Up until now, it's always been kind of vague - Think about it ...Think about what? Think how? It wasn't until I watched Steve Joordens' TED talk that I remembered it had a name - critical thinking.
One of the first things Joordens says is, "[Critical thinking] is what drives social change."
All of the progression we've made from history to the present day has been due to critical thinkers encouraging others to think the same. It used to be normal to receive therapy for being gay, it used to be normal to refuse women the vote, it used to be normal to treat black people as slaves. All of that changed because people starting to think.
Now, I'm going to touch on a few things Joordens says and afterwards, I'm going to explain how he influenced the way I want to approach things from now on.
The way that we naturally think, behave, see the world etc is due to [cultural] beliefs that we have probably held since we were children. The media, our parents, peers, teachers, law enforcers etc teach us right from wrong, what is acceptable and what isn't. For example, how do we know it's wrong to commit murder? We are not born with that knowledge, it's taught to us, we learn things like that from our environment and it becomes ingrained. If we find out that someone's killed someone else, we (normally) react negatively without a second thought.
Joordens brings up something called observational learning - learning things by copying. We do this almost exclusively when we're babies, but as we grow, we learn to think more for ourselves but we still engage in bits of observational learning.
We're not all 'sheep', we don't do everything just because other people do, but we often DO follow the majority in terms of what is acceptable behaviour and what isn't.
Think about if you were a white person in Southern America during the slave trade, Joordens says, and everyone around you owns slaves and treats them like objects. What would you have done?
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| Left image says: 'Am I not a man and a brother?' |
You can call old slave owners bastards, and rightly so, but what would YOU have done?
Did they know any better? "Generally speaking, most of us would think it's okay. In fact, most of us wouldn't think it's okay, most of us wouldn't think at all, we would simply accept it, it would just be normal," says Joordens.
They did not know any better, but that didn't mean that what they did should have been acceptable.
Going along with things without giving it real thought is the opposite of critical thinking, this is what critical thinking wants to combat - the normal, accepted way of thinking.
Then you get someone that Joordens terms an 'opinion oddball' who steps in and realises that treating black people as slaves is not okay because they, like the slave owners, are also human - slave abolitionists. Obviously, there was a slight backlash... Why didn't everyone automatically stop and say, "Know what? These people are right - keeping slaves is immoral, we should stop"? Because when someone says that what you naturally think or do is wrong, you get defensive and try to justify yourself, maybe even refuse to listen.
This all sounded similar to something that I've been fighting against for five years now, and I was amazed when Joordens said exactly what I was thinking - eating meat. He vocalised the fact that he knew it would make people uncomfortable, but, as an example, he wanted to encourage the audience to think critically about where their food comes from.
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He then talked about the realities of the meat industry and rounded it up with saying that what he just did was the equivilant of putting a hot air mass and a cold air mass together to create a thunderstorm: "When an opinion oddball uses critical thinking to attack your indoctrinated beliefs, you get what you feel right now."
It took me a while to understand that not everyone is going to believe that using animals for food (or anything unnecessary, for that matter) is wrong because most people are used to it. They're used to dipping chicken nuggets in ketchup as part of a Happy Meal, used to adverts advertising different meat every fifteen minutes, used to seeing meat on the menu at well-established restaurants.
If it's everywhere, if it's accepted and widely available, how can it possibly be wrong...right?
I forgot that for nineteen years...that was my life, and I can't expect everyone to see things my way just because I tell them that eating animals is messed up. Instead of trying to shock people or tell them they're shitty people, I need a better approach.
It took me nineteen years to realise that I didn't like what I'd been doing my whole life, so how can I expect people to listen immediately if I don't persuade them to think for themselves?
Of course, people will still get defensive...
"Our ancestors ate meat."
"It's what I'm used to, how can I change."
"That's just the way life is."
I hear this a lot from meat-eaters. But is that really enough to justify anything? Was that argument enough to justify the slave trade?
Sometimes it really helps to think about things you take for granted - just because something is normal doesn't deem it acceptable.
Without critical thought, normalised injustices will prevail.
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