On Thursday evening I did a phone interview from London with Edward de Bono after reading his new book, Parallel Thinking.
I am now fairly sure that we have to be wary of gurus.
They can come in with some new method of thinking, some panacea, some way of changing previous thought patterns and society can get into all sorts of strife. They can be dogmatic and destructive.
The trouble is their ideas can be addictive, especially to the young and gullible and thing can catch on. Before you know where you are you have thousands of adherents, indeed whole nations and political systems based on the new method of thinking.
And the trouble is the method might be defective some or indeed most of the time. At best it is inadequate. The guru’s thoughts, translated into the minds of too many people, can prevent humans fulfilling their dreams, they can prevent happiness and they can prevent us going forward.
They can be divisive and leave us fighting and arguing. Let us beware of gurus.
I had better make myself clear before going on. I am not talking about de Bono here. No. No. I am talking about Socrates, Plato and Aristotle.
De Bono calls them the Gang of Three. He acknowledges that the Socratic method of asking questions or putting up propositions to be knocked down has some merit. He acknowledges that the search for truth by the Socratic method has made a great contribution to Western civilisation.
The trouble with it, he says, is that it has dominated our political as well as scientific thinking for 2500 years. It has become virtually the only way we think. (A Bronwyn Bishop example, anon, will help illustrate the point.)
In science and mining the thinking has its uses. You keep working away, getting rid of the “”wrong” ideas or the sludge until the “”true” ideas or the gold is discovered.
“”But,” says de Bono, “”You cannot discover a house. You have to design a house.”
A house is not like gold, that is revealed after clearing away the sludge.
The trouble is that most of the world’s political leaders think that solutions to problems come from analysis of what is. Find the cause and then remove it and you will have a solution, they say.
De Bono says that may work in 60 per cent of cases. But in the remaining 40, you may not find the cause or if you find it, you may not be able to remove it, so you have to design a way forward without removing the cause.
Northern Ireland and Bosnia are good examples. They are beyond analysis and looking for the cause of the strife.
De Bono does not attack Socratic thinking. He says it is not appropriate a lot of the time, but it is foolishly applied.
In Socratic thinking people put things in boxes. Swans are white birds with long neck that swim. This is a white bird with a long neck that swims, so it must be a swan. Yes it is a swan; no it is not a swan. I’m right and you’re wrong. Then someone finds a black bird with a long neck that swims. This is a black swan. No it’s not; yes it is. I’m right and you’re wrong.
Bronwyn Bishop (pre-dressing down): Legal products should be allowed to be advertised freely. Tobacco is a legal product, so it should be allowed to be advertised freely. If not have the courage to ban them.
In Bishop’s world there are two boxes: one for legal products and one for illegal products. Things in the first box can be bought and sold and advertised. Things in the second box are illegal and cannot be bought and sold and advertised.
De Bono condemns the widespread use of this sort of thinking, especially for social problems. Because it just does not help. It does not show a way forward. It is concerned with what is, not what might be.
He prefers flagpoles surrounded by overlapping grey areas, not boxes. Home-made pickles are “”legal” most of the time. But if you sell them contrary to health regulations, they are “”illegal”. You can advertise them some of the time, when you are giving them away.
Things are relative to the system they are in. They change; they are not absolute.
This was known by the Sophists who dominated Greek thought before came before Socrates, who lived from 469BC to 399BC (the Greeks counted backwards).
The Gang of Three did not like the Sophists thinking with its sloppy most of the time, sometimes, often and maybe. They searched for the absolute truth in everything. It was fine for a long time in the physical sciences. Socratic thinking was very helpful in classifying things: the periodic table of the chemical elements and the classifications in botany and zoology are examples.
But the thought of the three gurus caught on. It was used in ethics, law and politics. Even after the Dark Ages, the universities snapped it up and are still teaching it 2500 years latter. The poor old Sophists got badly and ironically libelled with the change of meaning of the word sophistry. It now means fallacious argument or cunning trickery.
Sure, some of the Sophists were like that. They charged money to students to learn argumentative tricks.
The real sophistry is putting things in boxes or categories. Lawyers frequently do it in court. “”You told a lie two years ago. So you are a liar. Liars cannot be relied upon. Your evidence now is worthless.”
It is a simple, logical line of argument. But the world is not like that. More likely, the witness lies sometimes when under heavy pressure about his own misconduct but when retelling events about someone else’s car accident he is not a liar. Sometimes he is a liar, sometimes he is not. The Socratic thinking taught in our universities and used by lawyers and politicians cannot abide such vagaries.
A great parody of the Socratic method comes from Monty Python.
Man: “”I’ve come here for an argument.”
Cleese: “”No you haven’t.”
Man: “”Yes, I have.”
Cleese: “”No you haven’t”
Man: “”But they said I could get an argument in Room 16.”
Cleese: “”This is not Room 16.”
Man: “”Yes it is.”
Cleese: “”No it’s not.”
Man: “”Well, why are you arguing then?”
Cleese: “”I’m not arguing.”
Silence.
The great tragedy of the Socratic method comes from Bosnia.
“”This is Muslim territory.”
“”No, it’s not.”
“”Yes it is. We’ve been here longer.”
“”No, you haven’t”
“”Yes, we have.”
Shooting.
Of course, some of the Muslims were there before some of the Serbs and vice versa and the territory is both Serbian and Muslim or even neither.
Because the west has been following the thinking of the three Greek gurus, we concentrate on categorising what is. We try to search for the truth. Instead, we should be designing a way forward.
De Bono gives a marvellous example of a boy sent up to his room for not taking his spoonful of medicine. He comes back down a short time later and announces: “”I can come out of my room now. I have been a good boy. I have drunk the whole bottle of my medicine.”
The medicine is neither good nor bad. A spoonful is good; a bottle is bad.
Medicine was how de Bono came to think about thinking. He was doing psychology at Oxford and started to study the ways of human thinking.
“”Something psychologists do not often do,” he says. “”Then I was doing medical research on things like the functioning of the kidney and so on. I had to do a lot of work with computers and then got interested in the what computers could not do.”
The difference between self-organising biological systems on one hand and the linear thought of many humans and the logical flow of computers on the other made him changing his thinking, so to speak, about thinking.
He started to see defects in traditional thinking and started to construct new ways of thinking, such as the famous lateral thinking. Parallel thinking goes beyond that. You lay down possibilities, contradictions, viewpoints and values in strands. You do not judge them as they are being laid down. You just put them there. And then you design a way forward.
He is now working on three fronts: schools, business and politics.
“”There is a greater need for constructive politics,” he said. “”It is fine to have two levels of politics: the pantomime, and underneath the committee work, but the constructive committee work needs greater attention and should be made more visible.
“”If you get a leadership figure with courage who picks up on it and says this is good, then constructive politics with parallel thinking will take off.”
There would be less destructive politics based on criticism and attack of viewpoints and more constructive politics where people were not scared to put up ideas for fear of having them shot down rather than considered along with lots of other parallel ideas.
“”The United Nations needs a creative commission to think about the problems which the UN hasn’t got the faintest idea how to deal with. Somalia, Bosnia and so on,” he said.
On the media, he says attacking, critical journalism is easy. Constructive journalism showing a way forward is harder.
“”Journalists can be seen as sycophantic if they are constructive,” he said. “”but it need not be so. They can add and make connections to the basic material and be constructive that way.”
On television you often had the egoist interviewer, he said. The egoist presented himself as the conscience of the nation. There was room for the conscience of the nation interviewer, but “”there should be more room and prominence for the impresario interviewer who says here is something interesting and bring out good points”.
In schools he would like to see more time for teaching thinking.
“”At least as much time as for maths,” he said. “”We use thinking every day, but most of us do not use trigonometry and the like every day. We need to have constructive thinking as well as critical thinking in the schools. And the universities.”
One problem was appointments. The apostolic succession ensured people in universities only chose their own kind to teach in the universities. And it was the same in the media, politics and business.
In business, people were realising that they had to go beyond cost cutting and sacking stuff. They had done all that. But they still needed to go forward. Business needed more constructive thinking.
De Bono has been to Australia several times and will be here again this month.
“”Australia has a unique opportunity to do something about constructive thinking and moving forward because people in Australia have an instinct for saying that the old way is not necessarily a good thing,” he said.
“”Some parts of system inherited from Europe were all right, but they need redesigning from time to time.”
When he first came to Australia, people in Britain said he was wasting his time.
“”It was no good talking about thinking in Australia, they said. They are only interested in tinnies on the beach,” he said. “”In fact Australia has a higher readership of my books than any country in the world.”
Edward de Bono. Parallel Thinking. Viking Books (Penguin). $19.95. Out tomorrow.