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A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

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A Survival Guide for a World at Odds 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.
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