Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (34 page)

One doesn’t need, however, to engage in the act of coining catchy new words to benefit from the great richness of concepts of this sort. One can simply use conceptual broadening in the way it has always been done since time immemorial. Thus these days one often hears such sentences as “they had to make an end run around the President”, “the two missile-rattling countries played chicken for several months”, “we’re just not on the same wavelength”, “there’s a huge gridlock in congress”, “and as for the President’s stance on tax cuts, well, that’s still a bit of a black hole…”, “there was a chain reaction crash on the freeway involving 80 cars”, “those universities are playing musical presidents”. In short, the concepts that our culture hands us are constantly being stretched outwards by analogy, increasing their reach and their power.

Given that such a list of contemporary concepts that are “in the air” could be extended for many pages, and that most adults can effortlessly apply many if not most of these abstract and insight-providing concepts to novel situations that they run across, does this mean that as culture marches forward in time, people are inevitably becoming ever more intelligent, ever more capable of rapidly pinpointing the cruxes of the situations they face, and of doing so with ever greater precision?

As evidence in favor of this idea, many people have pointed to what is now called the “Flynn Effect”, after James R. Flynn, a political philosopher who in the 1980s drew attention to the fact that all around the world, scores on IQ tests were slowly but steadily rising, at the rate of roughly five points every twenty years. This unexpected observation has been confirmed many times in many countries. What could possibly account for such a striking effect, if not the notion that human intelligence is in fact steadily on the rise? And what could possibly lie behind the steady drumbeat of rising global intelligence if not the constant proliferation of new concepts coming from all across the vast spectrum of different human activities?

Are we to conclude that because our culture has handed us so many rich concepts on a silver platter, it follows that a random individual today might spontaneously come out with off-the-cuff remarks whose perspicacity would astonish Albert Einstein, James Clerk Maxwell, Alexander Pushkin, or Mark Twain, not to mention Shakespeare, Galileo, Newton, Dante, Archimedes, and so many other geniuses? Without doubt, the answer is “yes”. Since people and cultures develop through the construction of new categories that sometimes are highly idiosyncratic and sometimes are shared by vast numbers of people, an individual who seems quite ordinary in today’s society might well have a great intellectual advantage in various domains over people from earlier generations, simply because human beings, rather than storing their acquired ideas or abilities in their genetic material and passing it to their progeny at birth (Lamarck’s vision of evolution was long ago discredited), store it in their personal concepts and in their shared tools and culture. Each person’s repertoire of categories is the medium through which they filter and perceive their environment, as they attempt to pinpoint the most central aspects of situations that they come into contact with. And since our conceptual repertoires today are far richer than those of earlier eras, a random person today might well be able to astonish brilliant minds of previous ages by doing nothing more than making observations that to us seem routine and lacking in originality.

Does this mean that geniuses of bygone times would do poorly on contemporary IQ tests? And if so, what would that imply concerning their actual intelligence? It’s hard to say what scores would have been obtained by historical figures on IQ tests, but the more interesting question is whether the intelligence level of geniuses from long ago has been reached and even surpassed by average people in today’s world. We believe the answer to this question is “no”, because the great gift of those exceptional individuals was that of being able to home in on what really mattered in situations that no one had ever understood before, by constructing original and important analogies that were built on whatever repertoire of categories they happened to have at their disposition. This is always a deeply rare gift, no matter in what era it arises.

Imagine some mountaineers who come across a very tall, sheer rock face for the first time. At the outset, only the very best climbers in the world can scale it, and even they do so only with extreme difficulty. But some of those highly talented climbers leave behind pitons in the rock face, which allow less experienced climbers to do some of the ascents. And then those climbers in turn leave behind yet more pitons, and after a few years the once-barren face is full of pitons, and now almost anyone with a modicum of experience in rock-climbing can scale what once was nearly unclimbable. It would be absurd, however, to conclude from this that today’s climbers are superior to yesterday’s. Only thanks to the great climbers who made it up
without
pitons or prior known routes can the average climbers of today negotiate the once-formidable cliff. The excellent climbers who blazed the first trails up the sheer face had numerous abilities, such as the skill of spotting promising routes, the intuitive sense of where it would be advantageous to place pitons, and the skill of knowing how to drive pitons into the rock so that they will remain reliable for future climbers.

We who are alive today are the beneficiaries of countless thousands of conceptual pitons that have been driven into the metaphorical cliffs of highly abstruse situations. We can easily climb up steep slopes of abstraction that would have seemed impossible a few generations ago, for we have inherited a vast set of concepts that were created by ingenious forebears and that are easy to use. And the set of concepts available to us is constantly expanding. Does all this easily accessible power, however, wind up making us smarter and more creative than our forebears?

Think of today’s electronic music keyboards, which come with a host of built-in rhythmic accompaniments for many types of music. Does having a raft of such canned accompaniments turn the instrument’s user into a deeply creative musician? Does having a slew of highly variegated typefaces at one’s fingertips make one into a great graphic designer? Do the myriad bells and whistles supplied by PowerPoint turn all users of that software into world-class presenters of complex ideas? Certainly not! Likewise, the fact that we can easily put our finger on scads of situation-essences by exploiting standard labels that have been handed to us by our culture does not mean that we could do so in a trackless, uncharted wilderness where no one has gone before.

Concepts have a special property that distinguishes them from physical tools: as opposed to being just an external device, a concept becomes an integral part of the person who acquires it. The mathematician Henri Poincaré is said to have stated, “When a dog eats the flesh of a goose, it turns into the flesh of a dog.” He was referring to how we internalize knowledge we acquire, and how it differs for that reason from mere tools, which remain separate from us, much as a piton is totally separate from a mountain climber. Merely having a library filled with books about, say, mathematics, fashion, or word origins does not make one a mathematician, a fashion designer, or an etymologist. What counts, rather, is the degree to which the concepts in those books are internalized by a person, thus enriching their conceptual space and turning them into a thinker able to make new categorizations and analogies. In contrast to the image suggested by our mountain-climbing metaphor, conceptual pitons are not just tools, but devices that enrich and transform people, allowing them to make deeper, more insightful, and more precise categorizations. These mental pitons are no longer just inert objects in an external cliff, but become parts of the person using them. They cannot be easily removed in the same way that one can take a piton out of a rock, because to remove a concept is to take away some of the person who owns it.

How would Albert Einstein contribute to contemporary physics, were he a young physicist today? What would Alexander Pushkin bring to today’s poetry? What would Shakespeare or Dante write if they were alive today? What would Henri Poincaré give to mathematics, and Sigmund Freud to cognitive science? What analogies would they discover lurking implicitly in today’s concepts? What depths could they perceive in the world around them, by using the tools of their new conceptual universe to interpret the surface appearances that they would encounter all around them?

In this chapter and the preceding one, we have presented an image of any particular language’s repertoire of lexical items as forming a “lexical galaxy” in conceptual space. We want, however, to convey a polyglottal image — thus, the idea that different languages overlap strongly at the center of conceptual space, and that as one drifts outwards towards the fringes (where concepts are more and more complex and thus rarer and rarer), each language’s coverage becomes not only sparser but also more idiosyncratic. The particular lexical galaxy associated with any specific language defines that language’s “genius”. And lying further out beyond each galaxy there is empty space — the sheer blackness of the untracked conceptual cosmos.

But things are not as bleak as that sounds. The fact is that a very large proportion of the concepts belonging to any person have no linguistic labels and yet are just as real as ones that have standard labels, such as “hand”, “pattern”, “green”, “dogmatic”, “twiddle”, “sashay”, “but”, “indeed”, “living room”, “Jewish mother”, “play it by ear”, “sour grapes”, “tail wagging the dog”, “esprit d’escalier”, and “bait and switch”. This idea that so many of our concepts, often ones that we care deeply about, entirely lack names was saluted by American poet Tony Hoagland in the following poem.