A Hipbone Approach IV: Polar bears and polar opposites

I have characterized Sterling’s stance as “science, fiction” and Rep. Shimkus as “scripture, fact” – but the connection between these two dots is far from clear, and it is at leasdt arguable whether the designations shouldn’t instead be “science, fact” for Sterling, and “scripture, fiction” for Rep. Shimkus.

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There’s a certain elegance to that – in fact it begs to be made into one of those diagrams that Jung and Levi-Strauss were fond of…

Of course, fact and fiction may not be exclusive, opposed categories, and the same is true of scripture and science. Consider, for example, Kathleen Raine’s comment:

myth, when a real event may be the enactment of a myth, is the truth of the fact and not the other way around”

or the similar idea that CS Lewis once wrote to her

What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something but reality is about which truth is) and therefore every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths…

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To return to Sterling… The game of connect the dots that Sterling plays here could be made into a simple systems diagram of the sort that Peter Senge used to illustrate his book, The Fifth Discipline, or the more elaborate form of systems dynamic model that Jay Forrester pioneered at MIT and Donella Meadows so eloquently preached in her essay, Places to Intervene in a System — complete with feedback loops in which shifts in global weather patterns and the exquisitely-patterned trails of SUVs dance the dance of complexity and emergence…

Sterling’s version of the game is verbal, minimalist, and suggestive: two phrases, not often found next to each other, quietly juxtaposed, in such a way that the mind can supply the connection that makes the leap between them. In short: the man can write.

The point I am laboring to make here has to do with communication: with getting an insight across to other people.

Writers do this by dropping verbal markers (“SUVs” and “polar bears”) into sentences. Mostly, they write many such sentences in sequence (a blog post, an article, a book), so the reader skims or skips lightly from one marker to the next, like a stone skipping across a pond in the childhood game. Individual leaps and single connections between pairs of dots are not important here, the reader’s mind half-notes them as it passes to the next dots and the next, and such things as “conclusions” and “actionable items” or in some cases “character” and “plot” far outweigh the largely subliminal links and connections triggered along the way.

From an analytic point of view, however, it is the connections that make the difference — whether those connections are causal, as in the steps of an argument; dynamic, as in the workings of a homeostatic system with feedback loops; emergent, as in the discernment of pattern at the edge of chaos; or associative, as with creative insight, metaphor and analogy.

And in each of these cases, some form of language, diagram or model can spell out the connection, some form of software can embody that language, diagram or model, and some form of human insight can assimilate its meaning and apply it to further tasks of observation, orientation, decision and action…

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We may connect the dots for pleasure, as in one of those games that chains of restaurants print up to keep children busy while their parents talk over pancakes and bacon, or for benefit: and here the issue is not only to connect “past” dots correctly so as to understand what has already happened and can be viewed with twenty-twenty hindsight, but to make the great conceptual leap from past and present and propose connections with dots that will arise in the “future” (that zone of uncertainty): we write scenarios, we plan, we attempt to intuit an enemy’s next move, to make our own OODA loop tighter and meaner than his.

And while in the short term we may succeed, in the mid and long term we may fail.

At which point, as a depth psychologist might say, our projections tell us more about ourselves than about the reality we are attempting to grasp.

I’d include here those moments when we “see” connections that don’t exist, as well as those in which we miss connections that do: hallucinatory links, and blind spots, both.

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