Jacobs, Alan. How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds, 2017.
Alan Jacobs, an English professor in
the Baylor University Honors Program, provides hope for those who wish to think
more soundly in these contentious times through this short, lively manual on the
way we make decisions. Jacobs engages with the experts on the topic (chiefly Daniel
Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt), pulls specific examples out of the recent past to
illustrate his points, and even provides a compelling checklist for thinking well. As
Jacobs contends, part of good thinking is merely diagnostic: knowing that you
have a thinking conundrum. If you can internalize a few more of Jacobs’s
recommended best practices, you’ll be glad you read the book.
Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be analyzing the rhetoric of Cornelius Van Til’s “Why I Believe in God.”
In the first part
of his apology for believing in God, Cornelius Van Til argues that believing in
God is necessary because without God we couldn’t understand anything else. He begins
his apology for believing in God by bringing up eminent scientists and
philosophers who are have recently addressed belief. Jeans and Eddington allow
for the possibility of religious experience, and Joad says that evil’s reality
forces him to consider the possibility of God’s existence. Van Til wonders if
the reader has pondered what happens after death. After all, even Socrates—the wisest
philosopher—was uncertain of what would happen after he died. Is there a
judgment or might there be a God? How does one know for sure. Asking such
questions is a sure sign of intelligence and indicates a desire for you to know
why it is you believe what you believe. You want to know what’s real, and
asking about God is one way of doing that. Van Til indicates that his belief in
God started when he was young and that he knows such an admission will taint
his case in the reader’s eyes. He doesn’t agree, however. He will discuss the
arguments he’s heard against God since he’s been an adult and why he’s even
more positive now that God exists. Both the arguments he makes and the
arguments he anticipates his readers will make are premised on God. He compares
this state of affair to arguing about air while breathing it the entire time or
trying to blow up a gun stand while using the gun stand as a foundation for
your guns. Unless the thing you’re attacking existed in the first place, you
couldn’t make your attack on its existence.
Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.
Psalm 139:23
I am anxious and am worried about many things. I am worried
about my adequacy as a teacher and scholar. I am worried about my adequacy as a
husband and father. I am worried about my adequacy as a child of God.
Yet the solution proposed in the Psalm is not intense
self-analysis or reflection. Instead, the Psalmist asks God to search him and,
through testing, to know my anxious thoughts.
This, indeed, is a radical kind of pedagogy!
If I am the student, the one who endures the test, then how
am I learning if it is God who knows my heart and my anxious thoughts? Wouldn’t it best for me to know them so as to,
you know, give them over to God?
The root of a God-centered education might very well be
letting go of that need to know our own hearts first.
This week when I feel anxiety, I want my first impulse to be
prayer: that God would know my heart and my anxious thoughts and that the Holy
Spirit would intercede for me in my ignorance. This semester when I feel
anxiety, I want my first impulse to be prayer too so that this semester when my
students are afflicted by anxieties, I can with confidence encourage them to turn
to God and pray this Psalm as well.
In his first collection of short stories, Klosterman presents fictional answers to implicit hypothetical scenarios. What would you do if you encountered a puma in an airplane lavatory? How do you communicate through an ad the quantum leap of a new product? Can someone get a little rabid from a rabies shot, and if so, how responsible are they for seeming menacing? What happens when the wrong kind of fans make a song you made popular though the fans seemed to have missed the point of the song? My questions are a bit too specific. Klosterman is interested in how technology and modernity have made us captive to specific kinds of expectations, perceptions, and experiences. The stories, at their best, alert us to our own chains. What’s shocking is that there’s really nothing in here I would classify as spiritual. Let’s say that one thing these stories are about is the way that we need fictional constructs to help us engage the truths of the world, that we would go blind if we looked directly into some of those truths without protective eye-wear. Then what’s the story in here about growing up Catholic or being a Christian or converting to Buddhism? I’m not saying it’s not here, but it seems like that kind of story should be here and it’s not.
The Ghost Map – Steven Johnson
This is gripping narrative of how two men, a doctor and a minister, helped solve the cause of the cholera outbreak in 19th Century London. John Snow, a doctor, and Henry Whitehead, an Anglican clergyman, collaborated to disprove the miasma theory and locate the source of the deadly outbreak in the water Soho residents were drinking. Johnson’s portrait examines how and why certain kinds of scientific arguments persuade while others fail and how important the marketing of an argument is. For instance, Snow’s two maps of the outbreak were more compelling than any single piece of writing he or Whitehead released to the public. Along the way, Johnson delves into the benefits and vulnerabilities associated with densely populated urban spaces. Snow and Whitehead won a victory for human flourishing in the big city, but Johnson warns we must continue to learn from their example in the era of biological weapons. Johnson’s analysis is indebted to evolutionary theory, and the book’s few mentions of religion reduce it to superstition. Whitehead, Johnson makes it seem, helps solve the cholera plague in spite of, rather than because of, his religious beliefs. What Johnson fails to mention is that one of the reasons Johnson was such a good neighbor to those who were in need was precisely the very real religious convictions he held. What role do spiritual communities play in ensuring the flourishing of the densely populated urban spaces Johnson adores?
Why Liberalism Failed – Patrick Deneen
I’ve just read a couple of chapters, but this book is a really compelling argument that representative democracy—which claims to provide political liberty and human dignity—is the source of the very problems that ail it. I’ve only read the diagnosis yet, not the cure, but Deneen is challenging both conservative and liberal thinkers in this book by going after the greed of the free market, on the one hand, and the disregard for tradition and entrenched forms of community on the other.
A novelist is a circus impresario, someone who puts on a grand performance for the reader. The chapters are tents, the characters the circus performers and the narrator a kind of ringmaster. How can you measure one circus against another? For that matter, how can you measure one circus performer against another? What matters is that the audience keeps wanting more, keeps wanting to come back because they sense, albeit dimly, that what they’re witnessing is truly fantastic, something spiritual not just material.
Erin Morgenstern pursues this metaphor throughout her novel The Night Circus. Why night? Probably because the circus is a waking dream, and fiction, Morgenstern’s analogue for the circus, is the mirror image of the daytime and “real life.” In 1870s Victorian England, two magicians challenge one another to a contest via their students. They’ve done this before. The man in gray, Alexander, seems to have won the past few. But now his opponent, who goes by the name Prospero, has his daughter as a student. Alexander claims Marcos from an orphanage as his pupil. Prospero and Alexander set to work training their respective students, and the novel recounts the outcome of their battle.
In his opinion editorial titled “Aspirational parents condemn their children to a desperate, joyless life,” George Monbiot argues that our culture’s quest for success is actually guaranteeing its opposite. Children are told they can improve their lives, but they are looking at a world that is worse than the one their parents grew up in. Childhood is being stripped from young people as they must begin training for success immediately. Everything from internships in college to getting into the right elementary show how success rather than happiness is culture’s ultimate goal. What makes it worse, Monbiot argues, is that the British government doesn’t seem to care about the mental toll this is taking on the country’s youths. Recent survey results show there is cause for concern. Children are hurting themselves and getting eating disorders more frequently. They feel less secure about their future and have less of a desire to go to school. Monbiot concludes that the very ambition that motivates these children to endure these hardships will rob them of the joy that their material success is supposed to bring.
Reinhold Niebuhr’s essay on humor and faith situates humor in the context of the Christian life. He begins with a verse from Psalms that records God laughing at sinners: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.” Because this kind of laughter is pure judgment with no mercy, it represents a point Niebuhr wants to make about humor. True laughter acts as a gateway to the reconciliation of two contradictory principles, like justice and mercy. Thus, Christ is the answer to the derisive God who laughs in the OT, and the cross, while featuring irony, is not a place of laughter. It is deathly serious.
Why do people laugh? Because they are able to discern an incongruity between the way things are and the way they should be. The incongruity of human existence is still too much for laughter to solve. That’s where faith comes. Laughter can be a way of gaining self-transcendence, of experiencing what it feels like to stand outside oneself and discover a greater order existing above the current disorder. This ability has its limits when confronted with humanity’s simultaneous power and powerlessness. If one must err on either favoring a rationality that exalts human strength or humor that admits human frailty, Niebuhr agrees that humor is the better option because an all-encompassing rationality will only lead to despair. True laughter, however, dies away as the sinner enters the holy of the holies. Humor lays the groundwork for true faith in God, the only one who can address humanity’s sin but cannot forgive those sins.
I continue to deliberate on fascinating problems to present my students with rather than a series of facts with which to stuff them.
My next series of questions come from the first real chapter of Literature Through the Eyes of Faith. I’ve put together question with examples from scripture, everyday life, and literature as possible test case answers. You can find the questions and answers after the jump.
In this chapter, Alan Jacobs uses a David Foster Wallace book review to tout the two most significant traits of good thinking: rigor and humility.
Wallace’s review demonstrates a person thinking well as
review that he is good precisely because it upholds the Democratic Spirit (yes,
with capital letters as a kind of tongue in cheek joke). The book Wallace
examines is about language usage, and Wallace finds it refreshing that the book’s
author, Bryan Garner, is able to offer expert advice without being preachy. In
short, Garner manages to write with the authority of a lawyer or doctor rather
than a dictator or preacher. This means that Garner meshes rigor (clear answers
with solid reasons on all sort of usage questions) with humility (clear
explanations that resist the urge to demean, belittle, or assume his position is
automatically the correct one).
Once again, Jacobs preaches temperance. We cannot possibly maintain a constant Democratic Spirit about us at every conceivable moment. Instead, we must make a concerted effort to admit where we’ve erred, show a willingness to learn from mistakes, and demonstrate a willingness to believe our opponents might benefit from the extension of that Spirit. This is easier said than done. It’s when reading books like Garner’s, or reviews like Wallace’s, or books like Jacobs’s that we can best see this kind of rigorous and humble thinking in action.
