This article is a continuation of What is Critical Thinking?
Critical Thinking as the Solution to 21st Century Problems?
The Democratisation of Knowledge and Misinformation
The 21st century, often referred to as the “Digital Information Age,” has achieved something truly unprecedented—today anyone with a basic Internet connection is granted free and instant access to a bottomless repository of information. The utopia where knowledge becomes readily accessible to everyone, regardless of class and race, is finally here. We are living in it right now.
And yet, as with everything, the democratisation of knowledge has not been without unintended consequences. In addition to striking down traditional barriers to knowledge, the Internet also struck down traditional standards of quality for information, effectively making the golden age of knowledge also the golden age of widespread misinformation, fake news, and charlatanism.
With the lack of proper verification procedures and quality control, it is ultimately up to individuals themselves to decide what is trustworthy and what is not. This is why critical thinking is said to be more important now than ever before: without it, we would lose our capacity to tell true from false.
My question is the following: what does critical thinking in the 21st century mean? Is critical thinking merely the solution to the problems we’re facing in the 21st century? Or is the increasing prominence of this term in the current social discourse suggestive that it has itself turned into a problem today?
The Battle Between Authentic and Inauthentic Thinkers
Today, it seems, the stakes have been raised. The battle is no longer black and white: between thought and prejudice, fact and ideology, reason and dogma, but rather between two different strands of thought, both claiming to be “critical.” For lack of better terms, I propose to call one “authentic” and the other “inauthentic,” for reasons I will discuss later.
By inauthentic critical thinkers, I am referring to, among others, science deniers, contemporary fundamentalists, and especially conspiracy theorists.
What strikes me about them is not so much their dogmatism and delusions, rather, it is how they’ve managed in recent years to appropriate the discourse on critical thinking in service of their own agendas.
Critical Thinking in the 21st Century Conspiracy Theories
For example, there is a common misconception that belief in conspiracy theories begins with a dogmatic leap of faith when, in reality, it usually begins with something very close to critical scepticism. It is simply not true that conspiracy theorists go around forcing their wild conjectures down people’s throats. More often than not, their opening move is much more modest and reasonable, at least on the surface: all they seem to do is advise people not to “blindly trust authorities” and instead “do their own research.”
Didn’t we hear so many people proudly proclaim during the COVID-19 pandemic that they “did their own research”? And that what they had found led them to be sceptical of what many of the experts, authorities, and public officials were saying? Surely enough, the deeper they dug, the more “research” they did, the more questions and suspicions they began to accumulate regarding every aspect of the pandemic: the existence of COVID-19, the safety of vaccines, the credibility of so-called “experts” and the media, and so on.
Wasn’t COVID-19 really a plot by Big Pharma to sell the public overpriced vaccines? If not, why is the pharmaceutical industry making billions of dollars in profit from the pandemic? Why are they suppressing and stigmatising alternative medications? Also, isn’t it convenient that the pandemic gave governments all around the world a pretext to expand mass surveillance and buttress state control? What could have been their real motives and intentions? And so on, and so forth. The questions multiply infinitely.
Of course, I am not saying that those in power were fully transparent during the pandemic or that we should naïvely trust that they had no ulterior motives behind their benign policies.
The point is that it’s not so easy to articulate in this case what type of scepticism constitutes genuine critical thinking and what type of scepticism constitutes conspiratorial thinking, if there is a distinction to be made at all. Perhaps the uncomfortable fact we’ll have to come to accept is that they share exactly the same roots.
The problem here is not so much about telling which theories are true and which are false. What I would like to draw attention to instead is the self-identification of many conspiracy theorists, science deniers, and even fundamentalists with the task of critical thinking. This is why I argue that the black-and-white opposition between critical and non-critical thinking is no longer tenable today.
Even if it’s true that the people who fall for conspiracy theories are not as critical as they believe (which is almost certainly the case), the fact that they openly wave the flag of critical thinking in public should worry us nonetheless. For, it is precisely in the name of “critical thinking” carried out independently of the influence of mainstream narratives that allows these people to discredit well-established facts like the existence of COVID-19, the imminent threat of climate change, the actual shape of the Earth, the empirical evidence for evolution by natural selection, and so on, to name a few.
Conspiracy Theorists and Their Search for Truth
In a strange and perverse way, couldn’t we say that the motto conspiracy theorists live by is exactly that of the Enlightenment’s—“Sapere aude!” (“Have the courage to use your own understanding!”) from Kant’s seminal 1784 text, “Was ist Aufklärung?” (“What is Enlightenment?”)?
In the eyes of conspiracy theorists, the masses are too lazy to search for the truth, too cowardly to think freely and independently of the mainstream media. They agree that many gladly remain minors for life, unaware of how they are being manipulated left and right by big corporations and scientific experts.
Now, it’s obvious that we have a problem here.
The reality is that, under some circumstances, conspiracy theorists do appear to be more critical than the average ordinary citizen.
We may comfortably mock those who believe that the Earth is flat, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, there is a good chance that many of us would lose in a real debate with them. We could, of course, blame our defeat on mere sophistry that should be dismissed out of hand rather than engaged with sincerely.
But perhaps the conspiracy theorist has a point: how many of us have actually analysed the scientific evidence behind the shape of the Earth? How many of us are capable of justifying on the spot why we believe the Earth to be round and not flat? Don’t we believe the Earth to be round simply because our teachers and textbooks said so? And if that’s the case, then aren’t we the naïve and gullible ones here? Aren’t we the ones who are uncritical?
This series of questions takes us to the heart of the problem: namely, the relationship between the critical self and authority. Is it a necessary condition of critical thinking that we distrust and disregard all forms of epistemic authority? Isn’t it the case that every appeal to authority is ipso facto a fallacy? How can one claim to think independently and be dependent on authorities at the same time? Doesn’t this amount to some kind of contradiction?
To begin responding to these questions, we must first examine more closely the different justifications given by “authentic” and “inauthentic” critical thinkers (keeping in mind these labels are only provisional at this stage) for distrusting authority. So, what’s wrong with authority?
The Basis for Distrusting Authority
The standard (authentic) argument can be summed up as follows: if it is necessary for us as critical thinkers to distrust what authorities say, then this is ultimately because we recognise that authorities are human beings just like the rest of us and therefore just as capable of error and prejudice. No one, regardless of their expertise or status, is all-knowing or all-objective. There will always be personal blindspots, oversights, and distortions which will have to be corrected by others. Fallibility is thus the main justification for distrusting authority.
But it is not why conspiracy theorists, science deniers, and fundamentalists distrust authority. Their justification, on the other hand, is based on the fundamentally dishonest nature of authority.
Dishonesty attributes a malicious intent to those in power in a way that fallibility doesn’t necessarily: this is most clearly seen in conspiracy theories where the government, the media, the education system, etc., are all “in it together” to sabotage public interest and to cover up “the Truth.”
The Root of Inauthentic Thinking: Conspiracy Theorists View Authority as Infallible
In the world of the conspiracy theorist, authority is never fallible; on the contrary, those in power are all too competent. Just think about how much continual and impeccable effort it must require to sustain the perfect illusion that the Earth is round when it is actually flat, or how much punctilious thought and consideration it would take to additionally plant red herrings that distract the public from “the Truth.” In their world, authorities never make mistakes—and that is precisely what makes them so dangerous and untrustworthy.
As a result, nothing can be trusted or taken for granted; everything, no matter how trivial or apparently insignificant, always has a deeper meaning that can be traced back and integrated into one overarching hyper-consistent narrative—it’s all part of “one big plot.”
It is hopefully evident by now what makes this type of distrust in authority inauthentic. Despite all appearances, conspiracy theorists are not actually critical in the sense that they recognise the inherent limits of authority. The axiomatic presumption they hold, namely that the authorities are constantly trying to deceive us, is not only unreasonable but also far too naïve and simplistic.
It divides the world neatly into good guys and bad guys, truth-tellers and deceivers. It is here that we find, paradoxically, that the most radical scepticism ends up coinciding with the most dogmatic beliefs. By flatly disregarding everything authorities have to say on the presumption that they’re dishonest and corrupt, one immediately places oneself in the comfortable position of knowing how everything really stands.
In classifying all claims by authority as a priori deceiving, this leaves nothing left in this world that is trustworthy except for the conspiracy theory which recognises and points out this deception, thereby proving itself to stand above the world it criticises. But there is nothing actually critical about this criticism, for it fails to confront the complications inherent within truth itself.
For the conspiracy theorist, the only obstacle preventing us from accessing the truth is the authorities’ deception; by removing the veil of deception, we automatically gain access to the unambiguous truth that was there all along. In this respect, there is really no critical analysis of what we take to be true at all; there is no sense in which the truth we understand can be wrong since whatever is wrong must be due to the authorities’ deception.
In reality, this whole narrative of deception functions as a coping mechanism so that the conspiracy theorist never has to confront the ambiguities of actual thinking.
For all their apparent scepticism and critical spirit, conspiracy theorists can hardly tolerate ambiguity; like everyone else, they crave certainty. When experts disagree or contradict each other in public—which they always do—the conspiracy theorist is more likely to take this as evidence of infighting or a cover-up rather than recognising how this is part and parcel of the process of establishing consensus.
They would much rather have the expert be an all-powerful, all-evil deceiver rather than somebody who makes mistakes. It is much more comfortable knowing that you’re being deceived and knowing what you’re being deceived about rather than not knowing if you and others could be wrong. By denying the fallibility inherent to authority, this also ensures I never have to confront my own fallibility.
Here we can notice how the two justifications for distrusting authority end up implying two different attitudes of the critical self. There is something deeply false or inauthentic about the absolute independence of thought conspiracy theorists like to espouse.
If anything, their idea of independence is more arrogant than it is critical. To be fair, it is true in principle that anyone living in our information age has little excuse not to do their own research and to come to their own conclusions, but we all know that things are hardly so straightforward in practice.
The reality is that most people lack proper research skills, and so, what “doing your own research” effectively amounts to for these people is performing a few Google searches already primed by confirmation bias before falling into a rabbit hole of ready-made, readily-consumable conspiracy theories.
What these people don’t seem to realise is that everybody has their own limitations, and that being critical entails not only being critical of others but also being critical of oneself. The former without the latter is just arrogance. Authentic distrust of authority, insofar as it’s consistent, must always imply distrust of ourselves as authority too.
How to Practice Authentic Critical Thinking
But how might we put ourselves in a legitimate position to criticise ourselves? Isn’t this a case of trying to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps? Here is where we should reassess our relationship with authority. If authentic critical thinking must necessarily be critical of itself, then, paradoxically perhaps, it must also depend on some form of authority outside itself.
The Importance of Relative Authority
Of course, the kind of authority I’m suggesting here is not the stereotypical absolute authority, i.e., an authority that authorises the truth by virtue of being an authority. What I have in mind is something much more modest, namely the concept of relative authorities, i.e., people who probably know better than us about a particular subject matter.
Taken in this context, authority is not so much something one claims to be but rather something one has relative to somebody else. There is nothing inherently special about this authority one can possess; it is not a privilege bestowed upon select individuals.
Anyone can, in principle, come to understand for themselves the reasons and justifications behind what relative authorities claim and, in so doing, dissolve the apparent coercive force of their assertions.
Authority in this sense merely signifies what lies outside of our current knowledge and understanding, which we must admit is imperfect. Authorities can be wrong, naturally, but so can we. The dependence in this case is thus anything but one-sided.
Instead of a hierarchy where knowledge is concentrated at the top, in the hands of a few experts, the concept of relative authority compels us to imagine a network of critical thinkers where nobody has all the knowledge and power and where everybody is equally fallible and dependent on others to correct them.
What We Need In the 21st Century: A Public Sphere
There is a name for this kind of network, it’s called a public sphere. While there is something to be said about critical thinking as a solitary withdrawal from the business of everyday life, the concept of the public sphere is not the simple reintroduction of the thinking self back into the public world but precisely the constitution of a world of the withdrawn.
A healthy public sphere is one in which all rational citizens are allowed the full freedom to communicate their thoughts with each other, to experiment with various perspectives disinterestedly, as well as point out the shortcomings and blindspots in each other’s thinking. And perhaps this is just what we need in the 21st century: not just more critical thinking but authentic critical thinking practised collectively within a well-functioning public sphere.
The Malaysian Philosophy Society actively promotes the cultivation of a network of critical thinkings in the community. Join the community here to spread the spirit of philosophy and critical thinking.
*Disclaimer: This article has been edited for clarity. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the stance of the Malaysian Philosophy Society.