by Juliana Paradise Hunt
A Few Introductory Thoughts...
Since this is a draft of my proposal, it is considerably longer than it will ultimately become (and may well contain elements of the book's Introduction). So if you are reading for a quick glance, please scroll down through the following headings to find what most interests you. Also, because it is an addendum to my query, I won't repeat here what was explained there that would naturally be included in a proposal.
The Big Ideas
Blog Overview
The Meaning of the Pretty Pictures
The Book's Central Argument
Some Controversies It Can Reconcile
A Few of the Problems It Addresses
The Value of Neglected Voices
Rethinking the Wisdom of Religious Belief vs. Understanding
The Promise of Socratic Relationships
The Educational Need
The Value of Practical Wisdom: Right Thing/Right Time/Right Reason
Potential Follow-Up Books
A Part for Everyone to Play
The State of My Manuscript(s)
Related Books & Authors
Related Projects & Platform Building
Concluding Thoughts
* * *
The Big Ideas
For the purposes of this proposal - and because the book is thoroughly researched and well-developed - it does seem necessary to include a summary of some of the deeper and more complex issues and controversies this book grapples with. I don't expect that a busy agent will care much about most of this, but a publisher might. So I include it here. Also, because it's condensed, this may not come across in the voice I hope to achieve in my book - ideally, one that even a thoughtful child could understand - without losing the rigor of good scholarship. So I hope you will bear with me.
I feel the need to make the strongest possible case up front for what this book is and could be. And I think you will understand better if you explore some of the chapter drafts posted here on this blog. You will no doubt see inconsistencies in voice throughout (academic habits die hard). But having pulled all this together in this form, my sense is that there is indeed a follow-up book to be written in this more direct voice - one that would function ideally as a well connected ebook that gives generations to come access to the full library of antiquity.
I believe both my topic and my approach are quite unique. This book attempts to do something I don't think has been done before - to unfold and lay out the dialogue as it naturally occurred between ancient wisdom traditions, and to do this in their own voices.
And in the process, it takes on many of our most deeply entrenched personal and institutional habits and explores the relationship between individuals and institutions - something I believe the world is calling out for.
I could not possibly put it better than Native American elder and scholar, Manitonquat, who said: “We live in an inhuman society of institutions, from government to business to education and health, which are pyramids. Power comes from the top, from the elite few who control the wealth and resources of the Earth. It is a society which, rather than supporting people, pit people against each other. Rather than a system of cooperation and equality, it is a system of competition, domination and subordination. Rather than bringing people together, it separates and divides. Rather than valuing love and companionship, creativity and learning and the beauty of the natural world, it turns people into consumers who are taught that happiness lies in wealth and status." And “what is the result of this alienation?” “It’s a civilization warped and twisted away from the trend of millions of years of evolution with more complex, rational, creative thought and into the madness of blind, unthinking rage, terror and desperation.” “This is what we think is normal. We say it’s just human nature.” But “It’s not. It’s insanity. It’s dehumanization.”(Original Instructions, 2009) And the challenge for us now is “to define an education process that is going to work for us. Not for the institutions, not for the government,” and not for big business, but “one that is going to work for us,” for people.” (Rivera, 2008)
If this is a radical claim, it is one shared by the left and at least a few free thinkers on the right. Conservative banker and inventor of VISA, Dee Ward Hock, also puts forth this argument in his book, Birth of a Chaordic Age: “Today, it doesn’t take much intelligence to realize we are in the midst of a global epidemic of institutional failure… the signs are everywhere if one cared to look.” Says Hock, “It’s my personal belief, although I would be hard-pressed to prove it, that we are at that very point in time when a four hundred-year-old age is dying and another struggling to be born: a shifting of culture, science, society, and institutions enormously greater than the world has ever experienced. Ahead, the possibility of regeneration of individuality, liberty, community and ethics such as the world has never known and a harmony with nature, with one another, and with the divine intelligence such as the world has never dreamed.” (more here)
All this is sure to draw the ire of many (certainly my colleagues in Philosophy, since I hold my own discipline responsible for failing in its primary purpose). But that's good. I've spent my career arguing with them on these topics, and the best of them come around. And controversy can only benefit us. As I mentioned earlier, Kant once said that the job of (small-p) philosophers is to keep controversy alive so that the best ideas can trickle up! I'm not trying to create conflict, but to resolve so many unnecessary ones. So my intention in this book is to make the strongest possible case, as humbly and firmly as I can, for what we have yet to learn from these sages of the ages - lessons we need rather desperately at this point. And my hope is that - done well - it could make a real difference in the way that we think about education, about philosophy, and about all our human relationships and institutions.
Fortunately, I've got the very best possible partners in dialogue to help me make this case. :-) And if all my book ultimately accomplishes is to make more people reach back to these ancient greats to solve their problems, that will have been worth doing! My intention is to accomplish much more though. I hope to reconcile these voices wherever possible to resolve those unnecessary intellectual conflicts that keep us at odds, and so ultimately to let the ancients "speak with one voice," as Huston Smith put it, so to give us just the scolding and the pep talk we so desperately need.
Blog Overview
Let me explain briefly at the outset what you'll find in this blog (assuming that pages won't continue to inexplicably migrate, a bug I'm working with the blog host to resolve). (And please be aware that I would be happy to send a word or pdf version of any of this, if that would function better for the reader.)
On the navigation bar, under Juliana's Thoughts, you'll see my Introductory Thoughts, which are the abbreviated memoirs of a seeker, including a little about the personal life challenges that got me started thirty some years ago. Parts of this may or may not end up in the book. Under An Open Letter to My Grandchildren you'll find key themes I hope young and old alike won't miss, again abbreviated. Under What the Ancients Knew you'll find the central insights of the main wisdom traditions I've incorporated into these dialogues. These are not abbreviated, and in fact, are quite extensive in places, and continue to grow (I'm still working on the Gnostic Gospels, for instance). Here you'll find the voices of the great teachers our heroine hears in her head, and whose voices speak to all the other issues that arise in the book.
Next, you'll find sections for the Environmental and Educational implications of all this. It's in these arenas that I've spent most of my teaching career, and where my personal passion runs highest, if only because the problems are so urgent. In the section called Sages of the Ages Since, I bring in some of the other brilliant voices from our intellectual history. And in the sections called Deep Science and Deep Green Political-Economy I bring the ancient into discussion with modern theorists about institutional practices that need these inspired voices to make sense of their many conundrums. These final sections will seem somewhat underdeveloped at this point because (since technology changes faster than I can keep up) some of what I've written on all this is awaiting my uploading it from older formats.
My ultimate intention is for this blog to initiate and host (upon publication of the book) a dialogue with and among those living thinkers I've included in it. I'm setting this up (along with several others) to begin growing my platform, which I realize is a very important aspect of publishing these days. (I hope you can see though that this particular site will be most useful after the book is published.)
Soon there will also be sections for the other organizations I've founded to support this project, including the Institute for Dialectic-Complementarity, our Mind-to-Mind teaching and learning technology, and the Madison Mentor Center (although the MMC/M2M does have it's own website here). Meanwhile, all this changes on a daily basis, so if you find a placeholder (blank) page or one that's incomplete or includes only notes, it will most likely be updated soon - the gods willing.
The Meaning of the Pretty Pictures...
That said, please allow me to begin these proposal thoughts with a few relevant images this book must include. This book initially grew out of an award-winning paper in which I dared to make an argument for the interrelationships between disciplines as complementary ways of knowing - showing visually why the ancients called dialectic thinking “the science of all sciences” (Plato, Theatetus) (I say ‘dared’ because I was scolded by my Philosophy advisers for the same paper that won the years’ highest award in Integrated Liberal Studies, my hearts home, where I studied as an undergrad and taught throughout graduate school. Thanks to its holistic and dialogic nature, ILS was closer to true philosophy than any learning experience I'd had, before or since. And Alexander Meiklejohn, its founder and free speech advocate, plays a brief but central role in my book.)
Long story short, that paper made a case for these original visual conceptions of the complementary relationships between philosophers, mind functions, and ways of knowing - arguments and images that could revolutionize the way we think about thinking, if understood for all they're worth:
The Argument... These images illustrate what Plato meant when he exclaimed (on the very first page of his masterwork, Republic) that if one listens with an open mind to the minds of others, it becomes clear that “all lines of discourse converge on a common center.” And why "the genuine lover of knowledge cannot fail, from his youth up, to strive after the whole of truth." For given all this, how could one ever be finished learning? Or for that matter, ever want to be?If these images aren't as self-explanatory at first glance as I might hope, you can view a succinct explanation here, and a more elaborate one here. In fact, they are a small, but important, aspect of my book. But I hope they images are enough to show that dialectic intelligence is more than a mere tendency toward dialogue, but an actual holistic system of knowledge that could change the way we think about teaching and learning, and how the mind itself works best in dialogue with other minds.
These images help make practical sense of what the ancients were trying to tell us, and could stimulate reconsideration of many things, including perhaps so many dichotomous conceptions that seek balance to be fully understood (some of which it seems necessary to discuss in this proposal.)
I hope these at least convey why, unlike many modern thinkers, the ancients understood that the search for truth is not a competition, but a cooperative collaboration, not a matter of right or wrong, but of viewing the world of knowledge in a non-linear and ever growing way, gaining ever more perspective to fill out the whole of truth about all that can be known.
The Book's Argument...
This model illustrates how disciplines, for instance, are like the blind men of ancient lore who all ‘see’ the same elephant differently – like a snake, a tree trunk, a wall – while the whole truth about the elephant can only be understood by those who see the world through multiple points of view and by way of continuous learning.
What’s more, the whole truth about any living thing must include its own perspective. So even an infinity of outside-looking-in perspectives could never be complete without incorporating the inside-looking-out point of view of the elephant, for the subjective and objective are themselves complementarity - a relationship that is too often neglected by contemporary schools of thought that pit these aspects of knowledge against one another. But as Indigenous scholars insist, “You can’t separate the subject from the object. It doesn’t separate.” (Allen, 2008)
This can also help us understand why Plato exclaimed (on the very first page of his masterwork, Republic) that if one listens with an open mind to the minds of others, it becomes clear that “all lines of discourse converge on a common center.” And why "the genuine lover of knowledge cannot fail, from his youth up, to strive after the whole of truth." For given all this, how could one ever be finished learning? Or for that matter, want to be?
And this can be applied practically, in the classroom, for instance, by way of any object - an eraser, a cup of coffee, or a bottle of water - held up in the center of the room. It's intuitively obvious that we all see this object of knowledge from different points of view, and that there is no justification for calling any of our diverse views more 'true' than any other. Each of us only has our own view to start with, and those learn best who listen to or empathize better with the points of view of others - and ultimately end up with an expanded point of view that is more 'objective' in the sense of well rounded. And if it were one of us who was the object of knowledge at issue, then no number of others' views would be enough without the 'subjective' voice of that particular individual.
We can clearly see then how there is no point in arguing to win about who is more right, when it is possible to continue learning. Only listening ever better to understand more of the whole of what is offered in the dialogue makes sense. So we would all do well to learn from those who see what’s in our blind spot, for none of us alone sees the whole truth about anything. Indeed, those we take to be our worst enemies may well be our best teachers!
And the same could be said of any stubborn controversy on which there are complementary points of view. The whole truth waits to be revealed by an ongoing process of discovery, and a healthy mind grows in this continuous process. By following curiosity, using empathy, embracing humility, and practicing dialogue, and always listening and asking questions, stretching to include ever more of the infinite points of view that are available on any given subject/object of our knowledge. All of this is why the ancients tried to teach us not to search for the truth, but for the whole truth!
As Aristotle put it, "No one individual is able to attain the whole truth adequately, while, on the other hand, we do not collectively fail... every one says something true about the nature of things, and while individually we contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed."(Metaphysics)
That is what this model of complementary ways of knowing can reveal – that consciousness, our inside-looking-out subjectivity, is complex, but wonderfully comprehensive! There are simple and understandable reasons why we all see the same world differently. (more here) And this diversity of individualized knowledge constitutes our true inner riches - intrinsic goods - the kind of wealth we can grow without impoverishing others, and can give away without impoverishing ourselves.
“This dialectical point of view – the merging of opposites – is [also] deeply rooted in Chinese culture.” Eastern sages called it complementarity because, like yin and yang, what appear at first to be “opposites…become complimentary when they interact.” And as the Book of Changes or I Ching teaches, “when two parts join together, a new character is formed, presenting the picture of a multitude of people gathered together and circling a point.” So, for the same reason that “People’s lines of vision are different,” even when viewing the same objects of knowledge, Hindu sages say, “Truth is one, but sages call it by different names.”(Upanishads) Across the east and throughout ancient cultures, great teachers taught that “this equilibrium is the great basis of all human activities.” And “this harmony is the universal path for all to pursue.”(more here)
So we can see why Indigenous Peoples call this “the circle way.”(Manitonquat, 2008) This is meant to be taken literally, in a certain sense, to refer to gathering in dialogic circles. But it is also meant to encourage respect for diverse voices that come from different points of view. For as in nature, diversity is the true wealth and strength of a healthy community and the foundation of the true democracy of all beings. So we can understand why they say that genuine intelligence is achieved only as we “put our minds together as one mind.”(Nelson, 2008) (more here)
This dialectic conception of how the mind works can help those with diverse perspectives enrich one another and resolve longstanding conflicts, and so much more. And yet all mention of this mutually uplifting learning process goes virtually unnoticed in Capital-P Philosophy. So an unwitting student might never know what they’re missing, much less what is meant when Socrates argues toward this conclusion in nearly every one of Plato’s Dialogues. (An example of this occurs when the physician, Diotima, passes on her dialectic wisdom to the young Socrates, which is treated in philosophical circles as nothing more than a rhetorical aside – as if “she has been woven cum dossier out of Socratic whole cloth.”(Waithe, 1987).
What Diotima, Aspasia, and his own mother - who was a midwife - taught Socrates was that wisdom is not induced, but educed - the way a midwife assists a birth or a gardener aids the growth of plants. The seeds of ideas may be planted and cultivated, but teachers are like midwifes when it comes to the labor of learning - assisting young minds to give birth to knowledge by a question and answer process of thought and reasoning - the way a good parent talks with a well-loved child. And the teacher cannot do for the students, nor the parent for the child, what they can and must do for themselves!
In fact, most Philosophers associate the word dialectic with a style of debate practiced by German thinkers many centuries later. But they seem to miss even the illuminating description of dialectic thinking (attributed to Hagel) that suggests wisdom advances upward by way of dialogic exchange - as thesis meets antithesis and synthesis emerges, from which a new thesis takes form, and so a new antithesis, and so on and so forth. As this process repeats, understanding advances and learning climbs by progressive revelation toward ever-higher vision, or conversely, toward ever deeper insight. This is a view in perfect harmony with what Diotima taught Socrates. But like too many of us, Philosophers too often see only what they want to see.
It is a great loss to us all that we do not learn to reconcile our differing points of view in this way, for the mind grows in just the way conflict is reconciled, by cumulative inclusion of ever more perspectives on an ever-expanding whole. Such that "two heads are better than one," as Socrates says, and three are better than two, and so on and so forth. And it is, arguably, the unique responsibility of all P/philosophers to teach this, if only because they claim to be passing on this ancient legacy. But most (women especially) who have earned their philosophical chops in Capital-P departments will tell you that their efforts to learn dialogically in this way come with near constant scolding and ridicule from their (usually, but not always male) advisers who assume they have the whole body of philosophy behind them... because that's what their own teachers and others secondary sources have taught them. And without these ancient voices to teach us any better, this active ignorance and blatant arrogance bleeds into all disciplines and prevents mutual understanding in so many arenas.
For instance, legendary physicist and father of quantum physics, Niels Bohr, held this complementarity to reveal “the oneness of the observer and the observed,” and “the undivided wholeness of the entire universe.” It was, he said, “reflective of the need for understanding mutually exclusive opposites as parts of a whole in every discipline.”(Jones, in Stinson, 1999) By way of this ancient insight, he argued, we might use our minds to reveal ever more of the whole truth about how the universe understand itself through us.
Perhaps Virginia Woolf said it best when she observed that “a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.”(A Room of One’s Own) F. Scott Fitzgerald put it this way: “the test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”(The Crack-up)
Bohr hoped this ancient insight would promote recognition that opposing points of view are but complementary perspectives on what Einstein called “reality in the round” – including that between relativity and quantum theory. But Einstein rejected Bohr’s attempts at dialogue, and held to a pure objectivists view, leaving their complementary views unreconciled. Einstein himself was well known as a peace-loving man, but failed in this respect to see his responsibility to hear and learn from his challengers. And if we could see what might have been, then we might agree this has been to the detriment of us all since. Einstein often observed that, “the ancients knew something that we seem to have forgotten.” He just refused to give Bohr as much credit and to share in that dialogue that might have advanced human understanding so much further.
Had these great minds followed through on this dialectic, they might have discovered together that different scales of reality (what appear to be the very large and the very small, from our scale) seem to operate by different rules for reasons explained by yet another discipline, which is these days called ecological systems theory. And if they had lived long enough to see what fractal geometry and chaos theory bring to this dialogue, they might have agreed that all this "completely changes what it means to know something" and “the practical import is staggering.”(Gleick, 1986)
We have yet to fully comprehend just how sensitively dependent we are on one another and our environment, or that the butterfly effects of our actions and our voices give great power to each and every one of us – a creativity that humans have in common with what some call ‘the Creator.’ But our creativity has both divine and diabolical potentials, which is why it falls to each generation anew to revive this dialogic wisdom, so to help our young learn the difference in being merely smart and truly wise.
For true wisdom “requires a willingness to see through another’s eyes to overcome limited perspective of what is possible; to hear through another’s ears to develop joint strategies of action.”(Cook, 2008) And the ancients understood better than we do today, the greatest danger to humanity is ‘creative intelligence’ without humility and a good will – that apple from the tree of knowledge we were warned against!
Perhaps it's time we set the standard for true intelligence higher? Perhaps it's time we recognize that it's not enough to have a great idea - the real challenge is to have sufficient humility to try to reconcile it with those of your opponents.
As nature teaches, cooperation and competition are complimentary, different sides of the same balancing process, and both are needed in human communication in all its many forms (education, economics, politics, religion, etc.) for humanity to have any chance of understanding the whole truth about anything.
The Controversies It Can Reconcile...
This is why what was once called natural philosophy included both the scientific and the Socratic methods in the search for the whole truth – not in competition, but in dialogue. The great contemplatives encouraged us to use both rational/analytic and metaphorical/creative thinking to synthesize these complementary ways of knowing so to utilize both sides of the whole mind. Because, like yin and yang, neither can exist, much less function well without the other. And taken together, these could help us learn to use the whole mind for all it’s worth. Perhaps then we might “find complementary ways to utilize (both) traditional (indigenous) knowledge and western science and medicine.”(Nelson, 2008) But there is nothing currently in our education process (except perhaps an occasional program here or there) that encourages this critical balance of respect for diverse traditions or ways of knowing.
We have also long neglected the reciprocal relationship between body and mind, which this model integrates - what Plato calls the visible and invisible, the physical and the psychological – as well as those reciprocal relationships between humans and their natural environment. For centuries we’ve reduced the study of mind and nature both to their physical properties in a kind of physics-envy that limits our vision – compelling us to look at the things we wish to know from outside-in, rather than through them from inside-out. We tend to study both the body and the mind as if they were made up of mere objects, analytically, rather than as systems of processes in synthesis to which we are all subject.
And the consequences are more severe than we realize. For instance, while we understand the conservation of energy when it comes to physical matters (i.e. that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so must go somewhere), we nonetheless medicate our children to hold them still (as if psychological energy doesn’t need to go somewhere too). Likewise, we understand the second law of thermodynamics (that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction) and yet we scoff at the principle of karma (as if we can escape the consequences of our sins, the reactions our actions set into motion). Likewise, we are well aware that chemicals can change how we think and feel, but we are inclined to ignore that thoughts and feelings can also change our biochemistry – a chicken and egg relationship, yet we tend to see the causal path only one way. Pharmaceuticals may seem a quick treatment for what ails us, but they are superficial and temporary fixes, whereas phenomenological cures are deep and lasting solutions. Which is why is being called philosophical counseling may do us all some good - though we need only turn to the ancients as practitioners.
All these contradictions confound our intelligence. And the ancients would have us remember that we cannot hope to understand the full “technology of the mind” until we recognize that the same laws of nature apply to both the physical and the psychological realms, that is, the material and the spiritual - which are themselves complementary. The key difference between them being that while the former may be understood from outside-looking-in, the latter must be understood from inside-looking-out. And the feedback processes by which change happens in both and all aspects of nature – including human nature – is essential wisdom if we are to understand how our actions become seeds for future realities. Like karma (which literally means action) these “are natural laws that, when ignored, have natural consequences.”(Nelson, 2008)
Some Problem It Can Help Resolve...
Hence, the many challenges we now face (e.g. climate change, antibiotic and pesticide resistance, student resistance to authoritarian learning, conditioned selfishness that reinforces itself by bringing out the worst in those around us, etc.). And if what the ancients have to offer isn't enough to convince us that ill-considered actions are likely to backfire – what systems thinkers call ecological backlash - then a good dose of what we call game theory might do us a great deal of good. Though it would require a healthy will to see “the connections between things.”(Republic)
All this is why one primary objective of this book is to dissuade that rampant tendency toward either pure objectivism - the idea that there is one reality, external to the mind, and a privileged perspective from which all deviation is considered distortion, at best, and patently false, at worst (a view which too often encourages a false hegemony around a single unquestioned worldview, and bleeds into a belief in pure laissez-faire capitalism) - OR pure subjectivism - the idea that your perspective is ‘true for you’ and that there is no objective reality or truth at all, only realities constructed by observers (a view that encourages self-deceit and active ignorance and feeds our postmodern conundrum by encouraging too many to believe that every view is equally real and true, as if we can simply make it up as we go).
As Socrates made clear, certainly “everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not every opinion is equal to every other.” There is all the difference in just wisdom and unjust foolishness (as our modern politics makes clear). A view is justified by its relationship to the way things really are, and merely rationalized when disconnected from that reality.
So both of these extreme views – pure subjectivity and objectivity - feed conflict and encourage miscommunication and deceit in a world already rife with it. While the truth, as Socrates says, “is somewhere in between,”(Parmenides) and found only by those who stretch their subjective mind (what the Hindus call Atman) to take in as much as possible of the objective world (what they call Brahman) – the whole of truth to which every perspective contributes something.
The Value of Neglected Voices...
Mind you, dialectic-complementary thinking does not mean bringing everyone to the middle of the road - a common misconception that comes with first impressions. It does mean, rather, bringing truth to the center of the table and giving every neglected voice a seat around it! It is not about tempering or watering down extreme views, but about bringing them into the dialogue where they can prove their centrality and relevance, if indeed it exists.
This is a theme we could discern more clearly from feminist philosophy, ecofeminism, and of course, many Indigenous voices. We all know, of course, that philosophy is and has always been a field dominated by white men, so most of us don’t realize how many women, for instance, are among its true heroes and how powerfully they have influenced its progress. Women don’t generally get the respect we deserve in philosophy (or apparently any high end discipline, according to this new study). But women’s voices are ubiquitous and eloquent throughout our intellectual history, and the best thinkers gave them due credit for the key insights they taught. So we find that nearly every Socrates has his Diotima, as every Pericles has his Aspasia, and every John Stuart Mill has his Harriet. Preventing them from publishing did not deter their due influence altogether.
Unfortunately, this is not equally true of Indigenous voices (which would include, by my lights, the origins of Gnostic thought). I spent twenty years studying and teaching in Philosophy departments without ever hearing mention of what turn out to be the most powerful and eloquent voices imaginable. Only in the last decade have I come to see the light of Indigenous wisdom. And I would wish this illumination on us all!
And this dialectic between genders, ethnicities, classes, and generations lays the foundation for a truer history of human thought, which calls for a good rethinking... if the past is to do the future any good. As Murry Bookchin put it, this is “not a yearning for the past,” which was typically as rife with injustice as our own, “but a recognition of past possibilities that remain unfulfilled.”
Unfortunately, history has been told by the winners, so much of the best of human thought did not survive the game-of-telephone that has passed for education for too long. Many Capital-P Philosophers deflect appeals to ancient wisdom by claiming that, “if the earlier positions were so feasible and so convincing, they would not have been abandoned.”(Ferry, 2011) But this simply ignores the relation of ideas to power and the hostility of political rhetoric toward truth. As anyone who has lived long enough must admit, there are those in every generation who will bury the truth, if they can find a way. And since the verb ‘to ignore’ is the active root of the state of ‘ignorance,’ there is simply no excuse for denial of history among those who claim to be lovers of truth and wisdom. The world is filled with too many who simply don’t know how much they don’t know, and ironically, they so often masquerade as those who know the most.
Perhaps John Stuart Mill said it best: “The dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods which men repeat after one another till they pass into commonplaces, but which all experience refutes. History teems with instances of truth put down by persecution... And the only real advantage which truth has consists in this; that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it.”(On Liberty)
The best of the ancient greats did not tell us what to think, but encouraged us to find our unique voice and develop our individuality to the fullest - a purpose too often lost in education-as-we-know-it, which encourages the pursuit of individualism and nurtures competition instead of cooperation and contribution. Too often, our one-size-fits-all education system conditions a kind of judgmental normalcy in our young, and fails in every way to help them understand, know, and love themselves or others, much less develop their unique genius or take aim at their higher purposes.
They, and we, need to be reminded, as Nietzsche once put it, “You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, the only way, it does not exist.” Our young need to be helped to see that the best you is absolutely unique. And this is also the one that makes you happiest – that is, that lets you live up to your most excellent virtue. These are our highest human ideals, and we need to remember them because, again, we cannot hit targets we don’t aim at! We'll never know how much the world has lost for so much conformity, how many creative fruits have died on the vine for lack of nourishment, how many ideas have been stillborn for lack of midwives. But it’s not too late – the truth waits for us to remember it!
Unfortunately, there is too little if any of this in education as we know it. By “reflecting on the past in light of the present,”(I Ching) as the ancients themselves did, we can see that the central concerns around which the great minds of antiquity converged focused on the well-being and character education of the young and the health of the future they delivered them into. We, on the other hand, have shamelessly put these higher purposes secondary to those of order, efficiency, and profit in our schools.
I’m always surprised to learn how many of my students make it all the way to college knowing nothing about Socrates, for instance (except perhaps what they gleaned from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), much less about the first democracy, never mind those voices from outside the western tradition. Is it any wonder there is so much misunderstanding between world cultures?
What’s more, our young get no exercise whatsoever in reasoning skills, and most don’t even know what a fallacy is! So what hope have they got of guarding against untruth in a world filled with empty rhetoric and PR BS? There’s little mystery in this deficit, of course, since incentive abounds to keep them ignorant in that respect, for who would buy into our economic, political, and religious institutions, after all, if their BS meters were working properly?
It seems clear that we have a moral responsibility to correct this sin against humanity – which first and foremost, calls for a rethinking of philosophy itself - the search for truth that was once synonymous with dialogic education, and is now the very furthers thing from it!
Rethinking the Wisdom of Religious Belief vs. Understanding...
And the fact that so many religions still actively work to silence dissent and ‘heretical’ voices shows that not all ‘spiritual’ traditions are equally worthy or wise. So this dialogue gives voice only to those who sought to enliven the egalitarian spirit that brings out the best in all participants – that is, those who worked to insure “that everybody in the whole society has a voice.”(Biesele et al., 2008) This is what qualifies a spiritual or intellectual wisdom tradition as truly wise - that it welcomes all comers and can answer to all questions!
Indeed, ‘Occupy Philosophy’ might well be a good description of the egalitarian purposes of this book, which render it something of a people’s history of philosophy. But what sets this book apart from other critiques of Philosophy is that is does not merely criticize the worst of it from outside-in, but emphasizes the best of it from inside-out – through the voices of the great philosophers themselves, who did not make the same mistakes that so many of their followers have. They give us just the tools and the pep talk we need to revive the genuine small-p search for truth from which too many Capital-P Philosophers have diverted us.
What's more, we might go so far as to call for the release of ancient texts and other unknown works from papal vaults, for they have too long kept humanity in the dark of ignorance about so much that could shed light on our higher purposes. It's time we exhume all this buried treasure! (And, miracle of all miracles, we might actually have a Pope who would understand the need.)
The Promise of Socratic Relationships...
It’s for this reason that I’ve included mainly the great teachers from Indigenous, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Greek and early Christian (Gnostic) cultures. Because - whatever else these traditions have become in later years under the influence of so many misguided followers - the best of them captured at the outset the spirit of both equality and excellence that were once the beating heart of all natural democracies. And I predict that many readers will discover that they did not truly understand any of these traditions until hearing them in dialogue with one another.
Even still, for those who learn well and continuously in this dialectic way, the whole truth about anything will remain forever out of reach, for life is simply not long enough for anyone to ever be finished learning. As Huston Smith so eloquently put it, “Knowledge and ignorance advance lockstep… the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.”
And this is more blessing than curse because learning and teaching turn out to be among life’s greatest intrinsic goods. Indeed, the idea that we ever grow out of learning has been a great loss to humankind and taken a greater toll on our happiness than we realize. For teaching and learning are just different sides of the same dialectic process that is friendship itself, complementary aspects of the same mutually enriching and uplifting human interconnectedness in which we are all teachers, just as we are all students. And relationships based on this progressive exchange of ideas are the healthiest we could ever hope to achieve.
For this reason, the best of our ancient ancestors would have us remember that loving and learning are not different things, but the same intrinsic motivation applied to different matters - and understanding is the key to both! This insight is at the heart of loving to learn, as well as its complement, learning to love.
As Huston Smith has put it, “Understanding… breeds love, but the reverse also holds. Love brings understanding – the two are reciprocal. So we must listen to understand…for it is impossible to love another without hearing that other.”(Smith, 1958) Which is also why Socrates – known for his claim that he knew nothing - ultimately proclaimed toward the end of his life, “Love is the only thing I ever claimed to know anything about!”
This may bring Jesus to mind, and it should. For it has often been said that there are no two characters in history more alike than Socrates and Jesus – and the Gnostic Gospels bear this out. The difference being that, while Jesus taught that we should love, Socrates taught us how to, and why it is that everything depends on how we talk to one another!
These are common themes throughout the best of ancient literature, but you’d never know it from most modern scholarship – as evidenced by the fact that we all know perfectly well what Platonic relationships are, while in the 2400 years since Socrates was put to death for its sake, we have apparently never asked what Socratic relationships might be. (A quick Google search brings up only this: Socratic relationships are those "in which you ask a lot of really difficult questions of the other person until they get annoyed and want to poison you.") Go figure. Please! Because the true answer to this question could do us a great deal of good! For who among us does not need more friendships in which both out the good in one another?
The Educational Need...
In his seminal book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian educational theorist Paulo Friere, emphasized the difference between teaching as midwifery and what he calls “the banking method of education.” The critical difference between these being that, “While bankers deposit knowledge in the learner’s head, midwives draw it out. They assist the students in giving birth to their own ideas, in making their own tacit knowledge explicit and elaborating it.”(Friere, 1971) In Understanding by Design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe argue that students who learn in this banking way develop too much reliance on the authority of teachers and texts, and too little ability to think for themselves. Twice New York teacher-of-the-year and author of Dumbing Us Down, John Taylor Gatto, argues that, because of this kind of education, "We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to tell themselves what to do." And in Assault on Reason, Al Gore laments the damage done to democracy when “Individuals receive but do not send, they listen but do not speak, they are given information but do not share it in return... and their ability to use the tools of reason as participants in the national conversation is suspended" And Gore elaborates on the profit-driven intention behind this deliberate public dumbing that began with the first PR campaign to get women to smoke in the 1920s, and continues with the multi-billion dollar advertising industry today.
Is it any wonder that our democracy has gone so awry? How induced want for extrinsic goods has diverted our educational purposes from understanding to profit, and in the process, clouded our better judgement and corrupted our character, as the ancients warned it would if we don't help our young learn the value of the intrinsic goods of play and friendship, food and conversation, art, music, dance, sexuality and spirituality - which they also understood to be complementary - and of course, teaching and learning! These are life's truest and most satisfying goods - but too often the furthest thing from the motivations that move us.
And what's more, does this not explain why our judge and jury system so often fails - for how many who’ve grown up in our ‘sit down and be quiet’ education system can make a convincing case for justice in the face of eleven others who oppose them - even when life and death, justice and democracy, hang in the balance?
But one generation of youth, spared this banking method of education and instead asked the really radical question, "What do you think?" could give us the answers we've long sought, could grow up truly free and equal, broadly self-interested, and wise enough to know what's honestly good for them - better, at least, than apparently many of us today. Then, and perhaps only then, will children be free to to truly love learning for its intrinsic good. Then, and only then, will democracy ever really work for the good of all, rather than merely for the interests of the already privileged, who control the flow of information the way they control the flow of money.
And students who learn to practice Philosophy in this banking way will likely never understand what love and learning have to do with one another, or learn to listen with respect for what diverse wisdom traditions – much less other people and students themselves - are saying. And sadly, too many of these students go on to become Philosophy professors who simply don’t know how much they don’t know and are ill equipped to illuminate this rich legacy of human wisdom for their own students. As too often happens in too many arenas, most tend to end up too busy trying to win the war to care much about ending it.
The world has long needed a revised small-p understanding of philosophy from the perspective of those least advantaged, since it began and grew from the seeds of dissident voices bent on questioning authority and willing to give their lives for the truth. The best of them advocate and teach a way of life in which “all share as a whole in the pain of the suffering part.”(Plato, Republic) And this, for the purpose of enhancing joy and happiness for all! Though you’d never know this was Plato’s message by studying him in any Philosophy Department since Karl Popper denounced him as the sweetheart of the elite and the father of fascism - a claim that, quite simply, could not be further from the truth.
The ancients understood that only by putting our minds together in this way can the many (demos) lovers of peace and justice finally balance the few (oligoi) lovers of power who have too long dominate us all. This is the divine power of ideas to help us rise above the induced oblivion that keeps so many in the dark of ignorance that is Plato’s allegorical cave, and could – given half a chance - let us realize the true ideals of intelligence, peace, and justice in our world.
And for this reason, it is up to every generation - and every person - to do their part! Because Mill was right when he said, "the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner."(On Liberty)
There is a gaping hole in the body of literature we offer our young that leaves them empty of a wealth of substance that the ancients tried to pass on to them, and entrusted us to deliver. And it’s for this reason, I argue, that philosophy must not remain merely a specialized discipline carried on by a few good ol’ boys playing logic games in back rooms of ivy covered towers. It is rather a great garden of buried treasure into which every thoughtful child must be welcomed and handed a shovel!
Hence, the many reasons that we need to recall these ancient voices dialectically. These are educational ideals that our young urgently need us to put into practice for their sake - not only because it’s critical to the learning and democratic process, but because it’s essential to their very mental health and well-being. Not to mention the health of the environment we deliver them into - which truly needs us to rediscover our inner resources, that we might stop robbing the future of those natural resources it will need.
The Value of Practical Wisdom: Doing the Right Thing at the Right Time for the Right Reason...
My book began with an environmental purpose (when I was working for Greenpeace in the 80s), but gradually developed an educational focus because these purposes are inextricably intertwined. In fact, it’s fair to say that we’ve little hope of resolving our environmental problems without a better understanding of what constitutes good education, which has too long served as a mere means to pass on our bad habits of competition and extrinsic motivations to our young.
It seems clear that primal and Indigenous Peoples are right when they say, “We’ll have peace with the earth only when we have peace with each other.”(Ausubel, 2008) (Which again highlights the need for what is these days called philosophical counseling, which has the potential to help us, individually, make things right in our lives and up for lost time in our learning.)
To that end, small-p philosophy offers us the skills we need for solving problems, resolving conflicts, and meeting the personal and collective challenges of our age, useful insights for forming and maintaining healthy relationships - not only with one another, but with the natural world that is our only home - and might still be a paradise… if we cared for it as it cares for us.
Call me a cockeyed optimist, but there is truly a sense of readiness in the air for all of this - if only because crisis is opportunity! And as in all learning - as the Taoists say - readiness is everything! Not only is it NOT too late for the rest of us to learn from the best of us, but the timing simply could not be better - or more urgent!
It’s true that we have a long way to go to bridge the isms between disciplines, ideologies, class, gender and religions that have been the source of so much conflict and suffering in our world. But fortunately, awakening can come of suffering, which “enlivens the capacity of goodness in people to connect with each other and collectively to realize a much greater power.“(Parhuli, 2008)
As Obama recently put it, people around the globe are fighting and dying for nothing more than a voice in their own lives - “the chance to argue!” Would that all leaders understood any of this (what he called in his State of the Union Address last week, “debate without demonizing”) well enough to help resolve those conflicts they are more inclined to create. How can we expect the least advantaged among us to rise above the difficulties of their lives, after all, when the most advantaged continue to create those struggles? It's precisely these survival strategies of the few - those unhealthy, win/lose, zero-sum, extrinsic–goods, narrow-self-interested, egoistic communication patterns, values, and strategies that are impoverishing the world – and the souls of the few and many alike in the process!
Most such egoists are unlikely to read this book, it’s true, but it would be enough if those who do read it would at least stop falling for their BS and voting them into positions where they can do so much harm and prevent so much good! Indeed, one central theme that emerges here is the nature of true leadership, and the relation of truth to deceit and empty rhetoric – the reason that democracy and philosophy were born together. Because while free speech gives power to reason, it also gives rise to the sophistic art of persuasion, spin and bullshit! Hence, the need for philosophy, i.e. the search for truth among lies.
Henry A. Giroux recently made the point that the neoliberal myth of the self-made man is as vacuous as the myth of the virgin birth, and people only believe such lies when there is no other discourse to complement them. That dialogue we need to hear most has taken place over three millennia, and it should anger (though not surprise) us all that it’s not still ringing in our ears. These ancient visionaries gave us the alternative perspectives we need to overcome that active ignorance that has been imposed on us. And they delivered it in voices so beautiful they will strike a harmonic chord with free thinking people everywhere - one that could ring loud well into the next millennium.
Follow-up Books...
And since the tumblers seem to be falling into place, perhaps there will be time and opportunity for other worthy books as well. And you may find the seeds of a few of these in my blog, each yet another path to the same summit of what could - the gods willing - become a dialectic revolution in human understanding and excellence.
There are many dialogues that would not have caught the public ear a generation ago that the world is calling out for, now more than ever. For instance, that between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, which would go a long way to quiet so many misguided followers who have had such a confounding effect on our understanding of healthy economy (which is likely to have elements of both capitalism and communism, as even Socrates argued thousands of years ago). As Virginia Held succinctly put it, there might be nothing wrong with capitalist games among consenting adults, but first the children must be fed!
This is true of many other dialogues between primary sources, from which so many secondary sources have distracted us - in the process, rendering education something more like the game-of-telephone it has become than the path of progressive revelation that it could be. Of course, there are secondary sources that point us back to the ancients, and I’ve incorporated many of these into this book. But too often, authors who misrepresent those original voices render them impotent and thereafter make them seem not even worth reading. (Of course, this is also the fault of those writers whose books were simply too long - even for an under-stimulated audience, which we are anything but! This is, admittedly, the philosopher’s original sin, which I’m trying very hard to avoid committing… (though you may not know it from the length of this proposal. lol)
This seems a good place to mention that I spent some years adapting Plato’s Dialogues to film (just one of many powerful learning experiences I could not have anticipated I would need, back when I first submit my work to your agency). Plato is a good example of one who some would say wrote too much. But since movies have the power to uplift the human spirit in the time it takes to sit through a single college power lecture, film might actually do justice to Socrates, at last, and help Plato reach those for whom life is simply too short and fast-paced to read his voluminous work. (At the time (1996-2000), I wrote this with an eye to it becoming the first interconnected ebook/film, and so was careful to meticulously reference every line for the purpose of connecting scenes to texts. I still dream of scenes and feel like I'm the only one who has seen this greatest story never told! Since all of history is said to be "a footnote on Plato," what could be more fitting as a first truly literary ebook-movie? But I digress...) At any rate, I can only hope there might still be time and opportunity to follow through on this dream as well – producing this screenplay on the interwoven lives of Socrates and Pericles, against the background of the golden age that birthed the twin sisters of philosophy and democracy. (Here's a sample scene from the Symposium - one that's close to my heart as a bi-sexual woman - since the Greeks did not even have a word for homosexuality, and were the first to exclaim - love is love!)
And of course, technology is playing an essential part in this nascent shift in consciousness. There is a growing appreciation of the power of our collective wisdom emerging among the world’s people as the internet facilitates communication across generations, cultures, and worldviews. Our new habit of crowd-sourcing recognizes that ideas have a sort of reverse gravity by which the cream will rise to the top, given half a chance. The possibilities that the internet creates for global cross-cultural dialogic communities - especially between living visionaries, but also for ordinary people to learn from one another’s hard learned experience - are truly awe inspiring. One BBC blogger put this in perspective: “During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these.”(Paul Mason)
The true beauty and potential of the internet is that it undermines centralized authority, fosters individual power, and facilitates autonomy and personal freedom by equalizing voices and promoting a kind of mind-to-mind intimacy. In this way, people around the world are able to communicate instantaneously, spontaneously, and without the interference of culture, class, age, gender, race, religion, sexual-orientation, physical appearance, or any of the other isms that typically divide us. In cyberspace, ideas illuminate the darkness, memes self-replicate like genes, and horizontal networks prove more powerful than vertical hierarchies. We may not yet be using the internet for all it’s truly worth, but again, it’s not too late for the rest of us to learn from the best of us in this way. For even true enlightenment is possible in this life, as Buddha said, “but we must be willing to learn!”
So my hope is that, by replanting these ancient and indigenous seeds in the soil from which our young grow, we might reinspire that love of learning they were born with. And to that end, bring diverse thinkers with complementary views into dialogue to talk out those controversies that keep so many so busy fighting unwinable battles in this war-wrought world.
And as mentioned early on, because this book draws on the full library of antiquity, it could make an excellent ebook - perhaps the first that makes the most of the technology - one that connects its readers directly in dialogue with one another, and with these sages and makes these ancient texts readily available for generations to come. This is very realistic potential now that would have seemed like science fiction back when I began writing this book - another indication that the timing is right.
Since change will happen one way or another, so we might as well take aim at our higher potentials, as Aristotle said. If the ancients well-chosen words can help us reawaken to our better selves, there may still be time for that “great chain reaction of communication” and illumination that Einstein and so many others have called for – a new renaissance of human vision and creativity!
A Part for Everyone to Play...
As for it’s market, it’s probably fair to say that my work will reach only the idealists of the world – but then a good proportion of us are that optimistic, and there are more of us born in every heart-to-heart discussion with other idealists. And if my teaching experience is any indication, all this is could convert many realists as well, if only because everyone cares about their own well-being. Focusing my book on the practical wisdom by which our higher happiness can be earned seems the best way to reach even those who care only about themselves. Because, as Socrates put it, “Everyone wants what’s good for them, though not everyone knows what that is.”
We’ll never know what might have been had the world not been deprived of so many inspired and inspiring voices along the way. But if I’ve learned one thing in my years of teaching and counseling, it’s that George Elliot was right when she said (paraphrasing here), it is never too late to become the people we might have been!
There may seem little hope for change in those of us who are too well conditioned into the habits of our culture - but as the ancients knew, all hope for humanity lies in the fact that every generation is born fresh, with all the higher and lower potentials that are both part of our human nature. And it’s in the dialogic education of young and growing minds that real change happens. So everything depends on good guidance and reinspiring the love of learning they were born with!
And the good news is, what we tend to call 'human nature' is just a bundle of bad habits – and habits can be broken! What’s more, we can refrain from teaching these to begin with. It seems the very least we can do - indeed, a moral imperative – considering the calamity they are in for, thanks to us. We have a compelling responsibility to stop teaching our young the same bad habits we were taught and now find so difficult to change in ourselves!
Our generation especially has an ethical duty to pass on to generations to come all the best that our collective ancestors passed on to us. This is what Pericles meant when he inspired JFK to say, “Of those to whom much is given, much is required.” All this is the due inheritance of our young, and the very least we can do to help them weather the challenges we’ve set them up for.
And we all have a part to play in this needed change! My ultimate hope for this book is that it will inspire individual readers to do their part – whatever that might mean. For each of us that challenge is unique, and that thing that needs doing but won’t get done if we don’t do it depends on us alone! Many like to blame other people or 'human nature,' but none of us has a right to complain that others aren’t doing their part unless we are doing ours! It isn’t necessary that we each change the whole world – we need only change the quality of our own.
And all the related projects I’ve created are but means to put this inspiration into practice - paths that readers might follow toward their own higher potentials. It's not enough to merely see the light, after all - people also need ways to act on their inspiration and move toward it.
Arguably, the primary challenge of our age may be to encourage all, especially our children, to dream of what is still and always possible - the gods willing - and help them actualize their unique potentials by taking aim at higher ideals. Our job is to encourage the aspirations they must each take up in earnest, in the interest of their own happiness, first and foremost. If we are ever to have this dream of peace and justice come true, it must begin in the lives of each of us individually. We must, as Gandhi said, "Be the change!" (Again, philosophical counseling in all this.)
And if the history of philosophy teaches us anything, it’s that the butterfly effect of a single individual voice can reverberate well into the future. To some that might sound like delusions of grandeur, but the ancients would say we must guard against delusions of insignificance. We ALL make a difference, one way or another. And my hope is that this book will encourage people to understand that their voice truly matters, and their creativity is potentially divine. “Our original instruction is that we have intelligence so we need to use it clearly and coherently. We need to take responsibility for our lives,” and “use our intelligence… to create the reality that must be created.”(Trudell, 2008)
So this is my part - to convince living generations that dialectic complementary thinking is an art we need rather desperately to remember, one that could initially enhance our individual lives, and ultimately improve the lives of those we care about for generations to come.
The State of My Manuscript(s)...
As for the progress of my manuscript - excellence is always elusive, of course - but it's nearing completion (though, like this proposal, still too long). As you can see (if you follow some of the links provided or explore the navigation bar above) my blog contains drafts of many potential chapters – indeed, many more than can fit between the covers of a single book. So decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out must be made. I’m also still working on voice and narrative - and for this reason, I’ve not yet posted the very first chapter, which will set the tone for all the rest. (More and more I see two distinct books with two distinct styles and voices, but both with the Many Paths title...)
In keeping with the many paths concept, I'd like to render all this tangible for the reader by making the heroine of my story a walker who is thinking all this through while traversing the paths of her life. (So, for instance, she's reflecting on Virginia Woolf’s poignant prose about how men rule academia (from A Room of One’s Own) as she climbs Bascom Hill on her campus. And as she passes the Indian mounds along the Lakeshore Path so much forgotten Indigenous wisdom comes to mind. And so on, as she climbs the Acropolis to the Parthenon with her students, she can hear what Socrates would say about the way we are educating our young. And so on and so forth…)
Since I’ve spent much of my teaching career taking students abroad, I’d love to give the reader the experience of walking in the footsteps of these great souls while reflecting on their powerful words, which could anchor these abstract concepts to some beautiful and historic places in their minds. This is still an underdeveloped aspect of my book, but one I think could enhance it considerably. I would hope for a bit more time to work all this through though. (Since I’ve nearly exhausted my resources for love of all this, I would need some funding to keep going. My hope is to be able to afford a few months in NYC to weave the rest of this together. I love my grandkids, but they're too much fun and irresistibly distracting. :-) So I need some time away to concentrate.)
The other book I see taking form is more direct in voice, and may well draw on elements of this proposal as its introductory chapter. That book if far more complete and could be finished in a very short time, I suspect.
I’m sure you’ll agree that for either of these books to live up to their full potential, they would need an agent like yourself (or perhaps your colleagues), those of the rarest kind who “believes in a better world.” As you know, I’m deeply grateful for the inspiration you (Ms. Goldin) have already provided, and can only hope someone in your agency will be interested in helping me see this through to completion. As I’ve said before, I’ve been an admirer of your activism for a very long time, and I share your passion for justice. It’s that passion that has kept me working on one or another aspect of these books every morning for three decades - and I can still count the exceptions on two hands.
I’m also fairly sure it’s that passion that’s keeping me alive, even after almost fifteen years with cancer - which, strange as it may sound, has been a primary source of my inspiration. As Samuel Adams once said, "The prospect of hanging in a fortnight has a way of focusing the mind wonderfully." The universe is filled with irony. It also has ways of telling us to hurry the hell up – so without cancer, I might have kept writing for the sheer love of it until all my days had run out. So good comes of everything... if you let it.
Related Books & Authors...
As for recent titles on similar themes, Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom is one book currently on the market that's related in substance. Many Paths shares some of the same research and comes to many of the same conclusions (e.g. “A good place to look for wisdom, therefore, is where you least expect it: in the minds of your opponents,” Haidt concludes). But the dialogic format Many Paths employs digs much deeper into the radical insights of ancient wisdom traditions to illuminate the true nature of enlightened self-interest and class-consciousness that healthy democracy and personal happiness requires. Whereas Haidt’s book takes an outside-looking-in social science approach, Many Paths goes for more of an inside-looking-out process of self-discovery.
My sense is that Many Paths is likely to appeal to the readers of books like Tuesdays with Morrie, Sophie’s World, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I expect it will attract lovers of any of the wisdom traditions I’ve drawn on (though it may challenge them to stretch their views). And I hope it will share readers with the likes of Alan Watts, Abraham Maslow, Huston Smith, Elaine Pagels, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Paulo Friere, to name only a few kindred spirits. And it will almost certainly draw in feminists, environmentalists, Marxists, anarchists, and the LGBT community, since the ancient were the first to make their case.
I’m just digging into Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, by Sam Harris. And I can see more than a few quotes will find their way into Many Paths. But a key difference between mine and other books by contemporary philosophers is that I haven’t offered merely my own opinion, but have drawn heavily on the insights and actual voices of other thinkers. And because Many Paths incorporates the voices of writers, theorists, and activists across issues and disciplines (e.g. Bill Mckibben, Al Gore, Barbara Ehrenreich, James Gleick, Grant Wiggins & Jay Mctighe, Alphie Kohn, etc.), my hope is that it will draw in their readers as well, and ideally, earn their endorsements.
Related Projects & Platform Building...
Let me just reiterate that, while I have been busy in recent years completing these books, I am also well aware of the importance of building a platform for my work, and am at work establishing several ways to accomplish that as you read. I begin with many thousands of students ready to buy my book, but I have not yet established that on social media. So this is my current project - and ideally, by the time this book goes to a publisher, I will have evidence of its ready audience to show.
Among those projects I mentioned earlier, this blog will play a role. I intend to invite each of the living authors whose voices I’ve incorporated into this dialogue to participate in an ongoing online discussion with other thinkers who share their concerns. I, for one, would give a great deal to hear, for instance, climate change experts talk it out with climate change skeptics. (Of course, ‘deniers’ are unlikely to join in such a discussion because they are driven by belief and not the will to understand, which is just as well. True teachers will see the value.)
And given our well-developed social networking habits, we could put all this ancient wisdom into practice by way of the many digital tools that are emerging (the purpose of the nonprofits mentioned earlier, the IDCS, M2M, and MMC projects I’ve established and described elsewhere; see here for an overview of the Madison Mentor Center's Mission). By utilizing the dialectic-complementary visuals described earlier, these websites and apps could facilitate cross-cultural and inter-generational communication, and foster healthy dialogic connections between people of different worldviews - including the youngest among us who’ve not yet had time to forget what we were all born knowing, as well as those of us who’ve been up and down the mountain a few times.
Such digital forums could also enhance education across the globe, helping to reawaken the love of both teaching and learning we were all born with. And perhaps, best of all, these could also help put people to work teaching what they know, love, and do best to those a world away who need these skills (I, for instance, might be happy to pay an African mother to teach me her language or basket-weaving skills or dance moves, for instance, and in the process, make a new friend, while helping to feed her family). In this way, we might find ways to help alleviate income inequality, loosening the grip that corporate chains and hierarchical institutions have on too many of us around the world.
By tapping into our human resources in this way, we might reduce stress on our natural resources and plant the seeds of an intrinsic-goods economy that could help us all, and generations to come, grow rich in inner wealth and human relationships. And in the process, help turn us away from the self-fulfilling ‘end days’ prophesy into which we are rushing headlong. And if thinkers around the world can be educed to participate, perhaps such forums could even facilitate just the creative surge the world needs to actualize that ultimate renaissance the ancients anticipated.
That said - let me reiterate that the blog posts I’ve linked to are works-in-progress, incomplete in places, and still subject to bugs and server issues (fewer bugs when viewed in Firefox, I’ve noticed). I plan to spend days to come making adjustments to it, so if you find a broken link or a placeholder page, chances are it will have been made right if you check back soon. I was tempted to hold back my query until this blog is more polished, lest its weaknesses scare you away. But that would be letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, as the Taoists say. If it's living, it isn't perfect, and if it's perfect it isn't living. So I must read the signs, which all indicate that the time is right (after only thirty years lol) to send it... and hope for the best
Concluding Thoughts...
I hope I haven’t overwhelmed you with all this, and I certainly don’t expect you to read all the chapter drafts I’ve linked to. The blog is only meant to show the range and readiness of my work, and to help illuminate the possibilities for such a book (and perhaps follow-ups). To make it easier for you to navigate, I've indicated key chapters by way of an asterisk at the front of each heading (which you will be able to view from the navigation bar on any page). At this point, it’s become a resource bank to mine as I go forward, and I'll be adding and updating chapters as they develop.
Thank you, again, for hearing me out. As you may have surmised by now, time and attention are the very currency of an intrinsic goods economy - and no one knows better what these are worth than those of us near the end of our days. I’m sure yours are filled with many wonderful projects. I do hope you - or someone else in your agency - can find time for mine too.
I would certainly welcome any feedback you might have. And I look forward to talking with you, if you think you might be interested in discussing any of this further. I do hope and pray for that chance… but no pressure. lol
Hope & Gratitude,
Juliana
Juliana Paradise Hunt
Certified Philosophical Counselor and Educational Consultant
Founder: Institute for Dialectic-Complementarity Studies
Designer & Developer: Mind-to-Mind Teaching & Learning System
Director: Madison Mentor Center
IDCS blog: julianahunt.weebly.com
IDCS website: complementarity.org
MMC/M2M website: madisonmentorcenter.org
Counseling website: julianaparadisehunt.com
Email: [email protected]
Office: 6302 Odana Rd. Madison, WI 53719