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

by Alan Jacobs

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?

actual Puritans. They are invested, for the moment anyway, in not thinking. Robinson’s analysis is acute, and all the more so given that it was written before the Internet became a culturewide phenomenon. 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? Robinson concludes this reflection with the sobering comment that in such an environment “unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension,” not because we live in a society of conscious and intentional heresy hunters, though to some extent we do, “but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus.” If you want to think, then you are going to have to shrink that “hypertrophic instinct for consensus.” But given the power of that instinct, it is extremely unlikely that you, dear reader, are willing to go to that trouble.

Eliot’s conclusion—“when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”*5

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.

“critical thinking”—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.*4

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

set of judgments about irrational thinking, that can’t account for the power and the value of relational goods is a deeply impoverished model of rationality.

The pastor is not always the most influential person in a church, nor the boss in the workplace. Sometimes groups of people with no formal titles or authority are the ones who determine how the organization works. They form its Inner Ring.

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.”

But there are healthier kinds of group affiliation, and one of the primary ways we can tell the difference between an unhealthy Inner Ring and a healthy community is by their attitudes toward thinking. The Inner Ring discourages, mocks, and ruthlessly excludes those who ask uncomfortable questions.

“True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.” And this is true on a smaller scale and in less extreme situations as well. The genuine community is open to thinking and questioning, so long as those thoughts and questions come from people of goodwill.*5

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.

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 disables our ethical and our practical judgment.

And this is why learning to think with the best people, and not to think with the worst, is so important. 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.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.*5

Moreover, if, as is also often said, you don’t fully understand the resources and tendencies of your native language until you learn another one, the same is surely true of moral and political languages.

“You can shirk [the trouble of clear writing] by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself”

In this light we can see that the creating of social taxonomies is a form of the mythmaking described in the previous chapter. Just as we cannot do without our metaphors and myths, we cannot do without social taxonomies. There are too many people! But we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not always be what it is, or seems to be, today.

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.

I am human, and nothing human is alien to me”—

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?”

believer is always concerned, both on her behalf and on that of other members of her ingroup, for mental purity. But as Jesus said, it is not what we take in that defiles us, it’s what we send out.

the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn.” 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.

book review into such uncharted territory—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—especially, it’s tempting to say, if you want those people to respect your dialects and contexts and friends and family members, but perhaps what really matters is the damage this inability to code-switch does to the social fabric. It rends it.

The forbearance Wallace invokes is really a matter of suppressing your gag reflex when you’re having a close encounter with our old friend the RCO. But why should you do it? Simply put: because it’s good for you and good for society. It makes you a bigger and better person, and it helps to stitch that torn and frayed social garment.

Human beings, like you, who happen through circumstance or temperament to have come to different conclusions than yours.

you might come to realize that, with a different turn of Fortune’s wheel, there you could have been also. You suddenly imagine yourself, though perhaps faintly at first, as someone different from what you are, someone with a different set of what philosophers call “plausibility structures”; and once you imaginatively place yourself within the frame of another mind, then your own views come to seem…not inevitable.

makes you wonder whether your ingroup is helping you draw closer to the truth of things or blocking you from seeing that truth—is pretty much impossible to live with for the long term. You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world, any more than a flowering plant can flourish if its owner digs up its roots every morning to see how it’s doing.*2

First, the dangers. I can’t promise that if you change your mind you won’t lose at least some of your friends—and that matters, because if you learn to think, genuinely to think, you will sometimes change your mind.

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.

What is needed for the life of thinking is hope: hope of knowing more, understanding more, being more than we currently are. And I think we’ve seen, in the course of this book, the benefits that come to people who have the courage and determination to do the hard work of thinking. We have good cause for hope.