Thinking Critically

Whatever path leads a person to become committed to human liberation, that person ends up going through various transformations: they change their ideas, they change their practices, they change the way they approach the world. These transformations are undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks of becoming a revolutionary. Amilcar Cabral once wisely said that “this battle against ourselves, this struggle against our own weaknesses … is the most difficult of all.”

Disciplining one’s mind - committing one’s self to critical thinking, logic, thoughtful reflection, summation of experiences, criticism and self-criticism, materialism, and rationality - is certainly at the top of this difficult internal struggle against ourselves and our own weaknesses. When people begin to radicalize, many of them have a point where they quickly reject many of society’s institutions, norms, and practices. The speed of this rejection, without a sophisticated Left which would explain to new adherents what it means to be a revolutionary who is committed to struggling for the long-haul and eventually winning, often leads many of these new revolutionaries to begin to act in ways which doesn’t help build our movement.

What we need are thoughtful revolutionaries. When we are faced with a question, we should answer it after actually thinking about it ourselves. The point of reading literature isn’t to memorize some line to parrot to those who ask us questions, but to push our ability to critically think about questions forward - in short, to make ourselves into more effective critical thinkers. Noam Chomsky rightly said that all students should take a course in intellectual self-defense. A more modest demand would be for revolutionary movements to take the equivilent of such a course. What we need more than anything right now are people who are willing to abandon the dogma (and especially the language!) of past revolutionaries and their movements. Our study of history must be rooted in our current reality. We can learn much from the past, but nothing can replace careful and critical analysis of our current political moment and the opportunities (and challenges) we are faced with.

Those whom I’ve come to respect the most in my life are those who actually think about questions that are poised to them, instead of giving some cookie-cutter, pre-fab answer. This includes my mentors, of whom I am deeply blessed, and friends, of which I have many. I’m convinced that when we all begin to stregthen our intellectual self-defenses, we’ll start coming up with better and more effective ways to move our movement forward.