UNTHINKING REED
Few of us are able to think, and still fewer care to. ‘Man is a thinking reed,’ as Pascal said. But it is a thinking reed that would go to any length to avoid thinking, and which would soon split if it tried to. There are so many tasks that the mind is good for, but reasoning is not one of them. Stupidity is its element.
People are so unused to reflecting, not because they find it so hard to do it, but because they find it so convenient not to. They have a mine of plans and pastimes to take its place, or whose place they don’t want it to take.
When people try to think, they patch up plausible truisms from their deep-dyed errors.
Thinking is our glory. So why to our shame have we made it so hard? Though we have no wish to do it, we hold its fruits in high regard. It’s filthy and boring work, but we prize the gold that it yields.
Our ideologies bind us so indissolubly together because they work in tandem with our unwillingness to think.
Our age is sure that it has big bright ideas, because it prints them in big bright letters on billboards and banners ten foot high.
What a fate, to live in an age of second-rate minds, and not have the brains to rise to their level.
1 We would rather talk and feel than think
We like to talk as much as we hate to reflect. I must speak before I think, or I would never have a thing to say. Trollope shrewdly sketched a man who ‘half thought as he spoke, or thought that he thought so.’ I feel less than I feign, and I think less than I ought.
We don’t let truth get in the way of our style. But don’t we let all the rest of our wants get in the way of truth?
‘We all do no end of feeling,’ as Twain said, ‘and we mistake it for thinking.’ We prefer to feel rather than to think. But we prefer to think that we feel rather than feel in good earnest. Thinking is hard. Feeling is easy and far more gratifying.
Most people had far rather retell common fallacies than find out uncommon truths.
2 We speak before we think
Most of us know what we think before we think. I speak before I feel. I feel before I believe. And I believe before I think. And often I feel because I speak, and believe because I feel. But because I speak, feel and believe, I have no need to think.
‘In speaking,’ Trollope wrote, ‘grand words come so easily, while thoughts, even little thoughts, flow so slowly.’ We dawdle behind the truth, because we are too quick to speak and too reluctant to reflect. ‘It’s where a thought is lacking,’ Goethe said, ‘that, in the nick of time, a word turns up in its place.’ When asked about a topic that they’ve scarcely thought of, the first thought that occurs to some people to say is, ‘I’ve thought a lot about that.’
3 Thinking is superfluous, stupidity is thrifty
Thinking is a surplus activity. And a thinker is one who thinks uneconomically. Most of us pick up all the opinions that we need with no need of thought. But a thinker thinks long and laboriously to earn a few needless insights.
Some people will go to great lengths to seem original, short of thinking for themselves.
We are appalled by the thoughtlessness of those who fail to embrace the notions which we have embraced with no thought.
People fervidly long for truth, and they will do all that they can to get it, except think. They prefer to gain their opinions by any means other than reflecting for themselves. And they are keen to acquire new facts, so long as they can keep to their old ways of acquiring them.
Most of us judge that knowledge is best got by whatever means we reckon we’ve got ours, be that by experience, research or reflection.
Stupidity may pass for shrewdness, so long as it has luck on its side.
We have a great gift for not dwelling on what yields us no profit and yet for meddling in what is none of our business.
INDIFFERENT TO IDEAS
4 We believe on a whim
People choose most of their views by mere aesthetic whim.
People are deaf to the melody of some ideas, though they may grasp their meaning quite well. ‘Most faiths,’ says William James, ‘are bred from an aesthetic demand.’ The haphazard unshapeliness of quantum mechanics repulsed Einstein. What bard does not feel that rhyme proves more than reason?
I choose my beliefs with no more thought than I would a favourite football team, but I cling to them with the same ferociousness.
5 Ideas are a social currency
We shape our convictions not so much as a picture of the world but as a glue which we use to keep ourselves in one piece and to bind us to our tribe. They are aimed less at the things that we think of than at the people that we talk to.
Our personal beliefs are products of our social practices.
Our need to believe is a pale shadow of our real and deep need to belong.
People are loath to part with views which they have not pondered enough to make their own. And they go to great trouble to fight systems of thought which they scarcely grasp.
Like most of what we prize, speculation subsists in this world of mirrors mostly as a mere double or simulation of itself.
Most people don’t think, since they can’t see the people round them doing it, and so they can’t mimic them. But since they can see and replicate their views, they have no shortage of opinions.
6 ‘Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith’
Belief is not a personal conviction. It is a social contagion.
If people believe in truth, they do so not because it is true, but because others believe it. It’s their fellow flesh and blood that they have faith in, far more than the vaporous fabulations that it dreams up. So they plant their trust in a religion, not on the strength of the reasons they have found to think it true, but on the strength of the trust that they see the rest of the world puts in it. Most of us catch ideas by contact with close-by infected bodies. ‘Our faith,’ says William James, ‘is faith in someone else’s faith.’ And our doubt is faith in someone else’s doubt. Our minds are too weak to stick to a single opinion on their own without the concurrence of those round us.
If you can hold fast to your own standpoint when no one else agrees with you, you must be either a sage or a crackpot.
We get our opinions, like our clothes, readymade, mass-produced and cheap.
We get our precepts by borrowing them from others. So we feel that we prove them most conclusively not by grounding them in logic but by cajoling others to take them up in turn. It is by converting others that we convince ourselves. But if we had any real modesty or pride, we would not try to bring others round to our own point of view.
7 We assert ourselves through our ideas
I cling to my convictions as I do to my wonts, not because I give them so much thought, but in order to assert who I am. A belief is a more or less sincere pose meant to affirm our own being in the eyes of the world.
The faithful don’t care much whether or not there is a god, but they will stop at nothing to impose on others their own kind of god.
Our willingness to assent to a creed far exceeds our capacity to believe it.
How few pains people take to seek out the truth, yet how much pride they take in pronouncing what they have made up their minds it is.
Would we care for truth itself, if it gave us no vent to hold forth on it? ‘Wisdom and the good things of the mind,’ Montaigne says, ‘seem of no account to us if they are not paraded before the approving eyes of the world.’ Seneca said that he would give up the grant of good sense if he had to keep it sequestered. ‘Is all your knowledge nothing,’ asked Persius, ‘if someone else does not know that you know it?’
I take up my creed on impulse, since it is no more than a creed. But I argue for it vehemently, once I have made it a part of my self.
How did we end up with so many illusions but so few beliefs? Our ideas are a small subset of our errors, most of which are too personal to form real ideas.
8 Stupidity claims to think
People claim to think so much, they in fact think so little, yet they set such a high value on thinking. Why do they shy from what they claim to do so zealously? Why do they set such store on what they are so loath to do? And why do they prize so dear what yields them such sparse pay?
One mistake which all thinkers make is to assume that most people care for ideas. They sound as if they were speaking of some legendary species, which lived to think, and for whom thoughts were meat and drink, and truth a matter of life and death. Thinkers like Valéry may confess that ‘cognition reigns but does not rule,’ but only intellectuals with their head in the clouds would ever dream that cognition even reigns.
9 We are indifferent to ideas
Most people have no interest at all in general ideas. The sole thought that fills their minds is their schemes of greed and fun. They never get so close to thinking that they need to go out of their way to avoid it. It’s clear which are the great questions, because they are the ones that most people never ask themselves. And yet they never lack for a ready answer to them.
The best ideas may be common property, as Seneca said, but most people have no wish to claim their share in them.
On a map of literature books of thought would be the deserts. People have heard they are sublime, but they have no desire to traverse them.
In most minds sports hold the place that intellectuals think ideas do.
Unlearned people are too shrewd to be intimidated by ideas. All that they have seen of the world shows them that these count for nothing in it.
Some people are too ignorant to know how little they know. But most don’t even care.
BELIEF
10 The stupidity of opinion
We treat our opinions as a carefree holiday from the taxing rationality which our weekday schemes foist on us.
I collect opinions like a hoard of rubbishy keepsakes. They are all I have to show for the decades and regions that I have idled through. Most people contribute to the conceptual economy by circulating borrowed notions, but they turn out no new ones of their own. ‘We think as we do,’ Butler said, ‘mainly because other people think so.’ Our minds orbit in a closed loop of rattling platitudes, which we couch in current clichés and fill out with a padding of unrelated anecdotes.
Few of us think, yet we all hug our obsessions and convictions. When I don’t know quite what my views are, I am still in no doubt that they must be right.
Most people have no general ideas, but they still have enough opinions to send them as far off course as if they did.
If vain opinions and flattering hopes were taken out of our minds, Bacon says, they would turn to ‘poor shrunken things, unpleasing to themselves.’ If we cleared them, we might find out what cheap junk clutters them.
You need opinions like small change to deal with the demands of day-to-day life. And who wants their thoughts to do more than that? They are the dust flung up by our careening greed.
11 We believe without understanding
With what certainty people ground their lives in a sophistry which they have made no effort to examine. And how glibly they will bet their souls on a creed which they have not gone to the trouble of comprehending.
Faith is a substitute for understanding rather than a spur to it. Most beliefs don’t have reasons but causes, and those not overly deep ones. People cling to their faith, because they have never taxed their minds to grasp what it means. And they take pride in spouting opinions that they don’t understand. ‘There are,’ Lichtenberg says, ‘few who do not hold a lot of things which they would, if they put them to the test of close inspection, find they did not comprehend.’ They sign up to a creed without penetrating nine in ten of its articles.
If we gave more thought to our beliefs, we might find that we don’t much believe them. ‘Most people,’ Montaigne says, ‘force themselves to believe, having no idea what real belief would mean.’ They will assent to a thesis sooner than devote serious thought to it. They believe not in order to make sense of the world, but so that they won’t have to, just as others doubt for the same purpose.
A sect must profess a welter of dogmas which make no sense at all, but which train its congregants to yield without demur to superstitious explanations.
12 We believe without believing
People don’t understand a great deal of what they believe in, and they don’t even believe in a great deal of it. They believe less than they think they do, but more than they understand. Their faith is what they believe they believe in. And most of us believe in much less than we believe we do. ‘Religion,’ as Twain notes, ‘consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes in.’ Faith is a respectable shared form of delusion and insanity, which most of its votaries only dream they suffer from. It enables them to take up and act out a creed that they don’t quite grasp or believe. We must make our choice between no faith and bad faith.
The liar has learnt to lie without needing to tell many lies, and the believer can affirm a set of beliefs without needing to believe many of them.
The fraud that faith perpetrates is not to claim that there is a god, but to tell us that we believe in him. Most people’s faith is no more real than the things they think they believe in, as their love turns out to be as fake as the being that they think they love.
Because we have faith in so little, we can bring ourselves to lend our faith to nearly anything. Our self-interest will suffice to heal our unbelief.
13 The stupidity of habit
Most of our habits are more thought out than they seem. But most of our thinking is more habitual than it seems. Much of what I appear to do by rote I in fact do by express though routine intent. And much of what I reckon I think intuitively I in fact think by rote.
People assume that they do so much from habit because they get most of their notions from habit. It rules how they think far more than what they do. They allow torpid routine to fence in their meditations, and unresting self-interest to thrust them on to act.
Habit is a kind of thrift, and what we wish to skimp on is the work of the mind. Most of our habits of thinking are makeshifts which save us from the need to think. Our habits of conduct free us to act without the need of reflection. And our habits of thought enable us to get and keep opinions without the need of reflection. So we even think without thinking.
Some minds run with clockwork regularity on rails laid by a maniac. They are dependable and efficient, but inflexible and misguided.
Stupidity is so much more tenacious than intelligence, if only because it takes such pride in repeating itself.
14 Belief hardens into stupidity
By the time that we are of an age to think, most of us are bursting with so many opinions, that we have no more need to, and would scarcely be able. ‘We pick up our ideas,’ Lichtenberg said, ‘at an age when the understanding is at its most unsound.’
We take up tenancy in our small house of thought when we are young. And then instead of broadening it, we spend the remainder of our life bricking it up as a thick-walled prison.
The doctrines that are drummed into our heads when we are young keep such a hold on us, not because we think about them for the rest of our lives, but because we don’t think about anything much at all. ‘Most people grow old within a small coop of notions,’ Vauvenargues said, ‘which they have not found out by their own efforts.’ Their views set so hard in their heads because they never stir them up by thinking about them.
At the expiry of forty years of intrepid speculation, most philosophers still hold at sixty the same viewpoint that they did at twenty.
DIVERSION
15 Slothful stupidity
We are too restless or too idle to think. But we are too slovenly and skittish to do nothing. Our indolence whirrs so frenetically that it looks like a kind of animation. We have the roving lethargy of those who can’t keep still. ‘The shiftless,’ as Vauvenargues says, ‘are always anxious to be doing something.’
‘Mankind,’ as Johnson points out, ‘have a great aversion to intellectual labour.’ Mental sluggards are thrust on by a physical restlessness. Their stir and hustle is the mark of the torpor of their minds. The faster you rush, the more indolently you reflect. And the sole purpose for which we now think is to find some way to go faster.
A thinker such as Pascal claims that people can’t bear to stop moving because they would start to think. But they don’t wish to think because they would have to stop moving. Their physical activity cloaks the lassitude of their minds, though so does most of their mental activity. I’m so fond of travelling because it gives me things to chat about without requiring me to think.
Streams are not shallow because they run so fast, though they may run fast because they are shallow.
16 Diverted from thinking
Pascal says that we seek diversion so as to be spared from brooding on our comfortless state. But a fish doesn’t swim so that it won’t have to fly. We feel no call to brood on our dire plight, because we are so caught up in our hunt for distractions. Yet if we weren’t caught up in our hunt for distractions, we still wouldn’t brood on our dire plight.
How could we break the grip of our diversions, when we are diverting our minds not from exploring but from the void, not from our groaning misery but from our gaping nullity? We need work and fun, not to decoy us from the profound fact, but to pad out our shallow vacuity.
Most people’s minds are too vacant to bear up under the vacancy that thinking would force on them.
Those who are proud of leading such full lives are in too great a rush to have any but hollow ideas.
17 The stupidity of impatience, the impatience of stupidity
People are in such a hurry that they take the most meandering way in all that they do, since they won’t spend the time to find a more direct one.
Three fourths of the thinker’s work is waiting. And this is one reason why we don’t want to think. Thinking is a war of attrition, in which mass and endurance count for more than brilliance and daring.
‘Leisure,’ Hobbes wrote, ‘is the mother of philosophy.’ Thought thrives by boldness, but dies by impatience, which is, as Kafka says, the one cardinal sin.
I lose my time by scurrying so fast. I am stupefied by my own speed. Move briskly, and you have to keep your mind on how you move. Loaf, and you’re free to let it wander where it will.
Most discoverers don’t start right, because they start too soon. They begin to build their house of thought before they have laid the groundwork. Commencing in air, they never reach the light. They would have done well to heed Lec’s admonishment to ‘Think before you think.’
I’m so impatient that I never have time to start on my true work.
Truth, if you ever do see it, is a smudge which you glimpse in your peripheral vision as you zoom on past it to grab what you don’t really want.
18 ‘The idiot questioner’
When critics ask how a bold mind works, why do they all come up with the same stale reply, that it doesn’t nose out fresh answers but asks fresh questions? Questions are what you make of your patrimony. Answers are what you make of your own best gifts. A fine rejoinder may form the most fruitful queries. ‘To ask the hard question is simple,’ as Auden wrote, and jesting Pilate proved. A probing retort mocks Blake’s ‘idiot questioner, who is always questioning but never capable of answering.’
I mistake my own horizon for the farthest rim of the world. I trust that I have hit on the one field where all that has gone before needs to be corrected by my own inquiries or where corrections count. We take it that our intellectual responsibility ends where our own questions end. But for most of us it has not yet begun. We each lift a small square of the sheet of unreality, to catch a peek of the inch or two of the truth that lies adjacent to us.
The best method would work like a mechanism to turn out answers which modify the mechanism so that it can ask further questions.
The seeker’s task is to fill a capacious why with an adequate because.
Glib people reword deep questions to chime with their own glibness, and then plume themselves on answering them with such easiness.
19 The abyss and the shallows
We bob up and down like corks on the surface of life. I skim along where the world has strewn the tinselled refuse which I hope to scoop up. We feel borne up by life’s unfathomable depth. But it’s our own lightness that keeps us afloat.
The world is a depthless abyss. It is all gulf, and we are all shallows. It is a labyrinth with no centre.
The deepest truth about us is our shallowness.
Not even suffering abysmally cures us of thinking superficially. Life weighs us down, but fails to deepen us. It doesn’t grow. It thins out as it gets longer, and has less to show us as it gets darker. Though it leaves us heavier, it makes us no more profound. As we grow up, our world dilates, but our minds stay as small as ever they were.
Our shallowest traits stay with us through our most profound afflictions. Pedants will remain pedants in their worst crises, and will come out of them with their pedantry undiminished. And a fool on the point of death will still be playing the fool.
Even real agony must wear the clothes that it has to hand. And these may well be too small for it, and leave it looking ridiculous.
20 Superficiality and stupidity
Some of us are emptier than we appear on the outside. Our innermost qualities don’t go very deep. Dive as far down as you may, what do you meet with but one more exterior and front? How many break their necks when they plunge into the sea of truth and find it so much shallower than they guessed. But some of our thoughts may reach farther down than we judge, since we leave off before we get to the bottom of them.
Nothing is so shallow that it can’t touch us deeply. And what is deep will scarcely touch us at all.
You don’t glimpse how shallow some people are, till they dredge up their deepest beliefs. Most of our visceral convictions don’t go even skin deep. They are as thin as the paper or the blinking screens from which we filch them.
A few mouldy crusts and parings of prejudice will do to keep most souls from starving. And the most feathery stuffing is enough to fill our light and hollow hearts.
An idea must be very shallow to lodge deep in the human mind. And the most superficial beliefs are the most enduring and tenacious.