hyper-criticism, clumsy shoes, and messy reality

I. 

I am good at analyzing a problem. Bring me into a situation or a work group, or hand me a book to read, and the skill I bring to the table is telling you what's wrong with it, often in minute detail. If I really get on a roll, I can become passionate about my analysis, and I will wrestle your wimpy defense of the status quo to the ground. 

I was well into my 30s before I realized that other people aren't always happy to be on the receiving end of my analysis. Why wouldn't people want to know what is wrong? Of course they will be grateful for my brilliance! Surely people wouldn't want to blithely, ignorantly carry on when I could helpfully point out to them how a situation (or their personality) could be improved? But shockingly to me, that is often the case. 

There are times--especially at the beginning of solving a problem-- when skills like mine are useful. But analysis is only one small part of problem-solving, and it's not the most important part. It is the easy part--figuring out how to solve a problem and moving forward into a new way of doing things is way harder than critiquing what's wrong. Getting stuck in an infinite critique loop where you are continually, more precisely, defining what's wrong is a great way to guarantee you'll never move forward.

II.

My senior year in high school, I took calculus, which was just the next class you took if you had passed all the advanced math classes you'd been enrolled in since seventh grade. There were maybe 25 students in the class, and we all knew each other because of those previous math classes. The teacher, Mr Arnold, was much beloved, one of the best teachers I've ever had.

One day he posed a hypothetical question: if you were walking toward a wall, and every step you took was half the length of the previous step, would you ever reach the wall? We smiled smugly. This was easy. Of course not. We were used to hypothetical questions, and clearly, if every step you took was only half as long as the previous one, you could never actually arrive at the wall. There would always be tiny, ever-shrinking space between your shoe and the wall.

He let us yammer on for a few minutes and then he said, Of course you'd get there. We live in the real world. The material of your shoe, the nature of your physical presence, your ability to precisely move a tiny distance-- at some point, your shoe would hit the wall.

I still think about this (obviously) because it made such an impression on me. I thought math was all about the rules, and here was a teacher telling us that the real world answer is different than our ability to do the arithmetic to divide a distance in two.

III. 

I think in some ways, progressive intellectuals, myself included, think we have created a pristine critical space where our theory can slice and dice the problems of our culture ever more precisely. We are self-importantly sure that we know all the ways our society is wrong, and then we insist that it all needs to be changed. "Burn it all down" is not infrequently mentioned. 

But we live in the real world, and we're less good with exactly how that would happen and how things would look on the other side. We get so caught up in our dazzling ability to critique The Way Things Are that we forget that we are messy, imperfect people critiquing the actual lives of our messy, imperfect co-humans.

And somehow we think that if we can analyze a problem, it's not our problem. That's quite the mental leap. You get this from both sides of our polarized nation, of course, but based on some recent experiences I've had, I think that moderate conservatives are a little better at defusing this than we are. 

We're all in this together. If I'm sitting in the conference room at work and we're problem solving, I don't get to leave the room when the "analyze the problem" part is over just because it's what I'm good at. I'm still part of the team, and the real work is just getting started.

I'm only a few pages into Sho Baraka's book on creativity,* but I am struck by this thought in the introduction: "When our humility is low, and our anger is high and we are certain our ideology is right; we are capable of doing substantial damage," and this is true no matter which ideology you champion. Maybe the most important thing is humility, and the willingness to care about what's happening and then wade into the mess.

* Sho Baraka, He Saw That it was Good: Reimagining Your Creative Life to Repair a Broken World.