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

by Alan Jacobs

wouldn’t we all benefit from a better understanding of what it means to think well?

I’ve read many books about thinking, and while they offer varying and in some cases

it’s vital for me (for all of us) to get a firm grip on good thinking and bad, reason and error—to shun the Wrong and embrace the Right. But given that there appear to be as many kinds of mental error as stars in the sky, the investigation makes me dizzy. After a while I find myself asking: What are these people even talking about? What, at bottom, is thinking?

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.

If everything we have to think about were as easy as buying a car, then I’d need only to write a blog post or a few tweets to set us all on the right path. Instead, I’ve had to write this book.

“The short answer is that little can be achieved without a considerable investment of effort.”

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.

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.”

T. S. Eliot wrote almost a century ago about a phenomenon that he believed to be the product of the nineteenth century: “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

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.

The title of Harding’s essay is “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other,” and the phrase repugnant cultural other is one that we will have cause to employ in the pages to come. In fact, it will turn up so often that we’d best give it an initialism: RCO.

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.

The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”

We’re probably all subject to what the literary critic Gary Saul Morson calls “backshadowing”—“foreshadowing after the fact,” that is, the temptation to believe that we can look into the past and discern some point at which the present became inevitable. (“I should have seen it coming!”)*2

It’s the Enlightenment—whose rallying cry is, Immanuel Kant said, Sapere aude!—dare to think, dare to be wise—writ small and writ in a hundred ways.

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.”

How often do we say “she really thinks for herself” when someone rejects views that we hold?

people in my line of work always say that 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

So just as we do not “think for ourselves” but rather think with others, so too we think in active feeling response to the world, and in constant relation to others.

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.