How To Think: A Guide for the Perplexed

by Alan Jacobs

“Very simply,” Robinson writes, “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.”

Robinson further comments that this kind of usage “demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry,” which may be the most important point of all. The more useful a term is for marking my inclusion in a group, the less interested I will be in testing the validity of my use of that term against—well, against any kind of standard.

That instinct for consensus is magnified and intensified in our era because we deal daily with a wild torrent of what claims to be information but is often nonsense.

life in the bigger world may be hard at times, may even be miserable, it is nonetheless the right trade to make because the security of community is not really the most vital thing in the long run. Le Guin’s swerve from the more familiar form of the trope says: We don’t know that. To think, to dig into the foundations of our beliefs, is a risk, and perhaps a tragic risk. There are no guarantees that it will make us happy or even give us satisfaction.

James Mill had focused his energies relentlessly on developing his son’s analytical and critical powers, and had seen no place for poetry in that scheme. But what the younger Mill in his misery came to see was the disturbing truth 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 the wearing away of feelings was a great and complex loss.

Mill’s defense of the feelings and the imagination has two components. The first is that bringing analytical power to bear on a problem is not enough, especially if one’s goal is to make the world a better place. Rather, one must have a certain kind of character: one must be a certain kind of person, a person who has both the ability and the inclination to take the products of analysis and reassemble them into a positive account, a structure not just of thought but also of feelings that, when joined to thought, can produce meaningful action. The second component is this: when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really like. To have your feelings moved by the beauty of a landscape is to respond to that landscape in the way that it deserves; to have your feelings moved in a very different direction by the sight of people living in abject poverty is to respond to that situation in the way that it deserves.