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

by Alan Jacobs

The task of this chapter is to suggest ways of recognizing the power of animus and strategies for overcoming it. One of the classic ways to do this is to seek out the best—the smartest, most sensible, most fair-minded—representatives of the positions you disagree with.

(For instance, there is zero evidence that Barack Obama is a Muslim and a great deal of evidence that he isn’t, but the secret-Muslim theory is possible in a way the no-Holocaust theory is not.)

So Lewis gives this popular argumentative strategy—“assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error”—a name: Bulverism.

A valuable tool for understanding this situation is a concept introduced by Christopher Alexander et al. in their seminal book A Pattern Language, which explores the social contexts of architecture and more generally the design of spaces. The concept is intimacy gradients. 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.

We might recall here Roger Scruton’s commendation of taking “a negotiating posture towards the other”—to do that, I think, is to cease to see a person as “the other” but rather as “my neighbor.” And when you do that, it becomes harder to Bulverize that person, to treat him or her as so obviously wrong that no debate is required, only mockery.

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. These biases aren’t infallible, but they provide what Kahneman calls useful “heuristics”: they’re right often enough that it makes sense to follow them and not to try to override them without some good reason

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.”

G. K. Chesterton wrote, “If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

The temptation to overvalue words is increased by the role that words play in binding people socially.

The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest some alternative way of thinking about what argument is—It’s an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It’s a means of clarifying our views—you’re almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches.

If we look more closely at the argument-as-war metaphor, we’ll see that it depends on a habit of mind that is lodged very deep in our consciousness: the habit of dichotomizing.

For Gould, the real intellectual work begins when you realize that “for reasons that seem to transcend cultural peculiarities, and may lie deep within the architecture of the human mind, we construct our descriptive taxonomies and tell our explanatory stories as dichotomies, or contrasts between inherently distinct and logically opposite alternatives.” That is, we have an inbuilt and powerful disposition toward dichotomizing—but one that we don’t have to obey.

But we have to go on to say that the attempt is a facile one. The real story will be far more complicated, and not to be grasped by replacing a fictitious polarity with an equally fictitious unity. Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure; but peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.

The oft-stated view of the literary and legal theorist Stanley Fish is that whenever we disagree we do so from different, and irreconcilable, premises.

This kind of thing is closely related to the building of a straw man. The straw man is an evidently stupid argument that no one actually holds: refuting the ridiculous straw-man argument is easier than refuting the argument that someone actually made, so up in flames goes the figure of straw.

Robin Sloan, author of the wonderful novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, has described attending debates sponsored by the Long Now Foundation. He was struck by the debate format, which, he says, is “nothing like the showdowns on cable news or the debates in election season.” There are two debaters, Alice and Bob. Alice takes the podium, makes her argument. Then Bob takes her place, but before he can present his counter-argument, he must summarize Alice’s argument to her satisfaction—a demonstration of respect and good faith. Only when Alice agrees that Bob has got it right is he permitted to proceed with his own argument—and then, when he’s finished, Alice must summarize it to his satisfaction.

Robin Sloan’s post on the Long Now debates draws together many of the themes of this chapter, indeed of this whole book. I want to expand now on two of his metaphors.

The first is “method acting.” The method actor tries to become the character she is to portray, to work her way into that alien sensibility.

Sloan’s second metaphor is “dual booting,” which means having two operating systems, say Windows and Linux, installed on the same computer, so that you can use the computer with either one or the other.

Charles Darwin thought often about this problem, and commented in a letter that taxonomists tend to have strong tendencies in one direction or the other. The ones who like to put organisms in existing categories he called “lumpers”; the ones who like to create new categories he called “splitters.”

It turns out that the relevant taxonomic opposition here is not between man and animal; it is between the powerful and the powerless.

But here I think we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view.

So let me conclude this chapter with a celebration of splitting—of the disciplined, principled preference for rejecting categories whenever we discern them at work.

There’s a famous and often-told story about the great economist John Maynard Keynes: once, when accused of having flip-flopped on some policy issue, Keynes acerbically replied, “When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?”

Tommy Lasorda, the onetime Los Angeles Dodgers manager, used to say that managing players was like holding a bird in your hands: grip it too firmly and you crush it, too loosely and it escapes and flies away. In the life of thought, holding a position is like that: there’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity. We don’t want to be paralyzed by indecision or indifference, but like the apocryphal Keynes, we want to have the mental flexibility and honesty to adjust our views accordingly when the facts change.

In the laboratory you can and should wait to announce your findings until the evidence is all in and has been carefully assessed, following the best protocols of double-blind testing; but in many arenas of human life, including the political, it’s not possible to do any of those things. We must muddle along as best we can, and we must always be honest with ourselves about the muddling, and not pretend that the evidence is more conclusive than it really is. As I’ve said before: Thinking is hard.

If we all need, in good Aristotelian golden mean fashion, to steer virtuously between the vicious extremes of rigidity and flaccidity, we should engage in the preparatory exercise of discerning which of those extremes we’re more prone to.

Economists speak of sunk costs as investments in a particular project that cannot be recovered, and some of them have pointed out that sunk costs have a disproportionate influence on decision making. The more people have invested in a particular project, the more reluctant they are to abandon it,

all-too-common reaction to an awareness of sunk costs, what the scholars call “escalation of commitment.”

Fundamentally, for Hoffer, mass movements are a psychological phenomenon—however many roots they may have in particular cultural and political circumstances.

The “true believer” of Hoffer’s title is someone who belongs not to the few but to the many, someone who strives to bring the entire group (the church, the nation, the world even) within the grip of one narrative, the force of one body of belief, the authority of one charismatic Leader.

useful definition of fanaticism: No matter what happens, it proves my point. That is, true believers’ beliefs are not falsifiable: everything can be incorporated into the system—and indeed, the more costs true believers have sunk into the system, the more determined and resourceful they will be.

You can know whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup.

“Authority and American Usage” is funny, endlessly digressive, festooned not just with footnotes but also with footnotes to footnotes, and secretly concerned with profound moral questions. Which is to say, it’s anything but a “review” in any normal sense of the term. And exploring it turns out to be a vital exercise for anyone who wants to think about thinking—especially if that anyone’s ultimate purpose is to think better.

“Politically redemptive” is a strong phrase, but Wallace really means it. He thinks Garner is a kind of “genius” because he has found a way to say that certain matters about which most people are indifferent are in fact extremely important, and that he (Garner) has the right and proper understanding of those matters, and that we all should follow his advice—and to do all this without sounding like a condescending jerk. Without sounding snooty, we might say. For Wallace this tone marks Garner’s Dictionary as an effective book, yes, but still more as a triumph of “the Democratic Spirit.”

Wallace thinks Garner does this by “recast[ing] the Prescriptivist’s persona: the author presents himself not as a cop or a judge but as more like a doctor or lawyer”—someone with demonstrated professional expertise that you’re free to listen to or ignore (though with the silent addition if you choose the latter: “Hey, it’s your funeral”).

A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity—you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

What has he failed to learn? That navigating the social world (especially in a democratic society) requires the ability to code-switch. The little A+ SNOOTlet is actually in the same dialectal position as the class’s “slow” kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t or bringed. Exactly the same position. One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,” the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and another with T-ball coaches and so on.

this failure is essentially an ethical failure. It is the failure to recognize other dialects, other contexts, other people, as having value that needs to be respected—

And once your RCO becomes not so O and therefore somewhat less R, you might come to realize that, with a different turn of Fortune’s wheel, there you could have been also.

Better to follow the principle articulated by W. H. Auden: “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”

I just want to emphasize, here at the end, that you won’t profit from this book if you treat it as offering only a set of techniques. You have to be a certain kind of person to make this book work for you: the kind of person who, at least some of the time, cares more about working toward the truth than about one’s current social position.

To cease thinking, as Thomas Aquinas explained, is an act either of despair—“I can’t go any further”—or of presumption—“I need not go any further.”*2 What is needed for the life of thinking is hope: hope of knowing more, understanding more, being more than we currently are.

People make such checklists for themselves only when forced by experience into intellectual humility; proud people don’t want to use them. But once those same proud people are forced to use them they acquire a dose of that very humility,

The Thinking Person’s Checklist 1. When faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said, give it five minutes. Take a walk, or weed the garden, or chop some vegetables. Get your body involved: your body knows the rhythms to live by, and if your mind falls into your body’s rhythm, you’ll have a better chance of thinking. 2. Value learning over debating. Don’t “talk for victory.” 3. As best you can, online and off, avoid the people who fan flames. 4. Remember that you don’t have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness. 5. If you do have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness, or else lose your status in your community, then you should realize that it’s not a community but rather an Inner Ring. 6. Gravitate as best you can, in every way you can, toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity. 7. Seek out the best and fairest-minded of people whose views you disagree with. Listen to them for a time without responding. Whatever they say, think it over. 8. Patiently, and as honestly as you can, assess your repugnances. 9. Sometimes the “ick factor” is telling; sometimes it’s a distraction from what matters. 10. Beware of metaphors and myths that do too much heavy cognitive lifting; notice what your “terministic screens” are directing your attention to—and what they’re directing your attention away f...