WHILE THE SPEIGHTSTOWN STANDOFF RAGED, an interesting book titled The Thinking Life arrived – not via Kindle Fire or iPad2; my favourite postwoman Marquita brought it.
I like to feel up my books; to challenge authors by scribbling disagreements in the margins; to catch out proofreaders and admire the texture of the paper.
It’s an excellent little book and I recommend it to the combatants in The Alexandra School squabble – particularly the 800 students.
Pier Forni, the author, begins with a scenario in which a visitor from another planet is sending back this report on his findings on Earth:
As the first week of my mission on Earth comes to a close, I must report a puzzling find. You remember in a previous message I described the ability that all humans have to silently converse within their own selves. This internal conversation, which they call “thinking”, allows them to take stock of the world around them and to plan their most suitable ways to deal with it.
If there is something that I can determine for sure about life on Earth, it is that happiness is the most coveted good, and that it is a by-product of the good life. You will then fully understand the importance of thinking when I tell you that it is impossible to build a good life without the foundation of good thinking.
What puzzles me is the cavalier way humans use such a facility. Any inter-galactic visitor would be as struck, as I am, by their overindulging in thought-avoidance.
The amount of their time spent in serious thinking does not get close to that spent in mindless entertainment and the exchange of unnecessary information. From lack of thoughtful awareness of any situation in which they find themselves to the failure to prepare for adversity, inadequate thinking is without a doubt the number one cause of their grief and sorrow.
Even to a novice student of the human experience it becomes immediately apparent that good thinking is the necessary prelude to making good decisions. Training their children in it has to be a primary concern for human parents, you would think.
Well, it’s not.
Does such training occupy a prominent position in the schools’ curricula? It does not.
And so good thinking fails to become second nature. Humans keep arriving unprepared at the crossroads of their lives where they must make decisions upon which the quality of their remaining time on earth depends.
In sum: a distinctive human character is the inclination to relentlessly pursue the trivial. That makes them waste an enormous amount of time and energy that would be better spent on matters of consequence. It is heartbreaking indeed to witness their unwitting sabotage of their own lives – because this is what their avoidance of serious thinking amounts to.
I wonder what it is going to take for them to realise how crucial this issue is and to start a serious effort to reform their ways.
This book shows how to turn off the noise and begin to engage in that fundamental human activity known as thinking. Let your brain do its job. And you don’t have to be Socrates, Plato, Tacitus, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius or even Freundel Stuart.
Someone once described the human brain as a machine for winning arguments, for convincing others that its owner is in the right, and for convincing its owner of the same thing. It’s like
a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, he sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either.
I’m not persuaded that all that “suffering” took place last month. We rush to panic stations so quickly . . . and forget just as fast. What will we do when the tsunami comes?
Alexandra students were provided an object lesson in straight and crooked thinking and the fascinating machinations of the human brain.
• Carl Moore was the first Editor of THE NATION and is a social commentator. Email carlmoore@caribsurf.com.
