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Confessions of an Analyst
by Ariel Simmons, submitted to Sarah Lawrence, Hampshire College, and Marlboro
I was sitting in my chemistry teacher's kitchen, feeling particularly bovine. It happens when I'm confronted with math, and math
seemed to crop up frequently in my chemistry sessions. I think the portion of my brain designated for numbers and all their wacky antics was omitted during my assembly, and a cow's logic system put in instead. Somewhere
in Wisconsin a Hereford is balancing her farmer's books.
My long-suffering teacher, a working chemist and brilliant mathematician, was attempting to explain the concept of synthesis. It would have helped if she'd
gotten straight to the point, but she preferred to hint around.
"What is it when you have lots of manmade fibers blended together?"
"Unhealthy? Scratchy? Doesn't let your skin breathe?"
"No, okay, these came out in the eighties . . ." She had a gratifying capacity for patience.
"Do you have a keyboard? And it plays several different instrument sounds? What do you call it?"
Keyboard had sounded fine to me. Gradually I began to suspect she meant synthesizer and was driving at
synthetic, but I hadn't recognized it in the positive light she'd put around it. To me, synthetic had been all things artificial. I pictured sticky globs of plastic, melting and swirling together to make stronger, less
decomposable products. I thought of the frilly, flammable nightgowns my grandmother gave me every year. I thought of ultrasuede. "Perhaps she's been an engineer too long," I thought, "and now she's bought
into the system." Meanwhile she pressed on, and I began to understand. Her vision of synthetic was union. It was integration. It was good.
"So, if synthesis is putting together, what is analysis?"
With the new definition of synthesis, analysis took on a decidedly destructive aura. I couldn't deal with that. I'd been living the life of a happy analyst as long as I could remember. It was the only way I knew
how to think. I didn't just look at the trees instead of the forest, I scrutinized the bark. When I was very young I'd break down decks of cards into smaller and smaller piles, first by color, then by odds and evens,
then suit, until eventually I had 52 categories spread neatly all over the floor. When my hamsters had a population boom, I made bar graphs, showing color distribution. In adolescence, I dissected emotional issues. I
wrote analytical essays, for crying out loud. It seemed as though she was tearing down my entire system of beliefs.
It hadn't, of course, been an attack on my character. She'd simply hit on a point that
radically polarized us. I had to decide, she said, if I was a lumper or a splitter. Neither one sounded too appealing. Most people, she added, were splitters. I didn't want to be a splitter.
It had been fusion
and fission that had started her lecture in the first place. The superconductor, a big deal in Texas, was just being abandoned at the time. People considered it either a job opportunity or a giant hole in the ground
that cost billions of dollars. Probably very few were curious about what it might show us in the way of fusion.
"Do you realize how much time and money we spend on fission?" my teacher cried.
"Standing around, splitting atoms all day, when we could at least be trying to harness the energy from putting them together? We've never even given it a shot! Do you know why?" I shook my head, mooing
quietly. "Because we are human. And humans are splitters."
She had a point. We are splitters, by nature. But it took more than analysis to get us to the top of the food chain. It must have taken a lot
of "lumping" and putting together to make the connections necessary to evolve. Without synthesis the prehistoric dialogue might have gone:
"I have a rock."
"Rocks can smash things."
"Weird."
And the evolutionary process comes to a screeching halt. So why is this important second step going largely unemphasized? Well, Aristotle started a
trend, twenty-three thousand years ago, that hasn't lost any speed today. Our inherited splitter culture subtly reinforces our analytical focus at every turn.
One prime example is our media. The new news motto
seems to be reduce and repeat, abbreviating and condensing information into its simplest, most digestible form. I can see people in the near future staring blankly at the evening news, thinking, "Peter, would you
please rephrase that in the form of a pie chart?" In fact, USA Today can't print a cover without a bar graph, taking numbers and figures totally out of context and creating eye-appealing fact-candy we gobble up.
The biggest underuser of synthesis, however, might be the education system. By dividing the world into subjects, especially in primary schools, we leave children disconnected and disinterested. It was one area I
was surprised to realize I'd been synthesizing all along. Growing up actively unschooled, I could never figure out what my friends were doing with all those different subjects. I accepted the subtleties of different
areas of study, but it seemed much more like one huge subject to me. My mother (and main educator) presented everything as history. So in learning geometry, I learned the roots of geometry, I studied the fellows who
first used it, the political climate they worked in, the state of the world in their lifetime, and usually ended up in the middle of astronomy. Children given an hour and a social studies textbook chapter to study, say,
Ireland, certainly weren't learning the Ireland I knew. I was practicing immersion-education, living and breathing it until I knew all my mind could hold, or until I got ill thinking of clover.
So I wasn't
surprised (nor was I too happy) to find chemistry riddled with algebra. But, for the first time, the math began to make sense, and I wondered why I hadn't studied chemistry along with algebra to begin with. It is easy
to make sense of life when you're given the connections. Analysis in education sucks things out of context, rending them of logic.
All this begs the question: do we learn to deconstruct things, ideas, emotions,
or is it an instinct? When children take apart the VCR to see how it works, did they acquire this concept from their parents? It would hardly be a practical instinct to inherit. After all, when the VCR is nicely
analyzed, in forty zillion pieces, each part gives no clue to what makes the tape play. Attempting to put it all back together usually results in a huge muddle; only a shadow of its former self returns. In Operating
Manual for Spaceship Earth, R. Buckminster Fuller expressed the same idea:
Synergy is the only word in our language that means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system's separate parts or any subassembly of the system's parts.
[Because of this] it is clear that society does not think there are behaviors of whole systems unpredicted by their separate parts.
[Italics his.]
Fuller believed the universe, the earth, and the "miracle" of life all prime examples of synergy. "There is nothing about an electron alone that forecasts the proton, nor is there anything about the
Earth or the Moon that forecasts the co-existence of the Sun," he said, also in Operating Manual. Indeed, on a biological level, everything seems to be a carnival of synthesis. Why then, from the get-go, is it more
fun to dump out the puzzle pieces than put them together? Why do we go to psychoanalysts instead of psychosynthesists? We all have a set way of making sense of the world, and that way rarely involves looking at the big
picture. Because it is analytical to use only analysis, and synthetic to use them both, it could be a long time before we learn to integrate. Buckminster Fuller combined the two, and I suspect my chemistry teacher did,
too, but they are not the rule. The handful of exceptions often have a hard time getting the masses to catch their drift. There is a cultural gap between these outlooks, lumping and splitting, that really divides. It's
present even in simpler terms, something Martin Gardner writes about in an essay titled How Not to Talk about Mathematics. He asserts that there is a great difference between analytic and synthetic truth, seen in 2 + 2
= 4; an analytical absolute, but a synthetic contradiction. A synthesist would know a cup of popped corn and a cup of milk never produces two cups of anything. No matter the context, analysis and synthesis often emerge
as separate languages.
I'm a little more bilingual now. I still indulge in some of my old analytical habits -- I average how many push ups I do each month and the number of headaches I have per year. My family is
still laughing at me for a big bar graph I did, breaking down our grocery expenditures. Now though, I think I put the pieces together again, putting them to constructive uses. (Like showing the percentage of our budget
going to Cokes.) I have spent too much time in my life slicing and dicing problems, allowing them to take up a lot more space than necessary. When I catch myself analyzing now, I remember it's only half of the process.
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