Straight Thinking v. Thinking in the Round

A few things in nature go in straight lines, or seem to do so—but only a few.  And even they are suspect.  So why do we limit ourselves to straight thinking?

 

Thinking Straight

Where can you find straight lines in nature? Well, time, for one, seems to be linear, “the arrow of time” shooting forward from the past into the future. Evolution, which occurs through time, exhibits linear movement from lesser to greater complexity. But even those examples may reflect limited human vision more than absolute truth. For instance, I can (in principle) lay a rail, cut a road, or simply draw a straight line on the ground. But extend that line far enough on the Earth’s surface and it becomes a circle.

How do we really know the shape of time or the trajectory of evolution?

People used to think that if you sailed in a straight line you’d eventually drop off the edge of the flat earth. Now we know better—most of us do, anyway. What you’d actually do is become ungrounded and go off on a tangent.  By the way, did you know that there’s still a flat-earth society dedicated to the empiricist belief that what you see is what you get? Look here, or here, or google it for yourself.  (Some people still deny human-caused climate change too.)

Going the other way, from large to small, if you get a ruler and draw a straight line with your pencil and magnify it a thousand times, it won’t look so straight any more. Maybe being or looking or thinking straight is always an illusion, an artifact of limited vision, a trick of perspective or scale, or a simple fear-response to the real world being round, chaotic, and unpredictable.

Light may be an exception. Light actually does travel in straight lines, doesn’t it? Well, maybe, sort-of, sometimes. One summary of the physics explains that “light traveling in a straight line is a consequence of light going every which way.” Light, the straightest thing we can think of, is a paradox. Being straight, it seems, rarely or never is a simple, straight-forward thing, even for something as basic as light.

Straight is mostly against the grain of nature, against the natural order of things. Yet whenever possible we modern Western peoples create living environments comprised of straight lines and flat plains. It’s our thing, but it doesn’t come from our genes arrayed in their spiralling double helix. No. It’s our culture. We like square shooters and straight talkers and people who are on the level. Wherever in the world people with our culture go (and now that’s everywhere), we endlessly replicate square buildings, square rooms, square yards, cities laid out in square grids, roads as straight as the land allows, chairs with flat seats and straight backs, square fields, square windows to look out of and frame our world. But most of all, we hobble ourselves with straight thinking.

 

Thinking in the Round

I don’t know when or why straight thinking got to be such a fixation. Maybe factories and machines helped channel our minds into regular grooves and repetitive dogmas. But I think that the linear cause-and-effect logic of Newtonian physics that was so influential in the early formation of modern Western culture bears much of the blame.

Newtonian insights were great in their day, and still work well for many everyday problems. They laid foundations for later scientific learning about the world. That kind of reductionist, one-way linear thinking, however, as the major framework for scientific thought, began to fall behind its “best-by” date with the advent of relativity and quantum theory in the early twentieth century; and it soon thereafter became positively passé with systems theory, and more recently complexity and chaos theories. Science, in the disciplined but non-linear ways it has, moved on.

But the kind of linear thinking that early science helped institute still keeps a firm grip on today’s everyday thought. It shapes and limits our customary cultural mind-set and world-view. What’s the problem? you might ask. It’s worked pretty well for us, hasn’t it? Well, yes. In some ways it has. Maybe too well. Cold blood and large size worked well for the dinosaurs too—for a while.  Until they went as far as they could and hit a dead-end. Continuing to behave like cold-blooded bullies on a fragile Earth, are we buying the same one-way ticket?

 

What’s the Problem

What’s the problem?   The problem is that the self-imposed straight-jacket of linear thought constrains our human ability to imagine the full, realistic range of human possibilities.   We’ve reached a point in our cultural evolution where we will need to free up that imagination, to think outside the box.

According to growing numbers of serious writers and thinkers, as I said in my last post, we’re reaching the end of our ability as a global civilization—as a species—to carry on as we have been. If they and many others are even half-way right, we need to get to the next level, to open ourselves to the wider possibilities of our human nature.  How can we do that without giving up at least some of the linear thinking that’s been working so well for us, so that we can think more in the round instead?

Instead of thinking so much about the world and how to exploit it (linear thinking), we could think more about how we think about the world (thinking in the round). Rather than continuing on the straight and narrow paths of trying to get more things, make more money, grab more control, we might instead come around, back to ourselves, and ask “What do we really want?” Instead of falling back on excuses mired in linear logic (“What do you expect, it’s just human nature?”), we might open to the real possibilities of becoming more rounded, more fully, human—possibilities that only we ourselves can open.

The essence of human nature—it’s defining quality—is culture. We’re cultural beings by nature—which means that we ourselves create the best part of our human nature as we go. So, let’s make the human nature we have the one we really want. Let’s just do it, for ourselves.