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

by Alan Jacobs

This is what thinking is: not the decision itself but what goes into the decision, the consideration, the assessment. It’s testing your own responses and weighing the available evidence; it’s grasping, as best you can and with all available and relevant senses, what is, and it’s also speculating, as carefully and responsibly as you can, about what might be. And it’s knowing when not to go it alone, and whom you should ask for help.

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.

Why are people so puritanical about the Puritans?

“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.”

“demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry,”

Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved”—

let me add emphasis to Eliot’s conclusion—“when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”

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.

When I hear academics talk about Christians, I typically think, That’s not quite right. I don’t believe you understand the people you think you’re disagreeing with. And when I listen to Christians talk about academics I have precisely the same thought.

I may all too easily forget that political and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience.

while science is our friend, thinking is fundamentally an art, and art is notoriously resistant to strict rules—though there are good practices to follow, and I will describe those practices in the pages to come.

Proverbs 25:15. “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”)

that’s not at all what happened. Megan Phelps-Roper didn’t start “thinking for herself”—she started thinking with different people.

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.”

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.

but it should remind us that all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons, and that whatever we think we know, whether we’re right or wrong, arises from our interactions with other human beings. Thinking independently, solitarily, “for ourselves,” is not an option.

The first is that bringing analytical power to bear on a problem is not enough, especially if one’s goal is to make the world a better place.

when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really like.

“Religion didn’t really rise to the level of plausibility for me to think about denying it as a major part of my identity, any more than ‘UFO skeptic’ is how anyone would introduce themselves.”

Our “moral arguments” are therefore “mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.”

moral intuitions accomplish two things: they bind and they blind.

“People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.” “Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.”

“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 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.”

“Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.”

If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.

What is perhaps most important about this quartet is that none of them makes any effort to make another conform to some preestablished mold.

Each is accepted for his own distinctive contribution to the group: if it were less distinctive it would be less valuable.

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.

For a twenty-first-century person with a smartphone as well as for the prehistoric hunter-gatherer on the savanna, isolation is deadly, while genuine solidarity is life-giving.

there are ways to be dishonest that fall short of actual lying. You can stress certain points more than you believe, in your heart of hearts, they really deserve; you can gently steer your mind away from genuine convictions that might prove too controversial.

every good thing can be taken too far.

Let’s take a negotiating posture toward one another, shall we?” Such counsel leaves the world as it is, and disarms demands for justice. So for those who speak on behalf of the oppressed or marginalized, strong solidarity is far more important than “keeping an open mind” or “trying to understand the other side” or even being generous to people who are unlike you.

Let’s agree with them. Let’s place solidarity above open-mindedness, and agree that our deepest convictions need not be always open to scrutiny. (We will see later on that keeping an open mind is only sometimes a good thing.)

As the Bible says, “The simple inherit folly: but the prudent are crowned with knowledge.”

many Americans are happy to treat other people unfairly if those other people belong to the alien Tribe.

their desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup.

“Error has no rights, but the man who errs has equal rights with him who errs not.”

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.

it’s highly likely that the number of non-monsters holding monstrous views is greater than one.

Note the embedded assumption in such statements: that error results from pathology.

A Pattern Language, which explores the social contexts of architecture and more generally the design of spaces. The concept is intimacy gradients. Many of the tensions that afflict social media arise from incompatible assumptions about what degree of intimacy is in effect in any particular conversational exchange—

In his book Works of Love, Kierkegaard sardonically comments, “Neighbor is what philosophers would call the other.”

And when you do that, it becomes harder to Bulverize that person, to treat him or her as so obviously wrong that no debate is required, only mockery.

But here we should recall our old friend John Stuart Mill’s discovery that “the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings…when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives,”

That’s why the English essayist 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.”

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

He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.

For words are wise men’s counters—they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.”

“A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.”*2