"Thinking deeply exhausts us, and we instinctively avoid considering ideas that might complicate our lives and our relationships."

"'The person who wants to think,' Jacobs claims, 'will have to practice patience and master fear.' He cites Marilynne Robinson to explain the agita of our frantic life in the cloud, which accelerates our 'hypertrophic instinct for consensus.' We are hard-wired to be clannish, and our online habits exacerbate these penchants—for inclusion, for status, for affirmation—and strengthen their hold on us. Jacobs coins several terms to explain how this works. Whenever we hear something we disagree with we are tempted to enter 'Refutation Mode,' in which we stop listening because we have determined that 'no further information or reflection is required' on that subject. He draws our attention to what he calls the 'RCO,' short for 'Repugnant Cultural Other.' This phenomenon is so familiar to us as to be instinctive—Evangelical Christians are the RCO of secular academics and vice versa—and life online has enabled RCOs to shout at each other 'from two rooms away.' Other mental gymnastics include 'lumping' and 'splitting' people and ideas into 'Instant Taxonomies,' and 'in-other-wordsing' our RCO’s statements into reductive parodies that suit our purposes. Jacobs quotes psychologist Jonathan Haidt to argue that our tribes function as 'moral matrices' that 'bind people together and blind them to the coherence, or even existence, of other matrices.' Altogether, our instincts and our habits work to ensure that good thinking remains difficult."

From "To Think or Not to Think?" by Mike St. Thomas in The American Interest (via A&L Daily), reviewing "How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds" by Alan Jacobs.

St. Thomas is a little annoyed by all the terms Jacobs coins — does it help us think to have little nicknames for everything? — but I can see (at the Amazon link) that the book has gotten a lot of excellent reviews).