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

by Alan Jacobs

If we all need, in good Aristotelian golden mean fashion, to steer virtuously between the vicious extremes of rigidity and flaccidity, we should engage in the preparatory exercise of discerning which of those extremes we’re more prone to. For most of us, I expect, the temptations of rigidity will be greater, largely because of the informational fire hose we have so often had to consider in these pages. When you are dealing with contents under pressure blasting their way toward you, your natural impulse is probably to brace yourself. You don’t want to be moved. You want, precisely, to hold your position. It’s too disorienting and stressful to be, as St. Paul so vividly put it in a gaseous rather than a liquid metaphor, “blown about by every wind of doctrine.”