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

by Alan Jacobs

So in the past few years I’ve read many books about thinking, and while they offer varying and in some cases radically incompatible models of what thinking is, there’s one trait all of them share: they’re really depressing to read.

But he liked acting impulsively, and I believe he would rather have owned a lousy car than devoted research and planning to the task of purchasing one. (Verily, he had his reward.)

Daniel Kahneman summarized a lifetime of research into cognitive error in a big book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, and near the end of that book he came around to the really central question: “What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us?” To which he replies: “The short answer is that little can be achieved without a considerable investment of effort.”

This is why another psychologist who has researched thinking, Jonathan Haidt, uses a different set of terms when he’s describing essentially the same distinction: he thinks of intuitive thinking as an elephant, and conscious decision-making as the rider.

In particular I’m going to argue that we go astray when we think of our task primarily as “overcoming bias.” For me, the fundamental problem we have may best be described as an orientation of the will: we suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking.

Jason Fried, the creator of the popular project-management software Basecamp, tells a story about attending a conference and listening to a talk. He didn’t like the talk; he didn’t agree with the speaker’s point of view; as the talk went on he grew more agitated. When it was over, he rushed up to the speaker to express his disagreement. The speaker listened, and then said: “Give it five minutes.”

Why are people so puritanical about the Puritans? “Very simply,” Robinson writes, “it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.”

People who like accusing others of Puritanism have a fairly serious investment, then, in knowing as little as possible about actual Puritans. They are invested, for the moment anyway, in not thinking.

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,

And in such circumstances—let me add emphasis to Eliot’s conclusion—“when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”

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.

the phrase repugnant cultural other is one that we will have cause to employ in the pages to come. In fact, it will turn up so often that we’d best give it an initialism: RCO.

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.”

We’re probably all subject to what the literary critic Gary Saul Morson calls “backshadowing”—“foreshadowing after the fact,” that is, the temptation to believe that we can look into the past and discern some point at which the present became inevitable. (“I should have seen it coming!”)

Stories of forbidden knowledge come in many varieties, but in our time this is one of the more common: the tale of a community that provides security in exchange for thought, and the courageous member of that community who, daring to think, sacrifices the security.

Perhaps the canonical example today is Lois Lowry’s The Giver, that favorite of middle school teachers everywhere, with its rather blunt leading metaphor of moving from the monochromaticism of the protagonist’s little world to the Technicolor variety of the world outside.

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.”

While we’re clearing away misconceptions about thinking, let’s tackle another pervasive one: that in order to think well, one must be strictly rational, and being rational requires the suppression of all feelings.

in 1826, when Mill was twenty years old, that he confronted what he called “a crisis in my mental history.” (The attentive reader will note that I used a parallel phrase in describing Megan Phelps-Roper.) Mill sums up his crisis in this way: It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.

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:

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.

And it may very well happen that if the proper feelings are not present and imaginatively active, then you will not even bother to do the analysis that would reveal unmistakable injustice. If the feelings are not cultivated the analytical faculties might not function at all.

But that’s because Gladwell, like many of us, seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do, they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity (like the rest of us) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts, and doing so in a way that gives them delight. We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight. (In much the same way we enjoy watching the flight of birds, especially big birds of prey, associating such flying with freedom even though birds actually fly from necessity: they need to eat. And yet we have no interest in watching members of our own species drive to McDonald’s.)

And anyway: when Wilt shot free throws underhanded, he was the most unstoppable force the game of basketball had ever seen; then, when he returned to the conventional method he was…still the most unstoppable force the game had ever seen. You could say, then, that he gave up little in his workplace in order to create potentially more interesting opportunities for himself in an arena that meant more to him. This kind of decision making may be ethically dubious, but it’s anything but irrational.

But Frank, like Gladwell, conceives of only one relevant good to be sought: if in Gladwell’s tale of Wilt Chamberlain the only excellence that matters is workplace excellence, for Frank the only real “interests” that people have are financial interests. Both writers overlook relational goods.

My point is simply that an account of rational thinking, and a resulting set of judgments about irrational thinking, that can’t account for the power and the value of relational goods is a deeply impoverished model of rationality.

This is thinking: the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. We just need to learn how to be more aware, how to act more responsibly.

And changing your mind could yield a different you. But the whole ethos of the YPU, in Libresco’s experience, was built around the willingness to expose yourself to just such a risk. To be “broken on the floor” was a token of good faith and an indication of a willingness not just to accept but to live out the values of the community.

A willingness to be “broken on the floor,” for example, is in itself a testimony to belief that the people you’re debating are decent people who don’t want to harm or manipulate you—whereas if you don’t trust people you’re unlikely to allow them anything like a “victory” over you. This suggests that the problem of belonging and not-belonging, affiliation and separation, is central to the task of learning how to think.

Haidt talks a lot about how our moral intuitions accomplish two things: they bind and they blind.

So the question remains: What triggers the formation of a “moral matrix” that becomes for a given person the narrative according to which everything and everyone else is judged?

Sometimes groups of people with no formal titles or authority are the ones who determine how the organization works. They form its Inner Ring.

Lewis does not think that any of his audience will be surprised to hear of this phenomenon; but he thinks that some may be surprised when he goes on to make this claim: “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 is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

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.

In “The Inner Ring” Lewis portrays this group affiliation in the darkest of terms. That’s because he’s warning people about its dangers, which is important. But there are healthier kinds of group affiliation, and one of the primary ways we can tell the difference between an unhealthy Inner Ring and a healthy community is by their attitudes toward thinking.

Hoffer goes on to make the incisive point that “the loyalty of the true believer is to the whole—the church, party, nation—and not to his fellow true believer.”

The genuine community is open to thinking and questioning, so long as those thoughts and questions come from people of goodwill.

Lewis explains: How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself….If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.

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.

These people, again, are not necessarily like-minded, but they are temperamentally disposed to openness and have habits of listening—and in that sense are wonderfully like-hearted.

ASSESSING YOUR INVESTMENTS (AND YOUR LEVELS OF OPTIMISM) In trying to make such a distinction, the first thing that’s required, as Socrates told us long ago, is a bit of self-knowledge. And the variety of self-knowledge that’s especially valuable here is knowledge of your own personal investments.

If Roger Scruton is right in his book The Uses of Pessimism, then one of the impediments to genuine membership is what he calls “unscrupulous optimism.” This attitude—it’s one of the modes of Hoffer’s True Believing—is based on the belief that “the difficulties and disorders of humankind can be overcome by some large-scale adjustment: it suffices to devise a new arrangement, a new system, and people will be released from their temporary prison into a realm of success.”

Scruton believes that if we’re less concerned with ruling the world than with having a secure place to enjoy the “goods of social affection,” then we’ll be more likely to treat generously others who want to enjoy those same goods, even if those people are very different from us in both belief and practice.

Such counsel leaves the world as it is, and disarms demands for justice. So for those who speak on behalf of the oppressed or marginalized, strong solidarity is far more important than “keeping an open mind” or “trying to understand the other side” or even being generous to people who are unlike you.

If we are willing to grant, at the outset, that the people we’re debating agree about ends—that they want a healthy and prosperous society in which all people can flourish—then we can converse with them, we can see ourselves as genuine members of a community.

Here we might recall the “unscrupulousness,” the headlong rush forward, of the optimists Roger Scruton critiques. When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed, once and for all, then people who don’t share your optimism, or who do share it but invest it in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia.

One of my consistent themes over the years—one I will return to in this book—has been the importance of acting politically with the awareness that people who agree with you won’t always be in charge.

proceduralism: an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules, because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order.

Such is the power of sheer animus: it disables our ethical and our practical judgment.