Think About It

A few days ago I wrote about finding a name for our four-person reading group. Initially I decided to call us the 4-winds after the four characters--mole, rat, badger and toad in the children's novel, Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame because the four characters had such different personalities. After thinking about it I decided to call us the Windy-4, because all of us talk the leaves off the trees. So, the Windy-4 it is.

Well...the Windy-4 decided to read and discuss How to Think by Baylor scholar Alan Jacobs. The book is difficult. Not difficult to read. The sentence structure is bold and crisp. The book is little: 5"x7", the spine is less than 1/4 inch wide, 157 pages. The kind of book when you pull it from the shelf you say, "Oh, I can whip through this in a couple of hours and go watch Stranger Things."

Not so. The first person Jacobs mentions is Daniel Kahneman, the Noble Prize laureate in economics for whose work on decision making is fascinating, important, and requires time, much time to digest. With the mention of Kahneman's name we know we are in for some heavy stuff.

As I began to turn the pages of Jacobs book, the pages didn't turn quickly. It took an hour to read 12 pages. Not because the vocabulary was obtuse (it wasn't), not because the sentences were convoluted (they weren't), but because with every page I had to stop and think.

Jacobs quoted T. S. Eliot, words that Eliot wrote almost a century ago but seem to be written for today's audience:

When there is so much to be known, when there are are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.  

Eliot concludes, When we do not know, or we we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.

Think about that. In our liquid modernity world where knowledge flows and advances at nano speed we become so overwhelmed that we don't stop and think about what we are learning. We then tend to substitute emotions for thoughts.

We are likely to go with the consensus. What our neighbors think. What our friends think. What we read on the Internet. And in a vicious cycle we pick those neighbors, friends, Internet users because they "think" like us.

We get pleasure from sharing values we know are socially approved by our group. We are happy when we are around those who share our ideas and unhappy, even angry, when others threaten our beliefs.

To quote Jacobs: "Social bonding is cemented by shared emotion, shared emotion generates social bonding. It's a feedback loop from which reflection is excluded."

We become invested in not thinking about things in order to be part of our crowd.

The first step to knowledge is knowing what we don't know. We become clearer thinkers when we think about what we are thinking. Think about it.