Flaming Intellectual
But I didn’t know all this when I was sitting back there on that picnic bench at U. of C. It took a long personal journey before I learned to trust other sources of knowledge other than pure reason. To most people this is hardly a discovery - my wife laughs that I was ever in doubt about it. But, I wish someone would have explained this to me when I was younger. Up until this crisis of faith I had been a strict rationalist; Spock was my role model. In short, I was a nerd. I could literally spend all day wrapped up in abstract though, and I loved every second of it. This wasn’t, unfortunately, something I could share with most people. My high school was an inner-city, working class school. Intellectuals were not well tolerated, and I kept my love of ideas fairly well hidden. But I also lived in another world as well, the world of sports. Once, while I was on the football team, I got tired of waiting for the bus. It seemed like we were always waiting in the pseudo military that was football. One day, throwing caution to the wind, I pulled out a trashy sci-fi book (for some reason I thought it would help that the book was trashy) to read. Friends on the team came over to check in with me sincerely worried that there might be something wrong - they were really, touchingly concerned. The next day the coach accosted my father in the hallway (my father worked as the music supervisor for the district), and said in the bluff joking jock style “Do you know what the hell your son was doing the other day?!? He was reading!!, That’s what. What the hell has gotten into him!!?”. He was half serious. My worst fears were confirmed.
It was remarkably like being gay and in the closet. I was too scared to openly declare myself an intellectual, so I kept it hidden. So of course, I took that as my central identity. I longed to be an openly flaming intellectual, and looked for my version of San Francisco. The University of Chicago seemed to fit the bill nicely. The school was so intellectually pure they didn’t have any practical art or music classes, only art and music theory. At the time they didn’t even have a separate computer science department – that was much too applied. All computer courses were taught by the (purer) math department instead. But that was ok with me. I wanted to, finally, be surrounded by serious intellectuals. Finally, I was going to get to the good stuff. The only problem was that nobody seemed to be very happy – those grey minds always were beating down.
Before college I used to think that the world would be a much, much better place if everyone was just like me - oh sure, it would be a more boring, predictable world, but at least it would be saner. I was wrong. U. of C. gave me a glimpse of what a world of many me’s might be like - and it turns out that too many brooding intellectuals in one place is not a good idea at all. They need leavening! What goes missing is joy, beauty, and simple silliness. I remember sitting in on a difficult, advanced philosophy class (studying another book of Immanuel Kant) and looking around thinking about the professor and graduate students. Here they had dedicated their lives to pure reason, and yet they looked miserable. One look at these people and I realized that no matter how much I enjoyed philosophy I definitely did not want to lead lives like theirs. Clearly something was wrong with the path they were on but what? Maybe pure reason was not the answer after all?
After my second year at U. of C., I dropped out. I took a year off and explored for a while. On my way to Olympic National Park to do some hiking in Washington State, I discovered The Evergreen College and fell in love with it almost from the moment I entered its extensive, verdant forests. For someone from Illinois, Washington has an incredible, almost absurd wealth of trees. Evergreen is a very non-traditional school. Instead of signing up for separate, individual classes, Evergreen offers seminars that are focused on investigating a key question or two. Looking through the catalog I found one seminar, called Computability and Cognition. This seminar had two main questions: “What are the limits of Reason?” and “What do computers have to teach us about human thinking?” Bingo. These were definitely the questions that I wanted to spend time studying.
