How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

This is what thinking is: not the decision itself but what goes into the decision, the consideration, the assessment. It’s testing your own responses and weighing the available evidence; it’s grasping, as best you can and with all available and relevant senses, what is, and it’s also speculating, as carefully and responsibly as you can, about what might be. And it’s knowing when not to go it alone, and whom you should ask for help.

Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?

No social-media service I know of enforces a waiting period before responding, though Gmail allows you to set a delay in sending emails, a delay during which you can change your mind and “unsend.” However, the maximum delay allowed is thirty seconds. (Twenty-four hours might be more useful.)*3

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved”—especially in an online environment where the social approval of one’s attitudes is so much easier to acquire, in the currency of likes, faves, followers, and friends? And to acquire instantaneously?

when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”*5

People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified—and wrathful when it is thwarted.

The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

This is a profoundly unhealthy situation. It’s unhealthy because it prevents us from recognizing others as our neighbors—even when they are quite literally our neighbors. If I’m consumed by this belief that that person over there is both Other and Repugnant, I may never discover that my favorite television program is also his favorite television program; that we like some of the same books, though not for precisely the same reasons; that we both know what it’s like to nurse a loved one through a long illness. All of which is to say that I may all too easily forget that political and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience. The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”

To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.

To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”

Similarly, people in my line of work always say that we want to promote “critical thinking”—but really we want our students to think critically only about what they’ve learned at home and in church, not about what they learn from us.*4

it should remind us that all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons, and that whatever we think we know, whether we’re right or wrong, arises from our interactions with other human beings.

Mill’s defense of the feelings and the imagination has two components. The first is that bringing analytical power to bear on a problem is not enough, especially if one’s goal is to make the world a better place. Rather, one must have a certain kind of character: one must be a certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclination to take the products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure not just of thought but also of feelings that, when joined to thought, can produce meaningful action.

The second component is this: when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really like. To have your feelings moved by the beauty of a landscape is to respond to that landscape in the way that it deserves; to have your feelings moved in a very different direction by the sight of people living in abject poverty is to respond to that situation in the way that it deserves.

The whole person must be engaged, all the faculties present and accounted for, in order for real thinking to take place. Indeed, this for Mill is what it means to have character: to be fully alive in all your parts and therefore ready to perceive the world as it is—and to act responsibly toward it.

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.”

“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.” “Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.”

“I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many

men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.”

And it is important for young people to know of the force of this desire because “of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who ...

“you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.”*3

This, I think, is how our “moral matrices,” as Haidt calls them, are formed: we respond to the irresistible draw of belonging to a group of people whom we happen to encounter and happen to find immensely attractive. We may be acting under the influence of strong genetic predispositions, but how those dispositions are activated seems largely to be a matter of what particular people one happens to bump into and when.

But in any case, once we are drawn in, and allowed in, once we’re part of the Inner Ring, we maintain our status in part by coming up with those post hoc rationalizations that confirm our group identity and, equally important, confirm the nastiness of those who are Outside, who are Not Us.

The only real remedy for the dangers of false belonging is the true belonging to, true membership in, a fellowship of people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted.

For a twenty-first-century person with a smartphone as well as for the prehistoric hunter-gatherer on the savanna, isolation is deadly, while genuine solidarity is life-giving. The problem that arises for us, as opposed to our hunter-gatherer forebears, is the need to distinguish between “genuine solidarity” and participation in an Inner Ring.

But every good thing can be taken too far. And where is the line that separates (a) matching my writing to my audience from (b) telling people what they want to hear so that I can get into the pages of an influential magazine? I didn’t know where the line was—I still don’t know where the line is—but I know it exists.

But when Coates makes a “case for reparations,” that’s a matter of national public policy, which means that, though solidarity with the victims of injustice is an indispensable driver of meaningful political action, solidarity is not enough: it must be supplemented by a colder-eyed look at what particular strategies and tactics are most likely to realize the desired end.

And that’s when Alexander realized that “if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it’s the Red Tribe.” The real outgroup, for us, is the person next door.*2

That is, many Americans are happy to treat other people unfairly if those other people belong to the alien Tribe. And—this is perhaps the most telling and troubling finding of all—their desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup.

People who can’t stand one another will form powerful alliances if by doing so they can thwart their ideological enemies—and they will pursue that thwarting with a vigor and resourcefulness that would arouse Napoleon’s envy—and with a relentlessness that might well make him quail.

Over the years, I’ve had to acknowledge that some of the people whose views on education appall me are more devoted to their students than I am to mine; and that some of the people whose theological positions strike me as immensely damaging to the health of the church are nevertheless more prayerful and charitable, more Christlike, than I will ever be. This is immensely disconcerting, even when it doesn’t mean that those people are right about those matters we disagree on. Being around those people forces me to confront certain truths about myself that I would rather avoid; and that alone is reason to seek every means possible to constrain the energies of animus.

And yet all of us have been wrong. People you love and admire above all others have been wrong, and you can give plenty of examples of their wrongnesses if you want. Yet you don’t attribute those errors to pathology. You don’t place those people in what Hillary Clinton notoriously called the “basket of deplorables.” Why not?

“Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.”

Many of the tensions that afflict social media arise from incompatible assumptions about what degree of intimacy is in effect in any particular conversational exchange—the sea lion problem, we might call it.

Technologies of communication that allow us to overcome the distances of space also allow us to neglect the common humanity we share with the people we now find inhabiting our world. For every Megan Phelps-Roper, for whom digital technologies are the means of discovering humanity in unexpected places, there seem to be a hundred people who use those same technologies to maintain the Repugnant Cultural Otherness of those with erroneous beliefs.

“the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings…when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives,” and how this discovery led him to a new position: “The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.”

What System 1 does for us is to provide us with a repertoire of biases, biases that reduce the decision-making load on our conscious brains.

We simply would not be able to navigate through life without these biases, these prejudices—the cognitive demands of having to assess every single situation would be so great as to paralyze us. That’s why the English essayist William Hazlitt wrote, “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life. Reason may play the critic, and correct certain errors afterwards; but if we were to wait for its formal and absolute decisions in the shifting and multifarious combinations of human affairs, the world would stand still.”

So we need the biases, the emotional predispositions, to relieve that cognitive load. We just want them to be the right ones. As a wise man once said, one of the key tasks of critical reflection is to distinguish the true prejudices by which we understand from the false ones by which we misunderstand.*11

To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world, which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices. These best people will provide for you models of how to treat those who disagree with them:

“A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.”*2 (Science here means “disciplined knowledge.”)

#intersectionality is more of a rallying cry. It’s shorthand for an argument that begins with one key insight: that someone who belongs to more than one oppressed or marginalized group—a black lesbian, for instance—experiences such oppression or marginalization in a particularly intensified way thanks to the “intersection” of those social forces. To call attention to intersectionality with a hashtag is to remind people of that intensification, but also, often, to suggest that people who belong to various marginalized groups need to see their cause as a common one, to focus on the points at which their experiences intersect.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using such keywords—indeed, they’re necessary. In any gathering where human beings communicate with one another, some beliefs or positions will be taken for granted: we cannot and need not justify everything we think, before every audience, by arguing from first principles. But keywords have a tendency to become parasitic: they enter the mind and displace thought.

We fixate so immovably on this notion of argument as war in part because human beings, generally speaking, are insanely competitive about everything; but also because in many arguments there truly is something to be lost, and most often what’s under threat is social affiliation.

Because there are many situations in which we lose something of our humanity by militarizing discussion and debate; and we lose something of our humanity by dehumanizing our interlocutors. When people cease to be people because they are, to us, merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate, then we, in our zeal to win, have sacrificed empathy: we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires, principles, fears. And that is a great price to pay for supposed “victory” in debate.

the making of analogies is intrinsic to thinking, and we always and inevitably strive to understand one thing in relation to another thing that we already know.

in search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we’re in the presence of like-minded people, we come to rely on keywords, and then metaphors, and then myths—and at every stage habits become more deeply ingrained in us, habits that inhibit our ability to think. We can only hope that there are strategies by which we might counteract the force of those habits—and develop new and better ones.

We use these heuristics, these strategies of simplification, all the time; we just don’t like them used on us. We don’t want our lives summarized with an acronym, or our deaths with a bitterly ironic joke. We’re funny that way. We don’t like our distinctiveness, our me-ness, compromised or ignored.

we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not always be what it is, or seems to be, today.

Our social taxonomies are useful, but if we think of them as something more than that, if we employ them to enforce strict separation between one person and another, if we treat them as solid and impermeable barriers that make mutual understanding impossible, they serve us poorly. Our age is so dedicated to its various lumpings that it has, I think, lost sight of these dangers, and of the possibilities that may be found in judicious contemplation of Terence’s wise statement.