Everyone’s clamoring for critical thinking, bull**** detectors, methodologies for checking sources, increased media literacy, and the like. These are all laudable efforts, so far as they go, but the great paradox of our time is that exhortations to independent thought and cries of “do your own research” seem just about as likely to lead to crazy conspiracy theories as to fact and truth.

I have been thinking for several years about the idea of “dispositions,” the third term in the education trio of “knowledge, skills, and dispositions.” It’s the mysterious member of that set, but also I think the one that, more than reason itself, is the charioteer (to recall the famous analogy from Plato).

Today I ran across these words from George MacDonald, quoted in a delightful anthology of reviews and essays by C. S. Lewis (many of them not collected before, and new to me) called Image and Imagination.  The quotation appears in a note, presumably by the volume’s editor, Walter Hooper, explaining a moment in Lewis’s encomium for W. P. Ker. Here’s the quotation, from MacDonald’s 1867 essay “The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture”:

The right teacher would have his pupil easy to please, but ill [that is, hard] to satisfy; ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to discover beauty, slow to say, “Here I will dwell.”

Obviously the above is not an infallible prescription for sifting disinformation from fact and truth. This is perhaps the whole point. No single investigative or evaluative methodology will suffice, not a four- or five-step program for fact-checking, nor the practice of “interrogation” (what a terrifying word) as one seeks to know what’s real. No methodology will suffice, though many methods may be valuable. In the end, one also needs something like the rhythms MacDonald articulates. One needs a certain poised readiness as well as a certain practiced reluctance, and likewise, a practiced readiness and a poised reluctance. These are attitudinal or dispositional orientations, or commitments, or (one might even say) spiritual disciplines.

They are also difficult and exhausting. But in a polarized culture in which hostilities are always one interrogation away from erupting into war, or worse, I think MacDonald’s blend of cautious hospitality and wise forbearance is worth considering as a valuable approach to many things, literary criticism as well as friendship and yes, one’s disposition as one reads or views or hears the latest piece of persuasion.