Knowing Things

“Do you wish to rise?  Begin by descending.  You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds?  Lay first the foundation of humility.”

~ St. Augustine

A recent survey shows that Generation Y thinks pretty darn high of itself.  And yet, the same survey also finds that our self-infatuation is rather unfounded.  We don’t really know things.  But we think that we do.  Our hubris is appalling.  It didn’t appear out of nowhere.  This asininity of ours has been carefully cultivated throughout our education and development in society at large… at the expense of our intellect and our souls.

Throughout our schooling these days, teachers often place a much higher value on “how to think” over “what to know.”  This problematic pedagogical notion naturally follows  from our modern “just Google it” culture.  If we know how to think, then we can just fill in the blanks with the facts courtesy of our smart phones, tablets, and laptops as we need them.  That’s the idea at any rate.  But it’s a weak idea.

Out in society as well, we are similarly told to construct “a way of thinking.”  We are to develop what is known as a “worldview” i.e. a way of interpreting the world around us.  This alone is a house of cards.  It lacks a sound foundation.  The foundation that is needed is concrete knowledge, cemented together by the virtue of humility.  Knowledge and humility go hand-in-hand.  Together, these two elements will lead us to Truth.

Without real knowledge in the mental bank, we are empty suits.  Perhaps finely trimmed and tailored Italian suits, given all that highly developed critical thinking ability and sensitivity to nuance.  But devoid of the gritty, factual substance that is knowledge.  This intellectual vacuity is only one aspect of the problem.  The ability to look at something critically and perceive nuance is indeed valuable only when coupled with real knowledge, but alone it bears the danger of pride.

Having a firm grounding in factual knowledge makes us aware that we do not and cannot know and process everything.  In short, we realize our own finitude.  This gives us a real sense of scale.  An overemphasis on “how to think,” on the other hand, can skew our perspectives of the world and give us overblown senses of ourselves.  Furthermore, our dependence on the Pierian Spring of Wikipedia (or whatever other font of knowledge from which we casually sip) causes us to have an excessive and hubristic trust in the upward thrust of technology and human ingenuity.  We trust in a collective human knowledge but don’t vigorously strive to hold onto much of it ourselves.

It is a funny thing to step back for a moment and realize the great irony in all this:  we extol the virtue of critical thinking, but so seldom put the notion to the test.  Perhaps it’s about time we critically evaluated our reverence for the pedagogy of critical thinking and worldview-cultivation and revisited the classical pedagogy of pursuing Truth.

Expect more on this in blog posts to come!