Lee Harris

I am talking to you today for one reason and one reason only. It is because I was asked to talk to you by John Hibbs. I almost called him my friend, John Hibbs, but I corrected myself before I said it. This is because while John is my friend now, he wasn't my friend when he first asked me to talk to you today. All that John knew about me then was that I had written an article that he had found posted on the internet.

Sometimes, as you know, when you read an article on the net, it will provide you with some biographical information about the person whose words you are reading. But this was not the case with my article. The Policy Review website offered no clue to who I was, or why I had been asked to write a piece on Al Qaeda. And even if John had gone and gotten himself a hard copy of the relevant issue of Policy Review, he would have discovered little more to enlighten him than the tight-lipped description of the article's author as "a writer who lives in Atlanta," quote unquote.

But John Hibbs is not a man who is happy to remain ignorant when he believes there is an alternative. And that is why John decided to track me down. He sent me an email and out of this we began to have a number of telephone conversations. And it was during the courses of these often very long conversation that John asked me to speak to you today.

For me these conversations have been delightful; but for John there was a sense of growing frustration and impatience. And the reason for this is both simple and understandable. John wanted me to give an address, but he also wanted to be able to tell you why he had chosen me instead of someone else. He wanted to assure you that I was worth listening to, before you actually had to listen to me.

So John's challenge was this: How was he to persuade other people that I was a person worth listening to? And this challenge was not made any easier for John by the fact that he had to first of all persuade me. For the question I had to ask myself was the same question any sensible person should be asking himself right now, namely, What makes this guy's words so damn important?

And this forced me to start thinking. What, after all, makes anyone's words so damn important? What is it, in short, that makes us shut our own mouths and actually listen to what someone else has to say?

Sometimes we listen to other people because they are authorities on the subject they are addressing.

For example, if a man has penetrated into the rain forests of the Amazon, and has lived amongst a tribe whose existence was previously unknown to the world, we will keep our mouths shut and listen to him as he describes the customs and mores of the tribe in question. And we will do this because he knows something that we do not know‹indeed, something that we will probably never even have a chance to know first-hand. We have to take his word for it, or else make the arduous journey down the Amazon for ourselves.

Or take another example: we attend the lectures of a man who has dedicated many years to deciphering ancient texts from their original language. And here again when he explains to us the significance of a certain text, we acknowledge his authority in exactly the same sense that we acknowledge that of the explorer.

Most of what we know‹or at least think we know‹comes from listening to the authority of those who have had experiences that we simply will never have ourselves. They are reporting back to us their findings concerning things that we will never know first hand. This is how we know about the year of the Battle of Hastings and how we know that Socrates was condemned to drink hemlock by the people of Athens or that John Kennedy's father was ambassador to England. Indeed, as a thought experiment, try imagining how much you would know about the world if you were suddenly to discard all this second- and third-hand information. Precious little is the answer.

So what about the bumper sticker that tells us to QUESTION AUTHORITY?

Like most advice, this sounds much more impressive before you try to follow it than after you have tried and failed. For how do you question the authority of a scholar in an ancient language if you don't happen to know a single word of this language? Or how do you criticize the report of an Amazon explorer when you don't quite remember which continent the Amazon runs through? Here, to question authority intelligently you would have to become an authority yourself‹but even the longest lifetime and the most brilliant mind will not permit you to achieve such authority in more than a handful of subjects.

And this means that if we want to know about the world beyond our own narrow range of experience, we are forced to take a vast amount of information on faith. And this is precisely what we do when we look up information in an encyclopedia or a world atlas or when we search the world wide web for reliable sources.

And here the operative word is reliable. When our dashing Amazon explorer is telling us about his lost tribe, for example, imagine how we would feel if we discovered that he wasn't really an explorer at all, but just an accountant who had never stepped foot outside his home in Birmingham, England, and who had merely decided to pretend to be an explorer on a lark.

Obviously we would be outraged at the fake explorer‹but probably not half so outraged as we would be at the person who had talked us into coming to hear the fake explorer in the first place.

And here you see the plight in which my friend John Hibbs found himself when he invited me to speak to you. Was I like the fake explorer in my analogy? Was I only pretending to claim an expertise in the psychological motivations of Al Qaeda? Or could he point to something in my Curriculum Vitae and say, "Ah ha---there it is. That's is why you should listen to him." A PhD in Arab studies, for instance? Or in the Psychology of Fanaticism? Had I ever been introduced on CNN as An Expert in Terrorism?

Regrettably, I could offer John Hibbs none of these things. Search through my life with the most powerful search engine, and you will find no link connecting me to any hint of a professional qualification or any suggestion of a suitable credential. In short, judged objectively, there was no more likelihood that I might shed light on the motivations of Al Qaeda than your stock broker or your automobile mechanic. And hence no more reason to listen to me than to them.

But, in fact, unlike our fake explorer, I have never made any claim to the contrary. When I wrote the article on Al Qaeda I was not writing from the point of view of someone whose statements were the result of any special expertise or claims to authority. And unlike our Amazon explorer, I was not basing my claims‹whether bogus or valid--on some alleged fund of first-hand experience that I had had, but which my readers had not. Nor was I relying on long years of scholarly preparation that put my conclusions beyond the critical reach of anyone lacking the same intellectual background.

All that I was working with was exactly what my reader had to work with‹the personal experience of 9-11. And even this was not the first-hand experience of those who were there, watching in horror, as the towers collapsed, but the experience of someone living in Georgia, who saw it all for the first time on his TV screen, in a taped replay of the disaster.

It is this fact that I have tried to bring to John Hibbs' attention, and which I am now trying to bring to yours. I have seen nothing that you have not seen as well, and with your own eyes. But then I saw nothing that John Hibbs had not seen with his own eyes either.

So the question I then had to put to my friend John Hibbs was a very simple one, "Why did you pick me? What was it in the article I wrote that had motivated you to call me up and ask me to be a keynote speaker? Because, whatever it was, it was the only thing I could possibly have to offer either to you or to anyone else." The only reason, in short, that John Hibbs could offer to others as a reason to listen to me was in fact a reason that John Hibbs already possessed in himself, and not a reason that I could provide for him out of even the most extensive resume of my life or of my various careers.

This reason is called Insight.

The man who has insight is not claiming to have a different set of experiences than you do. He is not like the Amazon explorer who has been where you have not, or who has seen things that you will never see. The man with insight is seeing exactly the same thing you are seeing. He has no privileged point of view.

Nor does the man with insight rely on any special background skills that you do not possess. It is not that he knows the secret code of what lies before you both, whereas you do not. In fact, he possesses no specific advantages that can be incorporated into a resume or into the byline of a bio.

Though this is exactly what you should expect from Insight. For if insight could be taught, if it could be made a matter of routine and training, then it would cease to be insight.

Insight is the ability to see the exact same thing that everyone else sees, but to see it in a fresh and original way. For insight, by its very nature, is always a challenge to the conventional wisdom. And this means that the man with insight cannot be a man who thinks within the famous box provided by the conventional wisdom of his particular time and of his particular peer group.

Insight is, by definition, an event that cannot be placed inside the box.

But if this is the case, how is it ever achieved? How, in short, does anyone even begin to think outside the box?

Many people try to do this on the cheap. If they have been raised according to their parent's values, they simply repudiate these values and adopt those of an alien group. Yet, in doing this, they have only moved their belongings from one box to another; and since converts to a new set of values are notoriously greater zealots than those for whom these same values are merely an inherited tradition, the ironical result of such re-locations is a radical decrease in the independence of the convert's thinking.

In fact it turns out there is only one way to think outside the box, and that is to forget about the box entirely. Don't let it cross your mind!

But how do you do this?

First, you must begin by realizing that all your ideas are conventional, and that if you decide to discard these and adopt a whole new set of ideas, these too will be just as conventional as the ones you have replaced them with. And you will accept this as a fact of life, just as you accept the fact that in using the English language you will invariably be using other people's words. You could of course begin to make up your very own language, but would anyone understand you? And isn't the same thing true about our ideas? If I were suddenly to begin speaking in words and concepts that had no meaning whatsoever to any of my possible listeners, would I be thinking outside the box, or simply speaking in tongues?

We must begin where we are‹and where others are too. For there is no surer truth than this: If you desire to be original for the sheer sake of being original, you will end up a third-rate imitation of a second-rate mind.

In short, don't worry where to start. Take whatever ideas your community happens to have on hand, and then use these ideas to make sense of the world around you. And if the conventional ideas are effective in this respect, keep them! Or as the slogan goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

But sometimes you will get a funny feeling. There will be a sense that something isn't quite right. One of the conventional ideas that you have been working with, taking it pretty much on trust, will suddenly lose its capacity to illuminate a problem for you. Or, to take an example from ordinary life, suppose you have a box of tools and you have set about to fix the engine of your car‹suddenly you discover a nut that none of your wrenches quite fits, or a screw that is compatible with neither a Philips head or a conventional screwdriver; or you are a carpenter and you go to drive a nail, and discover that you have shattered your hammer.

Now the exact same thing happens to ideas. And it is then‹and only then‹that we need to go out and find a replacement for the ideas that are no longer, for one reason or other, serviceable for our purposes.

This is what happened to me when I set about writing my article on Al Qaeda. I had tried all the other tools in our society's collective tool box, but I discovered to my dismay that none of them seemed to work.

This is the first stage of insight. It is the recognition that something doesn't quite fit‹the shock of discovering that there is a radical mismatch between the tools we are working with, and the project that we are working on. We are then in the position of a man coming home late at night and who tries his key in the lock of his door, only to find that it no longer works. The key represents our social fund of ideas, and the lock stands for the reality that we are trying to decipher through these ideas.

But to achieve this stage of insight is very difficult because it requires admitting that we don't understand something. And this is quite hard for many of us to do. But if we hope to ever have insight, it is an absolutely necessary step‹and this is where the virtue of intellectual honesty becomes imperative.

Intellectual honesty begins when you say, "I am missing something in this picture. There is something here I don't understand."

And this fact explains why intellectual honesty is so difficult.

First of all, it requires a personal act of humility. It compels me to admit that I don't have all the answers.

But, secondly, it raises the even more disturbing possibility that we collectively may not have all the answers. And this is another way of saying that the solution to the problem may not be found inside our box at all. And this requires not only an enormous degree of cultural, and not merely personal humility, but also a substantial fund of moral courage. And no where is this more true than in the case of a person who, aside from his own personal insight, has nothing else on which to base a claim to be worthy of other people's attention and consideration.

In my own case, all I had to offer were the thoughts I put down in my article‹thoughts whose value you were perfectly free to "test" for yourself in the exact same way that you can test to see if a tool I have handed you allows you to finish the project you are working on. Or, to use another one of our earlier metaphors, you and you alone had to be the judge of whether the key I had crafted---crafted only after having tried and rejected all the other conventional keys‹was the key that would unlock this particular door. And this meant that if it failed to work for you, then it did not greatly matter if I had been given the Locksmith of the Year Award twenty-seven times running, or if I had been by The New York Times as "America's Pre-eminent Locksmith"‹the key I had offered to you hadn't worked, and that is all that mattered to you. And it is all that should matter to you.

Authorities have a necessary place. They are there to help guide us through those realms of experience that you and I will never get a chance to learn about first hand. But there is another domain of experience where the over-reliance on authorities‹and on their credentials and paraphernalia of prestige‹can get us into trouble, both as individuals and as whole societies; and this occurs whenever the authority in question has set himself up as an authority over our own experience‹when he tells us what we are seeing with our own eyes, and when we begin to believe him, instead of our own eyes.

This, tragically, is becoming the paradigm of modern education. You are no longer being given merely the tools to create your own insights, but you are being handed a ready-made, pre-fabricated product, NO ASSEMBLY REQUIRED. But since you did not make it yourself, and, indeed, since you have not been given the skills by which you could ever make it for yourself, how will you know whether it is good or bad, useful or dangerous?

You will have no recourse but to do here what you do in the case of all other consumer goods, you will look at the brandname or check the label. You will seek our testimonials. You will call the better business bureau. You will want to know how many Awards of Recognition the manufacturer has been given. And you will do all of these things because you will have accepted the basic principle that you are not able, with your own resources, to figure out the value of the product for yourself. And, sadly, precisely because you have come to believe this, you are not able to figure it out, and never will be, so long as you buy into the consumer model of education.

My article on Al Qaeda was like a Do-It-Yourself project: I built it with my own hands, and I have the bruised knuckles to prove it. And as such it has both the benefits and the drawbacks of all such projects.

The benefits are entirely personal: When you have put something together yourself, you will always understand it in a radically different way than someone who has only seen the finished product: you will know its weaknesses and its strengths; you will see connections where others see none; you will know exactly how it works.

The drawbacks are that you are never quite sure when a professional carpenter will walk by and glance at your work and say, "You call yourself a carpenter?"

Which is why I have taken such pains not to call myself one, and why I refused to mislead my friend John Hibbs concerning my credentials, and why I refuse to mislead any of you listening to me today. I would love to provide guarantees that I know what I am talking about; but I cannot.

But then, I don't need to. And this is because what I am offering you today is exactly what I offered in my article on Fantasy Ideology. I am offering insight‹or, at least I am trying to. And an offer of insight does not need to come accompanied by a chaperone or escorted by a team of experts testifying to its authoritative status. For an offer of insight is only good if it is accepted in an act of insight. It cannot, like the word of an authority, be taken on faith, but must be met halfway. And indeed nothing kills insight more swiftly than the determination to take it on faith.

Insight occurs when what I have seen into, you may now see into yourself; where what I saw first with my eyes, you may now see with your own. You are not taking my word for it: you are verifying the truth of my word for yourself.

To go back to our Amazon metaphor, the person who offers an insight is like someone who has gone out in the morning to survey the next stage of the river, and who returns at evening to report on what awaits the following day. His only advantage is that he happened to get there first, and that he can now show us the way‹but once we have seen what he saw earlier, we can dispense with his assistance and decide for ourselves how to proceed.

This is my only source of authority. If I can say something that rings true for you; if I can point out something that you overlooked before, but which, after I have pointed it out, you can now see with your own eyes; if I can provide a new tool that fits perfectly into your hand and that you can now use to do all sorts of interesting things that would never have occurred to me to do with it, then‹and only then‹should you trust me, and even here, only with a trust that is provisional because it confidently expects to be replaced by genuine insight.

Nor should this be degraded as merely a "second-hand" insight because it has been inspired by someone else's historically prior act of insight. For each act of insight is equally fresh, equally original, and equally creative: the child who has suddenly grasped the truth of the Pythagorean theorem has achieved an insight no less astonishing than that achieved by Pythagorean two and a half millennia ago. His name will not replace that of the original discoverer, and yet his discovery is not a whit less original, provided he has truly had that all-decisive flash of insight.

For that is one of the mysteries of insight. Since it cannot manufactured to specifications, this means that such insight can come anytime, anywhere, and to the most unlikely people. The Great Austrian philosopher of science, Karl Popper, repeatedly stressed that while there were settled routines by which a scientific theory could be tested once it had been hit upon, there was simply no way of routinely hitting upon them in the first place. Each was an absolute discovery‹a revelation of what has been overlooked by others‹an insight. It might result from a dream; or from an accident; or from happening to chance across the right paragraph in the right book; or taking a bath. But in each instance the flash of insight is inevitably accompanied by a wonderful exclamation of "Ah ha! That's it. Eureka!"

And this proves to be the only valid test of insight when you stumble across it in another person. When you read his words, do you think, "Gosh, I have no clue what he is talking about. But he is a recognized authority, after all, so who am I to question him?" Or do you say, "Ah ha! That's it! That's just what I thought too‹only somehow I didn't see it before."

We have all had this experience‹it is the primordial experience of insight. And it is this experience that must be our litmus test for all those who wish to claim authority over our own first-hand experience of the world: Can they provide the same shock of recognition? Can they provide us with the means of making better sense of our world, however much they may claim to understand the world as such?

If they can, trust them‹but no farther than they continue to deserve your trust by frankly offering their alleged insights to your critical inspection.

If they cannot, then set them aside. You may simply not be ready for them yet. Or they may have nothing to offer you that you need or care to have, now or later.

And now the time has come to set me aside too.

My departing words of wisdom are simple. Ultimately there is only one authority you should listen to. It is the little bell that goes off inside your head and that informs you that you have heard something that makes sense, that strikes home, that puts it all into perspective. There are, in fact, a thousand picturesque ways of saying the same thing here, but they all come down to this: Has the person you have been listening to offered you an insight that illuminates your world, or has he simply added yet another opinion to the cacophony of discordant ideas and ideologies?

Cultivate the capacity for insight. Look for it. And treasure it when you find it. And pass it on, so that others may share in it. For it is only through insight that human beings can share the same truth and share it in the same way. Truths based solely on authority and expertise can never be the foundation of a genuinely democratic world, for they cannot never be shared in the same way.

A world in which insight must first prove its credentials is a world in which insight will no longer exist. And a world in which insight no longer exists will be, for all practical purposes, a world in which the human spirit is not longer living.

Let us do what we can to guard against this.

Thank you.

October 13, 2002

Global Learn Day VI