijacks the Brain.)

The memes of any form of fundamentalism promise a fulfillment of our yearning for certitude, the comfort provided by associating with believers all of whom have tasted the magical sauce.

Critical Thinking opens windows; it engages with competing dogmas; it builds complex bridges of shared wonder. It realizes that our collective ignorance is an ocean surrounding awesome islands of human accomplishment built by listening more and lecturing less. 

The Context Question Is Also the Complexity Question

Allegedly, as he lay dying Einstein was asked what wisdom he would like to pass along. He thought for a while and then said, “Everything is context.”

Think of the scores of things that are true in parts of that refinery picture, but not true in other components of that transfer system. Statements offered as universally true or false are entering dangerous terrain. Critical thinkers often ask the context question: But is what you are saying accurate in all contexts?

Another way to think about the context question is to see it as the “complexity” question. That question is designed to remind us that multiple factors shape any judgment we form. The frequency of complexity is important in reminding us that highly important questions are the ones requiring the best evidence as a foundation. Making errors in unimportant scenarios is unfortunate, but not tragic.

An important recent book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, illustrates how universities and the medical community make extraordinary errors with immense consequences because they repeatedly generalize from research results emphasizing the importance of muscle memory and cognitive patterns. 

We are understandably impressed by the example of Tiger Woods who developed a proficiency in golf at an incredibly early age through repeated practice, music savants who show early brilliance with an instrument and spend thousands of hours with that instrument developing that competence to amazing levels, and academic researchers whose training in narrow specialties is used to diagnose and cure heretofore deadly diseases. 

On the basis of those instances, parents push children to develop a specific skill at an early age and universities tout specialization, praising those who have focused their development narrowly on a single human problem. 

But David Epstein, the author of Range, presents a different area of research demonstrating the dangers of and losses from early specialization. For some situations experimentation at an early age in many areas and advanced training in modes of analysis in many domains pays spectacular benefits. He explains when specialization is our greatest need and when experiences in many areas offer huge dividends. In other words, the learning context matters big time when thinking about the experts and achievers we need to develop.

A personal note: I am a generalist. I am amazed at the level of illiteracy among academics who ignore and even revile researchers in other disciplines even when many times, their expertise would be complemented enormously had they demonstrated the humility to inform themselves about research in related disciplines. 

At the same time, in some  learning domains I would seek narrow specialists for that focus is required where repeated patterns need to be recognized through intense practice. In short, if I were in an automobile accident, and multiple doctors in different specialties agree that I need a repair of my hand, I would seek a plastic surgeon whose expertise is repairing injured hands. 

Desert Bees and Cognitive Biases

Somewhere in that frenzied mass of cactus honey bees is a single irresistible female bee. Minutes ago young male bees emerged from their underground birthing chambers. They immediately pursued their objects of desire. The purpose of the struggle was to be the solitary successful inseminator.

While we systemically flatter ourselves that we humans are unlike other species in that we are in control of our thinking, we habitually engage in mental biases that distort our thinking. A central task of critical thinking is to ask questions of ourselves and others that identify mental habits that harm our decision making.

For example, again and again we tell ourselves and others that we will complete a task before we, in fact, do finish the activity. This cognitive bias is a close relative of the mother of a large proportion of cognitive stumbling blocks, “the romance with ourselves.”  We persistently exaggerate our prowess rating ourselves as more advanced in skill areas where we know the least. The more one knows about a skill area the more we realize our limits in that domain because we now know so many dimensions involved in using the skill.

We distinguish ourselves as human, not because we lack drives and persistent mental frailties; we have both of these.  We distinguish ourselves by our knowledge of the existence of patterns of cognitive flaws. That knowledge should provide us with the humility to hold our conclusions with a light grip.

Let Shakespeare Remind Us of an Important Critical Thinking Question

Here is a brief summary of the stream of death and butchery in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus.

The Roman general Titus Andronicus returns from war with four prisoners who vow to take revenge against him. They rape and mutilate Titus' daughter and have his sons killed and banished. Titus kills two of them and cooks them into a pie, which he serves to their mother before killing her too. The Roman emperor kills Titus, and Titus' last remaining son kills the emperor and takes his place. 

When trying to make a decision, we dissect the consequences of each option.  Whose lives will be affected and what is the magnitude of those effects? But we often forget to ask how long various consequences will continue? In other words, it is one thing to examine the consequences of potential decisions, but we should not forget an important companion question: HOW LONG WILL THE CONSEQUENCES ENDURE?

Shakespeare warns us that war never ends as long as revenge is alive.

The South Queensbury Mosaic Mural and Relational Meaning

This post is the first episode of what will be an ongoing series of extensions of the ideas and skills discussed this year in the 3 books published by QBCT (Question-Based Critical Thinking). What I hope to correct is the appearance of most books that a commitment has been completed and the author is now onto the next project. In the case of this blog, each new post will be part of the ongoing fabric of this critical thinking project.

“Critical Thinking” as a concept is neither good nor bad. It is a tool used by us for our purposes.

When we activate our lives creating meaning with individual accomplishments, envisioning life as a contest of individuals against a hostile environment and as a struggle against one another to see who can amass the greatest collection of toys, critical thinking can enable us to dominate situations and others. Even in a more benign instance a person with greater knowledge of critical thinking can use it as a cudgel to demonstrate superiority in cognitive disputes.

But there is a nobler use of critical thinking, one emerging from a recognition that our links to one another can create a higher meaning. This higher meaning is relational, one that recognizes that a symphony can create music that individual instrumentalists can only dream of producing. Relational meaning is grounded in the acceptance of our individual frailties and limitations as thinkers and actors.

Cervantes’ Don Quixote may be more financially comfortable than his Sancho Panza, and Quixote may be more alert to moral outrages, but he badly needs his peasant assistant to avoid windmills disguised as villains. Our humility permits us to use critical thinking as both a teaching and learning device. By seeing others with whom we are having a disagreement as joint explorers for better beliefs, conclusions, and decisions, we can see ourselves as partners. The sound and look of our collaboration permits us to consider options otherwise obscured by inflated egos.

1+1 equals more than 2 when strengthening relationships replaces individual achievement as life’s purpose.

In a small suburb of Edinburgh, Scotland, a couple artists provided a model for the transcendent potential of collective aspirations. They and other leaders in South Queensbury developed a plan to build an uncommon cohesion in their neighborhood. I had the privilege of visiting their testament to relationships only because multiple members of the town urged my wife Nancy and me to “go see our mural,” They enabled me to see empathy as more than compassion for others; the pride in their voice as they heralded the mural made it clear that givers also grow from seeing the potential of recipients.

The mural is roughly 10 by 60 feet in a small park. The original purpose of the mural was to teach mosaics skills to members of the community as an avenue to involve otherwise invisible neighbors in the magic of belonging. Stroke victims, the aged, the homeless, those enduring the devastation of dementia, and the unemployed collected small pieces of glass and metal and used their mosaics training to construct a collective art piece. The mosaic attracted so much interest that children and others whose voices were often overlooked lobbied to become members of the artist team.

The mural is beautiful in both the traditional and the aspirational sense.

Soon everyone wanted to share in the spirit of “weness.” The town reminded me of the insight of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who described taxes the “voice of civilization.” They are the price of our higher needs, those that make us more than lonely survivors.

The Story of Critical Thinking and This Blog

Fifty-five years ago, I was a young professor feeling a need to help my students make important choices when 4,400 religions, over 100 political perspectives, self-designated experts on every street corner and $250 Billion in annual advertising pitches were each seeking their devotion.

I knew that logic and evidence were important components of what they needed, but proficiency in the complexities of deduction and statistics would always be a mystery to all but a few who had benefitted from specialized training.

I wanted for them something more practical and informal that they could use daily to evaluate the way beliefs, conclusions, and decisions (BCDs) are being justified. Then, the standards used to judge the quality of that connection between rationale and belief could be a sorting mechanism that would distinguishnoise from relative insight.

I stumbled upon a few textbooks teaching “critical thinking.” As much as I was attracted to them, I thought most of them had a particular problem.

“I stumbled upon a few textbooks teaching critical thinking. As much as I was attracted to them, I thought most of them had a particular problem.”

Like me, the authors wanted to make their students aware of human tendencies that would taint their thinking and frustrate their efforts to achieve goals. So, for example, we want to share instances with our students when people confused correlation with causation. Or we wanted them to realize the illogic of deciding whether to agree with someone based on how the advocate looked. For example, the size of someone’s nose should never be used to make judgments about someone’s views about the dangers of climate change.

But as teachers we were not effectively addressing the lack of passion most learners felt about critical thinking. They were willing to learn critical thinking techniques because their teacher directed them to do so. However, when I would observe their behavior when class was not in session, I sadly saw very little interest in using critical thinking when interacting with others.

In contrast, they listened to music because doing so struck a chord in their imagination. Learning compilations of hurdles to effective thinking did not address a felt need for any more than a few students.

Stu Keeley and I wrote Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking to try in some small way to encourage awareness of the practical usefulness of asking questions. But we were not focusing on just the engagement that questions encourage. Rather, we wanted critical thinking in schools to be less about visiting a coach to learn a sport you were not sure you wanted to play and more about rekindling our innate wonder about our thinly understood assortment of life experiences.

The success of that first book shocked us. It has been reproduced in 16 languages, published in 12 editions, and used in widely diverse educational settings. Middle schools, medical schools, the Fashion Institute of New York, the Social Security Administration, the National Security Agency, law schools, and hundreds of classrooms complimented the book by choosing it as a vehicle to learn questions that promised to improve their learners’ ability to evaluate the pathways people have chosen to justify their decisions.

As exciting as the success of that book has been, I increasingly felt that more people would be interested in critical thinking if it were taught and used in a particular fashion. In other words, I sensed that critical thinking needed a boost for it to achieve its optimal potential. My persistent disappointment clanged in my ears in the form of student comments that they were glad they learned critical thinking but did not think they wanted to use it in conversations because it was uncomfortable, unkind, or flat out mean. A thin minority of my thousands of students looked forward to the combative furor of a weaponized critical thinking.

The two new books are a form of ethical steroids for critical thinkers, both those learning and those teaching critical thinking. They represent what I believe I have learned since we last wrote a critical thinking book more than 45 years ago. On one level these books represent a wistful apology that we wish we had known then what we believe we know now.

A Healthy Democracy’s Best Hope: Building the Critical Thinking Habit is our effort to anchor critical thinking in an existential social problem that affects everyone: Can democracy survive? Can all of the rights and opportunities that we celebrate in a country where everyone is encouraged to voice their needs by voting move with the speed required to address effectively emergent species-threatening problems? Our objective is to plant a need for critical thinking in the minds of our readers at the outset of the learning experience.

Why do we have that focus? When a teacher is lucky enough to teach Adolescent Psychology, Nutrition, Social Work, or Golf, the experience is propelled forward by active motivation on the part of the learner. The “student” is attentive, motivated, and relatively inquisitive. Not always, but usually! The learner brings to the study of those topics a felt need to know.

But one of us has been teaching critical thinking for decades, and I cannot recall more than a handful of students with a visible initial hunger to learn and use critical thinking. Some develop hunger for the experience over time, but the motivation has to be acquired. The task of learning critical thinking is challenging enough without having to start with a huge obstacle—apathy about the skills and attitudes of critical thinking.

I should mention that motivation to learn critical thinking was evident in those instances when the people in charge insisted that careers required critical thinking. It would be difficult to encounter more motivated learners in this regard than the students at the military academies, commanding officers of the U.S. Navy at the Naval War College, and the specialists at the National Security Agency who I had the privilege to teach. My experience with them hollered to me the paramount importance of initial excitement about correcting a felt problem.

Friendly Critical Thinking: Harnessing Questions to Teach and Learn is devoted to recasting critical thinking, transforming it into a mutual search for improved beliefs, conclusions, and decisions. The critical thinking it is proposing is “friendly” because it flourishes consistent with one of Aristotle’s three types of friendship.

That friendship is defined as two people becoming one person in the sense that the interests of the other person are indistinguishable from your own. You bleed and grow together, not as individuals who view life heroically as something for individuals to dominate and create as they make choices. Those reared in an individualistic culture may stand shoulder to shoulder together, but all the while they are wrestling with the world and its inhabitants to “get to heaven,” “succeed,” or emerge victoriously from life’s struggles. They are pursuing a better life through individual choices.

The friendly critical thinking we advocate is in the spirit of President Kennedy’s famous challenge that we ask not what the country can do for us, but what we can do for the country. In that regard, it is a more ethical critical thinking aspiring to make choices and exhibit behavior in the course of a conversation based on an enlarged empathy.

Friendly Critical Thinking urges us to escape the individualistic thinking that would reduce critical thinking to self-improvement. Any critical thinking learned from an individualistic perspective resembles a sporting event in which a spirit of friendliness is well hidden. Teams and individuals are trying to win, not construct an environment in which they can both flourish.

Friendly critical thinking does not pretend that all participants in a conversation have identical mental skills. Training and genes guarantee that few conversations will occur between mental equals. In that regard, any conversation between two of us creates implicit or explicit assigned roles as primary teacher or primary learner. But when the parties see and feel the benefits of collaboration, friendly critical thinking urges teachers to use their status not to just fix or teach the other person. Their respect for the other person mandates that they listen and learn from the other person as well.

The thoughts I just articulated developed from four sets of experiences:

1. Much of my professional writing has been antagonistic to the individualistic foundation of a market culture. That foundation is verbalized by the celebration of the rationality of the individual chooser. That rationality is alleged to lead to economic growth. However, that growth is increasingly a reflection of a winner-takes-all doctrine with persistent inequality. Something is very wrong with a perspective that results in eight people having such gargantuan wealth that it is equal to the total wealth of the poorest 60% of the rest of their species.

   The critique of individualism that was such an immense component of my professional research opened my eyes to the individualism implicit in the desires of some critical thinkers to in their words, “win every argument.”

2. For decades I had ambivalent feelings about feminist critiques of critical thinking. Those critiques are encased in a pithy statement resonating throughout Women’s Ways of Knowing: Men think against what others say; women think with what others say.

   Initially, I reacted very negatively to the conclusion in these critiques for they opposed teaching critical thinking to women. That attitude struck me as demeaning the talents of women. I had known numerous women who were superb critical thinkers; I immediately thought of the scholarly career of one of my intellectual heroines, Martha Nussbaum. I was outraged by any hint that the range of her brilliance should have been abbreviated by protecting her against critical thinking.

   Fortunately, I continued to read every argument I could find in feminist theory that would enable me to understand why critical thinking was seen by some as a patriarchal bullying device. I also started noticing how frequently in academia critical thinking was used as an interruptive device to seize the microphone as a prelude to abrasive domination.

   An additional push in the direction of understanding what feminist critiques were saying was an experience I had while delivering a paper at a teaching conference in Orlando. The paper, I learned in the first few minutes of my presentation, was clearly inappropriate. The title was “How Would We Treat New Untenured Colleagues If We Wanted Them to Succeed.”

   I was thinking in terms of “we-ness;” the reactions were shaped by “me-ness.” (See the next factor that moved me toward friendly critical thinking—relational meaning.) The sound of the responses to my paper made it clear that I had touched a sensitive bundle of nerves. Male memes reverberated around the room. I was told in no uncertain terms that “I do not want colleagues who cannot chart their own paths.” “I reached my current status all by myself and am not about to treat colleagues as babies.” “When things get tough in our department, I do not want to struggle with a bunch of weak colleagues. Feminist critics of critical thinking were not upset about critical thinking; they were upset about how the mental tool was usually being deployed. They were reacting to a weaponized critical thinking, one that was used to “fix” other people.

3. Another chain of reading that influenced me in designing a friendly critical thinking was the work of those in Psychology and Communication Studies who touted something they called “relational meaning.”

   The stream of literature from Psychology heralded the efficacy and reality of using relationships as the polestar for creating meaning in our lives. Seeing life as the creation and maintenance of vibrant relationships is recommended as the most productive vantage point for making life choices. Relational meaning replaces competition with collaboration, personal choices with community objectives, and self-love with social growth and survival.

   Communication Studies scholars urge awareness of the impact of what they term “the second language.” They see the effectiveness of our words as inescapably linked to the vocal tones and body language used by the vehicle for the words. A central objective of Friendly Critical Thinking is to soften the rough edge associated with any concept that has the word “critical” embedded in its label. The use of critical thinking can easily devolve into a male domination contest in word and form. Friendly critical thinking urges careful listening to every voice with an argument so that we do not miss the insights that may reside in what seem to us to be absurd or even evil arguments.

4. Most recently, I was propelled to pursue a positive form of critical thinking by my many years of coaching Intercollegiate Mock Trial and Intercollegiate Mediation teams. The former was all about winning.

   When the university president would encounter me, she never once asked me about my daily experience with my students as I and the other professors tried to stimulate the students’ embrace of lifelong learning and the skills and attitudes essential to that goal. Instead, she would ask me who our mock trial team had defeated recently so that the university’s public relations officers could boast of our victories over schools with endowments 30 times larger than ours. She would conclude by urging me to try to develop national championships.

   My experience coaching the university’s Mediation team was sharply different. The objective of mediation was for opposing teams to work together to create a settlement. Winning was discouraged. Mediation gurus would be noticeably embarrassed when in keynote speeches they would say “we want to welcome all competitors.” Immediately, after that seemingly innocuous greeting, the person would apologize profusely and say, “I meant ‘participants’.”

   Teams were “victorious” when they fashioned harmony from discord. The skills rewarded with praise were careful listening, demonstrated ability to negotiate agreement among angry disputants, and above all else a future orientation. Teams were trained to think in terms of creating attitudes that would permit the warring parties to work well together after the mediation experience. In other words, the essence of a successful mediation was to teach the parties that they needed to get on with their lives rather than allowing their conflict to prevent future cooperation toward achieving joint goals such as a fair workplace or a convivial family. All of these stimuli stimulated me to seek a critical thinking that would maximize toleration and openness toward arguments that seem foreign and foolhardy when you first hear them, not to encourage us to change our minds, but to be open to the possibility of doing so.