HOW AND WHY WE LEARN TO HOLD OUR HORSES

When I was a young buck getting overly rambunctious, my mother would inevitably intervene by saying: "Now just a minute mister...Hold your horses!" In other words, "Pull in your reins, slow down. Don't get too frisky without thinking of the ramifications of your actions."

I was thinking about the meaning behind the idiom "hold your horses" last night during a six-hour power outage and it sent me off on a course of discovery and revelation after the lights eventually came on, as it were.  There is really more to this expression than initially appears on the surface. Who would have thunk it? 

Realizing that this subject is somewhat philosophical by nature and not everyone's cup of tea, I will try to explain it in non-scholarly, everyday prose.

At the outset, and without delving too deep, I find that reality is generally more complex than a tidy theory. Nevertheless, a theory helps us to organize complexity. From a place of reference, we put the forces at play into a coherent pattern. We see how things are connected; we make sense of what is happening in a given situation. Hence, we become more aware of how we might respond and where we might aim our efforts.

System Theory is a way of conceptualizing reality. It organizes our thinking from a specific vantage point. System thinking considers the interrelatedness of the parts. Instead of seeing isolated, unrelated parts, we ideally look at the whole.  Truth be known, some people do not know how to do that, and it impedes progress individually or in groups.

Learning theorist Jean Piaget noted that for approximately the first 15 years of life we assimilate pieces of information. Thereafter we develop the ability to fit the pieces together. We learn to associate what we assimilate. We see likenesses between dissimilar objects; we coordinate separate entities into interrelated parts; we realize that differences do not necessarily cancel out each other; we see how opposites are suited to one another. Looking at how things are interrelated, we reach a higher level of thinking. With maturity we see both parts and wholes and, ideally, that should carry over into government, our churches and other impactful organizational aspects of the world at large.

Now "hold your horses" for a minute dear reader. I'm getting to my thesis.

All life is marked by the continuing play of balance and imbalance, but when we turn from internal milieu of the body to external environment of the body politic, circumstances are more complex. Externally we need stabilizing forces, i.e keeping traditions, following rules and contributing to the balance of things we are involved in. 

Change, however, is necessary for survival but balancing forces keep in place a narrow range of responses that need to be modified. An example from the military system of yesteryear accents this point:

In the early days of the last war when armaments of all kinds were in short supply. the British made use of a venerable field piece that had come down from previous generations of armament. The honorable past of this light artillery stretched back, in fact, to the Boer War. In the days of uncertainty after the fall of France, these guns, hitched to trucks, served as useful mobile units in coastal defense.  But it was felt that the rapidity of fire could be increased. A time motion expert was, therefore, called in to suggest ways of simplifying the firing procedures.

The expert watched one of the five-man gun crews taking part in a field exercise. Puzzled by certain aspects of the procedure, he took slow motion film of the soldiers performing the loading, aiming and firing routines. After repeated views of the film, he noticed something that appeared odd to him...A moment before the actual firing, two members of the crew ceased all activity and came to attention for a three-second interval during the discharge of the gun.

He summoned an old artillery colonel, showing him the film and pointing out the strange behavior of the two men. "What," he asked the colonel, "did it mean?"

The colonel too, was puzzled and asked to see the film again. "Ah," he finally announced, "I have it...They are holding the horses!"

Even though cannons were hitched to vehicles, not horse-drawn carts as was the case originally, the cannon firing routine had been so completely reinforced that no one thought to change it.  Not until the rapidity of the firing became a focal point did someone step back to see the old pattern when horses had to be held due to the loud roar of the cannon upon discharge.

When customary things are disturbed, we often suffer temporary culture shock. "This isn't the way we used to do it," sort of thing. We are, after all, creatures of habit.  We crave continuity and sameness, but at the same time we need to be flexible. Therefore change is as normal as the norms to which we become accustomed.

People simply have to negotiate new ways of living together in order to avoid trauma in real-life situations. There is a time for homeostasis, and there is a time in everyone's life for asking: "Why are you holding the horses?"