HOW TO THINK

An outline of the social forces that work to prevent us from thinking: our desire to belong to some Inner Ring, our repugnance for the outgroup, our reliance on words that do heavy signaling. We have become incapable of recognizing our lapses. Anyone who claims not to be shaped by these forces is almost certainly self-deceived. We are wired to the waves of the social world. Most of us don't even have even the slightest reluctance to drift along with the flow. By a Distinghuished Profess of the Humanities at Baylor University.

Drawing on sources ranging from Marilynne Robinson to T. S. Eliot, innovator and author Jason Fried to Jonathan Haidt, anddrawing on his own experiences, Jacobs theorizes that the person who genuinely wants to think will have to develop strategies for recognizing even the subtlest of social pressures, and will have to recognize and confront the pull of the ingroup and disgust for the outgroup. The person who wants to think will have to practice patience as well as master fear. As C. S. Lewis once wrote to describe the subtle butpersistent pressure we confront every day, "Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as a triviality and sandwiched between two jokes … the hint will come.” And when it does come, “you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.”

In this short, punchy treatise written in the spirit of On Bullshit or, more recently,Assholes: A Theory by philosopher Aaron James, Jacobs provides both a diagnosis (often the best treatment for our maladies of thinking) and also a set of practical recommendations for overcoming those impediments and learning the pleasures and benefits of real thinking. By no meansholding himself above the plight of his fellow citizens, Jacobs gained a lot of attention a few years ago when he quit what he calls Big Twitter after being one of itsearly adopters (he has since reframed hisengagement with it). His struggles with thinking in the modern era, as well as his experiences teaching students how to think (and write) as a college professor for many years, will wind their way into the book.

Alan Jacobs is the Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University, and before that taught for many years at Wheaton College in Illinois. He has written extensively for publications ranging from The Atlantic, WSJ, The New Atlantis, and Harper’s and is the author of several books including a well-received and bestselling biography of C. S. Lewis, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction and a book on original sin.