The Between

We were taught to picture intelligence as a thing inside a single head: measurable, ownable, scarce. But a room can be more intelligent than any person in it, when the room is built so that minds can reach one another.

Insight lives in the space between people: in the question one person asks that unlocks another, in the trust that lets an idea be handed across without being dropped, in the friction of difference that strikes a light neither could have struck alone. A civilization is not wise because it contains brilliant individuals. It is wise because of what passes between them. We spent an age trying to sharpen the single mind. The leverage was always in the between, and we left it almost untouched. This is, in Gregory Bateson's phrase, the pattern which connects, an idea Stephen Harrod Buhner later carried forward.

TO GO DEEPER Volume II: the relational mind

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