The 12th century French abbot and mystic, Bernard of Clairvaux, once wrote, "Reading without thinking makes you dull; thinking without reading goes astray."
All these centuries later, his words still ring true. If we read without thinking about the words we are taking in, if we accept them uncritically, without really thinking about what we are reading, we are not doing justice to them. I am guilty of this at times - when I have a new book, I tear through it at a rate of knots, desperate to find out what happens next. But I am not savouring each word, each sentence, each paragraph, let alone thinking about their deeper meaning. Which is doing an injustice to the author, who will have chosen each word carefully.... It is also likely that we will miss the deeper meaning of the words, if any.
Or not. Many of the posts on social media are dashed out without thinking at all about the impact they might have on those who read them. Or worse, in the sure and certain knowledge that they will upset or inflame people. Which is equally as bad.
On the other side of the coin, thinking without reading can be equally dangerous. Our minds can be seized by an idea and we rush off and do something impulsive as a result. Which may be unwise, or even dangerous. When we are presented with a new idea, it is our duty to receive it critically, to fact-check it, and to read around it. Many illustrations of this are in the popular health TV series Dr Xand's Con or Cure, which features people who have been taken in by posts on social media which promise instant cures for their ills. Viewers are warned to do their research before ordering anything, rather than relying on the website's own claims. I tested this for myself last night - a post popped up on Facebook for some sleep patches, claiming that using them results in 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep every night. I remembered what they had advised on the programme, and checked the product on Trust Pilot. To find that 93% of the reviews were one star ones.
And the moral of the story is that we need to both think and read critically, so that we are able to respond wisely and with judgement to both thoughts and written material.