The ability to think

This week – in my local Eaux Vives cinema in Geneva - I saw the German movie ‘Hannah Arendt`, directed by Margarethe von Trotta. The film is about Arendt's reporting on the Eichmann trial, the Nazi responsible for organising the deportation of millions of Jews. Her book "Eichmann in Jerusalem," stirred up a firestorm by suggesting that Jewish leaders were in part responsible for the extermination of their own people. But the main theme of her work is that she discovered that Eichmann was not an evil man by nature. As she wrote: "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal." Eichmann just followed orders, liked to do that efficiently and did not think about the moral. “This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale. The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil". And that is -perhaps her most well known words - "the banality of evil".

Struck by the danger of thoughtlessness, Arendt spent the rest of her life thinking about thinking. Could thinking, she asked, save us from the willingness of many, if not most, people to participate in bureaucratically regulated evil like the administrative extermination of six million Jews? Only thinking, Arendt argued, has the potential to remind us of our human dignity and free us to resist our servility.

The ability to think is also an important issue in the field of ageing. Apart from the important issue of dementia, it could also be a kind of comfort to know that even if we have less years left, we at least will spend them knowing more about the world. Or that we are better able to cope with other people and not repeating our mistakes of the past. Unfortunately, most frameworks for ageing and health only look at issues like functional decline and frailty and make no distinction between physical and cognitive decline. We still do not know whether ageing means more wisdom and less muscles, nor whether the mind can compensate for some physical decline.

To answer these questions, I think it is important to first make the distinction between cognitive decline and the ability to think. Cognitive decline happens in the form of for example memory loss, lesser ability to play video games and dementia. It is true that this loss of cognitive functions can severely impact your ability to think (clearly). But in a way this loss is much more a form of physical decline (less cells and worse connections in your brain).

The ability to think is a deeper concept and goes much further than just the capacity to think fast and clear. It can be defined as the way to use experience and knowledge gained through the life course to come to deeper insights. The ability to think is not or much less connected to physical or even cognitive functions. By definition, the ability to think can increase over the life course, especially if you have experienced a lot and took the effort to gain knowledge. But not necessarily. There is also something which I call the wisdom paradox: young people are sometimes wiser than old people. The explanation is that those young have experienced more in their short lives and have already studied more than some their older fellow human beings who had more regular and superficial lives, mainly watching television in the evening.

But let's not be pessimistic and assume that most older people have gained some wisdom over the life course. Can old people use this ability to think for compensating some loss of physical functions? Maybe. I can think of not doing things that you better not do at a certain age. Especially men are vulnerable to the illusion that physical decline is something for others (I am no exception with my exhaustive biking up the mountain near Geneva this week on a sunny evening after work). Or to derive more pleasure from other things in life like reading and from the art of thinking itself. I think we need to explore this further and ask older people themselves to give us examples.

But how to compensate for the loss of cognitive functions that will have an impact on our ability to think? Memory loss is not something you enjoy and can compensate easily by doing other things in life. Fortunately, there are many new tools to help old people. LinkedIn wil help you remember the (names of) people you meet in your life, Outlook reminds you of your appointments and smart phones give you access to all information you need to have. While getting rid of the need to remember routine things in life, we can use our remaining brain power to really think when we are old. Well, hopefully.

Back to Hannah Arendt. She was a good philosopher but missed some important issues. Seldom I have seen a film where a woman was smoking that much. It is true that the dangers of smoking were less well known in her time, but a women with such an ability to think should have known better. Tobacco is evil and smoking is a banality. I am afraid that there are still many Eichmanns working in the tobacco industry.