Copyright 1999 Joe Shea. All Rights Reserved.

I suspect a deep structure is driving this penchant of the human mind for making lists

British author A. S. Byatt noted in a recent essay on the New York Times Web site, "If the last millenium was a time of plagues and portents, this one is the time of lists."

Lists are wonderful stimulants for thought and opinion. Byatt confesses to enjoying such lists, and I am with her. "With lists we arrange both the past and the future of our minds," she writes.

It should come as no surprise that Time magazine is trying to arrange our collective American minds and providing us a chance to vote along with its editors in selecting the century's most influential people.

The magazine has been generating its own list of "The 100 Most Influential People of the Century." Planned in five separate groups, the last of which is set to publish in June, the series has thus far picked the most influential Leaders and Revolutionaries; Artists and Entertainers; Builders and Titans; and Scientists and Thinkers. June will provide the most influential Heroes and Inspirations.

In December, just before the 21st century is greeted, the magazine will announce its pick for "Person of the Century."

Most recently (March 29 issue), Time provided a list of "people who overthrew our inherited ideas about logic, language, learning, mathematics, economics and even space and time." Its list is comprised of 23 "scientists and thinkers," among them Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk, the Wright Brothers, John Maynard Keynes, Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget.

John Wilson, the editor of Books and Culture, the evangelical Christian guide to intelligent reading, picked up an important bias in Times' selection of thinkers, calling it "a curious mix."

From the list, Wilson notes, "we can infer, to some extent at least, what kind of thinking matters to Time. Great minds are pre-eminently scientific/mathematical/technological."

What about theology? Wilson asks. He wants to know if the Time crew ever considered Hans Kung or Karl Barth. Well, who knows, perhaps one of them will show up in June as inspirations.

Wilson had me in his corner for a while, then he added this low blow: "I've already started my revision by crossing out Piaget and writing in Marshall McLuhan."

I shrink in horror at such a suggestion, which to me smacks of voting for style over substance, of succumbing to the mind-numbing suggestions of the media and ignoring the deep structures of cognition that are the essence of thought. (Parenthetically, where's the theology in such a revision?)

In my view, Piaget -- more than any other scientist or thinker on the list -- alerted us to the very shortsightedness that Wilson attributes to Time magazine: In Piagetian terms, the concrete operational thinking that dominates technology is less mature than the formal operational hypothesizing and analyzing that characterizes theological reflection.

My horror, I hasten to add, has nothing to do with Wilson's alternative choice of McLuhan.

The Canadian inventor of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the global village has transformed our way of looking at technology, and the growing pervasiveness of the Internet only underscores his prophetic vision.

However, McLuhan's insight that technology transforms our consciousness is miniscule compared to the insight Piaget brings to our understanding of that consciousness. In a sense, Piaget gave the mind back to psychology and refocused scientific research on it, rescuing us from the Freudian preoccupation with our loins.

Piaget taught us that the unfolding of adolescence was less a libidinal discovery of hormones and more a transformation of cognitive capabilities. Piaget showed us that growth and maturation drag us from the object-oriented, self-centered thinking of childhood into the fascinating formalities of symbolic, theoretical and altruistic speculation.

Piaget's observations taught us that children's "cute" errors of cognition are not mistakes but indicators of the very structure of early consciousness.

The toddler who tells her mother the moon sleeps when she sleeps is not offering a comic misperception, she is revealing a developing structure of the organizing capabilities of her mind, as is the pre-teen who suddenly comprehends there is a dark side to the moon and to humankind.

McLuhan's influence may have radicalized many a college and university English department, but Piaget's work revamped the curricula of every elementary, middle and high school in the world.

McLuhan provides us a model of limitations on the mind; Piaget alerts us to the mind's unlimited potential.

So go ahead and add McLuhan to the list, if one must, but not as a replacement for Piaget.

My major gripe with such lists, anyway, is that they are never long enough to contain what is truly significant and influential among us.

Allan R. Andrews can be contacted at allan.andrews@reporters.net

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