SOCRATIC SCRIBBLER ON HOW TO THINK AHEAD

When was the last time you said, “Hmmm, I’ll think about it.” When we say that, just what do we intend to do? All kinds of books on Amazon promise to show us how to think better. Many of them tell us how the brain works, you know, the ones written by those neurosomethings. But wait…after they tell us how our mental engine works, they forget to show us how to drive. In college, you may have taken a course in logic where you learned that thinking is, well, just another math course with elaborate proofs and twisted problems. Or if you were a business major, maybe you took a course in “decision making” only to find out that it was a statistics course in disguise. And, now that the liberal arts are a long lost cause, schools today seems to be where we learn what to think rather than how to think. Even if we just want practical training to make a living, something like digital programming, we end up making digital maps for machines. Who is making our maps? Who is doing the thinking for us?

Are you woke? Are you a fox fed conservative? What do you think about China? Is there too much government or too little? Too much spending or too many taxes? Lots of people are not only willing but are also poshly paid to tell you what to think. Is childcare considered infrastructure? Is there a vaccine to protect us against viral thinking? Maybe it is the selection of words. Maybe instead of saying “I will think on it”, we are better off muttering “I will chew on it” or “I will mull it over” or “Let me play with it” or “Let’s run it up the flag pole and see if anybody salutes.”

What do we actually end up doing when we say ‘I’ll think on it”? Well, if we are trying to make a choice of some kind, say which apartment to rent while you are in Denver on some assignment, we might make a chart comparing and contrasting each apartment with a list of criteria. And you will generate these criteria based on the things that you might think are important.

Indeed, when we look at specific cases of thinking, we realize that we are engaging in the activities of list making, mind mapping, side by side comparing. These help us lay out the “facts” in a vivid way that can show the relationship of one fact to another. Making a list is very useful when we just want to understand what’s going on. We work like TV detectives discussing a big white board.

What our list or map does not tell us is the importance of each factoid. And importance is a tricky kind of triangle, for it involves not only how one fact is connected to another (the logic of situation) but also the role each fact plays in our lives (the drama of our situation). I just need the apartment for three months while I do business in Denver, but the apartment needs to be someplace where “I can jog every morning to keep sane and located in a place that my girlfriend will want to come visit me and….”

How do we figure out the importance of each of our criteria? Is the size of the apartment more or less important than the location? Parking? Distance from the airport? Commute time to the office? In order to determine the importance of each of our criteria, we need to recognize the “event” that drives our desire for the apartment in the first place. Thinking is the way we navigate through the events of our lives trying to fulfill our desires…from getting married to introducting a new product, to buying a fish, to correcting a child, to starting a new job. When you think about it, everything is not really even a thing.

Everything is an event because all things come and go in time. And time is always a three act play: a before, a now, and an after. Even the mountains and the stars emerged and evolved and will ultimately be transformed into some other event.

Living in three acts demands that we answer those awful Why questions. If I do not know why I am moving to Denver for three months, then how could I possibly have any criteria for shopping and choosing an apartment there. Every list needs a Why.

The event of our moving to Denver for three months is driven by previous events with the intention of generating some kind of future event. We’re moving the Denver to do something, to make things happen…for our job and for ourselves, for the skiing.

Thinking always seems to be a part of doing or making something. What we are doing will define the scope and direction of our thinking, the scope of our lists and the weight or value we place on each item of our list. If we are doing math, we should think like a mathematician. If we are sailing a boat, we should think like a sailor. If we are in love, we should think like a lover. If we are techies, we should think like techies, if we are writers, we should have a cocktail.

That sounds like a lot work, because all of us play a lot of roles in life. And you will have to balance one role with another, one kind of thinking and doing with another — the job that takes you to Denver and the girlfriend you leave behind in Cincinnati. How do we figure out this balance?

Sounds like we might need role models. How do we balance our different desires and intentions? Can thinking be taught?

It is easy to imagine thinking and logic as unemotional and cold. “Euclid alone looked on beauty bare,” sings Saint Edna. Yet, if you’ve ever watched a math professor solve an impossible problem on a blackboard and then watch how she steps back to gaze at her work, as if she had just made love to Cary Grant and was still savoring the moment…well, it’s impossible to think of math as unemotional.

In his Ethics, Aristotle tells us that each of our actions is the result of some desire…something we want to do or to make …something we want to change into something somehow better. We may discover that we made a mistake, that what we thought would be better is actually worse, but it was that desire that got us thinking and moving in the first place.

When we are reading books in school, we are taught to figure out what the author is saying or thinking. “What does Shakespeare say about ambition in Macbeth?” “What does Herodotus think about freedom?” The older I get, the more frustrated I am with these kind of quiz kid questions.

Was Shakespeare just trying to say something or was he actually trying to accomplish something, to make a script to do a play that would delight and instruct? Is it a matter of what the three witches are saying in Act One, scene one? Or is it even a matter of what Shakespeare is trying to “say” in that scene? Isn’t the important question more abot what Shakespeare is trying to do with those witches in dramatizing his story. What is their role in the story? When Fr. Vernon used to ask our high school English class, “What does Shakespeare mean when he says…..blah by blah….?” I raised my hand and replied, “I guess he meant just the words he wrote for Lady Macbeth to say…otherwise he would have used different words.” Fr. Vernon never really liked me. Apparently I was supposed to learn that in order to understand great writing we had to translate the great writing into not so great writing. If poetry is the best expression of a thought or a feeling, why do we need other words to explain it? Now, if you tell me that Lady Macbeth changes the way you think about love between a husband and wife, a love bonded in the eros murder and power…that might make you more cautious in your romantic life or it might excite and incite you to do a Bonnie and Clyde adventure. Is poetry a set of words waiting to be translated into other words or is it designed to change the way we see the world and our roles in it?

Is the question, “What do I think about this apartment?” or is it better to ask, “What role could this apartment play in my life.” What can I do here? What can I make? That would give us the criteria to make our lists.

Years ago, Jerome Bruner made the observation that we think in two ways: in logic and in stories. Science wants us to be objective, to put logic first and set the story and the emotion aside. Good luck with that. If logic is the way we human folks are supposed to think, then we must always remember that it is part of our story.

Kenneth Burke, borrowing from Aristotle, tells us that we should look at our life and our world as an unravelling drama. This drama consists of a simple set of key elements:

• The settings and scenery we inhabit
• The people or characters we encounter
• The agendas triggered and planned by our desires
• The language and ideas we use to express those desires
• The actions we initiate to fulfill those desires
• The obstacles generated by our conflicting agendas
• The resulting consequences that round out the story…all of these in a sequence of events or scenes creating befores, nows, and futures.

With a dramatic model as insightful and comprehensive as Burke’s, you could write a play as good as Macbeth or pick an apartment in Denver. You could plan a day or a life. You could start a business. Or, like me, you could have spent a working life develop successful, and some not so successful, communication programs for Fortune 500 companies

In this world of drama, thinking is neither absolute nor relative. Desire drives the action, action drives the dialogue, and dialoge drives the thinking that leads to agendas of action. And conflicting desires make us think and choose.

Until you figure out what you really desire, until then, no list, no thinking, no action will help. In life, we get to play our roles, but we don’t have much control over the script. Could the universe just be a giant improv theater with all of us tilting at our own windmills?

Aristotle tells us that we are driven by our natural desire to do good and to be happy. How do we find out what we desire? Look at what you have done and made. What do those actions and creations tell you about your desires? When have your plans worked out? When not? Aristotle would ask you to reflect on what makes you happy. I remember my father giving me the good advice that… “In order to think ahead, you sometimes have to think back.”