Thinking about thinking

Attention Duke: We have an epidemic.

This affliction isn’t listed in any medical encyclopedia (at least not yet). But it is nonetheless serious. I am describing the phenomenon of the self-regarding student “intellectual” who, by virtue of his obvious high intelligence and Duke education, assumes the full authority of his worldview. This equating of intellect with a set of predetermined conclusions creates a campus echo chamber that stifles meaningful discourse.

The problem struck me during a conversation about the role of government, when a peer said he “just didn’t understand how an intelligent person could think” differently. He was not joking. The reasoning seems to be that “if you agree with me, you are intelligent; if you do not, there must be something wrong with your brain.”

This self-reverential obnoxiousness speaks to a deeper problem. College students today are far too certain—about their beliefs, about their politics, about their ethics.

Such certainty is problematic for a whole host of reasons. On one front, it precludes and limits the effect of true learning.

Education should entail a radical self-reflection on one’s core assumptions and philosophy. Intellectual egoism, then, renders education a lost opportunity. Certainty on questions that are hotly debated (the role of government, the nature of rights, the meaning of “progress”) is not impressive. Instead, it bespeaks ignorance of the moral complexity that underpins so much political and philosophical discourse.

The result is that too often, campus “discourse” feels like a monologue. Rather than allowing their convictions to be challenged, students tune out those with whom they disagree. Moralizing has become an exercise of the egoistic, rather than ethical, faculty. Education today serves to convince ourselves we are right, rather than to indulge the possibility that we may be wrong.

The why questions are also undervalued. Why, for instance, is the mere feeling of conviction enough to justify it? From one campus crusade to another, you name the issue, students make public the depth of their belief on the issue of the week. But if you press them, it’s alarming how few can articulate the core moral premises that animate their thinking.

Students must assume some of the blame here. If we do not think enough, it is ultimately our fault. But administrators and faculty, too, are responsible for too often encouraging strident and thoughtless conviction—provided those views are the right ones.

Faculty in particular bear responsibility. I can remember multiple times in class when a left-leaning professor proceeded to challenge the ethics of the market, or some other right-leaning viewpoint, while conspicuously omitting a similar critique of the left. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. Conservative students benefit enormously from such interrogation.

As I’ve written before, however, left-leaning students are getting ripped off. This alone would be cause for a remedy. But this disproportionate treatment also has broader consequences for campus culture. When liberal students see professors tag-teaming their conservative peers, this feeds further into their self-certainty. If you agree with the professor’s general line of attack, it’s hard not to draw the conclusion that “he’s not challenging me because I’m right.”

This is self-serving on professors’ behalf, to say the least. And it reflects the same problem that afflicts students. The duty of the University is not to guide students towards predetermined conclusions. Instead, it should instill in students ways of thinking that will help them investigate their own truths.

We need a different approach to political and moral discourse on this campus—one which, rather than telling us why we are right, challenges us to think about how we may be wrong. It is with this understanding that our lives become more purposeful, enriched with a fuller sense of the moral logic with which our choices are imbued. We could all use a strong reminder of Socrates’s lesson on the tentativeness of knowledge: “All I know is that I know nothing.”

The University presents a paradox. Even as it represents how much we have come to know, it also speaks to the sheer magnitude of that which we do not. Before this reality, the supreme self-confidence of the 20-year-old college student can only be comic.

I am not arguing that students should not believe in anything. Action, rooted in reflection, is praiseworthy. There is something to be said, though, for beginning one’s introspection by acknowledging the prospect that one’s deepest beliefs may be wrong, incoherent or ill-reasoned.

Without recognizing the potential for our own fallibility, discussion is fruitless and narcissistic—it is an expression of arbitrary feeling, instead of reason informed by experience. Conversations of this kind are defensive and fearful, never bold and open to new truths.

And that, I know, is a true shame.

Vikram Srinivasan is a Trinity senior. This is his final column.