The decline of critical thinking

Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation” and serves on the Business Council at Business for America. This is the sixth entry in a 10-part series on the American schism in 2024.

In last week’s article, I expounded upon the fall of American journalism and explained why the media industry, as currently incentivized, is provoking and exacerbating a healthy chunk of the American schism by intensifying polarization. Within the predominant business model, today’s media industry has relegated the pursuit of truth to the back burner. In its place, a significant portion of the industry today relentlessly deploys sensationalism as its principal tactic to attract clicks and eyeballs.

Moreover, this “journalistic approach” is intermingled with the dissemination of carefully tailored yet quite distorted narratives to best coddle consumers within the shelter of their own information bubbles.

In accordance with this line of thinking, the solution space to the “media problem” can best be demarcated by the necessity to create better incentives for profitable media business models that once again put the pursuit of truth at the center of the value hierarchy. This is undoubtedly a challenge given a stubborn reality, namely that the lion’s share of the media industry has become reliant on advertising as the sole profit engine. Further, with the command of artificial intelligence and advanced advertising targeting capabilities, consumers have been relegated to pushing buttons while entrapped in our individual Skinner boxes, an enclosure in which an animal pushes a lever to get its reward. How many of us today get our anticipated adrenaline reward when mouse clicks or phone taps become our lever? Digital advertising has effectively become a mechanistic behavior modification tool.

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But this perspective represents at best half the overall problem – the share of the pie related to the supply side of the media industry. What about the demand side? Why don’t enough American consumers insist on more accountable journalism? Shouldn’t a larger portion of viewership or readership demand more factual information? With the exception of a few national print newspapers, why do we as consumers tolerate sensational entertainment masquerading as news today, particularly after transcending centuries of yellow journalism via the curation of an ethical profession in more recent history?

And herein lies the other half of the problem – the slow decline of critical thinking in a population where too many consumers get lost in a sea of noise, and abandon the pursuit of truth altogether. With waning ability to evaluate sources of information, consumers too often today fail to seek out alternative viewpoints; instead they swallow hook, line and sinker what their favorite political hack or elected official spouts out.

Simply stated, critical thinking is sound thinking built on top of our fundamental human capacities of observation and reason. But rigorous thinking requires making choices about what sources to pursue for information and using reason and judgment to weigh the invariably conflicting data coming from different fronts. Today, ironically perhaps, we have turned this type of thinking on its proverbial head: As opposed to using facts and reason to arrive at a point of view, the opinion comes first, followed by a quest for whatever alternative facts might support it.

In previous generations, critical thinking was the very foundation of education. In more recent decades, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education has effectively crowded out not only civics classes but the pursuit of inquiry in the gamut of social sciences where students of yesteryear learned to grapple with complex issues relating to the body populace and society. In previous times, high school debate clubs were common and classes specifically designed around critical thinking were the norm. In these contexts, a typical assignment entailed students developing an argument for one side of an issue, complete with supporting data within a logical framework, and then subsequently making the case for the counter argument, with the same meticulousness. These types of learning environments fostered the assiduous development of empirical and rational skills which were not only nice to have but which in fact provide the foundation for a democratic republic.

Lest we forget that it was the French Enlighteners, like Diderot and Condorcet, who outlined the explicit educational needs upon which a representative democracy rests. These requirements were unambiguously developed in response to the domination of the church-mandated educational curriculum of previous centuries. Within the framework of the day, the ecclesiastics who provided instruction had scant ability or desire to cultivate the empirical and rational skills of the secular realm, core values of the Enlightenment. In writing the 1792 French Constitution (before the Reign of Terror in which he gave up his life), Condorcet delineated an entire set of educational programs that were to be mandated for provision by the state to all citizens of all classes. Abandoning such may provide the fuel for firebrands and manipulators, and usually proceeds down the path toward autocracy.

Once again, history can act as a salve for our wounds, if only we would apply it.