Intellectual Equanimity
“If you can keep your head,” said Rudyard Kipling, “when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.” Or as Alan Partridge summarised the poem, “If you do X, Y and Z, Bob’s your uncle.”
As the new academic year begins and, with it, a new year in the Food for Thought Programme, it might be worthwhile to take a moment to think about ‘keeping our heads’ and how it truly can give us the earth, and everything that’s in it.
Before we do that, for those new to the school or new to following this blog, you can find out more about the Food for Thought Programme and what we’re trying to achieve here.
One thing that the programme is trying to achieve is to teach pupils how to maintain an intellectual equanimity in the face of opposing views. We live in a society where people are very quick – thanks to social media and the “Twitter-Storm” (or should that now be the X-Plosion?) – to burst into a towering rage whenever someone who happens to disagree with them on a certain idea has the temerity to exist.
Passion is a very overused word in educational circles. We say we want our children to be ‘passionate’ about their studies, their interests, their hobbies, their future careers. Certainly, we should want to inspire excitement, enthusiasm, dedication and thoughtful but strongly held views. Nothing is more boring than a person who never really thinks about anything – except perhaps Celebrity Masterchef.
But ‘passion’ is also a very misunderstood word. It comes originally from the Latin verb for ‘to suffer’. A passion is something that happens to you, which you can’t control. You suffer an attack of it. Geeky Fact Alert: that is why the week before Easter is sometimes called ‘Passion Week’ – the Passion of Christ was his suffering and death.
To react ‘passionately’ to views that oppose our own axioms, assumptions or even well-reasoned beliefs really is to ‘lose our heads’: rather than assessing another human being’s beliefs and arguments rationally, fairly, even generously, we can very often simply dismiss them with anger or contempt, because they are different to what we have been taught or imagined for ourselves.
It is not merely that such a reaction can be ugly, possibly hurtful, sometimes even, in the worst cases, violent: it is also profoundly self-defeating. There are three possibilities:
- either our opponent is wrong, in which case they are best persuaded or defeated by a reasonable counter-argument;
- or else our opponent is correct, in which case we would be much better off listening to them, and so changing our own minds for the better;
- or else again, it is a question of different angles, of grey areas, perhaps something that nobody yet has understood fully or comprehended satisfactorily – in which case, a calm, generous, rational discussion will best show to both us and them the intricacies and difficulties of the problem.
In the Food for Thought Programme, in our seminars, and in our Discussion Lunches and Discussion Dinners, we love strong, forceful, energetic, provocative argument. We love analysing and criticising each other’s views and claims – this is the kind of intellectual sustenance that C. S. Lewis once called ‘red beef and strong beer’. But the free play of the mind, the free exchange of ideas, can only take place successfully between people who are able to maintain an intellectual equanimity in the face of disagreement. Parts of the media seem to idolise young people who shout loudly about the issues they consider the most important: personally, I’m rather more impressed with young people (and older ones!) who can listen calmly and receptively to something they deeply disagree with.
Our dear late colleague, Mr Wray, if you said something he disagreed with, always began his response with a thoughtful pause, followed by, “OK – well, …” and then a slow, careful, generous dissection of your claim. The medieval philosopher, Thomas Aquinas, always began his arguments with a neat summary of the opposing view, taking great care to present it as honestly and cogently as possible – before he took it apart. That is the way, not only to persuade others that we are right, but to learn from them, if we wrong. By keeping ours heads, we can genuinely understand and see the elements of truth in every human perspective in the world – as well as their (and our) faults and flaws. That way, ours is the earth, and everything that’s in it.
I’m very much looking forward to the fun and fireworks of our discussions and debates on the Food for Thought Programme over the academic year ahead – I genuinely miss them over the holidays! But through them we will continue learning together how to stare fearlessly into the face of diametrically opposed viewpoints, and not be afraid of intellectual diversity, any more than any other kind.
Otherwise we risk turning into the man who famously said, “I’m never wrong – once I thought I was, but I was mistaken.”
DPB
