When we show someone a new way to see something, we not only call attention to new aspects of that thing, but also show how it looks if we downplay or disregard other aspects.
In other words, learning a new perspective means unlearning to emphasize what we are accustomed to emphasizing. It means remapping one’s sense of relevance.
This runs counter to many conceptions of learning, which understands knowledge to be a cumulative process. More and more facts are gathered and systematized according to one’s existing conceptions. But this kind of factual accumulation serves only to reinforce the conception by which the knowledge has been ordered.
It is incredibly difficult to unlearn this cumulative conception of learning, and many people are entirely unable to do it. This inability is called “naive realism”. Naive realists confuse their own perspective with reality itself, and therefore think without empathic considerations.
When large groups share a common naive realist perspective, they are unable to learn anything new. They can continue to absorb facts, but they cannot absorb them in any new way that places them in different relationships. They collectively ignore what doesn’t make sense to them, agreeing among themselves that it is nonsense with no sense to understand. And they also agree that what they what does make sense to them collectively is correctly understood, which means looking into the matter further is a waste of time. And because they fail to look into things with any rigor or thoroughness, they fail to see any evidence of the inadequacy of their understandings.
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When we as individuals are unsure of our opinion, what do we do? We check in with our neighbor. When we as members of an organization are unsure of our organizational opinion, what do we do? We check in with our neighbor, a fellow member of our organization. This is the basic mechanism of mass insanity: “Madness is rare in individuals–but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”
What if the ordinary naive realism of the business world is such a form of mass insanity? What if the very mode of naive realism we teach our children in schools, reinforce in our popular culture and news media, and enforce in the workplace is a self-destructive delusion?
What if? To anyone not caught up in it, it is obvious.
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To naive realists, other people are understood in the factual manner one understands everything. Learn what behaviors they perform, what goals and what opinions influence the behaviors, in what context these behaviors are performed and how that context influences the behavior, and add it all to the stock of one’s knowledge. Oh — and don’t forget feelings: now we’re empathic because we’ve added subjective experience to the mix.
Our very conception of subjectivity is distorted by our naive realism.
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The irony of naive realism: in moderation this intellectual impairment appears to be an attractive personality characteristic. This is because naive realism permits a greater concentration of will.
Naive realists have powerful convictions, act decisively, speak plainly without equivocation or qualifications, and stay the course, even when those with invalid opinions question them.
We reward naive realism with power and respect.
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“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?– W. B. Yeats
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Actually, naive realism is not the problem. It is completely necessary that the majority of people be naive realists.
The problem always lies in the specific mode of naive realism. From time to time, for the continuance of culture, reality must be reconceived, which means the naive realists must be provided with a new, fresher, more productive, less destructive conception of reality, which must be mistaken for reality itself. Without this basic faith, humanity would lack all will and would never move mountains, build cities, establish institutions — or even make art of any kind, including philosophy. But reality is a living thing. It is born from an older reality, lives, has children, but eventually dies. Conservatives will keep the old reality alive at all costs, even if it means that reality must be forcibly sustained against nature, on an iron lung of dittoed conviction and selective eye blurring.