Sense and Nonsense (*put after Good and Bad Reasoning)
Noam Chomsky is one of the 20th centuries most tenacious champions against social conditioning and Behaviorism, especially as it is used to manipulate public opinion by way of the media. Social engineers of the early part of the century, influenced by the Freudian view that people are motivated by their appetites, not their reason, and so cannot be trusted to deliberate intelligently, control their appetites, or manage a civil society collectively. So, theorists like Reinhart Neigbor argued, to ensure that they would cooperate with the purposes and plans of a consumer society that feeds wealth up to the oligarchy, it was necessary to deliberately manufacture the opinions and motivations of the masses.
And one effective way to do this was by way of these conditioning processes, deliberately titillating their desires for consumer goods and keep them salivating for more and more of whatever unconditioned stimulus is put before them (Pavlov’s metaphor goes further than we might imagine to help us understand human behavior in the over the last century), not only to keep them comfortable, but to keep them having ‘fun,’ not to mention to enhance their reputations among those who can be impressed with extrinsic wealth, the assumption being that one did something to ‘earn’ those goods; of course, what they did may have been far from good. Hence the reason so many need medication, because conscience can be a cruel karma. So why should we be happy if we don’t deserve to be? Just assuming for a minute that the universe is fair, it stands to reason that if we diminish someone else’s happiness, then we don’t really deserve to be happy ourselves. So what should we expect but to grow less happy as we grow more greedy? We shouldn’t be surprised, after all, to find a pall of unhappiness hanging over a population that grew up steeped in a kind of ‘self-interest at all costs’ mentality. This IS the cost, after all, of robbing others of their happiness, i.e. our own happiness.
But here’s the thing – it stands to reason that, if the many (demos) are as ignorant as social engineers claim, it’s because they’ve been so badly raised, not by bad parents, as much as by those who are conditioning them to respond only to appetites, and in the process diverting them from the intelligent beings they might otherwise have learned to become, toward the ignorance of living only for conditioned wants. There’s nothing inherently wrong with loving and enjoying material things, after all. In fact, it would be a sort of sin not to appreciate all the goods that life makes possible. It only goes wrong when we trade away the intrinsic benefits and joys of the inner world for exclusively extrinsic goods, trading quality for quantity. Ideally, we should be encouraged from a young age to develop the kind of intelligence that comes with learning to want what’s actually good for us – which is a balance between outer and inner goods.
This is what Socrates argued our primary challenge in life should be - to learn what’s worth trading for what. The true value of all of life’s goods is what ancient wisdom can help us rediscover, because this doesn’t change, though we may all see it somewhat differently. This is, again, the good thing about the truth, that it stays true. And for this reason, we can measure what is untrue and false against it.
But again, not every thing human made (artificial) entails false value, for it is human creativity that gives us our divine potentials. It also gives us our diabolical potentials. But it is not all human artifice that should be condemned, and not all self-interest that is bad. We need self-interest to survive, after all. In fact, only that which harms others in ways that we ourselves would not consent to can be deemed unjustified, because “justice is consent,” as Plato said. And this is why we need the golden rule after all, to discern our justified from our unjustified treatment of others.
There are ways to see to our interests that are justified, that achieve a balance of good between us and others. And this is the condition that happiness should accompany. It may be the very definition of it, though only those who achieve it would know why, as Aristotle said, “the pleasure of a just person can never be experienced by one who is not just.” In other words, only the just understand why only the just are happy. We may all be able to read and follow the meaning of these words, but we cannot truly understand them, in the gnostic sense, until we have put them into practice and gain the experience that brings it home to us. Only a deservedly happy person can understand how and why true happiness was elusive until they earned it. At this point, a person understands what they had to do to make things right.
This process is called ho’ponopono in the indigenous huna wisdom tradition of what we now call Hawaii. Others may call it ‘twelve steps,” and others understand it as simply atonement and forgiveness. In all cases, it is achieving a balance in the relationship between self and others.
It is this process of making things right, or better yet, living in a way that prevents things from going wrong, that is the art that the ancients tried to teach us. It does not compete with any of the various dictums of other wisdom traditions (e.g. the golden rule, the ten commandments, the eightfold path, or In Lak’ Ech - a Mayan dictum that translates as…you are my other I”),
These are all but the same art, expressed uniquely from different world views, and all of them could do us all good. For just as a traveler needs different tools at different parts of his journey, so a soul needs a tool kit of diverse lessons to meet the survival challenges of its long and challenging path, trail and trial. Life is a test, and what ancient wisdom offers are survival skills, that is, practical wisdom, ways to solve the problems of being human, mastering the challenges of our ideals and actualizing the highest of our potentials.
Now, consider how the deliberate manufacture of public and personal opinion by way of these conditioning processes, and the often toxic behaviors we learn in the process that override all this power of self-determination we might otherwise have developed, and then we can see clearly what distinguishes diabolical human creativity from divine.
“There are no masters and slaves in nature,” as Socrates reminds us. That relationship which begins where one person tries to control and manipulate another, not for the others good, but for his own, that is where injustice begins. When we make tools of others, subverting their will to their own higher purposes in becoming the ‘good’ person they could be, and make them merely a means to our own ends, regardless of theirs, that is where evil bifurcates from good.
We have every right to pursue our best interest, our own good, as long as we don’t thwart the interests of others. Because, as John Stuart Mill put it, “Our freedom ends where another’s begins.” As long as we treat others as ends in themselves, the way we would have them treat us, then we are right and good to pursue our own ends. And if our creativity can enhance the interests of others, all the better! This is our divine potential! And it shows up in the world in (almost) every song, and movie, and book, and even every building, and car, and computer… all the plethora of goods – extrinsic and intrinsic – that proliferate by way of that human creativity that is our higher potential. This is humanities divine potential. But when we confuse strength with force, we come to think that our good entails usurping the good of others - a mistake the golden rule, learned early, could have prevented. But we don’t bother teaching this, so we see generation upon generation persuaded by oligarchic interests that their interest is in extrinsic goods only, inner wealth and well being be damned. And to the extent that some make it their purpose to deflect or control others away from their own purposes, condition them into behaviors that thwart their higher purposes, this is nothing less than a sin against humanity.
So is it any wonder the richest (in material terms) are among the unhappiest people on earth? By contrast, compare many less developed places on earth – Greece, for example, where all this ancient discussion took root – and you’ll find happiness of a kind that too many have forgotten, sometimes even without even enough extrinsic goods to meet their physical needs. And yet they can muster the intrinsic goods of love and laughter, music and dance, and all the experiential joy of living.
For all the privilege the overindulgent assume for themselves, they trade this – the ability to truly enjoy and appreciate their existence! A real shame since, as Achilles put it, the gods themselves envy humanity for this! And it stands to reason, for what would you miss most about living, after all, if not your eyes and ears, your ability to taste and smell, to experience the joy of beauty and music, and the touch of ones babies and lovers? These are life’s greatest goods, the source of true happiness. And the price for forgetting their value is just that – we don’t know what we’re missing. Only those who come to remember see, sometimes very suddenly, what true happiness has been in their hands and right before their eyes all along.
But again, we only come to remember all this by putting it into practice. This is why Socrates urges that learning is akin to remembering, because the truth stayed true all along, while we, for whatever reason, forgot, neglected, and ignored it – and ‘to ignore’ is, after all, the active root of ‘ignorance.
But again, not all media, advertising, promotion, and PR, politics and other forms of human manipulation do this, for some is perfectly well justified, as Chomsky notes. Only that which usurps other’s power to actualize their own higher potentials is unjust.
This is why, perhaps, Socrates argued that “Love is the only thing [he] ever claimed to know anything about,” because love is exactly treating others as ends in themselves, just as we would have them treat us. And this makes love applicable to all others, not merely those we have feelings for, but any over whom we have power, whether they be our children, or our lovers, or our students or constituents. Love is caring what’s good for others, for their own sake, their own purposes, and their own ends, rather than using them as means to our own.
And this is why what we call the Socratic method (in it’s genuine form, which may not be the same as we’ve come to know) is an essential element of human relationships, because Socratic relationships are those where mutual teaching and learning are the purpose, and so bring out the good in both. It is an art, a practical skill, that needn’t but (lucky for us) can be taught, though probably best by example, though it still won’t be understood until it’s put into practice.
And to that end, this book makes a case for how we might and why we must reawaken the dream of these higher potentials, because nothing happens in the world that does not first begin in the mind. After all, “awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn comes before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.” (OI, Alarcon, 274) (see bibliography on Anzaldua, 340) Or as Chomsky said, “social action must be animated by a vision of a future society.”
So it’s in our survival interest to keep an eye on the ideal of our better selves, and to take whatever guidance this ideal has to offer. After all, as * has said, “we cannot fight directly the powers of globalization that are killing us all. We can only strive to bring back the dream of the earth…Democracy and true community…a light of hope for our children.” (OI, Forest, 237) That is what ancient wisdom offers us – a vision of a healthy future that any fair and reasonable person would want for themselves, and so must justly want for their children and children’s children.
Which is why the challenge for democracy is always, as Plato said, “to keep power out of the hands of those who are in love with it.” And this goes for the power of social conditioning and control as well. But since Chomsky and other public intellectuals of the 20t century (e.g. Howard Zinn, Paulo Friere, etc.) are marginalized by public disinterest in social criticism, as well as a media motivated by profit, to tell people largely what they want to hear, we quite successfully raise our young to care nothing of the ethics of our culture, or have any context in which to understand the grounds and history of social criticism in general.
I could lament many omissions in our children’s education, (e.g. *), but as a philosophy teacher, and even more so, a mother and grandmother, the one that most pains me is the lack of any exercise in critical thinking skills in early education, such that our young make it all the way to college with no exercise in good reasoning skills. In fact, they – like most of the rest of us who’ve been educated this way – do not even know what a fallacy is, or that there is even a difference between good and bad reasoning. In fact, a full education in schools such as they are offers little exercise in any thinking skills other than calculating and memorization. Lucky for us that we have what Socrates calls an ‘inner criteria’ by which to help us discern sense from nonsense, but there is little in our culture that encourages the development and refinement of these skills.
They also make it all this way learning nothing about or from the ancient wisdom traditions that understood all this well. Everything they know about Socrates is likely to have come from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure! They’ve learned to think great thinkers like Buddha are in some kind of competition with Jesus. And they have the wildly mistaken idea that ancient and indigenous cultures lived in the darkness of ignorance. When almost nothing could be further from the truth – except perhaps the illusion that we live in the light of intelligence. It’s true that we have been educated to be smart, but being intelligent has as much or more to do with being wise. This is the kind of ‘intelligence’ we ought to be teaching our children.
In fact, when we come to learn how much the ancient actually understood, that somehow was not passed forward to us, we cannot avoid wondering if it is not we who live in ignorance, a condition that naturally results from ‘ignoring’ everything we don’t want to see, and believing what we do see is all that matters.
So imagine their surprise when they step into a philosophy class and discover that there are windows to be opened in dialogue with their fellow students and vistas to behold throughout time and across cultures just waiting to illuminate their worldview and enlighten their lives, as soon as they open their eyes. Admittedly, not all or even many philosophy classes have this effect, but for those who are ready for self-directed learning, they might. Even these don’t all see it right away because, as Plato made clear, whether leaving the cave or returning to rescue others from that cave, it takes time for our eyes to adjust. Sometimes a semester isn’t enough. But since it generally takes about three months to break a habit, a semester is usually long enough to at least broaden a person’s vision, let in perspectives they will remember when they most need them. Coming to see how many different and revealing ways there are to see the world is not something that’s easy to forget, no matter how much we might neglect it. Because each of these views adds depth to our understanding the same way a second eye adds depth to what can be seen with only one.
And so this kind of learning – what the ancients called dialectic – changes us, broadens and deepens our understanding of the world as it truly is, when we realize that all perspectives matter and that grasping ever more of the whole truth is the goal.
And so it is a question of value, that is, valuing others contributions for all they’re worth, in balance with our own – which results from observing a golden rule ethic of reciprocity. Unfortunately, instead of this, we teach a zero-sum, win-lose, ethic, and this is the foundation of the rationalization that we ought to seek to make others losers in an ongoing competition to be winners ourselves - never minding how much we lose in this process, or the self-fulfilling prophesies we set into motion by such assumptions.
And all the difference in these worldviews is captured in the meaning of our words and the metaphors that we live by that shape out understanding of how things work. For instance, take the word ‘fitness’ – as in, ‘survival of the fittest.’ The idea that life is a battle that only the most fit will survive is a view Darwin is said to have advanced. But putting aside the fact that Darwin never used the cliché ‘survival of the fittest,’ as systems theorist Tim Allen has made argued, “its original usage referred to fitting into the natural order.” The athletic fitness metaphor that dominates our worldview today is a connotation that grew up in an economy that emphasized competition, forgetting that cooperation is also essential in Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ philosophy. Fitness, in an ecological sense, means the organism is strongest that fits best into the whole system of reciprocal relationships that is its environment. For our good is inextricably intertwined, and so survival depends more on power in the sense of inner strength, than on power in the sense of outer force. If we’d learned this early on, then instead of being encouraged to compete in all cases, we’d have learned from experience that self-mastery gives rise to a kind of happiness and well-being that is not available to those without it, and who take other control, exploitation, and domination as their purpose. Once understood, we see our fitness as equilibrium with others, and our self-interest as reciprocal to their interests. Again, as Socrates said, there are no masters or slaves in nature - there is interdependence, and diversity is its strength.
Each of these ancient and indigenous cultures offers us yet another way to understand this – another perspective and another line of reasoning that argues to this conclusion. And it’s in our interest to follow good reasoning, because only it can lead us to the truth – the same truth where we meet all others who seek it and come together in agreement here where complimentary views meet, ‘like lines converging on a common center.’
There are ‘many paths to the same summit,’ as the ancient Hindu taught their young. And learning the whole truth requires viewing the world in this way – like a meeting of the minds around a campfire, as indigenous cultures taught by example.
And we can teach that too – bring dialogic learning back to our learning environments to facilitate dialectic thinking. But this is an ideal of education that eludes us today. W don’t care, apparently, if our young understand what they’re learning, only that they remember what they’re told long enough to get it ‘right’ on the test.
And I say ‘told’ because this is not true teaching. Understanding requires the free flow of question and answer. As Socrates said, “nothing is an answer if we haven’t asked the question.” And so we see why Dewey, like all the best educational theorists before him, warned that our top-down traditional forms of institutionalized education are more likely to thwart true learning than to encourage it.
And this is where we find ourselves today. Not only are our children raised and educated into a form of rationality that more closely resembles ignorance than intelligence, but we ourselves were most likely raised that way too. And so before we can even begin to improve their education, we must first reawaken our own learning process.
As a philosophical counselor, I find myself helping people make up for lost time. And that’s what this book aims to facilitate…the reawakening of the will to see how much we’ve been missing by living in the dark or narrow self-interest – call it rationalized selfishness.
And yet, all this that we have been conditioned into and are teaching our young to follow, we call human nature – as if we have no choice, and as if there were no alternative. This is how assumed worldviews become reality, by self-fulfilling prophesy. Having the name, why not play the game? But the opposite prophesy is also self-fulfilling – for if we believe that others are naturally good, we’d have no need to live defensively, and so do not offend in ways that provoke others defenses. And so we might develop good, instead of bad habits, by way of a world view that emphasizes the good that is possible when self-mastery, rather than self-indulgence, is understood to be the path to our higher potentials.
But again, to teach it to our young, we must first learn it for ourselves, and so also unlearn the bad habits we’ve come to think of as our nature.
Noam Chomsky is one of the 20th centuries most tenacious champions against social conditioning and Behaviorism, especially as it is used to manipulate public opinion by way of the media. Social engineers of the early part of the century, influenced by the Freudian view that people are motivated by their appetites, not their reason, and so cannot be trusted to deliberate intelligently, control their appetites, or manage a civil society collectively. So, theorists like Reinhart Neigbor argued, to ensure that they would cooperate with the purposes and plans of a consumer society that feeds wealth up to the oligarchy, it was necessary to deliberately manufacture the opinions and motivations of the masses.
And one effective way to do this was by way of these conditioning processes, deliberately titillating their desires for consumer goods and keep them salivating for more and more of whatever unconditioned stimulus is put before them (Pavlov’s metaphor goes further than we might imagine to help us understand human behavior in the over the last century), not only to keep them comfortable, but to keep them having ‘fun,’ not to mention to enhance their reputations among those who can be impressed with extrinsic wealth, the assumption being that one did something to ‘earn’ those goods; of course, what they did may have been far from good. Hence the reason so many need medication, because conscience can be a cruel karma. So why should we be happy if we don’t deserve to be? Just assuming for a minute that the universe is fair, it stands to reason that if we diminish someone else’s happiness, then we don’t really deserve to be happy ourselves. So what should we expect but to grow less happy as we grow more greedy? We shouldn’t be surprised, after all, to find a pall of unhappiness hanging over a population that grew up steeped in a kind of ‘self-interest at all costs’ mentality. This IS the cost, after all, of robbing others of their happiness, i.e. our own happiness.
But here’s the thing – it stands to reason that, if the many (demos) are as ignorant as social engineers claim, it’s because they’ve been so badly raised, not by bad parents, as much as by those who are conditioning them to respond only to appetites, and in the process diverting them from the intelligent beings they might otherwise have learned to become, toward the ignorance of living only for conditioned wants. There’s nothing inherently wrong with loving and enjoying material things, after all. In fact, it would be a sort of sin not to appreciate all the goods that life makes possible. It only goes wrong when we trade away the intrinsic benefits and joys of the inner world for exclusively extrinsic goods, trading quality for quantity. Ideally, we should be encouraged from a young age to develop the kind of intelligence that comes with learning to want what’s actually good for us – which is a balance between outer and inner goods.
This is what Socrates argued our primary challenge in life should be - to learn what’s worth trading for what. The true value of all of life’s goods is what ancient wisdom can help us rediscover, because this doesn’t change, though we may all see it somewhat differently. This is, again, the good thing about the truth, that it stays true. And for this reason, we can measure what is untrue and false against it.
But again, not every thing human made (artificial) entails false value, for it is human creativity that gives us our divine potentials. It also gives us our diabolical potentials. But it is not all human artifice that should be condemned, and not all self-interest that is bad. We need self-interest to survive, after all. In fact, only that which harms others in ways that we ourselves would not consent to can be deemed unjustified, because “justice is consent,” as Plato said. And this is why we need the golden rule after all, to discern our justified from our unjustified treatment of others.
There are ways to see to our interests that are justified, that achieve a balance of good between us and others. And this is the condition that happiness should accompany. It may be the very definition of it, though only those who achieve it would know why, as Aristotle said, “the pleasure of a just person can never be experienced by one who is not just.” In other words, only the just understand why only the just are happy. We may all be able to read and follow the meaning of these words, but we cannot truly understand them, in the gnostic sense, until we have put them into practice and gain the experience that brings it home to us. Only a deservedly happy person can understand how and why true happiness was elusive until they earned it. At this point, a person understands what they had to do to make things right.
This process is called ho’ponopono in the indigenous huna wisdom tradition of what we now call Hawaii. Others may call it ‘twelve steps,” and others understand it as simply atonement and forgiveness. In all cases, it is achieving a balance in the relationship between self and others.
It is this process of making things right, or better yet, living in a way that prevents things from going wrong, that is the art that the ancients tried to teach us. It does not compete with any of the various dictums of other wisdom traditions (e.g. the golden rule, the ten commandments, the eightfold path, or In Lak’ Ech - a Mayan dictum that translates as…you are my other I”),
These are all but the same art, expressed uniquely from different world views, and all of them could do us all good. For just as a traveler needs different tools at different parts of his journey, so a soul needs a tool kit of diverse lessons to meet the survival challenges of its long and challenging path, trail and trial. Life is a test, and what ancient wisdom offers are survival skills, that is, practical wisdom, ways to solve the problems of being human, mastering the challenges of our ideals and actualizing the highest of our potentials.
Now, consider how the deliberate manufacture of public and personal opinion by way of these conditioning processes, and the often toxic behaviors we learn in the process that override all this power of self-determination we might otherwise have developed, and then we can see clearly what distinguishes diabolical human creativity from divine.
“There are no masters and slaves in nature,” as Socrates reminds us. That relationship which begins where one person tries to control and manipulate another, not for the others good, but for his own, that is where injustice begins. When we make tools of others, subverting their will to their own higher purposes in becoming the ‘good’ person they could be, and make them merely a means to our own ends, regardless of theirs, that is where evil bifurcates from good.
We have every right to pursue our best interest, our own good, as long as we don’t thwart the interests of others. Because, as John Stuart Mill put it, “Our freedom ends where another’s begins.” As long as we treat others as ends in themselves, the way we would have them treat us, then we are right and good to pursue our own ends. And if our creativity can enhance the interests of others, all the better! This is our divine potential! And it shows up in the world in (almost) every song, and movie, and book, and even every building, and car, and computer… all the plethora of goods – extrinsic and intrinsic – that proliferate by way of that human creativity that is our higher potential. This is humanities divine potential. But when we confuse strength with force, we come to think that our good entails usurping the good of others - a mistake the golden rule, learned early, could have prevented. But we don’t bother teaching this, so we see generation upon generation persuaded by oligarchic interests that their interest is in extrinsic goods only, inner wealth and well being be damned. And to the extent that some make it their purpose to deflect or control others away from their own purposes, condition them into behaviors that thwart their higher purposes, this is nothing less than a sin against humanity.
So is it any wonder the richest (in material terms) are among the unhappiest people on earth? By contrast, compare many less developed places on earth – Greece, for example, where all this ancient discussion took root – and you’ll find happiness of a kind that too many have forgotten, sometimes even without even enough extrinsic goods to meet their physical needs. And yet they can muster the intrinsic goods of love and laughter, music and dance, and all the experiential joy of living.
For all the privilege the overindulgent assume for themselves, they trade this – the ability to truly enjoy and appreciate their existence! A real shame since, as Achilles put it, the gods themselves envy humanity for this! And it stands to reason, for what would you miss most about living, after all, if not your eyes and ears, your ability to taste and smell, to experience the joy of beauty and music, and the touch of ones babies and lovers? These are life’s greatest goods, the source of true happiness. And the price for forgetting their value is just that – we don’t know what we’re missing. Only those who come to remember see, sometimes very suddenly, what true happiness has been in their hands and right before their eyes all along.
But again, we only come to remember all this by putting it into practice. This is why Socrates urges that learning is akin to remembering, because the truth stayed true all along, while we, for whatever reason, forgot, neglected, and ignored it – and ‘to ignore’ is, after all, the active root of ‘ignorance.
But again, not all media, advertising, promotion, and PR, politics and other forms of human manipulation do this, for some is perfectly well justified, as Chomsky notes. Only that which usurps other’s power to actualize their own higher potentials is unjust.
This is why, perhaps, Socrates argued that “Love is the only thing [he] ever claimed to know anything about,” because love is exactly treating others as ends in themselves, just as we would have them treat us. And this makes love applicable to all others, not merely those we have feelings for, but any over whom we have power, whether they be our children, or our lovers, or our students or constituents. Love is caring what’s good for others, for their own sake, their own purposes, and their own ends, rather than using them as means to our own.
And this is why what we call the Socratic method (in it’s genuine form, which may not be the same as we’ve come to know) is an essential element of human relationships, because Socratic relationships are those where mutual teaching and learning are the purpose, and so bring out the good in both. It is an art, a practical skill, that needn’t but (lucky for us) can be taught, though probably best by example, though it still won’t be understood until it’s put into practice.
And to that end, this book makes a case for how we might and why we must reawaken the dream of these higher potentials, because nothing happens in the world that does not first begin in the mind. After all, “awareness of our situation must come before inner changes, which in turn comes before changes in society. Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.” (OI, Alarcon, 274) (see bibliography on Anzaldua, 340) Or as Chomsky said, “social action must be animated by a vision of a future society.”
So it’s in our survival interest to keep an eye on the ideal of our better selves, and to take whatever guidance this ideal has to offer. After all, as * has said, “we cannot fight directly the powers of globalization that are killing us all. We can only strive to bring back the dream of the earth…Democracy and true community…a light of hope for our children.” (OI, Forest, 237) That is what ancient wisdom offers us – a vision of a healthy future that any fair and reasonable person would want for themselves, and so must justly want for their children and children’s children.
Which is why the challenge for democracy is always, as Plato said, “to keep power out of the hands of those who are in love with it.” And this goes for the power of social conditioning and control as well. But since Chomsky and other public intellectuals of the 20t century (e.g. Howard Zinn, Paulo Friere, etc.) are marginalized by public disinterest in social criticism, as well as a media motivated by profit, to tell people largely what they want to hear, we quite successfully raise our young to care nothing of the ethics of our culture, or have any context in which to understand the grounds and history of social criticism in general.
I could lament many omissions in our children’s education, (e.g. *), but as a philosophy teacher, and even more so, a mother and grandmother, the one that most pains me is the lack of any exercise in critical thinking skills in early education, such that our young make it all the way to college with no exercise in good reasoning skills. In fact, they – like most of the rest of us who’ve been educated this way – do not even know what a fallacy is, or that there is even a difference between good and bad reasoning. In fact, a full education in schools such as they are offers little exercise in any thinking skills other than calculating and memorization. Lucky for us that we have what Socrates calls an ‘inner criteria’ by which to help us discern sense from nonsense, but there is little in our culture that encourages the development and refinement of these skills.
They also make it all this way learning nothing about or from the ancient wisdom traditions that understood all this well. Everything they know about Socrates is likely to have come from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure! They’ve learned to think great thinkers like Buddha are in some kind of competition with Jesus. And they have the wildly mistaken idea that ancient and indigenous cultures lived in the darkness of ignorance. When almost nothing could be further from the truth – except perhaps the illusion that we live in the light of intelligence. It’s true that we have been educated to be smart, but being intelligent has as much or more to do with being wise. This is the kind of ‘intelligence’ we ought to be teaching our children.
In fact, when we come to learn how much the ancient actually understood, that somehow was not passed forward to us, we cannot avoid wondering if it is not we who live in ignorance, a condition that naturally results from ‘ignoring’ everything we don’t want to see, and believing what we do see is all that matters.
So imagine their surprise when they step into a philosophy class and discover that there are windows to be opened in dialogue with their fellow students and vistas to behold throughout time and across cultures just waiting to illuminate their worldview and enlighten their lives, as soon as they open their eyes. Admittedly, not all or even many philosophy classes have this effect, but for those who are ready for self-directed learning, they might. Even these don’t all see it right away because, as Plato made clear, whether leaving the cave or returning to rescue others from that cave, it takes time for our eyes to adjust. Sometimes a semester isn’t enough. But since it generally takes about three months to break a habit, a semester is usually long enough to at least broaden a person’s vision, let in perspectives they will remember when they most need them. Coming to see how many different and revealing ways there are to see the world is not something that’s easy to forget, no matter how much we might neglect it. Because each of these views adds depth to our understanding the same way a second eye adds depth to what can be seen with only one.
And so this kind of learning – what the ancients called dialectic – changes us, broadens and deepens our understanding of the world as it truly is, when we realize that all perspectives matter and that grasping ever more of the whole truth is the goal.
And so it is a question of value, that is, valuing others contributions for all they’re worth, in balance with our own – which results from observing a golden rule ethic of reciprocity. Unfortunately, instead of this, we teach a zero-sum, win-lose, ethic, and this is the foundation of the rationalization that we ought to seek to make others losers in an ongoing competition to be winners ourselves - never minding how much we lose in this process, or the self-fulfilling prophesies we set into motion by such assumptions.
And all the difference in these worldviews is captured in the meaning of our words and the metaphors that we live by that shape out understanding of how things work. For instance, take the word ‘fitness’ – as in, ‘survival of the fittest.’ The idea that life is a battle that only the most fit will survive is a view Darwin is said to have advanced. But putting aside the fact that Darwin never used the cliché ‘survival of the fittest,’ as systems theorist Tim Allen has made argued, “its original usage referred to fitting into the natural order.” The athletic fitness metaphor that dominates our worldview today is a connotation that grew up in an economy that emphasized competition, forgetting that cooperation is also essential in Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ philosophy. Fitness, in an ecological sense, means the organism is strongest that fits best into the whole system of reciprocal relationships that is its environment. For our good is inextricably intertwined, and so survival depends more on power in the sense of inner strength, than on power in the sense of outer force. If we’d learned this early on, then instead of being encouraged to compete in all cases, we’d have learned from experience that self-mastery gives rise to a kind of happiness and well-being that is not available to those without it, and who take other control, exploitation, and domination as their purpose. Once understood, we see our fitness as equilibrium with others, and our self-interest as reciprocal to their interests. Again, as Socrates said, there are no masters or slaves in nature - there is interdependence, and diversity is its strength.
Each of these ancient and indigenous cultures offers us yet another way to understand this – another perspective and another line of reasoning that argues to this conclusion. And it’s in our interest to follow good reasoning, because only it can lead us to the truth – the same truth where we meet all others who seek it and come together in agreement here where complimentary views meet, ‘like lines converging on a common center.’
There are ‘many paths to the same summit,’ as the ancient Hindu taught their young. And learning the whole truth requires viewing the world in this way – like a meeting of the minds around a campfire, as indigenous cultures taught by example.
And we can teach that too – bring dialogic learning back to our learning environments to facilitate dialectic thinking. But this is an ideal of education that eludes us today. W don’t care, apparently, if our young understand what they’re learning, only that they remember what they’re told long enough to get it ‘right’ on the test.
And I say ‘told’ because this is not true teaching. Understanding requires the free flow of question and answer. As Socrates said, “nothing is an answer if we haven’t asked the question.” And so we see why Dewey, like all the best educational theorists before him, warned that our top-down traditional forms of institutionalized education are more likely to thwart true learning than to encourage it.
And this is where we find ourselves today. Not only are our children raised and educated into a form of rationality that more closely resembles ignorance than intelligence, but we ourselves were most likely raised that way too. And so before we can even begin to improve their education, we must first reawaken our own learning process.
As a philosophical counselor, I find myself helping people make up for lost time. And that’s what this book aims to facilitate…the reawakening of the will to see how much we’ve been missing by living in the dark or narrow self-interest – call it rationalized selfishness.
And yet, all this that we have been conditioned into and are teaching our young to follow, we call human nature – as if we have no choice, and as if there were no alternative. This is how assumed worldviews become reality, by self-fulfilling prophesy. Having the name, why not play the game? But the opposite prophesy is also self-fulfilling – for if we believe that others are naturally good, we’d have no need to live defensively, and so do not offend in ways that provoke others defenses. And so we might develop good, instead of bad habits, by way of a world view that emphasizes the good that is possible when self-mastery, rather than self-indulgence, is understood to be the path to our higher potentials.
But again, to teach it to our young, we must first learn it for ourselves, and so also unlearn the bad habits we’ve come to think of as our nature.