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

by Alan Jacobs

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. The Roman poet Terence wrote a line that was once famous: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—“I am human, and nothing human is alien to me”—and I think this strikes precisely the right note. Terence doesn’t say that everything human is fully accessible to him, that there are no relevant divides of race or class or sexual orientation or religion; he doesn’t say that everyone else is instantly or fully comprehensible to him. He says, rather, than nothing human is alien to him: nothing human is beyond his capacity to understand, at least in part.