Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Mind sailing, curiosity and the curious case of Canterbury

Continuing from yesterday's mind sailing theme (Mind Sailing), one of the interesting things about the human brain lies in its patterning ability. To understand and remember things, we have to impose order, to create links. The more links there are, the easier to understand and to remember. Further, once we have created a pattern, we look for things to slot in that will reinforce that pattern. Things that don't fit in are ignored.

This can have odd results. Conspiracy theories are a case in point. I have known a good many conspiracy theorists. Once the theory - the pattern - is established, the holder goes in search of things that will support the theory, leading to some weird and wonderful results. Sometimes, just often enough to make me cautious of all rejection without checking, the theory proves to be correct in whole or part.

All societies have explorers, people who feel restless and want to learn or experience new things. The young warrior In Aboriginal Australia who, restless at the daily routine, goes travelling is an example.

European society in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries was full of explorers driven by insatiable curiosity to find new things, to extend the bounds. I am not talking just about those who actually travelled in physical terms. Behind them lay hundreds of thousands, millions, of people who shared the thirst for discovery in one way or another. They bought the books and magazines, they created or laboured in the new factories, they emigrated to find a better life. The results were not always good, but the end result was one of the transformational points in human history. Ernest_Rutherford_cropped

All human exploration begins in the mind, begins by wondering. That is where mind sailing comes in. We wonder, then we plan or just write. 

A remarkable thing occurred on New Zealand's Canterbury Plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The population was very small, measured in the hundred's of thousands. Yet, somehow, that place became the centre of an intellectual endeavour that influences the world to this day.

Physicist Lord Rutherford of Nelson, to give him his official title, is an example, but he is not the only one. By nature, I am insatiably curious. I wonder why Canterbury should have been such an intellectual centre? Was it something in the water? Remember, pound for pound, Canterbury greatly out weighed Australia in the same period.

As with all these things, it was probably a combination of factors. looking at the people and the history of the period, there seems to have been a complicated interlock between intellectual freedom, curiosity, a desire to achieve and the availability of competitive channels that allowed people to advance.

The last was critical. We are dealing with a world where only a small proportion of people had access to university education, but those who did had relatively greater opportunities than exist in today's mass competitive world. 

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sir Karl Popper FRS held a lectureship in philosophy at Canterbury University College between 1937-1945. He had a hell of a time there because of his Jewish heritage; but his impact was remarkable on science in NZ as well a generation of famous NZ economists, including Rex Bergstrom (a world leader in continuous time series econometrics) and Colin Simkin - both of whom were pupils of Popper at Canterbury. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were also profoundly influenced by Sir Karl.

DG

Jim Belshaw said...

Thank you for reminding me of the Hayek case, DG. I, too, was influenced by Popper.

Rafe Champion and I tried to get a group blog going on the History of Australian and New Zealand thought. This is Rafe's brief post on Popper in the antipodes http://historyofaustralianthought.blogspot.com.au/2008/02/karl-popper-in-antipodes.html

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this link, Jim. It was fascinating as well as the follow on links it offered. I understand that when Sir Karl was on his deathbed, he was asking for Colin Simkin. Colin was a fine NZ scholar and gentleman. His D.Phil was a masterpiece of NZ's economic history. Unappreciated and shabbily treated in NZ by envious mediocraties, he eventually took refuge in Sydney (after the death of Lise)where sadly, he encountered even greater hostility.

DG

Jim Belshaw said...

Thanks, DG. I didn't know about Colin's thesis; there is an overlap here with the Belshaw family - New Zealand born economists/anthropologists also with an interest in economic history. In case you haven't seen it, here is Colin's obit written by Peter Groenewegen - http://www.assa.edu.au/fellowship/fellow/deceased/100111

I have written a little on the troubles at Sydney as part of my musings on the state of economics as a discipline - http://belshaw.blogspot.com.au/2013/07/sunday-essay-economists-and-decline-of.html. It was a very sad case that came at a time of overlap between changes in the discipline with and broader social changes that played out on campuses across Australia.

Anonymous said...

Read with interest; thanks, Jim.

DG

Jim Belshaw said...

A pleasure!