How to Think Read online

  In his leisure time, Wilt Chamberlain had one central interest: having sex with as many women as possible. (He famously claimed in an autobiography to have bedded twenty thousand, which has caused many envious and/or skeptical readers to resort to arithmetical calculation.) This is what Gladwell missed when assessing the rationality of Chamberlain’s free-throw shooting. If your primary goal in life is to have sex with as many people as possible, then you very well might avoid any behavior that could lower your reputation for desirability. What if some woman you approach had heard someone say, “Wilt’s a great player, I guess, but only a sissy would use that granny shot”? And who knows, perhaps Wilt actually heard the s-word from a woman he was pursuing; that, or something like that, could have influenced him to abandon the far more successful underhand style of free-throw shooting.

  Moreover, what was Wilt actually giving up when he returned to a more “manly” style of free-throw shooting? Several points a game, perhaps; but only rarely would that make a difference in the game’s outcome. And anyway: when Wilt shot free throws underhanded, he was the most unstoppable force the game of basketball had ever seen; then, when he returned to the conventional method he was . . . still the most unstoppable force the game had ever seen. You could say, then, that he gave up little in his workplace in order to create potentially more interesting opportunities for himself in an arena that meant more to him. This kind of decision making may be ethically dubious, but it’s anything but irrational.

  RELATIONAL GOODS

  We might call Gladwell’s error the What’s the Matter with What’s the Matter with Kansas Problem. Thomas Frank’s 2004 book famously tries to address what is to him an astonishing puzzle: why so many people in the American heartland vote in defiance of their “best interests.” But Frank, like Gladwell, conceives of only one relevant good to be sought: if in Gladwell’s tale of Wilt Chamberlain the only excellence that matters is workplace excellence, for Frank the only real “interests” that people have are financial interests. Both writers overlook relational goods. In Chamberlain’s case the relevant relations are purely sexual—given his numerical ambitions, none of his encounters could have lasted more than a few hours—while the factors for Frank’s representative Kansans are, as many critics of the book have noted, communal. (That is, Frank doesn’t acknowledge that people might be willing to make economic sacrifices in order to live in societies they think of as morally stronger.) But none of those “other” commitments are any less rational than the desire for economic and workplace success.

  As can be seen from these examples, I’m not paying anyone a compliment when I speak of relational goods. Chamberlain’s Don Juanism is, in my judgment, both wrong and sad. The “Kansan” desire for communal solidarity is far more noble, though that impulse is sadly subject to its own perversions. My point is simply that an account of rational thinking, and a resulting set of judgments about irrational thinking, that can’t account for the power and the value of relational goods is a deeply impoverished model of rationality.

  So just as we do not “think for ourselves” but rather think with others, so too we think in active feeling response to the world, and in constant relation to others. Or we should. Only something that complete—relational, engaged, honest—truly deserves to be called thinking. In a preface to his novel The Princess Casamassima, Henry James writes, “But there are degrees of feeling—the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word—the power to be finely aware and richly responsible.”* This is thinking: the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. We just need to learn how to be more aware, how to act more responsibly.

  * * *

  * The story of Megan Phelps-Roper is brilliantly told by Chen in his article for the November 23, 2015, issue of The New Yorker, “Unfollow.” Everything I know about the situation I learned from Chen’s article.

  * Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (Yale University Press, 1994), chap. 6.

  * In Le Guin’s collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 283–84.

  * See Patrick Deneen’s wonderful essay “Critical Thinking About Critical Thinking”: http://patrickdeneen.blogspot.com/2008/11/thinking-critically-about-critical.html. I might also pause to note here that one of my least favorite rhetorical practices is use of what I call the “false we”: When people say things like “We need to learn to be more tolerant of difference,” what they typically mean is “You need to learn to be more tolerant of difference.” When in the paragraph above I say that “we” academics want our students to be critical only about what they’ve learned from other people, I can’t help acknowledging that I am as guilty of that sin as anyone else in my profession. So I had to use “we” there; and I do so in a few other places as well, where my conscience won out over my dislike of a rhetorical tic.

  * Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood (Norton, 1962).

  * A brief historical digression: If you consider the character of these two misconceptions—the value of thinking for yourself and the necessity of eliminating feelings from the rational act—you can see how much of our common understanding of thinking is derived from one work, René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), in which Descartes describes himself sitting alone in a hot kitchen with a piece of paper in his hand and asks how he can know that he’s sitting alone in a hot kitchen with a piece of paper in his hand.

  * Mill wrote his Autobiography in the last months of his life, and it was published after his death in 1873.

  * James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, ed. Colm Tóibín (University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 62.

  two

  ATTRACTIONS

  How good people can be led to do bad things

  Leah Libresco, of the same generation as Megan Phelps-Roper, grew up on Long Island in a family where atheism was simply assumed. “Religion didn’t really rise to the level of plausibility for me to think about denying it as a major part of my identity, any more than ‘UFO skeptic’ is how anyone would introduce themselves.” And this attitude, or perhaps it would be better to say lack of attitude, was common in Libresco’s world: in her high school history class studying the Reformation, a classmate raised her hand and asked whether there were still any Lutherans. Leah Libresco is now a Roman Catholic.*

  How did this happen? First of all, one might ask whether her parents ever took measures against her being drawn toward theism. One suspects not. Atheists have a tendency to think that atheism is humanity’s future, and religious belief an evolutionary leftover that’s useless at best and at worst dangerous, like the vermiform appendix; not the sort of thing one needs to make a special effort to protect oneself from. And insofar as Libresco knew, or thought she knew, anything about Christianity, it was American Protestant fundamentalism—something perhaps resembling the theology (if not necessarily the marketing strategy) of Westboro Baptist Church.

  So when she came to Yale University and met Catholic and Orthodox Christians—people grounded in an older faith with stronger intellectual buttressing—Libresco did not have ready refutations of their views. But that probably wouldn’t have mattered if she hadn’t made what proved to be a fateful decision for her: she joined a debating society, the Yale Political Union. It’s vital to note that, though many of the people in YPU had experience in competitive debate, that’s not what the society did. “At the end of a debate, no one won, and no points were awarded.” But in its own way the society was deeply competitive. “When we kept score,” Libresco says, “we counted in converts.” That is, what really mattered was that you actually won someone over—and not to the position you were assigned for the evening, but to something you actually believed in.

  Now, it would be more accurate to say that winning someone over was one of the two things that really mattered. The other was being won over. Members who interviewed for some leadership position in the YPU would u
sually be asked, “Did you ever break someone on the floor?” To “break on the floor,” in the society’s parlance, was to change your mind in the middle of a debate, right there in front of everyone. To break someone on the floor was a signal achievement. But—and here is the really essential thing—the candidate would also be asked, “So, have you ever broken on the floor?” And to this question, Libresco says, “The correct answer was yes.” After all, “It wasn’t very likely that you’d walked into the YPU with the most accurate possible politics, ethics, and metaethics. If you hadn’t had to jettison some of your ideas several years in, we had our doubts about how honestly and deeply you were engaging in debate.” James Boswell, in his famous Life of Samuel Johnson, speaks of Johnson’s habit of “talking for victory,” but in the YPU, at least at its best, this would not be a virtue.

  In that sense the stakes in the YPU were considerably higher than the stakes of standard competitive debate: you didn’t just win or lose according to what some judges decreed about your ability to defend a designated position; you were vulnerable to changes of your own mind. And changing your mind could yield a different you. But the whole ethos of the YPU, in Libresco’s experience, was built around the willingness to expose yourself to just such a risk. To be “broken on the floor” was a token of good faith and an indication of a willingness not just to accept but to live out the values of the community. Libresco internalized those values, and that eventually made it possible, or at least easier, for her to embrace a set of beliefs, and a way of life, that set her at odds with her own upbringing.

  In the previous chapter I wrote that we always think with others, and Libresco’s story illustrates that point. It also suggests that our ability to think well will be determined to some considerable degree by who those others are: what we might call the moral form of our community. A willingness to be “broken on the floor,” for example, is in itself a testimony to belief that the people you’re debating are decent people who don’t want to harm or manipulate you—whereas if you don’t trust people you’re unlikely to allow them anything like a “victory” over you. This suggests that the problem of belonging and not-belonging, affiliation and separation, is central to the task of learning how to think.

  BINDING, BLINDING, AND THE INNER RING

  In his 2012 book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt tries to understand why we disagree with one another—especially, but not only, about politics and religion—and, more important, why it is so hard for people to see those who disagree with them as equally intelligent, equally decent human beings.

  Central to his argument is this point: “Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning.” Our “moral arguments” are therefore “mostly post hoc constructions made up on the fly, crafted to advance one or more strategic objectives.”

  Haidt talks a lot about how our moral intuitions accomplish two things: they bind and they blind. “People bind themselves into political teams that share moral narratives. Once they accept a particular narrative, they become blind to alternative moral worlds.” “Moral matrices bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.”

  But how do we acquire these initial moral intuitions—or, rather, the ones that prove decisive for our moral lives? (I make that distinction because, as we have just seen, people often end up dissenting, sometimes in the strongest possible terms, from the moral frameworks within which they were raised.) Haidt offers a partial answer to this question by contending that people have different genetic predispositions to the new: some of us are neophilic, others neophobic. But this really isn’t a very helpful answer, especially in describing people who change: even a person who does make a major shift will in her lifetime have experienced any number of new ideas, but will have rejected or ignored most of them. So the question remains: What triggers the formation of a “moral matrix” that becomes for a given person the narrative according to which everything and everyone else is judged?

  I think C. S. Lewis answered that question in December 1944, when he gave the Commemoration Oration at King’s College in London, a public lecture largely attended by students. Lewis called his audience’s attention to the presence, in schools and businesses and governments and armies and indeed in every other human institution, of a “second or unwritten system” that stands parallel to the formal organization—an Inner Ring.* The pastor is not always the most influential person in a church, nor the boss in the workplace. Sometimes groups of people with no formal titles or authority are the ones who determine how the organization works. They form its Inner Ring.

  Lewis does not think that any of his audience will be surprised to hear of this phenomenon; but he thinks that some may be surprised when he goes on to make this claim: “I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” And it is important for young people to know of the force of this desire because “of all passions the passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”

  The draw of the Inner Ring has such profound corrupting power because it never announces itself as evil—indeed, it never announces itself at all. On these grounds Lewis makes a “prophecy” to his audience at King’s College: “To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. . . . Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes . . . the hint will come.” And when it does come, “you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.”* It is by these subtle means that people who are “not yet very bad” can be drawn to “do very bad things”—by which actions they become, in the end, very bad people.

  This, I think, is how our “moral matrices,” as Haidt calls them, are formed: we respond to the irresistible draw of belonging to a group of people whom we happen to encounter and happen to find immensely attractive. We may be acting under the influence of strong genetic predispositions, but how those dispositions are activated seems largely to be a matter of what particular people one happens to bump into and when. The element of sheer contingency here is, or ought to be, terrifying: had we encountered a group of equally attractive and interesting people who held very different views, then we too would hold very different views.

  Of course, my explanation hasn’t taken us very far beyond Haidt’s. I might plausibly be accused of saying that people are attracted to the ideas of people they are attracted to. But it’s hard to go much further while speaking in a general mode. For some, the attraction of the new people will be that they seem smart; for others, that they’re rich, or beautiful. For still others being radically different, socially or religiously or politically, from one’s immensely annoying family may be key.

  But in any case, once we are drawn in, and allowed in, once we’re part of the Inner Ring, we maintain our status in part by coming up with those post hoc rationalizations that confirm our group identity and, equally important, confirm the nastiness of those who are Outside, who are Not Us. (That’s the theme of the next chapter.) And it’s worth noting, as Avery Pennarun, an engineer at Google, has commented, that one of the things that makes smart people smart is their skill at such rationalization: “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.”*

  THE BELONGING WE NEED: MEMBERSHIP

  In “The Inner Ring” Lewis portrays this group affiliation in the darkest of terms. That’s because he’s warn
ing people about its dangers, which is important. But there are healthier kinds of group affiliation, and 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. This can be seen most clearly in extreme cases, as, for instance, when people participate in some kind of mass political movement, as Eric Hoffer has explained in his classic study The True Believer:

  Thus when the frustrated congregate in a mass movement, the air is heavy-laden with suspicion. There is prying and spying, tense watching and a tense awareness of being watched. The surprising thing is that this pathological mistrust within the ranks leads not to dissension but to strict conformity. Knowing themselves continually watched, the faithful strive to escape suspicion by adhering zealously to prescribed behavior and opinion. Strict orthodoxy is as much the result of mutual suspicion as of ardent faith.

  Hoffer goes on to make the incisive point that “the loyalty of the true believer is to the whole—the church, party, nation—and not to his fellow true believer.” Indeed, that fellow true believer might be pretending—which he also suspects you of. For Hoffer, “True loyalty between individuals is possible only in a loose and relatively free society.” And this is true on a smaller scale and in less extreme situations as well. The genuine community is open to thinking and questioning, so long as those thoughts and questions come from people of goodwill.*