Living the examined life

Living the examined life
October 23, 2001
By Peter Stair

I had a thought recently that I’ve been distilling for some time: Now that the world is changing faster than ever, it is more useful than ever to embrace flexibility as our worldview. And I’m not sure whether Stanford is encouraging this or holding us back.

Let me explain.

The earth’s population has doubled in the past 50 years. The human economy of goods and services has increased almost seven-fold. And one-fourth of the world’s mammal species have gone extinct.

The pace of change is increasing, especially in America, where we now have fast food, overnight delivery services, multi-tasking, instant coffee and “door close” buttons on the elevator. When our grandparents were our age, TV did not exist, male and female college students were separated by dorm, blacks and whites were separated by colleges, clothes were less colorful and wordy, music did not pervade the air, airplanes did not fill the sky, traffic was not really an issue, computers were abacuses and the Internet was hardly imagined by science fiction writers.

In the face of such change, we are realizing that the adaptive response is not to cling to old ideas. The life experience of old people often seems irrelevant to us, something we emphasis by our worship of youth and storage of elders.

Business leaders, too, are acknowledging the importance of quick adaptation. Goldman Sachs’ new slogan is “Minds Wide Open.” Apple’s is “Think Different.” Bill Gates wrote a book called “Business at the Speed of Thought.” Business magazines now list “intuition” as a key trait of good CEOs, because the marketplace is changing so fast that they must operate “by instinct.” The business mantra is “the only constant is change.”

Is Stanford responding well to the era of “Question Everything?”

We learn how much has changed since the time we were hunters and gatherers. We learn how different human cultures can be. Numerous professors would say that they encourage questioning. And those who study the scientific method understand that enduring uncertainty (open-mindedness) is a key element in the evolution of knowledge.

Willingness to question has long been a trait of successful leaders, because by separating themselves from dogma, they see possibilities. We know this. We are taught this.

We know that Genghis Khan conquered much of the world because he saw new ways of organizing an army and using horses. We know that Copernicus revolutionized our conception of the universe because he was willing to reconsider Ptolemaic dogma. And we know that Henry Ford succeeded brilliantly because he saw the possibility of using an assembly line in his plants. We learn about “thinking outside the box.”

We are even taught that institutions like Stanford have counter-productively resisted change. Universities and churches did not respond well to Darwin’s observations about evolution, to the calls of American abolitionists or to the emergence of chaos theory.

But, still, Stanford is a big and respected institution. And both those adjectives mean: “slow to change.” Almost without doubt, we will learn the ideology of our society here, and we will probably think that much of it is not worth questioning. Almost without doubt, by going to such a conventional university, we will limit our imaginations.

I’ve been surprised to find such a large number of students who are aware of the huge social revolutions of the past and vast differences in cultural ideologies but still confine themselves to fairly mainstream lives.

I’ve been surprised to find, in myself and others, such an unwillingness to question why we’re attending Stanford at all. Will my life be more satisfying if I go here? If so, why aren’t our professors more joyful? Are the billions of people who have no access to a college education condemned to less satisfying lives? If I want to learn engineering, why not just pay a professional engineer for an apprenticeship?

My point isn’t really that we shouldn’t be “mainstream,” or that Stanford is a waste. I just think that those who are serious about questioning everything end up living more successful lives. Psychologists talk about the “self-actualization” that comes from being a self-defined, often non-conventional, person.

And here is my real point: because we are on the verge of a “turning point,” or “tipping point,” or “revolution,” we live in a world of possibilities.

Whether we call it a transition from the Cenozoic to the Technozoic Era, or an Ecological Revolution like the Industrial Revolution, or a shift into the Information Age, we know we’re seeing big changes. And we have the chance to influence the direction of these changes if we are able to visualize new possibilities.

As change becomes more rapid, so should our questioning become deeper.

Peter Stair is a junior majoring in human ecology. Once upon a time, he lived in Alaska and worked for Ralph Nader. By attending Stanford, he thinks he experiences cognitive dissonance. He wants you to e-mail him at pstair@stanford.edu.