How to Think

Don't Reinvent the Wheel

I say this at the outset because much of what else I have to say drives off in other directions. It is easy to come up with new theories in fields you're not trained in. But once you've been initiated into a field beyond Wikipedia and have learned that there are too many smart people writing too many articles that you have to know about in too many journals in your field, it gets harder. I say all this as a bit of self-exhortation. After all (and you should know that this was a long time ago), I invented paper. I knew it existed, but I knew little enough else about it to know that it was what I was inventing. Similarly, I have had some good ideas in the field of musical instrument construction. But then in each instance I lifted up my head, looked around, and found that someone was already making money off my idea. Or, better yet in terms of a learning experience for me, losing money off it. At any rate, what follows are some things I've learned about how to think well. Or at least have more fun doing it.

Be a Good Buddhist

Being a good Buddhist has little to do with Buddhism but means merely focusing on process rather than goal. A New Yorker cartoon of a few years ago has two shaved-head monks, one young and the other old, lotusing on a mountain-top. The older monk is saying, with some aggravation it appears, "Nothing is next. This is it."

Go to Mental Montana

I discovered this place, though I had been there often, when a wife of mine asked where I wanted to live. I think we were considering real estate, which would all have been far from the actual state of Montana, which I have never visited.

I haven't been able to find any of the aerial photos of the cabin that were the source of my inspiration, but here is a different picture of it while it was still in Montana. transcend, v.t. blow apart, ignore, pretend you ain't heard, and other things to be careful about doing with your spouse's thoughts.

Ted Kaczynski inspired my discovery. News sources had been showing aerial photos of his cabin, which was deep in the woods of, I think, Montana, though it may have been Idaho, and I've never been there either. But "Mental Montana" is more euphonic. Ted's home looked beautiful.
    My reply to my wife's question was "in a cabin in Montana," but her question assumed parameters which would exclude that answer, namely a reasonable commute to a couple jobs far from Montana. That is the whole point of Mental Montana. When you are asked a question, try answering in such a way as to transcend the unspoken parameters (or maybe they have been spoken) of the question.
    Take a more general question: "What do you want?" or the polite form "What would you like? It could be about cars, careers, therapeutic goals, or dessert choices. But whether it's a waiter or the guy at the counter in the auto parts store asking, what you want might be world peace and universal happiness. Or a '56 TV yellow LP Special. Or sex. Or not to die ever.

Be Uncertain

It is amazing how little we know about the very things we know about. That is amazing to us because we expend so much effort telling ourselves otherwise, but it would not be amazing to an outside observer—God, for instance, or a perceptive space alien.
     We compensate for our lack of knowledge by having greater certainty about things than they deserve. The closer you get to academia, the more it is apparent that much of what happens in academic journals in—well, every field I know about and probably most others—is squabbling among people who hold opposed opinions with great certainty.     This is devastating to our ability to think and communicate, among other reasons, because our language of certainty is a language of deception.

Ellen F. Davis, in The Art of Reading Scripture, ed. Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 15, 14.

Our language is broken by our denial of its uncertainty. Mass media journalists, politicians, academics all speak and write copiously and, moreover, authoritatively; their jobs depend upon it. Maybe their jobs depend upon their sounding more certain than they are about what is true.

Since Ellen Davis says this in the course of talking about biblical interpretation, we may as well quote this sentence as well:

The church would be hugely blessed if its teachers, preachers, and theologians were to suffer a loss of fluency in speaking about how things stand with us before God.

On self-deception as a fundamental quality of humanness, see this page.

    Theology is a field of study generally engaged in by people who care about it in very deep ways, people, that is, who think some crucial matters are discussed there. So there can be some added passion in the normal academic game of self-deceptive certainty among theologians.
    This passion extends to the non-academic theologians who constitute, by my informed and therefore certain guess, about 75% of the American population, that is, everyone who has an opinion about God or related topics. Some people, for example, and I don't want to pick on them too much because I might be one, have criteria by which to say who exactly will be going to hell or heaven. And other people have other criteria. The spectrum of opinions is wide enough that we'll have a hell of a time knowing where we've got to when we've go to whichever it we get to. This is an extreme example. Heaven and hell we get from the Bible. But it is strange that interpretation of that book that tries so hard to make us uncertain is what so many of us are certain about.
    Perhaps certainty is a sin.