How to Think Page 7
Consider the case of the woman known as SM. SM has a rare condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease, which affects the functioning of her amygdala, at the base of her brain, in such a way that she feels no fear. As Rachel Feltman explains in The Washington Post, “SM isn’t stupid. She understands what can and can’t kill her. But she lacks the quick, subconscious, visceral response that the rest of us feel when we’re exposed to danger. In some ways, she leads a charmed life; everyone she meets wishes her well, and the world is a sunny place. But because she has to consciously process danger, she can put herself into unfortunate situations.” Once, when a man on a park bench asked her to come to him, she readily did—only for him to pull a knife and threaten her with it.*
The problem, Damasio writes, is that SM “has to consciously process danger,” and human brains don’t have the energy to do that kind of processing in every waking moment. If you and I were walking through a public park and a little old lady asked us to walk over to her, we would probably do it without a second thought—indeed, without a first conscious thought, because what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 (Jonathan Haidt’s “elephant”) would have already been at work establishing our response to the situation, clearing it as safe. We do not pause to work through the likelihood that the little old lady could be a psychopath or part of a criminal gang. We simply approach when called, because our conscious minds are occupied with other things, and we trust System 1 to do the reconnaissance and risk calculation for us. But if some creepy-looking dude who appears not to have bathed or washed his clothes in a year calls to us, System 1 has all its fear alarms primed: we don’t stop to think whether to go over there, because that decision has already been made, beneath the surface of consciousness. (The categories “little old lady” and “creepy-looking dude” are positively loaded with feeling.) But if System I weren’t functioning, if it set off no alarms, and especially if our conscious minds were occupied with something else, then we might do just what SM did and mosey on over.
What System 1 does for us is to provide us with a repertoire of biases, biases that reduce the decision-making load on our conscious brains. These 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.”
So we need the biases, the emotional predispositions, to relieve that cognitive load. We just want them to be the right ones. 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.* System 1 works on its own, without conscious direction, but it can be changed, trained; it can develop new habits. This is what Mill meant when he spoke of the power of rightly ordered affections to shape the character. 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. These best people will provide for you models of how to treat those who disagree with them: think back to the story of Megan Phelps-Roper, and the contrast between how David Abitbol handled her attacks on him and how the people of Westboro dealt with any dissent from their views. Phelps-Roper didn’t just change ideas, she changed communities, and she did so by following certain instincts, certain feelings, about human behavior. (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.) Before she could have made a rational argument for her change she was already changing, and that was in response to what she saw in the character, good and bad, of the people she interacted with. A model of rationality that can’t embrace this kind of change—from one set of biases to another, a set that is better because it draws on healthy feelings—is impoverished indeed.†
And maybe worse than impoverished. A hundred years ago G. K. Chesterton wrote, “If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”*
* * *
* http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
* “Post-Partisanship Is Hyper-Partisanship,” http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/27/post-partisanship-is-hyper-partisanship/. “We think of groups close to us in Near Mode, judging them on their merits as useful allies or dangerous enemies. We think of more distant groups in Far Mode—usually, we exoticize them. Sometimes it’s positive exoticization of the Noble Savage variety (understood so broadly that our treatment of Tibetans counts as an example of the trope). Other times it’s negative exoticization, treating them as cartoonish stereotypes of evil who are more funny or fascinating than repulsive. Take Genghis Khan—objectively he was one of the most evil people of all time, killing millions of victims, but since we think of him in Far Mode he becomes fascinating or even perversely admirable—‘wow, that was one impressively bloodthirsty warlord.’”
* The article appeared in the American Journal of Political Science 59, no. 3 (July 2015).
* It was Pius IX who made this statement in his famous Syllabus of Errors (Syllabus Errorum, 1864). Brownson—who was a fervent Catholic convert—made his statement in an essay titled “Reform and Reformers” (1863), which was part of the international conversation that led up to Pius’s Syllabus.
* Kass’s essay “The Wisdom of Repugnance” (New Republic, June 2, 1997) focused particularly on the repugnance he believed that we should feel at the prospect of cloning humans.
* C. S. Lewis, “‘Bulverism’ or, The Foundation of Twentieth Century Thought,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Eerd-mans, 1970), pp. 271–77.
* The phrase was coined by John Suler in “The Online Disinhibition Effect,” CyberPsychology & Behavior 7, no. 3 (2004): 321– 26.
* Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Harper, 1964), p. 37.
* http://www.overcomingbias.com/
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2015/01/20/meet-the-woman-who-cant-feel-fear/. The woman’s story was originally told on the NPR podcast Invisibilia, with commentary from Antonio Damasio. In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (G. P. Putnam, 1994), Damasio develops his theory of “somatic markers”: our bodies in a very strong sense mark our minds in ways that encode and then trigger certain feelings; these markers are in turn essential to healthy thinking and good decision making. As Damasio strikingly states his conclusion, “The mind is embodied, in the full sense of the term, not just embrained.”
* Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (Crossroad, 1992), p. 298.
†Kahneman and his longtime research partner Amos Tversky made a distinction between
Humans and Econs, Econs being the purely rational—in the narrow sense of “rational” I have been arguing against—agents beloved of certain strains of economic theory. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman, summarizing his work with Tversky, explains that Econs are creatures that are fairly easy to understand, but have the unfortunate trait of being purely imaginary. Humans, by contrast, are real but exceptionally complicated, and while they don’t behave as Econs do, they are not, says Kahneman, on that account to be dismissed as irrational. “The definition of rationality as coherence is impossibly restrictive; it demands adherence to rules of logic that a finite mind is not able to implement. Reasonable people cannot be rational by that definition, but they should not be branded as irrational for that reason. Irrational is a strong word, which connotes impulsivity, emotionality, and a stubborn resistance to reasonable argument. I often cringe when my work with Amos is credited with demonstrating that human choices are irrational, when in fact our research only showed that Humans are not well described by the rational-agent model.”
* G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), chap. 2.
four
THE MONEY OF FOOLS
The dangers of too much trust in and reliance on words
The title of this chapter comes courtesy of Thomas Hobbes, the great seventeenth-century political philosopher. Early in his masterpiece, Leviathan, he writes, “Nor is it possible without letters for any man to become either excellently wise, or, unless his memory be hurt by disease or ill constitution of organs, excellently foolish. For words are wise men’s counters—they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.”* Translating Hobbes’s point into contemporary English: Literacy (“letters”) is an extraordinary invention because of its power to amplify existing traits. By reading, a man already having some wisdom can gain far more; but it is equally true that reading can make a man already inclined toward foolishness far, far more foolish.
The point should not be confined to written words. As Doctor Cuticle says to some young naval surgeons in Melville’s White-Jacket, “A man of true science uses but few hard words, and those only when none other will answer his purpose; whereas the smatterer in science thinks, that by mouthing hard words, he proves that he understands hard things.”* (Science here means “disciplined knowledge.”) It is easy to become captive to words, to treat them as though they truly and fully convey genuine knowledge—as though they are real cash money, legal tender, accepted everywhere at their face value, rather than mere counters.
Words are immensely seductive, in ways we don’t often recognize. Their power can perhaps most clearly be seen in young children, who become fascinated by new words and look for every possible opportunity to use them. Now, in fact, adults are no different in this respect: we just have learned to do a better job than our younger counterparts of obscuring our fascination, of pretending that a phrase brand new to us has been part of our word hoard forever. Oh, this old thing? But we turn the shiny new phrases over and over in our minds, as a miser fondles the coins in his pockets.
The temptation to overvalue words is increased by the role that words play in binding people socially. In Chapter 2 we discussed Jonathan Haidt’s argument that “moral matrices” both bind and blind, and those matrices do that work largely through language. Decades ago the idiosyncratic literary critic Kenneth Burke wrote a brilliant essay called “Terministic Screens,” in which he made this point. Whenever we use a particular vocabulary—political, say, or aesthetic, or moral, or religious, or sociological—to describe a person, or a thing, or an event, we call attention to certain aspects of what we’re describing. But we also, as long as we look through the screen of that language, inadvertently hide from ourselves, become blind to, other aspects. Burke doesn’t believe we have a choice about whether or not to employ terministic screens: “We can’t say anything without the use of terms.” But for that very reason we need to work hard to understand how our terms work, especially how they “direct the attention”: What does this language ask me to see? What does it prevent me from seeing? And—perhaps most important of all: Who benefits from my attention being directed this way rather than that?*
KEYWORDS AND GROUP IDENTITY
One of the primary ways people indicate their group affiliations, and disaffiliations, is through the deployment of keywords. This is true across the political and social spectrums, and can be seen in its purest (i.e., most extreme) form in the deployment of certain social-media hashtags: #RINO, for example, or #cuckservative, or #intersectionality, or #whiteprivilege. Often these hashtags will be deployed as one-word replies to the tweets or posts of others. Hashtags like this do a lot of work, and they remind me of a scene between Humpty Dumpty and Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:
“Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
“Would you tell me please,” said Alice, “what that means?”
“Now you talk like a reasonable child,” said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. “I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.”
“That’s a great deal to make one word mean,” Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” said Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.”*
Let’s take #cuckservative as an example, since it’s a portmanteau word, and Humpty Dumpty claimed to have invented those: “two meanings packed up in one word,” in this case “cuckold” and “conservative.” The cuckold, the husband whose wife regularly cheats on him, is, in the classic account, weak-willed, dominated both by his wife and by the man who has supplanted him. The cuckservative then is a self-proclaimed conservative who lacks the courage of his convictions, has become dominated by liberalism, can no longer stand up for truly conservative ideas.
That’s a purely pejorative word, as are #RINO (Republican in Name Only) and #whiteprivilege. But #intersectionality is more of a rallying cry. It’s shorthand for an argument that begins with one key insight: that someone who belongs to more than one oppressed or marginalized group—a black lesbian, for instance—experiences such oppression or marginalization in a particularly intensified way thanks to the “intersection” of those social forces. To call attention to intersectionality with a hashtag is to remind people of that intensification, but also, often, to suggest that people who belong to various marginalized groups need to see their cause as a common one, to focus on the points at which their experiences intersect.
To invite people to political collaboration, or dismiss a political figure, with a single hashtag is, as Alice suggests, “a great deal to make one word mean,” and we might be tempted to say that it’s a temptation that social media, especially Twitter, with its 140-character-per-tweet limit, encourage. But in fact we do this kind of thing in conversation all the time—as long as we’re conversing with like-minded people, friends or colleagues or just acquaintances whom we’re confident know the same lingo we do and have the same attitude toward it. “Just another cuckservative” is the kind of thing that might be said to people sitting around a table at a restaurant; or “Come on, people, intersectionality.”
The sociology of deploying keywords is complicated and fascinating, and not as mindless as it might look to outsiders. I’m reminded here of an ancient joke about a man who is sent to prison, and discovers that his fellow prisoners have a habit of saying numbers to one another—“Four!” “Seventeen!”—and then laughing uproariously. When he asks what’s going on his neighbor explains that they pass the time by telling jokes, but they’ve all been there so long, and with a limited repertoire of jokes, that they’ve found it easier to number the jokes and just call out the numbers. This makes sense to the new prisoner, so after a few moments of silence he says, “Eleven!” But no one laughs. He turns to his neighbor in puzzlement, and the neighbor shrugs and says, “It’s how you tell it.”
>
Similarly, we’ve all seen newcomers to a social group suffering through a kind of linguistic struggle: they’ve paid attention to how the group converses, they’ve picked up a few keywords, but when they try to use them they don’t get the expected response. They’ve used one of the approved words, but not at the right time, or in the right context. There’s a curiously musical element to the sociology of keywords, a kind of group harmony that develops: the newcomer is prone to missing her cue or singing off-key. It takes a while to find your way into the Inner Ring, and the socially tone-deaf person may never get it right, and may be forever confined to the group’s periphery, or excluded from it altogether.
(There’s also the still more excruciating experience of using—or hearing someone use—the keywords that mark one group while unknowingly engaging with a wholly different group: a massive social miscalculation that, I assume, all of us have made from time to time. Once I was sitting with my father and a friend of his, two crusty old dudes if ever there were crusty old dudes, and was trying to make conversation with them. I decided to quote a witty comment by Rush Limbaugh—I couldn’t abide Rush, but a very conservative friend of mine who liked him had recently relayed the anecdote to me. Though my father never talked about politics, I guessed that he’d appreciate Rush’s line; but when I said it a cold silence descended. Then, after what seemed half an hour but was probably only a few seconds, my father lit a cigarette, took a pull, exhaled, and said, “Rush is full of shit.” To which his friend replied, “Sure is.”)
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with using such keywords—indeed, they’re necessary. In any gathering where human beings communicate with one another, some beliefs or positions will be taken for granted: we cannot and need not justify everything we think, before every audience, by arguing from first principles. 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: