Embracing Paradox

The book group (forerunner to Member Monday) once took on Catch-22, that disorienting collection of character introductions, sleight-of-hand logic, tricks and paradoxes all mixed together and flushed down the rabbit hole.

I can still recall, upon my initial reading of the book some sixty years ago, the way it was such an assault on my own painfully linear background – born and bred linear, at a linear time, in a linear location, with a linear education, and (later) a linear profession – that I wanted to throw the book across the room, the reflex of a linear sole beholding a mobius world.

But somehow those mythic tricks coalesced over the years to reveal a larger truth about the limits of rigid thought. It’s equivalent to the first time one totally immersed in the self-defining internal logic of mathematics is suddenly confronted with the square root of negative-one.

Our focus piece (click: The Great Paradoxes That Shape Our Lives introduces various timeless paradoxes that continue to shape how we think and live e.g. the social media tolerance dilemma wherein unlimited tolerance leads to expressions of intolerance with ultimate consequences to tolerance itself, or the paradox of democracy wherein the people democratically decide not to govern themselves but to be governed by a tyrant (imagine that), or perhaps such uncited cases as that of the French high court’s ruling that disabled children were entitled to be compensated when their mothers were not given a chance to abort the defective fetus i.e. themselves.

We might enjoy citing and sharing examples of everyday paradoxes that sound contradictory but often describe real life: less is more; the more you rush, the slower you get; the harder you try to sleep, the harder it becomes; the more you check your phone, the less present you feel; the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t; the more freedom you have, the more overwhelming the choices; the more you want to be liked, the stiffer you are; the more you avoid a problem, the bigger it becomes; the more you simplify something, the more effective it is; the best way to persuade is to shut up and listen; the only constant is change; and, finally, the need to fail in order to improve. And then are the biggies as applied to enlightenment and love i.e. the harder you pursue them the more difficult they are to achieve.

So how, we might ask, to explain such inherent self-referencing contradiction? I know – how about inventing the magic having some new postmodern phrase? Maybe something like “paraconsistency” which lies outside classical logic to mean the coexistence of inconsistency without descending into absurdity. Okay, then, maybe we’ll next try quantum mechanics (now that we’re all quantum physicists even though most of us can’t quite get beyond Schrodinger’s cat) with the theory of multiple states.

In any event, history is replete with examples of paradoxical outcomes fueled by seemingly rational linear thinking. Take war, for example. Who can forget the way the best linear thinkers of the time goaded us with talk of falling dominoes and maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by the ever-encroaching Doohdah, leading to the tragedy of Vietnam and the attendant logic of destroying a village to save it.

Good thing that lesson was finally learned. What’s that, you say? The Middle East? Were that whole matter a book I might throw it across the room.

Please note the following RSVP Policy for Member Monday: RSVP sign-up opens up at 11:00am on Fridays via the City Club weekly Newsletter. Seats are first-come, first-served: the first 14 secure a spot at the table, the last 3 on the couch. Cancellations must be made 24 hours in advance or the standard Social Lunch rate applies.