I teach writing to people in business and public life, and I like to confront them with the question: how can you know what you think until you’ve written it? It’s an old point, versions of which have variously been attributed to EM Forster, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and, of course, Winston Churchill.

For me, it’s also a great personal truth. On more than one occasion I’ve set off down a path of argument and found that by the end of the article I’ve arrived at the opposing view. Sometimes I start typing without knowing what I want to say – it’s the process, the chiselling, the dead ends, the self-excavation, that reveal and sharpen. Writing at some length is a kind of test: to succeed, you must challenge your own prejudices and assumptions, interrogate alternative views, then make choices which, while no doubt subjective, are hopefully logical, coherent and publicly defensible. It can be hard going, but otherwise you’re doing it wrong.

It’s an entirely different experience to social media’s glib 140-character spasms of anger, or the heated pub argument, or even the short, sharp letter to the editor. The essay or the paper or the book, if it’s to hold up under scrutiny, requires intellectual scaffolding.

This is why I’m in favour of politicians who write (although one might draw the line at Jeffrey Archer). The type was more common in the past, when public representatives were expected to have a hinterland: books spilled out of the irrepressible Churchill, Benjamin Disraeli authored some very fine state-of-the-nation novels, Richard Crossman, Michael Foot and Ian Gilmour were eminent men of letters. Today, for every Rachel Reeves, Jesse Norman, Mike Russell or Adam Tomkins who engages with ideas at their deepest level, there are an exponential number of deal-makers with an eye for the main chance and sloganising lefties for whom literature starts and ends with The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist. There is, too often, a shallow tribalism in our politics that is dressed up as profundity. It does not reflect well on us.

So whatever your view of Ruth Davidson or her party’s policies, it’s worth taking a moment to track down and read the 3,000-word article she published at the weekend on the website UnHerd. Titled "Conservatives must reboot capitalism", it’s a serious piece of writing and thinking that wrestles with one of the greatest challenges currently facing us. Indeed, if it weren’t for the black hole that is Brexit, the redrafting of the country’s economic contract would be our most prominent debate. It certainly should be.

Through the choices she makes in her writing, Ms Davidson reveals herself. She praises Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, which gives the lie to claims he was some kind of rabid proto-Thatcherite: "He argued that far from being purely self-interested, we care about the well-being of others, for no reason beyond the simple pleasure we take from their evident happiness. What Smith knew – and what we continually need reminded of – is that people are not pieces on a chess board, to be moved around by outside forces."

She adds that Smith was "a great Scottish humanist – he saw us for the individuals that we are. From this basic insight, flowed everything: his liberal outlook on life, his practicality, his sense of justice and his recognition that markets have to operate with consent."

Then comes her central insight. "In the UK, in 2017, that consent is crumbling. We stand at a moment in time suspended between what has gone before and that which is to come. The conclusion of the industrial revolution and the start of the technological one. That second when breath is caught, before we exhale."

I suspect Davidson would admit that her critique of the challenges is stronger than her suggested remedies, but she is hardly alone in that. It’s a feature of the times that the difficult questions facing Western economies far outnumber the available answers.

These moments of transition are unsettling, even frightening. As the 19th century Russian socialist thinker Alexander Herzen put it: "At first sight, there is much that is still normal; things run smoothly, judges judge, the churches are open, the stock exchange hums with activity, armies manoeuvre, palaces blaze with light, but the soul of life has fled, everyone is uneasy at heart, death is at our elbow, and, in reality, nothing goes well… the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of one and the birth of the other much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass." Think Trump, Corbyn, Farage, Le Pen and Brexit.

If we’re to find those elusive answers, we must provide the space to think – indeed, we must demand those elected to lead think harder. A simplistic resort to ideology rarely works. The empty promises of Jeremy Corbyn that so appealed to the young in the recent general election are quickly being exposed as fraudulent: he will not write off student debt, nor will he fight to keep Britain in the single market after Brexit, and his views on immigration are verging on unpleasant. The SNP’s inability so far to prioritise good public policy over independence at any cost has stultified our national debate.

Scotland was the cradle of the Enlightenment, once. That was the product of men having the will and the freedom to challenge received wisdom and lazy tropes, to push the boundaries, to see the possibilities of a world beyond the one that existed. We may be a lesser nation these days, but the technological revolution contains challenges and opportunities that require a similarly courageous mindset.

We’re not there yet, but the more we allow and indeed encourage people of differing and even incompatible views to think, to go further, without demonising them for doing so, the closer we will get. This is not a time for chancers or ranters. The 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi had it right: "Raise your words, not voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder."