[Industrialblog,
February 22, 2007]
Why Smartypants can be so dumb
Yesterday, after posting on the prisonhouse of primary school, I got to thinking about another subject that I also rarely post on: Why are some of the smartest people some of the dumbest people?
I have a theory, but to get to it, we need to take a step back to Hermann Hesse for a moment. In Hesse's Magister Ludi, young Joseph Knecht, a prodigy, loses his cool for a moment before his teacher, the Music Master. What is the point?--Knecht cries. Why all this study when we know we can never find the answers we want? What's the point of it all?
Now, as someone who had been asking himself the same question for some time, I was eager for the answer, and I was prepared to be disappointed. I expected the Music Master's answer to be some fatuous, sentimental response or an exercise in abstract rhetoric or something so friggin' abstruse that I wouldn't get it. But the answer was none of these. It was a direct, concrete, and, well, true. The Music Master responded by asking Knecht this: Have you been neglecting your meditation? And Knecht responded, yes, in fact, he had.
That answer, in the vernacular of the 60s, blew my mind. Hesse was saying that thinking and study unhinged from mysticism means futility, inevitably. Spiritual practices ultimately change how we think.
With that, I began to investigate mysticism. Which leads you naturally into two other areas — religion and psychology.
So when I investigate my own or others' thinking, I look at not only at the reasoning, but the spiritual practice and the psychological angle. But with this caveat — I take a dim view of armchair psychoanalyzing people, especially people I've never met. Instead, I look for what I'll look at symptoms, specifically, thought distortions and emotional distortions.
People's thinking is not so much based on reason as we think, mine own included. Reason unhinged from a mystical base has a major problem. And emotion can easily grab reason and use it as a tool for its own ends. The answer to why smart people can be dumb is in there — smart people ask questions and pursue reason into places that others don't bother. But without a solid spiritual place, or if they are susceptible to self-deception or rationalization for emotional reasons, then they fall into one trap after another.
FWIW. More on this tomorrow.
I have a theory, but to get to it, we need to take a step back to Hermann Hesse for a moment. In Hesse's Magister Ludi, young Joseph Knecht, a prodigy, loses his cool for a moment before his teacher, the Music Master. What is the point?--Knecht cries. Why all this study when we know we can never find the answers we want? What's the point of it all?
Now, as someone who had been asking himself the same question for some time, I was eager for the answer, and I was prepared to be disappointed. I expected the Music Master's answer to be some fatuous, sentimental response or an exercise in abstract rhetoric or something so friggin' abstruse that I wouldn't get it. But the answer was none of these. It was a direct, concrete, and, well, true. The Music Master responded by asking Knecht this: Have you been neglecting your meditation? And Knecht responded, yes, in fact, he had.
That answer, in the vernacular of the 60s, blew my mind. Hesse was saying that thinking and study unhinged from mysticism means futility, inevitably. Spiritual practices ultimately change how we think.
With that, I began to investigate mysticism. Which leads you naturally into two other areas — religion and psychology.
So when I investigate my own or others' thinking, I look at not only at the reasoning, but the spiritual practice and the psychological angle. But with this caveat — I take a dim view of armchair psychoanalyzing people, especially people I've never met. Instead, I look for what I'll look at symptoms, specifically, thought distortions and emotional distortions.
People's thinking is not so much based on reason as we think, mine own included. Reason unhinged from a mystical base has a major problem. And emotion can easily grab reason and use it as a tool for its own ends. The answer to why smart people can be dumb is in there — smart people ask questions and pursue reason into places that others don't bother. But without a solid spiritual place, or if they are susceptible to self-deception or rationalization for emotional reasons, then they fall into one trap after another.
FWIW. More on this tomorrow.
I'll resist the temptation to go off on one of my patented rants about Cartesian dualism and the characteristic liabilities and incapacities and systemic dysfunctions of modern Western thought. I'll only say that you've expressed very well Why I Am Not a Rationalist.
Yes, in order for reason to function aright, it must function as part of a greater whole which is ordered and orchestrated by spiritual practice. This is something Western man always knew, up into the dawn of the modern era. And we have paid a heavy price for "forgetting" it. (Note my use of scare quotes: not really "forgot," more like conveniently repressed.) So we end up with untrammeled rationalism, so we end up with unbridled emotionalism— sometimes coexisting within the same "split brain." Concepts untethered from perception, percepts not situated within a conceptual framework. (Officer Fred/Bob Arctor in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly: "You mean the two hemispheres of my brain are... competing?" Both psychologists in unison: "Yes.")
I'll pull one more bibliographic reference out of my hat, then let it rest. In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller wrote of the Formtrieb and the Sinnestrieb, the formal drive and the sensuous drive, which are brought together and united only through the Spieltrieb or play drive. In his first series of Gifford Lectures, published under the title of Human Nature, Reinhold Niebuhr does some interesting work with this opposition, though IIRC without bringing the play drive into it. (For a theological treatment of the play drive, you have to go to Hugo Rahner's Man at Play, Jürgen Moltmann's Theology of Play, one important section of Wolfhart Pannenberg's Anthropology in Theological Perspective, etc.; cf. also Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens.) In place of "play" in this context, one might better say "ritual," or as you put it, "spiritual practice."
You're onto something here, Bill. As you can probably also tell, you're pushing some of my buttons like hell; so I'm going to let it rest there. I think you're "getting warmer" in regard to certain key fault lines or dysfunctions in modern Western culture. We have tried to know in ways which leave no room for our participation, as full human beings, in the process of knowing. In some limited (mostly scientific or technical) domains, that may work; applied to the broader field of human endeavor, it is a recipe for distortion and seamless, self-deluded [pun intended] dysfunction.
Mind you, mysticism cannot be proved, regardless of which flavor one addresses. But it cannot be disproved, and it appears to be consistent with our needs for our mental health. This ties into mysticism's differentiating characteristic: its final explanation is deliberately placed beyond all possibility of further interrogation by rational-temporal means.
We appear to be able to accept a proposition on faith only if that proposition lies entirely beyond the reach of our senses and the instruments we contrive to extend them. It would follow that metaphysical schemes founded in nature (i.e., spatiotemporally) rather than supernaturally will always fail to satisfy -- yet it is in the nature of a metaphysical claim that its proponents insist on its finality.
This is a rich vein for further thought.
Two points:
1. When you say that people's thinking isn't as rational as we think, I think that you're confusing unvoiced reason with emotion. You can make rational deductions without either voicing them in an internal monologue or using formal logic.
Ultimately, however, all reason rests on the fact that the reasoner is real, and hence will "resonate" with reality when reasoning correctly. This "resonance" is the way the reasoner knows that he's correct, and I'll grant you that it's a feeling. But feelings are more reasonable than you give them credit for. (Incidentally, this is why all men know the moral law and to varying degrees are culpable for breaking it, even if they've never heard it verbally stated. Being real, can tell the difference between something which is true and something which is false; all sin rests on falsehood.)
2. I don't think that mysticism is much of a guard. The Siddhārtha Gautama was a mystic. Martin Luther prayed frequently.
I think that intelligent people are often so dumb simply because the more intelligent you are, the worse your mistakes will be. Strong men make heavier mistakes, tall men make taller mistakes, and fast men make faster mistakes. I mean that if anyone is going to build a wall in the wrong place, I expect that it will be a strong man who can carry all of the stones without tiring and who will enjoy the labor of lifting them into place. If someone is going to run to the wrong place, I expect that it will be the man fleet of foot to whom the exertion is little and the pleasure of speed great.
Metaphorically speaking, anyone who's good enough at the traveling to enjoy the trip is capable of making really big mistakes; he's more likely to carry them through any difficulty he meets for the pleasure of it, and more likely to manage, too.
At least, I've never met any tradition where Satan's great problem was that he wasn't spiritual enough.
It's possible for somebody to be strong intellectually yet middling of imagination. It's common enough for somebody to be strong intellectually yet weak in the senses and cultivable "senses"/intuitions, and weak in commonsense perception -- shrewdness, foresight, percipience, and familiarity, the things which, when strong enough, used to be called "wisdom" until that word's suggestiveness of "agedness" made it laus non grata in our youth-cult culture. It fell into quaintness, used especially by newspaper editorialists and movies involving wizards. The common associations seem to go like this:
Youth -- imagination.
Dwelling, staying put - intellect
Travel, mobility -- senses &intuition/instinct.
Age -- wisdom.
This isn't to suggest that well-roundedness of cognitive powers suffices without spiritual focus. Well-roundedness of cognitive power is not even possible without significant volitional, competential, and affective development. I'd hardly doubt that a healthy spiritual discipline is one of the missing pieces of the puzzle of unhinged intelligence (for my part I've never had a mystical experience and my attention is hopelessly voluble).