Critical Thinking

Developing the Intellectual Tools for Social Justice

Joseph Zornado, Jill Harrison, Daniel Weisman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138342842
• eBook ISBN: 9780429800306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Critical Thinking presents, defines and explains the intellectual skills and habits of mind that comprise critical thinking and its relationship to social justice. Each of the sequential chapters includes detailed examples and learning exercises that guide the reader step by step from intellectual competency, to critical thinking, to cultural cognition, and to critical awareness necessary for social justice.

The book documents and explains the scope of multiple crises facing society today, including environmental destruction, income and wealth inequality, large-scale human migration, and the rise of autocratic governments. It shows how critical thinking, cultural cognition, and critical awareness lead to the possibility of solutions grounded in social justice.

All college students, especially those in the social sciences and humanities, will develop the intellectual skills necessary for critically engaging information in order to become active learners and effective agents in the world. This book complements information in introductory, interdisciplinary, or discipline-specific courses. Every chapter contains examples and exercises that can be assigned as homework, adopted as in-class activities, or both. The Conclusion also contains exercises for developing writing and basic mathematical competency skills.

1 GLOBAL CRISIS

The sixth extinction

We live in an age burdened by an epidemic of anxiety and addiction placed on our path toward destruction. Reactionary political and social ideologies depend on fear and anger while channeling wrath as worship at the twin alters of violence and power. Our political discourse has become suddenly retrospective, and we look nostalgically backward in time for guidance. The great project of modernity has left the world aching and traumatized. What can disenfranchise a community more than having its most basic resources made toxic by the day-to-day manner in which those with wealth and power live, a way of living supported and caressed by political and corporate power?

The problems seem clear enough, but the solutions are slow in coming.¹ The cycle of poverty, lack of education, and limited access to employment, food, clean water, land and air perpetuate social and economic injustice. So what can we do about it?

Experts from the fields of political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, history, and more warn us that a superficial, distracted population is a population at risk of demagoguery, authoritarianism, and violent impositions of power, all of which engender the conditions for social injustice to persist and expand. Experts have been warning us that the phenomenon of the social networking “bubble” serves as a reaffirmation of a user’s fantasies and as a result by-passes brain centers that are the seat of meta-cognition. A recent study from the Pew Research Center on Internet and Technology, confirms that “people tend to seek information that aligns with their views,” and this “makes them vulnerable to acting on misinformation.”² And according to Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired magazine, “truth is networked by peers. For every fact there is a counterfact and all these counterfacts and facts look identical online, which is confusing to most people.”³

Constantly and everywhere, we are invited to enter, even retreat, into our bubbles. These patterns of entering and retreating may only grow worse over time. The biologist Rolston Homes observed that, “a general pattern of behavior among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.”⁴ The implications of Homes’ observations are discouraging, for as social and economic crises mount, so too will be our need for distraction and fantasy, all as forms of disavowal and denial. But on other hand, if we have the ability to recognize the “general pattern of behavior” this suggests that the human mind is capable of making the sort of meta-cognitive leap required to save itself, if we can only act on what we discover.

Princeton University historian Cornel West maintains that we have been radically conditioned to look the other way when faced with the dehumanization of others, or, put another way, the degradation of the world.⁵ Our world, he argues, is filled with “life-denying forces,” bent on economic exploitation, scientific manipulation, state repression, bureaucratic domination, and racial, sexual, and heterosexual subjugation. According to West, these same life-denying forces represent the inevitable consequences of power unchecked by social justice, and this jeopardizes us all.

Environmental pollution represents incontrovertible evidence of these social and economic injustices that threaten life as we know it. The evidence shows that first-world market societies are having an inordinate amount of undesirable influence on the biosphere on the planet in which we inhabit and rely on. “No creatures have ever altered life on the planet in this way before,” Elizabeth Kolbert writes in The Sixth Extinction. ⁶ The world has entered what is now known as the Anthropocene Era, precisely named to reflect the globalized impact of human civilization and the resulting global die-off of species.⁷ Anywhere in the world biological systems of the planet are at risk, and not just from human pollution. Political and economic decisions and indecisions put millions of people in harm’s way—it is political violence that incites wars and famine and species extinction.⁸ The United Nations (2017) reports that more than 20 million people in Somalia, South Sudan, Yemen, and Nigeria teeter on the edge of famine, calling the situation “the worst humanitarian crisis since the end of World War II.” The vital point is that the famines are not caused by drought but by the failure of political will to act.⁹

According to experts the Anthropocene Era is the commencement of negative, significant human impact on the planet. Born of the Industrial Revolution, perfected throughout the twentieth century, and accelerated during the first one-fifth of the current century, ecological scientists almost unanimously recognize that human activity has had a geological impact on the planet.

The vast gyres of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans represent a terrifying symbol of an economic and political system run amok. Uninhibited private profit has placed itself above the public good, has appropriated the public commons as resources, extracts wealth, and poisons the resources we all need in the process—in the name of servicing economic markets. Meanwhile, consumerism requires an ideological justification, a fantasy imposed on the world to explain it, and the consumer’s place within it, all of which obscures the true costs of the consumer lifestyle. How is it that corporate powers take virtually no interest in the generational costs to society of the toll industry takes, and has taken, on the air we breathe, the water we drink, and soil we need to grow our crops?

Inequality in wealth and income

In 2017, the richest one percent of the world’s population owned half the planet’s wealth, an increase of 5 percent over 16 years.¹⁰ And the concentration of wealth into fewer hands is only increasing. The Institute for Policy Study’s inequality-tracking website reports:¹¹

• “One-third of one percent of the world’s population owns 11% of the planet’s wealth.”
• “Adults with less than $10,000 in wealth make up 64 percent of the world’s population but hold less than two percent of global wealth.”
• “The world’s wealthiest individuals, those owning over $100,000 in assets, total less than 10 percent of the global population but own 84 percent of global wealth.”
• “The 42 richest individuals (down from 380 ten years ago) own as much (wealth) as 50% of the world’s population.”

By every measure of wealth distribution, inequality is rising almost everywhere in the world, including the United States with 15,300,000 millionaires—the most in any country in the world—along with the so-called liberal democracies of Scandinavia and Western Europe. Since 1980, the global top one percent has “captured twice as much growth as the bottom half.” The gap between the richest and poorest people is larger than ever, and it is growing.

Economic inequality is a symptom of an economic system that promotes and sustains the privatizing of the public Commons by transnational corporations. Environmental destruction, human migration, and autocratic regimes are only a few of the most extreme consequences. Those who are on the losing side of the economic inequality equation are disproportionately women, children, and people of color.

The Office of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) measures the level of economic inequality among its 36 member countries, primarily in Europe, North America, and Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and Chile. OECD data do not include any African countries or most of Asia and South America, i.e., the world’s poorer countries. For example, according to the World Bank, between 1995 and 2015, “(G)lobal wealth grew an estimated 66 percent (from $690 trillion to $1,143 trillion in constant 2014 U.S. dollars at market prices). But inequality was substantial, as wealth per capita in high-income OECD countries was 52 times greater than wealth in low-income countries.”¹² Even among the richest countries, wealth inequality is persistent and growing.¹³

The OECD adds that “uncertainty and fears of social decline and exclusion have reached the middle classes in many societies. Arresting the trend of rising inequality has become a priority for policy makers in many countries. Even in countries that have enjoyed reliable economic growth, raising millions of families out of poverty, inequality has risen further. In terms of actual (rather than relative) wealth, OECD estimates that up to 25 percent of member countries’ households have little in the way of economic resources and often are saddled with insurmountable debt.¹⁴

Economic inequality affects society by “undermining education opportunities for children from poor socioeconomic backgrounds.” Poverty is a self-perpetuating cycle that impedes social mobility and makes economic advancement difficult, if not almost impossible. According to the OECD, children from the bottom 40 percent of households cannot afford education. “That makes them less productive employees, which means lower wages, which means lower overall participation in the economy.”¹⁵ It also means an uneducated electorate is prone to ideological manipulation, fear-mongering, scapegoating, and authoritarian politicos who appeal to emotion and reject reason and evidence. According to the evidence, economic inequality blocks people from accessing resources necessary for a well-lived life. Their interest may be in survival, let alone having the time and resources to campaign and vote for political, economic, or social change.

As the OECD examples indicate, richer countries are located in Europe, North America and Oceania; poorer countries are concentrated in Central and South America, mainland Asia, and Africa. Understanding the geography of economies helps explain world migration now and in the near future. Along with high poverty rates come local conflicts over scarce resources, such as arable land, potable water, and other natural resources necessary for life. Consequently, countries with poorer economies experience more civil wars, informal and illegal economies, human trafficking, various forms of political extremism, corruption, environmental destruction, and migration, both legal and illegal. While wealthier countries experience some of these same effects, these violent and nonviolent atrocities are more concentrated and widespread in poorer nations.

Migration and the growth of dictatorships around the world

We believe that human migration across borders and the rise of authoritarian dictatorships are two sides of the same coin, and together are part of a larger crisis. While there is income inequality within nations, income inequality between individual nations promotes international migration. The income inequality world map identifies two geographic boundaries that separate rich and poor countries: the Mediterranean Sea in southern Europe, and the Rio Grande River at the border between the United States and Mexico. Countries north of these boundaries have experienced a rise in nationalism, hate groups, and autocratic political leadership, in part as a response to immigrants who, coming as economic, climate, or war refugees, have fled scarcity and violence in their homelands in the hope of finding safety, freedom, and economic opportunities for themselves and their families. Meanwhile the middle and working classes of the “richer” nations have experienced decades of economic stagnation along with growing income inequality and many see migrants as competitors for jobs they need.

Traditionally democratic countries have experienced mounting internal popular pressure to weaken democratic institutions in favor of autocratic ones. Such viewpoints encourage nationalism, and would-be dictators find easy scapegoats in migrants, who usually speak different languages, have different cultures and religions, and appear different, as in language, skin color, and other external features.

The European Union and the United States are two cases in point. The latter, in 2016, elected a self-defined “America First” populist who retained a strong base of public support after more than two years of overtly attacking democratic institutions, notably the free press, the courts, and the United States Congress. In Europe, nationalism is on the rise with numerous examples of whom the local press describes as narrow-minded political groups and politicians.¹⁶ In Spain, for example, the BBC reports multiple far-right politicians from the Vox Party who were elected to parliament “to make Spain great again.” ¹⁷

In the midst of elections for leadership of the European Union, similar challenges to democracy were evident across the continent. In May 2019, the New York Times reported that

(E)uropean politics have been fragmenting since the financial crisis of 2008, and populist anger deepened after an influx of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Global crisis
• 2. Intellectual competence
• 3. Critical thinking
• 4. Cultural cognition
• 5. Critical awareness
• 6. Restorative justice
• Conclusion: Developing the intellectual tools for social justice
• Index