Why nonsense sharpens the intellect
by Robert Philbin
[ opinion - may 10 ]
An interesting recent science article in the New York Times the obvious as if it were some kind of wonderful discovery. "Disorientation begets creative thinking," the article concludes after reporting a series of interesting behavioral experiments, adding the caveat of the perennially uncreative mind - "at least some of the time." As if there might actually be a time when disorientation does not beget creative thinking? How short-lived that caveat becomes in the real world. If survival is necessary to biological continuity, "disorientation" logically produces two primary outcomes. The first of which is to remain in a state of continued disorientation without engaging the "creative mind" which almost certainly results in disaster. The second is to engage the brain creatively, thereby discovering and implementing an immediate strategy which allows the biological continuity of the species, and become relatively educated or wizened to the point of reflex, in the process.
So let's say you are walking across a savannah on your way home, bringing a bag of goodies, like grass seeds, perhaps an unusually colored stone, to your recently allied significant other when you come upon a lion in your path. You either think creatively, resolving the encounter to your advantage, or your unique DNA becomes the lion's lunch while your significant other moves along replicating her or his unique DNA with a more creative competitor. This conclusion appears so obvious as to be intuited by a nine-year old on any field of athletic play, however it might take behavioral researchers years of careful study to tentatively advance a similar hypothesis.
We are a patient species after all. "We are all of us pilgrims who struggle along different paths," Antoine De Saint-Exupery once commented, "toward the same destination." I think the dadaist aviator meant death, a lion's lunch or otherwise, but in this context the ultimate destination is human knowledge. A gene pool of the wizened, as it were. We share an urge for order which stimulates the ability to recognize and parse patterns, an essential short cut to get a grip on that which is essentially unknowable. We can't know everything, so we recognize useful synapses whenever we discover one. (There's a reason why we anthropomorphize our deities by calling some of them omniscient. God becomes the concept which promulgates our simultaneous human limitation and aspiration.) We respect knowledge because it's useful, it takes time to acquire and sometimes it's even teachable. When we turn it into dogma, however, the collective sum gain peaks. The comfort of the status quo turns us lazy and stupid. The lion yawns, waiting at the next bend in the pathway.
This urge for order, like any human capacity, occasionally malfunctions to one degree or another and produces a pattern of repetitive, ritualistic, unhealthy behaviors and culturally it might even produce a fascist state every now and then. The Mayan turned to human sacrifice because their god, manipulated by their elite in the name of its status quo, had limited their collective ability to understand climate change. We are perfectly capable of replicating with perfect order and reason one disaster after another - let's say a war in Viet Nam or Iraq, for example, can be easily replicated in a completely different set of geopolitical circumstances, like Afghanistan or Pakistan. It's an easy albeit self-destructive habit to acquire once the creative mind is sufficiently dulled by widespread addiction to the status quo of war production. The fear of change in the orderly mind becomes greater than the courage to create in the creative mind.
The result is that same old disorientation, only more widespread now, and this time the collective lion, the tribe, the nation, the state, the military industrial complex, eats you alive. (Jared Diamond explores the minutia of such historic cultural malaise in his dadaist work, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail.) For the sake of some make-believe journalistic sense of balance, I'm sure a similarly useless extreme could be identified for the overly creative-mind process run amuck, although I confess, beyond a certain impulse toward mad prankstersism and tasteless humor, I can't think of one at the moment. Has there ever been a culture that created itself into extinction? Suburbia, maybe, or Hollywood perhaps?
As a species we tend to enjoy the products of the creative mind particularly when they point toward a new and improved way of finding a sexual partner, hunting or gathering or advancing agriculture, or controlling environmental threats like floods, too much exposure to sun light, disease, or lack of water. Sometimes the creative mind does go off track, of course, usually lured by more sex, money, fame - elite status indicators which we can be acculturated to pursue to the point of absurdity - and occasionally we inadvertently, but logically end up with the Nuclear Bombs, Napalm, Drones, or Soup Cans as cultural artifacts in the process. Even the legendary Leonardo, dadaist lion of the Florentine, was captivated by unhealthy thoughts - like mobile cannon machines, his intriguing models of which would later be perfected by modern minds into military tanks, excellent weapons of mass destruction, particularly useful in crushing peasant hovels and oil resource desert warfare.
We are also amused by the fruits of creative labor sometimes called, "art," which is why we have, species wide, created retail outlets where we delight in or even worship with money, fame and sex, or in huge public warehouses called museums which overtime become our cultural legacy or simply more baggage to retard the creative mind, depending on one's sense of irony. But, you might ask, why does any of this matter now? Don't we have enough on our minds at the moment, given a collapsing global economy and the pressures of existence in a world which appears daily more vague around the edges? Do we not suffer enough, as a species? The scientific truth may be that we live in an historic moment that demands global creativity to overcome a vast state of disorientation which has been perpetrated upon the planet, like a dark cloud, by the global machinery of the orderly mind.
Once having come upon that collective lion in the pathway, the challenge for science is to advance our innately biological and existential need for nonsense in the overwhelming face of the rational, and that will take a century or more of incremental research. Of course none of us has that much time to wait, or to waste.
