Category: Writing

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.

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.