A Revolution of Thought

I have decided, after much thought, to write a book. The purpose of this book is to advocate a revolution of thought. I think this sort of a revolution is what we need desperately in our world (not just our country), and so, I have decided to advocate strongly for it.

Let me start, I guess, by saying what a revolution need not be. The American Revolution was an example of what a revolution need not be. A group of rebels, who we now oxymoronically call “patriots”, fought against their government and gained their independence from it. The sort of revolution I am challenging you to take part in is not that sort of revolution.

Instead, the sort of revolution I am challenging you to take part in is much more akin to what Thomas Kuhn calls a “Scientific Revolution”. A large upswing and re-valuation of things.

As I hope to make clear, we are in desperate need of just such a revolution. A revolution of thought.

In the early part of the 20^th century, there was a revolution of physics. It began simply in 1905 with Swiss patent clerk publishing some thoughts he had about what makes the universe tick away. This launched, of course, the Theory of Relativity. At one time, you might be considered a genius if you read this theory and understood what it was all about.

Within thirty years, Relativity found itself in combat with Quantum Mechanics. The history of physics ever since has been one attempt to reconcile these two theories after another. What is important, what makes this so revolutionary was that Einstein’s thoughts, in large measure, junked the physical theory that had preceded: Newtonian Mechanics.

Suddenly, Newtonian mechanics was only so good. It will still suffice if you plan to build a bridge, but will not suffice if you want to talk about space-time, gravity, stars, and the like. It will also not suffice if you want to talk about the behavior of electrons, neutrons, gluons, and the like.

In short, a good revolution takes the old with it, even though the old may seem less useful.

You might ask, then, what sort of thing is the “old” if our revolution is to be a revolution of thought. You might guess things like faith. That is on the table, certainly, but hardly captures the thought-less-ness of our day. Faith, like Newtonian mechanics, we will keep. For those of you who may be expecting a Hitchens-esque story of how faith is ruining our world and the antidote is reason, I am sorry to disappoint you. The moral of this story is not that faith is ruining our world. The moral of this story is that a lack of thought is ruining our world. To save it, we must think, but to think, we do not need to abandon faith. If faith is what you have, it no doubt serves a psychologically necessary function in your life.

Many of things I think we should be wary of are also things that serve psychologically necessary functions in our lives. The danger they represent is not intrinsic to them, but is rather found in their use. And the way in which they are used threatens us in ways that are not at all apparent.

I talked about this some last time. The antidote is not to abandon those things we have which are psychologically necessary: faith, distraction, &c. The antidote, I think, is to revalue our thinkers, and to create an environment where thinkers are free to do the work we desperately need them to do. We need to promote rational inquiry rather than dollar accumulation. Or perhaps a better way of saying it is that we need to promote rational inquiry as well as the other things we already promote. The survival of our society, in a few short decades, is going to depend on an environment of rationality emerging now.

So, I'm going to write a book about it. Perhaps, I will even post its contents here. Stay tuned.