“I pointed out a month or two ago that the kind of meritocracy we have makes people stupid, mostly because it’s based on a technological attitude toward human life. Thought has an order, but not one we can fully grasp, so if it’s reduced to certified expertise and made a sort of industrial process it stops being thought. The more impressively it’s organized, after a certain point, the less like thought it becomes.
“Since that’s so, intelligence needs to consider a counterattack: what should be done so our ways of thinking become more functional and attuned to reality? The most important point, it seems to me, is restoring an understanding of the world that has a place for intelligence and meaning. We orient ourselves toward reality, so if we think the world is mindless we become so ourselves. We can’t quite become mindless, and we can’t help but believe that the world makes sense of some kind, so to make our thought coherent with itself and with our own experience we must accept that the world is ordered by reason and meaning.
“The Christian view enables us to do so, and thus to understand our actual situation. It tells us that the world includes not only atoms and the void, along with human skill and desire, but an array of other realities extending up to the absolute intelligence that is God. So technology is not everything, but leaves out what concerns us most. . . .”
In a recent commentary, writer and lawyer James Kalb reflected on the development of thought processes, particularly from a Catholic Christian perspective.
To access Mr. Kalb’s complete post, please visit:
Crisis Magazine: Unlearning the Errors of Our Secular Age (8 MAY 13)
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