 Welcome to another edition of Thinking Things Through, Thinking Critically in Critical Times. I'm your host, Michael Sukoff. Today we're going to discuss the theme and purpose of this show and we're going to be doing that through a consideration of what it means to think critically. And before I go any further, I just want to say that this is the fifth show we've done and except for perhaps the first show, I haven't really gone into a whole lot of detail about what it means to think critically and therefore what the intent and purpose of this show is. So today we're going to talk about and consider questions like what is critical thinking? What does it mean to think critically? And what does this look like in the real world? Secondly, what's the relationship between being able to think critically and being a citizen in an allegedly democratic society such as our own? And finally, why is the ability to think critically absolutely essential if we are to have a truly democratic society? So we've got a lot to cover. We may not cover it all. And finally, what I'd like to get to at the end of the show or toward the end is discuss what all this means for us as citizens of Hawaii and the United States? What are some of the existing barriers or obstacles might be to creating a truly democratic society and political culture? And what we can do to bring such a society about? So before we get into all of this, what I thought I would do first is read an excerpt from a book from many years ago was actually published in 1968 in this country by R.D. Lang, who was a famous British psychologist and psychoanalyst. And the reason why I'm going to read this, I think it exemplifies someone who is thinking critically about the world. So excuse me, I may have to look down briefly just to read this excerpt. So here we go. The name of the book is The Politics of Experience. Few books today are forgivable. Lack on the canvas, silence on the screen, an empty white sheet of paper are perhaps feasible. There is little conjunction of truth and social reality. Around us are pseudo-events to which we adjust with a false consciousness adapted to see these events as true and real and even as beautiful. In the society of, it says men here, but of course I'm including men and women, the truth resides now less in what things are than in what they are not. Our social realities are so ugly if seen in the light of exiled truth. And beauty is almost no longer possible if it is not a lie. Well, let me just stop there for a moment. What this paragraph I just quoted to me exemplifies is someone who is seeing the world around him, but not taking what he sees for granted. In other words, he says there is little conjunction of truth and social reality. Now this phrase really hits home for me given what we've been going through and experiencing in this country for the last few years. We've got this whole debate about post-truth, what is truth, what is reality. And we're constantly hit with displays of pseudo-events on the screen. In other words, through our mass media, we watched the January 6th insurrection. But we're all experiencing, we all experience seeing that as mediated as seen through our television sets or smartphones or computers. So already we're not experiencing the event itself, but we're experiencing images of that event. And then of course the way we see or saw that event is very much molded by how we already see the world, how we understand what we're looking at, and also particularly how these events are framed and interpreted for us and explained by pundits and news folks on MSNBC, CNBC, NBC, all of these sources of mass media. And I just want to skip to this last sentence from R. D. Lang. He says that our discouragement about all these things and about not being able to really understand the world anymore because it's so complex, he says, quote, this mood is already dated, at least insofar as is not a perennial possibility of the human spirit. This possibility entails a sense of time which is already being dissolved in the instantaneous, stochastic, abrupt, discontinuous electronic cosmos, the dynamic mosaic of the electromagnetic field, unquote. So even back in 1968 before the internet and a lot of the advances in media and technology that were now taken for granted, he was already seeing the problem with the mass media and the virtual world and the internet and how that was, the precursors to that were already affecting the way we saw and thought about the world in front of us. So before getting into the meat of the show, I thought it would be important for me just to share a little bit more about my own personal background experiences and interests as well as what has brought me to become interested in these issues and thus to host this show. So very briefly, I was born and grew up at the beginning of what is now referred to as the atomic age. In other words, the early 1950s when the first nuclear weapons were tested and exploded, I'm sorry, of course there was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, 1945, which was really the dawn of the nuclear age. So I grew up at the first few years of the atomic age and this immediately affected the way I saw the world. I had a father who taught me by example to think about and question what was going on in the world. I was very much aware of the racism and violence in the southern United States that was happening during that time. My father took me on civil rights marches as a very young boy and then what I remember clearly that really shaped in a major way who I am today was my experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and for our younger viewers and listeners who weren't around then or have no idea what I'm talking about after World War II in which the United States and its allied countries and what was then the Soviet Union were victorious began an arms race, a military cold war between the Western powers including the United States and the Soviet Union, which is now Russia, but the Soviet Union and its allied republics as well as some countries in Eastern Europe there was an arms race to see who could develop the most advanced, most destructive weapons first and that anyway skipping ahead to 1962 the Soviet Union which is now Russia installed nuclear capable missiles in Cuba which is and was a country only 90 miles from the US coastline from Florida and when that came into the public consciousness and it was covered on the media there were 10 days there where things were so ramped up between the Soviet Union and the United States it was possible that nuclear weapons could have been used and I was 10 years old at the time and it it scared the living daylights out of me because I understood what the implications would be and that changed my consciousness in a very fundamental way at that young age so all these things that I've been describing contributed to the beginnings of my being being able to think critically about things in the world and what I mean by thinking critically is questioning what I'm seeing what I'm hearing on television or on the radio not just accepting what's being presented to me and learning how to ask deeper questions about what I was seeing and hearing and of course I had the advantage of being able to talk to to my parents about these things so anyway now I'm going to skip to my early college years I went to the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate and at the time I got there which was not until 1972 but it still felt like this 1960s and what I mean by the phrase the 1960s is in this country in the United States and also in many other countries around the world there were massive protest movements first of all against racism and discrimination in the in the southern United States and then soon once the United States government and military became involved in what was a civil war in Vietnam between North Vietnam and South Vietnam once that started to happen I was in high school I became of of draft age there was a military draft in the United States at that time and I had to register for it so I had to decide what I would do because I already did not believe that the war that the United States was waging in Vietnam was a just war I thought it was or it was wrong many innocent Vietnamese were being killed and bombed and and of course once the United States introduced troops there in massive numbers many young men that were close to my age were coming home in body bags and this was all over television so this all affected my my the way I thought about the world and that was these were the roots of my own thinking critically in the world and there were other things that affected that in in the subsequent years so I just wanted to share a little bit with with with our viewers and listeners about my own personal history and background and what in many ways has led me to to do this show so skipping ahead very quickly now and I just want to mention that because I don't have a guest today on this show if anybody has any questions that they would like to ask me during the course of this show please do send them to the email address that's on your screen now and I will become aware of them and I will be happy to take them and answer them during the course of the rest of this show so what is critical thinking there are many different meanings for the term critical as one of my previous guests noted about a month ago critical relates to the word critique it also relates to the word criticism and both those both those terms can have you know several different meanings there's also the word critical to criticized as in criticizing someone or something so I'm I'm mentioning all these different meanings of the term critical because I want to be clear about how I'm using the term what do I mean when I say critical thinking so when I'm using the term critical or critical thinking I'm largely using it in the context of a type of thinking or theory that came out of largely Germany in the early 1920s there was a tradition of philosophical thought that became called critical theory and that tradition originated with a certain group of thinkers in Germany in the early 1920s I'll mention two or three names but I don't expect many if not most of our viewers and listeners to ever have heard of them Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Markuza, Walter Benjamin, the the basic characteristics of this type of thinking and I'm just going to summarize this briefly are the following the ability to think holistically and what what I mean by that is a person's ability to see the whole the big picture the big picture behind whatever they're looking at thinking about or talking about for example in relationship to the current Russian invasion and war against Ukraine we need to see the bigger picture and what I mean by that is not just seeing what's in front of our faces right now not just seeing the daily reports of killing atrocities in Ukraine how people are suffering there but we need to be able to step back and see the bigger picture of how did we get here in the first place how did things get to the point where Russia felt the need to invade the country the sovereign country of Ukraine what were the historical events that led up to this so thinking critically also involves the ability to think historically in other words to be able to understand the relationships among and between the events and actions that preceded what we may be experiencing or witnessing right now through our through our media and as as those things are interpreted by pundits and political figures and so forth the third main aspect of critical thinking in this in this sense is for me the ability to question statements of fact in other words when we're told that attacks on our capital building in January of 2021 were threats to our democracy that's that that phrase is presented as it's as a fact our democracy but as as citizens of an informed democratic society and culture we need to be able to not just accept those statements that face value we need to be able to understand what's being said and ask questions like what is democracy what does it mean to call it our democracy there are a lot of assumptions in statements like that we that we don't ordinarily question because we're certainly not taught how to question these kinds of statements and assertions in our in our democratic society I would argue as an educator and teacher for many years I don't see a whole lot of evidence from the students that I've taught of course I don't I don't know I have not normally gotten to have students until they were in their first or second year of undergraduate college but I see very little evidence that they've ever been taught how to think critically with with with a few exceptions of course so these are the main points I wanted to raise for a discussion today critical thinking critical theory well in relationship to today's what's going on in today's world I believe and think feel very strongly that unless we as citizens of the United States and of Hawaii can start to question some of the things that are being communicated to us either through our political leaders through our media outlets through the internet that we have very little chance of actually contributing to what our democracy is supposed to be all about and what I mean by that is is the following we've got racism and discrimination police killings of African-Americans and others and this has really come to the fore in in our public consciousness through our media especially since May of 2020 which was when George Floyd was murdered and we very soon became aware of that if many of us weren't already aware and many of us were that police killings of African-Americans have been going on almost since the inception of of the United States although at that time there there was nothing called police per se we may have had the the remnants of the continental army and state and state militias and so forth but to think critically about these kinds of issues means asking questions about wait a minute why is this happening why has there been a pattern of killings of African-Americans and other racial minority groups in this country going back 75, 80, 90 years or more to think critically is to start asking questions about when we see a pattern like this how do we understand it and I'm sure I'm saying some things that are probably quite controversial to some members of our audience and I realize that and I'm happy to hear other points of view or questions that might question what I'm saying but the whole point of what I'm saying today and of this show is to get us to start thinking more deeply more critically about what's going on in the world or in our neighborhood in our island in Hawaii and in the world at large because being able to think critically is an essential part of what it means to be able to be an informed citizen in a democratic society and if we don't have the ability to do that we're really in trouble so let me switch gears now because I don't want to end on a negative note I want us to think about what can we do as citizens to empower ourselves to be more informed and therefore to participate in the processes of decision making in our political system in our neighborhoods and our communities to make our state, our island, our country and the world a better place and to really understand what it means to bring values of democracy and freedom and justice to our country and to the world at large so I guess I'm going to stop with this I hope we can have some more discussions on future shows that would address some of these questions and I certainly encourage everybody who's watching and listening to please communicate with me with this program not just through sending questions that you see on your screen but through contacting me directly and I'm going to give my email address I'm going to say it and then I'm going to spell it very slowly so again I'll do that in a moment because this is basically going to be all the time we have for today this has been thinking things through thinking critically in critical times on Think Tech Hawaii I'm your host Michael Sukoff please do join us again two weeks from today at the same time wherever you may be and to contact me my email address is it's three words first word is Hawaii H-A-W-A-I-I second word is is I-S and the third word is calling C-A-L-L-I-N-G so my email address is Hawaii is calling at gmail.com if there's any way of putting that up on the screen there we go thank you so much to our engineer for doing that please feel free to email me and I'll be happy to respond and I will certainly take in consideration whatever you have to say whether it's criticism support encouragement or suggestions for future shows I will definitely take your whatever you have to share with me seriously and I will try to respond to as many of your emails as I can okay thank you very much for joining us today on Thinking Things Through thanks to our engineers to Jay Fidel and Haley Aketa and the rest of the Think Tech team in our studios in downtown Honolulu Mahalo and Aloha to you all thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on youtube and the follow button on Vimeo you can also follow us on facebook instagram twitter and linked in 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