A Pro-Thought Manifesto (I've had this lurking around in my file of half- written rants for some time. It came up in conversation today and someone expressed interest in reading it, so I thought perhaps it was time to polish it up and post it. I'm probably mostly preaching to the choir here, but I wanted to get it down in writing anyway.) I am, as any but my newest readers will not need to be told, a thoroughgoing computer geek. Some people loudly and vocally express dislike of computer geeks; being one myself, I naturally notice this when it happens around me, and occasionally try to fathom what it is they dislike. Some people, for example, seem to dislike computer geeks because they dislike computers in particular. That's fair enough; I don't have to like it, of course, but I can understand it. I dislike some other kinds of people on a similar basis: for example, aggressive sales pitches and ubiquitous advertising annoy me, and hence I'd be likely to feel a certain antipathy towards someone if I found out that those things were what they did for a living, or (even worse) for fun. But there's another reason for disliking geeks which I find a lot harder to forgive: as closely as I can tell, some people dislike geeks (of all stripes) not because of any specific attitude to their field, but essentially because they dislike the fact that geeks think about things for fun. You hear words like ‘sad’ bandied about with great abandon; you hear a veiled, and sometimes not so veiled, disapproval of anyone spending time sitting at a computer – or whatever – which they ‘ought’ to be spending drinking beer and watching TV. And it really makes me cross when people do this, or when they demonise the use of thought and reasoning in any other context. We have more than enough trouble in the world already due to people not thinking, so encouraging further failure or refusal to think seems to me to be at least misguided, and at worst culpable. I'm not saying that you have a moral duty to use your brain all the time (although I might well be persuadable that you have a duty to use it some of the time). I have nothing against leisure pursuits that don't involve thinking, or even that involve killing some of your brain cells; I indulge in them myself regularly. What I hate is people saying it's a bad thing that sometimes I do think for fun, or think about things I might otherwise do on autopilot; when people try to make it morally wrong, or legally wrong, or (most perniciously) socially unacceptable to use my brain. Another example: some people are terribly quick to throw around words like ‘over- analysing’. Now there is such a thing as over- analysing something: it's the point at which you're going round and round in circles trying to squeeze juice out where there is none, the point where you should have given up and admitted you don't know what something means and are not achieving anything by trying to figure it out. Deciding you're over- analysing is a last resort when you genuinely aren't getting anywhere; but some people seem to be keen to use the phrase pre- emptively as a means of encouraging people to deal with issues by means that don't involve thinking in the first place. So here is my personal Pro- Thought Manifesto, which I think to myself whenever I encounter this attitude: Every human being's birthright, the thing that sets us apart from other mammals, is a brain capable of thought and reasoning. The use of the brain for this purpose, in general, should be encouraged. Thinking is not a moral imperative, at least all the time. There is nothing wrong with choosing leisure activities that don't involve thought; you can't blame people for being too tired, too ill, too distracted or simply too stupid to think at any particular moment; it's not even easy to blame people for not wanting to think about particular things because they find it uncomfortable. The use of the brain should be seen as admirable and praiseworthy, but not in general an absolute duty. But if anyone discourages or disparages the use of the brain, this is a bad thing and should be vigorously argued against; and if anyone attempts to forcibly prevent people from using their brains, this is not to be tolerated. I have a brain. I like to use it for fun; I habitually use it in my day- to- day life; and I instinctively turn to it for help when I'm in difficult situations. That is the way I am; I feel strongly that it is a good way to be; and I will not be made to feel like a second- class citizen for it. OK, more of a rant than a manifesto, but it's the best I can do.