How to Think Well

Intelligence needs nine helpers.

A set of bad intellec­tual and academic practices, often perpetrated by senior academics, often fêted, have spread in some of the world’s most prestigious univer­sities: smearing by association, the authoritarian pulling of professional rank, careless misrepresentation, the setting up of straw men, unjust bias, false assertion, axiomatic ideological abstraction and evasive omission. And through these practices, moral vices such as malice, arro­gance, impatience, uncharity, injustice, unfairness, dishonesty and cowardice have become widespread.

Moreover, what is spread in the lecture hall or seminar room doesn’t stay there. It walks out into the streets. For, graduate bankers, businessmen, healthcare staff, military professionals, journalists, civil servants, politicians, and government ministers who, making decisions that are careless with the truth, arrogant, unteachable, impatient, unjust, uncharitable, and cowardly are bad decisions that cause real damage to institutions and to the human individuals who inhabit or depend upon them. For that reason, we cannot afford universities that are morally tongue-tied. We cannot afford them to be eloquent about transferable skills while speechless about transferable virtues.

These vices and the malpractices they generate impede the common pursuit and discovery of the truth, which is the specific vocation of universities. They permit the perpetrator to avoid listening to opposing views, from being challenged by them and provoked into thinking, lest they be provoked to rethink. They allow him to refuse contrary opinion the basic respect of letting it stand on its own terms and of engaging with it honestly, albeit critically. Thus, they corrupt academic dialogue by making its friction throw out heat rather than light.

Tom Quad, Christchurch, Oxford

Universities, therefore, face a choice. Either they appoint and promote professors who display and disseminate intel­lectual vices, or they reward those who exemplify and cultivate intellectual virtues.

First among those virtues should be temperance. In this context, that does not mean abjuring alcohol. Rather, more generally, it means the restraint of emotions or, more exactly, passions. Strictly speaking, a ‘passion’ is an emotion that is out of our control and has us at its beck and call. Sexual passion is its epitome. The word derives from the Latin verb, patior, which means ‘to suffer’ or, specifically, ‘to be subjected to’.

We live in a culture that vaunts passion and strong emo­tion as signs of authenticity and vitality. But emotions can lie. They do not lie about their own felt strength, of course. But they are based on perceptions, and perceptions can be untrue, embodying a lie about what is perceived. Nazis, for example, were subject to very strong, ‘authentic’ passions about Jews. But those passions lied.

Giotto’s Allegory of Temperance. La Cappella degli Scrovegni

Moreover, emotions that are out of our control – passions – blind and deafen us to things we ought to see and truths we ought to hear. Among those truths are the duties we owe other people. Passions can make it impossible for us to perform them.

So, if we are going to be able to see straight and listen care­fully, and if we are going to be able to treat other people as they deserve, we need to cultivate temperance. And if we are going to foster temperate graduate citizens, voters, businessmen, lawyers, soldiers, journalists and politicians, then university professors are going to have to start modelling it.

Temperance or self-control is the necessary condition of a second virtue: respect. The duty of the virtue of respect is widely recognized and talked about – but not what is required to make it possible. If we cannot control or restrain ourselves – if we are ‘full of passionate intensity’ – we will not be able to stop ourselves trampling over the rights of others. We will not be able to respect what they deserve.

One thing that other people deserve, at least on first encounter, is the presumption that they are acting in good faith. So, when they speak or write, we should assume that they are expressing the truth as they see it. We should not cyni­cally, presumptuously, arrogantly assume that they are simply rationalizing some unjust interest or advantage.

Accordingly, we should begin by attending to what they say, rather than trying to discredit it by assaulting their person – whether by insinuating or smearing or damning by associa­tion. Of course, it may be that the more we attend, the more apparent it becomes that they are not acting in good faith. So be it. But our initial stance should be to give benefit of doubt and exercise the virtue of respect.

If we are going to show respect, we will also need to exercise a third virtue: carefulness. When reporting what someone has said or written, we should take care to be strictly accurate, not omitting inconvenient bits, distorting others, bending the whole into a straw man, the easier to knock down.

It may seem that accuracy in reportage is too elementary and prosaic a skill to merit adult attention. But many adults have never learned it, because their teachers never taught or rewarded the virtue of carefulness. Consequently, we have journalists, politicians and – as we have seen in these pages – decorated university professors who constantly misrepresent some people, thereby misleading many others.

Being careful with a person’s words, so as to hear and report them accurately is, indeed, elementary in the sense of basic. It is a basic form of doing them justice.

Involved in the virtue of carefulness is, fourth, that of patience. Careful listening often takes time. And if what someone is saying is unfamiliar or complex or ambiguous, careful listening will take a lot of time. So, in order to be careful, we will have to be patient. Sometimes, the meaning of what is said will not give itself up quickly and only becomes clear with careful attention, patiently sustained over time.

The word ‘patience’ derives from the same Latin root as ‘pas­sion’, but in this case it means the opposite. Far from being a strong emotion that renders us its helpless playthings, patience is a species of emotional self-control – of temperance - that enables us to suffer frustration and discomfort in waiting. The virtue of patience is the ability to endure.

Sometimes, what others say or write is not only complicated; sometimes, it is uncertain, inconsistent or ambiguous. One possible response is to represent it in its weakest form. But that is mean and unkind, and possibly cowardly. The generous response is to give an ambiguous utterance the strongest pos­sible construction, not the weakest. This brings us to our fifth virtue: charity.

‘Charity’ here does not mean what we usually take it to mean, namely, the voluntary giving of aid. It means, more broadly, a generous form of love.

It is said of Barack Obama that, as an attorney (‘barrister’, for us Brits), he was wont to open his case by scrupulously summarizing the position of his opponent, giving it the best possible construc­tion. Only then did he set about dismantling it.

Such charitable practice is not only kind, but rhetorically optimal. For, generous scrupulousness wins the trust of impartial observers. And it gives precision to the criticism that follows, making it all the more cogent.

Unless we intend to mistake ourselves for gods, we will be aware of our cognitive limits and moral flaws. So, when we first encounter someone else’s speech or writing, we should do so with a sixth virtue, humility.

We should not stand upon our rank, looking down, but face the author as an equal, subjecting ourselves to the common rule of evidence and reason. We may have higher professional status and we may be much celebrated, but we should not take ourselves too seriously. We should acknowledge that authori­ties and professionals sometimes get it wrong – and, if they are arrogant, they almost certainly will. Moreover, temperate, careful, patient, charitable amateurs sometimes get it right. It is not uncommon for truth to speak from an unlikely quarter. Following closely on the heels of humility is, seventh, docil­ity or teachableness. Aware of our cognitive limits and moral flaws, we should be open to the possibility that we have things to learn and that we might be mistaken in what we think we know. We should always be ‘docile’, not in the modern sense of being blindly submissive, but in the original sense of being open to being taught and corrected.

Luke Conway observes that ‘one of the hallmarks of the modern left-wing authoritarian movement is its intellectual apathy… They dislike thoughtful reflection… They shun serious intel­lectual questions.’ Thinking is what the Tavistock Institute failed to do, as the title of Hannah Barnes’s book indicates: Time to Think. It is also what, I believe, the ‘antiracist’ critics of the Sewell report and the ‘progressive’ critics of my book on colonialism failed to do: engage thoughtfully, albeit sceptically, to find out what they might learn.

Detail of Rodin’s Gates of Hell. © Musée d'Orsay / Sophie Crépy

In contrast, if we exercise the virtues of temperance, care­fulness, respect, patience, humility and docility, we will also exercise an eighth virtue: that of thoughtfulness. We will allow the difference between what we have assumed and what another says to provoke us to reflect, interrogate ourselves, perchance to think and rethink.

Finally, we should exercise the virtue of courage. To be respect­ful, careful, patient, charitable, humble, docile and thoughtful also makes us vulnerable. That is because, in allowing thevoice of another person to ring out clearly and cogently – by not obscuring it with noisy abuse or distorting it into a straw man to be casually dismissed – we may find some of our most cherished convictions challenged, threatened or toppled. And bound up with those convictions may be a career’s worth of reputation, rewards and accumulated social status. It is brave, indeed, to give another person the freedom to speak clearly.

So, there are some of the virtues that university professors ought to teach. There is no neutral position available. If they do not teach these virtues, they will, in effect, teach their oppos­ing vices: intemperance, disrespect, carelessness, impatience, meanness, arrogance, unteachableness, thoughtlessness and cowardice.

How should professors teach the virtues? Certainly, by giving voice to them and rewarding their exercise. Further, in the arts and humanities, by prescribing texts (or films) that illustrate them and provoke reflection and discussion about them. But, most of all, by modelling them in their own conduct. The best way to teach virtue is to be virtuous.

Ultimately, vice-chancellors, university managers and professors have a moral choice to make. Either they promote the virtues that make graduate citizens capable of being intellectually scrupu­lous and of behaving liberally, or they do not.

For sure, there is no universal consensus on what should count as a virtue and what should count as a vice. If we go with Confucius, we will view deference to political authority as a virtue, but not resistance to it. If we go with the ancient Hebrew prophets, we will view care for the weak and the poor as a virtue, but not if we go with Nietzsche or Ayn Rand. If we go with Jesus, we will view humility, compassion and forgive­ness as virtues, but not if we go with Aristotle. As we saw in the case of the controversy in Cambridge in 2020, some people think that ‘respect’ should be promoted, while others do not, preferring ‘tolerance’. And I think myself that compassion and kindness are only virtues in certain circumstances. In others – where, for example, military commanders have to put their own troops in harm’s way, or surgeons have to perform ampu­tations without anaesthetics, or university managers have to make colleagues redundant, or professors have to award marks that cause students to fail – a certain thick-skinned quality, or what we might call ‘callousedness’, is a virtue.

It would have served human welfare better, for example, if staff at the Tavistock’s GIDS clinic had, instead of avoiding their own emotional discomfort, steeled themselves to risk upset­ting children by questioning their gender identification, rather than nodding them through to irreversible bodily changes that some have now come to regret.

So, we will not all agree about the choice of virtues or the meaning of them. There will always be room for a plurality of interpretations and further debate. Consensus is usually tense in this sense, not entirely settled and relaxed. That said, we should not exaggerate our moral differences. I cannot think of any former academic colleague who would actually rec­ommend intemperance, disrespect, carelessness, arrogance, thoughtlessness or cowardice.

Regardless, universities cannot afford not to discuss the matter and reach whatever provisional consensus they can. For that to happen, however, its members need to wake up – become ‘woke’, we might say – to the importance of what is at stake: namely, whether or not we are to have a society run by people who are so devoted to the welfare of individuals and the common good that they care to find out the truth – about gender, race, colonial history, etc. – and who care sufficiently to find out the truth that they are willing to humble themselves so as to listen, perhaps learn, and even change course.

W. B. Yeats. Credit: Alice Boughton, via Wikimedia

In 1919, on the eve of civil war in Ireland, W.B. Yeats wrote in his poem, The Second Coming, that famous line, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. If we are to avoid a New Dark Age of repression and naked power-struggle, university leaders, managers and professors need to recover liberal conviction and assert it, throwing off the intensely passionate, illiberal tyrants currently riding on the back of their acquiescence.