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

by Alan Jacobs

the infinitely varied paths we can take toward the seemingly inevitable dead end of Getting It Wrong. And these paths to error have names! Anchoring, availability cascades, confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, the endowment effect, framing effects, group attribution errors, halo effects, ingroup and outgroup homogeneity biases, recency illusions…that’s a small selection, but even so: what a list.

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. The uncertainties

thinking will always be an art rather than a science. (Science can help, though; science is our friend.)

“What can be done about biases? How can we improve judgments and decisions, both our own and those of the institutions that we serve and that serve us?”

Jonathan Haidt, uses a different set of terms when he’s describing essentially the same distinction: he thinks of intuitive thinking as an elephant, and conscious decision-making as the rider. The idea is that our intuitive thinking is immensely powerful and has a mind of its own, but can be gently steered—by a rider who is truly skillful and understands the elephant’s inclinations. It’s a hopeful image, and indeed Haidt is more cheerful about the possibility of better thinking than Kahneman is.

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.

knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.”

“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.

generally speaking undergraduate education is a wonderful laboratory for thinking.

And now I live in a political order that, taken as a whole, has assumed the lamentable traits—willful incomprehension, toxic suspicion—that I’m used to seeing in those smaller mutually antagonistic communities.

primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”

happiness is something one cannot aim straight at, but rather can achieve only by focusing on other good things, could have said it about thinking and been equally correct.

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!”)

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.

Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social.

Jean Piaget, the great child psychologist—or, as he preferred to call himself, “genetic epistemologist”—tells a wonderful story about two little boys. (He doesn’t say so, but I expect that they were his own children.) One night when the moon was full, the older, who was about four, led his younger brother into the front garden of his house and ordered him to walk back and forth. As little brother faithfully did so, big brother carefully observed him—and the moon. “I was trying to see if the moon follows him when he walks,” the older brother explained. “But it doesn’t, it only follows me.”

the correctness of the conclusion would not erase the falsity of the premises.

In a kind of summary passage, Mill comments that “the element which was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children was that of tenderness.” He did not blame his father for this: “He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstration, starving the feelings themselves.”

expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts, and doing so in a way that gives them delight.

Only something that complete—relational, engaged, honest—truly deserves to be called thinking.

Henry James

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.

Lewis does not think that any of his audience will be surprised to hear of this phenomenon; but he thinks that some may be surprised when he goes on to make this claim: “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.”

“To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours….Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes…the hint will come.” And when it does come, “you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.”*3 It is by these subtle means that people who are “not yet very bad” can be drawn to “do very bad things”—by which actions they become, in the end, very bad people.

“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.”

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 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.

Scruton believes that if we’re less concerned with ruling the world than with having a secure place to enjoy the “goods of social affection,” then we’ll be more likely to treat generously others who want to enjoy those same goods, even if those people are very different from us in both belief and practice.

Such counsel leaves the world as it is, and disarms demands for justice.

“Fear and Loathing Across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization,” by Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood, indicates that Americans today do not simply feel animus toward those who disagree with them politically; they are increasingly prepared to act on it.

“outgroup animosity is more consequential than favoritism for the ingroup.”

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.

Such is the power of sheer animus: it disables our ethical and our practical judgment.

The problem.with racial animus

that alone is reason to seek every means possible to constrain the energies of animus.

So Lewis gives this popular argumentative strategy—“assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error”—a name: Bulverism.

intimate relationship between the printing press and the Reformation has long been understood, and if anything has been overstressed. What has been comparatively neglected, in part because it has left so faint a historical record, is the European postal system—though it wasn’t really a system, and it was hard to be sure whether any given letter would reach its destination.

essayist William Hazlitt wrote, “Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life. Reason may play the critic, and correct certain errors afterwards; but if we were to wait for its formal and absolute decisions in the shifting and multifarious combinations of human affairs, the world would stand still.”

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.”

The title of this chapter comes courtesy of Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth-century political philosopher. 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 inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.

the idiosyncratic literary critic Kenneth Burke wrote a brilliant essay called “Terministic Screens,” in which he made this point. Whenever we use a particular vocabulary—political, say, or aesthetic, or moral, or religious, or sociological—to describe a person, or a thing, or an event, we call attention to certain aspects of what we’re describing. But we also, as long as we look through the screen of that language, inadvertently hide from ourselves, become blind to, other aspects. 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?*3

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 unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church.*5 And Orwell concludes that “this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political conformity”—and also, one might add, social conformity.

unacknowledged metaphors. This is one of the great themes of that seminal book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By.

argument as a form of warfare.

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

peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.