Virtuous Minds

Intellectual Character Development

Philip E. Dow

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780830884339
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Templeton Foundation Character Project's Character Essay and Book Prize Competition award winnerWhat does it mean to love God with all of our minds?Our culture today is in a state of crisis where intellectual virtue is concerned. Dishonesty, cheating, arrogance, laziness, cowardice--such vices are rampant in society, even among the world's most prominent leaders. We find ourselves in an ethical vacuum, as the daily headlines of our newspapers confirm again and again. Central to the problem is the state of education. We live in a technological world that has ever greater access to new information and yet no idea what to do with it all.In this wise and winsome book, Philip Dow presents a case for the recovery of intellectual character. He explores seven key virtues--courage, carefulness, tenacity, fair-mindedness, curiosity, honesty and humility--and discusses their many benefits. The recovery of virtue, Dow argues, is not about doing the right things, but about becoming the right kind of person. The formation of intellectual character produces a way of life that demonstrates love for both God and neighbor.Dow has written an eminently practical guide to a life of intellectual virtue designed especially for parents and educators. The book concludes with seven principles for a true education, a discussion guide for university and church groups, and nine appendices that provide examples from Dow's experience as a teacher and administrator.Virtuous Minds is a timely and thoughtful work for parents and pastors, teachers and students--anyone who thinks education is more about the quality of character than about the quantity of facts.

PART ONE

 The Seven Intellectual Virtues 

 

1

 Intellectual Courage 

A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, address at Harvard Class Day Afternoon Exercises, June 8, 1978

You know courage when you see it. The fireman who charges into the flames of a collapsing building to save an infant’s life is courageous. The woman who refuses to recant her beliefs, knowing that she will be burned at the stake is courageous. But how do you know this? What makes these acts courageous?

If the fireman who risked his life rescuing the young child were suicidal and the fact that he saved the infant was accidental, would his act still be considered courageous? Or if our martyr died because she had refused to recant her conviction that a pack of little purple elves was behind global warming, would her act still be seen as equally heroic? Or finally, if either of our heroes had only thought about being courageous, or had simply felt courageous, but had never acted, would we consider either of them courageous?

My guess is that to each of these questions, most of us would say no. These acts can no longer be considered courageous, at least not in the truly noble sense of the word. So, for something to be courageous, the motivation behind the deed must be good, reasonable and acted upon. The same things can be said about intellectual courage.

Those who are intellectually courageous earnestly want to know the truth, and so they take risks in the pursuit and promotion of truth. They are willing to reconsider their own beliefs, even if this scares them. But once they have done so, and come to a belief about what is true, they are willing to stick to their guns, even if the majority mocks or threatens them.

We now have a good understanding of what intellectual courage is, but why does it matter and what does it look like? Intellectual courage is not necessarily the most important of the virtues, but it is indispensable. As C. S. Lewis said, “You cannot practice any of the other virtues without bringing this one into play. . . . [It is] the form of every virtue at the testing point.”[1] Honest thinking, for instance, almost always includes the likelihood of personal sacrifice and usually includes the frightening prospect of direct confrontation. As a result, it can rightfully be said that if we are not courageous thinkers, we are unlikely to be truly honest thinkers.

The same principle holds true for those who want to be fair-minded in their thinking habits. Reflect on the tremendous courage needed to impartially consider arguments that threaten your most fundamental beliefs. What if you decide they are correct? For me that might include questions like, What if there is no Creator God who loves me personally and gives life its only real meaning? What if all of this is, as Freud and others have claimed, simply wish fulfillment? The whole world, as I have understood it, would come crashing down. The very foundation of my life would be betrayed as a sham. Talk about a frightening possibility. But if I want to be a genuinely fair-minded person, there are times when I am required to give a hearing to deeply threatening ideas—and that requires tremendous courage. In this way, intellectual courage can play a critical role in the exercise of all the intellectual virtues.

When Martin Luther was brought before the Holy Roman Emperor and accused of heresy, the choice before him seemed clear. He knew that by recanting he would be offered positions of privilege and prestige in European society. He also knew that if he refused to recant his beliefs, he would almost certainly face relentless persecution and excommunication, if not death. Faced with these options, Luther nevertheless refused to deny his convictions.[2]

I would be surprised if Martin Luther were not besieged by fear as he stood before his accusers. He knew that the threats of the authorities were more than idle words. He had seen the horrible deaths suffered by heretics in Europe. And yet, his commitment to truth trumped his fear and helped to open the floodgates of social, religious and political reforms that today we call the Protestant Reformation. The movement that Luther inspired was not blameless, but the basic pursuit of truth that was at its core unleashed advances that ultimately helped to produce modern democracy and astonishing material and scientific achievements.[3] It is possible that these advances would have happened without the intellectual courage displayed by Luther on that particular day in that particular city, but they wouldn’t have happened without someone displaying courageous thinking—for growth and progress require risk, and risk requires courage.

Martin Luther is a dramatic example of intellectual courage leading to growth and progress, but for most of us, growth comes from little acts of bravery in our daily lives. Consider the young student deciding whether to raise her hand in class. If she does raise her hand, she is risking the mockery of her peers, who will either see that she doesn’t understand the material or tease her for being overly enthusiastic. Yet, without this small act of courage, her growth is stunted. She begins to fall further and further behind, and a self-fulfilling cycle of fear and ignorance is initiated. Contrast that with the confidence she gains as she grasps the content and can use that knowledge as a base to understand more advanced concepts as they are introduced. So whether it is Martin Luther or a young schoolgirl, the principle is the same. Courageous thinking habits are at the heart of growth and progress. If, as H. L. Mencken is said to have remarked, “the one permanent emotion of the inferior [person] is fear—fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable,”[4] then it is equally true that the one permanent trait of the intellectually virtuous person is courage—courage to challenge frightening ideas and courage to stick to your guns when you become convinced of the truth.

There is just one thing to add. If Martin Luther had chosen to think, and ultimately act, in an intellectually courageous way only once, there is a strong likelihood that we would never have heard of him. He certainly would not have had the sort of influence on the world that he did. We know about Luther and we admire his courageous thinking only because, as a result of thousands of apparently insignificant choices throughout his life, intellectual courage had become a part of who he was.

It has been said that a person’s character is forged not in one dramatic moment but in the ledger of his or her daily work. In the same way, if we want to become people of intellectually courageous character, the war will not be dramatically won or lost in a single brave choice but rather quietly through a multitude of apparently insignificant courageous decisions. The elementary student who regularly risks the mockery of her friends by raising her hand to admit she doesn’t understand something, the college student willing to publicly challenge his professors, and the boss who risks losing her authority by changing her mind when she sees she has been wrong—these less dramatic, but no less difficult moments are where the battle for character is won or lost. Only when we win these small skirmishes will we form the habits that ultimately morph into intellectually courageous character.

2

Intellectual Carefulness

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson’s Table Talk

When John F. Kennedy announced that America would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, most people chalked it up to political grandstanding or arrogance. However, the time, energy and money (vast amounts of money) that soon began pouring into the American space program made the skeptics sit up and take notice. Within months, NASA announced a series of ambitious plans culminating in a manned trip to the moon. A key component of this program was the exploration of the atmosphere of Venus through the use of Mariner 1. Using state-of-the-art technology, this craft was expected to reach speeds of up to 25,820 miles per hour on its trip to Venus before unveiling 9,800 solar cells that would power the vessel while its computers investigated the unknown composition of the Venusian atmosphere. It was to be a multimillion-dollar leap forward for NASA and a signal to the Russians that the Americans were gaining the upper hand in the space race. Unfortunately, four minutes after takeoff, Mariner 1, America’s national pride with its multimillion-dollar price tag, crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The cause? It appears that a single symbol had been accidentally omitted from the instructions fed into the craft’s computer. Not a great day at the office for that particular rocket scientist.[1]

The story of Mariner 1 is an example of the dramatic consequences that an act of carelessness can have, but it is not necessarily a good illustration of intellectually careless character. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that the tiny error that doomed that spacecraft was an uncharacteristic act of carelessness by an otherwise intellectually careful person. If you are in any doubt of this, imagine NASA as a community of people who were habitually careless in their thinking. The space program that eventually put people on the moon would never have gotten to square one because in this field accuracy and precision are essential to every detail, of every step, of every project. Ironically, Mariner 1 failed so dramatically precisely because of NASA’s culture of intellectual carefulness. It was the space program’s consistent meticulousness and self-conscious attention to detail that had allowed it to produce an unmanned spacecraft with the astonishing capacity to travel to Venus. An act of intellectual carelessness may have led to the explosion of Mariner 1, but it was a culture of intellectual carefulness that had made the mind-boggling successes of the U.S. space program possible.

The same principle is at work in our individual lives. As human beings, we are inevitably going to make some careless mistakes in our thinking. Even the most careful thinker is not totally immune from errors resulting from exhaustion or our inability to handle the overabundance of details flooding our busy lives. And yet, if we are able to develop the habit of thinking carefully, the general trajectory of our lives will be fundamentally changed for the better. We might still lose a proverbial satellite from time to time, but without the habit of careful thinking, the chance for success in our lives will continually struggle just to get off the ground.

The example of Mariner 1 has one more important lesson for us as individual thinkers. Just as in NASA’s aspirations to put a person on the moon, our pursuit of the truth in every area of our lives almost always includes the risk of failure. Sometimes the risks are large and call for extraordinary caution, but it is also possible to become so careful and fastidious about getting things perfect that we never risk and therefore never grow. The student whose fear of getting the answer wrong keeps her from answering a test question and the secretary so concerned about misspelling a word that he reads over every memo thirty times are examples of carefulness gone awry. William James said excessive intellectual carefulness “is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound.”[2] If fear of making a small error petrifies us and keeps us from seeking to know and understand God and his world, carefulness has become a vice—not a virtue.

But that sort of excessive fastidiousness is not intellectual carefulness. Those who are intellectually careful earnestly want to know the truth; thus they are reasonably and consistently careful that they do not overlook important details and habitually avoid hasty conclusions based on limited evidence. They are patient and diligent in their pursuit of knowledge. Aristotle wisely noted that the intellectually careful person looks “for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.”[3] The intellectually careful and prudent doctor, for instance, will not give the same amount of attention to mowing her lawn as she would to diagnosing her patient because the stakes and circumstances do not warrant equal time. But that does not mean that she ceases to be careful when she mows her lawn or prunes her rose bushes. In fact, her decision to use just the right plant food, or to set her lawnmower blade at just the right height, is directly linked to her ability to carefully and successfully diagnose the ailments of her patients. By consistently choosing to think carefully about how to nurture her garden, the doctor is developing intellectual habits that show up in every area of her life—something for which her patients are extremely grateful.

The problem for most of us is that we see intellectual carefulness as something we can turn on and off at will instead of something that always needs to be turned on but used in proportion to the demands of the circumstances. Because we do not actively develop a consistent pattern of conscientiousness, we may think carefully in isolated moments but do not become intellectually careful people. As a result, when a situation demands careful thinking, we find it difficult to override the hasty and careless thinking patterns that have become the mind’s default operating system. The fact that we fail to be adequately careful in our thinking is usually not the fault of our intentions but simply the result of our being out of practice.

Unfortunately, the weeds of intellectual carelessness and hastiness seem to grow effortlessly and bring with them consequences that can be sobering. The case of Mariner 1 is a dramatic instance of carelessness, but examples of intellectual carelessness do not have to be spectacular to be significant. In the academic world, neglecting to use quotation marks and not citing a source can mean expulsion for students and the loss of a job or a severely damaged reputation for professors. Plagiarism is often intentional, but quite regularly it is simply the result of intellectual carelessness. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author David McCullough’s reputation was damaged, and the credibility of his otherwise outstanding biography of John Adams was undermined, because he attributed to Thomas Jefferson a key quotation that Jefferson never spoke.[4] McCullough’s apparently careless error quite reasonably raises the question of whether other equally significant errors have been included in his works. There is every reason to believe McCullough’s error was an unintentional anomaly in a generally stellar career, but if other errors are found, the credibility of his once highly respected works could very well collapse like a house of cards. The reason? Intentional deception and intellectual carelessness both produce lies, and people don’t tr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• 1 Intellectual Courage
• 2 Intellectual Carefulness
• 3 Intellectual Tenacity
• 4 Intellectual Fair-mindedness
• 5 Intellectual Curiosity
• 6 Intellectual Honesty
• 7 Intellectual Humility
• PART TWO
• 8 The Benefits of Knowing More About More
• 9 The Benefits of Better Thinking
• 10 Loving God
• 11 Loving Your Neighbor
• PART THREE
• 12 Developing Virtuous Intellectual Character
• 13 Seven Suggestions for Educators and Parents
• Conclusion
• A Discussion Guide for University and Church Groups
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• Appendix D
• Appendix E
• Appendix F
• Appendix G
• Appendix H
• Notes
• References
• Subject Index
• About the Author
• Endorsements