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

by Alan Jacobs

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.

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.

even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. 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.

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.

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.

Lewis called his audience’s attention to the presence, in schools and businesses and governments and armies and indeed in every other human institution, of a “second or unwritten system” that stands parallel to the formal organization—an Inner Ring.

“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

In “The Inner Ring” Lewis portrays this group affiliation in the darkest of terms.

But there are healthier kinds of group affiliation,

How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family.

it is not possible to “think for yourself” in the sense of thinking independently of others;

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. (An “adversary” is literally one who has turned against you, one who blocks your path.) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable—indeed, it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries. As

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. That is, I believe that it is reasonable and wise, in a democratic social order, to make a commitment to what political philosophers call proceduralism: an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules, because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order. That belief is on its way to being comprehensively rejected by the American people. And I have seen this in both academic and ecclesial settings as well: using the existing rules against your opponents, or formulating new ones with the explicit purpose of marginalizing them, without pausing to ask whether such methods are fair, or even whether they might be turned against you someday, when the political winds are blowing in a different direction. Such is the power of sheer animus: 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.

my chief mission in the latter part of this chapter will be to show you how to find the people who are really worth reading or hearing—even when you disagree with them.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

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.

He was struck by the debate format,

he must summarize Alice’s argument to her satisfaction

Similarly, the life-transforming event in the life of 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.

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

“he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind.” 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.”

But in general, and on most issues, it’s fair to say that if you cannot imagine circumstances that would cause you to change your mind about something, then you may well be the victim of the power of sunk costs.

You can know whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup. If you quote some unapproved figure, or have the “wrong” website open in your browser, and someone turns up his nose and says, “I can’t believe you’re reading that crap”—generally, not a good sign.

But as Jesus said, it is not what we take in that defiles us, it’s what we send

2001 David Foster Wallace published one of his most delightful essays, a review of Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage.

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.

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 from; look closel...