Challenging ourselves to keep learning
My eldest daughter often asks me, or certainly did more often when she was younger, what’s your favourite colour? Your favourite car? Your favourite singer? Your favourite song? Your favourite this? Your favourite that? It was a question I found as challenging as I did irritating because not only do I find it difficult to answer for a multitude of reasons, but it always had to be an either/or scenario – if I liked this, it meant I had a preference over that, which wasn’t always the case.
Her questions though were more a reflection of the society that we live in, i.e., you have to choose one or the other, you can’t have both, it has to be black or white, you can’t hold two differing views at the same time, you can’t be or at least appear to be contradictory!
Recently I have seen this become a pervasive feature in the media, even in respectable media outlets renowned for their impartiality or inquisitive questions - the idea of holding two diametrically opposing viewpoints, seems to be an anathema for some journalists.
Their questions are often framed in a way which is either/or, and if you try to give context before you come down on one side or the other, you were almost hung out to dry for not answering. I’m not talking about the completely avoiding the question type response that with politicians we have become so accustomed too, but the problem with an either/or question is that it merely simplifies what is often not simple. The difficulty with an either/or question is that things are more often than not either/or, not merely black or white, and most likely, that there is all too often a whole pile of grey in between. Either/or and black of white fails to take account of context, feeling, emotion, circumstance, nuance, pressures and so on.
Therein lies the crux of challenging ourselves to keep learning. We, or at least those of us living in Ireland, the UK, Western Europe and the US, live in a culture that has often expected or demanded an either/or, one or the other, or black and white responses.
Those who live in the East take the opposite view, or rather they are more open about when they don’t know, and not afraid to admit it. Their approach is one that is often underpinned by the concept of ‘Duality’, where two answers or ideas can be right or can apply in equal measure.
For us in the West, this is a difficult concept to accept let alone throw any weight behind. I often think about a very simple way to illustrate this – the number six is placed on the floor – two people stand opposite each other, either side of the six – is it six or nine? In this case, it’s both. But surely not? They can’t both be right, but surely they are, and this, is the challenge that lies before us. The challenge to keep learning and step away from the idea that there can only be one truth, one version.
Of course there are some things, many things, that are fact, that can’t be disputed – the air temperature at a given moment, the number of people that take part in a particular race, the length of a plank of wood, etc. But where there is opinion, values, ideals, beliefs, theories, and so on, on display, then the challenge to listen and consider the possibility of duality is necessary for our continued growth as a species.
We need to understand better how our limitations, our fallacies, and our heuristics fool us. We need to learn how to reconcile our beliefs with reality. We need to be able to distinguish between fact and fiction; learn how not to repeat the mistakes of the past; review and alter our positions against new information; reaffirm the importance and value of research, study and scientific endeavour; make a conscious effort to teach ourselves through new knowledge; understand that feeling, opinion, speculation and conjecture does not equal truth, and, that information glut does not equal deep knowledge.
In the West in particular, our education system(s) do not lend itself to nurturing critical thinking; more so we absorb information as passive recipients, and store it and recall it when necessary, namely at exam times. It’s no surprise that we struggle with extending ourselves more than is necessary to reach conclusions based on examining all the information that might be available to us.
However, never has a time in human history, demanded that we be better informed. Our very existence and more to the point, our very survival demands that we challenge ourselves to keep learning!
