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We humans are set up by our nature — and the cultures to which our nature gives rise — to deal with much of our lives and memories in stories and story-like forms. Proverbs are very short stories, and as such they are much more memorable than careful descriptive and expositional paragraphs.
A proverb at its best is actually a commercial for quite a bit more pondering. Many of them — including this one — can include themselves as subjects.
And — as with many commercials in the pop culture — and with proverbs throughout history — most are instead used directly as short stories, and most especially to rationalize an opinion or event.
For example, compare “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” with “You can’t tell a book by its cover”. Most proverbial cultures have a proverb and story for every side of every event because these are used not for “truth” but for *resonance*, to be dipped into for comfort and a kind of explanation that is the way people want to have something explained. This is how most religious tracts are used.
So they are a double-edged sword at best.
After not understanding Marshall McLuhan ca 1964, I was motivated to spend much of the summer of 1967 to take another deeper pass (a professor I wanted to talk to didn’t like to talk to grad students much, but he was a reader and was known to mention McLuhan … ). When the light finally dawned, I realized that McLuhan was one of a very few who had “made something that was invisible more visible”.
As with many of these momentous uncoverings, the “invisible” was slightly visible but deemed so unimportant that if was effectively not there. This was the idea — and fact — that most of what we take to be “plain reality” are actually just beliefs, and most of these are so taken for granted that we are almost never aware of them. We use them in our reasoning and decisions but think our logic is absolute rather than relative to the — “context”, “perspective”, “point of view”, “world-view”, “paradigm”, etc. — in which we are operating.
McLuhan used this as part of his assertion that the learning of a communications/representation system must require the brain/mind to change (this is what learning means), and that the most important changes are the ones that are absorbed as “context” and rendered effectively invisible. He was initially interested in the *qualitative* differences in thought brought by writing and then by the printing press. And then could see that television was likely to have an enormous impact on humanity (and without most people being aware of the changes that had to happen).
He was not a scientist, but once so prodded, any scientist and mathematician can see immediately that both maths and science were not just about *more* of something, but about vast changes in how things are looked at and thought about. *Methods* themselves could carry new points of view on their shoulders. This was already a topic of pondering — Kuhn etc — but without the pithy secret sauce of great aphorisms.
Arthur Koestler had recently written a terrific book about creativity — “The Act Of Creation” — and that used the explicit idea that most creativity was being able to see an idea, not just as a weak form in an initial context, but as a strong idea in a strong context. He used the imagery of “planes of thought” at different angles.
The ARPA research community in which I was luckily and happily embedded was coming up with new perspectives, POVs, contexts, etc. for computing. The McLuhan expositions made these much easier to see and think about as part of what we should be doing as researchers.
Part of the ARPA research context was drawn from “the implications behind Turing” as to “what computers actually *are*”. Another important part was drawn from the Cold War (and previous hot wars) as well as from other disasters in the making, such as planet-wide problems with food, water, the climate, etc.
If you try to make the invisible contexts visible, then it is easy to see that some of them are very positive with respect to advancing “civilization”, and others were terribly retrograde. What people “believe is ‘reality’ “ is the most important to put light on, especially if their “reality” doesn’t include the idea that “their reality is mostly just beliefs with no stronger foundations”.
These thoughts persisted in this form until Parc, when I found myself having to explain “stuff” to Xerox executives. One of the earliest ones popped out. I realized somewhat grudgingly that they weren’t “paragraph types”, and tried to find “punch lines” for the talks and pop papers I started to have to come up with.
It’s worth noting here that we need to use “change of context is worth 80 IQ points” on itself. For example: “IQ points” is a metaphor, and is not about what is officially considered “IQ”. And there is no sign: no “plus” or “minus”, even though a moment’s thought on contexts/POVs/etc will show that people can often have disastrously weak contexts for some of their thinking. (Witness history, the last few years, the last few weeks, yesterday, etc.)
Similarly, the earlier “The best way to predict the future is to invent it” doesn’t say anything about what kind of future. People in power often invent terrible futures and make them happen (again, just take a look at unnecessary disasters over history, especially recently).
works in a context with a flat geometry and instant propagation (Newton was quite sure the latter was not the case in our universe). It definitely worked well, and was soon taken to be absolutely true and was *believed as such*.
This process is very similar psychologically to Joseph Campbell’s observation that religions were generally founded by social geniuses who tried to find ways — many of them metaphorical — to talk about ideas outside of the general commonsense. Many of their less sophisticated followers *reified* the abstractions into what they thought were *actualities*, and believed them rather than thinking about them.
But small parts of science are much more careful about beliefs than the general public — even within science. Eventually enough careful work revealed tiny discrepancies in Newton’s suggested relationship that required a very different context to give rise to another compact more accurate explanation.
A great metaphor is not just a commercial for more thinking, but also can be a door into stronger contexts for thinking. It can also be used as an even more effective blinder (especially if the proverb above is not really contemplated!).
