by Alan Jacobs
(Which is more or less what this book is all about. I could take those three sentences as my epigraph.) With that definition of the DS in mind, we can turn an important corner in our exposition here, by exploring one important element of this story that I haven’t mentioned so far: what it’s like to be raised as a SNOOT. To be what Wallace calls a SNOOTlet.
When Wallace quotes Garner’s comment that “I realized early—at the age of 15—that my primary intellectual interest was the use of the English language,” he comments: “This reviewer regrets the bio-sketch’s failure to mention the rather significant social costs of being an adolescent whose overriding passion is English usage.” His own experience as a SNOOTlet was similarly painful—and painful in a way that has a bearing on the larger democratic context of the essay. “When his peers are ostracizing the SNOOTlet or giving him monstrous quadruple Wedgies or holding him down and taking turns spitting on him,” Wallace writes, “there’s serious learning going on”—except by the SNOOTlet. “In fact, what the SNOOTlet is being punished for is precisely his failure to learn.”
What has he failed to learn? That navigating the social world (especially in a democratic society) requires the ability to code-switch.
The little A+ SNOOTlet is actually in the same dialectal position as the class’s “slow” kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t or bringed. Exactly the same position. One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,” the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and another with T-ball coaches and so on.
And—Wallace never says this explicitly but it is implicit throughout the essay and absolutely essential to his meaning, the impetus that drove a simple book review into such un-charted territory—this failure is essentially an ethical failure. It is the failure to recognize other dialects, other contexts, other people, as having value that needs to be respected—especially, it’s tempting to say, if you want those people to respect your dialects and contexts and friends and family members, but perhaps what really matters is the damage this inability to code-switch does to the social fabric. It rends it.
FORBEARANCE
The most striking of the essay’s many digressions concerns, of all things, abortion. Why? Because the abortion debate in America is one in which it is obviously, manifestly, universally difficult to maintain a commitment to the Democratic Spirit. Wallace says that some of the things people say to him when the subject comes up challenge his commitment to “forbearance”: a moment like that “represents the really outer and tooth-grinding limits of my own personal Democratic Spirit.” Everybody’s got something like that, something that presses against “the really outer and tooth-grinding limits” of our ability to forbear. And it sometimes seems that today more and more people run into those limits more and more often, on an ever-widening range of issues. This matters because it’s when our forbearance fails that the social fabric tears.
The key to strengthening this necessary forbearance, Wallace suggests, and further suggests that he learned this in a very hard way as a result of being raised as a SNOOTlet, is that you have to be willing to switch codes. You have to be willing to inquire into someone else’s dialect, even, or especially, when it’s a moral dialect. You have to risk that impurity. The forbearance Wallace invokes is really a matter of suppressing your gag reflex when you’re having a close encounter with our old friend the RCO.
But why should you do it? Simply put: because it’s good for you and good for society. It makes you a bigger and better person, and it helps to stitch that torn and frayed social garment.
So why wouldn’t you do it? To answer that question we simply need to think back to the story I began with, that of Megan Phelps-Roper. The potential costs of learning your opponents’ moral dialect are so high. First, you humanize them: they become no longer the RCO, but just . . . people. Remember: Humani nihil a me alienum puto. Human beings, like you, who happen through circumstance or temperament to have come to different conclusions than yours. This does not mean that their views are correct, or even as likely to be correct as your own; you need not admit any such thing, but when they are wrong they’re wrong in the same way that you are, when that happens to you (as it assuredly does).
And once your RCO becomes not so O and therefore somewhat less R, you might come to realize that, with a different turn of Fortune’s wheel, there you could have been also. You suddenly imagine yourself, though perhaps faintly at first, as someone different from what you are, someone with a different set of what philosophers call “plausibility structures”; and once you imaginatively place yourself within the frame of another mind, then your own views come to seem . . . not inevitable. And this is profoundly destabilizing; which is why Phelps-Roper started cutting herself off from the people who were making stability impossible for her. Instability of this kind—the kind that makes you wonder whether your ingroup is helping you draw closer to the truth of things or blocking you from seeing that truth—is pretty much impossible to live with for the long term. You simply can’t thrive in a state of constant daily evaluation of the truth-conduciveness of your social world, any more than a flowering plant can flourish if its owner digs up its roots every morning to see how it’s doing.*
And this is why Wallace was wrong to say that “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.” You really can’t do that, which, I believe, he discovered: his ceaseless self-examination caused him ceaseless misery and contributed in a major way to his early death. Better to follow the principle articulated by W. H. Auden: “The same rules apply to self-examination as apply to auricular confession: Be brief, be blunt, be gone.”†
We shouldn’t expect moral heroism of ourselves. Such an expectation is fruitless and in the long run profoundly damaging. But we can expect to cultivate a more general disposition of skepticism about our own motives and generosity toward the motives of others. And—if the point isn’t already clear—this disposition is the royal road that carries us to the shining portal called Learning to Think.
* * *
* The essay was first published in the April 2001 issue of Harper’s under the title “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage.” However, the editors of Harper’s made many cuts to what Wallace sent them, and when he republished the essay in his collection Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (Little, Brown, 2006) he restored what had been cut. It’s the longer version I’m quoting from here.
* I stole this metaphor from Francis Spufford, who used it in his book Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense (Harper One, 2013) to describe the inadvisability of constantly assessing one’s spiritual status.
†Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (Random House, 1962), p. 99.
Conclusion
THE PLEASURES AND DANGERS OF THINKING
In which I explain—no, it is too much: in which I sum up
First, the dangers. I can’t promise that if you change your mind you won’t lose at least some of your friends—and that matters, because if you learn to think, genuinely to think, you will sometimes change your mind. It would be easy for me to say, “Well, any friends you lose because you change your mind weren’t real friends in the first place,” but that would be a facile comment. If you were to find yourself suddenly and completely isolated from your whole social circle because you no longer believe something that all of them believe, you wouldn’t be any less lonely because you could mutter to yourself that they weren’t real friends after all. You might even come to think that not-real friends are better than no friends at all.
But your fate might not be so dire—and you might not even need to resort to misleading silences or outright lies to keep your social network more or less functional. The key thing will be to av
oid displaying the zeal that’s all too commonly characteristic of the convert. If you can emphasize all the beliefs and commitments that you and your friends still have in common—and there will be many—while presenting your change of mind on one issue, or set of issues, as something that you have come to with some reluctance and without delight, then you should be able to convince them of your continued goodwill.
At least, as long as you don’t think of your old friends as foolish losers. (Remember: it wasn’t that long ago that you thought precisely as they do now.) Nevertheless, even if you are kind and forbearing toward them, they may not be so kind to you. It would be dishonest of me not to admit that; but I have devoted much of this book to exploring the power of the forces that inhibit thinking and the emotions they generate, so I’m not going back on that now. 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.
And working toward the truth is one of life’s great adventures. It’s hard to talk about this without sounding like one of those Victorian sages—“A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?”—“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—but those sages were on the right track, in this matter at least.* There was, in that time as in ours, an unavoidable awareness of cracks in the old certainties, though of course the certainties they inherited were quite different from ours. The excitement of exploration is what thrills, what gratifies, though not quite in the sense of that old chestnut “It’s the journey, not the destination, that matters.” Tell that one to parents who’ve been in a minivan all day with three cranky kids.
No, the journey-destination metaphor is one that we shouldn’t live by. Thinking does not have a destination, a stopping point, a “Well, we’re finally here.” To cease thinking, as Thomas Aquinas explained, is an act either of despair—“I can’t go any further”—or of presumption—“I need not go any further.”* 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.
* * *
* That first line is from Robert Browning’s “Andrea del Sarto” (1855), the second from Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842).
* See an exposition of Thomas’s argument in Josef Pieper’s beautiful little book On Hope (Ignatius Press, 1986 [1977]).
Afterword
THE THINKING PERSON’S CHECKLIST
In the first season of that masterpiece of television Breaking Bad, our protagonist, Walter White, finds himself in a peculiar situation: he has a violent criminal—who goes by the name Krazy-8, which should tell you most of what you need to know—shackled to a post in the basement of the house he’s living in. Which leaves Walt with a dilemma: kill Krazy-8 or set him free? Walt agonizes over this decision, and eventually grabs a legal pad and starts making a two-column list. Under the heading “RELEASE HIM” Walt writes several items: murder is wrong, and so on. But the “KILL HIM” column has only one item on it: “He’ll kill your entire family if you let him go.”
For Walt the making of a list is an immensely clarifying activity, and we should all follow his example—well, in that one respect. Atul Gawande’s wonderful book The Checklist Manifesto describes the power of that particular kind of list to reduce the cognitive load on people who are already mentally burdened: airplane pilots, big-time investors, surgeons.* All such people must, if they are consistently to make good decisions, keep track of more items than they can actually juggle. Thus checklists: you know what you need to do in advance, so quit trying to remember it all and put it on a list, so you can attend to other matters that require your attention.
Gawande is a surgeon, and though he became a vigorous proponent of operating room checklists, he didn’t think he really needed them—but then, in the first week that he used one, he and his team forgot important steps three times and were saved by the checklist. People make such checklists for themselves only when forced by experience into intellectual humility; proud people don’t want to use them. But once those same proud people are forced to use them they acquire a dose of that very humility, because they have no choice but to acknowledge that they forget things they need to remember.
So when I provide a checklist for good thinking, as I am about to do, it doesn’t mean that I am going back on my claim, at the end of the previous chapter, that thinking better isn’t a matter of technique, and that you need to become a certain kind of person to think well. The willingness to make and use a checklist of this kind is a mark of the kind of person you are. It’s not a fail-safe method. Even if you use a checklist you can use it carelessly. But if you take the following list and adapt it to your own circumstances, subtracting what’s useless to you and adding reminders of your own, it will help you.
The Thinking Person’s Checklist
1. When faced with provocation to respond to what someone has said, give it five minutes. Take a walk, or weed the garden, or chop some vegetables. Get your body involved: your body knows the rhythms to live by, and if your mind falls into your body’s rhythm, you’ll have a better chance of thinking.
2. Value learning over debating. Don’t “talk for victory.”
3. As best you can, online and off, avoid the people who fan flames.
4. Remember that you don’t have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness.
5. If you do have to respond to what everyone else is responding to in order to signal your virtue and right-mindedness, or else lose your status in your community, then you should realize that it’s not a community but rather an Inner Ring.
6. Gravitate as best you can, in every way you can, toward people who seem to value genuine community and can handle disagreement with equanimity.
7. Seek out the best and fairest-minded of people whose views you disagree with. Listen to them for a time without responding. Whatever they say, think it over.
8. Patiently, and as honestly as you can, assess your repugnances.
9. Sometimes the “ick factor” is telling; sometimes it’s a distraction from what matters.
10. Beware of metaphors and myths that do too much heavy cognitive lifting; notice what your “terministic screens” are directing your attention to—and what they’re directing your attention away from; look closely for hidden metaphors and beware the power of myth.
11. Try to describe others’ positions in the language that they use, without indulging in in-other-wordsing.
12. Be brave.
* * *
* Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (Picador, 2011).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want first to thank my agent, Christy Fletcher, for believing in the viability of this project when I first mooted it to her, and for helping me shape it into something more articulate and sensible. I am grateful also to the team at Convergent Books for their enthusiastic support, and especially to David Kopp and Derek Reed for shrewd and careful editorial labors. When I sent the first draft to my friends Adam Roberts and Francis Spufford—both far better writers than I am—they responded with warm hearts and critical minds; I am in their debt. And throughout the process of writing, my wife Teri and son Wesley provided, as they do constantly, love and support.
Much of what I say in this book arises from my many years of teaching, and when I think about thinking, the first and chief context for me is always the college classroom. That is why I have dedicated this book to my students and colleagues—past, present, and future—in the Honors College of Baylor University.
Shrinking Violets: The Secret Life of Shyness Joe Moran
Come on
, don’t be shy: pick up this outstanding cultural history of shyness from the brilliant Joe Moran.
ISBN 978 1 78125 264 2
eISBN 978 1 78283 067 2
Comparing Notes: how we make sense of music
Adam Ockelford
We are all instinctively musical. Why? And how does music work? Indeed, what is (or isn’t) music? Adam Ockelford has the answers.
ISBN 978 1 78125 603 9
eISBN 978 1 78283 231 7
Conservatism: Ideas in Profile
Roger Scruton
The ideas and principles of conservatism explored and explained by the world’s leading thinker on the subject.
ISBN 978 1 78125 752 4
eISBN 978 1 78283 310 9
Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic
Reason David Harvey
Marx’s Capital explained by its greatest expositor in simple, understandable terms.
ISBN 978 1 78125 874 3
eISBN 978 1 78283 368 0
That’s the way it Crumbles: the American Conquest of English
Matthew Engel
Americanisms have been slyly coloring the English language for centuries, and this practice must stop. Period.
ISBN 978 1 78125 668 8
eISBN 978 1 78283 262 1