| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"maff" |
| Date: |
24 Apr 2004 03:53:41 AM |
| Object: |
Creativity cannot be hurried |
Creativity cannot be hurried
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1202245,00.html
Are our powers of reflection atrophying in the electronic age?
Karen Armstrong
Saturday April 24, 2004
The Guardian
The government has indicated that in five years' time, students will
probably take their national tests and GCSE and A-level exams on
screen at a computer, and get their results within seven to 10 working
days. No examination system is perfect, and in matters of the mind
there is a natural tendency to resist new technology. Socrates opposed
the introduction of writing, believing that it would ruin memory and
oral tradition. Nevertheless, this method of instant assessment raises
questions about the way we acquire and evaluate knowledge in the
electronic age.
Karen Armstrong
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0404031212.4b89889%40posting.google.com
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| User: "stoney" |
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| Title: Re: Creativity cannot be hurried |
26 Apr 2004 11:24:53 AM |
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On 24 Apr 2004 01:53:41 -0700, (maff), Message ID:
<18510aff.0404240053.5db296b0@posting.google.com> wrote in alt.atheism;
Creativity cannot be hurried
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1202245,00.html
Creativity cannot be hurried
Are our powers of reflection atrophying in the electronic age?
Karen Armstrong
Saturday April 24, 2004
The Guardian
The government has indicated that in five years' time, students will
probably take their national tests and GCSE and A-level exams on screen
at a computer, and get their results within seven to 10 working days. No
examination system is perfect, and in matters of the mind there is a
natural tendency to resist new technology. Socrates opposed the
introduction of writing, believing that it would ruin memory and oral
tradition. Nevertheless, this method of instant assessment raises
questions about the way we acquire and evaluate knowledge in the
electronic age.
Socrates had a point. Nobody would be without writing, which has
wondrously altered the way we think, but our mnemonic powers have
certainly declined. Before the advent of literacy, Buddhist monks
memorised entire scriptures; Brahmin priests could chant huge portions
of the Rig Veda with perfect intonation long after its archaic language
had become incomprehensible; and bards effortlessly recited massive
epics. Today most of us are incapable of such feats, and our memories
are likely to deteriorate still further now that so much information is
available at the click of a mouse.
Nobody would be without either writing or computers, but the undoubted
advance that they represent is also a loss. Poems memorised in youth
become an intimate part of our interior world, and our relationship to
knowledge changes when it is a living presence in our minds. In an
interview last week, Sir Michael Atiyah, the winner of the prestigious
Abel prize for mathematics, explained that he often writes nothing at
all in the course of a hard day's work, and that in maths there are few
facts to master. "I just think ... and think." He lives with his ideas,
carrying them wherever he goes - on a train, a bus, even while asleep -
for days, weeks and years, making apparently little discernible
progress, but waiting confidently for what he calls "vision".
The proposed e-assessment of schoolchildren will almost certainly be
faster and more flexible. But speed and efficiency are not everything.
Some kinds of insight only emerge after a long period of patient
attention. Poets and writers insist that the creative process cannot be
hurried. Keats called it negative capability, "when a man is capable of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason". At a time when knowledge is almost
instantaneously achieved and habitually geared to productivity, many
would find this apparent passivity alien.
Use it or lose it. Our contemplative faculties may now be atrophying in
the same way as our memories, and this bodes ill for our creativity. Not
only are certain kinds of thinking impossible at top speed, they also
require solitude and silence, which are difficult to achieve in a world
where, to quote Philip Larkin, "all virtue is social" and where people
increasingly find it hard to take a country walk without a mobile phone.
Even if we are not original thinkers, we need a degree of negative
capability to understand certain disciplines. I am convinced that one of
the reasons why people have problems with religion today is that they
assess it rationally, and expect to comprehend its insights immediately.
But theology is - or should be - poetry, an attempt to express the
inexpressible. Just as it is difficult to read a Rilke sonnet at a rowdy
party, religious discourse requires a degree of silent attention; if you
try to extort its meaning prematurely, it will remain opaque.
Religion is essentially an art form, designed to give us intimations of
transcendence. As in mathematics, there are few facts: in most of the
great traditions, metaphysics is largely irrelevant - religion is not
about submitting to a set of creedal propositions, it is about behaving
differently. But during the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th
centuries, western people started to regard religious dogma as empirical
fact and to insist on an orthodoxy that consequently seemed incredible.
This was my own experience. For years after I left the convent where I
had spent seven years as a young nun, Christian doctrines seemed
self-evidently absurd, because I did not approach them with negative
capability but with the same logical, discursive reflection that I
employed in some of my secular studies. I had also found the long
struggle to submit to official doctrine mentally paralysing; we damage
our minds if we habitually deflect them from their natural bias towards
truth. My mind had seized up and it took about 12 years to unlock it. No
wonder Confucius, Buddha and the Koran had little time for theological
conformity.
After a series of career disasters, I ended up in religious
broadcasting. My approach was still entirely sceptical and secular. I
had to amass information at breakneck speed to keep one step ahead of
the production team, ransacking sacred texts to advance my thesis of the
moment. It was only after my television career collapsed, and I was
forced - initially against my inclinations - to write full time, that my
attitude towards religion changed.
Working alone, day after day, I was no longer engaged in witty banter
with my director about the absurdity of a Kabbalistic myth or the
hopeless irrationality of a Christian doctrine. There was now no busy
cerebral filter between the texts and myself. At first I resented the
silence, but I gradually discovered that the enveloping quiet became a
positive element, almost a presence, that somehow orchestrated
theological notions, revealing an unexpected resonance. I was no longer
using the ideas I was encountering as fodder for my next television
interview, but learning to live with them for years at a time and to
listen to the deeper meaning that lay ineffably beyond them.
What works in theology, poetry and mathematics must also be effective in
other fields; this patient waiting upon truth is as characteristic of
the human mind and as necessary to human existence as swift, aggressive
ratiocination. In our pragmatic, technological age, we may not be
sufficiently aware of the need to train children to wait for long,
apparently unproductive periods before achieving insight, and to feel
comfortable in silence. In a slower, quieter time, negative capability
probably came more naturally, but we may have to make a special effort
to cultivate what Wordsworth called "wise passiveness".
The A-level fiasco of 2003 revealed the inadequacy of the current
examination system, and some on-line testing may be a partial solution.
But too many "tick box" questions could lead to an over-simplified
conception of knowledge, and timed essays written at high speed on a
computer could encourage sloppy, ill-disciplined prose. In our complex
world, we need to counter the culture of the soundbite and the instant
opinion, and teach children that some truths are not instantly
accessible. If we do not, we will deprive them of an important creative
capacity. The assessment of students should test their powers of
reflection and their appreciation of complexity as well as their factual
and technical skills.
· Karen Armstrong is the author of The Spiral Staircase: A Memoir,
recently published by HarperCollins
karmstronginfo@btopenworld.com
(c) 2004 Guardian Newspapers
Stoney
"Designated Rascal and Rapscallion
and
SCAMPERMEISTER!"
When in doubt, SCAMPER about!
When things are fair, SCAMPER everywhere!
When things are rough, can't SCAMPER enough!
/end humour alert
alt.atheism military veteran #11
{so much for the 'no atheists in foxholes' rubbish}
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