A World of Questions & Answers—Part III
The Patterns that Connect
Introduction
This week’s instalment is actually the fourth in the present series, even though it’s numbered “Part III,” because the series actually began with our longer article “Questioning Truth” three weeks’ back, introducing Collingwood’s question-and-answer logic and epistemology.
This week, we continue to explore Collingwood’s question-and-answer logic along with other aspects of his philosophy of history, and to follow out the implications for change.
In particular, we continue last week’s discussion of “survivals” and the way in which the past is embodied here and now, as part of our present and future.
Along the way, we will attempt to draw out some of the implications for understanding the world around us and for effectively intervening in it.
—The Editors
A World of Questions & Answers—Part III: The Patterns that Connect
A Cautionary Tale
Upon declaring war on Germany in September 1939, Britain found itself caught unprepared, entering the war not only with shortages of manpower but, critically, with severe shortages of ordnance which would take some time to rectify. Meanwhile, the armouries were raided to bring armaments back into service that had been used in previous wars.
The story is told1 of one particular model of light artillery, that was still in ample supply, and which, hitched to trucks, could serve as useful mobile units for coastal defence after the fall of France in the the spring of 1940.
These old field pieces had been built for use in the Boer Wars and had been stored together with supplies of ammunition and manuals giving detailed instructions for deploying these guns in the field.
Five-man gun crews practiced with these venerable old pieces of equipment, carefully following the original instruction manual, which stipulated that immediately before firing, two of the five men were to retire to particular positions marked on the diagram and stand at attention for three seconds as the gun was discharged. But no one could figure out what the point of that was, and on this the manual was silent.
Finally, the British Army sought out an elderly retired colonel who had served in the Second Boer War four decades earlier, to ask him what the two soldiers were supposed to be doing there. After a moment’s study of the diagram, he replied, “Ah! I see exactly what they’re doing. They are holding the horses.”
As we shall see, as in the example of holding the horses, some of these survivals are now unnecessary and have come to constitute impediments.
However, others are valuable, time-honoured, proven solutions which ought not to be relinquished.
Still other survivals, such as the handshake which goes back at least 3000 years, or the originally mediaeval custom of the clinking of wine glasses, which may once have served as real or ritual defensive precautions, have become merely conventional and neutral, although the customary handshake was often omitted during both the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak and the recent Covid-19 pandemic as carrying a risk of disease transmission.
In any case, this popular anecdote of holding the horses, which many of you will have come across before, is paradigmatic of the kind of “survivals” Collingwood was referring to in his conception of history as something which is not confined to the past but still remains here with us in the present in countless ways.
The past has not been left behind us so much as morphed into the present in complex and often unrecognizable ways, continuing to govern how we conduct ourselves, how we interact with others and the world around us, how we interpret that world and how we situate ourselves within it.
“What Is Really Going on Now?” as a Question for Historians and Clinical Psychologists
Our current ways of thinking, mostly unconscious, including our ways of interpreting our situation and the actions of others to which we respond are, for Collingwood, precisely what the historian is seeking to unravel.
Historians are continually answering “What is this?” questions about the present and future—including questions about our current ways of thinking about and interpreting contemporary events.
Years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Cambridge historian friend, when discussing the geopolitical situation in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, presciently remarked that it was quite clear to him that what had been going on recently, for some years, was, at root, “simply a continuation of The Great Game”. And he opined that The Great Game would be continuing to govern the future course of events for some time to come throughout much of the world.
Basically, all those years back, he argued that the continuing Anglo-American struggle with Russia would be over Russia’s access to warm water ports, just as it always had been in The Great Game, and he thought that that would still prove to be the powder keg for the next big conflagration and that Crimea would once again be key, “as it had always been.”
Note that his prognostications were based not on crystal-ball gazing but on his understanding of The Great Game, which was the 19th Century rivalry between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, which goes back at least as far as the proposed pact between Napoleon and Tsar Paul I of Russia in 1801!
My friend also added that even though the Pax Britannica had meanwhile been replaced by the Pax Americana, it was still the same Great Game, as far as he could see, only now it was rivalry not so much between Britain and Russia as between America and Russia, while the Game itself was fundamentally unchanged, and had merely evolved.
More recently, another historian, a friend of a colleague of mine, put the seeds of the recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine down to the “all-but-Ukrainian” Nikita Khrushchev’s role in the Soviet Union’s 1954 tendentious ceding of Crimea to Ukraine rather than to Russia, in Kruschchev’s well-meaning effort to bolster Ukraine’s position within the Soviet Union by making Ukraine central to the USSR's security. But this was at a time when no one could have imagined the future breakup of the Soviet Union, which occurred a full 35 years later.
Whether those two historians were right or not in their assessments I am in no position to judge, as these are all topics far outside my own areas of knowledge or interest. However, what struck me was that in both cases, these two historians, in bringing their specialist historical understanding to bear, were primarily interested not in understanding what happened in the past, whether in Victorian times in the case of the Great Game, or in the early years of the Cold War in the case of Ukraine.
Rather these historians were grappling urgently with questions about the present and future world situation in the form of questions about “what exactly are we dealing with here, now? How are we to understand what’s going on today and what is likely to happen tomorrow, and how can we deal with the situation in the most thoughtful and well-informed way?”
Here we have the notion of the past as not something finished and left behind, but something which is alive and well in the form of the present, into which the past has morphed, evolved, often in paradoxical ways.
This is all familiar territory to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of all schools, ever since Freud. As a colleague of mine once put it, “the past affects us, not because it is past, but because it is ours.”
The only interest in an individual’s past, even among classical Freudian psychoanalysts, is in understanding what we are seeing now, in that same person’s present experience, in their current ways of seeing the world, and in their current patterns of interaction.
“What is this?” “What are we really dealing with here?” “What is this about?” are all questions constantly in virtually every psychotherapist’s mind, at some level—in my experience, at the very forefront most of the time. And here the patient’s past may be relevant. For, again, our past is not something we ever leave behind us. It is a living part of who we have become and who we are on our way to becoming. As Wordsworth memorably expressed it, “The Child is father of the Man.”
No wonder Freud was so fond of the analogies between psychoanalysis and archaeology—a subject in which he had a great deal of interest lifelong and a considerable degree of knowledge.2 If we are to think historically, as Collingwood said and as we discussed in recent posts in the present series, we ourselves need to think the very same thoughts that those we are seeking to understand are thinking, and not merely some thoughts that are more-or-less closely related.
To influence we must understand, and to understand we must think the other’s thoughts in such a way that we can see how, from their point of view, nothing else makes sense. Until we’ve got to that point we are going off half-cocked.
If we want to create change, if we want to influence another person or group of people, we can only do so if we understand how whatever we are dealing with appears to them, through their eyes.
The Design of Familiar Objects, Traditional Building Techniques, and the Work of Lawyers
Even the traditional design of everyday objects that have been in use for generations is what it is because their history of past use is embodied in their present “traditional” design.
Take axe handles for example.3 People have been chopping wood with axes for many thousands of years, and the shape of the haft or “handle” has evolved to be the most ergonomically effective shape possible. No one individual ever designed the near-universal shape of an axe handle, which is not so much “designed” as “designoid.” The history of its most effective use in chopping wood is embodied in the current design of the haft.
I once stayed in a self-styled “design hotel” where the interior architects and designers had clearly been suffering from an acute attack of creativity leading to intermittent, debilitating bouts of originality. Door handles, water faucets, you name it—nothing was like the traditional design.
And it is no surprise that, in so many ways, none of these things actually worked. I don’t mean they didn’t “work” as beautiful objects to look at. I mean they didn’t function for their intended purpose. The door handles, faucets and so on were a nightmare to use or barely worked at all.
That was when I realized the great degree to which certain traditional design parameters of everyday objects were a function of their history, and of accumulated human experience of what works best. These largely designoid objects have evolved over generations, just as humans and all other natural species have.
The same is true in architecture more generally. I was once treated to a fascinating account, in conversation with an expert on the history of vernacular domestic architecture in a very wet and boggy part of Southern England. He described the sequence of various solutions adopted in successive periods of local history over the past five hundred years for dealing with the periodic flooding to which that part of the country had been subject since time immemorial.
I recall him telling me that the Elizabethans had dug a deep well in the basement, and he went on to describe a succession of ingenious improvements and architectural innovations that followed, each widely adapted at the time as an improvement over the previous approach, right up until the mid-20th Century.
And then along came nationwide building firms with tract housing and private housing estates, churning out fixed designs for identical houses that they built in developments all over the country. And lo and behold, in this particular part of the country, the new-build, standardized construction began to be affected by severe subsidence. As I recall, a great many homes could not be saved and simply had to be demolished.
The traditional designs and construction techniques, embodying historically derived solutions unique to this local area, were the way they were because they worked and lasted. Those who built to the big firms’ national standardized housing designs were, in their extreme rationalism, behaving very, very irrationally, and the homeowners, their insurers’ and the national building firm’s reputation all paid the price for this bit of hubris.
The same considerations that apply to understanding personality, interpersonal interaction and traditional designs and building techniques, apply all the more to whole ways of life that are valued in themselves, and which have an integrity of their own. Those ways of life are not easily messed about with, sometimes not even in apparently “minor” ways, without risking undoing the whole fabric of that way of life.
And by the way, how many of the world’s conflicts, great and small, arise from perceived—or real—external threats to people’s way of life which they value, indeed cherish?
Change, Scientific Discovery, and the Work of Lawyers: Identifying the Right Pattern
The same applies to what is myopically derided as “resistance to change,” whether in organizations, in psychotherapy, or in everyday life.
If change is resisted, could it not be because it’s undesirable, and that there’s an alternative way of going about getting the same desired result that would be welcomed rather than resisted?
This is certainly what we have found consistently in our own change work. No well-designed change intervention should ever evoke any “resistance to change” whatsoever. The notion of universal “resistance to change” we have found to be a myth.
One vital key to effective change is in trying to understand—by asking the right questions in true Collingwoodian spirit, questions of the kind we have been discussing for the past several weeks—just what the other party is doing from their point of view. If an attempted change evokes resistance, what are we missing here?
We need continually to ask ourselves, regarding the people we are dealing with, “What are they trying to achieve, exactly, from their own point of view?” And the “exactly” is important.
Longstanding patterns of interaction are not difficult to change if you know how to go about it—even major, organization-wide pattern change, as we have discussed here throughout the pages of Change, should be fast and easy. It is easy to change patterns if you know how, no matter how intractable or longstanding they might be. However, what is infinitely more difficult is knowing precisely which patterns to change.
The issues we have been addressing in the present series of posts (starting with “Questioning Truth”) regarding the application of a historical mode of understanding in Collingwood’s sense, do not in any way boil down to a question of otherwise not being able to change patterns that need changing.
The issue, rather, is the risk of misidentifying and therefore badly defining the pattern to be changed—and, at the very least, risking throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is too easy to make things worse rather than better if you don’t know how to identify the right pattern at the right level of description.
This is just one reason why it is better, where possible, to accept and utilize existing patterns to avoid this double danger inherent in pattern change: either failing to change the right pattern because it’s been misidentified and so the desired transformation fails to occur or to stick, or of only making things worse through your intervention, or both. The principle of utilization is one we have stressed at many points in numerous previous articles here in Change on Substack. This is where Collingwood’s question-and-answer logic and epistemology comes in particularly handy.
In communication it is the difference between successful communication and talking at cross purposes without realizing it, often for a very long time, as in the example of the centuries-old misunderstanding over the two words “sola fide” which tore Europe apart for over 400 years and cost perhaps as many as 18 million lives or more until the misunderstanding was rectified in 1999.
For scientists, and not just archaeologists and scientific historians like Collingwood, identifying the right pattern at the right level of description is also of the very essence of scientific discovery.
Pinpointing the Right Pattern to Change, and the Work of Lawyers and Psychotherapists
For psychotherapists the single greatest clinical challenge and the one requiring the highest degree of skill and expertise is in identifying which pattern it is precisely, and at what level of description, that needs changing.4
Likewise for lawyers perhaps the biggest challenge both in drafting and in litigation over breach of contract, to take just two examples from legal work, is in pinning down exactly what the parties to the contract each meant by what they have agreed, no matter how precise the language seemed to be at the time the verbal agreement was reached or the written contract drafted and signed.
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, in interpreting even the most rigorously drafted piece of parliamentary legislation when new kinds of circumstances arise that could never have been envisaged at the time of drafting, routinely has extremely difficult judgements to make on just this kind of point.
The wording of the law can be as precise and unambiguous as you like—and indeed may have been completely unambiguous at the time—and then years later something happens that no one thought of at the time the legislation was drafted and enacted, and now it becomes a matter of often arcane legal debate between the nation’s top barristers before a panel of the top judges in the land, to determine what on earth those once very clear words could mean when applied to such a situation.
For example, this is the task currently facing the Supreme Court in a major decision forthcoming and eagerly awaited on litigation funding,5 with potentially tremendous consequences. If the decision goes one way, it is likely that virtually all extant funding agreements for group actions (what in America are called “class actions”) will be rendered unenforceable.
And all because the carefully drafted legislation whose meaning was as clear as the noonday sun at the time it was passed into law, now has become as clear as mud because of other legislation that has come into force in the meantime, along with new practices which have since evolved, and which could not have been envisaged at the time of drafting.
If you were to watch the recorded proceedings online, you would see the barristers for both sides, as well as the judges in putting questions to them, all applying precisely the same kind of question-and-answer logic and historical thinking that Collingwood saw as indispensable in both philosophy and in science—a form of logic which is clearly indispensable in legal argumentation of this kind, and which in our own experience is equally indispensable in designing effective interventions to create rapid, large-scale change.
The late Oxford philosopher Justin Gosling (1930-2022) defined Philosophy as “at least the study of the presuppositions of, and apparent contradictions in, our current ways of thinking.” Here too we can see why Collingwood saw the question-and-answer logic of historical thinking as indispensable in philosophical analysis and argument, and indeed as inseparable from it, not least because without it no one can be sure of what is truly a contradiction in someone else’s thinking or behaviour and what is not.
To be continued…
© Copyright 2023 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The most frequently cited version of this story derives from a 1950 Caltech lecture by the MIT historian of technology Elting E. Morison (1909–1995), “Gunfire at Sea,” published in his Men, Machines, and Modern Times, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966. I have been unable to locate the version, lurking somewhere in my library, on which I myself have drawn above.
Robert Waelder had an interesting further take on this analogy, drawing on the translation of the Rosetta Stone, in his “Observation, Historical Reconstruction and Experiment: An Epistemological Study,” in C. Hanly and M. Lazerowitz, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy, New York: International Universities Press.
I owe this example to Dr D. J. Stewart, to whom I also owe the excellent term “designoid.”
I have argued this in relation to psychotherapy in my 2013 paper, “The Pageantry of the Mind,” published by the Aalto University Press and available online.
R (on the application of PACCAR Inc and others) (Appellants) v Competition Appeal Tribunal and others (Respondents) Case ID: 2021/0078. The issue being decided is whether or not litigation funding agreements pursuant to which the funder is entitled to recover a percentage of any damages recovered, are to be regarded as “damages-based agreements” within the meaning of the legislation which regulates such agreements.