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

by Alan Jacobs

Here again C. S. Lewis comes to our aid. In a comical passage from a serious essay, he imagines one Ezekiel Bulver, “one of the makers of the Twentieth Century,” whose great achievement was the uncovering of this great and lasting truth: “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.”

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.

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

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.

reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.

joke about a man who is sent to prison, and discovers that his fellow prisoners have a habit of saying numbers to one another—“Four!” “Seventeen!”—and then laughing uproariously. When he asks what’s going on his neighbor explains that they pass the time by telling jokes, but they’ve all been there so long, and with a limited repertoire of jokes, that they’ve found it easier to number the jokes and just call out the numbers. This makes sense to the new prisoner, so after a few moments of silence he says, “Eleven!” But no one laughs. He turns to his neighbor in puzzlement, and the neighbor shrugs and says, “It’s how you tell it.”

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

A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine.

deeply embedded metaphors in our common discourse, the one that identifies argument as a form of warfare.

what argument is—It’s an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It’s a means of clarifying our views

Losing an argument can be a personal embarrassment, but it can also be an indication that you’ve sided with the wrong people, which means that you need to find a new ingroup or else learn to live with what the Marxists call “false consciousness.” (It was in hopes of avoiding this choice that Phelps-Roper cut off communication with David Abitbol, but, as we saw, she had already crossed a kind of social and intellectual Rubicon.)

So

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.

It’s true that most people don’t change their minds. But as we have seen repeatedly in this book, some people do—they really do change “the story they believe in.” And that’s a remarkable and encouraging thing.

The Myths We Live By. Introducing her theme, Midgley writes,

myths—which are, in effect, stories woven from metaphors

The myths we choose, or more likely simply inherit, do a tremendous amount of intellectual heavy lifting for us.

So that’s the story so far: 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.

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

you could be that person.

the Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came when, in prison, he looked at the guard who treated him cruelly and realized that had their circumstances been reversed, had by some turn of fate he been a guard, he would have treated prisoners cruelly too.

having seen the ways lumping helps us manage information overload and create group solidarity, we should become aware of the temptations it poses to us—to all of us.

cultivate skepticism as a first response.

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.

Chesterton, however, was by contrast “incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”

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:

Just

You want, precisely, to hold your position. It’s too disorienting and stressful to be, as St. Paul so vividly put it in a gaseous rather than a liquid metaphor, “blown about by every wind of doctrine.”

acknowledging that the facts have changed; you become entrenched. You’ve devoted a lot of time and energy to establishing your ground, protecting it from assault. To change now would be, it seems to you, to admit that all that work was for nothing.

you will sometimes change your mind.

But your fate might not be so dire—and you might not even need to resort to misleading silences or outright lies to keep your social network more or less functional.

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...