TE AWAMUTU COURIER. Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, 23rd SEPTEMBER, 1936. FACILE THINKING.

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3812, 23 September 1936, Page 4

TE AWAMUTU COURIER. Printed on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. WEDNESDAY, 23rd SEPTEMBER, 1936. FACILE THINKING.

MODERN civilisation is at present in sore straits. On all sides men are pointing to alleged causes, and expounding guaranteed remedies. These causes and remedies are almost entirely related to economic systems and distributive processes. But the most deeply roted causes are to be looked for at other sources; things unseen and intellectual are antecedent to things seen and temporal. Our troubles, ranging from the personal to the international are rarely due to evil choices deliberately made. They are due rather to lack of thinking clearly and of thinking ahead. By some people these things are simply not done, not because they are socially incorrect, but because they involve hard work. Such people never subject their ideas to any incubatory process. The action of their brain is purely automatic; they impose no strain on their mental machinery, which, owing to disuse, has become rusty. They are quite • unaware that their failure to correlate facts and to analyse arguments is being daily made manifest in the superficiality of their judgments. It is a readily demonstrable truth that, even on the nominally higher levels of society there are to be found pretentious individuals whose reasoning equipment is positively elementary. It is quite impossible that they could have at any time, crossed over Euclid’s “pons asinorum”; they seem never even to try to relate cause and effect. They pride themselves on possessing a rich store of what they arbitrarily describe as common sense, and they determine everything in conformity with that nebulous standard. Confronted with

new situations they promptly jump to conclusions. Invariably they jump short or overleap. Under the euphemism of “opinions” they propound and defend their quite irrational prejudices. There are implications to their theories which they have never probed; there are qualifications to their postulates for which they have never allowed. Because of their uniformed, untrained mind they can be trusted to make only the most obvious remark. They are members of that vast host of persons who believe themselves educated yet who adopt economic theories, political doctrines and religious fajth without anything like adequate intellectual examination. They promptly reject them under the same limiting condition. Some people do not think; they enthuse. Unballaced by any weight of reason they are borne along on successive waves of enthusiasm according as various proposals appeal to their imagination. From time to time there are advanced large-scale schemes designed to serve important national purposes. Usually there are alternative choices, each probably having merits. These merits have to be considered, the one against the other; reasons whyone choice is likely to be permanently most advantageous have to be summed up. There are people who never engage in these processes, but who are not in the least abashed because of it. Their voices are as a rule the noisiest, their reasons the flimsiest, their stock of facts the scantiest. Yet they flatter themselves on the ground of their facile thinking; they smile loftily at their neighbour whose brain seems slowermoving. They do not even dimly understand that the seeming slowness is probably due to the neighbour compelling his brain to take a wider sweep and to plumb to a greater depth. Without such a discipline a man or woman’s opinion on anything is worth nothing. In the bygone years life was simpler, distracting issues were fewer; such as there were men could investigate thoroughly and ponder carefully. To-day all phases of life are accelerated; international affairs and national activities form part of cur daily commonplaces, and manypeople succumb to the temptation to have their mental work done for them. They feel safe as long as they are echoing the shibboleths of their social set. Glib phrases are their chief mental food; they rarely have an honestly acquired idea in their head. The smart, epigrammatic slogan attracts them, although ten minutes careful analysis would suffice to disclose that the slogan’s smartness merely cloaked its hollowness. The world’s wide-range troubles are perplexing, and people are confused by the multiplicity of panaceas. But each community has short-range problems of its own, and these provide a point at which the earnest minded man or woman may begin. The impact any individual can make may be slight, but to the problems with which as a citizen he is immediately confronted he may contribute some measure of earnest, personally evolved thought. To try to ensure the soundness of one’s premises, the validity of one’s reasons -and the logicality of one’s conclusions is an invaluable mental discipline. It is a duty one owes to one’s own mental self-respect and to a world well-nigh distraught. The ability to think competently and clearly is not conferred; it can be only laboriously acquired. But the person who takes pains to examine as many public issues as possible, and who can say with respect at least to some: “This is one thing I know,” is as a tower of strength in a nation where men and women are carried about by every wind of doctrine. For most of the ills from which civilisation is suffering are ultimately traceable to this evil of facile thinking.