Can there be any doubt how much we stand to benefit by recalling the ancient methods of education and politics, and with them, coming to understand the interpersonal and intercultural[1] lessons we need to be able to justify calling ourselves teachers. Perhaps we are too steeped in sophist ways to recognize the destructive effects on the function of our minds of these non-dialogic methods of learning that assume that knowledge flows uni-directionally, from outside to inside, from adults to children, and from the past to the future exclusively.[2]
Ancient methods do not justify promoting any one privileged perspective as if it alone is 'true'; rather, they advocate the full development and consideration of all views toward an understanding of the whole of truth; the broad, deep and well-developed mind; toward the just soul and the just polity--i.e. the one and only seat of true happiness.
The key challenge of our age then is to take Kant’s advice, and keep controversy alive so that the voices of the most thoughtful people have a chance of trickling up to the most thoughtful leaders. Arguably, representative democracy isn't working, in part because it isn’t representative, and while this is in part due to class interests, it is also partly because leaders get little meaningful feedback from their constituents. In fact, we don't prepare young Americans to contribute their voices even to their education or their relationships, let alone their government.
If there is one thing I have learned from teaching philosophy, it’s that when you put great books together with young minds, you get great young minds. The ancients who gave birth to democracy were believers in this process. Dialectic thinking (as the ancients conceived of it, not as it has been twisted by many since) is about the importance of taking every voice seriously. They did not reduce 'reality' to the mere material, nor reduce education to the linear top-down process it is today. They understood 'reality' as a 'multiplicity in unity' with unseen spiritual dimensions that arise in ongoing discussion. They took seriously that we all see the same world differently, and that it is in dialogue that the whole truth of any matter is discerned - "like lines converging on a common center." Two heads are better than one, they understood, for the same reason that two eyes are better than one - it allows us to develop depth of understanding. Because of this, they knew something that we have largely forgotten - how to listen, how to empathize, and how to reconcile disparate points of view - because the truth of any matter is to be found in the balance. And the whole truth of any matter will include all conceivable points of view and all concerned voices.
Democracy was born out of this faith in the interaction of ideas - that reason would override rhetoric, truth outshine fallacy - and that if the process of deliberation is healthy, the more voices you bring to bear on a problem, the more likely it will be that better minds will develop and prevail. And they understood that the just politics of a mixed constitution required healthy and vigorous deliberation on EVERY level of society. Dissent is self-correcting, and the best ideas will trickle up...if we have every voice speaking for itself. They warned that the only way to avoid a 'tyranny of the majority' (or of the minority who manages to pass as the majority) is to develop a dynamic 'general will' - a sort of all-for-one-and-one-for-all process through which every voice can have its say. Each knowing they had this chance to say what they think and possibly to influence the direction of the whole would encourage the best thinking and bring out the best voice in each and all. This process reveals that people, educated dialectically, are truly more intelligent and insightful than they seem in a world where the only choice they have to make is which product and which candidate to 'buy'. This dialectic philosophy made the natural diversity that is intrinsic to democracy work for them. The goal was including all voices in communion and reaching agreement wherever possible. It was a sort of think-tank-of-all through which peaceful coexistence could be reached. With an appreciation of how much we have to learn from one another, and how much each and all have to contribute to the whole.
For democracy to function properly, educators must create incentive for young people to develop their minds and voices – learn to express their unique points of view, to represent themselves and others like them. We cannot expect to be understood or 'represented' otherwise. Participatory democracy is much healthier, if messier, than representative because it encourages the full development of every person's intellectual and expressive potentials. In order to fully participate, people had to develop their minds and their voices. This attitude made the ancients better speakers and listeners than we are, more empathic, humble, and curious, able to appreciate diverse points of view and to express their own in an energetic and ongoing exchange of ideas. This dialogic habit helped them understand the difference in good and bad reasoning, how to argue for the sake of understanding, rather than to win. All of which made them more sincere and genuine, and perhaps more skilled at recognizing wolves in sheep’s clothing for what they are. For discerning truth is less about proof, after all, and more about honesty and seeing things as they really are. We may be able to persuade people with empty rhetoric, as we do so well in our advertising age, but we can only convince them with the truth.
We, by contrast, have been conditioned into communication patterns that are actually violent in their effects, having been turned off at an early age to the subtle reasoning skills that are necessary to understand and reconcile complementary points of view necessary to see the whole truth about anything.
For this reason, our young need now more than ever to be encouraged to speak their minds, to articulate what only they can see from their perspectives, in order to help others do the same, so that all might see what they are missing, and learn to argue in healthy ways. This is what Socratic dialogue can do. It is a healing method of communication that encourages the deliberation necessary in healthy relationships, education, and democracy.
So, call me a dreamer, but by my lights, all evidence suggests we could revive and reinvigorate democracy by way of such dialogic groups and deliberative assemblies that the ancients knew to be essential to participatory democracy. While dissenting voices have little chance of being heard over the din of empty rhetoric that fills the airwaves in our time, there is no denying the power of a single intelligent voice when it contributes to the ongoing dialogues all around us. We have a lot to learn from the ancients about healthy democracy as multiplicity in unity, which is to say, about integrating our diverse subjective perspectives to compose the whole of objective reality.
This could help us resolve the other challenges of our age as well. Indeed, the reason it is important for us to remember the Socratic method, not as it has come to be known, but as it was originally intended, is because we cannot have a healthy democracy without it. This is a challenge, primarily, for educators, because here is where political processes begin. Unfortunately, the ancient Greeks did not take the advice of those great philosophers who warned of the importance of dialogue and free speech as the only means of keeping power out of the hands of those who are in love with it. They did not, but for a single generation, remember that the heart of healthy democracy is intelligent, ongoing, and deliberate discussion on all levels of social interaction. Hence, the ultimate fate of Athena’s great city when her people neglected the philosopher’s teachings was the death of the first and only democracy the world would ever know until our own.
But before we can teach this to our young, we ourselves must learn it for ourselves – that is, to develop our own voice and contribute it where it will uplift the discussions going on all around us. Kant says this is what philosophers are good for - keeping controversy alive so that good ideas can trickle up to leaders who need our help. So, again, this is only my part. What will be yours?
The great souls of human history have taught us that an ideal is never achieved by accident. We cannot hit a target we don’t even aim at, but the plethora of great souls who have graced this earth are evidence of how much can be accomplished if we do. If we do not have a dream - individually or collectively – then neither can we have a dream come true.
The choice is to believe in humanity, including our individual dreams, or to give in to thinking that we are not responsible for the problems we fact and cannot make a difference in this world. Either way, the result will be self-fulfilling prophesy. In the face of so many obstacles, we can easily become discouraged from following our better selves. But the truth is, we do not know what we can do until we try, and we can accomplish nothing if we don’t try - a terrible waste. In a world that suffers for so much mediocrity and craves beauty and truth so, to give up before one has even begun is to take responsibility for all those under our influence who will then who do the same. It is easy to make excuses for not using our talents or seizing our opportunities, and we often do so by telling ourselves that others aren’t doing their share, so why should we? But then we give up our right to complain about others if we do not even do our own part. On the other hand, the argument has been made here that courageous idealism is its own reward, and it’s easy to enjoy the internal rewards that come of doing one’s best, even in a world where so many do not do theirs.
As we prepare to face the challenges that lie ahead, the future born there is here conceived in the images we nurture and the choices that we make. And so, if ever there was a time for dreaming, it is now.
So much rides on our remembering the purposes that have propelled humanity to this moment of challenge, where the present hangs suspended between the past and the future. The hard-learned lessons of our diverse ancestors of all cultures, show us that human beings share essential common purposes which can be discerned by looking deep inside, which is to say, into our own memory and our own personal and collective challenges. Whether we heed the advice of the past, or not, is our choice and will plant the seeds of human destiny into which we deliver our children and our children’s children.
Hope for humanity lies in those authentic and fully actualized idealists and great teachers who show us, sometimes against our protest, who we could be. I, for one, am grateful to those who rise to the height of their potential and influence by the uplift of their ideals and raise my own standards in the process. We inherit from them believable ideals of truth, freedom, justice, and good, and the methods of knowing, doing, and teaching that follow naturally. For all that has come of human aspiration, we have these dreamers - visionaries, if you will - to thank. Seeing that such courageous idealists are not gods, and usually not even legends or folk heroes,[i] but "only human," people with families, friends, jobs to do and problems to face, we can also see that the same choices and dispositions are potential for us all.
We, individually, make the choice of which goods to follow as principles upon which to base our actions. Our very best hope lies in the fact that some among us don't forget what is still and always our potential, and they serve to remind the rest of us when we do. As one insightful student so eloquently put it, “The rest of us learn from the best of us.”[ii]
Thus, we can fairly conclude that misunderstanding and crisis of conflict is, in fact, opportunity for dialectic growth, and that liberal education truly has this as its purpose. Only by taking on the challenge of reconciling our relative but complementary perspectives do we begin to understand, not only one another, but ourselves as well.
Only by such self-knowledge do we have a chance of resolving that conflict that thwarts the social peace, and, if left to fester unresolved beneath the surface of our social interactions and communication, our peace of mind as well.
Native teaching “recount historic mistakes to remind us not to make them again,” learn from them…(OI, Nelson, 14) No one is perfect, and the fact that even the wise make “ecological mistakes” can’t be denied, Indeed, “many Native Peoples have become ‘Americanized’ with the same materialism and greed as anyone else and have been conditioned to forget the earth and our nonhuman relatives.”(OI, Nelson, 13) This might help us understand that Americans too have gone through this process, in their own way. So the situation we ALL find ourselves in as adults, if we did not learn well or were conditioned into bad habits in our youth, is how to quit these habits, choose better ones, and reconcile the deficiencies in our education now, while there still may be time…
For there to be peace (such as might be possible between modern Americans and American Indians) “there must be an acknowledgement of the truth, an apology, a reconciliation, restitution, and a healing.” (OI, Nelson, 16)
In this way, it is not a stretch to hope, as Plato did, that:
“as mankind improve, the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase; and the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested. The cessation, on one question after another, of serious controversy is one of the necessary incidents of the consolidation of opinion--a consolidation as salutary in the case of true opinions as it is dangerous and noxious when the opinions are erroneous.”(John Stuart Mill, On Liberty)
All of which is what drove Plato to proclaim, "in praise of true philosophy, that…the human race would never see the end of trouble until true lovers of wisdom should come to hold political power, OR the holders of political power should, by some divine appointment, become true lovers of wisdom."(p.xxv)
"Unless either philosophers become kings in their countries or those who are now called kings and rulers come to be sufficiently inspired with a genuine desire for wisdom; unless, that is to say, political power and philosophy meet together...there can be no rest from troubles…for states, nor yet, as I believe, for all mankind... This it was that I have so long hung back from saying; I knew what a paradox it would be, because it is hard to see that there is no other way of happiness either for the state or for the individual."[Republic, Book 5.473]
"[T]ruth compels me to declare that there will never be a perfect state or constitution, nor yet a perfect man, until some happy circumstance compels these few philosophers who have escaped corruption but are now called useless, to take charge, whether they like it or not…or else until kings and rulers…are divinely inspired with a genuine passion for true philosophy. If either alternative or both were impossible, we might justly be laughed at as idle dreamers; but, as I maintain, there is no ground for saying so. Accordingly, if ever in the infinity of time, past or future...people of the highest gifts for philosophy are encouraged to take charge of a commonwealth, we are ready to maintain that, then and there, the constitution we have described will have been realized, or will be realized when once the philosophic muse becomes mistress of a state. For that might happen. Our plan is difficult – we have admitted – but not impossible."[Republic, Book 6.499]
As Paulo Friere put it, “my trust [is] in the people, and my faith [is] in men [and women] and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.”(Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
[1] Thank you to Professor Richard Ruiz for the insight that the term 'multicultural' does not go far enough to communicate what is potential by recognition of the importance of dialogue between cultures, and that 'intercultural' goes further toward this end.
[2] Murray Bookchin argues in his book, Social Ecology, that this was and is the first hierarchy of power that we must see and thus get beyond, i.e. gerontocracy.
[i]As Powell points out, "Legend is a form of flattery, and the objects of flattery are, in the beginning, real human beings. Only later do fantastic elements accrue around the names of men and women who once really lived."(Powell, p. 20)
[ii] Quentin Gottung, UWMC, 2007.
Ancient methods do not justify promoting any one privileged perspective as if it alone is 'true'; rather, they advocate the full development and consideration of all views toward an understanding of the whole of truth; the broad, deep and well-developed mind; toward the just soul and the just polity--i.e. the one and only seat of true happiness.
The key challenge of our age then is to take Kant’s advice, and keep controversy alive so that the voices of the most thoughtful people have a chance of trickling up to the most thoughtful leaders. Arguably, representative democracy isn't working, in part because it isn’t representative, and while this is in part due to class interests, it is also partly because leaders get little meaningful feedback from their constituents. In fact, we don't prepare young Americans to contribute their voices even to their education or their relationships, let alone their government.
If there is one thing I have learned from teaching philosophy, it’s that when you put great books together with young minds, you get great young minds. The ancients who gave birth to democracy were believers in this process. Dialectic thinking (as the ancients conceived of it, not as it has been twisted by many since) is about the importance of taking every voice seriously. They did not reduce 'reality' to the mere material, nor reduce education to the linear top-down process it is today. They understood 'reality' as a 'multiplicity in unity' with unseen spiritual dimensions that arise in ongoing discussion. They took seriously that we all see the same world differently, and that it is in dialogue that the whole truth of any matter is discerned - "like lines converging on a common center." Two heads are better than one, they understood, for the same reason that two eyes are better than one - it allows us to develop depth of understanding. Because of this, they knew something that we have largely forgotten - how to listen, how to empathize, and how to reconcile disparate points of view - because the truth of any matter is to be found in the balance. And the whole truth of any matter will include all conceivable points of view and all concerned voices.
Democracy was born out of this faith in the interaction of ideas - that reason would override rhetoric, truth outshine fallacy - and that if the process of deliberation is healthy, the more voices you bring to bear on a problem, the more likely it will be that better minds will develop and prevail. And they understood that the just politics of a mixed constitution required healthy and vigorous deliberation on EVERY level of society. Dissent is self-correcting, and the best ideas will trickle up...if we have every voice speaking for itself. They warned that the only way to avoid a 'tyranny of the majority' (or of the minority who manages to pass as the majority) is to develop a dynamic 'general will' - a sort of all-for-one-and-one-for-all process through which every voice can have its say. Each knowing they had this chance to say what they think and possibly to influence the direction of the whole would encourage the best thinking and bring out the best voice in each and all. This process reveals that people, educated dialectically, are truly more intelligent and insightful than they seem in a world where the only choice they have to make is which product and which candidate to 'buy'. This dialectic philosophy made the natural diversity that is intrinsic to democracy work for them. The goal was including all voices in communion and reaching agreement wherever possible. It was a sort of think-tank-of-all through which peaceful coexistence could be reached. With an appreciation of how much we have to learn from one another, and how much each and all have to contribute to the whole.
For democracy to function properly, educators must create incentive for young people to develop their minds and voices – learn to express their unique points of view, to represent themselves and others like them. We cannot expect to be understood or 'represented' otherwise. Participatory democracy is much healthier, if messier, than representative because it encourages the full development of every person's intellectual and expressive potentials. In order to fully participate, people had to develop their minds and their voices. This attitude made the ancients better speakers and listeners than we are, more empathic, humble, and curious, able to appreciate diverse points of view and to express their own in an energetic and ongoing exchange of ideas. This dialogic habit helped them understand the difference in good and bad reasoning, how to argue for the sake of understanding, rather than to win. All of which made them more sincere and genuine, and perhaps more skilled at recognizing wolves in sheep’s clothing for what they are. For discerning truth is less about proof, after all, and more about honesty and seeing things as they really are. We may be able to persuade people with empty rhetoric, as we do so well in our advertising age, but we can only convince them with the truth.
We, by contrast, have been conditioned into communication patterns that are actually violent in their effects, having been turned off at an early age to the subtle reasoning skills that are necessary to understand and reconcile complementary points of view necessary to see the whole truth about anything.
For this reason, our young need now more than ever to be encouraged to speak their minds, to articulate what only they can see from their perspectives, in order to help others do the same, so that all might see what they are missing, and learn to argue in healthy ways. This is what Socratic dialogue can do. It is a healing method of communication that encourages the deliberation necessary in healthy relationships, education, and democracy.
So, call me a dreamer, but by my lights, all evidence suggests we could revive and reinvigorate democracy by way of such dialogic groups and deliberative assemblies that the ancients knew to be essential to participatory democracy. While dissenting voices have little chance of being heard over the din of empty rhetoric that fills the airwaves in our time, there is no denying the power of a single intelligent voice when it contributes to the ongoing dialogues all around us. We have a lot to learn from the ancients about healthy democracy as multiplicity in unity, which is to say, about integrating our diverse subjective perspectives to compose the whole of objective reality.
This could help us resolve the other challenges of our age as well. Indeed, the reason it is important for us to remember the Socratic method, not as it has come to be known, but as it was originally intended, is because we cannot have a healthy democracy without it. This is a challenge, primarily, for educators, because here is where political processes begin. Unfortunately, the ancient Greeks did not take the advice of those great philosophers who warned of the importance of dialogue and free speech as the only means of keeping power out of the hands of those who are in love with it. They did not, but for a single generation, remember that the heart of healthy democracy is intelligent, ongoing, and deliberate discussion on all levels of social interaction. Hence, the ultimate fate of Athena’s great city when her people neglected the philosopher’s teachings was the death of the first and only democracy the world would ever know until our own.
But before we can teach this to our young, we ourselves must learn it for ourselves – that is, to develop our own voice and contribute it where it will uplift the discussions going on all around us. Kant says this is what philosophers are good for - keeping controversy alive so that good ideas can trickle up to leaders who need our help. So, again, this is only my part. What will be yours?
The great souls of human history have taught us that an ideal is never achieved by accident. We cannot hit a target we don’t even aim at, but the plethora of great souls who have graced this earth are evidence of how much can be accomplished if we do. If we do not have a dream - individually or collectively – then neither can we have a dream come true.
The choice is to believe in humanity, including our individual dreams, or to give in to thinking that we are not responsible for the problems we fact and cannot make a difference in this world. Either way, the result will be self-fulfilling prophesy. In the face of so many obstacles, we can easily become discouraged from following our better selves. But the truth is, we do not know what we can do until we try, and we can accomplish nothing if we don’t try - a terrible waste. In a world that suffers for so much mediocrity and craves beauty and truth so, to give up before one has even begun is to take responsibility for all those under our influence who will then who do the same. It is easy to make excuses for not using our talents or seizing our opportunities, and we often do so by telling ourselves that others aren’t doing their share, so why should we? But then we give up our right to complain about others if we do not even do our own part. On the other hand, the argument has been made here that courageous idealism is its own reward, and it’s easy to enjoy the internal rewards that come of doing one’s best, even in a world where so many do not do theirs.
As we prepare to face the challenges that lie ahead, the future born there is here conceived in the images we nurture and the choices that we make. And so, if ever there was a time for dreaming, it is now.
So much rides on our remembering the purposes that have propelled humanity to this moment of challenge, where the present hangs suspended between the past and the future. The hard-learned lessons of our diverse ancestors of all cultures, show us that human beings share essential common purposes which can be discerned by looking deep inside, which is to say, into our own memory and our own personal and collective challenges. Whether we heed the advice of the past, or not, is our choice and will plant the seeds of human destiny into which we deliver our children and our children’s children.
Hope for humanity lies in those authentic and fully actualized idealists and great teachers who show us, sometimes against our protest, who we could be. I, for one, am grateful to those who rise to the height of their potential and influence by the uplift of their ideals and raise my own standards in the process. We inherit from them believable ideals of truth, freedom, justice, and good, and the methods of knowing, doing, and teaching that follow naturally. For all that has come of human aspiration, we have these dreamers - visionaries, if you will - to thank. Seeing that such courageous idealists are not gods, and usually not even legends or folk heroes,[i] but "only human," people with families, friends, jobs to do and problems to face, we can also see that the same choices and dispositions are potential for us all.
We, individually, make the choice of which goods to follow as principles upon which to base our actions. Our very best hope lies in the fact that some among us don't forget what is still and always our potential, and they serve to remind the rest of us when we do. As one insightful student so eloquently put it, “The rest of us learn from the best of us.”[ii]
Thus, we can fairly conclude that misunderstanding and crisis of conflict is, in fact, opportunity for dialectic growth, and that liberal education truly has this as its purpose. Only by taking on the challenge of reconciling our relative but complementary perspectives do we begin to understand, not only one another, but ourselves as well.
Only by such self-knowledge do we have a chance of resolving that conflict that thwarts the social peace, and, if left to fester unresolved beneath the surface of our social interactions and communication, our peace of mind as well.
Native teaching “recount historic mistakes to remind us not to make them again,” learn from them…(OI, Nelson, 14) No one is perfect, and the fact that even the wise make “ecological mistakes” can’t be denied, Indeed, “many Native Peoples have become ‘Americanized’ with the same materialism and greed as anyone else and have been conditioned to forget the earth and our nonhuman relatives.”(OI, Nelson, 13) This might help us understand that Americans too have gone through this process, in their own way. So the situation we ALL find ourselves in as adults, if we did not learn well or were conditioned into bad habits in our youth, is how to quit these habits, choose better ones, and reconcile the deficiencies in our education now, while there still may be time…
For there to be peace (such as might be possible between modern Americans and American Indians) “there must be an acknowledgement of the truth, an apology, a reconciliation, restitution, and a healing.” (OI, Nelson, 16)
In this way, it is not a stretch to hope, as Plato did, that:
“as mankind improve, the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase; and the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested. The cessation, on one question after another, of serious controversy is one of the necessary incidents of the consolidation of opinion--a consolidation as salutary in the case of true opinions as it is dangerous and noxious when the opinions are erroneous.”(John Stuart Mill, On Liberty)
All of which is what drove Plato to proclaim, "in praise of true philosophy, that…the human race would never see the end of trouble until true lovers of wisdom should come to hold political power, OR the holders of political power should, by some divine appointment, become true lovers of wisdom."(p.xxv)
"Unless either philosophers become kings in their countries or those who are now called kings and rulers come to be sufficiently inspired with a genuine desire for wisdom; unless, that is to say, political power and philosophy meet together...there can be no rest from troubles…for states, nor yet, as I believe, for all mankind... This it was that I have so long hung back from saying; I knew what a paradox it would be, because it is hard to see that there is no other way of happiness either for the state or for the individual."[Republic, Book 5.473]
"[T]ruth compels me to declare that there will never be a perfect state or constitution, nor yet a perfect man, until some happy circumstance compels these few philosophers who have escaped corruption but are now called useless, to take charge, whether they like it or not…or else until kings and rulers…are divinely inspired with a genuine passion for true philosophy. If either alternative or both were impossible, we might justly be laughed at as idle dreamers; but, as I maintain, there is no ground for saying so. Accordingly, if ever in the infinity of time, past or future...people of the highest gifts for philosophy are encouraged to take charge of a commonwealth, we are ready to maintain that, then and there, the constitution we have described will have been realized, or will be realized when once the philosophic muse becomes mistress of a state. For that might happen. Our plan is difficult – we have admitted – but not impossible."[Republic, Book 6.499]
As Paulo Friere put it, “my trust [is] in the people, and my faith [is] in men [and women] and in the creation of a world in which it will be easier to love.”(Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
[1] Thank you to Professor Richard Ruiz for the insight that the term 'multicultural' does not go far enough to communicate what is potential by recognition of the importance of dialogue between cultures, and that 'intercultural' goes further toward this end.
[2] Murray Bookchin argues in his book, Social Ecology, that this was and is the first hierarchy of power that we must see and thus get beyond, i.e. gerontocracy.
[i]As Powell points out, "Legend is a form of flattery, and the objects of flattery are, in the beginning, real human beings. Only later do fantastic elements accrue around the names of men and women who once really lived."(Powell, p. 20)
[ii] Quentin Gottung, UWMC, 2007.