Review: Alan Jacobs - How to Think

Jacobs, Alan. How to think: A survival guide for a world at odds. New York: Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017. 

This is the second in what became a trilogy of essays. The first was Reading in an Age of Distraction and the third is Breaking Bread with the Dead. All three books are delightful, thoughtful, essays that offer insight into the significance of literature, reading, and thinking, for communicating with fellow human beings in a civil, responsible, and respectful manner. Jacobs believes that people with different opinions can and ought to converse with one another. But, how to get past the rightness and intensity of our own opinions? Jacobs has some thoughts on how this can happen and a large part of it lies in being willing to learn how it is that we truly think. 

 

Jacobs begins with two people who were convinced of their opinions about the rightness of their own perception of things until they entered into genuine conversation with others who had a different perception: Megan Phelps-Roper and Leah Libresco. Phelps-Roper was a member of Westboro Baptist church and participated in the protests at funerals and other venues. Libresco grew up in an atheist household and was an atheist while a student at Yale University. Both women changed their “positions” because they started talking and listening and responding to others who thought and believed differently. Phelps-Roper ended up leaving her Church and its protest ministry. Libresco became a Christian. 

 

What makes this kind of a change possible? Talking with others, thinking with others, a level of empathy that enables one to inhabit another person or group’s ideas and argument, a sense of humility, and a regular discipline of personal restraint that leads to a thoughtful response rather than an entrenched reaction. 

 

In the course of these pages, Jacobs introduces us to C S Lewis’ essay “The Inner Ring” in addition to psychologists and sociologists that study communication and thinking in the context of group dynamics. I personally profited from his introduction to all these writers and studies. This subject is a personal one for Jacobs. He admits he has no shortage of opinion too. I was genuinely touched by his candid admission on why he no longer comments on Anglican blogs. He is doing his best to live out what he writes about here. 

 

In the Afterward, Jacobs includes his own version of The Thinking Person’s Checklist which succinctly summarizes Jacob’s basic points and suggests how we may continue to develop our thinking as we navigate this remarkable world. 

 

Jacobs realizes that not everyone will benefit from this book. On page 150 he says, “I just want to emphasize, here at the end, that you won’t profit from this book if you treat it as offering only a set of techniques. You have to be a certain kind of person to make this book work for you: the kind of person who, at least some of the time, cares more about working toward the truth than about one’s current social position.”     

 

We don’t ever stop thinking because we don’t ever stop relating to people and our world. Thinking is an essential part of being a human being. On page 151 he says, “What is needed for the life of thinking is hope: hope of knowing more, understanding more, being more than we currently are. And I think we’ve seen, in the course of this book, the benefits that come to people who have the courage and determination to do the hard work of thinking. We have good cause for hope.”

 

Indeed!