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.

the part that generates our immediate intuitions, “is not readily educable.

“intuitive thinking”: this is the “fast” kind. It’s what provides us with snap judgments, instantaneous reads on a given situation, strong predispositions toward approving some ideas and disapproving others.

We go through life basically running System 1; System 2 kicks in only when we perceive a problem,

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. 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?

The speaker listened, and then said: “Give it five minutes.”

Fried had effectively stopped listening: he had heard something he didn’t agree with and immediately entered Refutation Mode—and in Refutation Mode there is no listening.

“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.”

The word doesn’t have any meaning as such, certainly not any historical validity; it’s more like the password to get into the clubhouse.

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, in the currency of likes, faves, followers, and friends? And to acquire instantaneously?

If you want to think, then you are going to have to shrink that “hypertrophic instinct for consensus.”

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

the phrase repugnant cultural other is one that we will have cause to employ in the pages to come.

I may all too easily forget that political and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience.

When I asked the doctor what treatment he thought best, he replied, “The diagnosis is the treatment. Now that you know you don’t have a life-threatening illness, you won’t worry so much, and less stress in your mind will mean less stress on your chest muscles. That’ll give them a chance to heal.”

Oblique Strategies

In a similar way, sometimes you can get better at thinking only by turning your attention to matters other than thinking.

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.

Megan Phelps-Roper didn’t start “thinking for herself”—she started thinking with different people. 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.”

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.

Thinking independently, solitarily, “for ourselves,” is not an option.

the younger Mill in his misery came to see was the disturbing truth that “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.”

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.

If the feelings are not cultivated the analytical faculties might not function at all.

So 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. Or we should.

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.

This suggests that the problem of belonging and not-belonging, affiliation and separation, is central to the task of learning how to think.

Central to his argument is this point: “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.

“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.

For some, the attraction of the new people will be that they seem smart; for others, that they’re rich, or beautiful. For still others being radically different, socially or religiously or politically, from one’s immensely annoying family may be key.

that confirm our group identity and, equally important, confirm the nastiness of those who are Outside, who are Not Us.

Knowing themselves continually watched, the faithful strive to escape suspicion by adhering zealously to prescribed behavior and opinion. Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith.

If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.

Each is accepted for his own distinctive contribution to the group: if it were less distinctive it would be less valuable.

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.

I can hear a little voice piping from the deep recesses of my skull: Did you speak your heart’s truth? Or did you merely seek to please? Self-knowledge is hard.

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.

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.

a questioning of your preferred means can look like indifference toward your most treasured ends.

there can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.

prudence,” a virtue that, like many virtues, is cultivated largely by avoiding certain vices:

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.

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

“the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

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

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.

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.