Freedom of mind

This is a thought-provoking article about Susan Stebbing and her 1939 book Thinking to Some Purpose.

As I see it, what's especially interesting is how directly relevant many of her ideas are to our current situation.

For one thing, Stebbing distinguishes between political/economic freedom versus "freedom of mind".  She writes:

If it were in fact true that we were all politically and economically free, still it would not follow that we were possessed of the freedom of mind without which, in my opinion, no democratic institutions can be satisfactorily maintained.

That's an interesting thought, that democratic institutions cannot be satisfactorily maintained without people knowing how to think freely.

Thus, the aim of her book is to help people become more free in this more fundamental sense.

The aim is to help people to become better thinkers, by training them in thinking skills and giving them knowledge of how thinking failures happen (though 80+ years later it's a bit dated!).

The article gives an example:

What does thinking clearly involve? One important step, Stebbing argues, is to train ourselves out of bad habits of thinking. For example, she describes what she calls ‘potted thinking’. This is oversimplifying ideas using crude characterisations or slogans. While slogans aren’t always a bad thing, Stebbing thinks that they have a tendency to oversimplify more nuanced or sophisticated views and to hide the intricacies of an idea behind a catchy phrase.

When I read this I couldn't help thinking of the "freedom" protests against the Covid mandates.  Too often, the "freedom" slogans drowned out more nuanced views.  Too often, the protestors' crude characterisations of freedom meant they did not acknowledge the increased freedoms that Covid mandates gave.  Too often, the protestors lacked freedom of mind.