Rationalizing Atrocities (Comprehension: Part IV)

Writing is necessary for critical thinking because it allows us to thoroughly lay out claims without interruption. Writing adds a methodical process to critical thinking: make a claim, cite the evidence, and explain how the evidence supports or detracts from the claim you’ve presented. In doing so, students formulate rational beliefs rooted in morality.

Critical writing helps students determine who they are. It allows students to find, develop, and define their own worldview — with clarity. Instead of the bombast and heated rhetoric of oral debate, critical writing is a much slower process with an initial audience of one. Does your argument and the evidence you’ve presented even convince you? Is the path you’ve trudged to a conclusion through the untamed wilderness of subjective thought even clear to you? If your own mind can attack the argument you’ve crafted, certainly others will, too. It is at that point that students sincerely participating in critical analysis of ideas will abandon poor ones in favor of “better” ones. In essence, critical writing allows students to privately debate with themselves to determine whether their genuinely held beliefs — their worldview — is accurate or appropriate or logical or humane.

Critical writing thus has an additional benefit: it assimilates a moral society. Critical thinkers do not advocate for tyrants, brutality, oppression, slavery, prison camps, torture, genocide, rape, murder, or any other horror you could conceive. Why? Simply because critical thinkers have two powerful weapons against injustice: imagination and empathy. Critical thinkers ask themselves: How would I feel if someone raped me? How would I feel if someone tortured me? How would I feel if someone made me a slave? How would I feel about the perpetrators bombing my country? Whatever one’s individual answer to those questions is, critical thinkers then imagine what that experience would be like for someone else, and they then empathize with them. When people are trained to critically think and critically write, it is not possible to craft rational arguments that permit inhumanity. Critical writing guides students away from poor beliefs and into better ones. When an entire society can do it, atrocities are avoided.