Thinking Is Hard

Two weeks back, I wrote a small sally against the encroaching idea of “critical thinking” in higher education, a concept that threatens, kudzu-like, to envelop the natural environs of academia. As promised there, I want to occasionally circle back around to related concepts and develop my thoughts on teaching and learning into… well, nothing like a theory, but a series of sketches of a better world. In this post I want to talk briefly about some divisions of thought, and the challenges facing those who truly desire to think.

When I posted that previous essay, a friend left a comment on Facebook to the effect that he wouldn’t object to critical thinking being taught in schools if what was taught under that heading actually involved real, critical, logical thought processes. I largely agree with that sentiment — I’ve long been a proponent of required logic classes at the college, if not the high school, level. Simply disentangling good and bad habits of mind feels like the task of a lifetime. But I want to pivot away from that whole realm for now and think about a key difference in approaches to thought. This division I offer is not at all meant as comprehensive, but I find it useful to give myself terms to work with on a provisional basis.

For now, I will distinguish between what I will call “thinking” and what I will call “problem solving”. An overwhelming majority of what gets taught in schools is, I would argue, better classified under the rubric of “problem solving” than of “thinking”. “Problem solving” involves thinking through various immediately given scenarios, troubleshooting them, and devising solutions for their resolution. This process, it should go without saying, is invaluable to human life. It has given us roads, aqueducts, baths, and many other less useful technologies. It is the milieu of the engineer, the techbro, the (to engage in the most disgusting sort of stereotyping) Ancient Romans. Life without problem solving would be largely intolerable.

I say all of this on the front end to clarify that I am not attacking “problem solving” per se, but merely the misapplication of it to areas where it does not belong (most of what I’m doing on this blog falls under the heading of problem solving. When I write a post about the Muppets, or the Steve Miller Band, I hope no one mistakes that for “thinking”). For problem solving excels at tinkering with that which is right in front of it; but it lacks the broader view with which to make sense of the whole picture. This is where thinking comes in. When I play chess (very badly), I operate exclusively at the level of problem solving — reacting to what my opponent has done immediately before. But real chess masters possess chess thought, the ability, even with a blank board, to see 20 moves ahead and plan. (That’s an imperfect analogy, but it will do for now).

Some people throw out the idea that this thought process I’ve described as problem solving is the exclusive domain of STEM pursuits, as in the famous(ly tiresome) quip “STEM can teach you how to bring back dinosaurs. The humanities can tell you why that’s a bad idea”. That’s a pleasing platitude, perhaps, but hardly indicative of the state of the humanities today. Instead, we’ve adopted that same problem solving mentality as many in the STEM disciplines; thinking only narrowly about what’s right in front of us with no broader conception of knowledge. I’m speaking broadly, of course, and I know plenty of people, both professors and former fellow graduate students, who achieved real thought at times. But — and this is certainly the internal struggle I felt during graduate school — so much of the design slants toward narrowness, toward picking at small issues, rather than expanding to a fullness of thought. I think part of this tension comes naturally from the fact that true thinking struggles against attempts to institutionalize it, but there are also design flaws built into our current mode of graduate school that exacerbate these tendencies.

You see the issues inherent in problem solving dominance frequently in politics. An issue gets raised, and someone devises a policy solution (or, increasingly these days, a symbolic solution), but never stops to consider how this policy change might fit into a broader theory of governance. Obviously politics requires some sense of expediency, but take away the brakes of big picture thinking and what frequently results is a solution that is worse than the original problem. This is why political discourse as it stands today tires me out quite quickly: people mistake cleverness for real insight, and think that poking a hole in an opponent’s idea means proving the value of one’s own stance. It’s a limited view made blurrier by the pressures of our demands for instant results (but that’s another post for another time).

What are some of the biggest inhibitors of real thought? Here are a few contenders.

1. Time.

This is perhaps not a fully acceptable thing to say, but good, deep thinking requires time to one’s self, what might have once been called leisure. Of course, such time has always been rare, and critics are right to point out that often leisure time is afforded to only the few at the expense of the many. These days we have at least slightly more equally distributed leisure time, but more and more that fills it, and not nourishing things either.

So I don’t go too broad here, let me stick to graduate school. There are so many demands on a graduate student’s time — teaching, taking classes, reading interminable lists of books — that time for real, leisurely thought often goes out the window. By the end of the day, you’re lucky if you have the energy to read a Grisham novel, let along something stimulating but challenging. And because the guidelines are so firmly in place for most programs, you have little chance to explore lateral thinking that might enrich your own work in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. I was lucky in that my own program in comparative literature allowed me to take courses in anthropology, philosophy, film, even economics — classes that broadened my horizons — but this sort of flexibility seems largely the exception, not the rule.

I recently read Zena Hitz’s excellent little book Lost in Thought. One of my favorite insights from the book was the idea that great thinking often happens while we’re doing something else. It’s like crop rotation: by letting our minds wander as we peel potatoes, or scrub down in the shower, we often stumble upon our most interesting ideas. What would happen if we designed graduate programs (or better, undergraduate programs) with this idea in mind, that everyone benefits from periods of fallow leisure?

2. Teleology

Real thinking has a freedom about it not dictated by the demands of the immediate present. But graduate school of course aims relentlessly at that one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves: a tenure track position, a chance to say something that senior scholars will find really field-altering, etc. That’s why so much “thinking” in these contexts amounts to absorbing bits of theory and trying to carve out an area into which one can jab one’s theoretical spear. That’s not a knock on theory, which can at its best be really insightful, but at its mindlessly repetitive application. It reaches the point where you become suspect if you don’t apply the approved theoretical constructs to your work, even if you can intuit that they have little to do with the proper approach to your material. As someone who works in decidedly unsexy areas of research, that pressure to conform becomes especially irksome.

3. Community

Matt Dinan has an excellent review of Lost in Thought in which he pushes back slightly at Hitz’s tendency to frame the intellectual life as a solitary one and tries to imagine what thinking together looks like. That’s an incredibly valuable insight: thinking, as much as it involves those lone moments of distraction, also emerges through the refining process of conversation. While “problem solving” excels in the world of debate and bickering, “thinking” blossoms most fully in the warmth of generous discussion. This environment does not preclude disagreement, of course, but it presupposes a shared commitment to truth, humility, and generosity.

Again, I was in many ways lucky in my graduate school experience in that I felt very little of that cutthroat competition that you sometimes hear about as the default mode of graduate school. I was even lucky enough to emerge with some dear friends and intellectual companions (two of whom I run a podcast with, ahem ahem). But, I do think that the pressures of graduate school tend to inhibit that sort of intellectual community, in large part because so many people struggle merely to survive. Here again the ideological and disciplinary narrowness can be a hindrance; how many in your graduate cohort are going to challenge you with ideas that are actually interesting and outside the mainstream of whatever your discipline happens to be?

As always, these thoughts should be taken not as some grand pronouncement, but as a humble catalog of my own musings. I’m putting them out here primarily for my own benefit as I stumble through these notions in my own mind, and maybe one day make something out of them. Until then, receive them with a hand as open as the one that gives them. I’ll be busy watching the NBA playoffs, or wrestling with my children, and hoping inspiration strikes in the meantime.