Video: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Article: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Article: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Entry: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

Video: Global Warming Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit ...

SPECIAL SERIES:America Turns 250

This is the second of a three-part series originally delivered as a lecture May 15 at a conference, “The Declaration of Independence at 250: What New Can Be Said?” hosted by the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School. The first part is here.

Humanities and social sciences professors tend to regard “critical thinking” as the highest part of thinking or even equate criticism with thinking itself. The apotheosis of critical thinking spawns a rage to debunk and excommunicate. Social media multiplies the incentives for flamboyant and extravagant denunciation. The more venerable the idea or institution, the more enticing the target and the more vehement the rhetoric.

In the spirit of the times, the postmodern-progressive left and postliberal right have unleashed multiple broadsides against America’s founding principles. As the United States celebrates its Declaration of Independence’s 250th birthday, the defense of the nation’s founding principles involves exposing the one-sidedness of the fashionable tendency to take critical thinking to an extreme. It also requires countering the extreme criticisms of the nation’s founding principles emanating from seemingly diverse precincts of the professoriate.

All worthy thinking about ethics and politics involves a critical component. The conviction that critical thinking represents the essence or epitome of thinking, however, induces professors to concentrate exclusively on the defects of inherited beliefs, customary practices, and established institutions. It is one thing, though, to recognize that human beings are self-interested and fallible; that language is imprecise, ambiguous, and always open to interpretation and contestation; and that laws, institutions, and policies routinely fall short and rarely work as planned. It is quite another to insist that thinking’s principal task is to pinpoint people’s and institutions’ shortcomings, or, as the postmodern-progressive left and postliberal right sometimes seem to converge in supposing, that the supreme intellectual accomplishment is to expose the wickedness of the civilization of which one is a part.

Critical thinking must be combined with generous thinking. Grasping the needs met and purposes served by inherited beliefs, customary practices, and established institutions is also essential to understanding ethics and politics. Plato and John Stuart Mill, great pioneers of liberal education spanning the divide between classical and modern thought, well understood that comprehending the merits of ideas and institutions is no less important than assessing their deficiencies.

In Book I of “The Republic,” Plato’s Socrates clarifies the limitations of three familiar opinions about justice: that it consists in telling the truth and discharging debts, that it revolves around benefitting friends and harming enemies, and that in practice it consists of nothing other than the advantage of the stronger. Socrates does not, as is commonly supposed, refute these opinions. Rather, he shows that each is inadequate, capturing an aspect of, but misleading by purporting to state the whole truth about, justice.

To understand justice in its complexity and fullness, Plato’s “Republic” teaches, one must grasp why the most common opinions about it are partly true and partly false. For example, it is usually just to keep promises, but sometimes returning what is owed would harm the recipient. Especially in war, justice requires benefitting friends and harming enemies, but we make errors about who, and what kind of people, our friends and enemies are; and harming people, whether........

© RealClearPolitics