Shortreads
Be Very Careful: Intellectual Carefulness & American Civil Discourse
Philip Dow
What intellectual character has to do with practical Christian living
A View from Abroad
One of my earliest significant memories is the American community’s Independence Day celebration in Nairobi, Kenya in 1976. For a six-year-old American missionary kid, the day was magical. Songs of freedom and stories of heroic American deeds mingled with hot dogs, ketchup, and games—to produce in me a sense that I was a part of something profoundly good and significant.
Almost forty years later, my perspective on that enchanted bicentennial day has changed. I no longer believe that hotdogs are at the peak of the culinary mountain, that Washington cut down the cherry tree, or that America always does the right thing. And yet, when it comes to those things that make America America—a belief in the God-given dignity of all people, the goodness of freedom, and the value of hard work—the fundamental magic of that day remains.
The child’s sentimentality may have been replaced by a more complex and nuanced view of the world, but I remain a patriotic American.
From the Outside, Looking In
After a number of years living, studying, and working in America, I am also, again, an expat—an American watching the story of my country unfold from a distance. Seeing, hearing, and experiencing what that story looks like from the perspective of an outsider. The picture I have is probably less depressing or euphoric than it feels like when you are living it, but the larger trajectory, uncomplicated by the noise of excessive information and the “fog of culture,” might also be more clear.
From a distance, what is perhaps most striking is a noticeable deterioration in America of one of the essential pillars of any healthy democracy: its civil discourse. There might be hundreds of reasons for this trend, but one surprising cause stands out: a decline in intellectual carefulness.
Ferguson: Waiting for the Facts or Jumping to Conclusions
Consider the rhetoric surrounding the death of Michael Brown, and the almost complete failure of American society to deal with the tragic events in Ferguson, MO in a politically, relationally, or spiritually healthy way. Well before credible information was available, Americans of all economic, racial, and political perspectives not only leapt to conclusions, but angrily pronounced judgment regarding circumstances of which they could have had, at best, only partial information. Any hope of a constructive reaction to the tragedy was destroyed, not in the flames of Ferguson, but much earlier in the inability of nearly all of us to wait for the facts and consider the evidence carefully.
Declining Carefulness, Declining Civility
And Ferguson is not an outlier. Indeed, whether it is the public controversy surrounding recent political scandals or our private willingness to hastily judge a colleague based on a piece of office gossip, there is every indication that our lack of intellectual carefulness, and the decline of civil discourse that has resulted, has become habitual in America. It has become part of the fabric of our democratic culture.
Of course, a lack of intellectual carefulness is not a uniquely American trait. You can find intellectual carelessness in every culture and people. What should concern us in particular, however, is the fact that our system of government rests on civil discourse that is measured and wise, and this sort of healthy civic conversation can only be produced by an intellectually careful citizenry. In short, what we need are people who are habitually careful thinkers—not just in political or cultural matters, but across their lives.
What Is an Intellectually Careful Person?
But what does that look like and what does it mean to be a habitually intellectually careful person? Someone who is intellectually careful is someone who earnestly wants to know the truth and so they are reasonably and consistently careful in their thinking, taking care so that they do not overlook important details or leap to hasty conclusions based on limited evidence. Instead they are patient and diligent in their pursuit of knowledge.
Aristotle wisely noted, the intellectually careful person looks “for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.”[1] The intellectually careful and prudent doctor, for instance, will not give the same amount of attention to mowing her lawn as she would to diagnosing her patient because the stakes and circumstances do not warrant equal time. But that does not mean that she ceases to be careful when she mows her lawn or prunes her rose bushes. In fact, her decisions to use just the right plant food, or to set her lawnmower blade at just the right height, are directly linked to her ability to carefully and successfully diagnose the ailments of her patients. By consistently choosing to think carefully about how to nurture her garden, the doctor is developing intellectual habits that show up in every area of her life—something for which her patients are extremely grateful.
The Problem for Most of Us: The On/Off Mentality
The problem for most of us is that we see intellectual carefulness as something we can turn on and off at will, instead of something that always needs to be turned on but used in proportion to the demands of the circumstances. Because we do not actively develop a consistent pattern of conscientiousness in our thinking, we may act intellectually careful in isolated moments but we do not become intellectually careful people. As a result, when a situation demands careful thinking, we find it difficult to override the hasty and careless thinking patterns that have become our mind’s default operating system. The fact that we usually fail to be adequately careful in our thinking is usually not the fault of our intentions but simply the result of our being out of practice.
How often, for instance, do we uncritically accept casual office gossip or leap to hasty judgments about others based on innuendo or flimsy circumstantial evidence?
Unfortunately, the weeds of intellectual carelessness and hastiness seem to grow effortlessly and, as we have seen in our reaction to Michael Brown’s death, bring with them consequences that can be sobering. American society’s hasty and reckless response to Ferguson is a dramatic instance of carelessness, but examples of intellectual carelessness do not have to be spectacular to be significant.
In the academic world, neglecting to use quotation marks and not citing a source can mean expulsion for students, and the loss of a job or a severely damaged reputation for professors. Plagiarism is often intentional, but quite regularly it is simply the result of intellectual carelessness. The Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough’s reputation was damaged, and the credibility of his otherwise outstanding biography of John Adams was undermined, because he attributed a key quotation to Thomas Jefferson that it appears Jefferson never said.[2] McCullough’s apparently careless error quite reasonably raises the question of whether other equally significant “errors” have been included in his works. There is every reason to believe McCullough’s error was an unintentional anomaly in a generally stellar career, but if other errors are found, the credibility of his once towering works could very well collapse like a house of cards.
The reason?
Intentional deception and intellectual carelessness both produce lies and people don’t trust liars.
Too Hasty
Another slightly different form of intellectual carelessness that seems to be rampant in our culture is intellectual hastiness. In his famous address to Harvard University, Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued that the media’s desperate attempt to meet society’s insatiable demand for news pushes it towards “guesswork, rumors, and suppositions to fill in voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the reader’s memory.” The result, Solzhenitsyn continued, are countless “hasty, immature, superficial, and misleading judgments.”[3]
The consequences of the media’s intellectual hastiness seem to be everywhere. In March of 2006 three members of the Duke University lacrosse team were accused of rape by a North Carolinian woman. Almost as soon as the accusations were made newspapers and magazines across the country were writing sordid accounts, filled with unsubstantiated innuendo, and complete with strident moral judgments. The Los Angeles Times said the young men were examples of a college sport’s culture that was “out of control, fueled by pampered athletes with a sense of entitlement” and Rolling Stone magazine ran its story under the headline of “Sex and Scandal at Duke.”[4] Well before any evidence had been examined, the players had been declared guilty in the court of public opinion. The problem was, that while the Duke athletes had put themselves into a morally compromising situation, the accusations had been false.
In the Duke case reputations were ruined. But consider a real jury made up of people who have developed the habit of either jumping to conclusions or failing to closely examine the evidence that is available. More to the point, consider the nineteen year-old kid mistakenly condemned to a life in prison because the jury made up their minds after the prosecutor’s opening statement. Intellectual hastiness can have serious consequences.
Of course, few of us consciously rush to judgments in situations of such gravity. Yet in the so-called little things we are often guilty of habitually hasty thinking.
How often, for instance, do we uncritically accept casual office gossip or leap to hasty judgments about others based on innuendo or flimsy circumstantial evidence? If you are anything like me, the answer is: Far too often. Not only does this form of intellectual hastiness lead to reckless judgments against colleagues—creating a lens through which we then begin to unfairly interpret all other information we hear about them—but it inevitably influences our actions towards those people. Even if we never explicitly pass on our unsubstantiated impressions to others (which we almost always do), our intellectual hastiness has poisoned a relationship and probably affected the way that person is treated in our community.
If you are still tempted to think that intellectual character has little to do with practical Christian living, try loving your neighbor as yourself while practicing intellectual hastiness. It can’t be done.
Lack of Confidence
A lack of confidence is another natural attribute of the habitually careless or hasty thinker. Consider the following example. Nigel and Jess are on their honeymoon and decide that they would like to try parachuting. From an early age Nigel has been taught to dot his i’s and cross his t’s. His love of truth was also enough to push him to take reasonable intellectual risks, but when he goes to pack his chute, Nigel’s habitual intellectual carefulness serves him well. He listens closely to the instructions and follows them faithfully. Then he goes back and double-checks his work. Nigel’s brilliant and carefree bride, on the other hand, has always gotten by on her natural smarts and charisma and so when it comes to packing her parachute, Jess wings it.
On the ground both are equally relaxed, but standing on the edge of the plane’s door, ten thousand feet up, their experiences are worlds apart. Nigel is excited about the jump knowing that his chute is sound and set to function perfectly; Jess is rightly paralyzed with fear.
The consequences of her carelessness are obviously potentially tragic for Jess, but for the sake of pleasantness let’s say that she gets lucky and her shoot still functions properly. Even though they both made it to the ground safely the thinking habits they had developed prior to the jump still had an important influence on their experience. Rooted in the confidence gained from his habit of careful thinking Nigel’s experience was one of unabashed exhilaration, while Jessica’s intellectual carelessness rightly produced intense and paralyzing fear.
Paying close attention to evidence and taking care that we don’t hastily pass over important information is not only likely to create a higher rate of success in every area of our lives, but it will necessarily produce peace of mind and the confidence needed to tackle life’s opportunities and obstacles.
The Cost of Careless Thinking
When we choose not to develop habits of careful thinking, the consequences to our personal lives and to the health of our democracy can be as dramatic as they are harmful—reputations are unjustly damaged, relationships poisoned, and our civil discourse deteriorates into a national shouting match. By contrast, the fruits of habitually careful thinking are deceptively and pleasantly mundane. Offices effectively accomplish their goals because employees trust each other’s work, relationships blossom, and political enemies can offer opposing views with dignity and civility. Like all the intellectual virtues, intellectual carefulness is not something that we can turn on and off at will. It is, however, something that we can grow into becoming if we are willing to work at it. By consistently and actively choosing to examine evidence closely and by refusing to jump to hasty conclusions, even in life’s apparently unimportant moments, our minds, our lives, and our culture can slowly be transformed.
Taken from Virtuous Minds by Philip E. Dow. Copyright (c) 2013 by Philip E. Dow. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426. www.ivpress.com
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