More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Alan Jacobs
Read between
June 23 - June 30, 2018
never agree,” he said; “they’re arguing from different premises.”*8 The oft-stated view of the literary and legal theorist Stanley Fish is that whenever we disagree we do so from different, and irreconcilable, premises.
Lyndon Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination. “The question is, ‘Could you show to those people a set of facts that would lead them to abandon what we consider to be their outlandish views?’ ” said Fish. “The answer to that question is no, because all people who have a story to which they are committed are able to take any set of counter-evidence and turn it back, within the perspective of the story they believe in.”
metaphors do a tremendous amount of underground work,
Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world.
The myths we choose, or more likely simply inherit, do a tremendous amount of intellectual heavy lifting for us.
The most dangerous metaphors for us are the ones that cease to be recognizable as metaphors.
Even worse, perhaps, is the Twitter version, which begins like this: “Shorter David Brooks,” or “Shorter Pope Francis,” or whomever the object of scrutiny is, followed by a colon and then an absurdly reductive account, not of what the person actually said but of what the tweeter is absolutely confident that the person meant. This kind of thing is closely related to the building of a straw man. 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
...more
a demonstration of respect and good faith.
Long Now Foundation:
The overall sensibility is closer to caregiving than to punditry.
Solzhenitsyn, like a method actor, projected himself into the life of another and discovered that they had far more in common than he would ever have wanted to believe.
you can speak right away, but you have to speak someone else’s thoughts, and for that time forgo advocating for your own.
loosen the hold of keywords, metaphors, and myths upon your mind. It is to demote them from money—the money of fools—to counters—the counters of the wise. It might also cost you some friends. But we’ll deal with that unpleasant possibility later.
strategies of simplification that relieve cognitive load
identifying ingroups and outgroups, deploying keywords, and the like. The hashtags I mentioned in the previous chapter (#cuckservative, #whiteprivilege) are essentially quick-and-dirty classifications, Instant Taxonomy.
First, the life of the mind always requires triage, the sorting of the valuable from the less valuable, the usable from the unusable—and in conditions of information overload we start looking for reasons to rule things out.
doctors and nurses simply cannot afford to pause and consider the relevant in its full human dimensionality,
these initialisms exemplify lumping not for dismissal or ruling out but for solidarity, for the making of common cause.
Lenin—whom Orwell satirizes in Animal Farm and condemns elsewhere—got one important thing right when he asked a question: Kto kovo? “Who whom?” The question has general relevance: Who, we might ask in any given situation, controls whom? Who is sovereign over whom? Who benefits from adopting these categories—and who is victimized by them?
they made those views. They centered their public lives on the enforcement of taxonomies, and the pernicious myths that underlay them.
for the health of our public world we need to become alert to the compelling power of lumping: having seen the ways lumping helps us manage information overload and create group solidarity, we should become aware of the temptations it poses to us—to all of us.
splitting—of the disciplined, principled preference for rejecting categories whenever we discern them at work.
skepticism as a first response.
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.
There’s a famous and often-told story about the great 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 story appears not to be true, alas:
it’s always used in the same ways and for the same reasons: to denounce ideologues and to commend open-mindedness.
We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.
when the mind is governed by properly settled convictions, only then can it be truly nourished
To understand this problem and begin addressing it, we need to think in terms of the old Aristotelian language of virtue and vice, in which a virtue lies midway between two opposing vices.
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.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s imagined Evidentiary Republic of Rationalia: it’s perfectly fine to say that “all policy shall be based on the weight of evidence,” but sometimes the evidence is insufficient or contradictory, especially when we’re trying to predict the future consequences of today’s actions, and yet policy must be made all the same. In the laboratory you can and should wait to announce your
St. Paul so vividly put it in a gaseous rather than a liquid metaphor, “blown about by every wind of doctrine.”
what is irretrievably past,
prone to the undue influence of intellectual sunk costs.
fanaticism: No matter what happens, it proves my point.
true believers’ beliefs are not falsifiable: everything can be incorporated into the system—and indeed, the more costs true believers have sunk into the system, the more determined and resourceful they will be.
as Jesus said, it is not what we take in that defiles us, it’s what we send out.
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 you believe, and to do it more or less continually.
This matters because it’s when our forbearance fails that the social fabric tears.
Humani nihil a me alienum puto. Human beings, like you, who happen through circumstance or temperament to have come to different conclusions than yours.
“The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”
Gravitate as best you can, in every way you can, toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity.
