1. Why Are Mental Skills Important?
The key mental
skills form the foundation for everything we will ever do in life and they go a
long way in determining how successful we will be. NOTHING is more important than our ability to think
effectively and make good decisions.
You might think
being born rich is more important than having good
mental skills but without
these skills how will you avoid losing your money and how will you know how to use it in ways that will be most effective in achieving your goals?
You might think
good health is more important than having good mental skills but without these
skills how will you know how to preserve your health, or make the
best of a bad situation if you should lose it?
You might think
that relationships with other people are more important than mental
skills but without these skills how will you know which relationships
are helpful to you, and how those relationships can best be nurtured,
and, on the other hand, how will you know which relationships are
harming you, and how those can best be broken off?
Clearly mental skills guide us in everything we do and lead us in every
decision we make. If these skills are well developed we can expect
them to guide us well and lead us to success, and if they are not
well developed we can expect them to let us down and lead us to
failure.
2. What are the most important mental skills?
The most
important mental skills are knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom.
Knowledge is
simply the awareness of facts. The more facts you pack into your
brain the more knowledge you have. Knowledge is a vital foundation
for developing intelligence and wisdom but it is also valuable in its
own right by helping us solve simple problems and make simple decisions.
If you know there
is a restaurant across town that serves good food at a reasonable
price that knowledge will be extremely useful to you when you are
hungry.
If you have a
headache and you know that aspirin relieves headache pain and you
know there is a bottle of aspirin on the little table beside your
bed, that knowledge will also be very useful and could make the
difference between enjoying a pleasant day and enduring a miserable
one.
At a more
advanced intellectual level, if you hear someone argue that all of the
Founding Fathers of the United States agreed that the Federal
government was not permitted to do anything unless it was explicitly
authorized by the Constitution BUT you know that George Washington
supported a national bank AND you know that he was a Founding Father
AND you know that there is no explicit authorization in the
Constitution for a national bank then this knowledge will help you to
refute the argument being made.
To gain the
benefits that mental skills can give us we need more than knowledge,
we also need to develop intelligence.
Intelligence is the ability to construct and analyze logical
arguments. The better you are at following
premises through to conclusions and the better you are at spotting
conclusions that are NOT derived from the premises offered to support
them - the more intelligent you are.
For example, if
someone says it will be better for the US economy to cut taxes for
the rich and someone else says, "Oh that is an ultra-right-wing
activist speaking. We should not even consider any policy proposals
made by that person because they will obviously be wrong," then
we should notice that this statement contains a fallacy. Whether a
statement is true or false depends on the available factual and
logical support offered on its behalf. The truth or falsity of a
statement does not depend in any way on the political beliefs of the
person making the statement.
If we are able to
recognize this type of fallacy, which is a form of the ad hominem
fallacy, then we are more intelligent than people who cannot
recognize it.
For another example, suppose the
minimum wage is raised and then the economy begins to grow faster
than it was growing before, and we hear someone argue that since the
economic growth started AFTER the minimum wage was increased then the
growth must have been CAUSED by the increase.
If we are intelligent we will notice that this argument is also a fallacy. There is no necessary relationship
between timing and causation. Even if we see the sun rise ten
mornings in a row shortly after the rooster crows that does not prove
that the rooster's crow CAUSED the sun to rise.
Certainly events
are caused by other events but just because one thing happens after
another does not prove that the second thing was caused by the first.
Even knowledge
and intelligence together are not enough to achieve a well-lived
life. To get through all the complex issues that face us
every day we also need wisdom. To me wisdom is the ability to make
good decisions – to figure out the right thing to do – in the
face of all the complexities and uncertainties of life and without
ever being 100% sure that we HAVE, in fact, made the right decision.
The simplest
issues we face can be solved directly by our knowledge of facts. If
we are hungry and know there is food in the refrigerator then our
problem is solved.
More complicated
issues can be solved by using our intelligence, our ability to think
logically. Is the Affordable Care Act Constitutional? A question like
that can be answered through a logical analysis of the Act and the
Constitution.
For the most
complex problems though, and for the most complex decisions we face, we will often find that all of our
knowledge and all of our intelligence are not enough to tell us the
answer. In these cases we have to sort through the elements of the
problem to understand it deeply, we have to sort through the
available facts and arguments to determine which are most important,
we have to decide which of our goals are most important and how our
decisions will affect those goals, we have to consider human nature
and human feelings and human values, and then we have to make the
best call we can.
After the Civil War was it better policy to punish
the South or to show mercy? Will it be better for the United States
to expel all undocumented immigrants or find a pathway to citizenship
for most of them? Questions like these can only be answered well with
wisdom – the ability to make good real-life decision in complex
situations where we cannot follow a simple formula and where we cannot ever be
absolutely sure that we are right.
3. How do we develop mental skills?
Given the vital
importance of these skills: Knowledge, Intelligence, and Wisdom, what is the best way to get them?
Some people might
think there is no way to develop these skills, we just have to accept
whatever we are born with and be happy with that. This is clearly
wrong. Every day through observation and conversation and reading we
can pack more facts into our brains which means we are increasing our
knowledge. Also, it is certainly possible to learn more about the
forms of argument and the logical syllogisms, which are the tools of
intelligence and, by doing this, we can sharpen our own intelligent. Finally,
by watching people make difficult life decisions in complex situations we
can learn from examples of wisdom and, little-by-little, deepen our own wisdom.
Clearly it is possible
to increase our knowledge and intelligence and wisdom. One of the best
ways to do that is by reading good books. The task will not be easy,
it is something we will have to work at day by day, year by year,
over the course of an entire lifetime, but I believe the results will
be more than worth the effort...
Like all big and
complicated goals this one is more likely to be achieved with
careful planning. We should make a yearly reading plan, listing books
that will improve our minds and then working our way through them
one-by-one.
I have heard
people argue it is better to learn from experience than from reading
books - and there may be some truth to this where experience is
possible - but consider all the experiences that are IMPOSSIBLE, all
the experiences you will NEVER have if you don't read books: living
through the Great Depression, witnessing the trial and death of
Socrates, suffering through the Battle of the Bulge in World War II,
listening to Einstein talk about the theory of relativity, sitting in
the White House as Abraham Lincoln decides what to do about
secession, watching that first split second of time when the entire
universe exploded into existence, or participating in the daily lives
of Native American families a thousand years before the white man
arrived, all these amazing experiences are things you will never know at all unless you learn about them through books.
If we really want to gain more knowledge and sharpen our intelligence and deepen our wisdom shouldn't we plan to spend
as much time as possible with the most knowledgeable and the most
intelligent and the wisest people who have ever lived? Unless you
have the power to travel magically through space and time the only
way you can spend time with these people is by reading the great
books they wrote or the great books that have been written about
them.
Some books
contain lots of information, lots of facts about interesting and
useful topics. Reading these books will help us to increase our
knowledge.
Some books are
either directly about logical thinking skills or show us examples of
thinking skills in action as brilliant people make discoveries or
solve problems. A book about argumentation might teach us thinking
skills directly. A book about how a particular scientific discovery
was made might teach us thinking skills indirectly, by showing us
examples of those skills in use.
Some books are
about the great issues of life: right and wrong, happiness and pain,
success and failure, the need to make vital personal decisions
without any way of knowing for sure if we are really choosing right.
Other books show us examples of people working their way through life
and let us watch them trying to deal with these issues and decisions
we all have to face along our way. These are the books that can teach
us something about how to be wise.
In truth, every
book we read can increase our knowledge, our intelligence, AND our
wisdom but some books are better suited to developing one or the
other of these mental skills. In the list below I have divided the
books into three groups of four, one group best suited to increase
knowledge, one group best suited to sharpen intelligence, and one
group best suited to deepen wisdom.
So here they are,
the twelve books on my 2017-2018 Knowledge – Intelligence –
Wisdom reading plan.
4. Reading Plan: Year 1
Knowledge
1. The Story of Philosophy
Will Durant
I will read this
book primarily for knowledge. Philosophers think hard about deep
issues of life like how can we tell the difference between the true
and the false, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. If I
want to think clearly about these important issues I will need my
brain well-stocked with facts about what others have thought about
them.
2. The Passion of the Western Mind
Richard Tarnas
I will read this
book primarily for knowledge. This great book traces all of Western
intellectual history from the ancient Greeks to the 20th
century. It covers ideas from philosophy, religion, science, and the
arts. If I want to think clearly about the ideas that have seemed
important in Western Civilization, like the central importance of
logic and rationality, I need my brain well-stocked with facts about
what people from all fields of knowledge have said about these ideas
over the last 25 centuries.
3. The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great
Economic Thinkers, Seventh ed.
Robert L. Heilbroner
I will read this
book for knowledge. Economics is one of the most important subjects
in the world because it tells us so much about how the world works,
how human needs are satisfied or fail to get satisfied, how we can
organize society in such a way that all of us can have better lives.
Economics is also a vital subject because so many of us know
virtually nothing about it which makes it easy for the greedy, the
politicians, and the cranks to fool us and get us to support policies
that will benefit them rather than ourselves.
4. The World's Religions
Huston Smith
I will read this
book for knowledge. For much of human history religious beliefs have
been big motivators of human behavior. The more we know about the
religions of the world the better we will be able to understand what
many people, groups, or even whole countries, are doing and why they
are doing it.
Intelligence
5. 76 Fallacies
Dr. Michael Cooper LaBossiere
I will read this
book to sharpen my intelligence. Like a chess master studies
positions from great games a thinker studies fallacies. These are the
unsound arguments you have to spot when other people use them and
avoid using yourself. The more you know about fallacies the smarter
you will be. This book should help.
6. How to Think Clearly
Doug Erlandson
I will study this
book to sharpen my intelligence. The more we learn about the
principles of clear thinking, and the more we put those principles
into practice every day on every issue we face, the smarter we will be.
7. The Double Helix
James D. Watson
I will read this
book to sharpen my intelligence. This very great book tells the
inside story of one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the
20th century, the structure of DNA. As we watch very human
scientists struggling to solve a tough problem we can pick up some
tips that might help us with problems we have to solve.
8. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos
Dennis Overbye
I will read this
book primarily to sharpen my intelligence. This is one of the best popular
science books ever written. It describes how scientists have tried to
figure out the size and origins and fate of the universe. As we read
about how scientists think about these hard questions we can learn how to think better ourselves and thus become more
intelligent.
Wisdom
9. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Studying the
lives of great people is a good way to seek wisdom. We can try to
learn from exceptional people what kinds of choices we have to make
in life, what kinds of options we have in making those choices, and
what kinds of consequences we might expect from those options. Don't forget to learn from bad choices so you won't have to make them yourself! This
kind of learning will start us on the road to attaining
wisdom.
10. Walden
Henry David Thoreau
I will read this
book mainly for wisdom. Thoreau spent a little over two years living
in a cabin near Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He took walks and read
books and grew beans... and thought about life, and then wrote his
thoughts down to help us think about life. Thinking about how we
should live, trying to figure out what is the best way to live, those
are certainly aspects of what we call wisdom.
11. The Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell
I will read this
book mainly in the quest for wisdom. Boswell's brilliant biography mainly shows us
Johnson talking. He thought about everything and then he talked about
everything. And talked and talked and talked. Johnson was a brilliant
man who studied history and literature and philosophy and wrote plays
and poems and biographies and the first dictionary of the English
language. Reading and thinking about Johnson's ideas about life will
help us sort through and evaluate our own ideas about life,
rejecting the bad ones while keeping the good ones and letting them guide
us... and that is wisdom.
12. Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch
I will read this
book primarily for wisdom. Plutarch wrote biographies in pairs
comparing ancient Greek and Roman generals, statesmen, orators. By
studying their lives I can learn what was important to them and how they lived and that
will help me think about what is important to me and how I should live. I can learn about
the various life choices these people made and think about whether I
agree or disagree with them, and why, and that will help me to make
better life choices for myself... and that is wisdom!
~~~
So this is my
2017-2018 Knowledge, Intelligence, Wisdom Reading Plan. I am looking
forward to becoming more knowledgeable by learning more facts,
becoming smarter by learning more about thinking skills, becoming wiser by
watching great people make important life decisions and by watching how
those decisions turned out.
Next year there
will be a fresh set of books to enjoy and learn from, but for this
year, let's read these!
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Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Wayne Gadway
