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

by Alan Jacobs

I’ve read many books about thinking, and while they offer varying and in some cases radically incompatible models of what thinking is, there’s one trait all of them share: they’re really depressing to read.

provide an astonishingly detailed and wide-ranging litany of the ways that thinking goes astray—

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.

I truly believe that there are some insufficiently explored ways to understand and ameliorate the problems we have in thinking. We have thought too much in recent years about the science of thinking and not enough about the art.

I’m going to argue that we go astray when we think of our task primarily as “overcoming bias.” 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.

After the first few moments of the speaker’s lecture, Fried had effectively stopped listening: he had heard something he didn’t agree with and immediately entered Refutation Mode—and in Refutation Mode there is no listening. Moreover, when there is no listening there is no thinking. To enter Refutation Mode is to say, in effect, that you’ve already done all

the thinking you need to do, that no further information or reflection is required.

Fried was so taken by the speaker’s request, he adopted “Give it five minutes” as a k...

Robinson writes, “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.”

The more useful a term is for marking my inclusion in a group, the less interested I will be in testing the validity of my use of that term against—well, against any kind of standard.

They are invested, for the moment anyway, in not thinking.

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?

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 in such circumstances—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.”*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

The danger of this advice can be that it might lead one to confuse nonconformity with thinking.

wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

Academics have always been afflicted by unusually high levels of conformity to expectations: one of the chief ways you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don’t get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.*6

Academics are also very good at disagreeing and nitpicking, selectively trained and incentivized to be suspicious and disagreeable.

Being a teacher, though: that’s a different thing. I have been teaching undergraduates for more than thirty years now, and generally speaking undergraduate education is a wonderful laboratory for thinking. Most of my students know what they believe, and want to argue for it, but they also realize that they still have a lot to learn.

I would love to offer you a set of invariable instructions that you could follow step by step to become a better thinker, but thinking isn’t like that. Again, 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.

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.”

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.

Mill’s defense of the feelings and the imagination has two components. 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. Rather, one must have a certain kind of character: one must be a certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclination to take the products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure not just of thought but also of feelings that, when joined to thought, can produce meaningful action.

So just as we do not “think for ourselves” but rather think with others, so too we think in active feeling response to the world, and in constant relation to others. Or we should. Only something that complete—relational, engaged, honest—truly deserves to be called thinking.

It also suggests that our ability to think well will be determined to some considerable degree by who those others are: what we might call the moral form of our community. A willingness to be “broken on the floor,” for example, is in itself a testimony to belief that the people you’re debating are decent people who don’t want to harm or manipulate you—whereas if you don’t trust people you’re unlikely to allow them anything like a “victory” over you. This suggests that the problem of belonging and not-belonging, affiliation and separation, is central to the task of learning how to think.

Hell no! Being open to brainwashing from a community of well-meaning confused people is not a virtue. Unless thinking is not meant to achieve correct results. What is the point of thinking then?

Then how do you explain moral progress?

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.” This attitude—it’s one of the modes of Hoffer’s True Believing—is based on the belief that “the difficulties and disorders of humankind can be overcome by some large-scale adjustment: it suffices to devise a new arrangement, a new system, and people will be released from their temporary prison into a realm of success.” (Scruton calls it “unscrupulous” because it lacks scruples, hesitations, self-critical inquiry. It runs headlong.)

it links a preference for “love and friendship” with “a negotiating posture towards the other.” 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.

it must be acknowledged that the argument he makes here can easily be used to prop up an unjust social order. After all, if you’re a member of the ruling class, it’s very much in your interests to say, “Now, now, let’s put aside your selfish interest in having your own way and just enjoy one another’s company. 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.

Reperations were the end, not just means.

so what, people contain multitudes, some of them monstrous; just because one aspect pf their character is fine does not make their other less abominable

but the secret-Muslim theory is possible in a way the no-Holocaust theory is not.)

excuse you!

Thomas More’s attacks on Martin Luther and his followers, and Luther’s attacks on Catholicism (and especially the papacy), make most of today’s online insult fests seem tame. More wrote to Luther about “your shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up,” and said of Luther’s followers that they “bespatter the most holy image of Christ crucified with the most foul excrement of their bodies”—bodies “destined to be burned.” Luther, for his part, referred to the “dear little ass-pope” who licks the Devil’s anus, and said of all the popes, “You are desperate, thorough arch-rascals, murderers, traitors, liars, the very scum of all the most evil people on earth. You are full of all the worst devils in hell—full, full, and so full that you can do nothing but vomit, throw, and blow out devils!”

In his book Works of Love, Kierkegaard sardonically comments, “Neighbor is what philosophers would call the other.” And it is perhaps significant that Kierkegaard, who spent his whole life engaged in the political and social conflicts of what was then a small town, Copenhagen, can see the degeneration involved in the shift from “neighbor” to “other.”*8 He is calling us back from the disinhibition, and accompanying lack of charity, generated by a set of technologies that allow us to converse and debate with people who are not, in the historical sense of the term, our neighbors.

So we need the biases, the emotional predispositions, to relieve that cognitive load. We just want them to be the right ones. As a wise man once said, one of the key tasks of critical reflection is to distinguish the true prejudices by which we understand from the false ones by which we misunderstand.*11 System 1 works on its own, without conscious direction, but it can be changed, trained; it can develop new habits. This is what Mill meant when he spoke of the power of rightly ordered affections to shape the character. Learning to feel as we should is enormously helpful for learning to think as we should.

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.

we need to work hard to understand how our terms work, especially how they “direct the attention”: 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

One of the primary ways people indicate their group affiliations, and disaffiliations, is through the deployment of keywords.

did you just compare insults (RINO, cuck) to legit concepts like intersectionality!? dude!

what’s pejorative about white privilege?

Yea, so!? What’s your problem? Why do you try to make it sound unbecoming?

#ffs

Just as Lakoff and Johnson reveal that we use metaphors without knowing that they are metaphors, so Midgley shows that we rely on myths—which are, in effect, stories woven from metaphors—without knowing that they are myths. Organic creatures do not actually have “building-blocks.” Similarly, despite what thousands of computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers will tell you, the human brain is not a computer.

The myths we choose, or more likely simply inherit, do a tremendous amount of intellectual heavy lifting for us. Even more than the empty words and phrases of Orwell’s “tired hack on the platform,” these myths do our thinking for us. We can’t do without them; the making of analogies is intrinsic to thinking, and we always and inevitably strive to understand one thing in relation to another thing that we already know. (When we call this process the “association of ideas”—association from social, society—we’re engaging in this kind of mythmaking, treating ideas as though they’re little communities. See?) And every analogy helps—but also, as Kenneth Burke reminds us, if it directs our attention one way it also turns our attention aside from other things.

The most dangerous metaphors for us are the ones that cease to be recognizable as metaphors. For many people the analogy between brain and computer has reached that point: the brain isn’t like a computer, they think, it is a computer.

So that’s the story so far: in search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we’re in the presence of like-minded people, we come to rely on keywords, and then metaphors, and then myths—and at every stage habits become more deeply ingrained in us, habits that inhibit our ability to think. We can only hope that there are strategies by which we might counteract the force of those habits—and develop new and better ones.

nothing is to be gained by demanding that we adhere to a standard of objective rationality that no human being can manage.

and often it is just a description of the logical implications of those words that the speaker refuses to confront, ie it’s not twisting but thinking through.

your bias is showing

it can be hard to know when to place something in an existing category and when to create a new one. Charles Darwin thought often about this problem, and commented in a letter that taxonomists tend to have strong tendencies in one direction or the other. The ones who like to put organisms in existing categories he called “lumpers”; the ones who like to create new categories he called “splitters.”

the life of the mind always requires triage, the sorting of the valuable from the less valuable, the usable from the unusable—and in conditions of information overload we start looking for reasons to rule things out.

Sometimes the need for triage isn’t about ruling something (someone) in or out but about deciding what, if anything, to do next: where to invest limited resources. In a hospital, for example, a newborn whose appearance suggests some possible anomaly gets a note on his chart: FLK (Funny-Looking Kid). An elderly woman whose vitals are fading: CTD (Circling the Drain). Someone who dies on the ward is “discharged up” or “transferred to the ECU” (Eternal Care Unit). Hospital staff make these seemingly callous judgments because time is usually scarce, and doctors and nurses simply cannot afford to pause and consider the relevant in its full human dimensionality, lest they become overwhelmed.