It's hard to make a case for critical reading and thinking, or indeed for learning, at a time when the most popular exponents of "Reason" and "Science" routinely travesty disciplines they don't read or even think about, unless for the crassest polemical purposes.
More than once *this term* I've received a "response" to assigned reading that opens with a student announcing they have not bothered to do the reading because they reject its premises, its subject, or its *discipline* as either "postmodern" or as "conspiratorial"...
...and then going on to "prove" that the contents are so much postmodern nonsense without any reference whatever to what is actually said in them (or indeed to the subject or sources they deal with) -- instead denouncing claims the readings don't make.
Needless to say, nothing is learned when this happens. Teaching assumes the possibility of learning, and it runs to a considerable extent on trust. Where both are ostentatiously denied, there is no way forward.
I am not saying we have the likes of Pinker and Peterson to thank for intellectual laziness, or dishonestly, or willed ignorance. I am saying, though, that they and their ilk encourage us to dress these things up as responsible and respectable intellectual stances. They aren't.
