Original Sources vs. Education as a Game of Telephone
It was also during these years that I learned another indelible lesson about writing. Studying deeper into Plato, Marx, Adam Smith, Darwin and others like them, I could not help but notice that those who have the most of great worth to say, also write books longer than most people care to read, which renders them the most likely to be misunderstood. And no wonder, since generation after generation of compliant students take their teacher’s word for what is written in those pages, and sometimes become teachers themselves, passing those misconceptions forward as if they knew what they were talking about.
And so the game of telephone ensues as one after another of these classic books succumbs to popular, if mistaken, interpretations of those who won’t be bothered to think for themselves. This sounds very cynical, but it’s true too often to be ignored. I could see with my own eyes that these famed, and sometimes infamous, thinkers did not actually say, or at any rate, did not mean much of what has been attributed to them. They may have expressed some of these ideas for the sake of argument, but they did not assert or advocate them. And what’s more, what they did say was something that the world truly needs to hear, but too few are really listening, too certain they already know what they’re going to hear.
And all this seemed especially true of the message of ancient literature. Since it was more inclined to stimulate people to think, rather than tell them what to think, modern readers are unused to this art of what Socrates called midwifery. And so, for instance, a question asked for the sake of argument (e.g. “So we think women and children should be owned in common by men?”) tends to be taken by modern readers as a statement of belief, a conclusion, as if asserted to be true. (And the ancient’s disregard for punctuation certainly didn’t help.)
At any rate, no one has been more misinterpreted and misconstrued in this way than Plato, who wrote for an under-stimulated audience, and of course, we are anything but! Given our short attention span, we don’t bother to reconcile the meaning of, say, an entire discussion. And the result has been that Socrates (Plato’s teacher and the central character of his dialogues) turns out to be the most misunderstood thinker of all time!
This champion of freedom, who argued from every angle that people ought to be free to find and grow into what they are good at, has been accepted throughout the 20th century as what Karl Popper calls “the enemy of the free individual.” Socrates’ ideal, Popper said, is “a totalitarian state with mass conformity,” and he concludes that Socrates would have viewed the Christian doctrine ‘love thy neighbor’ as “the enemy of his caste state.”
In fact, NOTHING could be further from the truth, as any first time reader can discern, IF they approach it without prior direction about what to expect. Indeed, “Love is the only thing I ever claims to know anything about,” Socrates ultimately proclaimed. But since his central message was that we should question the authority of false experts who create a reputation for great knowledge, despite sometimes having little clue what they’re actually talking about, we can see why he has been passed down to us by those who actually have an interest in keeping him quite, while thwarting his true message. With the consequent that, like many of the world’s great thinkers, he has been taken to have been precisely the opposite of what he actually was, as if he was a proponent of things he never would have endorsed - the so-called Guardian State, for instance, which he only agreed to discuss in the first place to answer the question, What is wrong with this picture? And where does injustice set in?
It was then that I made it my mission to see to it that Socrates might get a fair trial once and for all. I spent some years thereafter, during grad school and beyond, adapting Plato’s Dialogues to film (including a thorough exegesis of his work, as well as all the relevant material from Aristotle, Xenophon, Thudycides, Plutarch, and other ancient voices we have yet to truly hear). Since film has the power to uplift and inspire a life in the time that it takes to sit through a single college power lecture, it seemed to me that this medium may actually have a chance of reaching those young minds who might otherwise never meet this great soul in our attention deficit age...except perhaps what they could glean from Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure. Long story short, I realized at length that I’d probably have to produce it myself if I hoped for it to be true to Socrates… So that’s a story for another proposal.
At any rate, if misreading isn’t problem enough for ancient literature, come to find that much of it wasn’t even passed on at all. Many texts (such as those we now call the Gnostic Gospels) simply did not survive the Christianized Roman Empire to tell their tales – or so it had seemed, until they emerged only recently from the sands of Egypt, where they were hidden in the 3rd century A.D. to prevent them from destruction by the newly Christianized Roman Empire.
It was then that I made it my mission to include these ancient voices into my own work, if only to inspire others to look closer at what we’ve all missed. Though I realized that I would be setting myself up for the same fate that philosophers had long faced - that is, no one would even read, much less understanding, my work if it ended up to be as lengthy as it typically starts out as (an ongoing struggle that makes me think I may have to publish a series of books, rather than a single one. Or perhaps a simple blog will do the trick…)
It was also during these years that I learned another indelible lesson about writing. Studying deeper into Plato, Marx, Adam Smith, Darwin and others like them, I could not help but notice that those who have the most of great worth to say, also write books longer than most people care to read, which renders them the most likely to be misunderstood. And no wonder, since generation after generation of compliant students take their teacher’s word for what is written in those pages, and sometimes become teachers themselves, passing those misconceptions forward as if they knew what they were talking about.
And so the game of telephone ensues as one after another of these classic books succumbs to popular, if mistaken, interpretations of those who won’t be bothered to think for themselves. This sounds very cynical, but it’s true too often to be ignored. I could see with my own eyes that these famed, and sometimes infamous, thinkers did not actually say, or at any rate, did not mean much of what has been attributed to them. They may have expressed some of these ideas for the sake of argument, but they did not assert or advocate them. And what’s more, what they did say was something that the world truly needs to hear, but too few are really listening, too certain they already know what they’re going to hear.
And all this seemed especially true of the message of ancient literature. Since it was more inclined to stimulate people to think, rather than tell them what to think, modern readers are unused to this art of what Socrates called midwifery. And so, for instance, a question asked for the sake of argument (e.g. “So we think women and children should be owned in common by men?”) tends to be taken by modern readers as a statement of belief, a conclusion, as if asserted to be true. (And the ancient’s disregard for punctuation certainly didn’t help.)
At any rate, no one has been more misinterpreted and misconstrued in this way than Plato, who wrote for an under-stimulated audience, and of course, we are anything but! Given our short attention span, we don’t bother to reconcile the meaning of, say, an entire discussion. And the result has been that Socrates (Plato’s teacher and the central character of his dialogues) turns out to be the most misunderstood thinker of all time!
This champion of freedom, who argued from every angle that people ought to be free to find and grow into what they are good at, has been accepted throughout the 20th century as what Karl Popper calls “the enemy of the free individual.” Socrates’ ideal, Popper said, is “a totalitarian state with mass conformity,” and he concludes that Socrates would have viewed the Christian doctrine ‘love thy neighbor’ as “the enemy of his caste state.”
In fact, NOTHING could be further from the truth, as any first time reader can discern, IF they approach it without prior direction about what to expect. Indeed, “Love is the only thing I ever claims to know anything about,” Socrates ultimately proclaimed. But since his central message was that we should question the authority of false experts who create a reputation for great knowledge, despite sometimes having little clue what they’re actually talking about, we can see why he has been passed down to us by those who actually have an interest in keeping him quite, while thwarting his true message. With the consequent that, like many of the world’s great thinkers, he has been taken to have been precisely the opposite of what he actually was, as if he was a proponent of things he never would have endorsed - the so-called Guardian State, for instance, which he only agreed to discuss in the first place to answer the question, What is wrong with this picture? And where does injustice set in?
It was then that I made it my mission to see to it that Socrates might get a fair trial once and for all. I spent some years thereafter, during grad school and beyond, adapting Plato’s Dialogues to film (including a thorough exegesis of his work, as well as all the relevant material from Aristotle, Xenophon, Thudycides, Plutarch, and other ancient voices we have yet to truly hear). Since film has the power to uplift and inspire a life in the time that it takes to sit through a single college power lecture, it seemed to me that this medium may actually have a chance of reaching those young minds who might otherwise never meet this great soul in our attention deficit age...except perhaps what they could glean from Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure. Long story short, I realized at length that I’d probably have to produce it myself if I hoped for it to be true to Socrates… So that’s a story for another proposal.
At any rate, if misreading isn’t problem enough for ancient literature, come to find that much of it wasn’t even passed on at all. Many texts (such as those we now call the Gnostic Gospels) simply did not survive the Christianized Roman Empire to tell their tales – or so it had seemed, until they emerged only recently from the sands of Egypt, where they were hidden in the 3rd century A.D. to prevent them from destruction by the newly Christianized Roman Empire.
It was then that I made it my mission to include these ancient voices into my own work, if only to inspire others to look closer at what we’ve all missed. Though I realized that I would be setting myself up for the same fate that philosophers had long faced - that is, no one would even read, much less understanding, my work if it ended up to be as lengthy as it typically starts out as (an ongoing struggle that makes me think I may have to publish a series of books, rather than a single one. Or perhaps a simple blog will do the trick…)