What if everyone thought that way…
(Or, the beauty of non-conformism.)
In one of the many magnificent set pieces of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
In the world of science, examples of unorthodox thought that ultimately sweeps away a whole body of ill-formed ideas abound, as do examples of the hard road that the non-conformist must often trek — Galileo Galilei, for instance, found himself under indefinite house arrest for supporting Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the solar system. These days, a proposal that the sun revolves around the earth would be so ridiculous that it wouldn’t even draw ridicule, never mind the attention of the Inquisition.
In a lovely, scathing testament to his burning disdain for orthodoxy, Arthur Schopenhauer subtitled his essay On The Basis of Morality “not awarded a prize by the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies.” (His was the only entry to the competition.)
And just yesterday, MIT sued Frank Gehry’s architecture firm claiming design and construction failures in its Stata Center which has developed cracks, leaks and other problems. “These things are complicated,†Gehry said, “and they involved a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong. A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small.â€
Many at MIT are happy with Gehry’s construction, as the NY Times reports: “It is a joy to work in this building,†said Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics, “and I know that many of its occupants feel the same as I do about it. We asked Frank to give us a building that fostered communication, and he delivered.â€
But it seems that Gehry is no stranger to disgruntled clients. Sometimes the very isolation of the lone voice speaks to the depth of its insight.
There’s an important philosophical aspect of non-conformism that I think we do well as a society and as individuals to remember. Human understanding works through three important processes:
1. Direct, immediate understanding. (A baby knows instinctively to reach for its mother’s nipple when hungry.)
2. Received understanding. Â (What we know or think we know from being told or from reading or otherwise learning about how things work.)
3. Deduced, rational understanding. (What we piece together rationally from what we observe.)
The rational non-conformist then works from the third kind of understanding to debunk flawed examples of the second kind. Galileo used scientific observation to unseat the non-scientific theories of the geocentric worldview. When someone speaks out against an established understanding, then, we should ask ourselves whether that established understanding is something that we have simply accepted as fact, or whether we have arrived at it ourselves through a process of rational examination. If our answer is that we have no reason to believe it other than that everyone else seems to believe it, we should consider giving the non-conformist view our diligent attention.
This is, I think, what the Buddha had in mind when he said the following:
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” — Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha), 563-483 B.C.
It’s perhaps not immediately obvious how this applies to Gehry; but I think it does. Implicit in Gehry’s architecture is the debunking of our expected ideas of what a building should look like. Apart from some very creative and aesthetically adventurous designs, his work says, “you don’t need to start with four walls at right angles.”
The wonderful thing about non-conformists of course is that they break the mold not just for themselves but for all future generations. We’ll never go back to believing that the sun revolves around the earth (well, most of us won’t). And, post-Gehry, innovative architects will never be afraid to make buildings look like we don’t expect them to look.
Tags: arthur-schopenhauer, conformism, copernicus, frank-gehry, galileo-galilei, heliocentricty, mit, mit-stata-center, non-conformism, philosophy