There is not much the matter with our intelligence. There is a great deal wrong with our thinking habits and style – in fact with our thinking culture in general. There is a big difference between wisdom and cleverness. In camera terms cleverness is a sharp focus and wisdom is a wide angle lens. We can measure and note cleverness so we promote it. We cannot measure wisdom so we ignore it. We can measure intelligence or see its manifestation in ordinary school work so we promote it. We cannot easily measure thinking skill so we ignore it and assume that thinking skill is but intelligence in action. It is nothing of the sort. Many highly intelligent people are poor thinkers. Many people of average intelligence are skilled thinkers. The power of a car is separate from the way the car is driven.
There is a good reason behind our appallingly inadequate thinking methods. These were developed by the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages for a particular purpose. That purpose was the defence of an articulated theology that had been constructed with words and was vaguely related to the teachings of Christ as turned into an imperial religion. The theology had to be kept intact and pure. Above all it had to be defended against the heresies that were forever springing up. Paradoxically many of these heresies were in fact created by the elaborate wordplay of the constructed theology. So the clergy were elaborately trained in disputation and argument. At the university of Salamanca the training took fourteen years – of listening. The style of thinking was directly concerned with so-called logical deduction. Both sides accepted basic concepts and then argument was joined to see whether obtained conclusions were consistent with the premises or not. This is a highly artificial form of thinking specifically designed for a very tight purpose. In fact the style of thinking was based on the Hellenic style of thinking in general, and Aristotle in particular, honed and armed by the brilliantly clear mind of St. Thomas Aquinas who provided the Church with a thinking method that has lasted until today.
This particular thinking method of the Church set the thinking culture of society because for many centuries all education and universities and thinking were indeed in the hands of the Church. Most of the famous universities of Europe were originally Church institutions. So the thinking culture was handed down. Even the French philosopher Descartes had to spend his early thinking years being trained in this style of thinking. Since the Church thinking was based on Hellenic thinking and since the Renaissance introduced to the barbaric world the beauty of Hellenic thinking and the classics, the idiom was reinforced for even those who opposed the Church used its style of thought. To this day our style of thinking is almost totally dominated by that idiom. We take it so much for granted because we do not realise that it is but one idiom of thinking.
Chinese science and technology which were very advanced in their early days came to a stop because the Chinese never developed the concept of an hypothesis. The Greeks were appallingly cumbersome mathematicians because they never developed the concept of the zero (and a suitable notation). Our own social development has been, to my mind, severely retarded because we could not escape from the idiom of disputation and dialectic.
Any system that is defending itself against alteration has no choice but to be negative. Since no alteration is allowed all suggested alteration must be shown to be false.
In general terms it is very much easier to be negative than to be constructive. Any person is able to visit an art gallery and sneer at the exhibited work and yet be totally unable to paint anything himself.
Negativity is the sole activity open to a mediocre mind. A mind that is, itself, unable to create, can only display its talents through criticism of others.
A critic setting out to review a play has a need to fill his column and write something interesting. He is unlikely to be able to do this in praising the play, for his piece will be bland and sound sycophantic or at least fulsome. But in the exercise of an attack he can be brilliant and even witty.
A negative approach is easy because it is always possible to compare what is seen against a model that one chooses for oneself. An ornate piece of furniture is seen as fussy, vulgar and over-elaborate because the chosen model is simple. But if the piece of furniture had been simple then the chosen model would have been more ornate and the piece would have been condemned as stark or plain or utilitarian. No one is ever at a loss for criticism if he is so minded.
Criticising something makes us feel superior. We are as good as the creator and better since we can find fault with the created object. Adulation puts us on a lower level since we are in the posture of adoration and are seen to be a follower.
The sneer is easy and requires no back-up and no justification. It is extraordinary that we can readily accept as sneers such words as do-gooder, pious, intellectual, literary, populariser, workaholic, sober and middle-class.
Malicious gossip is more interesting than tittle-tattle. Attack is more interesting reading than a mere account. Investigative journalism is more interesting than description. A fight is more interesting than a parade.
Having something to oppose gives direction and meaning to life and to action and to thinking. Revolutions would never have succeeded without a hatred of the bourgeoisie or of capitalists. Missions need focus and hatred is the surest way to provide this.
In discussing politics with his friends a man waxes more eloquent and more interesting when attacking the notions of the opposite party to his own than when in praise of his own side. In elections we tend to vote against the other party rather than for our own.
By definition envy is a negative emotion. I suppose the converse is hero-worship which is as positive without reason as envy is negative without reason.
None of the above examples of the negative mind are exclusively to do with the style of thinking developed by the medieval schoolmen. They are more examples of a negative attitude which is then followed by thinking appropriate to that attitude.
It is often claimed that the main purpose of education is to develop the critical intelligence. We equip our children with hatchets, not with the seeds of positive contribution. We have traditionally put a higher emphasis on the critical intelligence than on the creative intelligence. We hope that the exercise of critical intelligence will prevent the making of mistakes and help us to resist the blandishments of charismatic nonsense.
Destruction of an idea provides instant achievement. The destruction is an end in itself. There is little achievement to be had in supporting an idea because it takes time for the idea to be shown to work and the achievement is someone else’s anyway. But destruction is personal, immediate and final.
If something is ninety-per-cent worthwhile and ten-per-cent wrong we focus our attention on that ten per cent and ignore the rest. It could be supposed that by focusing on that ten per cent the critic was seeking to bring it up to the standard of the rest. But in practice the attitude is rather different. The suggestion is that the criticised ten per cent is only a sample of the whole thing and if this can be shown to be weak then the whole thing collapses. After all you only need one leak to sink a boat. Far too many reviews are niggling, nit-picking and petty-minded. One reviewer even complained that the binding of his copy was faulty and the centre pages fell out.
We seek to improve designs by criticising the faults and trying to improve them. We seek to improve society by indicating the shortcomings and demanding their redress. However, removing the faults in a stage-coach may produce a perfect stage-coach but is most unlikely to produce the first motor car.
Very often a design will be improved not by picking out the faults but by challenging the features which seem beyond criticism and asking for an improvement in them. We should not only focus our attention on what is wrong. There are greater benefits to be obtained from attention to what is just adequate. Or we might even adopt the improvement policy of focusing on the strongest features and asking for their further development. Criticism alone is a poor route to design improvement – yet it is one we habitually use.
As soon as we spot a thesis or hypothesis we immediately search around for an example which refutes the thesis. According to Sir Karl Popper the sole function of an hypothesis is to invite refutation because from the refutation will arise a better hypothesis. Clearly a single refutation will destroy the certainty of an hypothesis. A claim that all swans are white will be refuted by the first spotting of a black swan whereas to prove the hypothesis you would have to examine every single swan. There is a grave danger in this attitude. It excludes the provocative hypothesis, the function of which is to stimulate further exploration from which a better hypothesis will emerge. It also restricts us to absolute hypotheses rather than statistical ones and in some fields this can hold up progress. What we require from an hypothesis is a usable scan of predictions.
If we cannot prove that violence on television encourages violent behaviour in the viewers then we must not try to interfere with the programme content. It is not enough that an accumulation of evidence seems to show this because each experiment can be shown to be imperfect in some sense. I believe that the school curriculum is crowded with subjects that are only of use for the examinations and are of little use later in life. This is to the exclusion of more important subjects – like the development of thinking skills. But it would be impossible to prove that these subjects are harmful because they are not. So since they are beyond criticism they are beyond alteration. A consequence of the critical intelligence is that anything which can survive the critical intelligence is thereby validated or protected.
This arises directly from the disputations of the medieval schoolmen and the Hellenic dialogue. It is the basis of debate and politics and dialectics. The basic principle is that a situation allows just two mutually exclusive hypotheses. If you succeed in proving one of them wrong then you have proved the other right. The trouble is that there are very few situations which allow of only two, exclusive, hypotheses. In practice there may be more than two hypotheses. Or they may not be mutually exclusive so proving one wrong does not prove the other right. In politics destruction of the other person’s policy is in no way proof of the validity of yours.
If all you had to do to prove the validity of your argument was to prove wrong the holder of an opposing argument, then the best proof would be to find a fool who supported the other argument.
If you find a weakness in the other man’s argument this does not prove the falsity of his conclusion. It merely means that his conclusion is as yet unproven.
It is all too easy in dialectic argument to take the other argument to an extreme – creating what is called a straw man – and then to attack this extreme.
All too often we use debate as a sort of intellectual jousting. If one politician can better another in a debate, the offered conclusion is that he is intellectually superior. This does not follow. He may have been superior on this occasion or, indeed, he may always be superior in the exercise of critical faculties but may be inferior in the exercise of judgement or in creative ability.
There is much of value in debate because the method forces us to focus on the issue and tease out the implications and consequences. But the method often forces the opposing views too far apart, denying them any agreed area of overlap. A valid argument may be lost over a debating point. Each side concentrates its efforts on destructive criticism instead of seeking to develop the most positive aspects both of its own notion and also that of its opponent. There is no constructive cooperation. If an idea occurs to one debater that would strengthen his opponent’s case then this idea is suppressed. There is a great deal of wasted intellectual effort and what decides the issue is not the worth of the idea but the debating skill of the proponent. It is also the case that the system is asymmetric insofar as it is usually much more difficult to show why a new suggestion is worthwhile than to show why it will not work. A new idea must often be judged within a new framework but the debate is always carried out within the old framework. We know that all developments in art – and most in science – have been initially condemned when judged in the old framework.
The system that was designed for debating theologians is grossly inadequate to deal in a constructive and positive way with the problems of today. Nor is designing a more positive system difficult – once we have freed ourselves from the tyranny of this habit. In a political system it is difficult to believe that all the wisdom is on one side and that the other side has no contribution to make. The purpose of a court of law is, presumably, to establish innocence or guilt rather than the relative debating skills of two lawyers.
In practical terms it may be argued that for one hundred people to each have an idea would lead to utter chaos and that it must be better for one person to have an idea and the other ninety-nine to improve that idea by criticism. The answer is that with a positive attitude of mind the hundred could between them develop one strong idea by each contributing to its improvement. Alternatively there could be one hundred ideas in the first place and then the best would be chosen and used. One of the strong points of Japanese technology is that the Japanese are positive about the development of ideas. In the United Kingdom on the other hand there is very often the ‘not invented here’ attitude which means a negative and destructive response to an idea from elsewhere or someone else.
The positive attitude does not mean that every idea has to be treated as wonderful. It means a positive exploration of an idea to discover and show up whatever good features it has. The next step might be to find the weaknesses in order to avoid or strengthen them, rather than using them as a means for rejecting the idea. Finally the fully developed idea may not be used because there is a better one or because – good though it may be – it is not suitable. Too often we feel we have to start rejecting an idea at the beginning because we know that at the end we are not going to be able to act upon it. There is nothing wrong with being positive about an idea and showing, honestly, at the end why it is not possible to adopt it.
With regard to the general negative attitude of mind, perhaps society ought to turn on this attitude its own powerful weapon of the sneer. Perhaps the ease of being negative should be emphasised. Perhaps we should dethrone the critical intelligence from its long domination of our intellectual culture and replace it with the constructive intelligence. We can still use constructive criticism for the focusing of attention on weaknesses which might otherwise be overlooked in a positive euphoria. In any case we could demand of a critic that he must first list the positive points before he earns himself the right to be negative. We must train our youngsters to be more positive in attitude. Too much brilliant mental effort is wasted on negativity. Set a mind in a negative direction and it will perform brilliantly. Set a mind in a positive direction and it will perform as brilliantly. In fact the very first thinking-lesson we use in schools is designed to do just this: focus the mind in a positive direction, in a negative direction and in a direction that is loosely called ‘interest’.
With regard to our institutions that rely too heavily on the adversary system we can make a conscious effort to design and develop other methods. For example family courts are now making a move away from the adversary system towards cooperative exploration. The Senate Committee method in the United States is a step towards such constructive cooperation. After all many effective organisations in the world are not run on a dialectical method at all. It is by no means the only way. Naturally the method will be most strongly defended by those who are unable to operate their intellectual equipment in any other way, and those who quite fancy their skills of dialectic desolation.
This is a very real problem in our thinking style – but a hidden one. It also arises, indirectly, from the thinking habits of the disputatious medieval schoolmen though in this instance the habit was used as much for constructive theology as for heresy-bashing.
If something is bad then it follows that its opposite is good. There are echoes here of the debate: if you prove one thing wrong then the opposite must be right.
Everyone is agreed that bad logic makes for poor thinking. So naturally it must follow that good logic makes for good thinking. This is, of course, complete nonsense. Good logic is one requirement of good thinking but by no means the only one. Water is a requirement of soup but few would accept a bowl of hot water as a satisfactory soup. Perfect logic can only service the perceptions on which it is required to act. If these are inadequate then the faultlessness of the logic will not improve them and will still give a poor answer. No one has ever suggested that the perfect working of a computer can by itself validate its answers. These can be no better than consistent with the input. Hence the term GIGO which means ‘Garbage In – Garbage Out’. When Galileo had performed his elementary experiment on gravity showing that bodies of different weight fell at the same speed, his conclusion was logically disproved by the brilliance of the schoolmen logicians who showed that it could not be so. Galileo’s results had also been obtained by de Groot but the excellence of the logic still transcended the fact of experiment.
We accept that tyranny is reprehensible and contrary to human dignity. Therefore it must follow that its opposite – namely freedom – is highly desirable. But this does not necessarily follow at all. What may be desirable is the absence of tyranny and not freedom. The importance of this distinction will be considered at length later in the book.
We know that a sloppy work of ill-supported speculation is not much use for the advancement of human knowledge. So the opposite must be true: that a work of exquisite and detailed scholarship is the proper endeavour of the human mind. The result is that scholarship becomes the triumph of form over content. Many brilliant minds are wasted in detailed scholarship over trivial matters that lend themselves to this approach whilst much more important matters are simply neglected because they do not lend themselves to this approach. Too often the result has the thundering significance of nuns’ knitting.
We know that a person who has no knowledge is, by definition, an uneducated person. Clearly this must imply that a person with the maximum amount of knowledge must be maximally educated. So education sees its role as imparting the maximum amount of knowledge. Again this is nonsense. Up to a point we may need pure knowledge but beyond that point it may be more important to supplement that knowledge with thinking skills rather than to pile on yet more knowledge.
If we are decided to make capitalism the enemy then it must follow that the opposite of capitalism will lead to a livable utopia. Again this argument by opposites leads us into trouble and shuts our minds to a whole range of alternatives including different sorts of capital and alternatives other than Marxism. Revolutionaries have repeatedly found – to their cost – that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend.
Of course the argument by opposites works both ways. If something is bad then the opposite is good. And if something is good then the opposite is bad. So if collectivism is good it must follow that individualism is bad – so excluding a society which can work cooperatively and still have space for individuals.
It also follows that if you are in favour of something it must be implied – even if you have not expressed it yourself – that you are against the opposite. For example if I am in favour of lateral thinking then it must follow that I condemn logical thinking. In fact we need both. Being against the traditional exclusive dominance of logic is not the same as being against logic.
If love is good then more love is better. If information is useful then more information is more useful. If order and discipline in society are necessary then more order and discipline will make for a better society. If cleverness is important in business then a more dever man will make a better business man. If learning history is essential then learning even more history can only be better still. If socialism is good then more socialism is better. If poverty is a saintly virtue then more poverty indicates even more virtue. If freedom of the press is a good thing then more freedom of the press is better. If travel is a good thing then the farther you travel the better it is.
We use this sort of thinking a good deal and yet the absurdity of it is patent. If salt is a good thing then more salt must be better. If one leader in a group is good then two leaders must be better. If four sparking plugs are necessary to make a car go then eight sparking plugs will make it go better. If protest is good then more protest is better. Obviously there are many things which are good up to a point – like salt. Beyond that point they may become harmful. Government regulation would seem to be an obvious example. There are other things which are only good in the required amount – more of them or less of them is worse.
Creativity is good and more creativity is better, but yet more creativity may lead to impotent chaos. The point is obvious but because of our dialectical habits it is very difficult to demonstrate. I can show you that creativity is good by showing you the dangers of the lack of creativity (stagnation) and by showing the usefulness of a certain amount of creativity. On the other hand by looking at an excess of creativity you can argue that creativity is bad. So creativity is both bad and good at the same time. Most arguments are of this sort. There is no doubt that in our thinking we have not solved the problem of amounts – mainly because it evades our traditional thinking methods and political habits. How can you argue that socialism is fine up to a point or that capitalism is fine up to a point?
The sneer is a beautiful illustration of our problem with amounts. We can sneer at an excessively literary person, or at someone who is obsessed by work or someone who is blinded by patriotism or at someone who ‘does good’ not as an exercise in help but for ego importance. The paradox is that we have to ‘sneer’ because we cannot show these things to be wrong. We start by sneering at the excesses. But who defines an excess? If the excess is unattractive then surely lesser amounts are also unattractive. Before long we find that most things which were once regarded as rather important virtues are the subject of a sneer. Obviously the process can be applied to virtually everything: by taking it to its excess and sneering at the excess, then allowing the sneer to edge downwards until it encompasses the whole quality.
Implicit in our problem of amounts is the idea that amount itself makes no difference. There is the story of the man in a hotel who propositioned a girl and offered her $5,000 to go to his room with him. She accepted, but as they were going up in the elevator the man asked if she would come for a mere $10. The girl was furious:
‘What do you take me for?’ she asked.
‘I thought we had established that,’ said he, ‘and were now haggling over the price.’
With the girl the amount of money made no difference to the principle (from his point of view, not hers) but with other things the actual amount does make a huge difference. But the example does serve to show how the problem arose from a technological point of view. Once the principle was established juggling with amounts does not matter: for the Catholic Church an artificial method of birth control is still condemned whether it is relatively ineffective or highly efficient. Nor do we allow someone to be just a little bit dishonest.
The scholastic heritage in our thinking requires absolute ideas, pure classifications and certain hypotheses. All these arise from the Aristotelian base that St. Thomas Aquinas used. Indeed his celebrated revamping of Aristotle’s syllogism becomes useless if this is not so. Consider: all capitalists are thieves; he is a capitalist; therefore he is a thief. Obviously the argument would not work at all if the first proposition read: some capitalists are thieves. In order to guide our politics, our emotions and our morals we have developed absolute ideas.
In fact we defend our civilisation by attacking the slightest threat to any of the absolute principles we hold. The slightest suggestion of an infringement of the freedom of the press is met by howls of outrage because it is felt that once the absolute principle is breached then the floodgates are open and all freedom will be lost.
Similarly we have to have the certain hypothesis in science. The hypothesis that all swans are white is destroyed by one instance of a black swan. But the hypothesis that all swans have long necks is certain and therefore usable (of course if it did not have a long neck we would hardly classify it as a swan). Yet it is possible to develop a whole different approach to science – and perhaps one more suited to a systems world – by dealing with hypotheses which work on the ‘by and large’ basis. For example: ‘by and large swans are white’. Naturally we have been unable to make much progress in this promising direction because we remain largely trapped within the old idiom.
It is easy to see why absolute ideas were required by the Greek thinkers. If you were going to play around with words then the only way you could have a conversation was to have absolute concepts – otherwise there could be no meaning or truth (but just poetry). The medieval schoolmen had the same problem but writ much larger because their whole constructed theology required an absolute construction with brick-solid concepts. The 9,187 philosophy teachers in the USA with their 98 philosophy journals have the same problem today.
To be fair, words are but a classification system to make sense of the world around us, of our thinking and of our communication. If we have a box labelled ‘red’ then it only makes sense to have that box if everything inside is indeed red. In future we can put our hand into that box and without looking draw forth something that is red. If some things are more orangey than red we take them out of that box and create a new box labelled ‘orangey’ and in that new box everything is orangey.
Innumerable problems arise from this particular thinking style we have chosen. I do not intend to go into all of them here because it would take a book in itself. We can, however, mention the sampling problem. We saw that the hypothesis that all swans are white can be destroyed by the single instance of a black swan. In a parallel way an ardent socialist would regard the single instance of a plutocrat driving past in his Rolls-Royce as an indication that society was still capitalist – since the car refuted the hypothesis that society was socialist. The fact that the car might be the last remaining Rolls-Royce or that if all Rolls-Royce owners had their entire wealth confiscated it would only mean three cigarettes each for everyone else, is quite irrelevant for we are dealing with absolute ideas.
For ease of emotional administration it is obvious that battle-cries, slogans and party labels all have to be absolute. Whatever comes out of the box that bears your party label must be worthwhile and whatever comes out of the other box must be worthless. You cannot have a battle-cry that is against some naughty capitalists but not against the absolute principle of capitalism. You cannot have a battle-cry against Russian communism but not against the principle of communism. The medieval schoolmen knew full well that ideologies can only work with absolute ideas. Of course this can lead to a certain amount of trouble as illustrated by the remark a young child made to her teacher:
‘Can God do everything?’
‘Yes, child, he is all powerful so he can do everything.’
‘In that case can God make a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it?’
Quite a lot of our political argument is of a similar nature.
Intermediate labels are a sort of currency that make more convenient our mental transactions. They include labels like good, bad, sin, undemocratic, exploitation, Marxist and so on. The principle is perfectly sound. You examine a situation and you slap on the label. Whenever you have to deal with that situation again in the future you do not need to re-examine it in detail, you simply read the label. This saves time and clarifies decisions. The labels themselves are unequivocal: they indicate absolute value. We no longer react to the situation but to the label, just as we treat money as a value in itself and not only in relation to what it can buy.
Obviously the trouble arises at the moment of attachment of the label. The attachment may be loose, it may only refer to one part of the situation or the situation viewed in a particular way or to a particular level of some quality. All the nuances and peculiar circumstances of the initial judgement are lost. Imagine that you have a new cook who does not speak English very well. You indicate the salt jar and show that salt is ‘good’ for cooking. The meal turns out to be so salty that it is inedible. Clearly what you meant – and took for granted – is that the right amount of salt is good. But once intermediate labels are attached we cannot re-examine on every occasion the basis of the attachment. We just accept it and react to the label.
Our educational tradition and our thinking culture have always emphasised reactive thinking. At school a problem is set out for us and we react to the situation and solve the problem. In our critical frame of mind we look at something that is being put forward and we react to it. As problem-solvers we receive the problem and we set out to solve it.
In contrast a projective thinker may only have a starting point and a general direction. He then sets out to do something. It may be an exercise in design or creativity or entrepreneurship or project-development. He has to find his own way and generate his own information. This is not set out for him as it is in a textbook problem at school.
In our teaching of thinking in schools (at the Cognitive Research Trust) we have noticed what might be called the ‘Everest’ effect with the most gifted children. They are used to being stretched by difficult problems that are put in front of them. These problems are of the reactive type: the children are required to use the information given to arrive at an answer. Just as a mountain stands in front of the climbers and is ready to be climbed so the problem stands in front of the children.
They are good at tackling such problems – and the higher the mountain the more the sense of achievement (hence the term Everest effect). But the same children may be very superficial and weak at tackling quite simple problems where the information is not given but where they have to exercise a projective thinking faculty which they have not developed. In an examination we set to test General Thinking Skills in schools we found that many good academic thinkers were poor projective thinkers. They could react to a given situation but they could not create for themselves the situation in which to make decisions or take action. Such activities as the assessment of priorities, generating ideas, selecting alternatives, guessing and strategy are all part of projective thinking but not part of reactive thinking. The result is that many of our best brains are locked up in a limited thinking idiom through this early diversion of their talent towards reactive thinking and away from projective thinking. Projective thinking is also constructive thinking.
Our management training schools fall into the same trap. We train managers to be problem-solvers rather than opportunity-finders. We train them to run an organisation smoothly and to cope with the problems that arise from time to time. They are to be car mechanics not car designers. We train managers and not entrepreneurs. We train administrators and not system architects. How then are the systems to change and improve? By correction of faults, by reaction to protest and through the evolutionary pressure of circumstances. This is a very poor route of improvement when contrasted with positive design.
The clever person is the reactive thinker: he can solve brain teasers and play chess well and will probably pass the civil service exam. He will write pungent criticisms and perceptive reviews. He will generate his political momentum through following one ideology or opposing another. The wise person is the projective thinker. He will build situations in his mind. He will enlarge his perceptions and alter his perceptions. He will be an entrepreneur, a designer, a creator and a leader. The wise person does not always have to be active but he does bring to a situation much more than is immediately provided by it.
This problem arises directly from our emphasis on reactive thinking. There is the story about the man who jumped off the roof of a skyscraper. As he passed the tenth floor window he was heard to mutter: ‘So far so good’. If a future disaster is not within our perception as a tangible problem at the moment then we cannot react to it. The problem with criminals is that they do not perceive that they are going to get caught so the severity of the punishment is not a deterrent. An injured hunter who is living off the food in his deep-freeze looks at the food in front of him and enjoys eating it. What happens when the deep-freeze is empty lies in the future and he cannot react to that. In any case anything might happen before that: his injury might improve or someone might stop by and notice his predicament.
Banks arrange loans to Third World countries and when the debts fall due the banks re-schedule them in order not to lose the money since the country is unable to repay it. The amount of debt goes on accumulating and the banks know that the accumulation cannot last for ever but for the moment they are making profits. In the heady days of the American stock-market boom investors bought shares which were intrinsically worthless because they knew they would rise in price and could be sold at a profit. They knew that one day the bubble would burst and that was not today.
Politicians are constrained, by the nature of the system, to short-term views and moment to moment political expediency. They may know the future benefits of some temporarily unpopular policy but the electors see only the immediate effect. We react to what is in front of us.
Just as we find it difficult to react to future problems so we find it difficult to react to future benefits. Religion alone has been able to make future benefits tangible enough at the moment to be reacted to (through a process of disciplined masochism).
General uncertainty, speed of change, inflation and many other factors make us unwilling to predict the future or to react to it. But the basic problem remains our emphasis on reactive thinking. In school we put the emphasis on sorting things out, not on perception. We assume that the world is going to package its problems as neatly as the compilers of school textbooks. And because it does not we search for slogans and labels to provide the ingredients for our reactive thinking.
In the thinking lessons that the Cognitive Research Trust is introducing into the school curriculum the emphasis is not on reactive thinking, not on sorting out given information and not on problem-solving. It is on the development of perceptual skills, on projective thinking, and on wisdom rather than cleverness.
A business manager may be content when things are going smoothly. There is no need to alter anything because there is no immediate problem to be solved. It may be that the market – as with shipbuilding – is quietly slipping away from him but until he perceives that in a tangible way, there is nothing he can react to. We never see any need for altering things that are running smoothly. There are no problems so why should we create some. The projective thinker would not sit and wait for problems. He would look at the strengths of what was being done and try to build on them. He would continually be trying to improve the methods, simplifying them and making them more effective. He would not be content just to run the machine as it was and to wait for problems to arise so he could apply his reactive thinking. In government and in administration of every kind we suffer too much from thinkers who have been trained only to be reactive. The projective leader leads into the future; the reactive leader backs into the future relying on drift and crisis management.
This is also part of our habit of reactive thinking. We spend far too much of our intellectual effort on history. Some of this is justified because history is the only laboratory in which we can watch the interaction of human nature with events. We can certainly learn from history but our perception can also be frozen by an historical perspective that no longer applies. The real reason we are so obsessed with history is that it provides the ideal environment for our reactive thinking style. History is there – we can react to the information. Nor are we going to run out of information. More history is created every day. More detail of history is created every day by the work of other historians. So we have a feast of information to react to. We can isolate ourselves with the information and do our own thinking. There are no messy experiments to be done, no awkward sociological observations, no risky business investments. By now there are enough historians to ensure that history will maintain its dominant position in our intellectual culture. The major question can never be asked: do we study the past just because it is there or in order to help us cope with the present and the future? I have no doubt in my mind what the answer is. We climb Everest just because it is there – in the process we might generate some useful information about oxygen equipment and human endurance.
Again there is nothing wrong with the study of history but too many brilliant minds are locked into this prison and hence locked out of other contributions to society. Too much of our intellectual capital and university facilities is devoted to what is, intellectually speaking, an unproductive investment.
In administration we see a parallel problem. Collect all the information that is there to be collected. After all the process only involves designing a form and making it mandatory for every business to complete the form. In the army there is a saying: ‘If it moves salute it and if it does not move paint it white.’ In government administration there seems to be an equivalent saying: ‘If it can be counted ask for it, if it can be productive regulate it.’ The worry is that the computer will simply be used to make these demands for information even easier by reducing the storage and sorting load.
We know that the availability of the computer in science has done a certain disservice. The careful design of experiments and the generation of provocative hypotheses have been replaced by the idiom of: ‘Measure everything in sight, feed it into the computer, carry out a multivariate analysis and at the end you have a definite answer that will justify your next research grant.’ In the old method you may have laboured for years and got nowhere. Today you are sure of a computer print-out. And that is good enough for the research administrators who are, after all, administrators and like to see a paper output. The big breakthroughs and conceptualisations that alter the universe of consideration are most unlikely to arise from the new method. Moreover the scientists who might have made those leaps can no longer compete for funds or employment with the number-crunchers. Again, there is nothing wrong with the method but there is a wastage of minds and a misdirection of effort.
Imagine a group of skilled chess-players who played amongst themselves and wrote important observations on the game of chess and critiques of each other’s play. Imagine that these players were so advanced that their play no longer had any connection with the ordinary domestic chess-player. Moreover they had invented certain special rules which were known only to themselves. Matters which seemed of the utmost intensity and importance to certain groups of these players were incomprehensible and of no importance to anyone else. Imagine that the sheer intellectual skill exercised in this pursuit was of the highest order and could in no way be criticised. When you have completed such imaginings you may have a picture of the state of philosophy today: an in-game played by clever players for their own ends or rather for the game’s own end. Through no fault of their own they are entrapped.
The idiom is one of analysis, and more analysis and comment upon analysis and comment upon comment. There are elaborate theories of logical structure – based on some chunk of discourse – refutations, counter-examples and laser-like arguments. All within the rules of the philosophical game.
If it is not that then we are back to history. I remember seeing an advertisement for a university post that required a philosopher who was ‘an expert in Kant’ and thinking how tragic that small notice was.
From its central position as the very king-pin of human development philosophy has become an etiolated game played in a corner of Academia. Yet the world has a great need for a vigorous philosophy concerned not with preserving ancient traditions and playing petty word-games but with monitoring and developing more effective thinking styles and more useful concepts. The only solution might be to retire all departments of philosophy on double pay and to start again.
We are moving into a complex-system universe and the universe of systems is very different from the static world of the Greeks. The old idiom of analysis does not apply as easily to a system because once you have analysed out the parts you no longer have the operating system – rather like looking for a soul through anatomical dissection. We have not yet developed proper scientific methods for dealing with systems. It is an area to which we need to pay much more attention. The computer will help. But we should not feel that analysing into parts or atomic approach is sufficient for our needs.
In a static universe A is defined by reference to something outside itself – for example a system of coordinates. In a dynamic universe A may be defined by its development into B and B by its development into C and C by its development into A. There is nothing illogical about this circularity. It is also possible to have a practical situation in which A is ‘bigger’ than B and B is ‘bigger’ than C and yet C is ‘bigger’ than A. Again this is quite logical. Our thinking needs to make the same sort of jump that geometry made when it left plane surface Euclidean geometry and moved into the spherical and other geometries. As always it is the change of universe that is important. Once that is made a new logic develops in the new universe. Thinking is at the stage where we have to make this universe-jump.
We may want to move away from box-type classifications to flagpole classifications and the logic that springs from these. We may want to develop ‘field’ logic and ‘pattern’ logic. We may fail but we should try. Consider the following absurdity. In lateral thinking one of the provocative techniques is to use a random word to help generate new ideas or solve a problem. Now if the word is truly random then it has no connection with the given problem – and consequently it has as much connection with any other conceivable problem. Similarly any random word has as much connection with the given problem and, consequently, the implied suggestion is that any random word can solve any problem. This is an absurdity totally contrary to any traditional concept of meaning. Yet in practice it works very effectively. And the logic behind its working is very elementary – in the universe of a self-organising information system.
Consider two approaches to the problem of traffic congestion in cities. The first approach is to analyse the problem in detail and measure traffic flows, peak rates, parking spaces and so on. The idea is to find the cause and then try to eliminate it. The second approach would be to say: ‘How could we arrange for people to be delighted not to bring their cars into cities?’ That would provide the starting point. In practice the methods overlap. We need both provocation and analysis. With lateral thinking we might say: ‘Po a person no longer owned his car when he drove into the city.’ From such a provocation might arise concepts that converted private cars into a form of public transport within the city limits.
Our thinking tends to be descriptive, not operative. We aim to describe the true picture. We ask: ‘What is this?’ rather than, ‘What can be done?’ In the general system idiom the latter can be as useful.
In this chapter I have set out to describe some of the deficiencies, inadequacies and even dangers that arise from our traditional thinking system. This system is a particular system that was developed by scholars in the middle ages for a particular purpose. It is rooted in the Hellenic tradition. The system has a lot of advantages and many might claim that the development of civilisation has been due to its application. Others might claim that civilisation, in the social and political sense, might today be much further advanced if we had not been trapped within this system. I do not, myself, take a position on this. A knife is a most useful device but its very structure means that it is also dangerous. We tolerate the danger so long as the usefulness outweighs this. But if the danger grew too strong we might have to ban knives and develop a different system of cutting what we needed.
I have not wished to show that the traditional thinking idiom is bad or dangerous and therefore should be changed for a better one. I have tried to show that it has certain features which lead us to think in a particular way. Where there are abuses of the system we can try to correct them. Where they are structural faults we should be aware of them and seek to compensate for them. In some cases we may have to devise new methods, for example to replace the adversary procedure in some situations.
Above all I wish to suggest we can no longer be complacent and content with our traditional thinking system if we are to enjoy a positive future. We must be realistic about it rather than hysterically defensive. The dangers can be realised. There are positive steps that can be taken immediately and these are either implicit or openly suggested in this chapter. We must be aware of the huge wastage of misdirected intellectual talent that the system has caused and is still causing. We must focus more attention on the importance of thinking and realise that it is much more than exercised intelligence. In some cases there is no easy step to take and we shall simply have to focus deliberate thinking effort on developing new concepts and new thinking styles. There is a very great deal that can be done once we accept that something needs to be done.
There is a crude American expression indicated by the letters CYA which stand for the way you would place your hands in order to protect yourself from a kick in the pants. It means that a person will only take a course of action which he knows will be safe from criticism or attack. Obviously the sort of actions that follow are feeble and restricted. Yet this sort of behaviour arises directly from the misplaced adulation which we bestow on the negative faculties of mind. It would not have been possible to write this book from the cramped position suggested by CYA.