In this chapter, Jacobs explains that neither an open nor a shut mind is preferable: the two should work in tandem. Someone who has no set beliefs cannot be trusted. Someone whose every belief is unshakeable cannot be reasoned with.
Jacobs offers two metaphors to help us understand the proper
relationship open and shut minds. The first is our appetite. We shouldn’t open
our mind unless we intend to close it. If we’re going to think about something,
we should be ready to digest it. The second concerns solidity. We should aim
for firmness in our beliefs, neither rigidity nor flimsiness.
Sunk costs pose the greatest danger for the person prone to
rigidity. Sunk costs refer to unrecoverable resources that one invested cannot
be reclaimed. For instance, if you’ve been supporting a cause for 30 years, it
will be difficult to renounce your position without putting your identity in
jeopardy.
One of the things I’ll insist on my students considering is
that college is a time for them to take advantage of their minimal sunk costs
which can encourage their flexibility. At the same time, they’ll need to be
responsibility not to mistake flexibility for flimsiness under the mistaken impression
that changing your mind has no cost or that lacking firm beliefs is a virtue.
Alan Jacobs uses this chapter to distinguish two different dispositions: lumping and splitting. The first leads people to aggregate, to lump individuals or concepts together into larger groups or categories. A splitter does the opposite, uncovering dissimilarities and points of difference.
A quick thought experiment will show you how important such categories are. A prompt: which of these groups most determines your intellectual commitments?
Religious beliefs
Nationality
Political beliefs
Gende
Ethnicity
Education
Socio-economic background
Sexual orientation
We choose to belong to some of these categories. Some are not ours to choose. Others tend to overlap. Again, the problem is not lumping or splitting in themselves but relying on one or the other as an answer to every problem: in short, as an alternative to thinking. Jacobs in particular warns against lumping which can lead us too easily into dehumanizing our neighbors and letting them disappear into the crowd so it’s easier not to have to think about them.
In class, we’ll use the prompt above and see what kind of explanations students have for their lumping and splitting habits.
In this chapter, Jacobs observes that words can only accentuate our disposition. They are not a replacement for wisdom. Used as currency, they only hasten our intellectual bankruptcy.
Jacobs discusses the general role words have in building community and dismissing opponents. We use keywords to help unite us to like-minded people, letting short words do a lot of heavy-lifting either in support of our position or dismissing the positions of others. Those keywords are often bound together by metaphors, analogies that we use to help explain difficult ideas by framing them in terms of something we understand better. Thus, it matters if we connect argumentation and war: winning, destroying, shooting down, etc. Finally, these metaphors get woven into myths or narratives (stories about our tribe or about the tribes we define ourselves against). Now our language is way too weight bearing for what we ask it to do.
Again none of this is necessarily bad. What is harmful is
when we use keywords in place of thought, metaphors as though they are natural,
and stories that predict ahead of time how we will interpret any new evidence
we receive.
Jacobs admits that it really appears at times as though it is impossible to ever change someone’s mind. But we do know that people change their minds, and this can provide hope when we grow despondent.
One thing we can do when confronted with a position that differs from our own is attempt to summarize that position in such a way as to demonstrate to ourselves and the person who hold that position that we actually understand what we’re disagreeing with.
If we want to think well, we must distinguish good
preconceptions and bad biases, between recognizing that words can be a way of
intensifying our thoughts just as they can be a way of avoiding thought
altogether.
If our beliefs are often shaped by who we want to be in
community with, our communities are often strengthened by who they refuse to have community with, those
people who are no are longer neighbors but “others.”
Jacobs’s examples and analysis in this chapter are only more poignant now as we enter a new presidential election cycle. He begins by talking about how people negatively reacted to a blogger who expressed his happiness that Osama Bin Laden was dead and how those same people then gleefully celebrated the death of Margaret Thatcher. He ends by quoting the vulgar exchanges Sir Thomas More and Martin Luther had during the Reformation. Scorched earth.
Jacobs offers two pieces of advice to help temper our
repulsions.
Find people who you trust who do not hold your
same views. This act of intellectual humility will force you to consider that
you don’t have everything figured out and that someone who doesn’t share your
view on X issue is still your neighbor.
Emotions are not the problem. Making rationality
and emotions mutually exclusive is much more dangerous.
In an effort to help students acclimate to this advice, I will
have them pick a third-tier belief of theirs (e.g NASCAR is the best sport in
the world; that Chick-Fil-A has the best chicken sandwiches on the fast food
market; that Star Trek is better than Star Wars), something that they feel
passionately about but where the stakes are not too high. Then, I will ask them
to find someone who articulates the opposite view (e.g. that NASCAR blows, that
Zaxby wipes the floor with Chick-Fil-A, or that Star Wars eats Star Trek’s
lunch every day of the week). We’ll do our same summary/analysis exercise with
the articles/write-ups they find and pray that with some engagement, our
opponent remains, despite being an adversary, our neighbor.
In the second chapter of How To Think, Jacobs further develops his insight that thinking is social. Because we want to belong, we must be aware of the extent to which that desire for membership influences our beliefs. We can often sacrifice our willingness to scrutinize our beliefs because doing so may cause us to lose membership in a group that has come to define our identity.
When evaluating our memberships, we should start by looking at the ends our group prefers, so that even if we disagree about means, we can find enough solidarity to help sustain us in those disagreements. Prudence allows us to evaluate when it is time to hold our most cherished beliefs up to the light and when it is time to hold firm to our commitments. As Jacobs points out, the people most likely to resist coercion by true evil are those who are part of a group with deeply held beliefs.
Assigning my freshmen students the book How to Think appears to make my ends for the course quite clear. I
am subtly arguing that research and writing are means by which one can think
better, and I would prefer if students left the course better able to think,
which as I’ve discussed in the two previous posts is not so much about specific
beliefs as it is the process by which
we reach those beliefs.
Here’s the problem. If someone asked me what my goal for
every class was, I would say that in an overarching sense, I’m trying to
glorify God and enjoy Him forever and that my particular courses were attempts
to foster a desire for those same things in my students (which I could call “discipleship”
as shorthand). Here, my means would be the same (reading and writing) my goal
for the course would be a kind of thinking, a Christ-honoring form of thinking
which would necessarily lead to certain ends and not others.
I build my class around one kind of assignment: summary and
analysis. Students get handed an opinion editorial and are asked first to
summarize the argument then evaluate whether or not the author has made the
argument effectively. This assignment is a means to get them to be able first
to clearly state what someone else is arguing and before thinking critically
about the way that argument was presented. In the abstract, I would say that it’s
possible to have an argument you agree with while still maintaining that the
argument is made poorly while it is possible to have an argument that you
disagree with while admitting that it’s one made well. But what end does that
kind of observation serve?
Beliefs are not enough. The means by which we reach those
beliefs and the way we live out those beliefs matter. These are fundamentally
spiritual insights. I have to think more rigorously about how to foster
discipleship through the process of thinking.
In the first chapter of his book How to Think, Alan Jacobs makes two main points: 1) thinking alone is impossible and 2) true thinking requires a marriage of reason and emotion. Perhaps his most salient takeaway comes as a result of those two facts: it is possible to have engaged in genuine thought and come up with the wrong answer, and it is possible to come up with the right answer for bad reasons without thinking at all.
Jacobs focuses on the way that we tend to denigrate the thinking process of others. If those we love have changed their mind from our viewpoint to one we oppose, we tend to assume they’ve been ensnared instead of thinking for themselves. If those we love do something we can’t understand, we tend to dismiss them as irrational or crazy.
After the break, I’ll talk about some ways I will attempt to work through these dilemmas with my students..
I’m rereading Alan Jacobs’s fabulous How to Think this summer because I’m teaching it again in the fall. Below are my takeaways from the book’s introduction. After the break, you’ll find some prompts to help you personalize the takeaways.
Thinking is hard. There are tons of ways to get it wrong. That’s why we don’t work at it (much less do it) even though we know it’s important.
Thinking is the process that goes into making the decision, not the decision itself. It’s the work we did to come up with the answer, not the answer itself.
Thinking is social. We never do it alone, and when we fail to think, we often do it because it’s socially discouraged.
Thinking is emotional. Thinking is rational too. It’s just that it’s easy to make thinking one rather than both of these things.
Thinking is oblique. That’s why the best way to approach thinking is not by contemplating thinking in itself but by approaching it indirectly.
Thinking is ultimately moral because it’s primarily a matter of our wills.
[T]he essential purpose of this course goes far beyond the mere technicalities of grammar and rhetoric. Ultimately, this course engages your deepest needs and interests, your thinking, your feelings, your relationships with other people.
From Modern Rhetoric by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
What is freshman composition for?
In the very first paragraph of their multi-editioned textbook, Brooks and Warren give the above answer. The purpose of the composition course, in their minds, is to unite a person’s feelings and thought as well as increase that person’s ability to commune peacefully with other people.
These are spiritual purposes, not pragmatic ones. Though Brooks and Warren are not explicit about the spiritual roots of their view, they do not simply reduce language to a tool that can be used to accrue power, money, or personal happiness. There is something metaphysical here, a kind of harmony with one’s self and others, that language affords. This is not a bad way of answering the question, “Why do I have to take composition?” though I would want to know what the assumptions are that give Brooks and Warren the warrant for making this argument.
Like every God-given facet of human culture, language is a means by which to love God and others more fully. Here are the assumptions that undergird the composition courses I teach.
Language demands our attention because it’s part of God’s identity and thus is a crucial part of what it means to be a human made in God’s image. Jesus is called the word, and God reveals himself to us in words through sacred writings.
Language gives us a concrete way of ordering and organizing the world.
Language has rules and can be used correctly and incorrectly.
Language not only can be used to bless and curse but can, upon being used correctly or incorrectly, precipitate blessings or cursings.
Language that communicates truth will stand the test of time.
Language is at the core of who we are, how we know anything, and how we act in the world. Our relationship with language amounts to nothing less than our relationship with the God whose language brought the world into existence.
I’m trying to figure out a way to encourage my students to read and take notes in a way that’s productive. After watching some videos by a high school teacher named Tim McGee, I’m thinking about something like the reading notebook he encourages his students to keep.
McGee’s system asks you to divide each page into two halves: the left hand side for before class and the right hand side for during and after class.
On the left side, you track: 1) what happened in what you read (i.e. a summary), 2a) what it means and 2b) how the author says it, and 3a) what other literary works the text under discussion reminds you of and 3b) what personal events the text reminds you of.
I’m leading a reading group discussion of Jane Eyre this summer, so I’ll be keeping the journal as I read it to use as a model. I listened to this episode of In Our Time today to simulate the classroom lecture I was taking notes on. I was really encouraged by how the process worked, and I’m excited about honing it for use in the fall. Who knows? I might even start using it for my Bible reading.
As I prepare to teach a new course in the fall—The English Novel—I’ve been preparing the best way I know how: by watching lectures on youtube. Yesterday, I found this lecture given by Dr. Melanie Holm, an IUPUI professor, who posted some lectures from her graduate course on the origins of the English novel. The lecture I watched covered the introduction to Michael McKeon’s influential book titled…wait for it…The Origins of the English Novel.
Holm knows her stuff. She elicits the questions that the introduction provoked in her students then proceeds to work through McKeon’s argument. Her focus is less on McKeon’s thesis—that the rise of the English novel coincides with the rise of the English middle class—than how a critical theorist like McKeon makes his argument. In short, you can learn as much by following the way someone makes an argument as you can by simply reading someone’s thesis.
McKeon’s chief insight is to analogize Marx’s analysis of political economy—the dialectical method—to the historical formation of genre. McKeon manages to synthesize the structuralist critics like Frye with more dialogic critics like Bakhtin to put a properly historical spin on the novel’s origins. McKeon’s prose is knotty, and Holm does a good job of unpacking these dense ideas in ways that were easier to grasp.
But my main takeaway from the lecture was not something about the novel’s origins. It was Holm’s words of encouragement to her students about how to read. To put it bluntly, she talked to her graduate students like they were disciples. Holm urged her students to keep reading even when they got confused because it would all make sense in the end. They simply had to have faith, and they would see that McKeon’s way of getting to his main point—the journey—would be just as meaningful as the main point itself—his destination.
Holm advocated for a kind of providential reading, even though she seemed to buy McKeon’s secularizing thesis about how people rejected scriptural truth authority did not appear to be a Christ follower. Still, Holm’s language indicates that how we read, our posture towards reading, can be a way to work our discipleship. We can believe and hope with faith because our relationship to language and meaning has Christ at its center.
