In many modern economic organizations,

the quest for understanding [is] deferred until there is a symptom of trouble to deal with. When the pace is fast and the competitive pressure intense, such deferral may even involve the suppression of ordinary skepticism about the ... prevailing ways of doing things. ... High standards of proof are a luxury reserved to certain cliques among the inhabitants of the ivory tower [1].

So, it may appear that the situation in universities is much better than in industry, and that at least certain universities are bastions of thoughtful reflection and contemplative scholarship. Levy’s outstanding and thought-provoking overview demonstrates that this is, regretfully, not always the case. There is not a lot of time to think, even in universities.

While Levy is certainly not the first to make such observations, his paper is very well structured, emphasizes the essentials, uses excellent examples, and contains no jargon or buzzwords. He compares the approaches to contemplative thinking, described by Vannevar Bush and Joseph Pieper, and stresses that both authors, from different vantage points, emphasized the need to think more deeply and creatively. Bush’s technological proposals were for “powerful mechanical aids” that could be used to automate “routine thought,” while Bush stressed that “for mature thought ... there is no mechanical substitute.” Pieper, in his book based on his 1947 lectures [2], in a similar way (referring to the Greeks and medieval scholastics) distinguished between two kinds of thought, and emphasized that, deprived of contemplation and “lightning-like insights,” thinking and scholarship would “retain their shell of rationality but lose their vital core.” The world of “total work,” the “obsessive drive to work even faster and harder,” dehumanizes people.

Levy recalls that for the Greeks, their only word for work could be translated literally as “non-leisure,” and that leisure “was that which required no justification beyond itself, for example, philosophy, and the arts.” Here we may remember Hayek’s classical paper [3] (not mentioned by Levy), in which Hayek quotes Aristotle on “science for the sake of knowledge, and not for any practical utility,” and quotes Adam Smith on the role of philosophy:

Wonder ... and not any expectation of advantage from its discoveries, is the first principle which prompts mankind to study philosophy, that science which pretends to lay open the concealed connections that unite the various appearances of nature.

Furthermore, closer to (our computing science) home, but regretfully also not mentioned by Levy, E.W. Dijkstra clearly distinguished between two kinds of thinking, pondering and reasoning [4], and showed that pondering is essential to reduce reasoning to a doable amount, resulting in simplicity and elegance. It clearly follows that pondering (also known as contemplation and, yes, leisure) is also indispensable to deal with information overload, to handle the problematic aspects of acceleration, and to invent and innovate.

However, efficiency (as opposed to effectiveness) and “self-propelling” new technologies leave little time for reflection. Levy quotes Eriksen as saying that when fast time and slow time meet, fast time wins. Levy further notices that while Bush hoped that his proposed technologies would buy researchers more time to think, instead they have primarily been used only for acceleration rather than “to reflect on what has been collected.” In an excellent example of the pace of current research, Levy quotes Keller’s biography of Nobel Prize winning geneticist Barbara McClintock: while she “understood that deep reflection couldn’t be hurried,” her graduate students argued that the technology of molecular biology was self-propelling. Consequently, there was always the next experiment to do, and, therefore, there was no time to look and to think. This is where we may distinguish between bioinformatics and biosemiotics, a less popular but arguably much more interesting area of research (which accentuates the fallacy of reductionism in treating complex phenomena). Readers of this review may easily provide similar examples from computing science and computing science education.

Levy notes that all creative work, and not just work in the sciences, has an immersive, contemplative element. He provides many examples, including quotes from Mozart and Lewis Carroll, and I would like to add a more pragmatic example from investing: Richard Oldfield [5] urges the reader to focus on “things which matter--information minimalism,” rather than on “idiotic distraction and waste of time” when “staring ... mesmerized ... at [any] machine which tells one stock prices” and which “impels people to do all sorts of things which are better left undone.”

Finally, Levy observes that in universities, contemplation is not used a lot and not taught. While he describes the “extremely discouraging trends” of academics who face substantial difficulties in trying to “create the space and time for reading, writing, study, and teaching,” unfortunately, he never refers to Dijkstra’s papers in general, nor to Dijkstra’s remarks about the need for universities to avoid the “enormous external pressure to do the wrong [buzzword-compliant] thing” in particular. Dijkstra’s warnings have been mostly ignored, and examples abound: from teaching programming languages instead of teaching programming concepts (for the latter, I recall a 1960s textbook in which running a computer program was compared to trying to prove a mathematical theorem), and to the more recent teaching of ontology languages and tools instead of teaching ontology concepts. Levy warns that this external pressure may have destructive consequences:

Reduc[ing] universities to training institutes, largely preparing people to become efficient multi-taskers in a world of ‘total work,’ [and reducing] faculty to trainers and coaches, rather than scholars demonstrating and communicating the beauty and power of mature, creative thought.