If only it were so.
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| Taboga Island, Panama, 2017 |
If only it were so. If only living by maxims, proverbs, folk and conventional wisdom would make life as predictable as “if you have twenty chickens and you buy twenty more, you will have forty chickens and twice as many eggs, twice as much income as you had before.” Life just ain’t as mathematical as the wisdom of Proverbs implies. Chickens get diseases and die, markets rise and fall, foxes get into the hen house, ducks might be a better choice altogether.
In today’s Western world, a badly skewed “market-system” governs the bulk of public affairs. It’s not hard to imagine—given this environment—that the greedy and sly son of a deceased mine owner will inherit the gold while the son who “pursues righteousness and love” will end up with the shaft. Prosperity in the proverb had better mean “prosperity of spirit,” because wealth as we generally know it doesn’t typically follow from the “pursuit of righteousness and love.”
I guess you can’t blame the source for the sequence of “wall motto” sayings that make up much of the book of Proverbs; retreating into convergent thinking is a common phenomenon while the option of thinking divergently—as Christ repeatedly urged his followers to do—is too demanding for most, both in the church and in general. “An eye for an eye” follows from convergent thinking; “but I say to you, love your enemies” opens up an avenue for divergent thinking. To insist on doing what we did yesterday and the day before because it worked, is convergent decision-making; to take into account the fact that today is never the same day as yesterday and that there may be any number of more-appropriate options is divergent decision-reaching.
It shouldn’t come as any surprise
that people will be attracted to the venues where convergent views
are most honoured. By the same token, divergence will
drive many away. It’s just too demanding to live without binding
rules and constitutions and bylaws, confessions and creeds written on
“stone tablets.”
We all know the broad vs. narrow road syllogism;
convergent thinking unfortunately tends to measure success
mathematically: “if many people are going there, it must be the
right way.”
“Insanity
[is] doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different
results.” The source of this maxim is apparently unknown, but it’s
definitely not Proverbs. Christ’s message to the Jewish
establishment of his time was more or less a pointing out of the
insanity in what they were doing. Their whole reason
for living
had converged
on law and ritual to the point where his liberality on issues like
the Sabbath was a threat they couldn’t, in the end, tolerate.
Our
politicians, our educators, our judiciary, our social services
workers, our NGOs, even our pastors and Sunday school teachers have
ended up expending far too much valuable energy trying to undo the
harm we’ve done to ourselves and our neighbours by approaching the
world with a purely convergent mindset. It’s driven our gay
and transgender children into ghettos and bath-houses, it drove the
inhabitants of North, Central & South America, Australasia and
Africa onto reserves or off the good land and into the wasteland or
the mountains.
Creating the means to make these mistakes right
demands commitment and energy that orthodoxy simply doesn’t have. A
maxim from Christ himself points toward liberality of thought and
action: if you store new wine in old wine-skins, bad things happen;
old wine-skins are too brittle to contain expanding contents.
For
all its flaws and missteps, we have a government today that recognizes
the need to think divergently
about aspects of the future. In an interview on CBC’s Power
and Politics yesterday,
Ralph Goodale made the obvious point: we’ve been doing the same
thing regarding cannabis for 95 years with poor results; it’s high
time we launched something new. Unfortunately, the same government
has chosen to side with the convergent
view
on pipelines and the tar sands. (News
flash:
a “green, renewable world” creates more and better jobs than does
the extraction, status quo world.)
Nothing
arouses anger like change, however. An unavoidable stumbling block
like climate change, for instance, demands the creativity that only
divergent thinking can produce. Our politics, our religious
institutions, our economic, education and social systems all have to
go there, though, or perish, and they’ll have to do their work
despite the threats and invective hurled from time to time by the
fossilized worldview of a loud, insistent, convergent-thinking cohort.
But
here’s the kicker: the best decision-making process seems to be
for convergent-thinking persons and divergent-thinking
persons to be seated around one table where the creative thinkers
will come up with ideas that may be radical, may seem liberal in some
settings, are decidedly new, and more convergent
thinkers add their particular strength and experiences to test
which divergent ideas have a chance of success. Unfortunately,
this requires a generosity of spirit not evident in our world where
more convergent, conservative thinkers and their opposites are
busy name-calling and expressing rage, where decisions are connected
to political victory or loss, the vanquishing of those with whom
we ought to be collaborating.
Unless
divergent thinking comes up with ways to make this stop, to
find better ways to do our politics, our theology, our education and
our social contracts, we’re doomed: democracy will give way
to corporate authoritarianism, the church of Christ will be reduced
to a hodge-podgery of unfriendly schisms and the role of educators
and leaders will be made irrelevant in a morass of populism and rage.
Am
I exaggerating? Feel free to tell me so. I hope I’m wrong.
For
a useful discussion on the differences between, and possible
collaboration of, the differing worldviews mentioned, click here.
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