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

by Alan Jacobs

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? In this light we can see that the creating of social taxonomies is a form of the mythmaking described in the previous chapter. Just as we cannot do without our metaphors and myths, we cannot do without social taxonomies. There are too many people! But we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not always be what it is, or seems to be, today.

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. Such people are immensely dangerous, and for the health of our public world we need to become alert to the compelling power of lumping: having seen the ways lumping helps us manage information overload and create group solidarity, we should become aware of the temptations it poses to us—to all of us.

Again, this is not to say that we can live without them, but rather that we need to cultivate skepticism as a first response. Though group solidarity matters to almost all of us in one way or another—it is the stuff of which both Inner Rings and genuine membership are made—on some fundamental level, as Dorothy Sayers once wrote, “What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.” The key word there is always: to be “reckoned…as a member of a class” is sometimes useful, often necessary, but intolerably offensive as a universal practice.

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.

The primary problem is that, of course, we really don’t want to be or want anyone else to be permanently and universally open-minded. No one wants to hear anyone say that, while there is certainly general social disapproval of kidnapping, we should keep an open mind on the subject. No one wants an advocate for the poor to pause in her work and spend some months reflecting on whether the alleviation of poverty is really a good idea. 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.

The problem, of course, and sadly, is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled, and others that are settled when they ought to be unsettled. To understand this problem and begin addressing it, we need to think in terms of the old Aristotelian language of virtue and vice, in which a virtue lies midway between two opposing vices. We don’t want to be, and we don’t want others to be, intractably stubborn; but we don’t want them to be pusillanimous and vacillating either.

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. True believers are like the priests in Kafka’s parable: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”*5

Even if what you’re reading is Mein Kampf, because there are actually good reasons for reading Mein Kampf. The true believer is always concerned, both on her behalf and on that of other members of her ingroup, for mental purity. But as Jesus said, it is not what we take in that defiles us, it’s what we send out.

eh, actually, more often than not, you are what you read; ideas and notions normalize through repeated exposure, what was novel and weird becomes habitual, acceptable, finally fully accepted. garbage in, garbage out; most people aren't super rational and alert to bad thinking all the time.

What has he failed to learn? That 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. And—Wallace never says this explicitly but it is implicit throughout the essay and absolutely essential to his meaning, the impetus that drove a simple book review into such uncharted territory—this failure is essentially an ethical failure. It is the failure to recognize other dialects, other contexts, other people, as having value that needs to be respected—especially, it’s tempting to say, if you want those people to respect your dialects and contexts and friends and family members, but perhaps what really matters is the damage this inability to code-switch does to the social fabric. It rends it.

The key to strengthening this necessary forbearance, Wallace suggests, and further suggests that he learned this in a very hard way as a result of being raised as a SNOOTlet, is that you have to be willing to switch codes. 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. But why should you do it? Simply put: because it’s good for you and good for society. It makes you a bigger and better person, and it helps to stitch that torn and frayed social garment.

You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world, any more than a flowering plant can flourish if its owner digs up its roots every morning to see how it’s doing.*2