In Praise of Thinking

Those of a certain age may remember Rodin's statute, The Thinker, primarily due to the appearance of its likeness on TV, looming over Dobie Gillis as he thought aloud; mostly regarding his many loves and their loss.  It was an effective narrative device, and one of the show's several charms, topped, of course, by Maynard G. Krebs.

I think much about thinking and its benefits.  I think most about what benefits it would have if it was more prevalent in our remarkably thoughtless times.

I think John Dewey was right, and that we only think when faced with a problem we wish to resolve, a situation we find undesirable and desire to "fix."  Dewey may have caused confusion in calling his theory of inquiry "Logic."  He certainly confused Bertrand Russell who, typically, could think of logic as nothing but the logic with which he was familiar and at which he excelled.  What I think Dewey had in mind was the description of what takes place when we think intelligently of problems we face and overcome.  Logic, insofar as it is instrumental, is a kind of inquiry devoted to that purpose.  It functions within the analysis of a question and in the consideration of a claim.

What seems striking about these times is that we have available to us a great deal of information, more information than has ever before been available and that information is easily accessed by almost all of us.  Yet, we seem less and less able to think about that information, or anything else, intelligently.  It may be that our ability to access information, almost instantly, has encouraged us not to think.  We need only employ our smart phones or tablets or personal computers to find answers.

The unfortunate thing about information is that it may be accurate or inaccurate.  It may be fact or fiction.  It may be mere opinion.  It may be dogma, doctrine, propaganda.  It may be anything at all and used for a number of undesirable purposes.

Sifting through information requires the ability to think clearly and critically, to assess and to judge intelligently.  Without that ability, we're subject to self-delusion or manipulation by others.  As Dewey noted, we only think when resolving problems.  The rest of the time, we're creatures of habit, or daydreamers.  We're at best observers, at worst believers in whatever information we access, uncritically, which we find satisfying.  We accept that information without bothering to confirm or question it in any sense.

This may account for the fact that we seem now more than ever to accept certain information and reject other information, unthinkingly and often it seems regardless of evidence.   For example, those who believe the world is about 6,000 years old do so regardless of evidence (information) establishing that it's much, much older.  They are instead convinced by other information issued by like believers which asserts that the evidence against their belief is incorrect or is motivated by a desire to confuse them.  They'll accept the belief they find most satisfying and reject evidence not only because they're already inclined to do so, but because they don't know how to make intelligent judgments.

The view that it is possible to judge intelligently and decide whether one claim or another is accurate or one course of conduct or another preferable has itself been subject to attack for some time, of course.  This attack has been all too successful, as there are those who believe the idea that we can make judgments or distinguish between right or wrong, correct or incorrect, to be absurd.  If that's the case, why bother to think at all?

The great problem to be solved to remedy these circumstances involves education.  How do we induce people to think critically?  That would seem to be something we should do as soon as possible during the process of education, but how do it?  How teach children to identify premises and assumptions and treat them with skepticism, require support for claims, test possible answers?  Would we even be allowed to do so?  Would parents object if the result would be that their children questioned their parents' cherished beliefs?

Probably not, unless it's possible to accomplish this without offending the sensibilities or sensitivities of parents by teaching a kind of elementary logic without reference to controversial or accepted beliefs.  Logic in the abstract, let's say.  True critical thinking may have to be deferred until college.

Unfortunately, though, it appears colleges have taken to purging certain unpopular views or prohibiting them even from being stated let alone criticized.   Left and Right, liberal and conservative seem to be united in the effort to encourage people not to think, not to consider.  To hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.

Sometimes it seems, to this uninvolved spectator at least, that what we begin to see at colleges is a reversion to a kind of scholasticism, a tendency for learning to be based purely on dogma and doctrine and their extension or development subject to imposed limits enforced by faculty and students alike.  It would be appropriate, if this is true, that outside the Academy we see those features of a New Dark Age where thought and conduct is similarly narrow in focus.  But if so we can hope that history repeats itself and that another Renaissance awaits.

"As on a Darkling Plain"

It's not exactly the cheeriest of poems, but I've always been fond of it.  I refer of course to Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach."  It's one of those poems high school students were required to read in the distant days when I was in high school, so it is a kind of "oldie" to me in the manner of old popular songs.  But it was a poem I admired at the time, and there were not many of those.

The poem isn't cheery at all, in fact, though it begins mildly enough.  Unsurprisingly, it takes a dark turn when you encounter the reference to "human misery" which the narrator opines was brought to the mind of Sophocles by the tide or waves of the Aegean, crashing onto the shore.  Those waves which crash upon the shore at Dover Beach, presumably, brings human misery to the mind of the narrator of the poem, in any case. and from there he's off to the lugubrious races, referring to the world, so apparently beautiful, as having neither joy nor love nor light nor certitude nor hope of relief from pain.  From that the poem concludes with reckoning that we exist on that damned darkling plain, "swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night."

Perhaps the poem's appeal was to the romantic, alienated teenager in the me of that time.  But Arnold was a sturdy Victorian for the most part, pontificating magisterially on art and other things.  And why, if angst makes it admirable, would I still find it admirable now, when I aschew angst and romanticism of any kind?



I suppose because it seems a particularly apt description of the world of our times, if not that of Arnold, if we take the short view.  The short view is one taken naturally, though.  The world does indeed seem at times to be one vast plain on which we ignorantly clash, here in God's favorite country and elsewhere.  "Ignorance" is the word of the hour.  The word of the age, perhaps.  We have, after all, elected as president a preening ignoramus.


It's doubtful we've ever been so ill-informed now that most of us always have information at hand, instantly.   Maybe a lot of information is as dangerous as a little knowledge.  Maybe it's more dangerous.  Too much information is daunting and encourages us to look for what meets with our expectations and no more than that.



The plain on which we clash so ignorantly, however, is the world with us in it.  We do the clashing.  The clashing is not due to the rest of the world but to a particular, and very small, part of it (infinitely small if "world" is taken to mean "universe").  We are similarly ignorant due to our own fault.  The rest of the world has no responsibility for our ignorance.  We're responsible for it.


An aspiring Stoic will find the belief that we each of us possess a part of the Divine Reason or partake of it a hard one to accept in these times and no doubt did at other times.  Our capacity to be irrational seems boundless.  The traditional Stoic response, I think, is that those of us who fail to follow reason and instead indulge in the passions do so because of their ignorance, not because they're inherently bad.  Ignorant armies which clash at night or at any other time, therefore, are made up of those who are not Stoics, who do not follow the Stoic path.


I think that then as now, the clashing occurs because of the very un-Stoic tendency to concern ourselves with things which and people who are not in our control.  It seems to me that the acceptance of this very simple precept--that some things are in our control and some are not, and those which are not do not have real significance--would eliminate anxiety, fear, envy, greed, hatred; the reasons for our clashes.


So would be the acceptance of other precepts, I suppose.  Some have long maintained that if we were all true Christians, for example, all would be well in the garden which, somehow, exists within our darkling plain.  Or if we all love one another, or all do onto others as we would like them to do to us, etc.


Such precepts strike me, however, as more difficult to understand or follow.  We aren't all Christians and we never will be (very few of us are to begin with, if one is Christian if one follows what Jesus said as best as we can determine).  We simply cannot love one another, if love is what we feel for those close to us.  We love people because they're close to us.  We simply treat those who are not close to us differently; we don't have the knowledge of them, trust in them, admiration in them needed to love them.  As for doing onto others, etc., that would certainly serve, but until such time as we treat things beyond our control as insignificant I doubt anyone would consistently apply that precept.  Without it, we desire or fear those things too much.


I view the Stoic precept as fundamental to a reasonable course of life.  It's simple, easy to understand (relatively speaking), has no necessary connection to acceptance of a particular deity, and eliminates the anxious pursuit of or flight from things not in our control which is otherwise a constant preoccupation.
 

Whither Classical Music?

Last weekend, I attended a performance of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra during one of my solo sojourns to the downtown of The City of Broad Shoulders, the Windy City as it's also called.  Charlie Kane said of it to his friend Jedediah that "the wind comes howling in off the lake and gosh only knows if they ever heard of lobster Newburg" but it wasn't for that wind that it earned the latter nickname.  According to what I've read, an East Coast journalist called it that because of the tendency of its residents to boast of it, rendering them and their city "windy" in the parlance of the times.

It's interesting that although I visit River North and the Loop with some frequency, and enjoy classical music, I haven't been to a performance previously.  I'm not even certain why I did so in this case.  I had been to Winter's Jazz Club the night before and enjoyed what I heard and was checking for other live performance of music or a show, and thought of the symphony and am glad I did.

An orchestra at work is an impressive and powerful thing to observe.  It would seem to me that composing for a full orchestra is onerous and creating a composition which can be played and enjoyed by musicians and audiences is a remarkable artistic achievement.  Hearing an orchestra play great music is a notable sensory experience, or is for me. 

Listening to the CSO that evening prompted me to wonder, though.  Is classical music still a living art form?  One can of course still listen to and enjoy the work of great composers of the past as played by capable professional musicians, and that in itself, I would think, will always keep some of us listening to and appreciating the music.  But what of new composers and compositions and how they compare to the those of the past?

I was about to write that I'm unfamiliar with modern classical music (it seems difficult to even write those words as what is classical would seem on its face or by definition as not being modern or new).  But if we include within it the classical music written by 20th century composers, that wouldn't be entirely correct.  I have some familiarity with Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Schoenberg, Ravel, Debussy, Elgar, Benjamin Britten, Respighi, Berg, Poulenc, Richard Strauss, and Rachmaninoff so perhaps it can be said that as to classical music of the first half of the 20th century, at least, I'm not altogether ignorant.  But I know virtually nothing of what's gone on in the last 60 years or so.

I can't say I've liked some of the modern classical music I've heard.  Atonal and twelve tone music annoy me, for the most part.  To my doubtless unschooled ear, some modern classical music is mere noise.  It is I'm sure highly complicated noise, and may even be organized noise, but I don't associate noise with classical music or music of any kind.  I'm aware of the fact that certain composers have invited musicians to more or less do what they please, or select certain chords of phrases randomly and play them haphazardly, or laugh and shout or honk while others in the orchestra do something more traditionally associated with their instruments. 

That sort of thing has led me and perhaps others to speculate that classical music has played itself out.  That's to say that what has been done has pretty much covered all the ground which can be covered by orchestras or quintets or quartets or trios of a melodic nature by past masters of the various styles popular prior to the 20th century or the more melodic styles of the last century, for example the tone poems of Richard Strauss and Respighi.  And so, classical music composers now in a kind of despair resort to musical chaos.

I don't see how that can be, though.  I'd think that the variety of instruments available traditionally in classical music, combined with what technology now allow for, means it's likely still for new classical music to be made.  And, I think that it could still be music and not be wholly derivative of what has been done by the great composers of the past.

It's not a question of whether there is classical music which can yet be composed and played, then.  It's more a question of whether there will be patrons of that music.  Will those who now grow up with modern popular music even be exposed to let alone appreciate classical music?  Will they be musicians willing to play classical music?

The experience of being at a live performance of an orchestra would, I think, convince some of them at least to be patrons of it, because it can impress and can even be profound.  And, it does so without the need for the light shows filled with dancers, musicians pretending to play guitars and stars who most likely lip-sync their way through songs which are so over-produced that they can't be duplicated in a live venue.