Thinking for yourself is overrated
Elayne Allen
Video Embed
Over the past couple of years, many scholars and journalists have been trying to make sense of the United States’ unprecedented decline in religious affiliation. About 25% of Americans are “nones,” meaning they claim no religion. And most nones — about 41 million Americans — are what sociologist Stephen Bullivant calls “nonverts,” those who once identified with religion but ceased to.
The New York Times’s Jessica Grose recently surveyed about 7,000 of the newspaper’s de-churched readers about their reasons for leaving. Many, unsurprisingly, found their former religion (often Christianity) too disagreeable or weird, and concluded that they’re better off thinking for themselves.
A YEAR LATER, LIFE AND DEMOCRACY ARE THE BIG DOBBS WINNERS
The need to “think for yourself” is ubiquitous in our culture. It’s the air we breathe: we choose our college major, career path, and where we live. This individualized kind of thinking makes religion seem dispensable when it no longer sits well with us.
But thinking for yourself doesn’t actually help you think clearly; in fact, it narrows your perception of the world. It truncates the range of things that will appear plausible. Thinking as an individual suggests that anything beyond the vicinity of your experience can be safely dismissed. I’ve never seen anyone get healed, let alone resurrected from the dead, so it’s untenable to think that Jesus did both of these things.
This “epistemology of loneliness,” in other words, forecloses possibilities that fall beyond what our individual reason can grasp. This isn’t to say that individual reason has no role in guiding people’s religious beliefs; of course, it does. But the question is whether we acknowledge the limits of our thinking and reasoning, for all their power and majesty.
Yet many nonverts from Grose’s survey seem to rely on their own reason to navigate reality.
According to Grose, some survey respondents are “trying to forge new kinds of religious paths for themselves.” They deconstruct religions, especially Christianity, and re-bundle certain teachings and practices from various traditions that they like. Others abandon life’s big questions altogether. Instead, they focus on “spending time in nature, meditation, and physical activity — basically, anything that got them out of their own heads.” In both cases, they’re going it alone.
Trying to go it alone is detrimental to sound thinking.
In a recent National Affairs essay, philosopher Ian Marcus Corbin explains how loneliness starves reason. The world is vast, variegated, and befuddling. On a basic psychological level, human beings offload cognition on people around them to help them secure their perception of the world. Without feedback from others’ minds, we’re starved of confirmation that our judgment is correct. A sense of purpose and direction withers because all confidence in one’s reasoning power evaporates.
Compare this isolation with the frontiers that open from collaborative thinking.
Corbin explains, “I have more of myself available to me when I have friends around: Your mind joins with mine, and I experience myself as larger in your presence. This largeness of self allows for the growth and change characteristic of healthy world-tending.” Perhaps paradoxically, by outsourcing some of our thinking process to friends, our own thinking and comprehension becomes enlarged.
This fact of our intellectual codependence indicates that people naturally need outside guidance, authority, and support. Accepting this is freeing: It should open us to the enrichment of other minds and experiences across times and places. We need not be immediately skeptical of longstanding institutions, which develop traditions of inquiry that become refined over time and seek deeper, fuller wisdom. Under their guidance, reason reaches new heights: Miracles, when considered alongside minds wiser and more virtuous than our own, suddenly seem reasonable.
Not all communities and friendships expand our horizon of perception in this way. Some are self-enclosed and truncate our image of reality. How do we know when a community contracts or magnifies our reason?
Corbin writes: “Friends are not bound to live frozen inside some particular communally constructed picture of the world; dissent, growth, rebellion, and conversion remain live possibilities.” Openness to challenging reality, loving wonder, constructive debate: these are characteristics of communities that will enlarge our vision of reality.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
So nonverts seeking their own path might find that well-trodden ones are smoother — and perhaps more exhilarating — than they expected.
Elayne Allen is the managing editor of Public Discourse.