GOEG PAPER

Joy Prior
Geo 120
Sec. 005
Samuel Otterstrom
Hugh Nibley
In the testing center I saw a new pencil sharpener. You stick your pencil into the sharpener, and when the pencil is sharp a blue light flashes on. It felt like an electronic slap in the face; not only are you going to fail your examine but you are so dumb that you cannot even tell when your own pencil is sharp. It gets worse above the pencil sharpener is a sign, when the light flashes blue your pencil is sharpened. In short the testing center expects me to know how to statistically predict the next election, label every country in the world, but not figure out an automatic pencil sharpener. After rolling my eyes I sharpened my pencil, and sat in a plastic desk for the next two hours while I filled in the answer sheet and wrote out responses. I had just finished reading Hugh Nibley’s Zeal Without Knowledge essay, and could not help but to wonder if such inventions were contributing to or discouraging from my thought process. I willfully admite that I am acting overly dramatic… I am discussing a pencil sharpener.
It was not that the pencil sharpener that bothered me, but the assumption that I could not figure out when my own pencil was sharp. After reading an article about wasteful knowledge, and being filled of facts without direction all I could think about was the process of thinking. More importantly it caused me to wonder what is a valuable thought, and what is a trivial thought. With the testing center behind me I walked home puzzling over the question, Was the pencil sharpener saving me valuable time that I could spend thinking about something significant or was the machine denying me the daily “brain pushups” that will help me to understand powerful thoughts? I turned over the quote from Nibley, “If the mind is denied functioning to capacity, it will take terrible revenge. The penalty we pay for starving our minds is a phenomenon that is only to conspicuous at Brigham Young University.” The real issue for me was not the pencil sharpener, but it caused me to question if my dependency on technology is keeping my mind from functioning to it’s full capacity.
As I thought about machines restricting my thoughts I realized that it is not simply about the amount of time that I spend thinking, but about what I am thinking about. For as much time as I spent thinking about this particular idea I could have written this paper. Instead I chose to spend time thinking about the way that I think. The real discussion in Nibley’s essay is about making valuable usage of the time we have to think. He believes that “Probably 99 percent of human ability has been wholly wasted, even today… (we) operate for most of our time as automatic machines, and glimpse the profounder resources of our minds only once or twice in a lifetime.” I came to the rocky conclusion that it not simply constantly thinking, but chosing to think. Instead of depending on spell check, and my calculator to do my thinking I can chose to think.
As for the pencil sharpener in the testing center I can still chose to think, to think about the test I am about to take, to think if I want to have my pencil that sharp, or even to think if I want to use the pencil sharpener. The message that I took from Hugh Nibley was that I need to chose to think. Every day I am surrounded by inventions and technology that can think for me. For now I am now chosing to think by thinking about how I think, Hugh Nibley, and pencil sharpeners.