Taping up an Old Box
There’s a metaphor you’ve probably heard, but the fact that you’ve heard it verifies that it has become self-contradictory.
Outside the box.
We are encouraged to think outside the box. One of the great proponents of outside-the-box thinking is Edward de Bono, author of Lateral Thinking and pioneer in mapping techniques to come up with creative and unconventional ideas. Now, corporate boards, religious institutions, and political parties all tout their ability to think outside the box. The outside-the-box metaphor has been applied to other disciplines, too. The United Church Observer invoked the metaphor in reference to Gretta Vosper’s Progressive Christianity – she is believing outside the box. I’ve encountered it with sports development. “Train outside the gym,” says a poster stapled to a neighbourhood utility pole with an obvious tip of the hat to the well-worn phrase. Doing things outside the box is a virtue that deserves to be rewarded.
But what if thinking outside the box has become so commonplace that it’s just another box? Maybe it’s time to think outside the outside-the-box box – admittedly a paradox box if ever I saw one, but that can’t be any worse than the prevailing paradox of conventional originality, can it?
Pandora’s Box
There may be many reasons for the appeal of the outside-the-box metaphor, but several seem to be rooted in mythologies. The most obvious of these is the story of Pandora’s Box. As with its biblical counterpart, there’s a prohibition (don’t open the box; don’t eat the fruit), there’s a violation of the rule (the lid comes up, the fruit tastes sweet), and as with its biblical counterpart, what gets released into the world is an ambivalent knowledge – the knowledge of good and evil. (It’s noteworthy that the Greek root of the name Pandora is “all” + “gift”.) Sometimes these two tales are read as origin myths to account for the presence of evil in the world (primitive attempts at theodicy), but that misses the point: it is in our nature to know things, but the knowledge we gain often comes at a cost. On this account, there’s something sexy about thinking outside the box. It’s what bad boys do; it involves flouting the rules. So it turns out that thinking outside the box is really just another strategy to get laid.
America
The second myth also seems to have, as its primary purpose, the goal of getting laid – this is the myth of America. In fact, this mythos may have its intellectual roots in the Reformation, but its consequences bear their juiciest fruits in all that is secular America – it is the myth that couples a revolutionary spirit with rugged individualism. America (the myth, not the country) is the conviction that we each have the natural right to a self-actualizing experience (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) even if, collectively, we end up consuming more resources than the planet can provide as we scurry around being all we can be. It is the myth of the Marlborough Man (hack, hack, cough, gag); it is the myth of the self-reliant Thoreau philosophizing in his vegetable patch; and most recently it is the myth of the maverick John McCain (huh?). We might say, then, that one way to think outside the box is to apply good old American know-how (à la Ben Franklin, Tom Edison, and Angus MacGyver).
Genius
The third myth that lies surreptitiously beneath the appeal of the outside-the-box metaphor is the myth of genius. We have a long tradition of locating the source of good ideas and acute intuitions in a quasi-supernatural realm. The word, genius, is associated with those little demi-deities who sit on your shoulder and whisper things in your ear. Poets have always had Muses. And some have romanticized mental illness by suggesting that true genius is inaccessible to all but the mad – that madness is the price for rare insight (or vice versa depending on which is more onerous) – that madness opens the doors of perception to the infinite.
What is common to the different accounts of the genius myth is dissociation: you can’t think outside the box without the help of something that is already outside the box. It might be a hidden piece of the psyche, or a deity, a hallucinogenic drug, or a messed-up brain chemistry. Whatever the cause – or so the myth goes – everybody benefits, so it’s best to put up with the eccentric behaviours of your local genius who is, after all, powerless to do anything about the outside forces acting on her.
Except nowadays everybody’s mind is crackling with fresh knowledge, everybody’s a maverick with a daring new idea, everybody’s exploding with nuclear inspiration like nothing the world’s seen before. Now everybody’s zigging and zagging outside their boxes like ants outside the hill, and just like the ants, it’s hard to tell if anyone’s getting anywhere.
If every path we took were fresh, I’m afraid we’d exhaust ourselves breaking new ground, or we’d feel perpetually disoriented. If we were always being struck with the brilliance of the noonday sun, then soon we’d find ourselves walking through a burnt out wasteland.
There’s nothing wrong with thinking outside the box, but if that’s all we ever did, then we’d only ever be doing half of what it takes to have a complete thought. The problem with the outside-the-box metaphor is that it appeals to assumptions (myths) that ignore the social nature of thinking. Even thinking in solitude is a social act.
The recent rise of online collaborative tools like wikis and content management systems illustrate in a structured way what human beings have already been doing well since the first cave dweller grunted and his companion understood exactly what he meant. Language is the ultimate wiki. Not one of us has ever had a thought, whether inside or outside the box, without using this gift of language bequeathed to us and nurtured for us by our tribe. Apart from language, our assumptions, stories, and world views have all likewise been bequeathed to us by our tribe. Most of these bequests are foisted on us long before we are at an age to examine them critically, but there they are, imprinted on us whether we want them or not. We’re already in the box before we know what a box is, and yet we’d never be able to climb outside of it without first gathering up all the things we’ve found inside of it.
This explains why I am inclined to tweak the metaphor. I don’t want to think outside the box. I want to think with the box. I need the box, because it holds the only tools I have to do my work outside the box. For me, the best thinking happens when I think inside the box and outside the box simultaneously.
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