As critical thinkers, we tend to eschew absolutes. Those typhoid-ridden imperatives often manifest in the form of words, motioning to the conscientious reasoner to leave in the foyer such unconditional ideas as "always," "forever," "eternal," "unquestionably," as well as their opposites, in the same way the critical thinker resists the pull to use such prejudicial expressions as "any reasonable person" or "only a fool." Because critical thinking stands leagues deeper and hillsides taller than the baby food wallowing wide-eyed ponderers represented by the lock-and-load point guards who place the desires of the few over the needs of the many, I cannot deny that critical thinking rightly maintains a place of honor and I would be the last person to suggest expunging the aesthetic and ontological beauty of analytic thought from our schools and universities.
My own meager contribution to critical thinking presents more dimensions than the version encountered in the common liberal arts college of one's choice. I call the advanced type of reasoning meta critical thinking. This system of ideas, as one might anticipate, puts a critical eye to critical thinking. The MCT advocate dissects the cult of reactive qualifiers and argues that the search for knowledge equates to a search for the very absolutes the critical thinker finds so terrifying. While the CT implores us to wretch at the fallacious stench of statements such as "All elephants are big," the MCT calls for making a choice between forcing the adversary to prove the statement false (two invalid premises may still, after all, yield a valid conclusion, however serendipitously) or to rework the declaration with intellectual precision, as in "All living Kenyan elephants beyond the age of three years weigh in excess of four hundred pounds."
The distinction between the two-dimensional critical thinker and the nonlinear meta critical thinker is subtle and real. While the CT yearns for the sterile womb afforded by such qualifiers as "most," "several," "tend," "suggests" and others, the MCT applies the mind with just as much sober passion to the cause of expressing broad exactitudes. My parents were the first people I ever met who identified themselves as meta critical thinkers and it is with some sorrow that I recall my initial reaction to one of their preferred reasonings: "All politicians are crooks." Even as a child in the single digits of development, I objected that given as how my parents had neither encountered every politician--living or dead (assuming the distinction could be made)--nor established their pre-existing criteria for this assessment, their reasoning was therefore flawed and their conclusion suspect.
My impetuosity may be one reason why children are so universally despised. Because Charles and Martha were blessed with more imaginative resources than I would ever come to develop, they were positioned to skip the preliminary obfuscations and land in the more fertile and fascinating cubed vestibules of the MCT. For my parents to object to the statement "All politicians are crooks" was tantamount to invalidating the suggestion that all snakes slither or that all books are made up of at least two pages. In other words, observing that "All politicians are crooks" was less a philosophic pronouncement than a chemical equation wherein human beings who willfully embark upon a career of elected or appointed office holdings are, de facto, thieving bastards because politics by its nature excludes any who fail to conform to this classification. To the point articulated by my parents, this was no value judgment. It was a transposed definition. A politician is a professional thieving bastard. One synonym for "thieving bastard" is "crook." Ergo, all politicians are crooks.
In the same way that the radioactive elements on the chemist's Periodic Table are likewise the most unstable of entities, so are the processes of meta critical thinking the most potentially dangerous, particularly when employed by intellectual terrorists. The same uranium which can be manipulated into the power source of an atomic plant can also fuel a dangerous weapon. When the intellectual terrorist hijacks MCT, the yield of mass idiocy indiscriminately blows the minds of everything in its path. Where I come from, we call the intellectual terrorist by another name. We call him a fascist.
The satisfying stupidity has ascended to the role of mob mantra for the contemporary office-seeking cretinous goon. "Government is not the solution to our [economic] problems. It is the source of our [economic] problems." With this declaration painted across the trim border of a giant U.S. flag, cheerleaders line up to kick their legs while the auditorium of salivating stooges salute and snigger. One ridiculous parallel to this inspired idiocy could be "Waste removal is not the solution to our garbage problems. It is the source of our garbage problems." In both instances the unspoken plea to the listener is this: "Having said that, please elect me." Neither absurd statement carries the benefit of being poetic, much less rational. Yet our ears are pounded by this repetitious nonsense much as Bruce Banner found himself subjected to gamma rays. In the case of the wartime comic book character, Banner was transformed into the Incredible Hulk, whereas the rest of us have become the incredulous mass. With whatever segment of our population gaining gratification from the pablum of Fox News or the Disney Channel, the stupefaction of celebrity idolatry or the proliferation of predigested advertising dropping deposits in our mental toilets, the result remains a populace exhausted by the simplicity of it all and with no strength left to argue.
It is on that sour note that I employ this mechanical transition and at long last recommend to one and all a fine paperback book with the uninspiring title On Writing, a panoply of essays, reviews and articles by the very inspiring Jorge Luis Borges. I could make any number of arguments supporting the case that anyone who has read this far along should own the book. Instead, I will limit myself to a representative section of six pages that Borges called "Arte de Injuriar," or which editor Suzanne Jill Levine called "The Art of Verbal Abuse," a portion of which leads off with this tantalizing sentence:
"A conscientious study of other literary genres has led me to believe in the greater value of insult and mockery."
The wit with which Borges presents his examples is a match for the wit of the history itself. I cannot resist an illustrative example from the text. "To a question about an auctioneer who also used to recite poetry, someone quickly responded that he was energetically raffling off the
Divine Comedy." In these shallow times, almost any reference to Dante is funny regardless of the context. The elevated level of written assaults intrigues Borges just as it fascinates the reader, the latter perhaps sensing a huge leap in the former's degree of enthusiasm as he rationally interprets all manner of judicious invective.
The Argentine author of A Universal History of Infamy was both anti-communist and anti-fascist. He wrote, in thinking of Juan and Evita Peron, "Dictatorships breed oppression, dictatorships breed servility, dictatorships breed cruelty; more loathsome still is the fact that they breed idiocy. . . fighting these sad monotonies is one of the duties of a writer." He also popularized one of the most important and imaginative subject matters: the review of a non-existent book. Borges went so far as to invent a fellow writer named Pierre Menard, a man who rewrote much of Cervantes word for word, finding the fictitious Menard's version somehow "richer." Just as clever is Borges' treatment of James Joyce's Ulysses, about which he confesses, "I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages. . .yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes." Or as one can recognize that all politicians are crooks without having met and independently evaluated each one.
One of Borges contributions was likewise in his explication and adventures in magic realism, a literary search for absolute truth that merges fiction and nonfiction, the key irony being that the first magic realist creative writer, Massimo Bontempelli, helped set the psychological stage for Italy's foray into fascism.
Magic realism is a genre of fiction, I would argue a legitimate one, in which fantastical things happen right alongside real things, each element presented as equally accurate. I try to do this in my own fiction. The narrative is usually about some mundane activity, such as driving a cab, and magic elements materialize, such as the hint of an explanation of the murder of a president, an event that transpires adjacent to symbolic and actual drudgery, the mundane aspects of which, I trust, are told in a manner that points up the banality in a captivating style.
On Writing really does exist. Published in the U.S. by Penguin, it will cost you $15.00. The book may get you to laugh. Anyone who meets it even halfway will celebrate its wit and irony. But I am willing to wager it is the chapter on verbal abuse that most people will find thrilling. A personal favorite abuse is the mock-innocence that wrecks that which it pretends to endorse, such as "The last film of the talented director was utterly charming. When we woke up. . ."
There is one final irony about this book and it is one which unifies meta critical thinking, magic realism and verbal abuse. Throughout this essay, Borges refers to someone named Paul Groussac, a name that meant nothing to me. I was certain Borges had invented him. I was incorrect. Groussac was a French-born Argentine historian, critic and librarianwho became a key figure in the Argentine literary realm.