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First opening statement: To read something you don’t just follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and the level of paragraph “is this true? Are there counter-arguments that can be put forward that are credible? Is this solid thinking?” And I have to tell you, and I’m not trying to be flippant here, that I have rarely read a tract that made as many conceptual errors per sentence as the Communist Manifesto. It was quite a miraculous re-read. And it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well because I’ve read student papers that were of the same ilk in some sense, although I’m not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality. And I also understand that the Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument, but that not withstanding I have some things to say about the authors psychologically. The first thing is that is doesn’t seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with this particular fundamental truth, which is that almost all ideas are wrong. And it doesn’t matter if they're your ideas or someone else’s ideas, they’re probably wrong. And even if they strike you with the force of brilliance, your job is to assume first of all that they’re probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive. And what struck me about the Communist Manifesto was, it was akin to something Jung said about typical thinking and this was the thinking of people who were not trained to think. He said that the typical thinker has a thought, it appears to them like an object might appear in a room. The thought appears and they just accept it as true. They don't go the second step, which is to think about the thinking. And that's the real essence of critical thinking. And so that's what you try to teach people in university is to read a text and think about it critically. Not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff. And so what I tried to do when I was reading the Communist Manifesto was to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I'm afraid I found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff, and I'm going to explain why hopefully in relatiely short order. (en) |
