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

by Alan Jacobs

impoverished. 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.”*13

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.

To invite people to political collaboration, or dismiss a political figure, with a single hashtag is, as Alice suggests, “a great deal to make one word mean,” and we might be tempted to say that it’s a temptation that social media, especially Twitter, with its 140-character-per-tweet limit, encourage. But in fact we do this kind of thing in conversation all the time—as long as we’re conversing with like-minded people, friends or colleagues or just acquaintances whom we’re confident know the same lingo we do and have the same attitude toward it. “Just another cuckservative” is the kind of thing that might be said to people sitting around a table at a restaurant; or “Come on, people, intersectionality.”

Similarly, we’ve all seen newcomers to a social group suffering through a kind of linguistic struggle: they’ve paid attention to how the group converses, they’ve picked up a few keywords, but when they try to use them they don’t get the expected response. They’ve used one of the approved words, but not at the right time, or in the right context. There’s a curiously musical element to the sociology of keywords, a kind of group harmony that develops: the newcomer is prone to missing her cue or singing off-key. It takes a while to find your way into the Inner Ring, and the socially tone-deaf person may never get it right, and may be forever confined to the group’s periphery, or excluded from it altogether.

But keywords have a tendency to become parasitic: they enter the mind and displace thought. George Orwell, in his famous essay “Politics

and the English Language,” captures this phenomenon

with an eerie vividness: When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost...

Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target. I demolished his argument. I’ve never won an argument with him. If you use that strategy, he’ll wipe you out. He shot down all of my arguments.*6 The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest some alternative way of thinking about what argument is—It’s an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It’s a means of clarifying our views—you’re almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches.

So yes: argument can indeed be war, or at least a contest in which it is possible to lose. But there’s another side to this story: what is lost not in an argument but through passive complicity with that militaristic metaphor. Because there are many situations in which we lose something of our humanity by militarizing discussion and debate; and we lose something of our humanity by dehumanizing our interlocutors. When people cease to be people because they are, to us, merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate, then we, in our zeal to win, have sacrificed empathy: we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires, principles, fears. And that is a great price to pay for supposed “victory” in debate.

Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure; but peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.

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.

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.

We see it every day. Someone points at an argument—a blog post, say, or an op-ed column—and someone else replies, “In other words, you’re saying…” And inevitably the argument, when put in other words, is revealed to be vacuous or wicked.

Now, there’s no doubt that writers can use words evasively, to indicate or suggest things that they wouldn’t dare to say straight out. This is what “Politics and the English Language,” that Orwell essay I mentioned earlier, is all about. But often—astonishingly often, really—the “other words” people use to summarize an opponent’s argument grossly distort or even invert that argument.*13

The straw man is an evidently stupid argument that no one actually holds: refuting the ridiculous straw-man argument is easier than refuting the argument that someone actually made, so up in flames goes the figure of straw. And straw-manning is a version of in-other-wordsing. But it’s also possible to in-other-words someone’s argument not to make it seem that she holds simplistic views but rather to indicate that she holds views belonging to your adversary, to your outgroup.*14

There are two debaters, Alice and Bob. Alice takes the podium, makes her argument. Then Bob takes her place, but before he can present his counter-argument, he must summarize Alice’s argument to her satisfaction—a demonstration of respect and good faith. Only when Alice agrees that Bob has got it right is he permitted to proceed with his own argument—and then, when he’s finished, Alice must summarize it to his satisfaction.*15

This kind of writing is dangerous because it goes beyond (mere) argumentation; it becomes immersion, method acting, dual-booting. To make your argument strong, you have to make your opponent’s argument

stronger. You need sharp thinking and compelling language, but you also need close attention and deep empathy. I don’t mean to be too woo-woo about it, but truly, you need love. The overall sensibility is closer to caregiving than to punditry.

It is to demote them from money—the money of fools—to counters—the counters of the wise.

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.”

A complete awareness of what’s at stake is valuable—of course it’s valuable, and doctors and nurses know the value—but they keep this awareness at bay because it’s not in their immediate context usable. Indeed, it can inhibit their ability to do what they have to do.

We use these heuristics, these strategies of simplification, all the time; we just don’t like them used on us. We don’t want our lives summarized with an acronym, or our deaths with a bitterly ironic joke. We’re funny that way. We don’t like our distinctiveness, our me-ness, compromised or ignored.

In this light we can see that the creating of social taxonomies is a form of the mythmaking described in the previous chapter.

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”

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.

Roman poet Terence wrote

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—“I am human, and nothing hum...

thinking person. Our social taxonomies are useful, but if we think of them as something more than that, if we employ them to enforce strict separation between one person and another, if we treat them as solid and impermeable barriers that make mutual understanding impossible, they serve us poorly.

Let a billion eccentric individuals bloom. Even Timothy.

economist John Maynard Keynes: once, when accused of having flip-flopped on some policy issue, Keynes acerbically replied, “When the facts change, sir, I change my mind. What do you do?”

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.

Tommy Lasorda, the onetime Los Angeles Dodgers manager, used to say that managing players was like holding a bird in your hands: grip it too firmly and you crush it, too loosely and it escapes and flies away. In the life of thought, holding a position is like that: there’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity. We don’t want to be paralyzed by indecision or indifference, but like the apocryphal Keynes, we want to have the mental flexibility and honesty to adjust our views accordingly when the facts change.*2

When you are dealing with contents under pressure blasting their way toward you, your natural impulse is probably to brace yourself. You don’t want to be moved. You want, precisely, to hold your position. It’s too disorienting and stressful to be, as St. Paul so vividly put it in a gaseous rather than a liquid metaphor, “blown about by every wind of doctrine.” Establishing and holding a position in that way is natural, probably inevitable, but it can lead to errors. You become resistant to acknowledging that the

facts have changed; you become entrenched. You’ve devoted a lot of time and energy to establishing your ground, protecting it from assault. To change now would be, it seems to you, to admit that all that work was for nothing.

Such people are fixated on their sunk costs, on what is irretrievably past, rather than on the best available decision right now; this fixation leads to the all-too-common reaction to an awareness of sunk costs, what the scholars call “escalation of

commitment.”

But here’s the salient point: poker players and stock investors who don’t learn to control their instinctive deference to sunk costs go broke. They lose all their money and can’t play poker or invest in stocks anymore. By contrast, the average person whose sunk costs have made him so irrationally stubborn that he has effectively reached intellectual bankruptcy just trundles right along, mostl...

G. C. Lichtenberg issued a wise warning centuries ago: “A book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

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.

It is the failure to recognize other dialects, other contexts, other people,

“The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”*3 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.

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.

What is needed for the life of thinking is hope: hope of knowing more, understanding more, being more than we currently are. And I think we’ve seen, in the course of this book, the benefits that come to people who have the courage and determination to do the hard work of thinking. We have good cause for hope.

Atul Gawande’s wonderful book The Checklist Manifesto describes the power of that particular kind of list to reduce the cognitive load on people who are already mentally burdened: airplane pilots, big-time investors, surgeons.*

People make such checklists for themselves only when forced by experience into intellectual humility; proud people don’t want to use them. But once those same proud people are forced to use them they acquire a dose of that very humility, because they have no choice but to acknowledge that they forget things they need to remember.

The Thinking Person’s Checklist 1. When faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said, give it five minutes. Take a walk, or weed the garden, or chop some vegetables. Get your body involved: your body knows the rhythms to live by, and if your mind falls into your body’s rhythm, you’ll have a better chance of thinking. 2. Value learning over debating. Don’t “talk for victory.”

3. As best you can, online and off, avoid the people who fan flames. 4. Remember that you don’t have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness. 5. If you do have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness, or else lose your status in your community, then you should realize that it’s not a community but rather an Inner Ring. 6. Gravitate as best you can, in every way you can, toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity. 7. Seek out the best and fairest-minded of people whose views you disagree with. Listen to them for a time without responding. Whatever they say, think it over. 8. Patiently, and as honestly as you can, assess your repugnances. 9. Sometimes the “ick factor” is telling; sometimes

it’s a distraction from what matters. 10. Beware of metaphors and myths that do too much heavy cognitive lifting; notice what your “terministic screens” are directing your attention to—and what they’re directing your attention away from; look closely for hidden metaphors and beware the power of myth. 11. Try to describe others’ positi...