Clear Thinking as Broad Rationality for Living with Excellence and Flourishing Together 

  

This book suggests a framework for how we can live better, both individually and together.  It isn’t a new framework, it is a modern take on a very old framework.  The framework is based on a particular conception of what sort of species we are, including being cultural, social, and in a very broad sense, rational.  We are capable of learning to reason well and make good decisions and take effective action both individually and jointly.  Yet we cannot take this kind of broad rationality for granted as already being present just because we are born of human parents.  It is something we develop as a result of our social and cultural practices.  The requirement of being able to communicate with each other about our different needs, desires, knowledge, and skills is a vital part of being a cultural and social species and it requires a certain explicitness and candor that I refer to in broad terms as “clear thinking.”  

It will take an extended argument and many examples to illustrate this idea of clear thinking as broad rationality.  That’s because we have many ways of thinking of the same things that tend to obscure the central ideas required for this framework.  For example, it requires a particular way of thinking about human abilities in general and particularly how human excellence arises as a result of development in a cultural environment.  We often use terms like intelligence, wisdom, expertise, knowledge, and personality in some technical or narrow ways that can obscure their potential role in human flourishing.  

One of the first questions I think a good reader should be asking in any book drawing on a prescriptive or normative argument (as I do here) is: “what does the author hope to accomplish that is truly promising yet which others have not already covered better?”  I'm very explicitly standing on the shoulders of many others in this book and I will try to give many of them the credit they are due.  

  

What I hope to add is a way of putting several existing ideas together that makes them more practical, more systematic, and more generally useful.  The biggest challenge I have in coming up with such a general framework is that a vital part of my argument is that our reliance on universal general abstract principles has been part of the reason our thinking has been constrained and our rationality overly narrow.  So I have to be careful about not replacing some overly general principles with another set of overly general principles.  At the same time I have to be careful that in arguing against overly general principles I don't also undermine our capacity for reasoning through our situations and contribute to the existing and corrosive cynicism and "relativism" that has pervaded so much of culture.  

When we want to offer a normative or prescriptive argument about humanity, it’s traditional to start with some claim about what humans are particularly or uniquely good at and to build upon that.  There’s a very old argument along these lines that starts with trying to discern our purpose.  Traditional examples are “tool using” and “language” and “imagination.”  

My argument starts with humans being cultural animals, because culture is how we adapted ourselves to living in so many different environments and in so many different ways.  What I propose we as individual humans we do particularly or uniquely well as cultural animals is to each develop a range of skills and knowledge that adapt us to our own way of life.  Culture is the indispensable scaffolding for this cultivation of skills and knowledge.      

  

I argue that: (1)  there is a foundation for thinking clearly, (2) that it can be learned by human beings as part of their education and development, (3) that it does lead to living well individually and together, and (4) that on the whole we have rarely taken advantage of this foundation, and (5) that is more because of commitments to certain opposing aspects of culture than because the foundation isn't sound. 

Building and expanding on this argument in several dimensions, I try to provide a framework for thinking clearly that includes but does not merely stop at individual critical thinking.  

What the Radical Enlightenment vision got dangerously wrong about humanity and reasoning

Long before the origins of agriculture, humans expanded across the globe, from the arid deserts of Australia to the frozen tundra of the Canadian Arctic. Surviving in this immense diversity of habitats depended not on specific genetic adaptations, but on large bodies of culturally transmitted know-how, abilities, and skills that no single individual could figure out in his or her lifetime (e.g., blowguns, animal tracking). Lacking local cultural knowledge, many an explorer has perished in supposedly “harsh” environments in which local adolescents would have easily survived.  (Boyd, Richerson, & Henrich, 2011)[Boyd, R., Richerson, P. J., & Henrich, J. (2011). The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108, 10918-10925.]

The human species is characterized by a single primary adaptation that makes it possible for us to thrive in a wide variety of physical environments.  That adaptation is what we call culture.   All living things including human beings face adaptive challenges but humans are distinctive in that most of our adaptations are transmitted culturally rather than genetically.  Cultural adaptations, like biological ones, are generally built up incrementally over time and can become extremely complex compared to the adaptations of other animals. 

This is all made possible by biologically transmitted species-typical abilities such as imitation, socializing, and invention, but the specifics of how we live well are transmitted culturally and require vital practices built upon those abilities which allow us to take part in complex cultural adaptations (such as the specific roles we take on) as we each develop.

Living together through a myriad of different ways of life is a central part of what it means to be human.  I think that much is relatively straightforward biological fact.  The specific implications for how we can best live well take some further thought.     

A very popular myth suggests that we are born as hermits outside of the rest of humanity and then decide to join in with the rest of our species via some sort of agreement or social contract.  One version of this individualist myth even suggests that we are simply individuals trying to survive and reproduce in a jungle of other individuals doing the same.  Often it may well feel that way.  My thesis here is that the biological reality is very different from that appearance and this mistake has many important implications for how well we live.

There are a number of good reasons why we feel like we are lone individuals fighting and competing for survival even though the reality is that we survive and thrive primarily because of our social nature and our ability to work together to accomplish things.  

Some of these reasons are psychological: we find it far easier to think from our own inside perspective focused on our own immediate needs and desires than to take an outside perspective that lets us see more broadly what is going on around us and see our deep interdependence.  

Then some of these reasons are conceptual and have to do with a deeply embedded tradition of thought that accompanied and supported the industrial revolution by stressing an exclusively competitive view of how business, for example, works.  This view was probably central in justifying the accumulation of extreme wealth by corporations while large and sometimes growing numbers of people lived in poverty.  

Today we still see many people arguing from these system justifying traditions of thought. I believe we can trace this justification of unjust living conditions back to a particular narrow conception of reasoning based on a radical sort of individualism that many or perhaps most of us take for granted as true.  I suggest that the view of business for example as accumulating wealth for individuals rather than fostering prosperity in general for human life is a fundamental mistake.  It ignores the biological reality of our role as members of a community and as members of humanity.  

There’s a commonly made error suggesting that being members of a community or members of humanity merely imposes obligations or duties upon the otherwise free individual.  To put it simply, this is nonsense.  Our freedom itself is meaningless without considering the way we live and our interdependence with others.  And as cultural and social beings most of our needs and concerns are either mutual with others or shared with others rather than in conflict with others.  Yes we have different preferences and we sometimes compete but when we compete it is within a larger framework of assumptions and rules, without which our competition would (and sometimes does) degrade into ways of living that are far below what any of us aspires to.    

I propose that that as a social and cultural species, the situation we are born into is from the very start social and cultural.  We learn to live well within the situation we find ourselves in by taking on various specific roles and learning specific practices that are already present in the  culture and society into which we are born.  We learn to navigate these roles we take on by acquiring competence and excellence in the associated practices.  We can participate in these practices and roles, we can create new ones, and we can change or eliminate existing ones.  It is culture itself that is our adaptation, not the specific roles and practices that have evolved over time.    

The Problem of Cultural and Moral Pluralism

If you accept my proposal above, even just tentatively for the sake of argument, a massive concern has probably already become obvious to you.  If we are really a social and cultural species that thrives by joint effort and mutual and shared needs and interests as I claim, then why are we so divided over every little thing that comes along?   If we are a species biologically rooted in cooperation as I claim, how can we make sense of so often being unable to agree on even the simplest things?  How can the social and cultural perspective I am proposing possibly be reconciled with our unmistakable cultural and moral pluralism and our seeming refusal (or even inability) to disagree constructively to flourish together?  Even if you can find your way past the trap of radical individualism, the trap of “civilization” seeming to either be a bloody jungle of competition or a authoritarian gulag seems unavoidable, especially during difficult times.     We sometimes seem to navigate a certain amount of pluralism because we recognize our commonalities, but there are times when our disagreements seem both deep and irreconcilable.  What lesson should we draw from this?  

That problem is exactly the reason the human flourishing perspective must be recognized.  Not to eliminate the cultural and moral pluralism by totalitarian means, but to recognize our interdependence and navigate the unavoidable differences.  This means recognizing the fundamental need for roles, practices, and ethics that put our human flourishing and individual excellence first rather than prioritizing the justification of destructive practices and systems that preserve unjust conditions.  

I argue that mutual mistrust and resentment are poisons to human flourishing.  To my thinking, the only way to address the root causes of mistrust is to build trust.  For me, the only way to address the root causes of resentment is to bring about justice.    That’s why the clear thinking framework is rooted in the concept of roles and practices rather than just rules and calculations.  Those are valuable ideas but they don’t provide a way to address the obstacles to human flourishing.  I focus on the skills we need to build trust, think and act with excellence, and create the preconditions needed for those things.  That’s clear thinking.  

We are not as good at solving problems together or at resolving our conflicts constructively as our most promising philosophies assume we are or require us to be. The usual knee-jerk reaction deriving from the popular radical individualist perspective is to blame individual lack of “critical thinking” and wax poetic about how people have to learn to be “more rational.”  As if being better critical thinkers would make cultural and moral pluralism disappear because we would all somehow reason to the same conclusions.  We might call that the rationalist utopia.  Everyone works together because they all agree on the relevant facts.  It makes for a very compelling vision but we simply aren’t a species of individual computers or fictional Vulcans.  

The rationalist utopia is very misguided specifically because when we try in all sincerity to “think critically” we  find that it is not a solo activity at all as we often assume, but rather a social practice where we assist each other in compensating for the blind-spots and biases that each of us cannot avoid.  This is what makes science “self-correcting” over time for example, not just performing experiments and testing hypotheses in isolation.  We can find ways to resolve disagreements over facts (though even this can be surprisingly difficult under some conditions) but it takes additional skills and dispositions to disagree constructively when we have different perspectives and prioritize ends and means differently and when we mistrust each other.    Reasoning together, making good decisions, and solving our problems jointly means much more than just using good logic to align our facts and looking for hypothetical decisive experiments that often don’t exist for the issues we are most concerned about.  

Most important to remember during times when we see the effects of “tribal” thinking or “polarization,” this is not just an individual phenomenon where we are in conflict with other people who share something with us (”intra-group conflict”), it is also a social  phenomenon between groups that identify themselves differently from each other (”inter-group conflict”).  

Inter-group conflict and associated polarization is a result of how social processes in different communities shape the thinking of their members and this can often turn us against each other.  The assumption that we can resolve inter-group conflict involving mutual mistrust simply by appealing to critical thinking is extremely unrealistic.   

We do need to cultivate individual judgment as a priority.  But what we need is not the narrow rationality of the hermit that selectively chooses to participate in roles to meet solely their own individual desires in a presumed jungle of zero sum competition.  What we need is to cultivate a broader rationality that takes others and our deep interdependence into consideration and supports our practices for living together and flourishing together to meet shared and mutual need and desires as well, in spite of even deep disagreements.  

Thinking of rationality in a broad social and cultural way rather than as merely individual critical thinking has some intriguing implications that may be surprising at first.  It implies that our traditional conception of human abilities (intelligence, expertise, wisdom, personality, knowledge) may well all be expanded as a result of taking our social nature into consideration.