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

by Alan Jacobs

The most dangerous metaphors for us are the ones that cease to be recognizable as metaphors.

But despite their superficial impressiveness of size, our myth machines are more delicate than they appear, and our unconscious awareness of that fact tempts us to deal in less than fair ways with the myth machines of others.

This kind of writing is dangerous because it goes beyond (mere) argumentation; it becomes immersion, method acting, dual-booting. To make your argument strong, you have to make your opponent’s argument stronger.

“dual booting,” which means having two operating systems, say Windows and Linux, installed on the same computer, so that you can use the computer with either one or the other. If you do this, and alternate between the two systems, you’ll learn that most of what you can do on one you can also do on the other, though using different techniques, and in a different style.

The ones who like to put organisms in existing categories he called “lumpers”; the ones who like to create new categories he called “splitters.”

In general, our culture is a lumping one. And maybe all cultures are. If so, there would be, I think, two reasons.

control. But lumping can also be desirable for a very different—indeed, almost the opposite—reason, as a strategy of inclusion.

All social taxonomies are prone to these forces of consolidation and dissolution, assembly and disassembly, because, unlike biological taxonomies, they’re all temporary and contingent—and are often created by opposition.

Who, we might ask in any given situation, controls whom? Who is sovereign over whom? Who benefits from adopting these categories—and who is victimized by them?

But here I think we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view.

In brief: Calhoun devoted his life to arguing for and politically implementing a taxonomy that radically separated free and superior white people from enslaved and inferior black people;

In investigating the lumpings that 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.

There is a kind of blessed selfishness to this cry—a celebration of the “eccentric individual” who doesn’t give a fig about what other supposed members of her class do. But there is also a blessed universalism, a blessed humanism, if I may dare so beaten-up a word.

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—“

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.

In the life of thought, holding a position is like that: there’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity. We don’t want to be paralyzed by indecision or indifference, but like the apocryphal Keynes, we want to have the mental flexibility and honesty to adjust our views accordingly when the facts change.*2

we all need, in good Aristotelian golden mean fashion, to steer virtuously between the vicious extremes of rigidity and flaccidity, we should engage in the preparatory exercise of discerning which of those extremes we’re more prone to.

The more people have invested in a particular project, the more reluctant they are to abandon it, no matter how strong the evidence indicating that it’s a lost cause.

this fixation leads to the all-too-common reaction to an awareness of sunk costs, what the scholars call “escalation of commitment.”

We might consider this point a necessary ingredient of any useful definition of fanaticism: No matter what happens, it proves my point. That is, true believers’ beliefs are not falsifiable: everything can be incorporated into the system—and indeed, the more costs true believers

have sunk into the system, the more determined and resourceful they will be.

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.

book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

You have to be willing to inquire into someone else’s dialect, even, or especially, when it’s a moral dialect. You have to risk that impurity. 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.

What is needed for the life of thinking is hope: hope of knowing more, understanding more, being more than we currently are.