Tried With Fire

"When you believe that the brokenness of this world can be not just ameliorated but fixed once and for all, then people who don't share your optimism, or who do share it but invest it in a different system, are adversaries of Utopia. (An "adversary" is literally one who has turned against you, one who blocks your path.) Whole classes of people can by this logic become expendable - indeed, it can become the optimist's perceived duty to eliminate the adversaries." 1 This quote from How to Think is spot on. It is easy to become so invested in what is believed to be the "right way" of doing things that any disagreement is seen as a threat. Arguments are shot down and any disagreers are shut up and labeled with the appropriate pejoratives. (see Argument as war ) Perhaps the issue isn't optimism in general but one that is untempered and attempts to circumvent the consequences of the fall in this life. Rather than facing circumstances as they a...

How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds - Alan Jacobs, Currency,  2017, 157 pages. I debated about writing a one sentence review - "If you don't want to act like a jerk toward people you disagree with, read this book." Or its converse - "If you want to be respectful and gracious toward people you disagree with, read this book." While both of those statements are true about How to Think , this book is more than tips on being nice and not being mean. Thinking is more than just being intelligent. It's more than always making the right decision or having the right answer. It also isn't about turning off emotions and being purely rational. Thinking is about taking the time and making the effort to consider how our thoughts and thought patterns cause us to view and treat others. To use biblical language, thinking is critical in how we love our neighbor. Written out of concern for the increasing nastiness in the culture and social media, in...

I posted quotes from How to Think about argument as war . If we don't want to fall into that trap, it is easy to make another mistake by overlooking very real differences that need to be acknowledged. Here's what Jacobs has to say about that: "So when people say, "They really mean the same thing, they're just using different vocabularies to express it," 1 or "We all believe in the same God, we just express that belief in different ways," we may with some justification commend these people for attempting to get beyond confrontation, dichotomy, argument as war. But we have to go on to say that the attempt is a facile one. The real story will be far more complicated, and not to be grasped by replacing a fictitious polarity with an equally fictitious unity. Blessed are the peacemakers, to be sure, but peacemaking is a long, hard labor, and not a mere declaration." 2 1. Didn't this happen during the 2016 Trinity debate? 2. 2.  How to Th...

Your claims are indefensible. He attacked every weak point in my argument. His criticisms were right on target . I demolished his argument. I've never won an argument with him. You disagree? Okay, shoot ! If you use that strategy , he will wipe you out . He shot down all my arguments. 1 "The identification of argument with war is so complete that if you try to suggest some alternative way of thinking about what argument is - It's an attempt to achieve mutual understanding; It's a means of clarifying our views - you're almost certainly going to be denounced as a wishy-washy, namby-pamby sissy-britches." 2 "So yes: argument can indeed be war, or at least a contest in which it is possible to lose. But there's another side to this story: what is lost not in an argument but through passive complicity with that militaristic metaphor. Because there are many situations in which we lose something of our humanity by militarizing disc...

It's easy to assume that emotions have little place, if any, in thinking well. After all, an argument based on "I just feel this is the way it is" isn't much of an argument at all. So should we check our emotions at the door? To continue in  How to Think , Alan Jacobs uses the example of the philosopher John Stuart Mill. He was raised by his father to be a thinker, no emotions necessary with a true Brit stiff upper lip. But as brilliant as Mill was, he reached a point of mental collapse. What rescued him from the brink was a volume of Wordsworth's poetry in which he experienced a delight that had been missing for so long. Mill's writes "the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings... when no other mental habit is cultivated, and the analysing spirit remains without its natural complements and correctives." Jacobs interprets this as "The analytical mind constantly separates, divides, distinguishes until its whole mental wo...

Megan Phelps-Roper grew up in Westboro Baptist Church, and Fred Phelps was her grandfather. This was the only mindset she knew, and she believed it. She picketed and protested and used her social media account to denigrate anyone who would try to challenge her brand of hate. However, she interacted with one young man, a Jew in fact, who did not trade fire for fire but engaged her in respectful conversation, as best as Twitter could provide. Through these dialogues, Megan began to question what she believed. She eventually rejected what she had known all her life and now "is a social media activist, lobbying to overcome divisions and hatred between religious and political divides." ( Wikipedia ) Quite a transformation. If you are like me, my first reaction was "I am so glad she started to think for herself ." But did she? In How to Think , Alan Jacobs argues that it wasn't so much thinking by herself as beginning to think with different people.   He als...

After so many decades of not thinking carefully about what I believe and why I believe it, I want to think well. How to Think arrived yesterday which went straight to the top of my reading stack. In the introduction, author Alan Jacobs cites an essay by Marilynne Robinson where she observed that if you associate "rigidity, narrowness of mind, judgmentalism" with the label "puritan", this is exactly what is demonstrated by some people when they criticize the Puritans. She writes "it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved." So the actual historical meaning of a word like "Puritan" doesn't matter anymore. The point is to toss around the same pejoratives "like a password to get into the clubhouse." Jacobs writes - "Robinson further comments that this kind of u...