How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

the architecture of the human mind, we construct our descriptive taxonomies and tell our explanatory stories as dichotomies, or contrasts between inherently distinct and logically opposite alternatives.” That is, we have an inbuilt and powerful disposition toward dichotomizing—but one that we don’t have to obey.

The second component is this: when your feelings are properly cultivated, when that part of your life is strong and healthy, then your responses to the world will be adequate to what the world is really like. To have your feelings moved by the beauty of a landscape is to respond to that landscape in the way that it deserves;

We might recall here Roger Scruton’s commendation of taking “a negotiating posture towards the other”—to do that, I think, is to cease to see a person as “the other” but rather as “my neighbor.” And when you do that, it becomes harder to Bulverize that person, to treat him or her as so obviously wrong that no debate is required, only mockery.

And where is the line that separates (a) matching my writing to my audience from (b) telling people what they want to hear so that I can get into the pages of an influential magazine? I didn’t know where the line was—I still don’t know where the line is—but I know it exists.

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.

Instability of this kind—the kind that makes you wonder whether your ingroup is helping you draw closer to the truth of things or blocking you from seeing that truth—is pretty much impossible to live with for the long term. You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world, any more than

The cold divisive logic of the RCO impoverishes us, all of us, and brings us closer to that primitive state that the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes called “the war of every man against every man.”

we need to be able to make reliable assessments about the state of our knowledge, in such a way that when necessary we can hold back from taking any position until we learn more; and we need to accept that while knowledge may be analog, decision making is often digital, that is, binary. I may believe with some but not absolute confidence that one p

the failure to recognize other dialects, other contexts, other people, as having value that needs to be respected—especially, it’s tempting to say, if you want those people to respect your dialects and contexts and friends and family members, but perhaps what really matters is the damage this inability to code-switch does to the social fabric.

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.*2 The pastor is not always the most influential person in a church, nor the boss in the workplace. S