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Key points
- Language isn't just how we communicate. It's also how we think. Without it, we'd think more like dogs do.
- Reality includes reversals. We try to track them much as investors try to track markets' ups and downs.
- Some people pretend away the reversals, acting like they have a simple formula for what to always do.
- To overcome a dangerous tendency to oversimplify life, cultivate "reversal grammar" terms like "On the one hand/on the other."
Language isn't just for communication. It's also how we think. If we didn't have language, we'd think more like dogs do.
Me, I think a lot about reversals. You know how what’s good in some contexts is bad in others? How what would solve problems in some situations will cause problems in others?
Reversals are what makes fiction interesting. Not just reversals of fortune, but antiheroes, for example, appealing gangsters who you wouldn’t like in real life. Or just people trying to do the right thing but it turning out wrong.
Reality itself is peppered with reversals, even in physics. Tides go in and then reverse and go out. Stars collapse and explode. Processes flowing one direction reverse course. We live in a world of time and space reversals. Trying to stay alive we try to track the changes.
The universe has a liberal bias in that, despite reversals, entropy increases overall. Matter gets desegregated, liberally mixed.
Mind you, I’m not saying it’s a happy liberalism. Organisms thrive and then die. Corpses decompose, cells disintegrating and desegregating. That particular reversal makes life poignant. We throw all into our lives, knowing we’ll be thrown out eventually. When? We don’t know. The Quakers say build it to last 100 years; be ready to leave tomorrow. Such is the ambiguity we all deal with.
The universe also has an ironic bias, at least for us organisms struggling for our own existence. Nature’s reversals can be ironic. Just when you “discover" the meaning of life, it changes. The universe is slapstick at least to organisms like us.
Adapting to reality means adapting to reversals, tracking and timing changed responses to changed circumstances. We try to match our changed response to spontaneously changing circumstances much the way investors try to time their responses to track a market’s ups and downs.
We experience reversals as ambiguities and ambivalences, wondering how to respond to nature’s switchbacks trying to guess what’s coming and going.
People don’t always admit that they’re trying to track the reversals. They aspire to integrity but mistake it for absolute consistency. They act like they know exactly what to do always because it’s simple. Never retreat. Always persist. Always love. Never hate – simple rules that sound easy to follow though nobody does, or should.
Not me. I admit that I’m trying to track the reversals, so I think a lot about contradictions, tensions, dilemmas, paradoxes. I find them much more interesting and fundamental than principles, which to me are mostly hungry attempts to resolve the unresolvable, to straighten out reality’s zig-zags. The author F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” To me, a first rate intelligence is one that tracks and responds well to reality’s reversals.
To dwell among life's reversals, I end up using a lot of grammatical switch-backs and turnarounds: On the one hand, on the other hand. This, but still that. Although. Nevertheless, conversely, and yet – little grammatical pivots from one response to its opposite.
Getting fluent in those grammatical switch-backs gives me ways to express what it’s like to live in our slapstick universe. Once you get fluent in grammatical reversals, you gain what I’ll call inversatility, the versatility to invert things, to flip them over. Inversatility keeps us limber. It prevents “hardening of the smarteries.”
With inversatility you become more like a tennis pro. You don’t plant yourself firmly on the left side of the court because that’s where the ball landed last. You return to the flexible center, ready to bound left or right depending on where the ball flies next. We need that limberness because rushing to the left is the right move if the ball flies left, but the wrong move if the ball flies right.
Inversatility is my definition of wisdom, for example, the wisdom to know the difference between situations that call for the loving serenity to accept things vs. the fierce courage to try to change things. On the one hand, kindness always trumps fierceness. On the other hand, fierceness always trumps kindness. Paradoxes like that keep me thinking, wondering, and doubting.
I’ve long been fascinated by the “Trivium” which, during the Middle Ages was the core curriculum of a liberal arts education. The trivium is three subjects: Rhetoric, logic, and grammar.
I’ve come up with what I call a novum or new trivium: Teaching citizens of a free society how to spin, unspin, and do both evenhandedly. Spin is rhetoric. Unspin is logic or critical thinking. Doing both evenhandedly is having the ability to unspin your own opinions unflatteringly and spin your opponent’s opinions flatteringly. Spinning and unspinning evenhandedly counteracts confirmation bias, the tendency to flatter our ideas and unflatter our opponent’s ideas. On the one hand, I agree with myself; on the other, I can imagine my opponent’s enthusiasm for ideas that are the opposite of mine.
I’ve thought of grammar as the dispensable element in the original Trivium. It isn’t really. Again, we humans think in language. Without fluency with switchback grammar, it’s harder to imagine, let alone face life’s reversals. Want to think more complex thoughts? Gain fluency with complex grammar including the language that expresses reversals.
I’ll sometimes get students who have a lot of trouble spitting out what they’re thinking. Other students may smirk at their fumbling. I don’t. I consider the fumblers some of my most promising students. They’re trying to find words for more paradoxical ideas, ideas better matched to reality’s reversals. With practice, they’ll gain more language fluency, which will, in turn, enable them to think more complex thoughts.
Still, there are plenty of reasons we would want to keep our grammar and thinking simple. Thinking can fill us with doubts and anxieties we’d often rather avoid. Life can get so complicated, we might wish that we thought as simply as dogs do.
Then again, people often make life a whole lot harder than it has to be by pretending that it’s a whole lot simpler than it can be.
A video I made on cultivating language skills.
This essay as a video:
