Homework Check:
Read How to Think, up to page 50 and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains why we are bad at thinking.
Team Activity:
Share some stories of people who got unfairly scapegoated or bullied in order to make the bullying group feel stronger with a shared purpose.
Next Homework:
Finish How to Think and write a 3-paragraph essay that explains that being a critical thinker can be dangerous.
Lesson Two
How to Think by Alan Jacobs
Writing Assignment
Option A
In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that explains how Megan Phelps-Roper, as featured in Adrian Chen’s essay “Unfollow,” unshackled herself from the anti-thinking biases and demonstrated the principles of critical thinking laid forth in Alan Jacobs’ How to Think. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.
Option B
In a 1,000-word essay, develop a thesis that defends, refutes, or complicates the argument that Megan Phelps-Roper, featured in Adrian Chen’s “Unfollow,” is a salient illustration of Alan Jacobs’ thesis that critical thinking is dependent on moral character. Use “Unfollow” and How to Think as your two sources for your Works Cited page.
Chapter 2: Attractions: How Good People Can be Led to Do Bad Things
One. What matters at the Yale Political Union?
Thinking well is not the priority. Winning is. Why? Because the world is a zero-sum game.
How is winning accomplished in the realm of critical thinking? Winning people over through the power of persuasion and “being won over.”
To win is a competition, but competition is not always moral. The need to dominate others springs from the war instinct. It's a form of human aggression. It's our Inner Lobster.
Real Thinking
Having the ability to use ethos (credibility), logos (logic and reasoning), and pathos (strong emotion) to present an argument is a sign of intelligence, craftiness, and commitment to one’s ideas.
To cause someone to “break the floor,” to change their mind in the middle of a debate was considered one of life’s highest achievements.
This is significant because when you change your mind, “you yield a different you.”
Changing your mind, in other words, radically redefines the essence of yourself.
Jacobs makes another important point about a culture that embraces the possibility of “breaking the floor”: Only in a culture where people who disagree aren’t trying to hurt each other but share values can such a changing of the mind take place. A certain trust must be present for people to be in a position to change their mind.
This kind of trust is difficult when everyone is in their own social media silo, absorbed by their smartphone chat groups and ignoring the people who surround them in the physical world.
Two. What makes our thoughts almost secondary to the point of being irrelevant?
Jacobs quotes Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind, who observes that we experience instantaneous moral intuitions and judgments followed by our explanation of those intuitions. Our “post hoc constructions,” after-the-fact thoughts, rationalize our emotional dispositions.
A variation of the post hoc construction is the sour grapes fallacy. We do something stupid, and then we justify our stupidity by saying that doing the smart thing would not have mattered since life sucks anyway.
Example of such an argument:
"Yes, you went to college and you make good money as an engineer, and I dropped out of college, and I'm working at the coffee shop. But look at all those taxes you have to pay. And that summer vacation to Maui cost you over five thousand dollars. Bummer, man. And look how complicated your life is. And look at all those hours you have to work a week. And for what? You're always tired. Look at me. I've got energy and lots of free time during the day."
"Yeah, but, dude, I live in a house. You live in a cardboard box."
The speaker never had sound arguments for dropping out of college, but he is hellbent on justifying his semi-poverty while working in a coffee shop.
Bind and Blind
These “moral intuitions” both “bind and blind.” We are both binded to our political and religious teams, but we are at the same time blinded by reasonable opposition to our strongly-held views.
Critical Thinking Requirement
To think critically, we must fairly evaluate opposing views, but few people do because narcissism is the default setting that says, "I'm right. Nothing will change my way of thinking. That's it." Jacobs calls this default setting "neophobic": fear of new ideas.
In a critical thinking class, students need a counterargument-rebuttal section to show they've explored opposing views.
Neophobic and Neophilic Dispositions Inform Our Moral Matrix
Our moral intuitions, or “moral matrix,” are directed by our genetic predisposition.
We are either hard-wired to be neophilic (love new things, love change) or neophobic (hate new things, hate change), and this hard-wiring influences our moral intuitions.
The Inner Ring
To explain our “moral matrix” and the way we make emotional decisions followed by rationalizations for our positions, Jacobs prefers the C.S. Lewis metaphor of The Inner Ring.
According to C.S. Lewis, our greatest desire is to be inside The Inner Ring; our greatest fear is to be outside The Inner Ring.
Our desire to belong to the ingroup is so strong, we will be open to corruption in order to conform to its ways.
We all have our own standards for what makes an Inner Ring appealing, but once we’re allowed in we make “post hoc rationalizations” to defend its positions because our desire to belong is greater than our desire to satisfy our inquisitive mind and our demands for integrity.
Other names for Inner Ring:
Tight circle
Clique
The Cool Crowd
The Club
The Tribe
The Banquet (opposite is the Outer Darkness)
Our desire to belong to Inner Ring makes us protect its interests. Our loyalty compromises our morality and our critical thinking.
Three. Why is “some form of genuine membership necessary for thinking”?
What we need is a group whom we trust and respect. They can disagree with us, but we must trust and respect their decency and honesty. Only in this environment can we have real thinking.
If your Twitter account is infected with “haters” and liars, then you can’t engage in real thinking on Twitter, as Jacobs learned the hard way.
Connections with groups we trust give us power to resist evil and stupidity.
Four. What is “unscrupulous optimism” and why is it dangerous?
Referring to a term coined by Roger Scruton, Jacobs is writing about the foolishness of taking deeply-rooted complex human problems and finding easy solutions to these problems. These solutions become a new system, the “Clearly Right” path, and all who stand in the way become enemies.
Ingroup members are not allowed to question the Clearly Right Path.
This path is “I-based,” that is to say, it is “good for me and people like me.”
Take for example a heralded writer like Ta-Nehisi Coates who wrote a famous essay, “The Case for Reparations.” Coates wrote convincing diagnosis of America’s kleptocracy (system of stealing) and how this kleptocracy stole from the bodies, minds and souls of African-Americans. But Jacobs points out that while he agreed with the essay’s diagnosis, he did not see an adequate prescription for the injustices described, and his friends criticized him for not drinking all of Coates’ Kool-Aid.
Take other programs that need a critical examination before made into official solutions:
- Free college education
- Getting rid of grades
- Universal Basic Income
- Universal Health Care
- Driverless Cars
- Creating civilizations on other planets because Planet Earth is not big enough for the growing population
- Calvinism: A predestination religion that says some people, the Elect, were chosen to go to heaven before Creation and a larger group of people, the Damned, are predestined to go to hell. Predestination is a simplified way of explaining who gets to heaven and who doesn’t.
- Universalism: A religion that says everyone, eventually, gets to heaven. Perhaps such an approach is too optimistic?
But membership into the Inner Ring requires you keep your mouth shut if you have any doubts or critical questions.
Arguing against unscrupulous optimism, Jacobs observes we must assert prudence and healthy skepticism against simple solutions for our problems.
Chapter 3 Repulsions: Why you’re not as tolerant of others as you think
Five. What is suspicious ingroup behavior?
Blogger Scott Adams notes that a group of people expressed disgust at the glee some people showed for the death of Osama Bin Laden. But this same group of people were gleeful when Margaret Thatcher died. Their political correctness code compelled them to condemn happiness over Bin Laden’s death while celebrating Thatcher’s. They are blind to their inconsistency because they are tribalists shackled by ingroup behavior.
There is a hatred of the blue and red tribe that is growing so powerful we could find ourselves in a Civil War with physical violence.
We live in a society where it’s socially acceptable to unleash raw hate on people who don’t share our party affiliation.
Ingroup Behavior and Cognitive Bias Makes Us Blind to Our Prejudice
Personal Anecdote
In the early 1980s, I was working in a wine store in Berkeley. At that the time, I was reading Albert Camus’ Notebooks, and I read that Camus dismissed the music of Peter Tchaikovsky as “mediocre,” and wanting to be a faithful Albert Camus disciple I decided that I shared Camus’ disdain for Tchaikovsky’s music.
One afternoon in the wine store, with the classical music station on, there was this riveting piano concerto playing. I didn’t know who the composer was, so I was standing by the speaker with a notebook and pen, so I could write down the composer’s name. All my co-workers were staring at me in amusement because I had become obviously full of so much intense pleasure as I listened to the concerto. When the music ended, the announcer stated that it was the First Piano Concerto by Peter Tchaikovsky, upon which I threw the notepad and pen on the floor and screamed: “Tchaikovsky? I hate Tchaikovsky!” All my co-workers laughed at me.
Ingroup Hate
In the religious realm, Martin Luther and Thomas More, who disagreed on Catholicism and Protestantism, demonized the other as “complete crap.” And their followers used the same language to define each other.
Even those these factions had a lot in common, they hated each other to the bone.
The same is true in communism. There are Marxists and there are Trotskyists and they hate each more than they hate non-communists.
Six. Is there such thing as “life in Rationalia”?
In other words, can we live in a community that is strictly rational, that makes its decisions purely on scientific evidence?
But analysis by itself, harkening back to John Stuart Mill, tires our emotions. We need the nourishment of feeling to balance rational thinking.Why? In part because we don’t learn anything unless there is an emotional context. Learning evidence to stop smoking is one thing. But to see children who lost their parents to lung cancer is more powerful and makes the point that “hits home.”
Further, we need biases and emotional predispositions to survive. When we see dogs baring their teeth and growling, we don’t need to stick around and think about the dog before finding a way to escape the dog. We quickly use biases and cues to “reduce the decision load on the brain.”
There are true prejudices that lead us to safety and false prejudices that create misunderstandings and fog the brain.
Example of Megan Phelps-Roper
Indeed, Roper used rational thinking to leave her hateful religious cult. But the rational thinking happened AFTER she experienced the emotional response of revulsion from her church’s hateful behavior.
Chapter 4: The Money of Fools and The Power of Myth
Seven. What is myth and how does myth affect our thinking?
Referring to Mary Midgley, Jacobs defines myth as powerful symbols that help us interpret the world. “They shape its meaning.”
Without knowing it, we use myths, based on metaphors, that build narratives that describe our life, our identity, and our self.
We choose or inherit our myths.
“The brain is like a computer.”
“Animals are food, not sentient creatures.”
“The Confederate flag represents our family’s noble heritage.”
“The Confederate flag represents a false religion of white supremacy that makes people behave in ways that can only be described as a moral abomination.”
“God chose my particular religious denomination to find the true interpretation of the Bible and we’re going to heaven while the false religions and their people are all going to hell.”
Imposing the Dominant Myth on Culture Is Act of War
When we argue, we should try to arrive at mutual understanding, but too often when we represent our tribe we rely on a myth and we propagate this myth to triumph. Our version of events rules.
Conclusion: The Pleasures and Dangers of Thinking
Eight. What are the dangers of thinking critically?
Sometimes you will change your mind, which can upset your identity and core values and beliefs. This can be a scary, disorienting experience.
Your critical thinking may result in you being exiled from the tribe or ingroup from which you wish to belong.
A lot of students lose bonds with family and friends when they go to college because they begin to engage in critical thinking, which is in conflict with the way they used to be.
I hear countless stories of students who feel alienated from high school friends, even family members, have they have a "woke" experience that forces them to think critically.
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