Thinking outside the box.

• Author: Kreyche, Gerald F.
• Position: Parting Thoughts - Brief Article

WE HUMANS tend to get set in our ways. Largely, this is a matter of habit taking over, combined with a certain laziness to be open to new ideas. Yet, the history of human progress can be accounted for by those who had the courage, sometimes against strong opposition, to "think outside the box" in which we imprison our ideas. We get too comfortable with old conventions and must shake ourselves vigorously to escape them. Let's take a look at some past and present-day examples of how exceptional people helped change our world of thought.

Much of the cultural heritage of the Western world owes a debt to the ancient Greeks. The Athenians gave us the idea of democracy. Euclid invented geometry, and other Greeks used its principles in their magnificent architecture. They also offered Aristotelian philosophy to break out of a mythical-religious explanation of our world, but there's the rub. Scholars grew so enamored of those intellectual giants that, in an age of authority, they began to accept authority as a principal basis for truth. The differing and radical views of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and others proposing a heliocentric universe instead of a geocentric one brought the Inquisition down on the new science. Nevertheless, they persisted, and in the main proved to be correct, and the Aristotelian edifice collapsed. As an aside, it was said that the science of Aristotle was a magnificent tribute to the man's genius with but a single flaw--it was wrong! By freeing science from the box of scholastic philosophy and theology, Europe could escape from the Dark Ages.

Despite biting criticism by thinkers such as Desiderius Erasmus, the philosophy of Aristotle, as embellished by early medieval thinkers and, later, St. Thomas, did not die easily. This "scholasticism" remained the core of curricula in Catholic colleges until the last half of the 20th century. To "persuade" Catholics to stay "in the box," the Catholic Church produced an Index of Forbidden Books and various mandates.

Creationist theory, supposedly rooted in an inerrant Genesis, carried the day until naturalist Charles Darwin proposed the new paradigm of evolution as an explanation for the development of things organic, including humans. This, too, created great controversy, but freed biologists to continue looking for truth, albeit in new directions.

In the 19th century, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud shook the foundations of psychology and, to some extent, morality by proposing...