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

by Alan Jacobs

those who believe that they are impeccably thoughtful turn out to be some of the worst offenders against good sense.*1

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?

in Refutation Mode there is no listening. Moreover, when there is no listening there is no thinking.

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved”—

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.

whoever it was who first said that happiness is something one cannot aim straight at, but rather can achieve only by focusing on other good things, could have said it about thinking and been equally correct.

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,

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.

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.”

When we believe something to be true, we tend also to see the very process of arriving at it as clear and objective, and therefore the kind of thing we can achieve on our own; when we hold that a given notion is false, we ascribe belief in it to some unfortunate wrong turning, usually taken because an inquirer was led astray, like Hansel and Gretel being tempted into the oven by a wicked witch.

the correctness of the conclusion would not erase the falsity of the premises.

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.

The whole person must be engaged, all the faculties present and accounted for, in order for real thinking to take place.

just as we do not “think for ourselves” but rather think with others, so too we think in active feeling response to the world, and in constant relation to others.

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.

The genuine community is open to thinking and questioning, so long as those thoughts and questions come from people of goodwill.*5

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.

isolation is deadly,

there are ways to be dishonest that fall short of actual lying. You can stress certain points more than you believe, in your heart of hearts, they really deserve; you can gently steer your mind away from genuine convictions that might prove too controversial.

Prudence doesn’t mean being uncertain about what’s right; it means being scrupulous about finding the best means to get there, and it leads us to seek allies, however imperfect, in preference to making enemies. And all this matters if we want to think well. As the Bible says, “The simple inherit folly: but the prudent are crowned with knowledge.”

their desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup.

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.

seek out the best—the smartest, most sensible, most fair-minded—representatives of the positions you disagree with.

Being around those people forces me to confront certain truths about myself that I would rather avoid;

our repulsion glands don’t secrete their chemical cocktails with complete reliability: sometimes we’re rightly repulsed; sometimes we’re repulsed unnecessarily, and can learn to get over 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

reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.

Learning to feel as we should is enormously helpful for learning to think as we should.

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.

By reading, a man already having some wisdom can gain far more; but it is equally true that reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.

As Doctor Cuticle says to some young naval surgeons in Melville’s White-Jacket, “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

keywords have a tendency to become parasitic: they enter the mind and displace thought.

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 words people use to describe themselves become a kind of currency, as Hobbes might put it, and a way to make those who disagree more completely Other.

Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure; but peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.

we always and inevitably strive to understand one thing in relation to another thing that we already know.

The most dangerous metaphors for us are the ones that cease to be recognizable as metaphors.

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.

the “other words” people use to summarize an opponent’s argument grossly distort or even invert that argument.*13

the key to playing a really nasty character, and saying and doing the really nasty things that make up that character, is to realize that in different circumstances you could be that person.

It’s a clever twist on the “give it five minutes” rule: you can speak right away, but you have to speak someone else’s thoughts, and for that time forgo advocating for your own.

the life of the mind always requires triage, the sorting of the valuable from the less valuable, the usable from the unusable—and in conditions of information overload we start looking for reasons to rule things out.

In investigating the lumpings that have shaped societies past and present, we should, I believe, be charitable toward those who merely inherited the classifications that were dominant in their own times. But we should be less patient with those, like Calhoun and Sanger, who pressed to enforce their preferred categories, to encode them in law and make them permanent.

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.

About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.

when the mind is governed by properly settled convictions, only then can it be truly nourished.

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.*2

we need to be able to make reliable assessments about the state of our knowledge, in such a way that when necessary we can hold back from taking any position until we learn more;