Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning (19 page)

THE MOTHER OF SCIENCE

The Greeks personified memory as lady Mnemosyne. Mother of the nine Muses, she was believed to have given birth to all the arts and sciences. It is valid to consider memory the oldest mental skill, from which all others derive, for, if we weren’t able to remember, we couldn’t follow the rules that make other mental operations possible. Neither logic nor poetry could exist, and the rudiments of science would have to be rediscovered with each new generation. The primacy of memory is true first of all in terms of the history of the species. Before written notation systems were developed, all learned information had to be transmitted from the memory of one person to that of another. And it is true also in terms of the history of each individual human being. A person who cannot remember is cut off from the knowledge of prior experiences, unable to build patterns of consciousness that bring order to the mind. As Buñuel has said, “Life without memory is no life at all…. our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”

All forms of mental flow depend on memory, either directly or indirectly. History suggests that the oldest way of organizing information involved recalling one’s ancestors, the line of descent that gave each person his or her identity as member of a tribe or a family. It is not by chance that the Old Testament, especially in the early books, contains so much genealogical information (e.g., Genesis 10: 26–29: “The descendants of Joktan were the people of Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah, Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah, Obal, Abimael, Sheba, Ophir, Havilah, and Jobab….”). Knowing one’s origins, and to whom one was related, was an indispensable method for creating social order when no other basis for order existed. In preliterate cultures reciting lists of ancestors’ names is a very important activity even today, and it is one in which the people who can do it take a great delight. Remembering is enjoyable because it entails fulfilling a goal and so brings order to consciousness. We all know the little spark of satisfaction that comes when we remember where we put the car keys, or any other object that has been temporarily misplaced. To remember a long list of elders, going back a dozen generations, is particularly enjoyable in that it satisfies the need to find a place in the ongoing stream of life. To recall one’s ancestors places the recaller as a link in a chain that starts in the mythical past and extends into the unfathomable future. Even though in our culture lineage histories have lost all practical significance, people still enjoy thinking and talking about their roots.

It was not only their origins that our ancestors had to commit to memory, but all other facts bearing on their ability to control the environment. Lists of edible herbs and fruits, health tips, rules of behavior, patterns of inheritance, laws, geographical knowledge, rudiments of technology, and pearls of wisdom were all bundled into easily remembered sayings or verse. Before printing became readily available in the last few hundred years, much of human knowledge was condensed in forms similar to the “Alphabet Song” which puppets now sing on children’s television shows such as “Sesame Street.”

According to Johann Huizinga, the great Dutch cultural historian, among the most important precursors of systematic knowledge were riddling games. In the most ancient cultures, the elders of the tribe would challenge each other to contests in which one person sang a text filled with hidden references, and the other person had to interpret the meaning encoded in the song. A competition between expert riddlers was often the most stimulating intellectual event the local community could witness. The forms of the riddle anticipated the rules of logic, and its content was used to transmit factual knowledge our ancestors needed to preserve. Some of the riddles were fairly simple and easy, like the following rhyme sung by ancient Welsh minstrels and translated by Lady Charlotte Guest:

Discover what it is:

The strong creature from before the Flood

Without flesh, without bone,

Without vein, without blood,

Without head, without feet…

In field, in forest…

Without hand, without foot.

It is also as wide

As the surface of the earth,

And it was not born,

Nor was it seen…

The answer in this case is “the wind.”

Other riddles that the druids and minstrels committed to memory were much longer and more complex, and contained important bits of secret lore disguised in cunning verses. Robert Graves, for instance, thought that the early wise men of Ireland and Wales stored their knowledge in poems that were easy to remember. Often they used elaborate secret codes, as when the names of trees stood for letters, and a list of trees spelled out words. Lines 67–70 of the
Battle of the Trees
, a strange, long poem sung by ancient Welsh minstrels:

The alders in the front line

Began the affray.

Willow and rowan-tree

were tardy in array.

encoded the letters
F
(which in the secret druidic alphabet was represented by the alder tree),
S
(willow), and
L
(rowan). In this fashion, the few druids who knew how to use letters could sing a song ostensibly referring to a battle among the trees of the forest, which actually spelled out a message only initiates could interpret. Of course, the solution of riddles does not depend exclusively on memory; specialized knowledge and a great deal of imagination and problem-solving ability are also required. But without a good memory one could not be a good riddle master, nor could one become proficient at any other mental skill.

As far back as there are records of human intelligence, the most prized mental gift has been a well-cultivated memory. My grandfather at seventy could still recall passages from the three thousand lines of the
Iliad
he had to learn by heart in Greek to graduate from high school. Whenever he did so, a look of pride settled on his features, as his unfocused eyes ranged over the horizon. With each unfolding cadence, his mind returned to the years of his youth. The words evoked experiences he had had when he first learned them; remembering poetry was for him a form of time travel. For people in his generation, knowledge was still synonymous with memorization. Only in the past century, as written records have become less expensive and more easily available, has the importance of remembering dramatically declined. Nowadays a good memory is considered useless except for performing on some game shows or for playing Trivial Pursuit.

But for a person who has nothing to remember, life can become severely impoverished. This possibility was completely overlooked by educational reformers early in this century, who, armed with research results, proved that “rote learning” was not an efficient way to store and acquire information. As a result of their efforts, rote learning was phased out of the schools. The reformers would have had justification, if the point of remembering was simply to solve practical problems. But if control of consciousness is judged to be at least as important as the ability to get things done, then learning complex patterns of information by heart is by no means a waste of effort. A mind with some stable content to it is much richer than one without. It is a mistake to assume that creativity and rote learning are incompatible. Some of the most original scientists, for instance, have been known to have memorized music, poetry, or historical information extensively.

A person who can remember stories, poems, lyrics of songs, baseball statistics, chemical formulas, mathematical operations, historical dates, biblical passages, and wise quotations has many advantages over one who has not cultivated such a skill. The consciousness of such a person is independent of the order that may or may not be provided by the environment. She can always amuse herself, and find meaning in the contents of her mind. While others need external stimulation—television, reading, conversation, or drugs—to keep their minds from drifting into chaos, the person whose memory is stocked with patterns of information is autonomous and self-contained. Additionally, such a person is also a much more cherished companion, because she can share the information in her mind, and thus help bring order into the consciousness of those with whom she interacts.

How can one find more value in memory? The most natural way to begin is to decide what subject one is really interested in—poetry, fine cuisine, the history of the Civil War, or baseball—and then start paying attention to key facts and figures in that chosen area. With a good grasp of the subject will come the knowledge of what is worth remembering and what is not. The important thing to recognize here is that you should not feel that you
have to
absorb a string of facts, that there is a right list you must memorize. If you decide what
you
would like to have in memory, the information will be under your control, and the whole process of learning by heart will become a pleasant task, instead of a chore imposed from outside. A Civil War buff need not feel compelled to know the sequence of dates of all major engagements; if, for instance, he is interested in the role of the artillery, then only those battles where cannons played an important part need concern him. Some people carry with them the texts of choice poems or quotations written on pieces of paper, to glance over whenever they feel bored or dispirited. It is amazing what a sense of control it gives to know that favorite facts or lyrics are always at hand. Once they are stored in memory, however, this feeling of ownership—or better, of
connectedness
with the content recalled—becomes even more intense.

Of course there is always a danger that the person who has mastered a domain of information will use it to become an overbearing bore. We all know people who cannot resist flaunting their memory. But this usually occurs when someone memorizes only in order to impress others. It is less likely that one will become a bore when one is intrinsically motivated—with a genuine interest in the material, and a desire to control consciousness, rather than in controlling the environment.

THE RULES OF THE GAMES OF THE MIND

Memory is not the only tool needed to give shape to what takes place in the mind. It is useless to remember facts unless they fit into patterns, unless one finds likenesses and regularities among them. The simplest ordering system is to give names to things; the words we invent transform discrete events into universal categories. The power of the word is immense. In Genesis 1, God names day, night, sky, earth, sea, and all the living things immediately after He creates them, thereby completing the process of creation. The Gospel of John begins with: “Before the World was created, the Word already existed…”; and Heraclitus starts his now almost completely lost volume: “This Word (
Logos
) is from everlasting, yet men understand it as little after the first hearing of it as before….” All these references suggest the importance of words in controlling experience. The building blocks of most symbol systems, words make abstract thinking possible and increase the mind’s capacity to store the stimuli it has attended to. Without systems for ordering information, even the clearest memory will find consciousness in a state of chaos.

After names came numbers and concepts, and then the primary rules for combining them in predictable ways. By the sixth century
B.C.
Pythagoras and his students had embarked on the immense ordering task that attempted to find common numerical laws binding together astronomy, geometry, music, and arithmetic. Not surprisingly, their work was difficult to distinguish from religion, since it tried to accomplish similar goals: to find a way of expressing the structure of the universe. Two thousand years later, Kepler and then Newton were still on the same quest.

Theoretical thinking has never completely lost the imagistic, puzzlelike qualities of the earliest riddles. For example Archytas, the fourth-century-
B.C.
philosopher and commander-in-chief of the city-state of Tarentum (now in southern Italy), proved that the universe had no limits by asking himself: “Supposing that I came to the outer limits of the universe. If I now thrust out a stick, what would I find?” Archytas thought that the stick must have projected out into space. But in that case there was space beyond the limits of the universe, which meant that the universe had no bounds. If Archytas’s reasoning appears primitive, it is useful to recall that the intellectual experiments Einstein used to clarify to himself how relativity worked, concerning clocks seen from trains moving at different speeds, were not that different.

Besides stories and riddles all civilizations gradually developed more systematic rules for combining information, in the form of geometric representations and formal proofs. With the help of such formulas it became possible to describe the movement of the stars, predict precisely seasonal cycles, and accurately map the earth. Abstract knowledge, and finally what we know as experimental science, grew out of these rules.

It is important to stress here a fact that is all too often lost sight of: philosophy and science were invented and flourished because thinking is pleasurable. If thinkers did not enjoy the sense of order that the use of syllogisms and numbers creates in consciousness, it is very unlikely that now we would have the disciplines of mathematics and physics.

This claim, however, flies in the face of most current theories of cultural development. Historians imbued with variants of the precepts of material determinism hold that thought is shaped by what people must do to make a living. The evolution of arithmetic and geometry, for instance, is explained almost exclusively in terms of the need for accurate astronomical knowledge and for the irrigational technology that was indispensable in maintaining the great “hydraulic civilizations” located along the course of large rivers like the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Indus, the Chang Jiang (Yangtze), and the Nile. For these historians, every creative step is interpreted as the product of extrinsic forces, whether they be wars, demographic pressures, territorial ambitions, market conditions, technological necessity, or the struggle for class supremacy.

External forces are very important in determining which new ideas will be
selected
from among the many available; but they cannot explain their
production
. It is perfectly true, for instance, that the development and application of the knowledge of atomic energy were expedited enormously by the life-and-death struggle over the bomb between Germany on the one hand, and England and the United States on the other. But the science that formed the basis of nuclear fission owed very little to the war; it was made possible through knowledge laid down in more peaceful circumstances—for example, in the friendly exchange of ideas European physicists had over the years in the beer garden turned over to Niels Bohr and his scientific colleagues by a brewery in Copenhagen.

Great thinkers have always been motivated by the enjoyment of thinking rather than by the material rewards that could be gained by it. Democritus, one of the most original minds of antiquity, was highly respected by his countrymen, the Abderites. However, they had no idea what Democritus was about. Watching him sit for days immersed in thought, they assumed he was acting unnaturally, and must be ill. So they sent for Hippocrates, the great doctor, to see what ailed their sage. After Hippocrates, who was not only a good medical man but also wise, discussed with Democritus the absurdities of life, he reassured the townspeople that their philosopher was, if anything, only too sane. He was not losing his mind; he was lost in the flow of thought.

The surviving fragments of Democritus’s writing illustrate how rewarding he found the practice of thinking to be: “It is godlike ever to think on something beautiful and on something new”; “Happiness does not reside in strength or money; it lies in rightness and many-sidedness”; “I would rather discover one true cause than gain the kingdom of Persia.” Not surprisingly, some of his more enlightened contemporaries concluded that Democritus had a cheerful disposition, and said that he “called Cheerfulness, and often Confidence, that is a mind devoid of fear, the highest good.” In other words, he enjoyed life because he had learned to control his consciousness.

Democritus was neither the first nor the last thinker to be lost in the flow of the mind. Philosophers have frequently been regarded as being “absentminded,” which of course means not that their minds were lost, but that they had temporarily tuned out of everyday reality to dwell among the symbolic forms of their favorite domain of knowledge. When Kant supposedly placed his watch in a pot of boiling water while holding an egg in his hand to time its cooking, all his psychic energy was probably invested in bringing abstract thoughts into harmony, leaving no attention free to meet the incidental demands of the concrete world.

The point is that playing with ideas is extremely exhilarating. Not only philosophy but the emergence of new scientific ideas is fueled by the enjoyment one obtains from creating a new way to describe reality. The tools that make the flow of thought possible are common property, and consist of the knowledge recorded in books available in schools and libraries. A person who becomes familiar with the conventions of poetry, or the rules of calculus, can subsequently grow independent of external stimulation. She can generate ordered trains of thought regardless of what is happening in external reality. When a person has learned a symbolic system well enough to use it, she has established a portable, self-contained world within the mind.

Sometimes having control over such an internalized symbol system can save one’s life. It has been claimed, for instance, that the reason there are more poets per capita in Iceland than in any other country of the world is that reciting the sagas became a way for the Icelanders to keep their consciousness ordered in an environment exceedingly hostile to human existence. For centuries the Icelanders have not only preserved in memory but also added new verses to the epics chronicling the deeds of their ancestors. Isolated in the freezing night, they used to chant their poems huddled around fires in precarious huts, while outside the winds of the interminable arctic winters howled. If the Icelanders had spent all those nights in silence listening to the mocking wind, their minds would have soon filled with dread and despair. By mastering the orderly cadence of meter and rhyme, and encasing the events of their own lives in verbal images, they succeeded instead in taking control of their experiences. In the face of chaotic snowstorms they created songs with form and meaning. To what extent did the sagas help the Icelanders endure? Would they have survived without them? There is no way to answer these questions with certainty. But who would dare to try the experiment?

Similar conditions hold true when individuals are suddenly wrenched from civilization, and find themselves in those extreme situations we described earlier, such as concentration camps or polar expeditions. Whenever the outside world offers no mercy, an internal symbolic system can become a salvation. Anyone in possession of portable rules for the mind has a great advantage. In conditions of extreme deprivation poets, mathematicians, musicians, historians, and biblical experts have stood out as islands of sanity surrounded by the waves of chaos. To a certain extent, farmers who know the life of the fields or lumbermen who understand the forest have a similar support system, but because their knowledge is less abstractly coded, they have more need to interact with the actual environment to be in control.

Let us hope none of us will be forced to call upon symbolic skills to survive concentration camps or arctic ordeals. But having a portable set of rules that the mind can work with is of great benefit even in normal life. People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media. They are easily manipulated by demagogues, pacified by entertainers, and exploited by anyone who has something to sell. If we have become dependent on television, on drugs, and on facile calls to political or religious salvation, it is because we have so little to fall back on, so few internal rules to keep our mind from being taken over by those who claim to have the answers. Without the capacity to provide its own information, the mind drifts into randomness. It is within each person’s power to decide whether its order will be restored from the outside, in ways over which we have no control, or whether the order will be the result of an internal pattern that grows organically from our skills and knowledge.