Thinking--The Subversive Art

Watching Congress, the President and all the king’s horses flail about trying to rescue the economy somehow brings to mind the wonderfully misogynistic question that Lerner and Lowe (and probably George Bernard Shaw) put in the mouth of “My Fair Lady’s” Henry Higgins.
“Why,” he asks, “is thinking something women never try?” It’s only a fair question, of course, if you change it to include both sexes. For good measure you can throw in Congress, most Presidents and other governmental entities. Include the entire human race. We all so rarely try it. Why?
For one thing it’s hard work. For another it can bring up embarrassing questions. It can also derail historic assumptions. If you do it publicly, it can get you labeled weird (or worse) very quickly. Your friends will start to avoid you. Your boss will find you tiresome.
I remember an exchange I had the first year I taught school. It was a parochial private school where I was assigned to teach Eighth and Ninth Grade English literature and grammar. My four classes contained a substantial number of kids with genius I.Q.s (considerably above Obama’s 135).
We somehow had a real problem understanding each other. I was baffled; I’m not really a dummy myself. What was the matter? One day a quiet little kid raised his hand. “Mr. W---------,” he asked, “do you know what the problem is?” I admitted I did not.
“You want us to think.”
They were bright kids whose parents paid good tuition to send them there—and on to college. They had been prescriptively taught for years by educated teachers who did no thinking, asked for none and would have been unforgiving had any hint of it popped up. Smart, the kids quickly sensed that what was wanted was memorization and repetition with no alterations.
How hard was it for those intelligent kids to put their thinking mechanism back into gear in later years? Do you believe they ever did? How about the ladies and gentlemen, mostly with enough brains, who run Washington? Did they ever turn theirs back on again?
Look at our educated elite. On global warming, they let Al Gore and his crew of bright film makers do their thinking for them. They are still very good at memorization and repetition. The “New York Times” tells them what to think about books, movies and the arts. .
The “Wall Street Journal”, “Forbes” and “Barrons” tell us what to think about the markets; we allow “Newsweek”, “The Washington Post” and “Time” (with a few asides from “The Atlantic Monthly” and “The New Yorker”) to tell us what to believe about Iraq and Afghanistan—whether we are in or out of Washington. These are the opinion makers read by the Elite.
They enable the elite to stay in lockstep, with much of the rest of us tailing behind, careful not to say anything that might sound strange, either to one’s neighbors or one’s colleagues. (Strangeness—uniqueness?—is to be avoided at all costs. It carries too great a social, political and economic risk.)
This is true on Wall Street and Main Street, in the Capital and at the barber shop; it is equally true among the faculties of Harvard and Stanford. The penalties inflicted on a professor who falls out of step with his fellow academicians can be brutal indeed. (You think theologians are bad, watch professors!)
The expression “I think…” should be banned from most human speech. “I read”, “I was told”, or “I heard ought always to be substituted. Most people who say “I think” are bald faced liars.
At the end of his life, Albert Einstein—one of the few original minds of the past century—said that he had finally achieved the ability to think for about fifteen minutes a day. (And everyone DID regard him as weird—he sort of got away with it by looking kind of cute.)
When I first heard that story, I did some soul searching. I concluded that I, myself, was probably capable of two minutes or less thought per day. Half a century later, I may have worked myself up to an occasional five minute day. It is hard to do. I ask questions no one wants to hear. My neighbor, much more affluent than I (but who likes me, most of the time) says, “You’re readin’ too many of them damn’ books again, W………..”.
I was at lunch with a Wall Street lawyer (himself a very bright man) years ago when I asked him if I could make money working on the Street. “You couldn’t make a dime,” he replied, “you think too much.
“Look at the guys on the Street. They’re not smart. They’re fast; they have quick reflexes because they never think before they act. They buy; they sell—all on reflex. Instinct. By the time you had thought it through, the stock would have risen a half-point and fallen back again.”
Maybe, heretical suggestion, someone at Citicorp or Bank of America or Lehman Brothers should have taken a second or two to think it through.
But if they had, they would have missed the instant when the stock jumped half a point. That would have been bad—wouldn’t it?