TEDxUFM: Michael Strong - Socratic Practice as Disruptive Technology

Thank you. One of the first things that I feel I have to do is to help you see the whole phrase Socratic practice fresh. I understand at UFM we've been doing things that are called Socratic practice and many wonderful things have happened, but maybe there's some confusion. All over the world, the term "Socratic" has these heavy overtones of some, you know, old, dead, gray Greek guy and a marble face and so forth. And it's hard to really get excited about that as a disruptive technology. So I'm going to try to help you see things fresh. For me, what I love most, what I'm most fascinated about is creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. And so you might say, "What does Socratic practice have to do with creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship?" I'm going to start by telling you a little story from Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. He describes a situation in which a Korean jetliner is flying in the dark and bad weather in the middle of the Pacific headed towards an island, and the copilot senses something wrong, and he says to the pilot something like, "Perhaps, sir, you ought to check your gauge." And the pilot just keeps going and doesn't pay any attention. A little bit later, the copilot says, "I wonder if we maybe should check the gauge." and does this a couple of times, and then the plane crashes into a mountain, and everybody's dead. And, you know, it's horrible. But what Gladwell says is that they discovered that in South Korea, it's a very authoritarian hierarchical society. And as a consequence, the copilot does not feel comfortable telling the pilot, "Stop! Look at the gauge! We're going to die!" No, he goes, "Well, maybe you might want to consider this." And I often stop and wonder, what does it feel like to be that copilot? Knowing that you're going to die, knowing that everybody in the plane is going to die, but you don't have the courage within to overrule the pilot's judgment or even to bring it up. And for me, it just must be the strangest interior feeling. I can't even imagine it. I bring that up because rightly or wrongly, Gladwell cites a study when he tells that story that claims that South Korea is the most hierarchical and authoritarian culture on Earth. But Guatemala is number 2. May or may not be true, but I've known a lot of Americans who come down to Guatemala, and they are struck by the respect for authority and submission to authority that is characteristic and typical here. So for that reason, I'm especially appreciative of Giancarlo's, I would say, visionary leadership in introducing Socratic practice into UFM, because I believe it's the first time there's been a deliberate, orchestrated, concentrated attempt through a major institution in a country to shift norms away from submission to those sorts of hierarchies and authorities towards thinking for yourself. So whether or not it works, I think it's a brilliant and beautiful experiment, and I just wanted to acknowledge that early on. I'm going to shift now to a different context. I'm going to go way back to ancient Greece. And instead of Socrates, I'm going to go even earlier to Antigone. Antigone, famous Greek play, Sophocles, a legend separate from that. And in the play Antigone, her step— or her brother, her uncle, Creon, has gone to war with Polynices, her brother, and killed Polynices. Polynices is dead on the battlefield, and Creon, because he believes Polynices betrayed him, has declared that Polynices' body must be left to rot and eaten by the vultures. Ugly, ugly scene. Antigone doesn't like this. She says, "According to divine law, we must bury our dead. It's a sacred law to bury our dead." But Creon said, "No, this guy betrayed me. Uh-uh, we're not burying him. Let the vultures eat him." The chorus in Greek plays often kind of goes back and forth to evaluate things, and the chorus in the play Antigone is full of, "Gosh, we need to respect our king Creon, but gosh, divine law really does say bury the dead. What are we going to do?" I bring this up as a very early incident in what I would call the history of individuality or the history of consciousness. In a sense, the very, very beginnings of independent thought. A man named Julian Jaynes wrote a book called "The Creation of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." And according to Jaynes, who may or may not be right, but I think it's a great story, so I'm going to keep it. The right brain, what we think of as the synthetic, creative brain, you know, we dream with our right brain. According to Jaynes, the right brain is the voice of God and the voice of society. It's the kind of voice that tells you what to do. The left brain is kind of the analytic, strategic. We think of it as, you know, math and verbal logic and so forth, reasoning. And according to Jaynes, we didn't really become conscious individuals until we started getting neuronal traffic from the left and right hemisphere, as left and right brain had to start talking to each other a lot more. And so an incident such as Antigone, where divine law, Creon, divine law, Creon, it's all of a sudden, whoops, got to go back and forth, got to figure this out. And I see that as a really important example of the early origins of thinking for ourselves. The Greek chorus didn't do a great job of that necessarily, but a couple hundred years later you have Socrates really systematically asking people questions, getting them to think for themselves. Of course, he was put to death for corrupting the young and teaching the young not to believe in the gods of the polis, the city of Athens. So something was going on there. I mean, we might say the Athenians were just dumb for putting Socrates to death, or you might say we're playing with some pretty fundamental stuff when we start asking people questions that separate them from the authorities. I want to go to another vignette. This time we're at Harvard in the 1950s, and there's an experiment in social psychology where there are a series series of lines, about 4 or 5 lines of the same length and then one much smaller. And in this experiment, we've got about 10 people, but 9 of them are part of the experiment and only one is the subject. And the way it goes is every person is asked, "Are these lines the same size or not?" And the 9 people who know darn well they're not the same size all say, "Yeah, they're exactly the same size, exactly the same size." And you get to the last person, they're like, "What?" But it turns out 2/3 2/3 of people in the last position will say, "Yep, they're the same size." Again, as with the Korean copilot, I wonder, what are these 2/3 people thinking? They've got to know that they're not the same size. Or do they actually believe they're the same size? What's going on here? 1/3, to their credit, do say they're not the same size, and those people are usually outraged at everybody else. "You idiots, can't you see they're different? Hello!" So that's a kind of dramatic difference. In, on the one hand, submitting to the group, submitting whether it's to an authority above you or a group around you, submitting to the group versus thinking for yourself. Thinking for yourself, in a way, is such a cliché. I mean, you know, everybody thinks that they think for themselves. Nobody would say, "No, I don't think for myself. I let that guy over there think for me." Never. You never hear that. But when it gets down to it, I think it's much harder to really think for ourselves than we realize, and we're far more deeply biologically programmed to submit to authority whether it's society as a whole or authorities in our lives, be it bosses or parents or churches or university professors or the media or whatever, I think that it's far more of a struggle to come to our own understanding of who we are and what our role is in the world and what we believe is authentically true, good, and beautiful than most of us realize. That's why for me, when I began doing Socratic inquiry in classrooms, I simply— they were called Socratic seminars based on a tradition that I'd come from. But I began calling it a Socratic practice because just like any kind of the practice of, you know, learning how to become a better winemaker or the practice of learning to play the violin, a practice in the Aristotelian sense is something that you do over and over again in an effort to become excellent at it. There are standards and aspirations of what you need to do to become truly superb at this practice. So for me, instead of a— either we think, let other people think for us, or we think for ourselves— for me, it's a lifelong practice to begin to take responsibility for my own learning, my own thought, my own ideas, and the manifestation, manifesting those ideas in the world at large. Even as I've been doing this for a long time, I constantly feel pressures to be like everybody else. I constantly feel pressures to submit. That's why I'm I'm always putting myself in the place of that Korean co-pilot, or the last person in this experiment at Harvard. You know, I'm superbly aware of what does it mean to kind of push out against this world. It feels like this huge pressure. Be like everybody else. I'll give you one little example, which may sound silly, but it's a way in which I test this practice in all sorts of, as it were, silly ways. There was a period in my life when I was doing tai chi. If I was a good person, I'd still be doing tai chi. But I'm imperfect. But at one point, I was in the Dallas airport with a long layover and feeling kind of all messed up, and I thought, "I should really calm down by doing tai chi." And, you know, Dallas, full of cowboys, cowboy hats, big guys, cowboy boots. I thought, "OK, I'm going to do this." And so I, you know, and I started doing tai chi. And at first, it was like, "Oh, everybody's looking at me. What am I doing? Am I a weirdo?" But then I started to get into it, and I started to calm down. I thought, "You know, I need to do what's right for me. If this is going to make me calmer and more effective when I get to my meetings," on the other side. I need to do it. And why can't a Dallas Cowboy let me do tai chi? You know? And, you know, but it was one of those interesting experiments. And every once in a while, just try to do what you think is right for you, no matter what's happening in the world at large. And as you become conscious of when you are submitting to outside authority versus when you're pushing out against it, you will gradually become ever more refined at learning what levels society is pushing on you, and it's not really authentically you. And, you know, it's up to you whether or not you want to be you. Maybe you don't want to be you, maybe you like being in society. Again, I don't mean to be entirely facetious. One of the texts that I like to use when I start Socratic practice in classrooms is Kant's "What is Enlightenment?" And he basically says we need to have the courage to think for ourselves, and people that don't think for themselves are either lazy or cowardly. And I like to put that in front of groups of students because nobody wants to be lazy and cowardly. So it's kind of like in-your-face sort of thing. But sometimes they do kind of say, "Well, why should we have to figure this out? Somebody else could figure it out for us, right? Why don't you just tell us what it means?" And I say, "Okay, I'm happy to tell you what Kant means, but if so, I also want the right to tell you what to dress, how to dress, what religion to believe in, what political views to have. And if you're not going to take responsibility for thinking for yourself, then I—" I should take responsibility for doing all of your thinking. Of course, no, no, no, no, I want to know how to dress and so forth, my own political opinions. We get into a conversation in which they really start to evaluate who they are and where they think for themselves and where they don't. But I don't tell them what Kant means at all. And one of the ways in which I typically lead Socratic discussions is to attempt not to let students know which way I'm going in things. I've had students turn to me in discussion and say, What answer do you want? I don't want any answer. I want you to think for yourself. I want you to evaluate the evidence, come back to me with whatever the evidence tells you authentically, and then let's talk about your personal relationship to the evidence. And here we're talking evidence in the text and the relationship to the evidence in the text that other students have, and then we compare it. And by means of working together in an authentic, honest conversation, I believe we will come up with a more true and accurate expression of the true, the good, and the beautiful as relates to an accurate understanding of the text, which may sound melodramatic, but it turns out that when people authentically try to understand what's going on and they are authentically engaged in conversation with other people, in my experience, they do approach a much more accurate understanding of reality. For me, understanding a text is a microcosm of understanding reality. And they also have to learn to, again, have the courage of their own opinions. Sometimes people think, well, that person over there is smart, I'm dumb, let the smart person tell us what it means. That's true even if I, as the leader, don't tell the students what the text means, they often turn to the kid that they think is smartest. Oh, what does the smart person say? That's what it really means. But then as you have these conversations, you find very often the so-called smart person also doesn't know. They're missing all kinds of things. And one of the experiences that I try to develop over and over again with students is the fact that no matter how allegedly smart, expert, mature, or whatever people are, no one can see all of reality. Reality— reality is infinitely complex. And because reality is infinitely complex, each of us has a personal obligation to learn an accurate expression of our relationship to that reality and tell the world about it. If you don't tell the world what reality is like for you, you're going to have the equivalent of planes crashing into mountains. And that's, again, kind of a heavy sort of thing to say, but I really think that the world will be a much more happy, peaceful, prosperous, healthy place when each of us learns to tell our truth in an honest and respectful manner vis-à-vis other people. So, with that in mind, I want to talk about some ways in which I've seen seen young people disrupted. I've often— students, when you first start going into a classroom and ask them questions without telling them answers, they're frustrated and angry. Come on, you're supposed to tell us what's going on. We're supposed to learn it and spit it back to you. What's this stupid game where you don't tell us anything? You're not teaching. You're irresponsible. You're wasting our time. Yada, yada, yada. I've heard some remarkable anecdotes about Albert Lone here at U of M where early on students were really frustrated at him for not telling them the answer. And they were about ready to mutiny and so and so forth. This applies both to students at U of M and sometimes faculty at U of M. And Albert, to his credit, kind of stuck by his guns and bit by bit some of the most resistant students and some of the most resistant professors realized that in fact it is valuable and important to be in a situation where the leader puts the responsibility on the students for coming up with their own ideas. And although it first appears to be an abdication of responsibility on behalf of Albert or myself or any of us that teach this way. Gradually, one realizes it's one of the greatest gifts to be put in a situation in which you have to come up with your own ideas. And I want to connect that now to the notion of ideas changing the world. UFM was founded on an idea, and I believe— you know, for me, doing tai chi in the Dallas airport, trivial idea of putting an idea into the world, Moussaou, believing in the ideas behind UFM and that those ideas could create prosperity and eliminate poverty, I think Moussaou was brilliant and creating a whole institution to manifest those ideas was brilliant. To take a different example, you know, Steve Jobs, amazing, recently Apple became the most largely capitalized company in the world, beat out Exxon a couple weeks ago, truly amazing. Steve Jobs, you know, little hippie kid in the 1970s, got fired from his company in a high-profile way in the 1980s, looked like he was totally a loser out of it. Late '90s, looked like Apple was a dead company. Now it's the most successful company on Earth by many measures. Steve Jobs had an idea, and he stuck with it. He had the conviction and the courage of his ideas to make them real, and he's absolutely changed the world as a consequence. Go to Giancarlo. Giancarlo has brought both Bert and me down here and other people And Giancarlo supported the Socratic program in the face of a culture that was often very resistant, a culture that often felt more comfortable with hierarchy and authority than a culture where people were comfortable discussing ideas and defending their ideas openly. I think Giancarlo is a powerful visionary for doing that. If, you know, UFM continues to do this, I see UFM really being the first case where the culture was changed from authoritarian, perhaps one of the most authoritarian on Earth, to one in which there was a vibrant, I will say, Silicon Valley of intellectual expression, where people became creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial by means of thinking of their own ideas and manifesting those ideas in reality. So, finally, I want to go back to this feeling inside. What does it feel like to have everybody else say the lines are equal when you know they're not? What does it feel like for the copilot to know that the plane is about to crash? What does it feel like when you sit there and you know that something is not right and you're not telling the world that it's not right? I would say that the ultimate disruptive technology is you. Every time you are an authentic, honest expression of your own belief in the true, the good, and the beautiful on whatever issue, no matter how trivial, no matter how profound, that if you come into the world as an honest person and tell us what you believe, not what the authorities have told you, not what society tells you, but what your inner genius tells you, this is what is real about the world, then you are the disruptive technology that will change the world. And as cool as iPads are, you are even cooler than iPads. Thank you.