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.

thinking will always be an art rather than a science.

(Science can help, though; science is our friend.)

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. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?

Why are people so puritanical about the Puritans? “Very simply,” 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.”

Robinson further comments that this kind of usage “demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry,” which may be the most important point of all. The

If you want to think, then you are going to have to shrink that “hypertrophic instinct for consensus.” But given the power of that instinct, it is extremely

unlikely that you, dear reader, are willing to go to that trouble.

“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

One of JS favorite lines too.

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.

Thirty years ago, when the anthropologist Susan Friend Harding began seriously to study American fundamentalist Christianity—study that eventuated in a remarkable account, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics—she discovered that her colleagues were deeply suspicious of her interests: Why would someone want to investigate such weird and obviously unpleasant people? “In effect,” Harding wrote, “I am perpetually asked: Are you now or have you ever been a born-again Christian?” Many readers will recognize Harding’s sly echo of the question posed to hundreds of people by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s: “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?”*8

We may be able to avoid listening to our RCO, but we can’t avoid the realization that he or she is there, shouting from two rooms away. This is a profoundly unhealthy situation. It’s unhealthy because it prevents us from recognizing others as our neighbors—even when they are quite literally our neighbors. If I’m consumed by this belief that that person over there is both Other and Repugnant, I may never discover that my favorite television program is also his favorite television program; that we like some of the same books, though not for precisely the same reasons; that we both know what it’s like to nurse a loved one through a long illness. All of which is to say that I may all too easily forget that political

and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience.

We can do better; we should do better.

Similarly, while I will offer positive prescriptions in the pages to come, simply knowing the forces that act on us to prevent genuine reflection, making an accurate diagnosis of our condition, is the first course of treatment.

“Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” “Ask your body.” “Work at a different speed.” These were meant to help artists, especially musicians, who had come to an impasse in their work. Eno and Schmidt called the card deck Oblique Strategies because they knew that when an artist is blocked, direct approaches meant to fix the problem invariably make it worse. In a similar way, sometimes you can get better at thinking only by turning your attention to matters other than thinking.

Abitbol responded with bemused humor. He would later comment that “I wanted to be like really nice so that they would have a hard time hating me.” This kind of response threw Phelps-Roper off-balance.

was beginning to see them as human,” instead of as the faceless RCO.

To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make

us happy or even give us satisfaction.

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.”

we want to promote “critical thinking”—but 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.*4

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. ON REASON AND FEELING (DIVIDED OR JOINED)

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.

This suggests that the problem of belonging and not-belonging, affiliation and separation, is central to the task of learning how to think.

“Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.” Our “moral arguments” are therefore “mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.”

Haidt talks a lot about how our moral intuitions accomplish two things: they bind and they blind.

even a person who does make a major shift will in her lifetime have experienced any number of new ideas, but will have rejected or ignored most of them. So the question remains: What triggers the formation of a “moral matrix” that becomes for a given person the narrative according to which everything and everyone else is judged?

“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.”

group of people whom we happen to encounter and happen to find immensely attractive. We may be acting under the influence of strong genetic predispositions, but how those dispositions are activated seems largely to be a matter of what particular people one happens to bump into and when.

in any case, once we are drawn in, and allowed in, once we’re part of the Inner Ring, we maintain our status in part by coming up with those post hoc rationalizations that confirm our group identity and, equally important, confirm the nastiness of those who are Outside, who are Not

Us.

“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.”*4

one of the primary ways we can tell the difference between an unhealthy Inner Ring and a healthy community is by their attitudes toward thinking. The Inner Ring discourages, mocks, and ruthlessly excludes those who ask uncomfortable questions.

Lewis thinks that the modern Western world tends to give us a choice between solitude—not always easy to choose—and “inclusion in a collective,” a collective for Lewis being an environment in which we all have more or less the same status and identity: as, for instance, part of the audience at a concert, or the crowd at a football game. What tends to get lost in our world is membership, which is neither solitary nor anonymous. Lewis explains: How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family.

The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself….If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.

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. I had been on Twitter for

The genuine “we”

recognizes limits and constraints, boundaries that we cannot transgress and that create the frame that gives meaning to our lives. Moreover, it stands back from the goals of the “I,” is prepared to renounce its purposes, however precious, for the sake of the long-term benefits of love and friendship. It takes a negotiating posture towards the other and seeks to share not goals but constraints. It is finite in ambition and easily deflected; and it is prepared to trade increases in power and scope for the more rewarding goods of social affection.*6

“Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” by Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood,

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. 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.

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

Everyone agrees that confusions about whether a conversation is private, or public, or semiprivate (e.g., a conversation at a restaurant table), coupled with what has been called the “online disinhibition effect,” contribute to the dysfunctional character of much online discourse; but it turns out that this is an old story.*7

Maybe the very philosophical concept of “the Other” arises only when certain communicative technologies allow us to converse with people who are not in any traditional or ordinary sense our neighbors. 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

to do that, I think, is to cease to see a person as “the other” but rather as “my neighbor.” 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. As long as someone remains to you merely “the other,” the RCO, accessible through technology but not truly present to you in full humanness, then the temptations of Bulverism will always be right at hand.

the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, as he explains in his powerful book Descartes’ Error. Damasio discovered that when people have limited or nonexistent emotional responses to situations, whether through injury or congenital defect, their decision making is seriously compromised. They use reason alone—and, it turns out, reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.

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.