In yesterday’s post, I stressed the need for new ways of thinking innovatively about the complex problems our world faces:
Einstein
famously said “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of
thinking we used when we created them.” We need some radical, even
crazy thinking. Innovation is not incremental change and it is not
arrived at analytically. And we need not only radical innovations; we
need radical ways of innovating, more holistic, more intuitive, more
collaborative, more discontinuous, more imaginative, and more connected
to the wisdom and understanding of all life on Earth.
It seems to me that one way of thinking differently would be thinking without language.
A
lot of academics argue that language is a precondition to thought.
Anyone observing babies or 'wild' children (those brought up in the
wild without exposure to language) or animals knows this is ludicrous.
Anthropologists and students of history can tell you that language is a
product of thought, and its
invention was primarily to allow us to communicate our thoughts
(fuzzily, alas) to others. Language is a kind of shorthand
representation of our thoughts. But if you spend enough time using that
shorthand as your means of thinking, you can start to get the two
(language and thinking) confused. What’s worse, your ability to think
without or outside of the symbolic representational shorthand of
language can atrophy from disuse.
Thinking is the act of processing information to create knowledge (=ability or capacity, from the German word that also means cunning).
Watch a bird or squirrel figure out how to extract food from a feeder,
or watch dogs corner their prey or herd sheep, and you’ll see how to
think without language. The learning process is one of trial and error,
but the result is knowledge, a superior, acquired ability born from
practice.
Not surprisingly, this is also how humans learn
best, by doing or observation or being shown, rather than by reading or
being told. Such learning and knowledge is ‘informed’ by both intuition
(the coding in our DNA that suggests some experiments to try) and
perception -- paying attention with all our senses, not just the five
best-known, and appreciating
these perceptions). It is partly an unconscious or subconscious process
(‘sleeping on it’ or just giving it time, will often transform
information into knowledge in profound ways we are not consciously
aware of). Because of the vast amount of detailed information that is
needed to thrive in a complex environment, people in indigenous
cultures do not depend as heavily as we do on the conscious mind to
process that information -- they appreciate how the subconscious,
dreams, and instincts play into and enrich our understanding, and allow
these elements to play an important part in their decision-making
process.
Indigenous cultures have other lessons
to teach us about thinking without language. They let their children
learn principally by trial and error, and by suggestion rather than
instruction. Exchange of knowledge in these cultures is expected,
automatic, urgent and completely candid, and deceit and hoarding
knowledge is extremely disreputable behaviour (because it can expose
others to danger).
Their expression "the land is made perfect by
knowledge" implies that what is valued to them is knowledge and
understanding of the environment, not control or ownership of it. They
observe the land and the natural world much more attentively than we
do, and they assign names to things and to places in order to help them
memorize and cope with potential dangers ("words are as precise as they
need to be"), not for taxonomic reasons. Language is a tool to aid the
thought process. Stories, and listening, are profoundly important to
them: A story takes as long as it needs to take to be told, and through
practice storytelling becomes an art. It is valuable because it is
context-rich enough to allow vicarious thinking and learning -- it enables us to see and hear and think and learn through another’s observation from another time.
Our purpose for thinking, like that of babies and animals without (symbolic, abstract) language, is to make decisions.
It is not important that these decisions be logical, or intelligent, or
rational. What is important is that they are effective, workable,
successful. Not necessarily the best decisions, but good
decisions. These decisions are the result of intellectual, emotional,
sensory/somatic (body) and intuitive knowledge (to use the Jungian
model) and integrate the conscious and unconscious. In 'modern' adult
humans knowing is less integrated and more conflicted, because we are
taught not to trust any kind of knowledge other than the conscious
intellectual type.
Wild children, linguists tell us, can never
learn language once they reach puberty – the neural pathways of their
brains have by then formed in different ways from those of us who are
taught to think as much as possible through language, and cannot be
rewired, any more than ours can be rewired to be as profoundly
perceptive and intuitive as they are, or to have the very different
thinking capacities of indigenous cultures. Our brains have become
dependent on language.
But there are ways to practice that can
make them less dependent, and that is what we need now, to discover
different ways of thinking. We need to learn to reconnect with and
listen to our instincts, our emotions, our senses (synaesthetically),
our bodies, and our unconscious dreams. And then we need to re-learn to
integrate all this knowledge and apply it to thinking holistically
about the complex problems we face in this century. This will not be
easy. It will take an enormous amount of coaching, practice and
patience. But Einstein was right: We aren't going to be able to solve
these problems with the same kind of thinking that created them. So we
have no choice. Now what we need to do is find (modest, generous,
patient) people who can show us how to do this re-learning.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
