The Slaughter of Critical Thought

Most people just hide their evil behind everyday banality, where they can still get away with denying accountability. They're just doing what everyone else is doing. They're just doing what they're told. They didn't think it would hurt anyone because they didn't think at all.

When I was a graduate instructor at Harvard, we were told that the skill we were ostensibly being paid to teach students was “critical inquiry.” What students expected to learn from our pedagogy was the practice of “critical thought.” What we were doing, supposedly, was training these young students in our discipline’s methods for social research and critical analysis of data and theory.

At our best moments, I guess that’s what sociology is about. I know that after my decade-long travels through its epistemic salt mines, I consider my capacity for critical reasoning fairly well developed and my doctorate degree well-earned.

But is “critical thinking” really what universities want students to learn? Is that actually the institutional goal of college administration?

I suppose it is. At least, I know from having read a lot of Marilynne Robinson that was the mission and intention with which many of our first American universities were founded. In fact, as I’ve learned from Robinson (and not, curiously enough, from my own liberal arts college) is that the liberal arts education tradition is, in fact, a quintessentially American artifact, as much a constitutive part of our nation’s heritage as the revolution itself.

The American university system, at least when it started, grew up as the quirky fruit of its own intellectual isolation. After all, the nearest university for the colonists was an ocean away and ruled over by tyrannical monarchs and bishops. And while many wealthy colonists did, nevertheless, send their sons abroad to receive a classical continental education, enough had the wits about them to see the benefits of cultivating an altogether new system for adult education that could better reflect the needs of growing a new nation on admittedly stolen land.

The newborn American university system thrived under conditions of imperial neglect. The kings of the Continent were too caught up in trade wars and territorial power grabs to notice that the sons of indentured servants and journeymen were rapidly learning to read, becoming as appreciably “educated” as the landed gentry were back on the Continent. They were discovering that they had the same faculties for governance as the landlords back home and no longer needed the direction of the Church or the King over their thinking and beliefs. There was, quietly, a revolution happening in America long the textbooks will admit there was one.

And of course, upon critical reflection, you, too, might reason that monarchy is bad, actually.

The critical rejection of monarchy in favor of democracy was not taken for granted, but rather cultivated in taverns and coffee houses, in newspapers, and especially pamphlets. Ideas were sent back and forth across the colonies as fast as horse carts could carry them, from Boston to Albany to Philadelphia and back again. Every day more thoughts arrived, louder ones, pressing the Colonists to recognize how truly free they already are from the foreign demands of an idiot king if they could only come to see themselves that way.

The American University system was largely the creative expression of this call to freedom, autonomy, and self-rule. Whereas obedience to God, King, and Everything was the founding mission of universities over there, America would offer its young an alternative, expressed in the liberal arts tradition. The Liberal Arts for these founders was not understood then as a loose euphemism for Classical Humanities but rather as the moral and intellectual discipline expected of those who would be truly free.

American Liberal Arts and Land Grant colleges were not, according to Robinson, founded with the intention of refining the upper crust and legitimizing their aristocratic authority. They were not on an institutionalized mission to propel their graduates to the highest echelon of the banking and finance industries. They were created to hold the line of freedom, to develop the capacity for liberation among the first generation to even know what such freedom from idiot tyranny might even taste like.

I know why universities started but all I can see is how it’s going. We pretend that our students are learning to think in college and we call that skill critical thinking but is that the skill employers actually want from college graduates? No. Rarely ever.

What employers and universities, too, prefer to thinking is analysis, seemingly objective thought alienated and removed from the person doing the thinking. What we usually want from a knowledge worker is someone who can extract themselves from their creative labor to create a knowledge product. These institutions and organizations don’t want to support living thinkers, what they want to do is to broker in dead thoughts. And as it really does turn out, these desires really are, sadly, mutually exclusive.

I am still grieving the loss of my friend and colleague, David Graeber, who died last September. He’s relevant to this subject because it was specifically his book Utopia of Rules that really broke me as a lonely and depressed graduate student of any delusions I still harbored about my future in the academy. I won’t bore you with my epiphany, but David had basically written a convincing case that had my late-century hero of critical thought, decorated French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, been a graduate student alongside me in an American R1 university like Harvard, he might finish his PhD, but no university would here offer him tenure.

Let’s just say it gave me a lot to think about.

But David is relevant here for another reason and that’s Bullshit Jobs, the last book he would publish before he died. In truth, David’s whole life was building towards a grand Bullshit Theory of Everything. My correspondence with David began with me many years ago writing to thank him for his generous lucidity in matters most are still too afraid to talk about in any louder than a hallway whisper. After all, rocking the boat could cost you tenure. But David never suffered anyone’s bullshit. It was as though he were spiritually allergic to it, in all its hypocritical manifestations. He was for me the holy fool of higher education, the jester who can say what no one else at court would dare.

Bullshit Jobs was his anthropology of our capitalist economy and his conclusion is that what we think of as chiefly comprising our “free market” economy is mostly just so much bullshit. He largely made the same thesis in Debt: The First 5,000 Years but that title doesn’t have the same zing to it. Though, whereas Debt argued that debt is bullshit, Bullshit Jobs argues the same for entire professions, especially finance and banking ones.

This brings me back to universities and why I care so much. You can’t teach Sociology at a school like Harvard and not wonder how many of your students are just biding their time before embarking on a career in investment banking. You can’t help but feel less than useless teaching sociology to a generation of white-collar consultants whose Harvard degree will be used to legitimize so much economic terrorism against their own people.

I know universities are where we think we should send our kids if what we want to learn is critical thinking, but is that still true? Or is it bullshit?