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Wallace thinks Garner does this by “recast[ing] the Prescriptivist’s persona: the author presents himself not as a cop or a judge but as more like a doctor or lawyer”—someone with demonstrated professional expertise that you’re free to listen to or ignore (though with the silent addition if you choose the latter: “Hey, it’s your funeral”).
A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others.
As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel
strongly about. Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity—you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what yo...
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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
the damage this inability to code-switch does to the social fabric. It rends it.
Everybody’s got something like that, something that presses against “the really outer and tooth-grinding limits” of our ability to forbear.
This matters because it’s when our forbearance fails that the social fabric tears.
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 risk that impurity.
The potential costs of learning
your opponents’ moral dialect are so high.
And once your RCO becomes not so O and therefore somewhat less R, you might come to realize that, with a different turn of Fortune’s wheel, there you could have been also. You
And this is why Wallace was wrong to say that “you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.” You really can’t do that, which, I believe, he discovered: his ceaseless self-examination caused him ceaseless misery and contributed in a major way to his early death. Better to follow the principle articulated by W. H. Auden: “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.
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. And—if the point isn’t already clear—this disposition is the royal road that carries us to the shining portal called Learning to Think.
First, the dangers. I can’t promise that if you change your mind you won’t lose at least
as something that you have come to with some reluctance and without delight, then you should be able to convince them of your continued goodwill.
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.
big-time investors,
The Thinking Person’s Checklist
