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

by Alan Jacobs

the problem of distinguishing the true prejudices, which help us to understand, from the false ones, which generate misunderstanding.

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.

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 in.”*9

in search of social belonging, and the blessed shortcuts that we can take when we’re in the presence of like-minded people, we come to rely on keywords, and then metaphors, and then myths—and at every stage habits become more deeply ingrained in us, habits that inhibit our ability to think. We can only hope that there are strategies by which we might counteract the force of those habits—and develop new and better ones.

nothing is to be gained by demanding that we adhere to a standard of objective rationality that no human being can manage.

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.

often—astonishingly often, really—the “other words” people use to summarize an opponent’s argument grossly distort or even invert that argument.*13

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 the figure of straw. And straw-manning is a version of in-other-wordsing. But it’s also possible to in-other-words someone’s argument not to make it seem that she holds simplistic views but rather to indicate that she holds views belonging to your adversary, to your outgroup.*14

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

The method actor tries to become the character she is to portray, to work her way into that alien sensibility. And yet on some level, method acting—perhaps all acting—brings one to see that that sensibility is not so completely alien after all.

My friend Mark Lewis, an actor and longtime teacher of acting, tells his students that the key to playing a really nasty character, and saying and doing the really nasty things that make up that character, is to realize that in different circumstances you could be that person.

Similarly, the life-transforming event in the life of the Soviet writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came when, in prison, he looked at the guard who treated him cruelly and realized that had their circumstances been reversed, had by some turn o...

It turns out that the relevant taxonomic opposition here is not between man and animal; it is between the powerful and the powerless.

we need to make a vital distinction: between those who held what we now believe to be a profoundly mistaken view, or tolerated such a view, simply because it was common in their time, and those who were the architects of and advocates for such a view.

as Dorothy Sayers once wrote, “What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.”

Those words come from a brilliant and delightful essay called “Are Women Human?” and elsewhere in that essay Sayers writes, When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: “Why should women want to know about Aristotle?” The answer is not that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle…but simply: “What women want as a class is irrelevant. I want to know about Aristotle. It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him—but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him.”*

The Roman poet Terence wrote a line that was once famous: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto—“I am human, and nothing human is alien to me”—

Terence doesn’t say that everything human is fully accessible to him, that there are no relevant divides of race or class or sexual orientation or religion; he doesn’t say that everyone else is instantly or fully comprehensible to him. He says, rather, than nothing human is alien to him: nothing human is beyond his capacity to understand, at least in part.

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: no one has ever been able to track down its source.

To be open-minded!—a condition to aspire to. To be closed-minded!—a condition to fear and shun. The contrasting terms are so deeply embedded in everyday usage that they’re almost impossible to avoid, but they really should be avoided. They’re nonsensical and misleading.

About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.

Chesterton said of H. G. Wells—with whom he disagreed about almost everything but remained in cordial relations—that “he thought that the object of opening the mind is simply opening the mind.” Chesterton, however, was by contrast “incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”*1 I like Chesterton’s gustatory metaphor: it suggests that when the mind is governed by properly settled convictions, only then can it be truly nourished.

The problem, of course, and sadly, is that we all have some convictions that are unsettled when they ought to be settled, and others that are ...

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, and we don’t want others to be, intractably stubbor...

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. In the life of thought, holding a position is like that: there’s a proper firmness of belief that lies between the extremes of rigidity and flaccidity. We don’t want to be paralyzed by indecision or indifference, but like the apocryphal...

We must muddle along as best we can, and we must always be honest with ourselves about the muddling, and not pretend that the evidence is more conclusive than it really is. As I’ve said before: Thinking is hard.

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.”