“Thinking is always in crisis.” Thus observes the narrator of Ian McEwan’s most recent novel, What We Can Know. Set in the year 2119, the novel focuses on its narrator-protagonist who teaches English literature at the British University of the South Downs. The proud British Isles have shrunk to an archipelago of minor islands during the “Inundation of 2042,” and the Oxbridge schools themselves drowned. Teaching students about our time, the early twenty-first century—a time of liberty and abandon, a time of denial—is, as the scholar in the novel observes, no easy feat: “The students had grown up with the consequences, heard their grandparents go on about it. The past was peopled by idiots. Big deal. The matter was dead.”

　　In other words, it will be hard in 2119 to make students care about knowledge and think, but so it is now. Thinking is always in crisis, and the prognosis is dire as we are confronted with two mutually reinforcing characteristics of this crisis, or two crises occurring at the same time. The first crisis is the way technology makes knowledge ubiquitous and thus devalues actual thinking. This will lead to increasing illiteracy, both culturally and literally, that will hollow out the idea of an active citizenry. Such a crisis would be easier to counter were it not for the second crisis: a general revolt against what I would term the thinking class.

　　The first crisis in and of thinking is rooted in an odd simultaneity: We live in a world drowning in information, facts, and factoids, a world in which everything can be found out instantaneously, and professors are told not to teach what and why, but focus on the how and what for. And yet, we are concurrently in a time in which knowledge has never been less valued, in which shortcuts supersede the acquisition of solid foundations.

　　In the name of teaching innovation and modern pedagogy, educators on all levels are scolded if they want to focus on basic skills and the dissemination of knowledge, so that they increasingly need to build on sand: in Germany, high school students often only read abridged and simplified versions of classics such as Goethe’s Faust. And it is not only the United States that is—as The Atlantic prophesied last year—“sliding toward illiteracy.” My native Switzerland, for example, also sees its reading comprehension scores in standardized tests continuously fall. Still, herds of professors nod along or refuse to pick a fight when they are time and again told that they should not evaluate knowledge and focus on creativity and critical thinking instead.

　　Leaving aside that uncritical thinking is barely deserving of the term, it has never been more urgent to properly ground students in the world of knowledge and demand that, irrespective of whether they are aiming for higher education or not, they master basic skills such as proper writing and reading. Both have never been more urgent for the very reason why many are questioning the need for it all. Why bother to learn proper grammar, punctuation, and syntax when Claude can turn even your laundry list into a poem? Why type when ChatGPT takes your notes? And why know, understand, or even think through anything when Claude Co. can relieve you of all the agony of searching for information, memorizing facts, and making sense of it all?

　　Companies are already reducing their intake of new employees from recent graduates or even laying off staff because the skills and knowledge people have honed over the years are being replaced by technology that could only be created by years of thinking and accumulating knowledge. And even intellectuals whose livelihoods depend on writing and thinking in public are questioning their purpose: Yascha Mounk predicted recently that the humanities are threatened by automation as Claude Co. produce highly readable papers on the history of political ideas. If Immanuel Kant’s fundamental question about the human condition was “What can we know?”, it has now seemingly been replaced by “Why know at all?” As McEwan’s narrator observes, the “humanities are always in crisis. I no longer believe this is an institutional matter—it’s in the nature of intellectual life, or of thought itself.” Indeed, lamentations about the end of thought and thinking are as old as the modern university, if not even older. Yet the humanities have proven more tenacious than their detractors would have liked, as they provided the orientation—and the thinking—needed for people to understand and weather political, societal, and technological upheavals. Therefore, it is all the more disappointing when intellectuals refuse to think through a crisis, but instead jump to the same conclusion embraced by those who would love to abolish liberal arts and humanities departments anyway. Mounk’s example above showed, as a wonderfully snarky journalist observed, how easily Claude and other AIs can present derivative work in a compelling manner—the kind of derivative work that requires knowledge and thinking to unveil it for what it is. The emperor’s new clothes have never been more in fashion. Consequently, it has never been more important that seasoned thinkers do what they claim their fame for and demonstrate the need for alert thinking.

　　This disconcerting simultaneity of ubiquitous knowledge, the devaluation of knowledge, and the decline of basic cognitive skills is to be conquered by—yes, an easy guess—thinking and the recognition that indeed the need to know is ever more important when people are tempted to outsource it. Kant’s famous opening line to “What Is Enlightenment?” resists a literal translation to English: man’s self-imposed immaturity is, in German, Unmündigkeit, a beautifully old-fashioned term that contains the word “Mund,” the mouth.

　　If we want to hold onto the semblance of a democratic regime, we need literacy to survive.

　　As German philosopher Wolfram Eilenberger points out, the term points to our capacity to use our voice, to voice our opinions and thoughts. By surrendering our thoughts to generative AI, we are not only trapping knowledge into an endless derivative cycle, into a cage of a recycled bricolage, but we are also receding into a state of self-imposed Unmündigkeit. To preserve our maturity, our Mündigkeit, and to empower future generations in the same way, we need a return to building solid cognitive foundations and fighting against the quicksand of shortcuts offered by AI. When thinking loses authority, it becomes indistinguishable from credentialism—and thus politically vulnerable.

　　For this to succeed, however, the second crisis of thinking needs to be addressed, a crisis that has been building over the last few decades and has been reshaping the political landscapes of most Western democracies. The rise of populism constitutes a revolt—not just against globalization and its disruptions, but also against those who flourish thanks to it. And those beneficiaries are the thinking class. Many will squirm at the term “thinking class” or the mere idea of “class” as such. But that is, at the end of the day, what most readers of this essay are part of. Others have called it “cognitive elite,” “the laptop class,” the entry-level to the Davos class, the Davoisie. Irrespective of their origin, members of the thinking class are at ease speaking English, their (my!) friends and colleagues are scattered around the globe, and despite different fields, backgrounds, et cetera, there is a sameness that bonds them.

　　Therefore, they value freedom of movement, the freedom to think, exchange, debate. In fact, the members of the thinking class tend to be the famous “anywheres” that David Goodhart described in his 2017 bestseller, The Road to Somewhere. And these “anywheres” are permanently at risk of losing touch with those who value their rootedness, who value being somewhere. Writer Philip Roth understood this before it became fashionable to write about it. In Exit Ghost, he placed a highly educated couple on a couch in Manhattan as they watch in utter disbelief the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2004:

　　For all their sharpness and articulateness and savoir-faire … they’d no idea who the great mass of Americans were, nor had they seen so clearly before that it was not those educated like themselves who would determine the country’s fate but the scores of millions unlike them and unknown to them who had given Bush a second chance.

　　Replace Bush with Donald Trump’s election in 2016 and his re-election in 2020—et voilà, similar scenes must have taken place in liberal households across the United States, as a Saturday Night Live skit suggested.

　　And it is the thinking class’s hubris and righteousness that endangers its very foundations. In December 2024, The Atlantic ran a cover story by David Brooks, “How the Ivy League Broke America.” Much of its diagnosis can be seen translated into the US policy that shocked the (liberal) academic public last year. Brooks observed that populist leaders understand how their working-class supporters “resent” the thinking class. “Populist leaders worldwide traffic in crude exaggerations, gross generalizations, and bald-faced lies,” he wrote, “all aimed at telling the educated class, in effect: Screw you and the epistemic regime you rode in on.”

　　Parts of said “epistemic regime” may deserve its demise, yet the cognitive foundations and the liberal arts will remain crucial to preserve the very maturity, Mündigkeit, that is needed to sustain a living democracy. The revolt against the thinking class makes it all the more challenging to achieve just that and overcome the first crisis in thinking. At long last, laptop workers need to question the very regime that allowed them to rise. No class has ever relinquished power easily, but democracy needs to rely on more than just diplomas.

　　In What We Can Know, the scholar-narrator is astutely aware of the fact that he is reliant on others who are unlike him: “It was the business of other people, of our frail civilization, to keep me sheltered and warm, hydrated and fed. We all had our specializations, our own particular talents. The others could rely on me for mine—for what?” McEwan’s protagonist does not have an answer, as he describes his work as “retrieving a lost poem and unhinging myself in the process.” Yet he is humble enough to recognize his shortcomings. Such humility would be a first step towards a more just order.

　　Consequently, the thinking class should not bemoan the rise of what the Wall Street Journal termed the “toolbelt generation” and instead applaud that a former plumber is now in charge of the Department of Homeland Security.

　　McEwan’s protagonist drily observes that “literacy will have to survive, at least for some.” But if we want to hold onto the semblance of a democratic regime, we need literacy to survive. For us all.