How to Think

by Alan Jacobs

  When the promised rescuers did not show up, and the threatened flood did not arrive either, the group was shaken. But then Keech felt once more the desire to write, and the message from Clarion was immensely reassuring: there was indeed a flood, but not a flood that kills, rather one that saves: “Not since the beginning of time upon this Earth has there been such a force of Good and light as now floods this room and that which has been loosed within this room now floods the entire Earth.” Because of their faithfulness, they had been spared, and not just the little band of believers, but the whole world! And it was now incumbent on them, further messages explained, to break their habits of privacy and secrecy and to share with everyone, insofar as they were able, this “Christmas Message to the People of Earth.” (To which one can only add: God bless us every one!)

  With every step they had taken over the previous months, the little group—the little Inner Ring—had invested more and more in the revelations from Clarion. They had abandoned families, jobs, social respect. For them the entire world had become the RCO. It had become, just as Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter had predicted, impossible for them to question the validity of their decisions. Their rigidity had become absolute; the immensity of their sunk costs had made them terrified of resuming the work of thinking.

  BUBBLES AND BELIEVERS

  The book in which Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter recorded their experience, When Prophecy Fails,* is a landmark in the history of social psychology, but it was not the first study of these matters. Perhaps the first major exploration of the ways people gather together to tie themselves in such knots was Charles Mackay’s Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the first edition of which appeared 1841. Mackay explores, with great journalistic enthusiasm, a very wide range of delusions, some religious, some political, some economic, some less clearly definable (the seventeenth-century craze for tulips, for instance). One of his signal examples is the so-called South Sea Bubble. The South Sea Company, devoted to British trade with the Southern Hemisphere, had been created in 1711, and over the next few years people throughout Great Britain, socially high and socially low, flush and more or less broke, came to believe that to buy shares in the company was to ensure for themselves lifelong prosperity. They believed the wealth to be extracted from the countries of the South Seas was close to infinite, the schemes for extracting that wealth infallible. So the value of those stocks rose, and rose, and rose . . . until in 1720 the bubble popped: thousands were ruined and indeed the whole national economy suffered significant damage that it took years to recover from.

  Mackay’s book was very widely read and tremendously influential: the famous financier Bernard Baruch, for instance, claimed in his autobiography that his reading of Mackay had helped him to anticipate the great stock market crash of 1929 and to sell off many of his stocks. But there’s an instructive little coda to this story. In a later edition of the book, Mackay added this interesting footnote:

  The South-Sea project remained until 1845 the greatest example in British history of the infatuation of the people for commercial gambling. The first edition of these volumes was published some time before the outbreak of the Great Railway Mania of that and the following year.

  In the 1840s rail companies were sprouting like weeds in Britain, and drew an enormous amount of financial speculation. As more and more of those companies failed, the country’s leaders began to exercise some control over the speculation, which led to a crash (though, most scholars think, a far less severe crash than the country would have suffered if there had been no governmental intervention). These controls went into effect in late 1845, though just a few weeks earlier, in October, an editorial writer for the Glasgow Argus insisted, with sublime confidence, “There is no reason whatever to fear a crash.” That writer’s name was Charles Mackay. Physician, heal thyself!*

  Most of us will not lose our shirts to perilous investments in a single stock; still fewer of us, I suspect, will give up our jobs and families in hopes of being rescued from a doomed Earth by benevolent interplanetary visitors. But all of us—even Mackay, who made a career of studying human error—are prone to the undue influence of intellectual sunk costs. So in further exploration of these matters, let’s move one step closer to normalcy and sanity by looking again at the work of Eric Hoffer.

  Hoffer’s particular concern, the problem he worked over in his mind for years, was the enormous power of massive social movements, the two most obvious of which in the 1940s were fascism—in Germany, Italy, and (in very different form) in Japan—and communism in the Soviet Union and, increasingly, in China. The more Hoffer studied these movements, and equally large movements from the past, most of which were religious in inspiration, the more he came to believe that they are structurally identical. Fundamentally, for Hoffer, mass movements are a psychological phenomenon—however many roots they may have in particular cultural and political circumstances. He called the book in which he explores this psychology The True Believer (1951).

  It might seem from that title that Hoffer is talking about something quite similar, if not identical, to the kind of delusion Marian Keech’s followers suffered from. But it is not so dramatic; it is perhaps even less dramatic than the sort of thing that prompts a South Sea Bubble, most participants in which thought that they and a select number—“we few, we happy few”—were going to get rich while their neighbors sank into poverty or at best treaded water in the social order. The “true believer” of Hoffer’s title is someone who belongs not to the few but to the many, someone who strives to bring the entire group (the church, the nation, the world even) within the grip of one narrative, the force of one body of belief, the authority of one charismatic Leader. This kind of fanaticism has no interest in Inner Rings; its movements are extraverted, not introverted. Its energy comes from engagement with the larger culture, not from withdrawal.

  The true believer might be said to share the same ends as the rest of the world, but has unusually strong and specific ideas about the means by which those ends are to be achieved. This is perhaps why the true believer need not live in secrecy and under strict informational discipline. True believers work away in broad daylight, and broadcast their ideas in the public square—unless prevented from doing so by hostile governments, as Christians were in the Soviet Union, or Communists in the era of the Red Scare in the United States.

  In what sense then are they “fanatical”? In the determination and resourcefulness with which they avoid considering any alternative to their preferred views. We might consider this point a necessary ingredient of any useful definition of fanaticism: No matter what happens, it proves my point. That is, true believers’ beliefs are not falsifiable: everything can be incorporated into the system—and indeed, the more costs true believers have sunk into the system, the more determined and resourceful they will be. True believers are like the priests in Kafka’s parable: “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”*

  It’s important to be careful here, and not paint with too broad a brush. Despite what the proponents of #Rationalia might tell you, we all hold with passionate commitment some beliefs for which we cannot provide strong evidence, in any public sense of evidence. (I believe my wife truly loves me, though I cannot look into her mind to see whether it’s so.) And, as we have seen, it is possible to hold a position too loosely, without sufficient firmness. But in general, and on most issues, it’s fair to say that if you cannot imagine circumstances that would cause you to change your mind about something, then you may well be the victim of the power of sunk costs. And genuine (if of course incomplete) self-knowledge can be yours if you meditate on just what it is—what beliefs, what social group—you have invested in so deeply.

  One of the things I most admire about Megan Phelps-Roper, whose story I told in Chapter 1, is that she did not allow her own
sunk costs, which were substantial, to keep her in an environment whose core beliefs she could no longer share. Why was it possible for her to avoid the escalation of commitment to which so many of us fall prey?

  Chiefly, I think, it was because social media gave her a way out of her echo chamber. As I noted earlier, you can talk to people on Twitter, but they can also talk back. Every cult, every closed community, controls information flow in order to keep people on message and on task, undistracted by . . . well, thinking. What’s fascinating about how most people use social media is that they, looking to fortify their position (to return for a moment to my earlier metaphor), do this work for themselves. They self-discipline, self-control, by weeding out dissonant voices, alternative points of view. But because all the major social media services are so large, with so many millions of users, people can control incoming messages while simultaneously reassuring themselves that there are countless others who see things precisely as they do. Still, Phelps-Roper, simply because she wanted to share the message of Westboro Baptist Church with people who ordinarily wouldn’t hear about it, ended up exposing herself to people who were very different from her.*

  I wrote in Chapter 2 about the vital necessity of distinguishing between Inner Rings and communities of which it is possible to become a genuine member, and we should recall that distinction now. You can know whether your social environment is healthy for thinking by its attitude toward ideas from the outgroup. If you quote some unapproved figure, or have the “wrong” website open in your browser, and someone turns up his nose and says, “I can’t believe you’re reading that crap”—generally, not a good sign. Even if what you’re reading is Mein Kampf, because there are actually good reasons for reading Mein Kampf. The true believer is always concerned, both on her behalf and on that of other members of her ingroup, for mental purity. But as Jesus said, it is not what we take in that defiles us, it’s what we send out. And, specifically in relation to what we read, the Swiss polymath G. C. Lichtenberg issued a wise warning centuries ago: “A book is like a mirror: if a donkey looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

  * * *

  * The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (1936), chap. 10, “Friendship and Foolery.”

  * I am borrowing the language of firmness, rigidity, and flaccidity from Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood in their book Intellectual Virtues (Oxford University Press, 2007). Their Chapter 7, “Firmness,” is by far the best exploration of these matters that I have read.

  * Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 1956).

  * A mathematician named Andrew Odlyzko has written an essay about this incident: “Charles Mackay’s own extraordinary popular delusions and the Railway Mania.” It may be found at his University of Minnesota webpage: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/mania04.pdf. I freely admit that I discovered Odlyzko’s work by consulting the excellent Wikipedia page for Mackay’s book.

  * The importance of falsifiability to genuine science was first emphasized by the philosopher of science Karl Popper: see especially his Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (Routledge, 1963), chap. 1. Kafka’s parable may be found in The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (Schocken, 1970), p. 165.

  * There continues to be a good deal of discussion about how echoey our social-media chambers are, but recent work by Walter Quattrociocchi, Antonio Scala, and Cass R. Sunstein, “Echo Chambers on Facebook,” gives some very strong support to the belief that the problem is real and troublesome. As I write, their article has not yet been published, but a draft may be found here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2795110.

  seven

  A PERSON, THINKING

  What English usage and the Democratic Spirit have in common

  In 2001 David Foster Wallace published one of his most delightful essays, a review of Bryan Garner’s Dictionary of Modern American Usage. In the mode of Infinite Jest, the vast novel that five years earlier had marked him as one of the essential writers of his era, “Authority and American Usage” is funny, endlessly digressive, festooned not just with footnotes but also with footnotes to footnotes, and secretly concerned with profound moral questions. Which is to say, it’s anything but a “review” in any normal sense of the term. And exploring it turns out to be a vital exercise for anyone who wants to think about thinking—especially if that anyone’s ultimate purpose is to think better.*

  Early in the essay Wallace outs himself as a SNOOT—his family’s ambivalent initialism for a language nerd, a “usage Trekkie,” someone weirdly obsessive about grammar and syntax. (SNOOT is an initialism for something, but disagreement about what the initials stand for seems to have been an essential element of the family joke.) Which means that a Dictionary of Modern American Usage is pure catnip to him, something to fascinate him endlessly and about which to have a thousand opinions. And watching him spool out those opinions is great fun.

  But there’s something more universally significant going on in this review that is more than a review, something extending well beyond the battle lines of what Wallace calls the Usage Wars, and the doorway to understanding it may be found in a few sentences from his description of SNOOTs:

  In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable with, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/ political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely defiled by supposedly literate adults. . . . We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.

  In short, the Usage Wars are a kind of miniature embodiment of Culture Wars in all their endless variety—and therefore a kind of test case for how we deal with disagreement, especially when there’s disagreement on matters we care about very deeply. Garner’s Dictionary came out in 1998, and the fact that Wallace’s review appeared only in 2001 indicates just how deeply he got into those endlessly ramifying cultural and moral questions, and the length to which he was prepared to go to pursue them: several prominent magazines wanted Wallace to write about the book for them but balked at how long his drafts were. In the midst of his struggles to get the piece written, he commented in a letter to Don DeLillo that “issues of usage, looked at closely even for a moment, become issues of Everything,” from the most arcane philosophical questions to the most mundane practices of everyday life.

  But for Wallace the heart of the matter, the most vital extension of the Usage Wars and Bryan Garner’s way of participating in them, is political and rhetorical. “The book’s spirit marries rigor and humility in such a way as to let Garner be extremely prescriptive without any appearance of evangelism or elitist put-down. This is an extraordinary accomplishment.” Furthermore, “it’s basically a rhetorical accomplishment, and . . . this is both historically significant and (in this reviewer’s opinion) politically redemptive.”

  “Politically redemptive” is a strong phrase, but Wallace really means it. He thinks Garner is a kind of “genius” because he has found a way to say that certain matters about which most people are indifferent are in fact extremely important, and that he (Garner) has the right and proper understanding of those matters, and that we all should follow his advice—and to do all this without sounding like a condescending jerk. Without sounding snooty, we might say. For Wallace this tone marks Garner’s Dictionary as an effective book, yes, but still more as a triumph of “the Democratic Spirit.”

  GRAMMAR POLICE AND THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT

  Wallace’s employment of the capital letters is a typical self-irony, a tiny strategy by which he winks at his own earnestness without actually apologizing for it and certainly without taking it back. He really does believe in the Democratic Spirit, and for him this Spirit is best manifested in t
he ability to persuade without dictating. Wallace calls the essay “Authority and English Usage” because the fundamentally intractable problem of any democratic order is, precisely, authority. When Homer Simpson responds to a command from God by shouting, “You’re not the boss of me!” he manifests the Democratic Spirit in one of its less admirable forms, but his defiance does at least have the merit of neatly specifying the problem. Like all SNOOTs, Bryan Garner has strong prescriptive views about English usage, and for Wallace the miracle of Garner’s writing is its ability to prescribe without triggering the you’re-not-the-boss-of-me reflex. Wallace thinks Garner does this by “recast[ing] the Prescriptivist’s persona: the author presents himself not as a cop or a judge but as more like a doctor or lawyer”—someone with demonstrated professional expertise that you’re free to listen to or ignore (though with the silent addition if you choose the latter: “Hey, it’s your funeral”).

  If it’s not exactly clear what all this has to do with the Democratic Spirit, perhaps Wallace’s definition of that Spirit will help:

  A Democratic Spirit is one that combines rigor and humility, i.e., passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS’s criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity—you have to be willing to look honestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.