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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.
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.”
The analytical mind constantly separates, divides, distinguishes, until its whole mental world lies in pieces around it. And where will that mind acquire the energy it needs to put things back together? In the aftermath of his collapse and poetic restoration, Mill writes, “The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.” But what did the cultivation of the feelings actually do? And what did it do for thinking?
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.
The second component is this: when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really like.
RELATIONAL GOODS
Central to his argument is this point: “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.”
a “second or unwritten system” that stands parallel to the formal organization—an Inner Ring.
“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.”
The draw of the Inner Ring has such profound corrupting power because it never announces itself as evil—indeed, it never announces itself at all.
Thus when the frustrated congregate in a mass movement, the air is heavy-laden with suspicion. There is prying and spying, tense watching and a tense awareness of being watched. The surprising thing is that this pathological mistrust within the ranks leads not to dissension but to strict conformity. Knowing themselves continually watched, the faithful strive to escape suspicion by adhering zealously to prescribed behavior and opinion. Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith.
Hoffer goes on to make the incisive point that “the loyalty of the true believer is to the whole—the church, party, nation—and not to his fellow true believer.”
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 quartet of Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad from The Wind in the Willows (one of his favorite books). They are all so different from one another, made of such dramatically varying stuff, yet taken together they are far greater than the sum of their parts.
What is perhaps most important about this quartet is that none of them makes any effort to make another conform to some preestablished mold. No one wants even Toad to change fundamentally, only to exercise a bit more self-restraint. Each is accepted for his own distinctive contribution to the group: if it were less distinctive it would be less valuable. This is also, I might add, the key point about the friendship of Harry, Hermione, and Ron in the Harry Potter books: there is not a great deal of overlap in their personalities and inclinations except that, being Gryffindors, they are all
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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.
But I also thought, Don’t sell yourself out. I didn’t think I would actually lie about what I think to get into the pages of Harper’s, but there are ways to be dishonest that fall short of actual lying. You can stress certain points more than you believe, in your heart of hearts, they really deserve; you can gently steer your mind away from genuine convictions that might prove too controversial. Now, I could tell myself that I was simply striving to match my writing to my audience, which is a necessary and a good thing, yes? Yes. But every good thing can be taken too far. And where is the line
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But when Coates makes a “case for reparations,” that’s a matter of national public policy, which means that, though solidarity with the victims of injustice is an indispensable driver of meaningful political action, solidarity is not enough: it must be supplemented by a colder-eyed look at what particular strategies and tactics are most likely to realize the desired
for there can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition
who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.
“outgroup animosity is more consequential than favoritism for the ingroup.
People who can’t stand one another will form powerful alliances if by doing so they can thwart their ideological enemies—and they will pursue that thwarting with a vigor and resourcefulness that would arouse Napoleon’s envy—and with a relentlessness that might well make him quail.
Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable—indeed, it can become the optimist’s perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries.
One of my consistent themes over the years—one I will return to in this book—has been the importance of acting politically with the awareness that people who agree with you won’t always be in charge. That is, I believe that it is reasonable and wise, in a democratic social order, to make a commitment to what political philosophers call proceduralism: an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules, because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order. That belief is on its way to being comprehensively rejected by the American people. And I have seen this in both
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The task of this chapter is to suggest ways of recognizing the power of animus and strategies for overcoming it. 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.
And it’s highly likely that the number of non-monsters holding monstrous views is greater than one.
Yet you don’t attribute those errors to pathology. You don’t place those people in what Hillary Clinton notoriously called the “basket of deplorables.” Why not?
How do we know that so-and-so is wrong? That’s a question always worth asking,
“Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.”
So Lewis gives this popular argumentative strategy—“assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error”—a name: Bulverism.
The concept is intimacy gradients. Many of the tensions that afflict social media arise from incompatible assumptions about what degree of intimacy is in effect in any particular conversational exchange—the sea lion problem, we might call it.
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
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“Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.”
attractions and repulsions alike are simply biases, and biases interfere with our ability to assess evidence and therefore should be “overcome,” eliminated.
“The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.” Mill’s point is compelling on its own, which is how I left matters when
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.
The problem, Damasio writes, is that SM “has to consciously process danger,” and human brains don’t have the energy to do that kind of processing in every waking moment.
System 1 works on its own, without conscious direction, but it can be changed, trained; it can develop new habits.
Learning to feel as we should is enormously helpful for learning to think as we should.
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.
The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
Early in his masterpiece, Leviathan, he writes, “Nor is it possible without letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or, unless his memory be hurt by disease or ill constitution of organs, excellently foolish. For words are wise men’s counters—they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.”*1 Translating Hobbes’s point into contemporary English: Literacy (“letters”) is an extraordinary invention because of its power to amplify existing traits. By reading, a man already having some wisdom can gain far more; but it is equally true that reading can make a man already
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The point should not be confined to written words. As Doctor Cuticle says to some young naval surgeons in Melville’s White-Jacket, “A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.”*2 (Science here means “disciplined knowledge.”)
Burke doesn’t believe we have a choice about whether or not to employ terministic screens: “We can’t say anything without the use of terms.” But for that very reason 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
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.
If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.*5
the one that identifies argument as a form of warfare.
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.
For Gould, the real intellectual work begins when you realize that “for reasons that seem to transcend cultural peculiarities, and may lie deep within the architecture of the human mind, we construct our descriptive taxonomies and tell our explanatory stories as dichotomies, or contrasts between inherently distinct and logically opposite alternatives.” That is, we have an inbuilt and powerful disposition toward dichotomizing—but one that we don’t have to obey.
The oft-stated view of the literary and legal theorist Stanley Fish is that whenever we disagree we do so from different, and irreconcilable,
