THE CHAMPIONING OF CRITICAL THINKING

"Unfortunately, understanding does not miraculously forestall any discomforts that may arise from the status ideal. Understanding bears the same relation to many of the difficulties of politics as a weather satellite to the crises of meteorology: it cannot always prevent problems, but it can at the very least teach us a host of useful things about the best ways to approach them, thereby sharply diminishing the sense of persecution, passivity and confusion we would otherwise feel. More ambitiously, understanding may also be a first step towards an attempt to shift, or tug at, a society’s ideals, and thus to bring about a world in which it will be marginally less likely that veneration and honour will be dogmatically or unsceptically surrendered to those who are still wearing stilts." [Alain De Batton, 2004]

Here, using the analogy of the weather satellite and meteorology, De Batton aptly describes the benefits of not only educating ones self but purposefully concentrating ones attenuation towards the concept of understanding. I would like to clarify the specific sense of the word I call upon when using the word 'understanding'.  I use this word in its external sense, its meaning being closely related to peace:

Understanding n. A state of cooperative or mutually tolerant relations between people: To him, understanding and goodwill were the supreme virtues.

Its ironic that internal understanding brings (at least initially) not peace but an internal Jihad. It exposes the depravity of our "heart" and "soul", and its terrifying. To appease our conscience we dabble in trying to reconcile our personal philosophy with what we know in our 'heart of hearts' to be right, to change our way of life in the wake of the sobriety that understanding brings. Its doubly ironic that we do this most often while drunk and talking to someone else that may be just as eager to validate their way of life and their personal philosophy. We call these moments of horrible vulnerability and earnestness 'D&M's'.

Unfortunately in our day to day lives, out of our own convenience and that of our peers, we are far less lucid, far more numb and callous. 'D&M's are really nothing more than a source of embarrassment. So we self-impose what can be described as a nihilistic attitude to self development and cognitive independence and we feign ignorance to any knowledge we posses of the inner workings of societal constructs that are greater than ourselves.





In an interview I watched recently with the Band 'Foals', the front man Yannis Philippakis stated that "David Attenbourough is amazing, he's everything you want to be as a human being, idealistic and passionate but not overly wet". By 'not overly wet' I think Yannis means that David Attenbouroughs publicly communicates with a kind of dry idealism born out of scientific and verified fact and not out of selfish utterances that stroke his conscience or ego.

David Attenborough has just reached the North Pole for the first time at age 83. Although he remained relatively politically neutral  throughout his career he has made the journey to such a place because he is making a series about climate change. To an adult generation that prefers to click buttons and flick channels rather than be "the nail that sticks up" Sir Davids journey communicates a disenchanting reality to all those that encourage 'understanding'; that as much as understanding can arm us with the means to find solutions, its our actions following our point of realization or understanding that really define us as purveyors of change and progression.

Always ALWAYS such people must be seeking to realign societal superstructures and ideology's with what the world needs most and not write a new holy book or repeat the mistakes of the past.