It’s intriguing to note that our free society’s continued push to further define and acknowledge commonalities shared by all citizens somehow fails to consider any basic traits deemed negative by that same society. Confusion is among these. After all, even the most practiced thinkers cannot claim to have escaped the occasional state of outright confusion. Being confused is a trait we all share.

I suspect we ignore this widely shared facet of the human condition, perhaps, because it contains little or no legislative value. Seriously, how would society benefit from, say, a “right to be confused?” No, confusion gets dismissed by philosophers and logicians alike and we carry that “permission” to dismiss it very deeply into our everyday lives. We ignore the concept of confusion, even fear it, fear how we might be freshly perceived if suddenly caught in a moment of confusion. Will it ruin all after hopes of a fruitful career? Will our friends abandon us if they find us to be confused more often than not? Will adversaries use such moments as opportunities to pounce? The sometimes paralytic fear of even acknowledging this common, nascent brain response leads otherwise smart people to sit in ignorant silence rather than simply posing questions to navigate themselves into the know.

I, for one, think it is beneficial to examine confusion, at least as much as it is to examine any play of the mind. Doing so is not an easy task. Examination is a cerebral undertaking and by common definition confusion is exactly when such mental efforts fail any demarcation of sense. How do you employ a technique to examine a state wherein that very technique must be absent? Dissecting confusion, one gets the feel of an “X” that cannot be solved for in an equation. The “X” gets moved around, back and forth, as different techniques are applied to either side of the formula, still ultimately resulting in a function of “X,” rather than any new or exact knowledge about the value of “X” itself. Confusion, like the unknown, is a negative space in the thought process, most difficult to penetrate. It is like trying to study pure chaos.

Since appropriately penetrating confusion on its own terms, then, is unlikely if not impossible, I start right at the edge of the issue, the brink. I consider the cause(s) of confusion. It is possible to derive at least part of the nature of confusion by examining its causes. In my own attempt, I’ve noted that the many causes I can identify tend to fit into two major categories, which implies then that there might be two (or more) different types of confusion.


Common Confusion

First, there is the confusion precipitated when the presented information is too new or too plentiful to process. In a sense, this is when the subject matter is “above” us, “over our heads.” There is often an unacknowledged, educational gap between what we know on a topic and what a speaker knows on that topic.

This is confusion in our animal sense. Examine a wolf being systematically thwarted off by ranchers. That wolf might “smartly” learn to avoid tire tracks, fences, daylight raids, learning ever more in its collected associations to humankind. But when the effort to thwart is concerted and suddenly the wolf is faced with the sound of loud gunfire and engines from multiple directions, its practiced mental and physical behaviors get befuddled. The wolf might dart right and left for short sprints, freeze, growl, run toward the noise. It can exhibit unpredictable, confused behavior. We suffer this as well. We share this brand of confusion with much of the animal kingdom. When faced with possible danger for, perhaps, the first time in one’s life, many of our reactions directly and immediately contradict not only our own practiced behaviors, but also the most reasonable escape tactics. It is why we have self-defense classes, to train our bodies and minds to overcome that particular neurological short circuit.

Confusion in a conversation or debate, when lives are not on the line, can still be a direct outgrowth of this blitzed string of behaviorally questionable reactions. We relate our understanding of the world around us to self-preservation because we see ourselves as more than the physical. We define the self as a deeper set of intangible qualities, among them our ability as humans to be smart. In absence of that understanding, we feel threatened. We can get threatened by people smarter than us. Presented with a subject which we’ve never before examined or hearing the subject communicated in a poor or contradictory manner, our thoughts can race all around for an explanation, sometimes so wildly that we freeze up, shut down, retreat, or check out of the dialogue. Neurologically, this is little different from mammalian fear response, synapses firing in brand new, overproduced fashions processing so many possible courses of action at once that none are mindfully prioritized as the best solution. We get stuck. We simply fear appearing to others as stupid and in our reaction to that fear we stop listening, stop learning. It is easier in the moment to “conclude” that figuratively sticking our heads in the sand will do a better job of preserving the self than to acknowledge our own confusion and better the self, long term, by choosing to learn from what another has to offer. This is undoubtedly the most common form of confusion both because no one is exempt from their animal origins and because of the high frequency with which EVERYBODY experiences being the lesser knowledgeable participant on any number of given topics.


Thinkers' Confusion

The second, lesser evident cause of confusion seems to be of a more elusive nature. It is a more mature classification of confusion that, while it exists, lies beyond the purely animal and reactionary form described above. After all, there exist precepts, as in sociology, that describe the evolution of human intellect as being, in some ways, a developmental measure to counteract instinct. That is the seemingly material purpose of human thought…overcoming, overcoming all. So, it’s reasonable to assume, then, that humans have a commonplace capacity to even overcome their own animal confusion.

Humans, through choice and effort, can mature to a point where they do not fear sounding silly, losing face, impacting their social reputation. They can develop into an arena of thought wherein, while still learning, they are fully comfortable with openly exploring and expressing why they, themselves, might be incorrect. They do not fear attracting a stupidity label while expressing thoughts or questions because those thoughts, those ideas, are seen as entities unto themselves, not part of the mind, the soul, the self. Ideas and knowledge are out there, cycling through the human condition free of charge. They are fruits of humanity ready to be plucked and gathered, but never viscerally owned by any one person or another. Knowledge can be shared, perhaps it can only be shared, and those who come to understand this possibility can pattern their mindsets in distinct opposition to animal confusion. They openly risk revealing their intellect as wanting at every turn so as to gain an even minutely greater perspective in the exchange.

Make no mistake. When I identify persons practicing the free abandon of any concern over labels, I do not include those who’ve done so through reckless abandon, people who care little about what others think, but who allow their perspective to stop at that one, solitary conclusion. We’ve generational throngs of non-thinkers and immature thinkers who isolate themselves from new ideas, constructive concepts, and assertions over which they’ve long ago decided they’ll not entertain any further input. These are folks who’ve passively identified the richness to be found in a fearless intellect, but who do little or none of the work to arrive there. They hide behind the sometimes righteous, but always too convenient notion that they need not at all concern themselves with what others think of them. Certainly, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conduct one’s life structured to please all peers. I’m no advocate of allowing others to define you. However, this be-all, end-all refuge stated as, “Why should I care what anyone else thinks of me?” all too often gets misapplied. It is wielded as license to ignore others, to dismiss their perspectives, to disallow contradictory thought or superior arguments from creeping into one’s view of the world. They view their idea as their possession, their own, part of the self while others who perceive ideas as free-for-all pose a threat to that comparatively myopic existence. The conscious practice of ignorance fails any measure of maturity.

To illustrate this second type of confusion, I am instead grouping together thinkers who’ve so often put themselves upon the riskier path of looking foolish in mere hopes of widening their intellectual experience, that they’ve completely desensitized themselves to any embarrassment involved with “sounding stupid.” These are the folks who’ve walked the mental walk, long term, as opposed to those who’ve shut off in a single, uninformed decision. They’ve matured so far through inevitable animal confusion that they’ve ceased to experience it without navigating through to new understanding. They will continue to come across that animal confusion. There will always be another person with newer or greater, even contradictory information to offer. Yet they’ve managed to separate out any mammalian fear response from their reaction to that broader insight. The synapses do not short circuit or fail to prioritize. Instead, these listeners build bridges of understanding. Asking questions and taking all answers at face value, they learn when unprepared, when unready. Particularizing each sequence of challenge and response until such time as they can properly assimilate the external information into a furtherance of their own global comprehension, these mature thinkers persist and probe, revel and celebrate, laud the very ideas that would otherwise put them to shame.

This mental practice, however, comes not without its price. For while the mature thinkers of this persuasion look ever onward and actually seek out those with knowledge superior to their own (most new and desired confusions now proving barely a bump in the road to broader understanding), these same persons inexorably alienate themselves from droves of very smart people who cannot make the same leap. A line is unwittingly drawn in the sand. Their own personal development is separatist in nature. They’ve ascended to a thought process in which many others either cannot or will not engage. It is from this delineated talent pool that we create experts, innovators, and world-bettering deciders. This “club” is not exclusive to notable names either. There is no PhD. required. Anyone, any person who both remains on this expansive mental journey and simply dedicates time to thinking, to observation, to experimentation, to questions, to challenges, to enrichment, to research, to balance, to fact, to expression, to debate, anyone can share in that enlightenment. Everyone thinks. But as a group, these better practiced thinkers tend to be viewed as the smartest among us. They are those we’d ask advice, those whose warnings we’d heed. They are the people we look to for inspiration and the ones whose answers we most trust.

So what is the second type of confusion? If these thinkers are so mature, so “unaffected” by animalistic bewilderment, so equipped to envelop information provided by thinkers who’ve surpassed even them, what could possibly send such minds reeling? The second grade of confusion stems from the comparatively uniformed assertions offered by those who could not make the cognitive leap. Grouped together, broad thinkers are collectively geared toward expanding their existing comprehension, changing perception to fit what they cannot disprove in the moment. As a group, however, they are often bereft of the tools best used to properly address a lesser informed viewpoint. By their very defined drive, the expansive thinkers must always presume that newly encountered information can lead to betterment, that their understanding can somehow be expanded to fit the novel data. The source of the information is less relevant. So, ironically, the truer thinker is veritably forced to, at least momentarily, treat morons on an equal par with geniuses. They must treat all speakers in between as if that invisible line in the sand represents nothing. Such a brief necessity frequently causes a type of confusion all its own.

It means that any human being offering information unfamiliar to the expansive thinker can insert even the smallest, completely fictional detail into an exchange and the broad thinker must then expansively re-examine everything s/he has ever come to know in attempts to impactfully comprehend the unfounded comment without dismissing it out of hand. The comment is an unintended monkey wrench. The less factual the detail, the greater the confusion. Hard core, proven, practiced knowledge-bases within the broader thinker’s repertoire are self-challenged, circling through proof after proof, example after example, modifier after modifier, trying to locate and explain the very legitimacy that the speaker could not lend his/her own comment. Broad thinkers must presume they’ve missed something in their growth and find all the indicated holes in some Swiss cheese upbringing. Yes, the thinker can engage in a line of questioning to navigate through as before, but what is mentally blueprinted as a through line to greater wisdom, in this case goes instead through to acknowledging the information as false. Immature thinkers dismiss. Mature thinkers disprove.

So there are, at least, two kinds of confusion. The first, a generalized, animal reaction to what we do not understand. The second, a cognitive attempt to navigate through the maze of our own examined comprehension to a new, suggested exit that does not exist. All humans have the capacity to experience both forms, but only a select group will journey far enough to recognize the difference between the two.


What To Do With Confusion

Why is it important to break up the subject of confusion in this way? Inappropriately, the instilling of confusion in a debate, disagreement, or argument is often used as a tactic. It is presumed that confusion is an equalizer, that it is a shared and useful tool in absence of some rule or etiquette against it. The presumption goes, if you are confused, all you need do to end the argument is to confuse the other person as well. The presumption furthers, if you hold your own and confuse your opponent, you win. Explaining the duality of confusion reveals this commonplace presumption as incorrect. It shows that one side of a disagreement can be severely lesser examined, lesser informed, and lesser justified despite that point’s asserter being able to momentarily confuse a contravening speaker. It emphasizes that just as one noted expert should be given far more attention on his/her studied subject than the lodger of a random opinion, so too should the expert’s brief confusion, if present, be regarded with far less importance than a similar moment of pause on the part of someone whose failed to fully explore the content.

It is a hierarchy. One form of confusion clearly trumps the other and is not nearly the “gotcha” that we presume it to be. Think this is a matter for formalized debate? Think again. Allowing plenty of room for multiple perspectives to be of simultaneous merit, how often does any disagreement in the home, the office, or everyday life pit two fighters of perfectly equal mental adept (on a subject) against each other? Rarely, if ever. That said, two narrow thinkers might never reach agreement, arguments ending in a huff. Two broad thinkers might always reach agreement, both prepped to find resolution and understanding. A narrow thinker versus a broad thinker might instead keep the debate rolling forward forever, the former constantly hoping to gain that elusive and everlasting win by tripping up the latter through means of tactic over content. Sorry, small minds. You can lose out even to sheer confusion.

Labels: animal, confusion, debate, mature, maturity, metacognition, method, reason, thinking

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I never grew attached enough to the apartment that I rent to refer to it with a tricky tongue. I don’t call it a domicile or dwelling, even in jest. I barely utter the lighter words “my place” or “home.” Attaching these ideas to my over-priced and under-modernized unit just seems too permanent, as if the words themselves could wash away all hopes of future homeownership or dreams of one day retiring to an outdoor area with greater square footage than a shoe.

That doesn’t change the fact, however, that it is this very apartment that my miraculous daughter will always know as her first home. She came to us, what seems like yesterday, more beautiful than autumn dusk and as smart as those who’d stop to ponder it, sprouting all her roots here as she instantaneously shot up to age two. And it is in this crumbling box that doubles as her perfect castle that we together might never have a fruitful dialogue on thoughts if I should fail to make time to think. What I think about today is this veritable cubicle with closets and how, while it may have perturbed me before, I dislike it anew for calling my parenthood into question.

We’ve a city. There are door locks. Ours are many, five if you total entryway and apartment. Enter the landlord with all good intensions and a Stanley screwdriver, adding a sixth lock to the storm door, free of charge and without a request to do so. Safety six, convenience zero; I can now get to the second story roof of my building more easily than I can get from my porch to my kitchen.

Pure force of habit drove me to initially overlook the new lock, leaving it unclasped more than once. And while we as a family were no less safe than the day before lock six had joined the keychain puzzle, my “mistake” somehow sanctioned a multidirectional barrage of snide commentary. “You musts,” and “Don’t forgets,” and “How could yous,” and “That’s irresponsibles” flurried down on me like my own personal ticker tape parade of shame. The neighbor, the landlord, the mother, the landlord’s spouse, the friend, the friend of the friend, the dumpster-diving passer-by; they all precipitated a collective onus in attributing an importance to that quarter inch keyhole and verbally flailing me for dismissing the same.

That ambient yapping was easy enough to ignore. I was aware of my “oversight” and actively trying to change my behavior. Plus, most of the reasons offered as to why “I must” lock the new lock sounded little more than, “Because it’s a lock. That’s what locks do.”

They weren’t thinking. I really wasn’t thinking. Had it stopped there, I’d have nothing to contribute to a blog about mature thought. Then the nightmares started.

For my part, I was soon tackling the subject solo. It doesn’t take a complex game of word association to understand how my mind went from lock to security, security to crime, crime to worst case scenario. If ever you plan to be a new parent, any parent, I suggest you take an active mental hiatus from working worst case scenarios into your thought process. The imagery your own mind can muster is horrifying enough, no less the knowledge that real life acts matching that imagery are how locks leapt onto doors in the first place, warranted or not. Yet as horrifying as those mental flashes were, nothing prepared me for what I’d thought of next.

While I believe it best never to blame oneself for another person’s misdeeds, I suddenly realized that I truly don’t know what I would do if ever horror visited our “home” after I had locked all, but that final lock. That lock could be the deterrent. That last lock could have bought time enough to make a difference. The jiggle at that lock could be the one that would wake me or the task that would re-time an intruder’s entrance to police patrols. That lock, in essence of the self, could be loosely viewed, with no crime committed, as the mindful difference between a good parent and a bad one.

So it begs the thinker’s question, where does it end? If the landlord decides to put 38 locks on the door, am I a bad parent if I only lock 37 of them? I think most people would say, “no,” but post emergency, I would know, very clearly, that I didn’t do EVERYTHING I could have to prevent disaster. I’m well aware and in full acceptance of the notion that a crook unstopped by 10 locks is unlikely to be deterred by an 11th. Yet, while that would seem to place full fault squarely upon the deviant, I ask if there wouldn’t be a small portion of that fault that would factually be my own. Perhaps that small portion is not fault, but simply contribution. I might never cognitively or emotionally reconcile my contribution of ignoring any one lock. Sure, mathematically, my contribution reads less and less with every extra lock we add to the equation, but where is the threshold? At what point can an emotionally mature individual determine through all acceptable measures that one step shy of X is prudent, but one beyond is overkill?

I refer to the elusive nature of this presumably common sense threshold in our thinker’s question as “propulsive morality.” I choose the phrase because it illustrates how the internal and external measures of ethic are stretched ever outward, like an unending and irreversible vector away from manageable criteria into the chaotically complex through a practiced compulsion to add a theoretical plus one. “Propulsive morality,” by whatever name, exists and is problematic at its core. It seems to snake through culture generationally, perhaps spurred on by litigation, politicking, propaganda, poor forensic practice, isolationism, nihilism, cognitive lock, oppression, reality television, psychological scotomata, or immaturity.

Let’s examine. “Propulsive morality” first presumes that a given situation (five locks) succeeds at an agreeable measure of ethic so long as any arguably mitigating addition to that situation (a sixth lock) remains theoretical. In this state, both parties seem to be on common ground and therefore each can be egalitarian in her/his treatment of the other. “You lock all your locks regularly. Great!” However, that mutual nicety is subject to an enormous loophole. Whereupon two or more parties start such agreement in theory, it takes only a single individual to later physically and autonomously add in the formerly theoretical next step. “We agreed on that yesterday, yes, but I just added this new lock and you should see it my way now too. You’d be wrong not to use it” Parties never require of themselves the related compromise defining a needed threshold, a distant point down the chain of their new disagreement that would once again bring them together, both acquiescing that a tiny step further would prove ridiculous or needlessly redundant. So, with that personal requirement absent, loose judgments are given license to propel and propel, ad infinitum, until a negative aspersion can be cast. As a missile can seek heat, “propulsive morality” seeks disparagement. It stretches as far as it must to reach its predestined marginalization and thereafter frames the breadth of that stretch, falsely, as an effort comparable to hard core logic.

The aspersions come from others, yes, predominantly, but can also wind their way into the psyche when one takes stock in oneself, sometimes for no other reason that the fact that, perhaps, no one has pointed out this flawed practice to the thinker.

What I, here, am calling, “propulsive morality” seems to warrant this potent a description as such disconcerting words are only a fraction of the lasting, negative impact that can be experienced each time this default “methodology” is employed. I may have simply taken note, egotistically, as I would a pet peeve, and tried to coin a phrase to describe it. Yet, I am certain there are philosophy experts, psychologists, and ethicists out there who can offer great insight on what it is that I am describing. Perhaps the practice already has a name with great study devoted to it; but try cross-referencing my meager description in a search engine or card catalog. I do not share the vocabulary of established social sciences.

Locks-wise, legally, I’m covered. Culpability aptly befalls a theoretical intruder. Ethically? I’m not exactly certain. I, myself, would judge me as a bad parent if I had regularly forced my daughter to miss just one meal a day, despite feeding her all the others. I, myself, would judge me as a bad parent if I let her stew in a dirty diaper just once a day, despite changing all the others. Why not the sixth lock? The thirty-eighth? Bars? A handgun? A shotgun? A force field? No. Until I hunt down and assimilate greater insights from those studied on the subject, all my locks get locked, all the time, no matter how plentiful, no matter how redundant or inconvenient. It serves my notions of fatherly responsibility, of course. However, that decision also thrusts me into this undefined mind game where I need play along, endlessly, despite the fact that I disagree. I’m sorry, but when do we take stock in the danger of that level of compromise? Is it more dangerous to my daughter that a sixth of six locks not get clasped on occasion, or that she might learn from me the less than artful life lesson of giving-in? I’m guessing that mature minds would view the latter as more impactful, agreeing on substance. Yet, if the latter is “in fact” more dangerous to her, why then does a good parent label get lent to the giving-in, and a bad parent label to the person who questions how far compromise should reach?

Labels: "propulsive morality", compromise, ethic, fatherhood, locks, mature, maturity, metacognition, method, morals, parenting, philosophy, psychology, right, social, thinking, threshold, wrong

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His was a curious comment, angling out there in cyberspace as if to purposely instigate a tweeting battle. It did. Hurrah, bold typist. I’d been aware for some time that Go-Text-Charlie did not put any stock in global climate change, me additionally cognizant of the fact that each beer in Charlie added a new level of anger to his expressiveness on the subject whilst always prying him ever more emotionally open to tell you why he FELT climatological results were an international conspiracy.

I guess, described in that way, it might be easy to dismiss Charlie. His single chat board opinion seemed a fringe venture, whatever one’s political bent. Yet, what you don’t know about Go-Text-Charlie is his decades spent as No-Text-Charlie, years replete with informed ideas, thoughts, opinions, and feelings vastly kept to himself. They were and still are years highly steeped in logic and reason, selflessness and intellect. Charlie mulled over all his innermost undertakings as if locked in a vault with nothing but math, method, and Descartes to guide him. Those rare, whispered assertions he would share were always among a privileged few listeners who’d marvel at what his mind and his untainted practices had accomplished.

Newly unconcerned about “backlash,” he posted publically, and disappointingly. His novelty comment claimed that climatology was bereft of scientific method. The fight was picked, the sides chosen, and the barrage of point and counterpoint that flooded hurtful ones and zeros through the ether astounded me.

Amidst that chaotic throe I found myself genuinely disinterested in adding to what passed for “debate.” Charlie means something to me. I was certain that I could set up a proof to dissuade him from his stance, convincingly, but I didn’t want to throw in with the scrappers and the moaners or get lost in the torrent. I needed to mature away from the word skirmish and the infuriating fact that every reply to Charlie’s comment was little more than a platitude, a sound bite heard a thousand times over, or a partisan campaign motto. Not one contributor, not even Charlie, offered anything more than what s/he’d heard elsewhere. The “argument” was definitively immature at best.

My attempt at maturity, I share. I offer it, hopefully, as a sobering aspect to this supposed “debate.” Charlie is not out there generating his own climate studies, gathering his own data, conducting his own experiments scientifically. And, to be fair, Charlie, neither am I. In this regard we are equals, equally versed in what we don’t know. Given that we don’t know, we have chosen to listen to others for our information. I think it logically sweeps away all the open sermonizing and pat generic responses attached to your comment when we realize that our choice resolves the issue. You have chosen to listen to the wise politicians, the studied pundits, the talk radio icons, and the popular hardliners who fervently disagree with the congruent results of independent global studies. I have chosen to listen to the people who conducted the studies.

Labels: Charlie, climate, climatology, debate, logic, mature, maturity, method, reason, science

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