Genuine education is aimed not merely at skills and a collection of facts – what Whitehead called “inert ideas” – but at a way of life that pursues understanding and an attitude of openness to new ideas and knowledge. This aim is acknowledged today by a verbal emphasis on critical thinking, but not much attention is given to what is meant by critical thinking or what might be done to advance it. Too often it means presenting students with an argument about which they are indifferent and asking them to evaluate it on the basis of logical consistency, evidence offered and substantiated, and clarity of presentation. This is a useful exercise, but it is not adequate for our purposes here. We have been talking about loving and hating war, and that means that the arguments to be considered arise in a strong emotional climate.

In such a climate, a question arises immediately about whether, while acknowledging our own feelings, we can listen to possibly opposing views without prejudging them. Cass Sunstein has pointed out that we are afflicted by something he has called “group polarization”; we tend to believe those with whom we somehow identify and disbelieve or distrust those who belong to a different group. One would think that in centers of higher learning such as universities this tendency would appear less often than in the general public. But many of us can – from decades of university experience – testify that this is not true. University audiences, like all others, have an ear keenly tuned to where a speaker is “coming from.” If his or her social/political/theoretical identification is compatible with that of the listener, his or her remarks get considerable approval a priori. If not, listeners are busy concocting counterarguments before the speaker has even articulated his or her thoughts.