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AMOMO
The root of character, creativity, courage, compassion, community In the animal kingdom, the newborns of some species are ready to fend for themselves as soon as they hit the ground running, or at least wobbling. A Homo sapiens newborn, by contrast, needs parenting for a long time. The main function of any parent in any species is to do whatever it takes to make sure their offspring survives.
Parenting is not a popularity contest. It is not a parent’s job to be a child's best friend, confidant, cook, chauffeur, laundry cleaner, social secretary, school counselor, marriage advisor, loan officer, or any such thing. However, in the service of whatever it takes to assure the offspring’s survival and wellbeing, every parent has to do most if not all of these (and many other) things at one time or another. It is my belief that the single most important gift with which a parent can endow a child is AMOMO = “a mind of my own.” This is the first installment of my writings about AMOMO. I start with a minimeditation on blind spots. What can you do about your own blind spots? At first, before we use the metaphor of the blind spot, let us get a bit medical… Most people (even many who work on the brain) assume that what you see is pretty much what your eye sees and reports to your brain. In fact, your brain adds very substantially to the report it gets from your eye, so that much of what you see is actually "made up" by the brain. Some special features of the anatomy of the eyeball make it possible to demonstrate this to you. The front of the eye acts like a camera lens, differently directing light rays from each point in space to create on the back of
If you would like to dig deeper into the biological blind spot, I, however, will turn my attention to the metaphorical blind spot, to describing the life of the mind, mental notes, and to the taming of the monkey mind. How to describe the life of the mind?
There is no man without qualities because there are indeed qualities without a man.
They come crushing through the dam of our vigilance. There is no biography without history, but history only has time for obituaries. An encomium is glowing and warmly enthusiastic praise; a eulogy is a prepared speech or writing extolling the virtues and services of a person; a panegyric is an elaborate often poetic compliment; a tribute is deeply felt praise conveyed either through words or through a significant act. None of the above even pretends to describe, much less to understand the life of the mind. I conclude that, since biographies do exist (and some of them are quite good) their objective is not to understand the mind of the subject of the biography (biographee?), but rather to describe the formation, evolution, and demise of the mind in question. Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and small minds discuss people. It seems that the biographer does all three. Therefore, a biographer should have a mind capable of being at the same time great, average, and small. A biography is a life’s story. Like all stories, it has a Story Mind. Any story can be seen as an analogy to a single human mind dealing with a particular problem, rather than simply as a number of characters interacting. This mind—the Story Mind—contains all the characters, themes, and plot progressions of the story as incarnations of the psychological processes of problem solving. In this way, each story explores the inner workings of the mind so that we (as audience) may take a more objective view of our decisions and indecisions and learn from the experience. Adopting the Story Mind extended metaphor leads to the following identifications between Story Mind elements and Story elements: Thoughts=characters Methodologies of problem solving=plot The evaluations used as standard of measurement; what does it evaluate things in terms of=theme The nature of the mind overall; the kind of mind it is=genre If you would like to dig deeper into this particular theory of story, I, however, will turn my attention to applying all this to biography. In the light of the Dramatica theory of story, we posit that like all stories, a biography has a Story Mind. This Story Mind should not be confused with the biographee’s mind. The Story Mind of a biography is, of course, a product of the biographer’s mind. How does the Story Mind of the biography relate to the biographee’s mind? Like the Story Mind of any story, it is an analogy to a single human mind dealing with a particular problem. Which human mind? What particular problem? The analogy is to a third human mind. It is not the mind of the biographer, and it is not the mind of the biographee. It is the Story Mind of the biography. The particular problem this third mind is trying to solve is the description of the life of the mind of the biographee. The thoughts of this third mind are the characters described in the biography; the main character being the biographee, of course. The methodologies of problem solving, the ways in which the biographer (who is of course the author of the Story Mind of the biography) finds and explores the facts and infers the rest constitute the plot of the biography. The evaluations used as standard of measurement by the biographer are the themes of the biography. They are also revealing the blind spots and limitations of portraiture inherent to the biographer. What can you do about your own blind spots? While driving a car you can do two things:
1. stay away from the blind spots of other drivers
While writing a biography you can also do something: treat your themes as potential blind spots; beware of normative masks everywhere. A biographer should keep in mind that “When Peter talks about Paul, we find out much more about Peter than about Paul.” (what psychologists call projection.) While depicting the full grace of his subject’s limitations, the biographer is exposing his own. Biography itself is a genre, and as such it circumscribes the nature of the Story Mind overall—the kind of mind it is. The German philosopher Vaihinger, who wrote a book called The Philosophy of "As If" had a term for beliefs that we know are not true but still come in handy: he called them useful fictions. That was his great philosophy of AS IF: you act AS IF something were true if it is beneficial to you. Vaihinger believed that ultimate truth would always be beyond us, but that, for practical purposes, we need to create partial truths. He had a major influence on Alfred Adler's thinking. Adler added that, at the center of each of our lifestyles, there sits one of these fictions—an important one about who we are and where we are going. Whether or not our minds are so simple that they are unable to do the understanding of minds, or so complex that they cannot be understood even by our complex minds, it is certain that sometimes they can be so confused as to be utterly confusing.
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