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

by Alan Jacobs

we deploy the accusation of Puritanism because we know that the people we’re talking to will share our disparagement of Puritanism, and will approve of us for invoking it. Whether the term as we use it has any significant relationship to the reality of Puritan actions and beliefs is totally irrelevant. The word doesn’t have any meaning as such, certainly not any historical validity; it’s more like the password to get into the clubhouse.

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

The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

So, again, no: academic life doesn’t do much to help one think, at least not in the sense in which I am commending thinking. It helps one to amass a body of knowledge and to learn and deploy certain approved rhetorical strategies, which requires a good memory, intellectual agility, and the like. But little about the academic life demands that you question your impulsive reactions—and that’s true, as Daniel Kahneman suggests, even when what you do with your academic life is study impulsive

I may all too easily forget that political and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience. The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”

It seemed that coughing had strained a muscle in my chest, and that was the source of the pain; and when I started worrying about it, the resulting anxiety tensed the muscle and increased the pain—which then led to more anxiety. It was the classic vicious circle of reinforcement.

the tale of a community that provides security in exchange for thought, and the courageous member of that community who, daring to think, sacrifices the security.

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.”

(Many errors in thinking arise from assumptions people don’t know they’re making.)

This is thinking: the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. We just need to learn how to be more aware, how to act more responsibly.

“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.

The Inner Ring discourages, mocks, and ruthlessly excludes those who ask uncomfortable questions.

Scruton believes that if we’re less concerned with ruling the world than with having a secure place to enjoy the “goods of social affection,” then we’ll be more likely to treat generously others who want to enjoy those same goods, even if those people are very different from us in both belief and practice.

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.

Such is the power of sheer animus: it disables our ethical and our practical judgment.

If your first thought on reading that sentence is that smart, sensible, and fair-minded people are extremely rare among your opponents, I would ask you to reflect on whether you think they are any more common among those who agree with you. And if you say they are, then I would encourage you to reflect on one of the lessons of the previous chapter: You have a large emotional investment in thinking that.

Note the embedded assumption in such statements: that error results from pathology. He couldn’t be wrong if he weren’t morally or psychologically seriously dysfunctional—that’s the implicit or explicit message.

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.

Phelps-Roper didn’t just change ideas, she changed communities, and she did so by following certain instincts, certain feelings, about human behavior.

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.”

A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity—you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

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.

Instability of this kind—the kind that 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.

Better to follow the principle articulated by W. H. Auden: “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”

We shouldn’t expect moral heroism of ourselves. Such an expectation is fruitless and in the long run profoundly damaging. But we can expect to cultivate a more general disposition of skepticism about our own motives and generosity toward the motives of others. And—if the point isn’t already clear—this disposition is the royal road that carries us to the shining portal called Learning to Think.

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.

Thinking does not have a destination, a stopping point, a “Well, we’re finally here.” 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.