Unlearning 101

God Dome It! Unlearn!

The Saint Ignatius church in Rome was originally designed to include a cupola. For financial reasons, the feature was never built.

In moment, sparked by Divine intervention perhaps, Church officials hired Andrea Pozzo to paint a fake dome on the ceiling over the altar. Today, more than 300 years later, many visitors are shocked to find out the spectacular cupola above them is not real but an illusion.

Sometimes all it takes to unlearn a problem is the willingness to embrace a new perspective.

Interested in some other examples of turning problems into opportunities? Check out these older posts by self-described "Chief Unlearning Officer" Jack Uldrich:

Put One Foot in Back of the Other

The Opposite May Also Be True

The Final Straw

Two years before his death, St. Thomas the Aquinas, the Catholic Church's greatest theologian and philosopher went silent. He just stopped speaking.

Why? No one is entirely sure why but the last thing he wrote is this: All that I have hitherto written seems to me nothing but straw.

As a writer I understand this sentiment, but St. Thomas the Aquinas is no ordinary writer, scholar or thinker. As I said earlier, he was the Catholic Church's greatest theologian. Pope Benedict XV even once went so far as to declare: "The Church has declared Thomas's doctrine to be her own."

I suspect Pope Benedict wasn't including Thomas' final "straw" statement in this assessment -- although it should. I say this because Thomas also once wrote that the ultimate in knowing God is "to know that we do not know Him."

This idea -- which is a big one -- requires a lot of unlearning. If more people could, however, embrace it, the world would be a better place because those who claim to "know God" are the ones who are really grasping at straws -- and making a great mess of the world while doing it.

Unlearning Death

In 1899, just a few years before the Wright brothers achieved their historic accomplishment, Lord Kelvin -- then one of the world's brightest men and most accomplished scientists -- declared heavier than air machines to be "impossible."

He was wrong. To add insult to injury, Lord Kelvin was proved wrong by a pair of bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio.

A few years ago, a relatively unknown computer scientist, Aubrey de Grey, declared that aging should not be viewed as something which will necessarily ultimately result in death. Rather, he theorized that aging is a  disease and should be treated as such.

The outcry from the scientific community was similar to Lord Kelvin's reaction to human flight. One group of scientists even declared that de Grey's idea was "so far from plausible that it commands no respect at all within the informed scientific community."

Well, according to this article in Wired, the idea is now beginning to gain some acceptance within scientific circles.

To be sure, society is still a long way from de Grey's goal of ending again but, as I have written before, I'd encourage people to not dismiss the idea entirely. For if he is right, it will require society to unlearn a great many ideas which it now holds as dear.

In fact, the scale of unlearning our current paradigm of "death as an inevitability" could make other past historic paradigm shifts -- such as the idea that the earth is not at the center of the universe (an idea for which Aristarchus was run out of Alexandria and Galileo was forced to recant under edict of the Catholic Church) or Darwin's theory of evolution -- look like child's play.

It's Never Too Late to Unlearn

In the spring of 2007 the Vatican announced that babies who died before they were baptized were no longer relegated to a life in limbo -- a rather mysterious land believed to reside just outside of heaven where unbaptized babies lived in perpetual happiness but were not in direct communion with God.

Regardless of one's religious views, I find the decision highly instructive for any institution that is attempting to unlearn a long-held belief because it demonstrates just how long it sometimes take to change. In this case, the Catholic Church held this particularly view for the last four centuries.

Interestingly, it seems that Church leaders ultimately reversed their policy because there were "reasons for prayerful hope, rather than grounds for sure knowledge" that unbaptized babies did not go to heaven.

I especially like that last idea about there not being "grounds for sure knowledge." Often, the first step in unlearning is the simple acknowledgment that you "don't know everything."

My point is this: If the conservative Catholic Church can unlearn a centuries old policy, might there be some long held policies that you or your organization can unlearn?