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

by Alan Jacobs

“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

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

“the loyalty of the true believer is to the whole—the church, party, nation—and not to his fellow true believer.”

“True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.”

The genuine community is open to thinking and questioning, so long as those thoughts and questions come from people of goodwill.*5

Lewis explains: How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself….If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.

We have already seen that it is not possible to “think for yourself” in the sense of thinking independently of others; and we have likewise seen how the pressures imposed on us by Inner Rings make genuine thinking almost impossible by making belonging contingent on conformity.

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-minde...

but there are ways to be dishonest that fall short of actual lying.

every good thing can be taken too far.

Optimistic attempts to promote what is Clearly Right will be presented as a pursuit of the common good, but Scruton believes that the attitude underlying them is always “I”-based: it’s for the good of me and people whose views are generally indistinguishable from mine.

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.

Now, Scruton is a very traditionalist sort of conservative—he is a longtime defender of fox hunting, for instance—and it must be acknowledged that the argument he makes here can easily be used to prop up an unjust social order. After all, if you’re a member of the ruling class, it’s very much in your interests to say, “Now, now, let’s put aside your selfish interest in having your own way and just enjoy one another’s company. Let’s take a negotiating posture toward one another, shall we?” Such counsel leaves the world as it is, and disarms demands for justice.

So for those who speak on behalf of the oppressed or marginalized, strong solidarity is far more important than “keeping an open mind” or “trying to understand the other side” or ...

a questioning of your preferred means can look like indifference toward your most treasured ends.

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.

Prudence doesn’t mean being uncertain about what’s right; it means being scrupulous about finding the best means to get there, and it leads us to seek allies, however imperfect, in preference to making enemies.

As the Bible says, “The simple inherit folly: but the prudent are crowned with knowledge.”

desire to punish the outgroup is significantly stronger than their desire to support the ingroup.

When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed, once and for all, then people who don’t share your optimism, or who do share it but invest it in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia.

(An “adversary” is literally one who has turned against you, one who blocks your path.)

As a nineteenth-century pope notoriously commented, “Error has no rights.” Caught up by the momentum of his or her cause, the Optimist can easily forget the vital addendum to the papal statement made by Orestes Brownson: “Error has no rights, but the man who errs has equal rights with him who errs not.”*4

That is, I believe that it is reasonable and wise, in a democratic social order, to make a commitment to what political philosophers call proceduralism: an agreement that political adversaries ought to abide by the same rules, because this is how we maintain a peaceable social order.

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

How do we know that so-and-so is wrong? That’s a question always worth asking,

C. S. Lewis comes to our aid. In a comical passage from a serious essay, he imagines one Ezekiel Bulver, “one of the makers of the Twentieth Century,” whose great achievement was the uncovering of this great and lasting truth: “Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.”

So Lewis gives this popular argumentative strategy—“assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error”—a name: Bulverism.*6

our old friend John Stuart Mill’s discovery that “the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings…when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives,” and how this discovery led him to a new position: “The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.”

reason alone is an insufficient guide to action.

biases aren’t infallible, but they provide what Kahneman calls useful “heuristics”: they’re right often enough that it makes sense to follow them and not to try to override them without some good reason (say, if you’re someone whose calling in life is to help homeless people). We simply would not be able to navigate through life without these biases, these prejudices—the cognitive demands of having to assess every single situation would be so great as to paralyze us.

That’s why the English 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.”

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

Learning to feel as we should is enormously helpful for learning to think as we should.

And this is why learning to think with the best people, and not to think with the worst, is so important. 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.

(Recall my earlier argument that in thinking about whom to associate with we should consider not just beliefs but also, and perhaps more important, dispositions.)

But 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 w...

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.

Orwell is quite right to call it a “reduced state of consciousness”: to borrow once again Daniel Kahneman’s language, it is as though complex questions that ought to be actively considered by System 2 have been shunted to System 1, where they run automatically.

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.

human beings, generally speaking, are insanely competitive about everything;

Because there are many situations in which 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 are, to us, merely representatives or mouthpieces of positions we want to eradicate, then we, in our zeal to win, have sacrificed empathy: we have declined the opportunity to understand other people’s desires, principles, fears. And that is a great price to pay for supposed “victory” in debate.

Stephen Jay Gould, in an essay on what he called the “science wars”—yes, that metaphor again. Those “wars” pitted what Gould calls “realists”—“working scientists…who uphold the objectivity and progressive nature of scientific knowledge”—against what he calls “relativists,” who think that science is but a “social construction” and therefore “just one system of belief among many alternatives.”*7

So we can see already that the words people use to describe themselves become a kind of currency, as Hobbes might put it, and a way to make those who disagree more completely Other.

For Gould, the real intellectual work begins when you realize that “for reasons that seem to transcend cultural peculiarities, and may lie deep within the architecture of the human mind, we construct our descriptive taxonomies and tell our explanatory stories as dichotomies, or contrasts between inherently distinct and logically opposite alternatives.” That is, we have an inbuilt and powerful disposition toward dichotomizing—but one that we don’t have to obey.

Once you know that the tendency to think dichotomously and militaristically is not just a local phenomenon, pertaining to this or that particular case, but exemplary of “our deeper error in parsing the complexities of human conflicts and natural continua into stark contrasts formulated as struggles between opposing sides,” then you have set yourself a task, not completed one. For now you must try to figure out how these nondichotomous forces work in relation to one another.