What do you think? It’s a question we’re asked more and more, and we’re always expected to have an answer. Radio and TV programmes invite listeners to share their thoughts on whatever is being discussed, as though two minutes of information on a subject was enough to turn anyone into an informed commentator.
Instant pontification is the younger sibling of instant gratification, both members of a the now generation in which immediacy is highly valued. Consumerism made many things available without delay but there is one thing we have lone believed to have instant and infallible access to: the contents of our own minds.
In fact, modern psychology has shown that if anything, when it comes to our beliefs, the opposite tends to be true. Stop someone and ask their opinion on something and they will generally give you one. The problem is that very often they’ve made it up on the spot, usually without realising that’s what they’re doing. So when pollsters ask members of the public what they think about a fictional politician, many say they do or do not like them. The British comedian Chris Morris took this to absurd extremes when he stopped people in the street and asked them nonsense questions like “Heavy electricity: good or bad?”, getting opinionated answers.
Quick, on-the-spot reactions also sometimes expose unconscious beliefs that we do not endorse on reflection. Most of us don’t think we’re prejudiced, for example, but take Harvard University’s Implicit Bias test and you’ll almost certainly find out that when you make quick judgments, you do draw on racist and sexist stereotypes.
The assumption that the speed and transparency of what we report about ourselves is an indicator of its authenticity needs junking. We should instead embrace the idea that who we really are is much more complicated and interesting than that. Take our prejudices. It’s too simplistic to say that the Implicit Bias test proves we’re all “really” bigoted. What it rather shows is that we are all complicated, and that our all-things-considered belief that we are all equal is in tension with some reflexive, intuitive reactions we have developed over our lifetimes. Knowing ourselves requires being aware of both these elements, something that requires a reflective, critical self-awareness that is a far cry from simply examining the contents of our minds as though they were glass fishbowls.
We should also be less attached to the opinions we can trot out on demand and be more interested in what we would think after having thought about it. I’ve long liked E.M. Forster’s line in Aspects of the Novel, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” It rings true for me because one of the reasons why I write is that it is a way for me to process information and come to some understanding of it. A lot of this processing is unconscious, so there is a real sense in which it is only when the words appear typed on the screen that I finally see what it is I do think.
We should also break the link between knowing something and being able to readily recall it. I’m acutely aware of this at the moment because my new book, How The World Thinks, comes out in October and I’m going to have to talk about it. To do that, I’m going to have to re-read it quite carefully. I learned so much researching the book and put a lot into it that I did not know before. As a result, there’s much there that I can’t just recall at the click of my fingers. You could say that means I don’t know everything that’s in my own book. I think it makes more sense to say that what I know is more or less accessible to me, rather like the things I own. Some things I can recall instantly, others take a little rummaging around in my head to find.
Writing this, what I have discovered I believe is that we should stop treating instantaneity as the mark of authenticity. What we find at the tips of our tongues or our fingers does not necessarily most deeply reflect who we are. If we always offer our instant reactions, in person or online, we give more time and space to our surface selves, allowing them to mute our more reflective sides. The sea is more than just the waves, the surface only a part of the deeper whole.
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