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How to think : a survival guide for a world at odds / Alan Jacobs

by Jacobs, Alan, 1958-

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Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, 2017.

Thought and thinking.

View articles by Alan Jacobs from the Atlantic magazine website.

9780451499608 (hc.)

157 pages ; 20 cm.

Includes bibliographical references

Introduction -- Beginning to think -- Attractions -- Repulsions -- The money of fools -- The age of lumping -- Open and shut -- A person, thinking -- Conclusion: the pleasures and dangers of thinking -- Afterword: the thinking person's checklist

A contrarian treatise on why we're not as good at thinking as we assume - but how recovering this lost art can rescue our inner lives from the chaos of modern life. Cultural critic for The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us - political, social, religious - Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we're doomed to be divided but because the people involved simply aren't thinking. Most of us don't want to think, Jacob writes. Thinking is trouble. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comforting habits, and it can complicate our relationships with like-minded friends. Finally, thinking is slow, and that's a problem when our habits of consuming information (mostly online) leave us lost in the spin cycle of social media, partisan bickering, and confirmation bias. Jacobs diagnoses the many forces that act on us to prevent thinking - forces that have only worsened in the age of Twitter, "alternative facts," and information overload - and he also dispels the many myths we hold about what it means to think well. For example, it's actually impossible to "think for yourself." Drawing on sources as far-flung as novelist Marilynne Robinson, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain, British philosopher John Stuart Mill, and Christian theologian C. S. Lewis, Jacobs digs into the nuts and bolts of the cognitive process, offering hope that each of us can reclaim our mental lives from the impediments that plague us all. Because if we can learn to think together, maybe we can learn to live together, too. Alan Jacobs is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University.

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