How to Think Read online

  This is another idea that seems more incisive as a diagnosis of our time than of its own. And it dovetails disturbingly with Robinson’s analysis. People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified—and wrathful when it is thwarted. (Social bonding is cemented by shared emotion, shared emotion generates social bonding. It’s a feedback loop from which reflection is excluded.) Between them, Robinson and Eliot explain a great deal about the constant frantic agita of life online—and, increasingly I think, offline.

  Anyone who claims not to be shaped by such forces is almost certainly self-deceived. Human beings are not built to be indifferent to the waves and pulses of their social world. For most of us the question is whether we have even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. The person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing the subtlest of social pressures, confronting the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.

  BELONGING TO MULTIPLE COMMUNITIES

  I believe I can help those who want to think better, but—I need to say it before taking one more step—no, it’s not because I’m an academic. My fellow academics, taken as a group, are just as reluctant to engage in genuine reflection as the less highly educated person in the street. Academics have always been afflicted by unusually high levels of conformity to expectations: 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.*

  So, again, no: academic life doesn’t do much to help one think, at least not in the sense in which I am commending thinking. It helps one to amass a body of knowledge and to learn and deploy certain approved rhetorical strategies, which requires a good memory, intellectual agility, and the like. But little about the academic life demands that you question your impulsive reactions—and that’s true, as Daniel Kahneman suggests, even when what you do with your academic life is study impulsive reactions.

  Being a teacher, though: that’s a different thing. I have been teaching undergraduates for more than thirty years now, and generally speaking undergraduate education is a wonderful laboratory for thinking. Most of my students know what they believe, and want to argue for it, but they also realize that they still have a lot to learn. (The widespread belief that college students are unteachably arrogant know-it-alls does not match my experience. I know the type, but it’s not a common one, and it’s not any more common now than it was when I started this game.) It’s very rewarding to show them not necessarily that their beliefs are wrong, but that they haven’t defended them very well, haven’t understood their underlying logic, haven’t grasped the best ways to commend their views to skeptical Others.* I estimate that in my time I have graded about fifteen thousand student essays, which means that I have seen all the ways an argument can go right and all the ways one can go wrong.

  But as valuable as that long experience has been in thinking about thinking, still more valuable has been my participation in multiple communities that are often at odds with one another. I am an academic, but I am also a Christian. When I hear academics talk about Christians, I typically think, That’s not quite right. I don’t believe you understand the people you think you’re disagreeing with. And when I listen to Christians talk about academics I have precisely the same thought. I have spent decades noting these pervasive misunderstandings, trying to figure out how they arise, and looking for ways to correct them.

  Thirty years ago, when the anthropologist Susan Friend Harding began seriously to study American fundamentalist Christianity—study that eventuated in a remarkable account, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics—she discovered that her colleagues were deeply suspicious of her interests: Why would someone want to investigate such weird and obviously unpleasant people? “In effect,” Harding wrote, “I am perpetually asked: Are you now or have you ever been a born-again Christian?” Many readers will recognize Harding’s sly echo of the question posed to hundreds of people by the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s: “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?”*

  In 1991 Harding published a powerful essay on this phenomenon. Aren’t anthropologists, she asked, intrinsically interested in cultural structures and practices that are different from their own? Why, then, were so many of them repelled by the idea of studying such difference when the difference lived right next door, and could vote in the same elections the anthropologists voted in? The title of Harding’s essay is “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other,” and the phrase repugnant cultural other is one that we will have cause to employ in the pages to come. In fact, it will turn up so often that we’d best give it an initialism: RCO.

  As I hinted earlier, if fundamentalist or evangelical Christians tend to be the RCO for secular academics, the reverse is true as well—and that mutual suspicion is something I’ve been trying to navigate my whole adult life. And now I live in a political order that, taken as a whole, has assumed the lamentable traits—willful incomprehension, toxic suspicion—that I’m used to seeing in those smaller mutually antagonistic communities. Everyone today seems to have an RCO, and everyone’s RCO is on social media somewhere. We may be able to avoid listening to our RCO, but we can’t avoid the realization that he or she is there, shouting from two rooms away.

  This is a profoundly unhealthy situation. It’s unhealthy because it prevents us from recognizing others as our neighbors—even when they are quite literally our neighbors. If I’m consumed by this belief that that person over there is both Other and Repugnant, I may never discover that my favorite television program is also his favorite television program; that we like some of the same books, though not for precisely the same reasons; that we both know what it’s like to nurse a loved one through a long illness. All of which is to say that I may all too easily forget that political and social and religious differences are not the whole of human experience. The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”

  We can do better; we should do better. And I believe, thanks in part to my years of negotiating mutually hostile communities, I can help. I know what it’s like to make common cause with people who are in some ways alien to me; I know how such experiences can expand my understanding of the world; I know how they can force me to confront the narrowness of my vision and my tendency to simplistic thinking—sometimes to not thinking at all. And, with apologies to Daniel Kahneman, I really do believe that I’ve gotten considerably better at thinking over the years. And I don’t want to keep what I’ve learned to myself.

  OBLIQUE STRATEGIES

  Much of what follows will be simply diagnostic, and there’s a good reason for that. Once, years ago, I started having chest pains, and my doctors couldn’t isolate the problem: I exercised regularly, my heart seemed healthy, nothing was evidently wrong. But the pains kept coming back, and that scared me. Finally, one doctor asked some probing questions and discovered that I had had, before the pains began, a lingering heavy cough. It seemed that coughing had strained a muscle in my chest, and that was the source of the pain; and when I started worrying about it, the resulting anxiety tensed the muscle and increased the pain—which then led to more anxiety. It was the classic vicious circle of reinforcement. When I asked the doctor what treatment he thought best, he replied, “The diagnosis is the treatment. Now that you know you don’t have a life-threatening illness, you won’t worry so much, and less stress in your mind will mean less stress on your chest muscles. That’ll give them a chance to heal.” Similarly, while I will offer positive prescriptions in the pages to come, simply knowin
g the forces that act on us to prevent genuine reflection, making an accurate diagnosis of our condition, is the first course of treatment.

  Beyond that: I would love to offer you a set of invariable instructions that you could follow step by step to become a better thinker, but thinking isn’t like that. Again, while science is our friend, thinking is fundamentally an art, and art is notoriously resistant to strict rules—though there are good practices to follow, and I will describe those practices in the pages to come. (Indeed, I’ve already hinted at almost all of them in describing the buying of an automobile.) But whoever it was who first said that happiness is something one cannot aim straight at, but rather can achieve only by focusing on other good things, could have said it about thinking and been equally correct.

  Back in 1975 the musician Brian Eno and the artist Peter Schmidt created a curious artifact, a set of cards containing peculiar instructions: “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” “Ask your body.” “Work at a different speed.” These were meant to help artists, especially musicians, who had come to an impasse in their work. Eno and Schmidt called the card deck Oblique Strategies because they knew that when an artist is blocked, direct approaches meant to fix the problem invariably make it worse. In a similar way, sometimes you can get better at thinking only by turning your attention to matters other than thinking. So what follows will be sometimes anecdotal, sometimes circuitous—but eventually we will always circle back to the forms that bad thinking takes, and discover habits that can help us better practice this most delicate of arts. It won’t be easy; that’s part of the point. But we can do this.

  * * *

  * Some of the books that chronicle these errors will be referred to throughout this book. The most important one is Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). I will also cite Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Basic Books, 2005) and The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012). Also useful is Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (HarperCollins, 2008; 2nd ed., 2012). But you can also take a shortcut to thoroughgoing despair simply by reading the Wikipedia page called “List of Cognitive Biases.”

  *https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes. In The Righteous Mind (p. 81) Haidt reports on an experiment conducted at Harvard in which people were asked to make a moral judgment on a particular issue—but some were not allowed to register their judgments until two minutes had elapsed. This delay allowed people to do a better job of recognizing poor arguments, arguments whose flaws were not as readily seen by those who were allowed to respond immediately. In thinking, it appears, every minute helps.

  * A former Google employee named Tristan Harris is attempting to persuade software engineers to stop trying to take advantage of users in this way, to stop what he calls the “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” Bianca Bosker, in a story in the November 2016 issue of The Atlantic called “The Binge Breaker,” quotes Harris: “You could say that it’s my responsibility” to back away from the phone, “but that’s not acknowledging that there’s a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain.” Harris wants those software engineers to adopt a kind of “Hippocratic oath” not to be so exploitative of users’ cognitive wiring. “There is a way to design based not on addiction.” Whether engineers will follow that better way . . . I’m not holding my breath waiting.

  * Marilynne Robinson, “Puritans and Prigs,” in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999), pp. 150–73.

  * T. S. Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), pp. 9–10. Note that the problem, for Eliot, is not that emotions are involved, but that they substitute for thought, that they replace thinking. Later on we’ll explore the vital role of emotion in thinking.

  * As Jeff Schmidt writes in Disciplined Minds (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), academia and the other high-ranking professions are good at maintaining “ideological discipline” within their ranks, and people who do well in the academy tend to have “assignable curiosity,” which is to say, they are obediently interested in the things they’re told to be interested in.

  * This is perhaps a good place to say that it was teaching freshman writing classes that got me thinking about thinking for the first time. I taught such classes for around twenty years, and came to rely heavily on the good old Norton Reader, an anthology of essays meant to help such writers. It has gone through a great many changes over the years: I started using it when it was in its third edition, and as I write these words it’s in its fourteenth. (It’ll probably be in the twenties by the time you read these words.) Some of the essays I relied on most heavily in my first years of teaching—William Golding’s “Thinking as a Hobby,” Annie Dillard’s “Seeing” (an excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), William G. Perry, Jr.’s “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts”—have fallen by the wayside over the decades, though Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” remains. Reading those essays with my students, trying to get them to apply those writers’ insights to their own work, consistently failing to get them to apply those writers’ insights to their own work—all this was my best education in thinking. I remain grateful to the editors for their wonderfully rich gathering of essays.

  * Susan Friend Harding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2000). The essay I quote in the following paragraph is “Representing Fundamentalism: The Problem of the Repugnant Cultural Other,” Social Research 58, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 373– 93.

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  BEGINNING TO THINK

  Why it wouldn’t be a good idea to think for yourself, even if you could

  A few years ago Megan Phelps-Roper, a member of West-boro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, a church founded by her grandfather Fred Phelps, decided to start using Twitter to spread the Westboro message. That message might be summed up by the statement most closely associated with WBC: God Hates Fags. (The church registered the URL godhatesfags.com all the way back in 1994.) As Adrian Chen reports in his New Yorker profile of Phelps-Roper, Twitter was a perfect venue for getting this kind of message across, thus this typical Phelps-Roper tweet: “Thank God for AIDS! You won’t repent of your rebellion that brought His wrath on you in this incurable scourge, so expect more & worse!”*

  But there was something Phelps-Roper didn’t anticipate: on Twitter, people talk back to you. When she began tweeting at a Jewish web developer named David Abitbol—“Oh & @jewlicious? Your dead rote rituals == true repentance. We know the diff. Rev. 3:9 You keep promoting sin, which belies the ugly truth”—Abitbol responded with bemused humor. He would later comment that “I wanted to be like really nice so that they would have a hard time hating me.” This kind of response threw Phelps-Roper off-balance. As she later told Adrian Chen, “I knew he was evil, but he was friendly, so I was especially wary, because you don’t want to be seduced away from the truth by a crafty deceiver.”

  We’re probably all subject to what the literary critic Gary Saul Morson calls “backshadowing”—“foreshadowing after the fact,” that is, the temptation to believe that we can look into the past and discern some point at which the present became inevitable. (“I should have seen it coming!”)* But it’s hard not to think that by engaging with Abitbol in a friendly way Phelps-Roper had already set off down the road that would lead her away from West-boro Baptist Church. She started responding to others who shared Abitbol’s skepticism about her beliefs, and some of them also proved funny, or interesting, or kind. She told Chen, “I was beginning to see them as human,” instead of as the faceless RCO.

  But it was the relationship with Abitbol—they even met in person, ironically enough, when Phelps-Roper picketed a gathering that Abitbol had helped to organize—that mattered more than any other. And that relationship became so d
ecisive for Phelps-Roper largely because Abitbol took the trouble to look into what Westboro members believed and why they believed it. They claimed to base their views that homosexuality should be punished by death on the Bible, particularly Leviticus 20:13: “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.” But wait a minute, Abitbol said: Didn’t Jesus say, when a woman was found to have committed adultery, that the “one without sin” should cast the first stone at her? And, by the way, didn’t Megan’s own mother have an illegitimate son, the product of an affair she had had in law school? Shouldn’t she “surely be put to death”?

  Phelps-Roper knew, and deployed, the standard West-boro response: that gays and lesbians attended Gay Pride parades—they were proud of their sins—whereas her mother had repented. To which Abitbol replied: How can gays and lesbians ever repent if you kill them?

  To this Phelps-Roper had no ready answer, and when she asked leaders of Westboro, they had none either. Phelps-Roper had already realized that believing in the Bible didn’t necessarily require her to perform the hostility that most members of Westboro exemplified. (When questioned about her friendliness to unbelievers she replied by citing Proverbs 25:15. “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.”) But now Abitbol was asking deeper and harder questions, not about whether the Bible was true, but rather about whether her community really bothered to discern and obey what they claimed was their supreme authority in all matters.