AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

HOW TO THINK: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR A WORLD AT ODDS

INTRODUCTION: RYAN STREETER, AEI

DISCUSSION PARTICIPANTS:

ALAN JACOBS, BAYLOR UNIVERSITY; AUTHOR, “HOW TO THINK: A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR A WORLD AT ODDS”

JONATHAN RAUCH, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

YUVAL LEVIN, NATIONAL AFFAIRS

PETE WEHNER, ETHICS & PUBLIC POLICY CENTER

MODERATOR: YUVAL LEVIN, NATIONAL AFFAIRS

10:00–11:15 AM TUESDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2017

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/how-to-think-a-survival-guide-for-a- world-at-odds/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM

RYAN STREETER: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute. My name is Ryan Streeter. I’m the director of domestic policy studies here at AEI. And it’s my pleasure to welcome all of you to today’s event, featuring a very distinguished panel and a distinguished author, Dr. Alan Jacobs, from Baylor University here to talk about his new book, “How to Think: A Guide for the Perplexed.” I’m glad you’ve come out and joined us today for this talk.

Dr. Jacobs is a distinguished professor of the humanities at Baylor University. He’s the author of a dozen books and many articles. The most recent book before this one was a book on — it’s called the “Common Book of Prayer: A Biography.” He’s ranged across a wide range of topics in his work. And he’s authored “How to Think,” this book, in a very timely way, at a time of fractious and agitated public square and debates that occupy much of our time, much of our energy, much of our mental energy and have made politics exhausting for many. He’s going to diagnose that for us and then talk about the best way to rebuild the public square in this fractious age that we’re in.

He’s joined by Dr. Yuval Levin, the editor of National Affairs, known to many people here at AEI, and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Also Johnathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings, next door, and a contributing editor to The Atlantic and author of about a half dozen books in his own right, also many articles.

And also Pete Wehner from the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a contributing editor to The New York Times. Each of our panelists have written books themselves that touch on these topics and could also talk about this topic as a featured speaker, so we’re really delighted and honored to have all of you here with us today.

So I’d like to turn the stage over to Dr. Jacobs. He’s going to talk about the book, give us an overview of what he’s thinking there, and then Yuval is going to moderate a discussion with our panelists after that. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Jacobs and our panelists to AEI. (Applause.)

ALAN JACOBS: Thanks very much for coming out. When I was writing this book, my editors wanted it to have a certain practical dimension. You know, I’m a humanities professor, so I usually don’t do practical dimensions, but I thought I would give it a try. And I had recently read Atul Gawande’s book, “The Checklist Manifesto.” And I decided that I wanted to make a little checklist, a thinking person’s checklist, and put that in the back of the book.

And then a friend of mine sent to me this morning a story from the Harvard Gazette about an interview that Gawande had done with Malcolm Gladwell on the topic of the “Checklist Manifesto.” And the headline of the article was “Checklists Are Boring but Death Is Worse.” And that does seem to me to be an incontestably true statement. So I’m hoping that that can be a selling point for the book. If you want to avoid death, then read this checklist and see how it helps.

So just a few small things about the book. And I want to start with an anthropologist named Susan Harding. Some years ago, Susan Harding started to do some research on American fundamentalist Christians. And as she wrote later on, there was a tremendous amount of suspicion and doubt about her anthropological colleagues about her taking on this particular topic. She said that she felt that what they were either implicitly or explicitly saying to her was, “Are you now or have you ever been a fundamentalist Christian?” An echo of the old McCarthy era: Are you now or have you ever been a communist? That the very fact that she was interested in this strange world was sufficient to make them wonder whether she had gone over to the other side.

And she said in response to that, how odd. We’re anthropologists. We study — that’s our whole thing is studying unusual groups of people, people that we don’t understand very well. She said, none of my colleagues would have thought it the least bit strange if I had studied some really tiny, bizarre, religious sect that no one had ever heard of, but the fact that I was studying this commonplace group, people who were all around us, that made my colleagues worry, she said.

And she realized at that moment that for her fellow anthropologists and for academics in general, the fundamental Christian was — and this is the phrase she coined — the repugnant cultural other. We’re going to call that the RCO for short, right? And that this was an otherness that they didn’t really want to bridge the gap, you know, between themselves and this other because of this feeling of repugnance — an intense repugnance.

Another way you can put this is the psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander, whose one of the smartest people around, I think, says that there’s a — people have long talked about in-groups and out-groups and how you treat your in-group versus how you treat your out- group. But he says, maybe we need three categories: the in-group, the out-group, and the far-group. The far-group are the people who are so strange, so little known, so little understood that they can be kind of exotically interesting to us. You know, we can be fascinated by the far-group because they are so different and they occupy such a different cultural space that we’re not afraid of them. There’s nothing that they could do or say that will impinge on our lives in any way.

And he says, we’re much more comfortable celebrating and praising the far-group than we are celebrating and praising or even acknowledging the full humanity of, in some cases, the out-group. The out-group is the person living next door to you, who practices a religion you don’t understand or who votes for candidates that you would never vote for. And in that way, your next-door neighbor can become for you the repugnant cultural other — not the person who lives on the other side of the world. The far-group is fine. The out-group is dangerous.

And I started writing this book when I realized two things: first of all, that out-group animosity seemed to me to be increasing quite significantly. And if it wasn’t increasing, then at the very least it was becoming much more highly and regularly visible to me. And that is something that the intensity of out-group animosity, animosity toward people you perceive as being very different than you, is something that people have done a lot of studying of in the last few years.

And I came across a particularly disturbing body of research that suggests that people are much, much more deeply committed to rejecting and repudiating their out-group than they are to forming positive relationships among those whom they consider to be their in- group. That is, despising and rejecting and pushing aside the person deemed other was more important than making my existing relationships stronger and healthier. So this out-group animosity was something that seemed to me to be on the increase.

And, again, even if it wasn’t, I was seeing it every day, and so it was hard for me not to think about it and worry about it. And that led to what seemed to me to be willed misunderstanding — people actively trying not to understand those who disagreed with them, actively trying to caricature them.

And I’ve spent most of my career as a teacher trying to help my students learn how to be fair, responsibly fair, toward points of view that they disagree with and how to write articulately and to defend their own positions, yes, but to do so in a way that is just and does not caricature and does not create straw men. And so it occurred to me that maybe this was a good time for me to sit down and try to write out of what I’ve learned in my career as a teacher about dealing with alien ideas and to do that in a way that would be accessible to the general American public at a time when this out-group animosity seems to be intensifying.

So that’s really what the book was about. And it struck me that there are all sorts of things that need to be done to heal our public order, but I don’t know that any of those things are going to get done if we don’t overcome first the resistance to thinking that is endemic to an in-group/out-group way of thinking or way of approaching the world. If that’s the way that you think about the world, you don’t want to start thinking too much because thinking too much is likely to soften the edges of your repugnance toward your RCO. And it may also weaken your place within the community that you want to belong to.

So there are — we actually have, all of us have sizable investments in not thinking. And some people have those investments to what I would say is a pathological degree — to a pathological degree, they strive to avoid thinking. And so what I had to do in this book was to try as best I could, first of all, to make thinking seem attractive, to make it seem desirable to think, even when there may be significant costs involved. And then, the second thing I wanted to do after making it desirable was to show the ways in which it was possible. And so that’s what I’ve tried to do in this book.

And I’m very eager to hear what my colleagues have to say about it, and I’m hoping they can set me straight on a few things. So thank you very much for coming out. (Applause.)

YUVAL LEVIN: Thank you very much, Alan. I think we’ll proceed by just hearing from Jonathan Rauch and Pete Wehner first and starting a bit of a conversation up here at first and then with all of you. So please do be thinking about what you’d like to hear about and ask about. But why don’t we start with Jon? JONATHAN RAUCH: Sure. Thank you, Yuval. It is such an honor to be here at AEI, some friends in the audience and, of course, some of the platform with two of my own intellectual heroes and mentors, both amazing people. So thank you. If I sniffle a bit, it’s not because I’m deeply moved, although I might be. When I fly, I get colds, and I’m fighting one at the moment.

I just wanted to say a few words by way of friendly amendment to this really marvelous and wonderfully concise little book, which I think anybody who reads it will come away with additional clarity about not only how to think but the limits of thinking. But I just wanted to add a few words on behalf of an additional proposition, which is not in the book, which is train more, think less. So let me explain what that means by backing up a bit.

We are in the middle of a revolution right now in thinking about thinking, or maybe call it a counterrevolution. For many, many generations, humans understood the limits of thinking. Plato understood most people don’t think well, which is why he wanted to find the person who thought best and put that person in charge of all society. Michele de Montaigne in the 1500s wrote some of his most memorable essays on the theme that the more reasonable people believed themselves to be, the more ridiculous they actually are. David Hume in the 1700s famously said, “reason is and always ought to be the slave of the passions,” a statement which modern science at least the (is ?) part has proved to exactly correct. And, of course, James Madison and the other founders were very careful when laying out the Constitution not to rely on people to think too much.

So people have always known about limits about thinking, but we tended to forget those limits in the past 100 years or so. And we had a kind of revolution based on what you might think of as cognitive individualism, which is everyone should think for themselves in order to solve problems, and we’ll all be better off.

Well, that’s an OK proposition up to a point, but it also led to a series of changes in society, which have been rather hard to deal with. Just on the political side, I mean, governance studies at Brookings, I would point to, for example, political reforms by progressives, which put a huge cognitive burden on individual voters to understand policy and educate themselves and get informed and so forth. You had populists who made a series of reforms along with progressives, whose general view was the more thinking is done by people, and ordinary people, and the less is done by politicians, the better off we’ll be. You had think tanks, organizations like this one devoted to the idea that data will give us better results. And then you had libertarians and free marketers who basically wanted to return decision-making to something they called reason. I’m a friend and contributor of Reason magazine, but reason has its limits.

I would argue that these changes have not actually worked out very well. And the reason they’ve worked out is actually stipulated pretty well in this book, which is there are limits — in fact inherent limits, in fact deep limits wired into our brains on how well individual people think. We are not put on this planet to think. We’re put on this planet to survive.

The recent counterrevolution is all kinds of research that shows the limits of thinking. You’ve got Kahneman and Tversky, Nobel Prize–winner Daniel Kahneman on rampant cognitive bias. Jonathan Haidt’s work on how in fact reason is the servant of the passions. He likens reason to a writer on top of an elephant — the reason believes it’s in charge, but, in fact, he’s just basically going where the elephant wants to go. Richard Thaler just won the Nobel Prize I think last week for arguing, don’t over-rely on people to think; nudge their cognitive patterns in directions so that they have to think and make better decisions by thinking less. And, just recently, a new book by a couple of political scientists, Achen and Bartels, built on an existing tradition but goes much further in showing just how badly voters think and how badly things go amiss when we rely on voters to make too many decisions.

So what do we do about this? Because it’s turning out to be a much bigger problem than we thought. Well, I concur with Mr. Jacobs’ advice, and I think it’s good advice. The five — there’s lots of good tips in his book. Five are my favorites. Take five minutes, try to switch to your slow circuits instead of your fast circuits, in Kahneman’s language. Those tend to make better judgments. Split more, lump less; that is, make distinctions and don’t lose sight of the importance of making those distinctions. Often a lot depends on it. Humanize the other. Be suspicious of your tribal reflexes. If you find yourself thinking tribally, step back a second. Think in good company. This one is very important. Humans make better decisions in groups if we choose our groups wisely, not if we don’t. And, finally, don’t be a fundamentalist. This is something Montaigne wrote about — what now? — 500 years ago. Mistrust your own certainty, mistrust anyone’s certainty, but especially mistrust your own.

All of that is wonderful advice, and I heartily endorse it. But I just want to go a step further and say, also, maybe try thinking less. And here’s what I mean about this. One of the important insights that the founder of conservatism Edmund Burke got right is that humans are not that good at thinking and one way we deal with that is we build up customs, traditions, and institutions that essentially do the thinking for us by channeling us into predetermined channels so that we don’t have to get up every morning and think things through.

Of course, in a society like ours, which devalues institutions and trashes norms, that’s a very hard thing to do. But Burke had a very deep wisdom. The answer to this dilemma or a big part of the answer is not to send all of you as individuals out on the street to work harder on your thinking. It’s to reestablish more of those channels so that every day you don’t have quite such a deep cognitive burden.

I think about — I’m a journalist. I’m not a professor. I think about my training in my first newsroom at a medium-size daily paper in North Carolina. We were told things like always use middle initials unless the person specifically tells you not to. Well, that’s a rule. That’s a kind of stupid rule. Why do we do that? So we didn’t have to think about doing it so that we were taught to be maximally accurate all the time. There were lots of rules, lots of traditions in all of these institutions, which rid us of the overbearing responsibility to think too much.

So although I think this is a wonderful book and we should take it on board, I think we tend as a society to ask people to do too much thinking for themselves. I think we need to think harder about reestablishing strength in the institutions that think for us, and that I think is so often the missing piece. You can go only so far with thinking by itself, but you also need training. You need to be taught how not to think and you need to be able to rely on institutions and norms that will channel your thinking for you. And when you get to a society which trashes those institutions and norms and goes with rampant cognitive individualism, the response is not, unfortunately, a more reasonable society. It’s the election of someone like Donald Trump.

DR. LEVIN: Thank you, Jon.

Pete, please.

PETE WEHNER: Great. Thank you. Thanks, ladies and gentlemen, for coming, Professor Jacobs for flying in from Waco. And these are three people that I admire, two of whom I know well personally, one that I haven’t, but it is a pleasure to be on the stage with them and here with you.

If I’m sniffling today, it’s not because I’m sick. It’s because I’m crying and grieving over the state of the republic. (Laughter.) But we can get into that during Q&A. Let me say a couple of things about this book and then maybe amplify some of the points that were in it.

First thing I’d say is that the people who need to read this book most won’t read it. That’s the problem. This is a — but it’s a terrific book. It’s extremely insightful and written in a very accessible and deep way, and the ability to get those two things, which is accessible and deep, is rare.

One of the things that struck me — Yuval and I were talking about this earlier before we came over — is how timely it is. It has struck me that the issues that Professor Jacobs talks about here have really been part of human nature since the beginning of time or since our race has been around, but there’s something about this moment where these human frailties have been accelerated and amplified. And I think it’s a complicated set of factors that have given rise to that. I’m pretty certain that social media is part of it, but I think there are other feelings as well.

It strikes me, generally speaking, that there is a kind of anxiety and anger and disorientation in America that’s explained in part because of the objective circumstances of the country, but I don’t think fully so. And why that is the case I think is an important thing to get into. I won’t get into it in my comments here, but I do think that this dehumanization that he talks about is greater than any time that I’ve been involved in politics. And there’s something that seems to be activating regions of people’s minds that the dehumanization is going on. We’re just very quick to go there, almost as if people think it saves them time to go there.

The other thing is I think it’s an honest book and honest in a couple of ways. It’s honest about how hard this exercise is, to think in a way that Professors Jacobs lays out. It takes effort and it takes a community and it takes self-reflection. And it’s honest in the sense of saying that sometimes you may lose friends. I think part of the reason that a lot of us don’t want to take on our own tribe is because being in a tribe gives you a sense of meaning and purpose and belonging. And if you take them on, particularly in the political sphere, but not only in the political sphere, theologically and all sorts of areas of life, you can be viewed as a traitor, as not loyal to the cause.

In terms of building on some of the insights of the book, number one — or number two in the list of the thinking person’s checklist — is value learning over debating. Don’t talk for victory. I think that is really important, that we have to develop the ability to listen well. And by that I mean listening to learn, not just to respond. I think most of us listen, and we’re listening in anticipation of how we’re going to respond to the people that we disagree with.

And understand — and, again, the book gets at this. The purpose of discourse and debate in a deep way, I think part of what’s been lost and things that I have to be reminded about is the purpose of debate isn’t to win an argument. The purpose of debate is to better apprehend truth. And it’s a very important distinction because if you view debate as a way to nudge you a few steps toward truth, that means you will be more open to hearing competing arguments because the end game is different.

And what you want — none of us, even if we had a disagreement on any particular issue, even if I was right — let’s say in some objective sense, I was right in my perception and you were wrong, I can only have a certain angle of vision on the truth. There’s no way that I can see the full scope of it. And that’s the reason that we need people in our lives who see things that are different than we are, which is to widen the aperture.

I’m reminded of — in C. S. Lewis’s biography, “Surprised by Joy,” he talks about first and second friends. And his first friend was Arthur Greeves, and Arthur Greeves first (ran as ?) a person, who is essentially your alter ego, who see the world pretty much the same way that you do, who would be able to complete your sentences. And we all need that, all of us need that kind of community within our life. But then he talks about what he referred to as a second friend, and he refers to Owen Barfield, who was part of the inklings group. And he said — about Barfield, he has this wonderful description where he says that they would argue back and forth, hammer and tong, late into the night. The second friend is the type of friend who reads the same books that you do and draws all the wrong conclusions from them. (Laughs.)

But what was interesting to me — and there’s a book called “The Inklings,” that talks about the relationship — was that both Lewis and Barfield treasured each other in part because of that kind of a friendship; that is, that they saw the world in a different way and they felt like they were both better for having done that. And I think that that’s been lost, and you need people to be able to articulate that.

Second is the importance of greater epistemological honesty. That is — you know, if I were to say, you know, the worst things that have happened to conservatism in recent years in terms of what’s been lost, I would put that very high up on the list. My own view as conservatism rightly understood, Oakeshott and Burke and others — Yuval did his Ph.D. on Burke so I’ll defer to him on it. But part of it was this idea of epistemological modesty — that is, that we only have some portion of the truth and so we’ve got to be careful about our certitudes.

My spiritual mentor, Steve Hayner, is a person I met in college and was a huge figure in my life for all sorts of reasons. He died a few years ago. And in my last conversation, which was a wonderful conversation, I took 11 pages of notes on it. But one of the things he said is that he believes in objective truth but that he held lightly to his ability to perceive truth and that the older he got, the more he had that sense. And I think that that’s important because that makes you open to learning.

A couple of other observations. I think that when you’re dealing with the tribalism that we have and this inability to think, what’s really important is that people within your own tribe take on people within the tribe. What doesn’t work is when somebody in the other tribe lectures folks. So if you have a liberal president lecturing conservatives or a conservative president lecturing liberals, to put in the political arena, that not only doesn’t work, it’s actively counterproductive because it enrages the people on the other side. Their feeling is, why are you lecturing me when you will never say anything to your own side?

So I think what’s important is to have people with some amount of authority within a particular political or theological tribe, whatever, speak to their own. You have to be careful about that because if you do it too often, they’ll run you out. They’ll say, look, you’re no longer with us. But it strikes me that that’s important.

The kind of thing that Professor Jacobs is writing about and that Yuval and Jon in my estimation embody. I mean, that kind of disposition and temperament is really important, and it’s important to make the case for it and to, in a sense, to begin to capture people’s hearts to it. I think that’s what you were trying to do with making thinking attractive.

Right now, there’s a lot of bad stuff that’s out and about in the public sphere. And it seems to me that all — almost all the energy is with the malicious forces that are going on. And people who want to heal this country and heal the public order need to have that same kind of energy.

There’s a great line in “The Prelude,” Wordsworth’s poem, where he said, what we have loved others will love and we will teach them how. And I think one of the things that we have to do is to have people who care deeply and passionately about these things, to love them and to teach other people why they should.

The last thing is I’ll mention an anecdote which has some bearing on this to underscore what I think is — I hope is getting at the point of the book. I was having an email exchange over the course of the last couple of years with somebody who’s a national radio talk show host, and he is always a Trumper. He was always defending Donald Trump, and I’m not to put it lightly. And, you know, it’s not a state secret. I’ve written about this. But we’ve stayed in the relationship. Anyway, we were having an email exchange. He was upset about something I had written in The New York Times. It was critical of Donald Trump. And in the back and forth that was going on, I could just tell that the temperature was going up. You can tell those things pretty easily in the emails. So he had sent me a note, and it had four or five accusations that were leveled against me. And my first response was, boy, is this going to be fun. I’m going to write a 10-page response, and I’m going to point by point demolish his arguments. And I thought, won’t that be great? It will be cathartic for me, and it will be totally useless, and there will be some amount of time spent at trying to heal the relationship that will have happened.

So I actually decided, in the spirit of Alan Jacobs, to set that approach aside. And instead, I said, look, I can answer those charges but I’m going to not do it for now. Why don’t I do this? Let me explain what I think your perspective is and what my perspective is as it relates to Trump and why I think we’re just not understanding each other. And so I made a good-faith effort to articulate his view.

And I said, I think what you do is you put a premium — you take the virtue of loyalty. That’s for you the highest good here. In your view, Donald Trump is being eviscerated on a daily basis by a liberal press. You think he’s better than Hillary Clinton. You think it’s important for this country to succeed, that people can go anywhere, to your criticisms, but they come to your show to be in a sense a safe harbor. And you don’t see your responsibility as adding logs onto that bonfire. And you view him in a sense as the quarterback and you’re the lineman, and you’re there to protect him because you really believe he needs to succeed for the country. So for you that I think is the highest loyalty.

I said, for me, a higher loyalty is intellectual honesty. So if I felt like Donald Trump — as a Republican and a lifelong conservative, if Donald Trump did something that I would have criticized Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama about, I would have to do it for intellectual integrity reasons, the same thing. And I tried to explain where I was coming from.

And what was interesting was he wrote me back, and he said, I’m just going to quote parts of this, “I received everything you said tonight fully. In fact, I read over your note a couple of times. I have one of those cathartic moments. I believe the disconnect you and I are experiencing regarding the Trump world is the difference between objectivity and subjectivity. You endeavor to be objective, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I have no desire to be objective. That’s my blind spot I suppose. I’m not a journalist. I’m an opinion guy.”

And then he talked about how there are these powerful forces trying to destroy and ruin lives, and I don’t want to sit by and let that happen without a fight. But he said, “But tonight I keep coming back to the difference between your objectivity and my subjectivity. I don’t think that makes either of us right or wrong. I’m self-aware enough to know that just because I disagree with you doesn’t make me right and you wrong. We’re just approaching this wild ride in quite a different way.”

The reason I quote from that and tell you that story was, again, my first impulse was not to do that. And years ago, I would have gone after it because I felt like it’s the power of the argument that you — I’m just going to force him to bend his sentiments to my will by the force of the arguments. And as I’ve gotten older, I don’t believe that works. And people have to feel like they’re heard. And I think he did feel heard, and I genuinely did try and do it. And that left both of us more open to hear each other. That isn’t my natural disposition. And if you went over my writings over the years, you would find a lot of things that are contrary to the spirit of this note.

But I do think that that was an anecdote that underscored for me the kind of spirit of what Alan Jacobs is getting at. And the fact that — if we do that, if we all do that a little bit better in our lives, I think that there’s some degree of hope that we can get out of the cul- de-sac we’re in.

DR. LEVIN: Thank you very much all three of you for really rich, wonderful comments. And they’re different in ways that I think can open up something of a conversation for us.

Let me, Alan, ask you to take up one thing that each of them said that might be a little bit in tension with some of what you said or at least might open up a set of questions we could think about. Pete says that your book is especially timely, that it’s relevant now in a way that it might not have been just at any random time. Is that right?

You’ve been teaching college students for 30 years. I think if we ask anybody in the room what’s different now, maybe the first thing we all would say is social media. And it strikes me that that’s an easy thing to say, and we have all sat and written books about this so maybe that’s not right. But is it your sense that you’re writing is distinctly speaking to this moment, or is this something that is a kind of culmination of something you’ve been thinking through as a teacher for decades?

DR. JACOBS: Some of both I think. I do not subscribe to the kids-these-days thesis, you know, that students are getting worse and worse at everything. My students haven’t changed that much over the years. There have been some ups and downs that I think are just the function of, you know, random fluctuation within groups. So I do not see a decline in students’ cognitive ability or fairness or anything like that. I see some people who maybe have a different kind of education than I would have wanted them to have, maybe less of a rhetorical education than I think is healthy and helpful. But it’s relatively minor.

You know, as you say, the easy response to this is to appeal to social media. And I will just take the easy response. I think it’s easy because it’s right. And the thing that I find really distinctive to our moment is that you can have people who will — who are gracious, thoughtful, who listen, who are engaged when you’re talking to them face to face and then are absolute monsters on their Twitter accounts. I mean, this bifurcation, this apparent split personality, it’s what researchers call the online disinhibition effect, and I think that that is really, really strong.

But what worries me more than the fact that there is an online disinhibition effect is that people can switch so rapidly back and forth between a kind of a generosity and openness in person and absolute viciousness online. And maybe the thing that worries me most is that that has become habitual so people now think of that as a normal way to be, to just change personalities according to the environment that you happen to be in. And that really worries me.

You know, I want to be able to advocate for something like a kind of a wholeness of personality that would manifest itself equally, though not in precisely the same ways but a general frame of character within which you would operate no matter what environment — discursive environment happened to be.

And, you know, I try to do that myself but I’ve never been very good at it. And so I actually ended up pulling back from Twitter and using it much less because I found it very difficult not to divide my own personality in that way and to be online a person that people who know me face to face wouldn’t recognize. So is it easy to blame social media? Yes. Do I blame social media? Yes. (Laughs.)

DR. LEVIN: So Jonathan Rauch says that some of what stands out most about the kinds of arguments you make, the counterrevolution you’re proposing or you’re part of in a sense is an awareness of the limits of individual thinking. I took your book to be really in some important ways about the limits of group thinking or the dangers of group thinking so that those of us who — and I agree with Jon about this — those of us who would say that institutions and frameworks and groups allow us to think as much as we’re capable of, which, for human beings is only so much, and allow us to overcome that, what you’re suggesting is it’s precisely institutions and groups and tribes that reinforce and exacerbate a kind of set of weaknesses in thinking. How does that distinction work for you?

DR. JACOBS: What I would say is that the groups both inhibit and enable thinking. And so one of the most forceful statements that I make in the whole book is not only should you not think for yourself, you cannot think for yourself. Nobody does, no one ever has. You think in relation to others. Your thoughts grow out of your dialogical interchange with other people. You think in response to what somebody else thinks. You either echo it or you reject it.

And this is — in fact, there’s a wonderful — I couldn’t squeeze this into the book, but there is a wonderful passage in a book by Kenneth Burke, who’s a mid-20th century literary critic, psychologist, thinker, where he talks about scholarship as being that kind of — he imagines you going into a parlor and people are having a debate, a conversation, and you listen until you figure out what’s going on, and then you say something and then someone disagrees with you, and then someone else says, no, no, you were right. And you kind of find your way into it and pitch in and find that you have some allies you didn’t expect and maybe some allies you don’t actually want. And then — and this model of scholarship as this kind of conversation in which there is no thinking except in a social framework is very important to me.

And so my theme then is — well, then, choose your company wisely, right? Choose your company wisely. If you can only think with others, ask yourself, well, who am I thinking with, right? And I think — and that’s why I do think of what Jon gave as a kind of a friendly amendment because what it really is is an extension, I think. What you were saying is an extension of that point. There is — I shouldn’t quote Burke in front of the Burke scholar here, but there is this great line where Burke says that any individual person’s store of reason is small. And, therefore, we need to draw on the larger storehouse that belongs to the community.

And if there is one thing that I wish that I could have — well, there’s several things. There’s the terrible thing about a book, after it’s out, you think of the 800 things that you wish you had said and the 700 you wish you hadn’t said. But maybe this could be, you know, a sequel, you know, son of how to think or something like that. (Laughs.)

That part of this learning to think with others needs to be also learning to think with others from the past; that is, learning to think with and in response and in engagement with people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago and figuring out how to interact with them properly.

There’s a wonderful little passage — quick anecdote. I’ll make this fast. There’s a great passage in the “Letters of Machiavelli” where — after Machiavelli was exiled from Florence and he’s living out in the countryside in his family farm, and he talks about getting into pointless arguments with the local farmers. And he’s like, you know, they’re cursing and abusing one another and calling one other names, but he says, but at the end of the day, I come back to my house and I put on my robes and I go into my library to converse with the great men of the past and to learn from them. And I thought, well, that’s just like picking up a book at the end of the day after you’ve been on Twitter, you know? (Laughs.) Machiavelli was having the same problem that we’re having, just in a slightly different environment.

DR. LEVIN: You raise the question of scholarship, which is another subject that seemed to me to be at the forefront in reading the book. A lot of times, when we think about the problems you’re raising now, we think about the universities.

DR. JACOBS: Yeah.

DR. LEVIN: And it’s maybe another instance where 30 years of teaching experience can help us with something we may not see. I’ll tell you my own experience. I’m not on Twitter, but I am on Facebook. And I’m part of two very different worlds on Facebook. I’m, on the one hand, a Jewish Ph.D. from New Jersey who lives in Maryland. Everybody I know is basically a communist. (Laughs.) On the other hand, I’m a conservative and I work in the conservative world and everybody I work with is very conservative.

DR. JACOBS: Yeah. Yeah.

DR. LEVIN: And these two worlds on Facebook are not arguing with each other. They’re not even aware of each other. They’re each very mad about something that the other has barely heard about at all. And a lot of the time, what the conservatives are very mad about has to do with the universities. And I think that’s so in a way that the liberals are barely aware of. And I wonder if it’s your sense that this is justified, if it’s your sense that the problems you’re describing are in fact somehow centered in university life.

You’re also suggesting that the scholarly life could be a solution to these problems. I think one way in which you — you say something a little different than what most people say about this is you don’t talk about the problems of thinking as problems to be solved by the sciences, but it’s problems to be solved by the humanities. And I wonder if you could say a little bit about the difference.

DR. JACOBS: Well, yeah. I think the main thing I would want to say about that is that a lot of the thinking that we have to do happens on the fly, you know, the decisions we have to make and the way we assess a particularly situation or a set of claims. We simply don’t have the opportunity in day-to-day life to do a thorough scientific assessment of the facts of the case. And, obviously, sometimes we’re going to need to take time to do that.

But in many cases, we have to make our decisions just sort of right then and there. And in those cases, what we need to do is to have the kind of assessment that grows out of certain dispositions and certain affections that have been trained, as you say, rather than, you know, the formation that happens within communities. These are the kinds of things that have long been a part of humanistic discourse, of the way that the humanities thinks is in terms of the forming and shaping of the affections. It’s not that that’s not something that scientists care about, write about. They do.

But I think that there are thousands of years of this kind of reflection within the humanistic traditions, and those things are — those writers, those thinkers, those ideas are very much worth drawing on because I think they’re really useful in kind of negotiating those day-to-day things. And that’s why — one of the things I talk about in the book is repugnance, and the situations in which repugnance is actually appropriate that there’s this — depending on what your community is, either infamous, notorious, or famous essay by Leon Kass called “The Wisdom of Repugnance,” and he was talking primarily about human cloning and saying that the proper instinctive response to human cloning is repugnance.

And whether you think that that’s true in that particular case or not, there are many cases in which it is right and appropriate to be repugnant. And that will happen only if you have been trained properly, to go back to what Jonathan was saying. And, in that sense, proper training, to again use your phrase, is a way of kind of relieving the cognitive burden on ourselves. But that proper training is something that happens within communities and within institutions.

So if you think about — this is something that Yuval has written about in his book “The Fractured Republic.” It’s something that John Inazu writes about in his book “Confident Pluralism,” where he talks about how the acquisition of certain virtues, certain good habits of thinking in response has to be done in conjunction with the rebuilding of damaged civil society and the institutions of civil society and that it’s relatively fruitless to try to do those — either of those in the absence of the other, and that’s, of course, what makes the task so difficult. It’s a warrior fighting on multiple fronts, but it’s got to be fought. DR. LEVIN: Let’s see what questions folks have in the room. And please, as you start, tell us who you are, maybe where you’re from, if you like, and ask a question. Yes, please. There. We have a microphone coming around so just wait for that. Right there.

Q: My name is Jordan (sp). I go to Cornerstone Schools of Washington, DC. My question was earlier you were talking about the people in the far-group and how their differences or like different views did not affect us, but the people in the out-group like feared them for their differences. I just wanted to know why is that.

DR. JACOBS: Yeah. So this is — I said that in conjunction — talking about Susan Harding and her fellow anthropologists, right? So if you’re like studying people in New Guinea, you know, you can think, wow, that’s really interesting how differently they do things, you know. That’s really fascinating. And one of the reasons it can be fascinating to you is that nobody in your neighborhood is going to behave that way, right? Nobody in your neighborhood is going to do that.

But if the person down your, you know, at the end of your street were behaving in this completely seems to you bizarre way, then — if they have totally different marriage customs, let’s say, you know, or totally different rituals involving the purification of what you eat or something like that, if somebody down the street from you is doing it, then you start getting a little worried because the sense is how is that going to affect my life.

And that’s how you get an out-group, right? The out-group is the person who’s different than you who might affect your life in some way. And, of course, one of the most prominent ways in which that can happen is that they can vote for somebody that you don’t want, you know, want to vote for, right? The people in New Guinea are not voting in our elections so they don’t have the impact on our society.

So the more that a group of people different than you impinges on how you actually live, then the more you’re going to perceive them as an out-group. The less they impinge on how you live, the more you think of them as a far-group. That’s Scott Alexander’s typology, right, in-group, out-group, and far-group. And I find it very useful. I think it’s quite helpful. We’ve gotten along for a long time with just the in-group/out-group dichotomy, and that’s clearly not adequate.

DR. LEVIN: Please. Right here.

Q: My name is Bonnie Wachtel (ph). Let me say for the audience there’s a heavy burden on the questions here I gather. They’re supposed to be thoughtful and non-tribal. (Laughs.) So I’ll do my best.

This is directed to Jonathan Rauch. So I liked everything that Alan had to say, and I liked everything that you had to say until you ended it with that little elbow in the ribs of Donald Trump, which struck me as actually a bit of a reversal of the point you were trying to make. And I know that you have a wide enough acquaintance so that you are aware of people who, taking all of the extremists out, which we’re aware of on both sides, that it was possible to have a very reasoned judgment call, that it was important to have a Republican in the White House and that Donald Trump on balance was a reasonable choice for the presidency at this time, that it was reasonable to have an outsider, all the various things that go to Donald Trump.

So assuming that you agree that it is possible to hold that judgment, do you not plead guilty to using this position to have a slightly — present a slightly tribal and biased and emotional point to end your talk? (Laughter.) Therefore, attempting to inflame the audience here, which is probably full of anti-Trumpers?

MR. RAUCH: Thank you, Bonnie. I think you’re correct. Thank you for calling me out on that. And thank you also for giving me a couple more sentences to elaborate where I’m coming from. I think actually it was unwise to end on that note without putting it in context, which now that you phrased it, I regret.

But here’s the context. To Donald Trump I could add Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, et cetera, et cetera. I would refer you to an article I wrote in The Atlantic about a year ago, which argues that the dismantling of the systems, the institutions, and norms that were used to vet politicians and bring them up through a training process such that when they got into higher office, their behavior was at least relatively predictable and not antisocial was deliberated dismantled by a series of reforms that was now screening what I call political sociopaths. It’s not a psychiatric diagnosis. A political sociopath is someone who doesn’t care what other politicians think about him or her and doesn’t need to care. They’re accountable only to themselves. The system began screening those people in instead of screening them out. And that makes for an extremely chaotic form of politics. I argue that Trump was only one of a number of people in this category and that his election was the symptom of this larger breakdown of institutions and not the cause.

So I was wrong to personalize this to Trump. I should have indicated that you’re going to get political chaos — (inaudible) — and very poor social decision-making to the extent you try to overburden individuals and demolish the systems on which they rely. So let that be the statement I want on the record. Thank you.

DR. LEVIN: Another question in the back please.

Q: Hello. My name is Amaya Jones (sp), and I also attend Cornerstone Schools. So my question — I was a little bit confused about what you meant by tribalism. I guess it means like who you side with, but I just wanted to be a little — make clear on it.

DR. JACOBS: That’s a great question actually.

Q: Could you repeat the question?

DR. JACOBS: Yeah. The question was what do we mean when we talk about tribalism, right? And I think tribalism is — it’s a pejorative word. It’s never used in a positive sense. It’s always used in a negative sense. So, typically, when we use that word, we use it to refer to a kind of a malformation of group identity — a group identity in which loyalty — to go back to the debate that you had with your friend — where loyalty to the people that you perceive as your in-group overrides everything else. I started to say trumps everything else. You can’t use that word anymore, you know? That word has been taken out of the vocabulary. It overrides everything else.

And so I think one — if, for your instance, you’re the sort of person who can be appropriately critical of your own in-group and you can at times call people to account for higher and better standards of behavior, then that’s an indication of group identity that is not tribalist. But if you defend what your people do no matter what, in all circumstances, then that’s what typically gets designated as a kind of a tribalism. So is that fair to say?

DR. LEVIN: Please.

Q: Thank you. It’s a wonderful discussion. My name is David Kelley. I’m with the Atlas Society and also the author of a college textbook in logic. So I was very eager to hear and very much looking forward to reading your book, Alan.

DR. JACOBS: Thank you.

Q: But as someone who’s taught, spent a lot of my working life trying to teach people how to think and beyond that as — I’ve described myself as a cognitive individualist who really believes in the power of reason, to some extent the message I’m getting is it sounds like an out-group for me on this issue anyway. (Laughs.) But let me reach out and put it as a question. To what extent do you think actual training in reasoning skills, which include dealing with emotional biases, cognitive biases, and also the tribal temptations we all have, but the actual — including the actual skill of making good inferences, having, defining your terms, avoiding fallacies — to what extent do you think that is a part of the problem and/or the solution?

DR. JACOBS: That’s for me?

Q: Yeah. Also for anyone.

DR. JACOBS: I’ll start then with that. I mean, I think it’s a tremendously important part of the solution. My sense is that groundwork has to be laid for that first. That is before people see the value of acquiring those kinds of skills, it seems to me there’s a couple of things that need to be done first. I mean, first of all, to make hard thinking seem desirable and attractive. And then, secondly, I think that this — you may disagree strongly about this, but I think that one of the things that we have to do is — or at least one of the things — I’ll put it this way. One of the things that I’ve always tried to do with students is to relieve them of the burden of believing that they can achieve some kind of radical objectivity in their thinking and that they can completely dismiss and eliminate all biases that — because I think that that impedes — if they think that they have to have that level of objectivity, it can impede their thinking.

And so I’m very attracted by a — William Hazlitt’s argument about prejudice. He said, without prejudice, I would not be able to navigate my way across the room. And then Hans-Georg Gadamer, who says that the real task of philosophy is to distinguish the false prejudices by which we misunderstand from the true ones which actually enable us to understand.

And so I’d like to give that kind of framework first and then within that framework say this is where you have to learn about your cognitive bias, you have to learn about the false inferences, the many different kinds of false inference that people can make, the many different wrong paths that people can go down when they’re trying to think.

But I hope first, before that, to try to make it seem a desirable thing to do and something which does not require them to have a kind of naive objectivity, which they often think that they need to have. So that would be a first response.

MR. WEHNER: I’ll just jump in. I think I would underscore the importance of disposition and formation of good character as the undergird for good reasoning. You have a section actually in the book where you talk about the danger of smart people — that in some ways, they’re more pernicious than people who are not as intelligent because they have the capacity to justify whatever it is that they happen to want to justify. The mind has that ability to marshal arguments on behalf of certain things.

And a lot of the most malicious and malevolent movements in human history are because very smart people made pretty compelling arguments on behalf of bad things. So reasoning is important, and I wouldn’t want to underplay it. But at least as I’ve gotten older and seen more things in life, I would say that it’s extremely important that you have the right temperament, right disposition, right character so you’re reasoning toward the moral good.

DR. LEVIN: Other questions. Yeah. Please.

Q: My name is Josiah Nelson (sp). I’m from Los Angeles. I actually work in the film industry. And I’m not sure who this would be directed to, maybe to Professor Jacobs, but there’s a lot of talk, and you talk today about the effects of social media on shaping the discourse, maybe putting us in a bit of the civil crisis we’re in. But I’m wondering what thoughts you have about others forms of media and how they’re contributed over maybe the last 10, 20, 30 years in putting us in that place. And then, also, what role other forms of media could have in helping repair some of the problems we have?

DR. JACOBS: I want to say a good word for one medium or maybe I should say a genre within a medium that I think has really helped, and that is the emergence over the last decade of long-form television narratives. You know, if you want to show how it is that a good person can become a bad person and all you’ve got is two hours in which to do that, it’s virtually impossible to have a really compelling picture of that. But “Breaking Bad” had five years of episodes in which to do that. And it is, I think, the most accurate, realistic, compelling picture that I know of how a relatively decent person can become a moral monster. And it happens by tiny steps.

And so that — “Breaking Bad” is one example. Obviously, there are many others. But I have just been thrilled by the emergence of this particular genre because of its power to explore the subtleties of the moral life, and also in many cases of the intellectual life because — speaking of smart people who are able to — that was a Google engineer who said — he said he learned from working at Google that really smart people can rationalize anything that they do, right. He said, they’re very good at it. They’re very skilled, and you can’t back them into a corner because they always have another argument. Well, welcome to Walter White’s world, you know. I mean, that’s who rationalizes everything that he does at every step along the way because he’s smart enough to do so.

I could do the denunciation of media, but I wanted to do, you know, one commendation of a place where I think the media are doing it right, which means that the visual media are getting closer to novels, which is kind of my thing.

DR. LEVIN: OK. The question over here.

Q: Hi. Luke Strange, I work here at AEI. I wanted to ask you about attention — the role that attention plays in how to think in the way that Matthew Crawford writes about attention in “The World Beyond Your Head,” which I think is an excellent book.

DR. JACOBS: Yeah.

Q: Specifically, do you think attention is a piggy bank, or do you think it’s a muscle? Is it somewhere in the between? And how does that play into your work?

DR. JACOBS: Yeah. So six years ago, I published a book called “The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.” And that was an attempt to try to make a case for reclaiming attention, long-term attention. And that is — and so in some ways, “How to Think” is like a sequel to that is it’s about the same sort of thing.

Matt Crawford’s book is terrific, I think. And I’m just going to single out one element of it that I think is particularly important, and that is his concept of the attentional commons. OK, that is the world in which we — the social world that we inhabit, the common world that we inhabit. And maybe a classic example of the attentional commons and what’s happening to the attentional commons is when you go to a gas station and a video starts playing while you’re trying to — you know, which just makes me wish I carried a handgun, you know, so I could just pull out and blow the thing away, right? (Laughs.) That this is where you just simply can’t navigate your way — I mean, I started realizing — when that started to happen, I realized, well, that used to be one of my rare moments where I could stop and think for a minute, you know? I could just stop and reflect for a minute while my car was filling up with gasoline. And now this thing is blaring and demanding my attention.

And Crawford is great on what he calls this kind of almost universal debasement of the attentional commons, where something is grabbing at our attention all the time and puts us in a condition of what Linda Stone, a researcher from Microsoft, who once worked at Microsoft, calls continuous partial attention. Nobody actually can — people talk about multitasking. Nobody can multitask. That’s actually cognitively impossible. You can just switch back and forth between different tasks.

And one of the really interesting bits of research about that is that the better you think you are at multitasking, the worse you actually are at multitasking. That is the people who are the worst at it are the ones who are most confident in their ability to multitask, which I think is very interesting. And so that attentional commons in which the notifications are coming ceaselessly, whether they’re from your phone or from wherever else, is what prevents that initial step which I talk about in “How to Think,” which is the give it five minutes step.

I got that from Jason Fried, a software developer, who was listening to a guy give a talk and strongly disagreed with it and couldn’t wait until the talk was over so that he could run up and tell him all the ways in which he was wrong. And he started blurting out, I don’t agree with this, I don’t — and the guy who gave the talk just said, hey, give it five minutes. Just give it five minutes. Just five minutes is all I’m asking, five minutes to think about it before you tell me how wrong I am. And Fried was really taken aback by that. I mean, he had not gotten — the guy hadn’t gotten five minutes into his talk before Fried was already deciding how am I going to tell him how wrong he is.

And that’s — our attentional commons in demanding that immediate response to everything has become so the debased that saying give it five minutes is like a radical cultural move but I think an absolutely necessary one.

DR. LEVIN: I think we have time for one more question, maybe right up here.

Q: Hi. Good to see everyone that I know and to learn from those I don’t know. And my name is Karen Hyman. I work for the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. I’m here with my colleagues. I’d like to ask all of you to address the question of universities a little bit more in sort of two parts. Doesn’t the fact that universities are really struggling with identity politics —

Q: Ma’am, can you speak louder, please?

Q: Certainly. Sorry.

Q: Thank you.

Q: Doesn’t the fact that the universities are dealing with identity politics, a kind of tribalism, really torque efforts at thinking, efforts at trying to give students a humanistic, humane education? So that’s part one.

Part two, following up on the remarks about disposition and character, when I think about great teachers that I had, there was a sort of religious underpinning, whether they were Christian or Jewish, to the way that they taught students to regard others in the classroom; that is, there was respect for other people, there was a sense of equality between teacher and student, that everybody was a learner. There was a sort of almost, you know, Christian deference to what another person had the right to say. Does the fact that religion is so threatened in the academy and in society in general sort of affect the way learning goes on and thinking goes on in the universities? OK? Thank you.

MR. WEHNER: Well, I’ll defer on the university side to Professor Jacobs because he knows more about it. He’s living there. I’ll just say that it strikes me what you said in the first part of your question is quite right. I think that there is now a premium put on identity politics at the exclusion of truth and in ways that the university has now become the most illiberal institution in American life, which is ironic and tragic because it’s an institution that was really built on the idea of the free exchange of ideas and to formulate thinking. And now — I mean, everybody who’s been in university campuses knows that there’s an ethos against that. And in some cases now there’s active violence against people, including a great scholar here, Charles Murray, when he was at Middlebury College. So I think that’s a real problem.

On the issue of Christianity and how that is in some ways set back potentially, and Jewish thought, how we view each other, I think there’s something to that. I would simply speak out here maybe as a, I don’t know, dissenting voice if that’s the right way to say. I’m an evangelical Christian and have been for much of my life. And I will simply say that I believe that the role of Christians in public life today is one of the real great disappointments for me, that it is — I’ve always thought that what Christianity should bring to the public square are certain kind of distinctives, including an appreciation and defense of human dignity and human person and really to steer away from the dehumanization that characterizes public life.

And today, I would say in — there would have to be a lot of caveats. I don’t have enough time, but with caveats in place, I would say that Christians, at least many prominent public Christian voices, today are not only not helping in that regard. They’re actively harming it. And I think it’s coming not only at a tremendous cost to our public life. I think it’s a tremendous cost to the public witness of Christianity, and it troubles me very, very much. And I think something has gone deeply awry.

DR. LEVIN: Jon, you wrote a book about open-mindedness at universities I think 20 something years ago, maybe 30 years ago? Has it gotten any better?

MR. RAUCH: Twenty-four, though the book was actually not about university life.

DR. LEVIN: OK.

MR. RAUCH: It was about how societies create knowledge. And most of the examples were off the university campus. Universities have in some ways become hotbeds of illiberalism, but it’s not only universities. One of the important I think merits of Professor Jacobs’ book is it draws our attention to the fact that every time we say, look at those terrible things going on in these campuses because terrible things are in the headlines, we distract attention from what goes around on the world — around us and increasingly online, which I would argue is a more toxic environment than anything you’ll find in a campus, where at least people are forced to face confrontations.

Campuses, you know, they have a difficult situation because they’re meant to be training people in the disciplines of knowledge, which requires the discipline of subjecting yourself to ideas that are deeply repugnant, but increasingly they’re also in a customer-is- always-right world. They’re in loco parentis for students who increasingly seem to think of themselves as children rather than grown-ups and have expectations that they’re going to have a great time there because the university said they’ll have a great time there. And I think that puts folks at places like ACTA in a bit of a bind because universities and trustees have to deal with both of these situations.

So it’s not altogether easy. That said, yeah, I’m unhappy with a lot of what I see going on in universities. And I think it has hurt not only our politics, but I think it’s hurt universities ourselves. They are the storekeepers of knowledge. If we’re going to think well as a society, it’s going to be because these minds and these places are pursuing knowledge with each other and against each other to the best of their ability.

The biggest problem I see is the one that Jonathan Haidt has identified, which is lack of intellectual diversity in a lot of disciplines, especially the humanities, which Haidt argues persuasively is leading to mistakes. It’s leading to bad science because too many assumptions are not getting questioned in the work. All of these are things I think I worry about.

DR. JACOBS: I think that — we could go on for a very long time about all these things, obviously. I will just say something really brief about this, that the — everywhere there is pressure on professors and administrators to make campuses safe spaces, intellectually and morally and emotionally, and that’s true no matter what kind of institution you teach at that. You know, we have this — you know, these sort of horror stories about people at Middlebury who think it’s not a safe space anymore because Charles Murray has been allowed to speak here or it’s not safe at Berkeley because Milo has shown up.

But, you know, I taught for 29 years at Wheaton College, evangelical Christian school, and there was always subtle pressure from parents in that case, whatever you do, make sure that it’s safe for my kid to be a Christian. Make sure that you don’t do anything that is going to weaken his or her attachment to the faith. And then at Baylor, where I now teach, sometimes you get a bit of that but you also do get a sense that this needs to be a safe place for people whose primary concern is, and whose parents’ primary concern is, that they get a really good job immediately out of school, right?

So this idea is that you’re always being told, don’t endanger my students, don’t endanger their ideas, don’t endanger their social commitments, don’t endanger their aspirations to economic success, don’t endanger their faith. You hear that all the time.

But education is — real education is risky. It is always risky. Thinking is always risky. And I think you can’t pretend it isn’t. You have to embrace that and say, yeah, this is a risk taking endeavor and things can go seriously wrong. But it’s a risk worth taking. That’s I think the argument that we have to make.

DR. LEVIN: That’s a wonderful note to end on. Thank you very much, Alan. Thank you to our panel in general. Dr. Jacobs will be signing books right outside. And thanks to all of you for being here. (Applause.)

(END)