How to Think is part essay, part lament, part how-to guide for processing the world more generously. My conversation with Jacobs has been edited for clarity and length.

Emma Green: Your book isn’t really about how to think. It’s about how to deal with the challenges of pluralism. Right?

Alan Jacobs: Well, I don’t think those are necessarily exclusive. In a pluralistic society, people struggle to deal with difference. One of the ways in which we typically deal with difference is by drawing really clear lines of belonging and not-belonging. To be able to signal “who is with me” and “who is not with me”—in-groups and out-groups—is extremely significant for human beings.

My view is that is the number-one impediment to thinking.

Green: You bring up conflicts across groups that have lasted for centuries. For example: Thomas More, the Roman Catholic humanist, wrote to Martin Luther, the leader of the Protestant Reformation, about his “shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up.” For his part, Luther referred to the “‘dear little ass-pope’ who licks the Devil’s anus.”

Even so, one could make an argument that discourse in our time is even more toxic. Is it?

Jacobs: I’m sure there are times where it has been as bad or worse. But I do think that we’re in this really weird place where the media through which we engage one another keep us in a permanent state of agitation and hostility.

The external consequences have not been overwhelmingly tragic yet—we’re not slaughtering one another in the streets. But, holy cow, are people internally messed up. People are going through day after day in a state of profound agitation, having to mark their place on the ideological landscape through social media.

Green: This seems connected to the death of objective fact in America. Ideologically speaking, people are often stuck in their own “truths”—they’re like circles in Venn diagrams that don’t necessarily overlap. Your proposal of generous listening and consideration is almost impossible to imagine.

Jacobs: You’re right that it is hard to envision. What I’m trying to do is slow people down. One of the most important passages in the book is where the software developer Jason Fried is wanting to argue with a guy who is giving a talk, and the guy says, “Just give it five minutes.” If we could just give it five minutes—even five minutes—we might be able to cool down enough to say, “Maybe this is different than what I first thought,” or “Maybe there’s a point here. Maybe this isn’t completely insane.”

Green: Is the right or the left more to blame for this fracture?

Jacobs: They’re bad in different ways. There’s a smugness on both sides. But I am more worried about the condition of the right in America right now.

I think the primary moral fault of the left is a kind of smug contemptuousness toward people who don’t agree. And I think that’s a bad fault. But the primary fault of the right at this moment in America is wrath. I worry about the consequences of wrath more than I worry about the consequences of contemptuous smugness.