A reflex response is what happens in the absence of thought and reflection

Monday, as we all know, is the absentee day. The day when the undermotivated, the hungover, the weather-challenged and the just plain lazy get their mother, their flatmate or their partner to ring the office and say they won’t be in.

The throat is so bad, they couldn’t even come to the phone.

Some absentees do manage to transport their bodies into the office on the first day of the week. It’s just their minds they leave at home. An example of this kind is probably to be found in a chair near you. That’s the one clutching a beaker of supercharged coffee who may be able to answer difficult questions like “What’s today’s date?” by about mid-morning.

The mentally-absent have no shame about leaving their minds at home. They behave as if the failure of their thinking process was a natural function, like the weather.

“I can’t think until I get caffeine,” they announce.

Or they do the “You know me in the morning” routine. Of course we know them in the morning. To our cost.

But we all go along with the general presumption that, given a little time, a little gentle ignoring and a lot of espresso, they WILL be able to think.

Me and Bill Clinton have doubts. About the thinking thing. Bill Clinton says, essentially, that we’ve stopped thinking. He wants us to get back to thinking. He particularly wants political parties to get back to it and he has a point.

His point is that political parties no longer reflect or consider. They just react. Some of the time, they have no choice: the media maw is open and needs feeding.

Another cause for instantaneous reaction, though, is where politicians know in their water that the other political party is steeped in corruption or warmongering.

They know in the same water that the other political leader is a half-witted neanderthal who wouldn’t know an ethic if it bit him in the biceps, and so their responses are little more than reflexes.

And that’s just America. Spot any similarities in Ireland to the Clinton syndrome of unthinking reactive political abuse? Thought you would.

But the thinking deficit isn’t exclusive to politics. In my day job, I get to show videotapes of presentations to small groups. When I stop the tape, I often ask a bog-standard, dead-simple question like “What point did the presenter make?”

I’ve yet to get an answer to the question. I get loads of ANSWERS, but they’re never to the question asked. The answers, typically, go like this.

“I really liked the way he used his hands and made eye contact.” (Oh, you expected him to turn his back and be handcuffed?) “He needs to cut to the chase quicker and be more punchy.” (This one tends to be from a male colleague of the presenter.) “He has a warm presence and good inflections.” (This, invariably, is from a female colleague).

Doing a Jeremy Paxman on the group and demanding an answer to the question asked will eventually out someone who can recall some point they made. But any group, left alone, by-passes listening. It watches but doesn’t see. It doesn’t set out to capture what was said by making notes of it. It doesn’t give houseroom to the possibility of reflecting on it. Instead, it rushes to judgment. It’s as if being caught without an opinion was the intellectual equivalent of indecent exposure.

Yesterday, for example, radio stations ran vox pop interviews, distinguished by the

input of people accosted in the street who weren’t desperately clear what it was that Bertie Ahern wasn’t saying, but who were nonetheless certain that he should get it off his chest.

Any reporter will tell you that, when someone backs away from a microphone in the street because they have no opinion on a particular issue, they invariably apologise. People feel they SHOULD have an opinion. They never feel they should have time to think.

Except the group I had on a training course last year, who unnerved me by asking me to go away for 15 minutes while they reflected on what they had heard up to that point.

The outcome of the day vastly improved as a result. They were nuns.

Apart from nuns, very few professional people today spend time on reflection. Reading something, or listening to something, and then gazing into space, does not play well in most offices.

Nor does anybody, going for a job, ever tell a potential employer “I do a lot of thinking.” It’s action that’s wanted.

Ordinary plain vanilla thinking has huge value, but nobody wants it.

Which is not to say that nobody NEEDS it. The first edition of the Young Doctors reality series on RTE demonstrated just how badly plain vanilla thinking is needed in the health service, for example.

The young doctors worked long hours and complained about working long hours. They ran around a lot.

Half the running about was patently unnecessary. The young doctors were being sent like An Post personnel to collect and deliver scans and other documents. Again and again, reference was made to scans and documents going missing. But nobody had sat back and said “Whoa. What the hell are we paying these young people high salaries for? Doing the job of an internal courier?”

Of course, young doctors lashing around, do give an impression of speed and excitement. The problem is when speed and excitement are valued over content and thought. The stereotype of the great manager is the guy striding down the corridor, signing documents, handing them off left and right, snapping decisions out of him on the fly, as if the task was to decide, rather than to think and then decide.

Scientist-turned novelist Alan Lightman, who teaches at MIT, published an essay a decade ago which suggested that communications technology may actually be killing the capacity to reflect and consider.

“It has become so easy and fast to communicate that we often do so without reflection,” Lightman observed. “When messages come in so quickly and effortlessly, we irresistibly and immediately respond. Although I cannot document it, I suspect that bad decisions are being made because of the haste in responding to email messages. But more to the point is the overall fast-food mentality at work in the rapid conveyance of our thoughts and responses. We are undercutting our contemplative powers. We could even be, ironically, impeding progress.”