Talking Backward | That thinking feeling

Alec Ward | William Golding, criticism and the search for truth

By Alec Ward 01/28/15 12:17am

In 1961, William Golding, perhaps best known as the author of the novel “Lord of the Flies” published a short essay entitled “Thinking as a Hobby.” It’s a wonderful piece of writing which I’d recommend to anyone who hasn’t read it. I first encountered it in middle school — assigned, incidentally, by the same teacher whose frustrated interrogatory: “Must you always talk back, Ward?” inspired the name of this column — and it has had perhaps the greatest influence on my thinking of anything I’ve ever read.

In the essay, Golding posits that there are three types, or “grades,” of thinking, which he sees embodied in three statuettes which stood in his prep-school headmaster’s office: a crouching leopard ready to pounce, a miniature Venus de Milo and a miniature of Rodin’s famous statue The Thinker. The leopard, following its natural impulse to hunt, represents “grade-three” thinking: unreflective and automatic, based on natural instincts which are “full of unconscious prejudice, ignorance and hypocrisy.” The Venus de Milo, aware that her robe is falling off but lacking any arms with which to put it back on or stop its fall, represents “grade-two” thinking: the detection of flaws and contradictions without the imagination or ability to propose solutions or improvements. “Grade-two thinking destroys without having the power to create,” says Golding. Finally, The Thinker, staring solemnly into the distance, represents “grade-one” thinking: deep and meaningful contemplation which strives not simply to discredit that which is wanting, but to discover that which is good. Grade-one thought is “a higher grade of thought which says, ‘What is truth?’ and sets out to find it.”

Golding argues that we ought to strive to practice grade-one thought, and I agree with him. However, he makes it clear that grade-one thinking is not a result which one achieves by simply meeting a set of criteria, but a process that one engages in and struggles with constantly. Simply offering constructive criticism doesn’t make one a grade-one thinker, but the failure to propose solutions or better alternatives to the problems one notices and points out eliminates the possibility of achieving grade-one thought.

To be a grade-one thinker is an aspiration of mine as a writer, as a student and simply as a member of society. Therefore I’m generally uncomfortable with criticizing situations in which I can’t propose a better alternative, even if it isn’t a perfect one. For me, it is something of a personal moral maxim that it’s far better to criticize while simultaneously offering an imperfect solution or even just an imperfect better alternative, than to criticize and leave as is. It’s a maxim which, when I watch the news — real or fake — or read articles that pop up on my newsfeed, I often wish that more people shared.

Grade-one thinking doesn’t commit the thinker permanently to the answers he finds or the positions he formulates. The grade-one thinker can, and arguably must, change his mind frequently as he continues the labor of seeking out the truth. What’s in his mind at any given moment is not an immutable doctrine or a dogma, set in stone, but a snapshot, a freeze-frame of a deliberative process which does not have a fixed or even a visible end. In fact, the “end” of grade-one thinking can’t be fixed or visible because grade-one thinking is inherently and inevitably quixotic. If a thinker were, at any moment, to fully accept the results of his own search for the truth, excluding the possibility that he may be wrong and thereby ceasing to search further, he would no longer be engaged in the search for truth and therefore no longer a grade-one thinker.

The consequence of this is that the grade-one thinker is never able to dismiss another’s positions out-of-hand, never able to assume that a claim is wrong or a position untenable without giving it serious consideration.

Especially as university students, and even just as people who hopefully aspire to be productive members of society, we all stand to benefit from obedience to the logical mandates of the attempt to be grade-one thinkers.

Or at least, that’s what I think.

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