Learn Again How to See
Many ancients believed that eating walnuts would make you smart because walnuts and brains had similar shapes, which meant the two things had the same substance. I’m not making that up. Getting beyond this confusion of form with substance marked the beginning of the enlightenment and the ascent of science.
Richard Feynman, one of the greatest minds of the modern era (and a wonderfully fascinating human), said the single most important principle of science — the one idea that he would want to preserve for posterity if all other knowledge were being destroyed — is that all of the many large things in the world are actually made from unique combinations of a few tiny components. In other words, science understands identity and function not by macro appearances and similarities, but by the micro — by the unique arrangement of very tiny components within, components that usually are not casually observable. Plants, animals, rocks, fluids, gases, jungles, oceans, reefs, and the international space station all adhere to this principle. Organizations, movements, countries, and humans are like that, too.
I’ve often seen a boat or a bike or a building or a tool that looked familiar, only to find out from the owner that it was built or equipped or modified or used in some remarkably unusual way that was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Beneath the surface, it was not familiar at all. “That looks familiar” is a powerful impulse because it’s so easy. But, it’s also fraught, as the walnut/brain story makes pretty clear.
While listening to someone talk have you ever found yourself instinctively thinking of a similar story from your experience? Sometimes we think that seeing how someone else’s life is similar to ours is the same as building an empathetic bridge to them. It’s not. The “you are like me” familiarity impulse is actually reducing the other person to a caricature of you, not bringing you thoughtfully to the real them. This very common (and sort of narcissistic) impulse is like a social black hole: by drawing someone into our own frame of reference, we actually destroy our sense of the individual’s uniqueness — of them as them.
Thinking is NOT making something appear familiar. Thinking is learning again how to see.
-Albert Camus
Camus saw that the impulse of familiarity is a shortcut, a reduction of thinking effort. To deal with each person or item in the world as a novel entity is a huge cognitive task. So, we simplify the task by giving most things only cursory treatment based upon familiar heuristics. We don’t take the time to look, really look, at each thing or person. We miss a lot by taking such shortcuts.
Empathy is one of the heaviest thought processes; it is the opposite of the familiarity shortcut. Empathy is exerting the effort to imagine the experience that another person is having (or had), to put yourself into their shoes and feel what they feel (or felt) — recognizing that you have never actually experienced the same thing. Empathy is centering your imagination on THEM… their perceptions, their experiences, their frame of reference — meeting them where they are, not centering everything in your own frame by translating them into that with which you are familiar. Empathy is assuming that this person is more complex than casual observation suggests, different from anyone including yourself, and therefore interesting and worthy of the deep look.
Such careful seeing and thinking is, well, hard. So, we generally try to avoid it, and that’s when we get caught in the ancient trap of making silly inferences about walnuts and brains. “He is one of them.” “She is one of us.” “Here we go again.” We must work hard to train our brains to go beyond primitive categorization to the familiar. This is what Albert Camus was referring to as learning again how to see.
Imagine how differently one looks at trees after learning that each is built from a scaffold of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (really, that’s all) which produces intermediate structures like lignin and cellulose which ultimately coalesce into similar external shapes like pine and ponderosa and cedar while maintaining wonderfully diverse behaviors and characteristics. Think of that for a minute: so many shapes and sizes and characteristics across thousands of species of trees on Earth, and all made from the same 3 basic building blocks!
If you want to make an interesting observation about almost any situation, focus on uniqueness. What is remarkable about life is not similarities; what is remarkable is the incredible variety that arises from such a small set of construction materials.
Now imagine looking at EVERYTHING with those eyes. Products, companies, parties, books, cultures, people… everything. Each thing is a marvel of unique pressures, incentives, experiences, symbioses — a living registry of a unique story. Resist the impulse to lump things into familiar buckets based upon casual external similarities. Do the hard work to see, really see, each thing and to think about it as 1 of 1 in the world. Resist the impulse to discount something as known based upon a sense of familiarity. Revel in the wonder that we have infinite variety in a world built from 118 basic elements.
To rif on the old Sesame Street line… none of these things is ACTUALLY like the others. What a marvelous, varied, novel world to explore! But, to marvel at it you must learn again how to see.
Have a great week!
Scott
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