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

by Alan Jacobs

We have thought too much in recent years about the science of thinking and not enough about the art. There are certain humanistic traditions, some of them quite ancient, that can come to our aid when we’re trying to think about thinking, and to get better at it.

Kahneman calls this System 1, and says that it is supplemented and sometimes corrected by System 2, which is conscious reflection.

We go through life basically running System 1; System 2 kicks in only when we perceive a problem, an inconsistency, an anomaly that needs to be addressed.

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.

in Refutation Mode there is no listening.

But I was going with the flow, moving at the speed of the social-media traffic.

the kinds of traits we label “puritan”—rigidity, narrowness of mind, judgmentalism—are precisely the ones people display whenever they talk about the Puritans.*4

“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.” That

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.”

T. S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century: “When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.” And

when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”*5

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.

repugnant cultural other is one that we will have cause to employ in the pages to come. In fact, it will turn up so often that we’d best give it an initialism: RCO.

Everyone today seems to have an RCO, and everyone’s RCO is on social media somewhere. We

But 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.

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.”

if your analysis leads you to the conclusion that is it unjust that people suffer in poverty in a wealthy country, but your feelings do not match your analysis, then something has gone awry with you. And it may very well happen that if the proper feelings are not present and imaginatively active, then you will not even bother to do the analysis that would reveal unmistakable injustice. If the feelings are not cultivated the analytical faculties might not function at all.

Indeed, this for Mill is what it means to have character: to be fully alive in all your parts and therefore ready to perceive the world as it is—and to act responsibly toward

Haidt talks a lot about how our moral intuitions accomplish two things: they bind and they blind.

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.

Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith.

Lewis thinks that the modern Western world tends to give us a choice between solitude—not always easy to choose—and “inclusion in a collective,” a collective for Lewis being an environment in which we all have more or less the same status and identity: as, for instance, part of the audience at a concert, or the crowd at a football game. What tends to get lost in our world is membership, which is neither solitary nor anonymous.

perhaps most adults no longer dare to hope for connections like these.)

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.

If Roger Scruton is right in his book The Uses of Pessimism, then one of the impediments to genuine membership is what he calls “unscrupulous optimism.”

But when Coates makes a “case for reparations,” that’s a matter of national public policy, which means that, 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.

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 that’s when Alexander realized that “if you’re part of the Blue Tribe, then your outgroup isn’t al-Qaeda, or Muslims, or blacks, or gays, or transpeople, or Jews, or atheists—it’s the Red Tribe.” The real outgroup, for us, is the person next door.*2

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 we now find inhabiting our world.

Damasio discovered that when people have limited or nonexistent emotional responses to situations, whether through injury or congenital defect, their decision making is seriously compromised. They use reason alone—and, it turns out, reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.

What System 1 does for us is to provide us with a repertoire of biases, biases that reduce the decision-making load on our conscious brains. These biases aren’t infallible, but they provide what Kahneman calls useful “heuristics”: they’re right often enough that it makes sense to follow them and not to try to override them without some good reason (say, if you’re someone whose calling in life is to help homeless people).

So we need the biases, the emotional predispositions, to relieve that cognitive load. We just want them to be the right ones.

A hundred years ago 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. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”*13

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”*13

Translating Hobbes’s point into contemporary English: Literacy (“letters”) is an extraordinary invention because of its power to amplify existing traits. 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.

What does this language ask me to see? What does it prevent me from seeing? And—perhaps most important of all: Who benefits from my

attention being directed this way rather than that?*3

But #intersectionality is more of a rallying cry. It’s shorthand for an argument that begins with one key insight: that someone who belongs to more than one oppressed or marginalized group—a black lesbian, for instance—experiences such oppression or marginalization in a particularly intensified way thanks to the “intersection” of those social forces.

To invite people to political collaboration, or dismiss a political figure, with a single hashtag is, as Alice suggests, “a great deal to make one word mean,”

There’s a curiously musical element to the sociology of keywords, a kind of group harmony that develops: the newcomer is prone to missing her cue or singing off-key. It takes a while to find your way into the Inner Ring, and the socially tone-deaf person may never get it right, and may be forever confined to the group’s periphery, or excluded from it altogether.

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

As Hobbes might put it, what ought to be his counters have become his money, and he has no idea what to do if someone refuses to accept them as legal tender.

The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest some alternative way of thinking about what argument is—It’s an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It’s a means of clarifying our views—you’re almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches.

we lose something of our humanity by dehumanizing our interlocutors.

Once you know that the tendency to think dichotomously and militaristically is not just a local phenomenon, pertaining to this or that particular case, but exemplary of “our deeper error in parsing the complexities of human conflicts and natural continua into stark contrasts formulated as struggles between opposing sides,” then you have set yourself a task, not completed one.

The real story will be far more complicated, and not to be grasped by replacing a fictitious polarity with an equally fictitious unity. Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure; but peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.

Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning. For instance, machine imagery, which began to pervade our thought in the seventeenth century, is still potent today. We still often tend to see ourselves, and the living things around us, as pieces of clockwork: items of a kind that we ourselves could make, and might decide to remake if it suits us better. Hence the confident language of “genetic engineering” and “the building-blocks of life.”*10

Midgley shows that we rely on myths—which are, in effect, stories woven from metaphors—without knowing that they are myths.

these myths do our thinking for us. We