Urgency To Stop Intellectual Decay

The famous twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell expressed his views about intellectual decay in his essay “Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” (1943). By intellectual decay, he meant the systemic decline of critical thinking, the rise of modern dogmatism, and what he famously diagnosed as "intellectual rubbish". Instead of viewing decay as a natural byproduct of aging, Russell diagnosed it as a structural failure driven by several external forces that hardened the internal power of human genius and ingenuity. He blamed authority and dogmatic thinking as the chief agents of intellectual decay. He explained that when individuals outsource their thinking to dogmatic religious, political, or social authorities, the mind freezes to zero, yielding nothing fruitful to the self and society. 

Dogmatism starts from baseless assumptions that are manufactured by people of self-interest, which the ordinary mass take for granted without questioning. We have some fabulous assumptions about life and the universe. We don’t exactly know when humans began to think, how thinking developed, and when the world became as we experience it today. Nor do we know for sure when knowledge became a turning point in the history of ignorance. As such, there is no dividing line between ignorance and knowledge, emotion and reason, and barbarism and civilisation. The border was blurred before, so it is now, and it is unlikely to drive the cloud completely out of the intellectual sky.

Uncritical thinking 

Yet we assume that we are rational animals, thinking beings, and wise people to distinguish between good and bad, heaven and hell, and all binaries that exist in the universe. Things we have heard so far are simply assumptions. Even if we think they are true, the truth is not absolute; it is based on partial evidence.  Unfortunately, we are hanging on partial truth, not the whole truth. Uncritical thinking is dangerous. There are many instances of being uncritical. When Aristotle said that women had fewer teeth than men, the general public believed his words without verifying the statement by counting the teeth of even their own wives. Many people until late believed that the Earth was flat. When Galileo discovered the telescope, he could see that the Earth was round. Likewise, the blind followers of religion follow religious dogma uncritically. They opposed what Charles Darwin wrote about natural selection in The Origin of Species after 20 years of scientific research.