Socially Minded

Friday, April 4, 2025

Socially Minded

“Don’t I need supervision for this?” [Source: Wikimedia commons]

Perusing the internet recently, I made the happy discovery of a Substack authored by Rabbi Zohar Adkins called What Is Called Thinking? which describes itself as a collection of questions “To stupefy and inspire.” In a blog entry from late January, Rabbi Adkins presented the following:

Humans are designed for dialogue, not monologue. Scientific paper comports well with the Talmudic model of chevruta learning and the teachings of Martin Buber. Agnes Callard argues for argument as the ideal form of dialogue. I’m less certain, but the rabbis agree that we should be having more “arguments for the sake of heaven.” The sages go so far as to imagine heaven as both an academy and a court room. (God delights in hearing both sides of the argument.) One problem with what Jonathan Haidt calls the “Anxious Generation” is that it can’t argue productively. Finding good faith conversationalists is hard. The rabbis understood that not all conversation is productive, such as that between Korach and Moses. In that case, the virtues of intellectual humility and civil discourse might be inappropriate.

Agnes Callard, to whom he links, is a philosopher and philosophy professor at U. Chicago. She makes the point in the linked tweet that a misunderestimated feature of the human brain is that it has a social design. That is, we aren’t able to think correctly when we cerebrate solo. We’re no darned good at it. We think ourselves into metaphysical culs-de-sac and can’t find our way back to the main boulevard. We can reason our way into a brown paper bag, but can’t fight our way out again.

As Callard states in the interview:

Socrates discovered you can inquire into deeper questions about life by calling into question someone else’s answers. There’s a certain kind of thinking you can’t do by yourself because you have blind spots. You have a whole self-justifying, rationalizing edifice that supports all your mistakes. It’s often very easy for other people to see your mistakes but incredibly hard for you to see them.

But there are other models that value interiority for probing a difficult question. I might go off by myself for deep reflection, or a writer might work this out on the printed page. That’s the opposite of what Socrates did.

As an academic philosopher, I give a lot of talks. Before I do, I’m thinking to myself, “What objections are the audience going to come up with?” But every time I give a talk, I get questions that surprise me. How did I not ask myself that? And the answer is, I was very invested in thinking that I was right about an idea. Other people are the ones who can help me see when I’m wrong.

Our evolution did not include mirrors in which to reflect. Mirrors— “looking glasses”, as they were quaintly known—are a relatively recent technological invention: They don’t go back much farther than a couple paltry centuries. But we did inherit an evolved capacity to see ourselves through the eyes of others, in a sense, in mirror neurons. These fire when one animal performs an action and when it observes the same action performed by another. Perhaps it is our very nature to be invisible to ourselves.

Now we live in a technological environment that not only has mirrors, but contains detailed images of us in every form. Maybe we’re not designed to deal with seeing ourselves so much—or at all—except through others’ eyes.

We also know there’s supposedly a lonesomeness epidemic these days. We’re told that our dopamine-stimulating pocket gizmos have us in their grip by our dwindling attention spans to such a degree that we can’t be bothered to interact with each other in person anymore. It’s too boring! If people in person were capable of making our pants pockets tingle, it might be a different story, but alas…

I would say this all sounds plausible, sensible, and quite possibly true. But I’m sitting here alone at the keyboard without additional outside human input. Is there anything to it? What do the rest of you think?