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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Some people have something to say in any conversation and can spot the hidden angles of completely unrelated problems; but how do they do it? So many books, apps, courses, and schools compete for our attention that the problem isn't a lack of opportunity to sharpen our minds, it's having to choose between so many options. And yet, more than two thousand years ago, the greatest thinker of Ancient Greece, Aristotle, had already discovered the blueprint of the human mind. Despite the fact that the latest cognitive science shows his blueprint to be exactly what sharpens our reasoning, subtlety of thought, and ability to think in different ways and for ourselves, we have meanwhile replaced it with a simplistic and seductive view of intelligence, education and the mind. Condensing that blueprint to six 'secrets', Craig Adams uncovers the underlying patterns of every discussion and debate we've ever had, and shows us how to be both harder to manipulate and more skilful in any conversation or debate – no matter the topic.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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THE SIX SECRETS OF INTELLIGENCE
What your education failed to teach you
CRAIG ADAMS
Contents
Introduction
Having emerged from the dark hardship of another day spent deep in the belly of the earth, Mr Wu sits in his living room, illuminated by a single bare light bulb. In the two-room brick house he built with his own hands, there is no sign of anything that you or I would call a luxury. Outside, there is no family car, and there never has been. Mr Wu has never seen the ocean.
And yet, after twenty years of mining coal, neither the intensity of his work nor the depth of his sacrifice has gone unrewarded. Mr Wu and his wife, who toils and saves with no less dedication, have something that’s very special indeed; something that’s worth more to them than a car or a holiday. What they have is a daughter who’s educated.
The young Miss Wu will graduate from university soon. She’s growing up in an increasingly connected world, and to find her place in it she’s studying logistics: the science of distribution. Twenty years of her parents’ effort and thousands of hours of her own study have led to one moment: the moment when her schooling must transform itself into a job.
Her parents have invested in the best education they could afford for their only daughter because as they grow older, they will both depend on her to take care of them. The Wu family can’t afford to think about it any other way. For a miner’s daughter in rural China in the early 21st century, education is about getting a job.
Deep inside the earth on the other side of the world, education is also going on. Through a dark tunnel, a tube carriage lurches from side to side, its passengers swaying to the rhythm of its journey. I’ve been lucky enough to find a seat, and so has the man sitting opposite me. I’m watching him with interest, and I’m not the only one.
I doubt he’s doing it on purpose; in fact, he seems to be completely absorbed in his own world, but eyes are turning towards him nonetheless. My fellow watchers, I think, are sharing the emotions that I’m feeling – a mixture of admiration and guilt – because the man is doing something that most of us feel we should be doing more of: reading.
It’s not just any book he’s reading, though. This book is huge. It’s thick. It’s one of those books where the spine is so wide that your first thought is not to wonder whether it might be interesting or entertaining, but to calculate how many hours of your life you would have to sacrifice to absorb it. I subtly tilt my head to read the title on the spine: JAMES JOYCE – ULYSSES.
At eight o’clock on a Tuesday night, this sharp-suited reader with bags under his eyes and a big leather satchel at his feet is very obviously on his way home from a long day at the office. I imagine him concentrating through endless meetings, frowning at huge spreadsheets or poring over dense legal documents. Yet despite his busy day, and in contrast to all the other things he could be doing, he’s giving his time, energy and concentration to a behemoth of a book that’s famously difficult to read. Why?
For the man on the train, this education isn’t about making money. The man on the train doesn’t have his back pressed up against the wall of economic necessity. This mind-sharpening is a different sort of thing to the education of a coal miner’s daughter and it seems to be meandering its way towards a destination that’s difficult to put one’s finger on. But wherever it’s heading, it’s the man who’s in charge of his own journey … just as we are.
In the Western world in the early decades of the 21st century, most of us are like the guy on the train. We arrive at school, take our seat and wait for the ride to begin; but once our schooldays are over, we get to walk in any educational direction we choose and it’s completely up to us how we do it. Education, like life, is a lottery, and – in stark contrast to those whose circumstances deny them both freedom and opportunity – the problem most of us face today isn’t a lack of choice; it’s having too much.
So what do you choose? Do you visit the library or the bookshop, and if so, which books do you pick out from the shelves? Do you download apps that promise to expand your vocabulary, polish your grammar or train your brain? Do you watch lectures online, listen to podcasts, or feed your mind with a diet of museums, galleries and exhibitions?
Most of us go in for a bit of everything. School is a base coat of traditional subjects that we embellish with a combination of what’s interesting, well-advertised and fashionable; but we can get so caught up in whatever is currently holding our interest that it’s easy to lose sight of what we really want in exchange for all that time, money and effort. What change are we hoping to see?
When we’re not educating ourselves to get a qualification that will help us to get a job or start a career, it’s my contention that we’re not entirely sure what we want, and that we find it hard to say exactly how our efforts to educate ourselves add up to a sharper mind. We’re impressed and entertained by knowledge about everything from the history of the world to the workings of the universe. We’re fascinated by all sorts of facts – but what we really want is something more mysterious and elusive. There is something that lives between the boundaries of any particular area of knowledge: something that’s deeper than the triviality of trivia. What we’re after is the thing we call intelligence.
One way to understand what we want is to follow the advice of Sigmund Freud and examine our fantasies. The collective intellectual dream that we see reflected back at us in the form of the characters we admire from films, on television and in books is not that of an expert in one tiny factual area, nor a master of general knowledge. Our fictional fantasies are of the flexible minds of insightful detectives and mercurial political masterminds. What we’re after is the kind of mental agility that makes observations no matter the situation, and has something to say no matter the topic of conversation. We don’t often fantasise about winning the local pub quiz. We want to be the person in the room who sees how everything fits together.
But what exactly is this all-round ability that we sometimes call general intelligence? Why is it that some people always have something to say and solutions to offer in any business meeting, political debate, family argument or philosophical discussion? How do they do it? You can’t memorise a pile of facts that works in every situation: that would be impossible. Intelligence is mysterious, but understanding it starts with a simple idea: intelligence isn’t what you know; it’s how you think.
Standing at this crossroads of the mind, with our backs turned away from the limitations of facts, you might think that we’d be set on the right path – headed in the general direction of intelligence – but there’s a problem. We describe intelligent people in different ways: ‘perceptive’, ‘subtle’, ‘critical’, ‘logical’, ‘rational’, ‘analytical’ or ‘creative’ – but what exactly do these words mean and how are they supposed to help us? We try to point out the fact that some people can do things with their brains that others can’t by saying things like: ‘she’s got an analytical mind’ or ‘what’s important is critical thinking’ – but how can being told to be ‘more analytical’ or ‘more critical’ actually change the way we think? A collection of vague synonyms that only describes the fact that some people notice what others don’t does not explain it. If we can’t say much about the thinking that defines intelligent people, how can we learn to do what they do?
This is the nature of intelligence and the problem with education itself. It’s easy to make grand promises and bombard the credulous with clever-sounding words that appear to explain something so elusive, but it’s incredibly difficult to say something fundamental and useful about what goes on in our heads. It’s difficult to say something practical that illuminates the everyday thinking of our everyday lives. In the modern age, the vague promise of a true education of the general mind is everywhere, but the concrete ideas that transform the way we see the world are not.
In the modern West – where we have so much freedom and opportunity to develop the sizzling ball of electricity that we use to make the decisions that shape every moment of our lives – we make the mistake of focusing only on the present and the future. We churn out educational platitudes centred around the meaningless trope of a ‘21st-century education’; we idolise our technology and we believe, with all the blind self-importance of modern man, that progress is unrelenting. But some of the sharpest minds of the modern age – indeed, some of the minds that helped create it – would disagree. Einstein said that someone who reads only today’s books and newspapers is like a short-sighted person who refuses to wear glasses. Steve Jobs, the most famous technologist of the modern age, once said that technology is not what really matters, and that it can even be disposed of in favour of a good teacher. When he was asked, in 2001, about ‘the classroom of the future’, he gave an answer that you might not expect. He said: ‘I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.’
I found that Socrates – despite being the father of Western philosophy and one of history’s most inspiring teachers – wasn’t the answer, but it was close. Less than a century after Socrates’ death in Athens in the year 399 BC, another philosopher left the city after failing to get the top job at its most famous school. He eventually made his way to the Gulf of Kalloni, on the island of Lesbos, where he indulged his passion for the study of nature, but another job offer was just around the corner. A school had been specially built for one fourteen-year-old boy, and the king who built it was looking for a teacher. King Philip of Macedon wanted his son’s mind and character to be shaped by the best education that money could buy, and judged by how great a mark that mind and character made on history, Philip would have been pleased with the result. Both the teacher and student would go on to eclipse the fame of the king who had brought them together: the philosopher was Aristotle and the boy became known as Alexander the Great.
With a growing collection of ideas and years of teaching experience under his belt, Aristotle returned to Athens to found his own school, and to write a collection of books (widely thought to have been lecture notes for his students) that would become the foundation of a staggering range of disciplines for the next 2,000 years. Eventually, the influence of those books waned; but in one area at least, the outline of what he wrote is just as true now as it was then. Aristotle was the first human being to describe the fundamental principles of the way we think about, argue over, explain and prove what we believe to be true. When he finally set down his lifetime of ideas, the jewel in the crown of his thought was a true marvel: a blueprint of the human mind.
Aristotle didn’t just understand our powers of deduction or the thing we now call ‘logic’: he discovered them. He wasn’t just an independent thinker who could see through the tricks of manipulative people: he was the first to be able to explain how those tricks worked. Some people claim he even invented science, and Virginia Woolf said of him that when it came to literature, he wrote ‘the first and last words on the subject’. A hundred books wouldn’t do justice to the influence of this great man, but it’s not his influence, nor even his brilliance that interests us here. This isn’t a book about smart people: it’s about the ones who can make us smarter.
One of the greatest thinkers who ever lived achieved what no one had ever done: he managed to turn his mind in on itself and explain what went on inside it. Aristotle discovered not just the fundamental principles of the way we think, but something more important even than that: a way of explaining how those principles work. In a crowded and competitive market of teachers who were the first to recognise the power of understanding our own thought, Aristotle outdid them all by discovering the fundamental blueprint of the human mind. The Six Secrets of Intelligence is about how that blueprint reveals the underlying patterns of every conversation, discussion, debate, argument or theory that we’ve ever had, and how we can use its intuitive ideas to become both harder to manipulate, and able to think in new and different ways.
The principles of intelligence that Aristotle discovered are secrets in the sense of their being key ideas that unlock an ability: the intellectual ability that every one of us is born with by virtue of the fact that we’re human. And yet … in the 21st century, we’ve replaced them with a simplistic and seductive view of intelligence, education and the human mind. In spite of the fact that at the cutting edge of modern science, we are beginning to see that Aristotle was right all along, the modern age has turned its back on the ideas that reveal what’s eternal and unchanging about the way we think: the fundamental and unavoidable principles of reasoning and truth. Aristotle’s challenge was to condense and explain these ideas in a way that even a fourteen-year-old like Alexander could understand and put to use in daily life, and to do it with as much clarity and simplicity as he could muster. My aim is exactly the same.
So where to begin? We’ll start by taking a small but necessary step backwards. The education of a toga-wearing, slave-owning people who lived thousands of years ago only interests us in so far as it gives us some much-needed perspective. By understanding where everyone’s education begins, and why schools and traditional education have been both unwilling and unable to show us what’s essential for a true education of the human mind, we’ll come to see what’s missing in our quest to sharpen it. That’s Part I.
In Part II we’ll plunge straight into the six fundamental principles of reasoning and truth, and apply them to some of the most common and controversial issues of the present day.
Part III explores the innate and unavoidable nature of a human mind, explains why some people notice what others don’t and reveals what modern psychology teaches us about how they learned to do it.
In Part IV, we’ll see why what we’re taught to believe about intelligence and education is wrong, why modern education doesn’t teach us to think for ourselves, and why intellectual power is built on emotional strength.
In the fifth and final part, I’ll bring everything together to explain what is really worth learning, and why the ideas that matter never get old. A true education of the mind depends on a handful of fundamental ideas that we rarely discover when we seek them out alone – but thanks to Aristotle, we don’t have to …
Part I
Not Thinking
A Brief History of Not Thinking
What to Think, Not How to Think
Alexander the Great was a lucky boy, because when history rolled its dice over ancient Greece, it threw three sixes in a row. Legend has it that one young Greek was about to start a career as a playwright when he heard Socrates speak for the first time, and that his response was to burn everything he’d ever written and ask to become Socrates’ student. That young Greek’s name was Plato. When Plato eventually opened the doors of his own school, one of the students to walk through them was a seventeen-year-old Aristotle. Socrates taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle. Alexander’s father may have only paid for the services of a single teacher, but what he got was three for the price of one: the distilled wisdom of the three greatest minds of ancient Greece.
Today, our world is almost irreconcilably different to theirs, and so despite their greatness, it might seem that we’d struggle to learn very much from the ancient Greeks, but that view is a mistake. Our computers and our telephones may be windows that look out onto an almost infinite landscape of facts, figures, discussions, essays, articles and information that would have been nothing but a wild fantasy in Alexander’s time, and in reading these very words as printed ink in a book or as pixels on a screen, you’re doing something that no Greek ever did. But ask yourself what difference it would make if these words were scratched into wax, painted on parchment or chiselled into stone. Even after 2,000 years, despite all the superficial differences in our technology, the electric dance of the human brain that turns letters into the ideas that fill our heads hasn’t changed at all. So much that is fundamental about the way we think never changes, and the same is true of the first chapter of our educational lives. The education of every human who has ever lived has begun in the same way: with stories.
It’s a fact of life that children get told what to do. As children, we’re encouraged and punished, rewarded and chastised, and if we pay attention to both the carrot and the stick, we can work out how we’re supposed to behave. This constant calibration of what’s acceptable helps us to learn what we should aim for, but it’s piecemeal. It happens in tiny increments, like a puzzle that we slowly piece together over the years of our childhood. Humans have always needed something stronger than the day-to-day interactions that shape us: something more consistent and more powerful. Humans have always needed stories.
For thousands of years children have been regaled with a relatively small selection of stories: those which comprise the great works of religion, and each culture’s selection of myths, fables, epics, legends and tales. Over and above the direction provided by our parents we have a pantheon of story-time models to learn from. We hear of the goodness and wisdom of the heroes and heroines, and they give us something to imitate.
Alexander’s favourite story was the Iliad, which is about the Greek war against the Trojans. The Iliad might not be considered appropriate for young children today because it’s largely comprised of graphic descriptions of warriors getting killed in a variety of gruesome ways – but it did have what all foundational stories of a culture need: authority. When schools first appeared in Greece and children started to learn how to write, they were made to copy out a famous line about the man they believed was its author. It is a famous and somewhat terrifying sentence, and it shows just how deeply his work saturated the minds of the Greek world: ‘Homer was not a man, but a god.’
What was true for Alexander then is still true for us now. Our earliest educational experiences – the stories that are repeatedly drummed into our young minds and which provide us with the values that our society is built on – aren’t designed to teach us how to think: they’re designed to teach us what to think.
And for good reason. Whatever ideal our culture stamps upon us, it has to do so when we’re young enough to be moulded. As children, we are the freshly poured wax that society presses into shape, and no matter how much any of us complains about ‘brainwashing’ in education, we should remember that it’s the foundation of education and has been since the dawn of humanity. When your blood boils at the unthinking absorption of ideals, remember that you only call it ‘indoctrination’ if you happen to disagree with the doctrine. Otherwise, you call it ‘education’. Every community passes on the culture that unites it, because without it, there would be no community of which to speak.
Stories, however, are not the only tool of what is sometimes called ‘social education’. When schools first appeared in ancient Greece, they also spent the majority of their time and effort in moulding children to become part of their society, and they achieved this, in large part, through sport. The poet Aristophanes’ portrait of ‘education in the olden days’ (in his play The Clouds) is almost entirely made up of exercise, the gymnasium and the pedotribe (the ancient Greek equivalent of a PE teacher). Even after the Greeks had made advances in philosophy, mathematics, literature and a whole host of other intellectual activities, if you’d asked the surrounding tribes what it was that made the Greeks Greek, they would have told you that as far as they could tell, it was running around a gymnasium without any clothes on.
Mount Olympus was chosen as the venue for the athletic competition that united the Greek world – the Olympic Games – because it was an ancient and well-known religious site. The various Greek city-states (whose citizens otherwise spent plenty of time trying to kill each other) agreed a truce once every four years so that they could come together and compete there, under the watchful eye of a 40-foot-tall statue of the god Zeus. Today, staging an athletics event in a holy place might be considered sacrilege, but for the Greeks it was just the opposite: it was a way of uniting themselves in a form of worship. Today we sometimes say that sport is like religion, but we only mean it metaphorically. For the Greeks, sport wasn’t just like religion: it was religion.
In the same way that religion makes use of rituals that give everyone a chance to do something together, and so create a sense of community, such was the function of sport in ancient Greece. When you add to that the values of a sporting culture – the honesty, fair play and moral conduct that we call sportsmanship – you have not just a way of behaving, but countless occasions and opportunities to instil and reinforce this behavioural code as a community.
As well as preparing to take part in the athletics that shaped Greek culture by getting thumped around the gymnasium by the pedotribe (who carried a forked stick for the purpose), Greek boys also learned how to play the lyre and sing patriotic songs, which further reminded them of the behaviour that was expected of them. Of course, to learn songs, it helps to be able to read, and they were given lessons in reading too. But, as the historian of education Henri Marrou puts it, the teacher of literacy was ‘third in order of origin and, for a long time, third in order of value too’. What he means is that Greek parents were far more concerned that their children should grow up to be well-behaved and able to take part in the sport and music that brought everyone together. It is an irony of educational history that we now use the word ‘pedagogue’ as a sexier, upmarket version of the more everyday word ‘teacher’ – because the original pedagogue was a slave whose job it was to accompany the children to every lesson to make sure that they behaved themselves.
It’s easy to think of school as being a place where you go to learn different skills, but in the same way that few of us who learn to play a sport or an instrument at school go on to become professionals, Greek schooling was first and foremost about learning to be a part of the group. Imagine yourself sitting around a sixties campfire, where being part of the group means knowing the words and the meaning of songs – the words that express what the group believes – not being the show-off drawing individual attention by playing a technically demanding solo while everyone else is trying to sing together.
Today, we fail to recognise all of the activities that we do at school that are designed to teach us what we need to know (or know how to do) in order to become part of our societies. The drive to socially educate – to teach the values that define our society and culture, and the activities that bring us together – is still alive and well. The emphasis on sport in American universities is one example, where educational institutions in relatively small towns own stadiums that are larger than those of most European professional sports teams, and which are packed to the rafters for every game. The playgrounds full of Chinese children swaying in a unison of tai chi are another. The hymns about what’s right and what’s good that have been learned and sung by generations of schoolchildren in Britain, or the sportsmanship and fair play that’s part of learning to play cricket are all echoes of the music, poems and sport that have been part of what goes on in schools for thousands of years. One way that an English person can express their belief that something is unjust or not the accepted way of doing things is to say that it ‘just isn’t cricket’. There is no school in the world where children are not lectured to in some form or another about the values that we hold dear: selflessness, charity, respect and a hundred other desirable and essential ideas. Although we don’t always notice it, a great deal of what we learn at school, and what we learned from our childhood stories, has nothing to do with learning to think.
The real problem, however, with the stories, sports, music and activities that define the culture into which we are born, is not that they teach us what to believe instead of how to think. The real problem with social education is that it couldn’t teach us to think even if it wanted to.
There comes a point in our lives when most of us want to exchange the simple obedience of childhood for the freedom of thinking for ourselves; and, just as this happens to us as individuals, it happened to the whole of Greek culture. Around 500 BC, the people of Athens did something remarkable that changed the world forever: they tried out something they called ‘democracy’. Whether democracy was the cause or the result of other changes that were going on in the Greek world is hard to say, but as the historian Thucydides tells us: ‘the Athenians were the first who laid aside arms and adopted an easier and more luxurious way of life.’ A period of wars, invasions and migrations was coming to an end, and with killing on the wane and talking on the rise, the emphasis shifted from brawn to brains.
The heroes of that pre-democratic time had been more martial in character. Alexander’s hero was the warrior Achilles: the protagonist of Homer’s Iliad. Achilles is the equivalent of our modern action hero: he’s not terribly bright, but he is fantastically brave, incredibly bold and extremely talented at killing his enemies. Homer’s second story, however, which was a kind of sequel to the Iliad, reflected the changing times with a new hero. The protagonist of the Odyssey is the smart and wily Odysseus, who is a cross between an eloquent and inspirational wartime politician, a resourceful secret agent and a special forces operative. Here we see a culture that was in the process of becoming more like ours: a culture that has noticed that the people who get ahead in life aren’t just those who know how to bash other people over the head to get their own way. Achilles is about war, bravery, blood, and fighting your way out of trouble, but Odysseus has other options too: he’s able to talk his way out of trouble. When it comes to having intelligent things to say – Achilles, the less modern hero, had to step aside to let Odysseus show us how it’s done. But – and it’s a big but – it’s here that we run into the real problem with the stories of traditional social education: when you read Homer, you never get to see how it’s done.
In Homer’s epic poems, the cause of almost every instance of genius or stupidity is something mysterious: a god. When the leader of the Greek army makes a terrible decision that nearly loses them the war and results in the death of many of the story’s much-loved characters, he blames it on Zeus. He says that his judgement was turned upside-down by the king of the gods; that he was sent into a state of confusion. He’s not just making excuses to see if he can get away with stupidity either: one of the men who suffers because of his bad decision agrees with him, saying, ‘Zeus the counsellor took away his understanding’. In the same way, when Odysseus’ son finds himself having nothing clever to say to a great king, the goddess Athene says to him: ‘where your own intelligence fails, a god will inspire you.’
Homer simply had no way of explaining why some people can do things with their mind that others can’t, and the same is true of the great works of religion that are still read today. Just as it was in the Homeric epics, the only way you get to be smart or brave is through the power of a god.
Every culture dangles dreams of a sharp mind in front of us, but stories have a fatal educational flaw: they tell us which target to aim for, but say nothing about how to hit it. Today we still tell stories and watch films and TV programmes that paint portraits of both smart and brave heroes, but even our modern fictions make no mention of how the smooth-talking characters who see the solutions that we fail to notice actually do what they do.
The stories of old, written in a distant age of gods, magic and witchcraft, had no way of showing us around the mind because they didn’t have any idea what it was, how we might understand it, or how we might use it. For the majority of human history, we’ve believed that intelligence is a gift from a god or fate because so much of our mental world was a mystery. Without being able to talk about what goes on inside our heads it’s difficult, if not impossible, to harness the power of our incredible minds.
The education that introduces us to the culture into whose embrace we are born is not an education in thinking; but it does teach us something important: that in order to become smarter, we need a way of talking about thinking. The first step towards changing the way you think is to realise that we need more than a finished portrait of intelligence: we need the ideas that explain intelligence and show us how to sharpen it.
A New World of Intellectual Possibility
The social education of classical Greek culture gradually took shape over the centuries: turning stories, sport and music into social glue just as we do today. But then everything changed. At a time when Athenian parents only wanted their kids to be well behaved and able to take their place in society, along came a group of teachers from other parts of the Greek world whose main interest wasn’t manners, modesty or trying to fit in. What these foreigners offered was a course in outwitting, outfoxing and outmanoeuvring; a sharp-toothed and silver-tongued approach to education that promised not community cohesion, but individual ability.
The steady advance of democracy that had begun in the 6th century BC meant that, increasingly, you could only be truly powerful if you were as good with words as you were with a sword. Today, not much has changed: those who get ahead in life know how to persuade other people that they’re right. Education adapts itself to changes in our cultural environment so that we can thrive in the inevitable competition to survive it, and when this enigmatic group of foreign teachers turned up in Athens claiming to be able to transform anyone into an invincible machine of argument and persuasion, they found that they could charge a fortune and still attract plenty of interest. They were known as the Sophists, and before long they became rich celebrity figures basking in the spotlight of fame and adored by a circle of devoted pupils. But the strength of speech and the power of persuasion had long been highly valued; Homer’s epic stories are full of eloquent characters and important speeches. So what exactly had the Sophists discovered that gave them the edge in the arms race of thinking?
It all starts with sounding good. When it comes to convincing other human beings to agree with you, content isn’t everything. It’s possible to make exactly the same point in two different ways, and somehow, one will sound convincing while another doesn’t persuade at all. The Sophists weren’t the first to discover that this is true, but they were the first to be able to teach others how it works.
In the year 427 BC, despite the fact that Athens had already witnessed some of the greatest orators in history, a Sicilian by the name of Gorgias arrived in town and quickly earned himself an astonishing reputation. Even Plato, who was highly suspicious of all things Sophistic, said that Gorgias was ‘popularly regarded as the best speaker ever to have addressed the Assembly’. What was Gorgias’ secret? It was rhetoric: the art of persuasion.
What Gorgias realised was that there are ways of saying things that make them not only more memorable, but more convincing too. Have you ever noticed how difficult it is to remember a couple of lines of text? I’d bet that you’re unable to quote much prose – say, a speech, an essay, a newspaper article or an extract from a novel – but that without much trouble, you could remember enough song lyrics to fill a modestly sized book. There’s something about the rhythm and rhyme of poetry that makes the words stick in our heads. What Gorgias realised was that there’s a relationship between what sounds good, what sticks in our memory and what has the power to persuade.
But what does it mean to ‘sound good’? Essentially, the answer has to do with patterns. We love a bouncing rhythm of consonants, vowels or syllables. We especially love things in threes. There are phrases that combine patterns of all of those things and they’re so catchy that some of them are still stuck in our minds hundreds of years after they were written. There’s Julius Caesar’s ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’, which sounds even better in the original Latin: ‘veni, vidi, vici’. In Shakespeare’s play about Caesar, Mark Anthony opens his speech with the immortal line: ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ … and every Tom, Dick and Harry knows that one should tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as well as being aware of the advice we should bear in mind when buying a house: location, location, location. But back to education, education, education …
There is something about our minds that’s drawn to patterns, and this is what causes particular arrangements of sounds and ideas to be both more memorable and more persuasive. Gorgias was a master of turning reasonable ideas into patterned reasonable ideas that stuck in your mind because of the way they sounded. He famously advertised his skills by writing model speeches, and the best known of these is one in which he tries to convince us that the person who was to blame for the war that we hear about in the Iliad isn’t a Greek queen, but a Trojan prince:
And how would it not be reasonable for a woman
raped and robbed of her country
and deprived of her friends
to be pitied rather than pilloried?
He did the dread deeds; she suffered them.
It is just, therefore,
to pity her, but to hate him.
This short extract (here translated skilfully by the classicists Dillon and Gergel) shows off an amazing density of patterns. There are patterns of vowels, consonants, syllables and even ideas. The rhythm of raped/robbed, her country/her friends, pitied/pilloried and he did/she suffered makes an impact that we feel on a level that we’re not entirely aware of and don’t control. When Gorgias writes that speeches work like ‘drugs over the nature of bodies’, he’s not only describing the power to influence the way we feel; he’s also pitching himself as a doctor of persuasion. He’s saying that there is a system to be understood, and in the same way that our bodies are similar enough for a doctor to learn the system and be able to help us, the same is true of our minds.
Gorgias is the great-grandfather of political soundbites, advertising slogans and slippery rhetoric. He was one of the first to draw up and teach a system of the most effective ways to sex up a speech and make it work like a Jedi mind trick – except the Jedi mind trick is a fantasy, and rhetoric is real. As if you had waved a magic wand in front of their face, people can be made to agree with things that they might otherwise have dismissed as ridiculous, and this was how Gorgias revealed something about thinking that had never really been explored. What Gorgias realised was that the mind is not a mystery; it could be examined and understood.
The power of persuasion can be subtle, but there is another ability that always leaves us staggered: memory. In the modern age, our technology allows us to carry around huge quantities of information and frees us from having to remember things like shopping lists or wedding speeches. We’re especially impressed by people who can speak for an hour without a note in sight, or remember our names despite having met us only once at a party three years previously. We are enchanted by people who can easily pluck dates, facts and figures from the depths of the mind that we just can’t seem to reach. But, like persuasion, memory is not as magical as we think.
In one of the books that Plato wrote about him, the Sophist Hippias is depicted as boasting that he can ‘reel off fifty names after hearing them only once,’ to which Socrates replies: ‘You’re right: I wasn’t taking your mnemonic technique into account.’ What Socrates is alluding to is that what Hippias is able to do is something that anyone can learn. It’s simply a matter of technique; and just like Gorgias’ rhetoric, it’s a technique that relies on patterns.
The technique that transforms our memories was attributed by the Greeks to a man called Simonides, who, according to legend, had momentarily left a party when an earthquake struck, squashing everyone inside into an unrecognisable pulp. Being the only survivor, it fell to Simonides to try and spare everyone the ignominy of a group burial. If only he could remember exactly who was at the party and where they were sitting when the roof collapsed …
Of course, I wouldn’t be telling you the story if Simonides hadn’t been able to do exactly that, but remember that this book isn’t about smart people; it’s about the ones who can make us smarter. Simonides’ stroke of genius wasn’t his feat of memory itself: it was realising that the feat had been made possible by a pattern. Had the evening been a cocktail party or a disco, Simonides would have had a problem because the guests would have been milling around in disorganised chaos. This party, however, was a banquet, and at a banquet, everyone sits in their place. What Simonides realised was that having to remember where everyone was sitting didn’t make it harder to name everyone who was at the party; it made it easier.
Simonides used this insight to develop the idea of the ‘memory palace’: an imaginary space that we know inside out and which we can use to help us ‘place’ things in a pattern that helps us to remember them. The colours of the rainbow seem to us to be seven unconnected words – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet – until we organise them into something simpler: a sentence or phrase that sticks in our mind as a single and complete unit rather than seven separate ones. In the United States this is the fictional character Roy G. Biv, and in England, the sentence/story ‘Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain’. We make up songs to remember things because the musical and rhyming pattern makes them stick in our heads, like the childhood songs about the order of the letters in the alphabet or the position of the bones in the body. Today, the concept of mnemonics has come a long way, and we’ve discovered all sorts of techniques that take advantage of how our minds work. Beyond acronyms and the memory palace, there are even more advanced techniques that make it possible to memorise an entire pack of playing cards, a long list of US presidents or World Cup winners, or a truly astonishing number of the infinite digits of pi.
Memory, like persuasion, is something that works the same for all of us because we all have human brains that work in fundamentally the same way. Both abilities can be improved by understanding a system of patterns, but what memory shows us is something that persuasion struggles to make clear. The differences between our relative powers of persuasion are not always obvious because persuasion is a subtle game. On the other hand, when we meet people who are able to remember an improbable quantity of names, phone numbers or anything else, we can’t help but think that they must have been born with a special ability. When we see someone perform a seemingly miraculous feat of memory, most of us are convinced that it’s the result of a talent given to them by God, by fate, or by having been dealt a good hand in the genetic lottery of life. When the Greeks noticed that knowing something about patterns makes you appear to have inexplicable and almost magical powers, they became the first to realise that they could shape their own intelligence rather than just accepting it.
In seeing the potential of techniques and patterns, Gorgias and Hippias were able to offer something new and exciting to the sons of the rich Athenian aristocrats who could afford their extravagant fees, but the most important pattern of all was still out of reach. The patterns of mnemonics help us to memorise, and the patterns of rhetorical language help us to sound more stylish and more convincing, but there is another set of patterns that’s always at work no matter what we talk or think about. Underlying every conversation, every decision, every theory and every argument is a pattern that no one invented or created, but which no one can ignore: logic.
Sometimes we call it reasoning or inference or working out, but whichever label we start from, we can’t deny that the pattern exists. When reasoning fails – when we recognise a pattern of logic that doesn’t add up – we use a powerful word to describe it: contradiction. Contradiction doesn’t care what any of us believe. When someone points out that what you’ve just said doesn’t make sense – that you’ve contradicted yourself – what can you say to them? That you don’t care? That it doesn’t matter?
The patterns of memory and stylish speeches are undoubtedly useful, but they don’t underpin the way we think and argue. Gorgias and Hippias promised amazing specific skills, but it was another Sophist called Protagoras who managed to outdo them both (in his attempt to steal their business) by claiming that he could provide the holy grail of general intelligence: critical thinking.
Protagoras’ promise was that he could turn his students into experts in ‘decision-making’ in both their private and public lives. He believed that a crucial part of a good education is ‘being able to see when the claims made by poets and songwriters make sense and when they don’t’. Today, we could replace ‘poets and songwriters’ with ‘politicians and journalists’, among others. Protagoras promised that he could teach anyone to use their powers of reasoning to transform the way they think and argue, no matter who they were talking to or what they were talking about.
When Protagoras offered an all-round transformation of the general mind (rather than just a more stylish way of speaking and a better memory), he managed to attract a lot of pupils and make a lot of money, but he couldn’t make good on his promise. His understanding of reasoning was competent enough to make him an excellent debater and a subtle mind. But by simply calling this ability by different names – ‘making sense’ and ‘decision-making’ – he fell into the trap of being clever, but not clever enough to explain to other people how he was doing it.
Education began as social education and not much else. The traditional social education that has shaped human societies for tens of thousands of years has always aimed to create community through unity. It is inevitable and essential, but its task is to teach us what to believe, not how to think.
Early man stared up at the heavens and prayed for wisdom or goodness. He was barely aware that he had a mind at all. If some of us were geniuses or idiots, he thought it was because God had blessed some people and cursed others. He had no words to describe what went on inside his own head, so he resigned himself to prayer, or simply hoping that fate or luck would send some brainpower his way. In the same way, traditional social education leaves us powerless because it lacks the one thing that’s essential to educate the mind: an understanding of how it works.
The Sophists made a true education of the mind possible by discovering and describing – for the first time in history – something fundamental and universal about its nature. The first step in this journey was to realise that all of our minds are structured in the same basic way. In our responses to the patterns of sounds and ideas, in the effect of techniques based on patterns to transform our memory, and in our use of the patterns of reasoning, there are deep and enduring similarities. What the Sophists realised was that despite the differences between us, those basic similarities are there to be discovered if we look hard enough. Thinking isn’t random; it has rules.
This early insight into the nature of the human mind created the tantalising possibility of self-improvement, and the proof was in the results. By showing that mnemonic patterns could give anyone a memory so astonishing that it seems like magic to those who don’t know how it works, the Sophists opened up a new world of intellectual possibility. They were the first teachers to understand that amazing powers of persuasion, memory, thought and argument could be produced not just by talent, but by technique too. They wrestled education from the lap of the gods when they encouraged us, for the first time, to see that we didn’t have to wait for intelligence to be given to us. Intelligence is something we can give to ourselves.
When the Sophists discovered the patterns that exist in our minds and the fact that we can be taught to recognise them, they changed education forever. They had worked out the patterns of style and memory, and we still teach these today. The patterns of style, for example, are taught in every school: alliteration, assonance, repetition, things in threes. We still like to dress up our thinking in nicer-sounding phrases. Mnemonics is still around, though less common than ever, because today there are so many ways to make yourself a note of things easily forgotten. What’s mostly absent, though, is what Protagoras promised but couldn’t deliver: being able to think for yourself, to make better decisions and to survive in any conversation, or any argument, on any topic whatsoever.
So, what are the patterns at work in every conversation on any topic? This general intelligence – this holy grail that we call critical thinking – only became a possibility once Aristotle had discovered a particular set of patterns. Those patterns do far more than make us sound persuasive or improve our memories: they reveal the fundamental and unavoidable principles that underpin the way we think.
