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

by Alan Jacobs

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. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking troubles us; thinking tires us. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow. Who needs thinking?

The speaker listened, and then said: “Give it five minutes.”*2

“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.”

“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.”

when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”*5

one of the chief ways you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don’t get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.*6

“The diagnosis is the treatment.

Often, in medicine the diagnosis is the treatment. And the same can be said for our spiritual condition??

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.”

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. Or we should.

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.

Atheists have a tendency to think that atheism is humanity’s future, and religious belief an evolutionary leftover that’s useless at best and at worst dangerous, like the vermiform appendix; not the sort of thing one needs to make a special effort to protect oneself from. And insofar as Libresco knew, or thought she knew, anything about Christianity, it was American Protestant fundamentalism—something perhaps resembling the theology (if not necessarily the marketing strategy) of Westboro Baptist Church.

What triggers the formation of a “moral matrix” that becomes for a given person the narrative according to which everything and everyone else is judged?

“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.”

“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.”*4

The Inner Ring discourages, mocks, and ruthlessly excludes those who ask uncomfortable questions.

(It’s curious that the examples that come to my mind of this kind of informal membership, sustained by affection and an easy acceptance of idiosyncrasy, tend to be from children’s books—perhaps most adults no longer dare to hope for connections like these.)

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.

for there can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.

their desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup. Through a series of games, Iyengar and Westwood discovered that “outgroup animosity is more consequential than favoritism for the ingroup.”

And I have seen this in both academic and ecclesial settings as well: using the existing rules against your opponents, or formulating new ones with the explicit purpose of marginalizing them, without pausing to ask whether such methods are fair, or even whether they might be turned against you someday, when the political winds are blowing in a different direction. Such is the power of sheer animus: it disables our ethical and our practical judgment.

The Kavanaugh hearings as a case in point

So we have a problem: this person’s beliefs are disgusting; this person seems to be just a person. Okay, so maybe he isn’t a monster as such, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not seriously messed up: morally corrupted (a “hater”) or in the grip of some kind of psychological affliction (“fearful,” “angry,” “bitter”). Note the embedded assumption in such statements: that error results from pathology. He couldn’t be wrong if he weren’t morally or psychologically seriously dysfunctional—that’s the implicit or explicit message.

Note that this fascinating conversation about why so-and-so is wrong is quite useful in helping us avoid a more challenging question: How do we know that so-and-so is wrong?

Maybe the very philosophical concept of “the Other” arises only when certain communicative technologies allow us to converse with people who are not in any traditional or ordinary sense our neighbors.

And when you do that, it becomes harder to Bulverize that person, to treat him or her as so obviously wrong that no debate is required, only mockery.

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.

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.”

As a wise man once said, one of the key tasks of critical reflection is to distinguish the true prejudices by which we understand from the false ones by which we misunderstand.*11 System 1 works on its own, without conscious direction, but it can be changed, trained; it can develop new habits. This is what Mill meant when he spoke of the power of rightly ordered affections to shape the character. Learning to feel as we should is enormously helpful for learning to think as we should.

To dwell habitually with people is inevitably to adopt their way of approaching the world, which is a matter not just of ideas but also of practices.

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. 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.”*13

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

To invite people to political collaboration, or dismiss a political figure, with a single hashtag is, as Alice suggests, “a great deal to make one word mean,” and we might be tempted to say that it’s a temptation that social media, especially Twitter, with its 140-character-per-tweet limit, encourage.

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.

So when people say, “They really mean the same thing, they’re just using different vocabularies to express it,” or “We all believe in the same God, we just express that belief in different ways,” we may with some justification commend those people for attempting to get beyond confrontation, dichotomy, argument as war. But we have to go on to say that the attempt is a facile one. The real story will be far more complicated, and not to be grasped by replacing a fictitious polarity with an equally fictitious unity. Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure; but peacemaking is long, hard labor, not a mere declaration.

Fish points out that this is true of many communities of conspiracy theorists, those who believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen, or that 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

See this is end times views, conspiracy theories, etc.

Take, for example, one of the most common and least appealing defensive strategies I know: what I call “in-other-wordsing.” We see it every day. Someone points at an argument—a blog post, say, or an op-ed column—and someone else replies, “In other words, you’re saying…” And inevitably the argument, when put in other words, is revealed to be vacuous or wicked.

There are two debaters, Alice and Bob. Alice takes the podium, makes her argument. Then Bob takes her place, but before he can present his counter-argument, he must summarize Alice’s argument to her satisfaction—a demonstration of respect and good faith. Only when Alice agrees that Bob has got it right is he permitted to proceed with his own argument—and then, when he’s finished, Alice must summarize it to his satisfaction.*15

It’s often said that when you learn a foreign language you haven’t succeeded in mastering it until you can think in it—which is to say, perceive the world from within that language: and within that language the world looks and feels different than it does in English.

We use these heuristics, these strategies of simplification, all the time; we just don’t like them used on us.

But whenever lumping by solidarity occurs—and it occurs in many different contexts: I could have chosen as my main example some ecumenical religious organization, of which there are many—the unity thus created is a fragile one, constantly threatening to separate.

All social taxonomies are prone to these forces of consolidation and dissolution, assembly and disassembly, because, unlike biological taxonomies, they’re all temporary and contingent—and are often created by opposition. Those who are subject to the same forces, the same powers-that-be, can find themselves grouped together, sometimes to their own surprise and discomfort: for example, homosexuals and Jews in Nazi Germany.

Who benefits from adopting these categories—and who is victimized by them?

Just as we cannot do without our metaphors and myths, we cannot do without social taxonomies. There are too many people! But we absolutely must remember what those taxonomies are: temporary, provisional intellectual structures whose relevance will not always be what it is, or seems to be, today.

Similarly, to those who would excuse Margaret Sanger’s support of eugenics as merely a product of her time and place, I say: Sanger did not just “hold eugenicist ideas,” as some have claimed; she was one of our nation’s most passionate and widely respected advocates for those ideas. It

In investigating the lumpings that have shaped societies past and present, we should, I believe, be charitable toward those who merely inherited the classifications that were dominant in their own times. But we should be less patient with those, like Calhoun and Sanger, who pressed to enforce their preferred categories, to encode them in law and make them permanent.

to be “reckoned…as a member of a class” is sometimes useful, often necessary, but intolerably offensive as a universal practice.

Aristotelian language of virtue and vice, in which a virtue lies midway between two opposing vices.

Tommy Lasorda, the onetime Los Angeles Dodgers manager, used to say that managing players was like holding a bird in your hands: grip it too firmly and you crush it, too loosely and it escapes and flies away.

Like parenting. However, in this day it seems that many parents have found a way to do both. Such freedom in discipline, morals, devices, etc. but such control in performing, experiences, etc.

But here’s the salient point: poker players and stock investors who don’t learn to control their instinctive deference to sunk costs go broke. They lose all their money and can’t play poker or invest in stocks anymore. By contrast, the average person whose sunk costs have made him so irrationally stubborn that he has effectively reached intellectual bankruptcy just trundles right along, mostly, sustained by habits and social structures that prevent him from paying the full price for his error. There’s no reason why a flat-earther, with his commitment to flat-earthery escalated to the max, can’t also be a good insurance adjuster. (You just wouldn’t want him designing navigation systems for spacecraft.)