Lazy Reason and Intellectual Complacency
I sit on my couch every morning with a fresh brewed cup of coffee during the hour or so before I begin working. I like to take advantage of what I call ‘the reading hours’—the time of day that I believe is best suited for stimulating my mind with reading. It is the time when I feel like I retain information the easiest (no science to back that up, it’s just how I feel)—all vibes. Recently, I’ve included listening and watching during this period to see how it feels. I will listen to a podcast or an audiobook, and on occasion I will turn on the TV, open YouTube, and watch a couple of clips from the late-night shows that aired the night before. The key ingredient to an enjoyable experience, of course, is caffeine. I’m an addict for sure.
The reading hours are also my favorite time to teach a class. And my favorite class to teach is still a simple introduction to philosophy class scheduled in an 8am or 9am time slot. In the first few weeks (3 or 4 to be precise) the goal is to teach students how to exercise critical thinking skills. Not teaching them what to think, but how to think—for themselves. And while I like the early morning hours, most of my students do not. And the first few weeks of this class are always the most challenging for students, who are new to philosophy. We learn basic critical thinking skills like how to identify logical fallacies. We learn how to identify our own intellectual complacency (i.e. lazy reason) and explore the inevitability that humans tend to uncritically accept the ideas of others. We learn how to analyze information, especially as it emerges from social media. We identify various philosophical tools that can help analyze information, learn how to ask good questions, and learn how to engage in thoughtful discourse, all at 8am in the morning. The first few weeks are where my stragglers begin skipping class or just dropping it altogether, but the ones who can endure my merely adequate teaching exercises develop a strong foundation in critical thinking that can be applied to the rest of the course. So, in the end, it is entirely necessary to push them through mental fatigue, even at 8am in the morning.
Fortunately for me, this portion of the class happens to be my favorite. It is a regular and intense reminder to myself of how to exercise critical thinking skills, which is becoming increasingly more difficult and exhausting as I’ve gotten older. Not more difficult because my mind is somehow deteriorating, thankfully that hasn’t happened yet. On the contrary, I find it less difficult now than I did in my grad studies to focus on complex philosophical concepts and arguments. The reason it is becoming more difficult is because of the technological shifts in the last twenty years like with YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, etc. These mediums of receiving information provide nearly instantaneous access to the fount of human ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ that was not around in the nineties and early 2000s when I was growing up.
I did grow up in the internet age, meaning my formative years were watching cell phones evolve, going from dial up to DSL, going from playing video games on LAN to mass-multiplayer-online, even having a learning management system where all my learning materials, class schedules, grades, discussion boards (etc.) could be found. So much of our lives in the West have slowly been moving online. But it has taken some time to feel the change. Yes, velocity. The velocity of change, particularly the changing and growing compendium of information available online, can be difficult to see for someone who grew up in the midst of it happening. For me it feels like it has always been there, and for the generations after me, it has literally always been there.
The velocity of information plays a big role in critical thinking. When information comes at me too quickly, it makes it very difficult to perform a satisfying critical analysis. The exercise of systematically analyzing information through the power of reason, evidence, and skepticism, all in pursuit of understanding can be a slow, meticulous, and exhausting activity. In the face of instantly and continuously emerging information, analysis and critical self-reflection can begin to feel futile. By the time you come to some semblance of understanding, it’s too late—the story has changed, or a new one has been pushed to the front and you forget what you were even concerned with because some other event has occurred that media believes sets the world on fire anew. The moment of critical self-reflection and analysis has passed, and the world wants you to shift your focus to a new moment. What you understood yesterday becomes less relevant today, and I begin to get lazy and complacent.
So, what is lazy reason? This is the actual question that I have been leading up to in this essay.
To be clear, this is not an original idea of mine. Early modern philosophers from the Western world, and more recently thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Slavoj Zizek, have put forth ideas about guarding one’s mind from the kind of intellectual laziness that leads to the negation of free thinking and the possibility of authentic autonomy. In some sense, I could argue that every major intellectual (r)evolution is its own form of pushing back own the feeling that lazy reason and intellectual complacency has taken root in a society, but I won’t. It is enough to say that lazy reason tends to express itself as an unwillingness to think for oneself. Lazy thinkers are quick to accept inherited ideologies rather than engage in critical self-reflection and analysis. In the worst cases there is a distinct lack of self-awareness at play, which allows other actors to force their perspectives and ideologies on you or on your behalf. And sometimes it happens when I just can’t be bothered to grapple with the possibility of uncertainty and complexity. ‘Tell me what to think [insert expert here]. It’s easier that way.’
Honestly, we’ve all been in this position. I can’t imagine a human being anywhere that hasn’t, at one point in their life, opted for the comfort and convenience of accepting ‘truths’ or ‘facts’ handed to them just because it is easier than the time-consuming process of skepticism, research, and analysis. My students always admit this to me, and they could usually point to specific moments in their lives when it occurred and how they felt about it. And to be clear there is nothing inherently wrong with this, in fact, I would argue that sometimes it is necessary—to just take someone’s word for it and move on with life.
It is common and advised in certain cases to take the word of an authority. And while we can argue that it is bad advice to knowingly commit a logical fallacy—in this case, conveniently accepting the authority of some expert. I would argue that logical fallacies are more like guidelines than hard and fast rules (more on this in another essay). The question isn’t whether you can or should violate them in your daily rationalizations; the question is whether you are aware of it when you do it. Being aware of the decision to believe in the information given to you by an authority figure is a very different exercise in rationality than blindly, and unwittingly accepting it. Awareness is crucial because it means you are making a decision for yourself. In fact, it is part of the antidote to lazy reason. (I’ve got another essay brewing that goes into awareness more deeply.)
At this point, I can honestly say that I have not entirely worked out a system or created a list of 5 tips to help deal with the phenomenon of lazy reason. It is a daily struggle and sometimes I have to catch myself mid-conversation— ‘wait, I should probably look into that more before making that claim.’ What I can tell you is what I would tell my students.
You don’t have to have an opinion or stand by every judgment that you make. Things change, new information is added to the ever-growing compendium of what you know aobut your world. Even more important, if you don’t feel like you have enough evidence or information, or if you don’t feel like you trust the source of that information, then refrain from judgment—wait. Tap into and leverage your self-awareness to help you recognize that maybe you don’t understand the situation or that it is more complicated than you are willing to grapple with in this moment. Don’t make snap judgements from a position of ignorance. A lack of information is not evidence; a lack of information is simply nothing. So don’t fall into the trap of our society’s need to have a detailed account/stance for every event or problem that shows up on social media and, inevitably, gets forgotten the next day or next week. You’re not missing out on anything. Now, if the occasion arises where you do feel compelled to express a perspective or judgment, then that is perfectly fine so long as you have made the decision to do so for yourself. But it is always acceptable to say, ‘I just don’t know.’
Ok, I am going to return to my couch and finish that coffee before it gets too cold. Bye for now!
More thoughts coming soon,
-R