UNLEARNING THE OLD
I was reading an article in an Italian newspaper that, in my experience, underlines and explains well the difficulties that we encounter when trying to acquire new knowledge by developing and applying a training program.
Every time a new piece of information is presented or a new method is proposed, everybody will prefer to A) continue with the old knowledge and system or B) use the newly acquired expertise as intellectual embellishment of the old method. The tyranny of the obvious is here obvious.
It was so obvious that I felt personally challenged by the thought: am I just reviving old ideas with new makeup? Is my old brain now so sclerotic not to see the tyranny of the old concepts? Is the desire for recognition, approval and power so vital to make me chat about new when repeating old stories? Is the archive of past ideas the real source of what I call new?
Curiosity, humility and prudence are essential virtues and tools for examining and growing our knowledge, awareness and ethical behaviour — valid tools for everybody involved in training, especially motorcycle training.
The word “obvious” moved from a positive meaning “easy to see and to understand” to a critical one “unnecessary and lacking imagination”. It is not a word you want to hear when somebody is involved in serious conversation or training with you. Because if “it is obvious”, is part of a routine, it is not a notion of independent work. As Mr Bordoni says: “obvious is inversely proportional to thinking”. Let us read further in his article “Tyranny of the obvious” (*) “The tyranny of the obvious may seem like an exaggeration, a hyperbolic statement to be greeted with irony. What can be tyrannical about the obvious? At first sight, the obvious is reassuring; it gives a sense of security typical of consolidated things on which to rely because they are evident, indisputable, and accepted by all. You don’t even need to think about it…Because the obvious is inversely proportional to thinking. It requires no effort — therefore, no tyranny but rather a sense of freedom of peace.
Over time, however, the obvious has proved fragile: more than a tyrant, it has proved sterile, incapable of understanding the complexity of reality, but only of stolidly relying on what is already known, what is taken for granted.
The battle against the obvious was fought with doubt, imagination, and creativity: characters from different eras, firmly determined to demonstrate that common sense is not absolute… Newton’s apple doesn’t always fall the same way. Just change one parameter (the force of gravity, the density of the atmosphere, the mass), and the result will be different. Getting out of the obvious is tiring; it implies an intellectual effort that we are only sometimes willing to make. Moreover, the obvious is stubborn; it is not easily set aside; it stays there like an insidious sprite suggesting to let it go, settle, and think of something else because questioning the certainties acquired is burdensome. And if working tires, thinking tires even more.
Carlo Rovelli … reminds us that «the difficult thing, as every good teacher knows, is not teaching the new: it is leading the listener to unlearn the old». In other words, finding the intellectual courage to admit that what we know, the acquired certainties on which we base our existence, can be wrong… Unlearning the old, starting from a different point of view, and questioning the established, also represents the emergency exit that could protect us from the dominance of artificial intelligence… Can you imagine an electronic brain willing to erase its knowledge to get rid of the obvious?”
Protection from artificial intelligence? For sure, but protection from my stupidity and from our desire to withdraw in what “everybody says”, what “all believe”, what “is so evident that I do not know why we should discuss it”. Protection as well for prejudices and preconceived ideas that are so ingrained in our minds and in our acts that we do not even notice them, calling “common knowledge, general culture, standard operating procedure”.
And when we come to motorcycling training (as in many other sports)” UNLEARNING old conceits and UNLEARNING old habits” is the mandatory door to LEARNING and IMPROVING. Every father teaches to use the bicycle using the back brake “Do not touch the front or you will crash” is the mantra that from the age of three, we bring with us to motorcycle: challenging to learn emergency braking if we do not de-learn, first, the exclusive use of the back brake. “Harley riders are all show and little riding, slow and in group” is a banal idea from a 1950 film, the Wild One, still imprinted in many biker’s minds. And these are only the “banal” examples I can think of now, hoping that they can trigger a personal examination of the ones we carry inside us as wounds of old battles. We need to avoid imposing our banal prejudices and platitudes on reality, learning to take our ideas from the acceptance of reality in all its aspects.
Before any moment of training we need to stop, make silence, empty our mind and spirit from the baggage of “everybody thinks so”: unlearning flawed concepts is difficult, unlearning lousy habits and bad behaviours is a more daunting task.
From personal experience, Curiosity, Humility and Prudence sometimes are not enough.
