Thinking With Alan Jacobs

The American Conservative:

This week, Alan Jacobs’s wonderful new book How To Think hit bookstores. Here’s the website for the book. On it, he explains why he wrote the book. Excerpt:

Across the political spectrum, people speak with a single voice on one point and one point only: our public sphere is a great big mess. Mistrust and suspicion of our neighbors, anger at their folly, inadvertent or deliberate misunderstanding of their views, attribution of the worst possible motives to those whose politics we despise: these are the dissonant notes we hear struck repeatedly every day, especially on social media. And while none of this began with the big political stories of 2016 — the Presidential election in the U.S., the Brexit decision in the U.K. — those events seem to have increased the volume pretty dramatically.

All this agitated hostility has grieved me, especially since I know and love people on all sides of the current culture wars. As someone who lives in both academic and religious communities, I am reminded every day of how deeply suspicious those groups can be of one another — and how little mutual comprehension there is. I’ve reflected a great deal on the major causes of our discontent and mutual suspicion, and I’ve wondered whether there might be some contribution I could make to the healing of these wounds.

This is not a book about basic logic, but a book designed specifically to help people caught up in the crossfire of contemporary debate (such as it is) resist emotion and think clearly and logically. It’s a fun book to read, and a useful one. I’m going to have a Q&A with Alan on this site next week, but for now, I want to offer you this excerpt from the text. A little background to this passage. Megan Phelps-Roper was the subject of an amazing profile in The New Yorker, by Adrian Chen, following how she came to question the world as presented to her by the Westboro Baptist Church, in which she grew up. Her semi-apostasy from Westboro-ism came because someone outside the church patiently engaged her mind, and she came to see that the interpretation of the world the Phelps family had given her was wanting. Second, “sapere aude” (“dare to think” or “dare to be wise”) is the rallying cry of the Enlightenment. So, here’s the excerpt:

Cont....