February 2020, Meta Intelligence

Essay 25: Movies as a Kind of Second University

If you take movies and “turn them inside out” or “upside down” you can extract a deep education from them.

Think of the dimension of “economic botany” (i.e., plants and trees and shrubs and bushes and vines) which produce profitable or lucrative crops and think how one can look at many movies from an “economic botany” perspective when you decide to put the main plot or nominal story on the back-burner and bring forward the plant aspect.

Think of The Bounty, the 1984 version with Anthony Hopkins as “Bligh” and Mel Gibson as “Fletcher Christian.”

In the opening scenes of the movie, Bligh meets Fletcher Christian at some festive occasion, takes him aside and tries to recruit him for a voyage to Tahiti. He (Bligh) explains that the purpose of the voyage is to bring breadfruit seedlings from Tahiti to Jamaica because the cost of feeding the laborers or slaves is becoming prohibitive. They need to lower the subsistence costs in the Caribbean plantation system by the introduction of these seedlings (economic botany).

When the mutiny takes place, there’s a scene where some of the mutineers throw the breadfruit trees from Tahiti off their ship HMS Bounty, wangled off the King of Tahiti, into the ocean thus destroying the mission of that voyage.

In the movie The Hawaiians, the wealthy planter played by Charlton Heston, gets into a “mini-lecture” on pineapples and how they don’t originate in Hawaii, as people suppose, but were brought in by unknown sailor-settlers from distant South Sea islands.

“King Cotton” is a major player in many American movies since cotton and tobacco are among the mainstays of the Southern economy (think of Henry Fonda in Jezebel, set in the immediate pre-Civil War era).

Think of the French movie Indochine from 1992 which is based on colonial rubber crops and plantations:

“In 1930, marked by growing anticolonial unrest, Éliane Devries (Catherine Deneuve), a single woman born to French parents in colonial Indochina, runs her and her widowed father’s (Henri Marteau) large rubber plantation with many indentured laborers, whom she casually refers to as her coolies, and divides her days between her homes at the plantation and outside Saigon. After her best friends from the Nguyễn Dynasty die in a plane crash, she adopts their five-year-old daughter Camille (Ba Hoang, as child). Guy Asselin (Jean Yanne), the head of the French security services in Indochina, courts Éliane, but she rejects him and raises Camille alone giving her the education of a privileged European through her teens.” [from Wikipedia]

Coffee-growing, coffee storage, coffee prices on the world market, coffee bush vulnerabilities might be seen as the larger context of the 1985 movie Out of Africa and might be though to subsume the romantic “musical chairs” of the romantic story. Like the rubber in Indochine, the European colonial hold on the less developed world is the political context.

The Letter is a 1940 classic movie based on the novel by Somerset Maugham. Rubber-growing is at the center of the romantic story:

“On a moonlit, tropical night, the native workers are asleep in their outdoor barracks. A shot is heard; the door of a house opens and a man stumbles out of it, followed by a woman who calmly shoots him several more times, the last few while standing over his body. The woman is Leslie Crosbie, the wife of a British rubber plantation manager in Malaya; the man whom she shot is recognized by her manservant as Geoff Hammond, a well-regarded member of the European community. Leslie tells the servant to send for her husband Robert, who is working at one of the plantations. Her husband returns, having summoned his attorney and a British police inspector. Leslie tells them that Geoff Hammond ‘tried to make love to me’ and that she killed him to save her honor.” [from Wikipedia]

Sugar growing in the Caribbean and the ins and outs of annuities are at the core of several miniseries on TV based on Jane Austen novels such as Mansfield Park.

In other words, humanity and its plants are a deep theme of human as well as film history.

This ability to make larger and deeper inferences as you sideline the romantic doings, is part of making movies into a kind of “second university.”

Essay 24: Education and the Limits of Knowledge

A student should be made aware of the constraints on education or the “knowledge acquisition” effort.

All such efforts face two fundamental constraints:

Ortega’s orange
Neurath’s boat

In his masterful Meditations on Quixote, the Spanish thinker Ortega y Gasset (died in 1955):

“Some people demand that we everything as clearly as they see an orange before their eyes. But actually, if seeing is understood as a merely sensorial (of the senses) function, neither they nor anyone else has ever seen an orange in their terms. The latter is a spherical body, therefore with an obverse and a reverse. Can anybody claim to have the obverse and the reverse of an orange in front of him at the same time? With our eyes we see one part of the orange, but the entire fruit is never presented to us in a perceptible form; the larger portion of the orange is concealed from our eyes.”

Husserl (died in 1938), the German philosopher, uses the same metaphor with a rhomboid (like a matchbox) he would show his students trying to get them to see what they could not see. One can twirl the matchbox and bring different sides and aspects into view and the students can walk around it at various speeds. One can never see the entire matchbox.

Deep education is partly the commitment to simultaneously inspect and “circumspect” the Ortega orange or the Husserl matchbox.

The orange and matchbox problem is made even “stranger” by the deep fact that all of this takes place on something called “Neurath’s boat” named after Otto Neurath, the Austrian thinker who died in 1945.

“Neurath’s boat” refers to a powerful image he conjured up in 1921 according to which the entire body of knowledge is compared to a boat that must be repaired at sea: “we are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom…” (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 1996, page 259)

Any part of the ship can be replaced, provided there is enough of the rest on which to stand. One cannot go back to the shipbuilder and there is no drydock for repairs. We knowledge “sailors” have to replace planks and do repairs “on the fly.” We can’t go back to Plato and Aristotle and discuss with them our interpretations of their thought and perhaps make adjustments for all the centuries between us.

We can’t start again (although Descartes thought he could with his “method of doubt.”)

William James (died in 1910) says in his writings that we must accept that one human mind can’t “grasp it all” and that all real knowledge is “relational.”

All of these constraints should neither be avoided or dodged but put in front of students from day one, since real and deep understanding, which is what education at its best can offer, must consider the overall truth of the “knowledge acquisition” situation.

Essay 23: Movies as a Kind of University

A meta-intelligent attention to movies (as well as songs) can serve as a university or university supplement. Let’s think of three early eighties movies together, as a cluster:

Romancing the Stone (Michael Douglas)
Salvador (James Woods, Oliver Stone movie)
Under Fire (Nicaragua setting)

These movies taken together reveal changing relationship between the West and the developing world. (so-called less developed countries or Third World).

Why?

There’s a scene in Romancing the Stone where Danny DeVito’s character finds himself in Colombia and exclaims at one point, “Who will save me from this Third World toilet?” (i.e., Donald Trump’s view at present).

In Salvador, there’s a scene where James Woods’ character is told by a local woman, commenting on the turmoil of the moment (such as Archbishop Óscar Romero’s assassination): “This reminds me of the “Matanza” (“massacre”).

The 1932 Salvadoran peasant massacre (Matanza) occurred on January 22 of that year, in the western departments of El Salvador when a brief peasant-led rebellion was suppressed by the government, then led by Maximiliano Hernández Martínez. The Salvadoran army, being vastly superior in terms of weapons and soldiers, executed those who stood against it. The rebellion was a mixture of protest and insurrection which ended in ethnocide, claiming the lives of an estimated 10,000 and 40,000 peasants and other civilians, many of them indigenous people.

All of this Central American turmoil has deep roots in (Spanish) colonial land distribution as well as post-colonial “state-formation” after the Spanish empire was gone, where the political elite families took over the land with millions of landless and subsistence-farmers excluded from any prospect of betterment. (The Guatemalan massacres of indigenous Indians under Ríos Montt follow the same pattern with its deep roots in “state malformation.” Costa Rica was somewhat spared this turmoil via 1948 progressive revolution under Figueres).

Under Fire shows the Nicaragua revolutionary situation in 1979. The “periodistas” (journalists) represented by Gene Hackman and his friends are told by a revolutionary soldier woman, “The world is now about North-South, not East-West.”

“North-South” means West/Third World and their changing relationship as opposed to Washington-Moscow rivalries.

The current migration crisis on the U.S. border in 2020 has everything to do with this background history of “state malformation” in Central America and its collision with nativist/populist virulence in Trump’s America. (i.e., Trump/Miller/Bannon). These problems can only be addressed by “developmentalist” policies and understandings and not by “know-nothingism.”

Thus, these three movies, taken as an “accidental cluster” give us an unintended insight into the moving “tectonic plates” that give us current history.

Movies should be seen in this “meta-intelligent way” (i.e., informative in an overview sense).

Essay 22: Education and Jean Piaget: Using “Moby Dick” as a Counterweight to Piaget

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (who died in 1980) was perhaps the greatest theorist of cognitive development and education of the twentieth century. His books are classics and his various explorations of childhood games, rules, knowledge, education, etc. are of outstanding quality.

A central work of Piaget’s for our purposes of educational deepening is his small masterpiece To Understand Is to Invent: The Future of Education.

We respectfully disagree with arguments put forth in this book which we see as overly narrow. Take these words on the uselessness of Eskimo knowledge: “We are like the old Eskimo who was asked by an ethnologist why his tribe so piously preserved certain rites, and answered that he could not understand what was the meaning of that, saying: ‘We preserve our old customs so that the universe will continue.’ ”

Piaget continues: “For primitive man, the universe is a great machine in unstable equilibrium where all is related to everything else (the social customs and physical laws are not differentiated one from another). If one removes even one of its pieces, even without knowing what purpose it has, the whole machine risks being thrown out of gear.” (Jean Piaget, To Understand Is to Invent: The Future of Education, Penguin Books, 1977, page 134)

Children too come under Piaget’s “disapproval” when he says a few paragraphs later:

“Every child has thought one day that the moon was following him, and, according to several primitive societies, the course of the heavenly bodies is ruled by the movement of men (in ancient China, for example, the Son of the Heavens insured the seasons by his moving about). The Chaldeans and the Babylonians made notable progress in freeing themselves from this initial egocentric vision and in understanding that the heavenly bodies have a trajectory which is independent of us…The Copernican revolution can be considered a most striking symbol of the victory of objective coordinations over the spontaneous egocentrism of the human being.” (Jean Piaget, To Understand Is to Invent: The Future of Education, Penguin Books, 1977, page 137-138).

Piaget, for all his acuity, sets up a rigid dichotomy between Western adults and primitive man and children. Primitive man is childish and children are primitive so they go together.

We find this extremely constraining and surprisingly, perhaps, point of Melville’s 1851 classic Moby –Dick as a counterexample to Piaget.

Ishmael, the narrator, is the only survivor of the shipwreck of the Pequod which is not only a ship but also a global university of sorts, a site of knowledge of all kinds: Ahab’s, Starbuck’s, Ishmael’s. Ishmael deeply respects the dignity and self-possession of the “primitive” sailor and harpooner Queequeg, whose coffin allows him not to drown. He (Ishmael) respects and finds moving the ‘primitive’ religious ceremonies of the native Queequeg for his god Yodo and Ishmael participates modestly and reverently.

Relentless dismissiveness of indigenous ways of seeing the world are dangerous and have led Western man to the current climate crisis and the complete paralysis in coping with it. Indigenous man’s basic belief that the “earth own us” and is Our Mother would be a healthy antidote to Western “techno-nihilism.” In Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s tolerance, openness, mildness, and cosmopolitan emotional life, saves him and this is a counterweight to Piaget-ism. He says in the beginning of the book that ships and voyages were “my Harvard and my Yale.”

Furthermore, childlike visions of the world (“the moon is following me”) are the basis, potentially of scientific advances later on since as Einstein and Feynman kept emphasizing, the trick in life and science is to “remain childlike all one’s life and keep asking all those children’s questions all through one’s life such as “why is the sky blue?” You will be told by the physics book Rayleigh Scattering, which explains the blue sky and then you ask, why is that? if we were wired differently would it still be blue? Is it blue or just seems so? What are colors like blue? Why would cosmic evolution, if it pertains, evolve in this way (i.e., where Rayleigh scattering applies)?

In other words, to set us a rigid binary world where modern physicists are right and indigenous people and children are naive if not idiotic is not attractive to someone who wants a wide-angle and deep education and combine modern science, a great accomplishment, with Ishmael’s openness to other modes and types of being, another kind of great accomplishment, as Melville shows us.

This is especially true since the chapters in Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale” and “The Doubloon” show us that finality in knowledge is not attainable and that modesty (i.e., Ishmael-ism) is what’s appropriate for man (e.g., open, inclusionary, tolerant views).

Real understanding (our goal) is to invent (following Piaget’s word) clusters of connected views, beyond specialization, and this would be the future of education. This can only be done by rescuing and including “childlike” and indigenous modes of understanding, a bit like Melville’s Ishmael.

Essay 21: Learning to Process the University With Your Own Questions

You need to “subdue” or “master” a university by “imposing” or layering your own questions on theirs in quizzes and exams, finals and midterms.

Here’s an example: In the masterpiece, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933, Joseph Roth (died in 1939), the author writes about Berlin traffic and transport:

“After all, the passengers on a bus or streetcar make up a community of a kind.” (“Some Reflections on Traffic,” November 15, 1924.)

This idea of “small communities” including transitory ones, is developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. He calls them “heterotopias” (different places) which are neither utopias or dystopias.

This notion reminds us of Edmund Burke’s (18th century conservative thinker), founder of concept of society’s “little platoons” like friends, families, clubs, congregations in churches, which Burke cherishes.

Heterotopia is a concept elaborated by the leading French philosopher Michel Foucault (died in 1984).

Heterotopias are worlds within worlds…micro-societies.

Foucault provides examples: ships, cemeteries, bars, brothels, prisons, gardens of antiquity, fairs, Turkish baths and many more.

If we take the ship as the utmost heterotopia, a society without ships is inherently a repressive one.

Foucault outlines the notion of heterotopia on three occasions between 1966-67.

Foucault explains the link between utopias and heterotopias using the metaphor of a mirror. A mirror is a utopia because the image reflected is a ‘placeless place’, an unreal virtual place that allows one to see one’s own visibility. However, the mirror is also a heterotopia, in that it is a real object. Hence a dual function.

The heterotopia of the mirror is at once absolutely real, relating with the real space surrounding it, and absolutely unreal, creating a virtual image. Foucault discusses several possible types of heterotopia:

A ‘crisis heterotopia’ is a separate space like a boarding school or a motel room where activities like coming of age or a honeymoon take place out of sight. Foucault describes the crisis heterotopia as “reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis.” He also points that crisis heterotopias are constantly disappearing from society and being replaced by the following heterotopia of deviation.
‘Heterotopias of deviation’ are institutions where we place individuals whose behavior is outside the norm (hospitals, asylums, prisons, rest homes, cemetery).
Heterotopia can be a single real place that juxtaposes several spaces. A garden can be a heterotopia, if it is a real space meant to be a microcosm of different environments, with plants from around the world.
‘Heterotopias of time’ such as museums enclose in one place objects from all times and styles. They exist in time but also exist outside of time because they are built and preserved to be physically insusceptible to time’s ravages.
‘Heterotopias of ritual or purification’ are spaces that are isolated and penetrable yet not freely accessible like a public place. Either entry to the heterotopia is compulsory like in entering a prison, or entry requires special rituals or gestures, like in a sauna or a hammam.
Heterotopia has a function in relation to all of the remaining spaces. The two functions are: heterotopia of illusion creates a space of illusion that exposes every real space, and the heterotopia of compensation is to create a real space—a space that is other.

You could use this idea of “heterotopias”(little societies and worlds) and apply it to the various buildings on a campus, the little worlds or sub-worlds of fields and faculties, to the sub-cultures of fraternities and dormitories, to sports teams and clubs, to classes of students at a lecture.

Joseph Roth is a “radical devotee” of the charms of local groupings and small “truths and atmospheres” such as these heterotopias and states:

“It’s only the minutiae of life that are important.” (What I Saw: Berlin, 1920-1933, “Going for a Walk,” 1921)

Looking through such lenses, a student could layer one’s own visions and questions on a university and counterbalance” theirs and bring enchantment to the current “knowledge factory.”

Essay 20: Becoming an Education-Processor (Continued)

We have just seen how the notion of going from processee to processor in education can bring some empowerment, shape and form to the educational “welter.”

Let’s give another simple example.

Consider this sentence from the classic work, The Triumph of the Middle Classes:

“In 1890 the stock exchanges of London, Paris, Berlin and New York, controlled the economic progress of the whole world.”

(Prof. Charles Moraze, Triumph of the Middle Classes, Anchor Books, 1966, page 525)

Stand back (i.e., using meta-intelligence) and the statement in this book is at the intersection of geography, financialization of the world, rise of stock markets, Western coerciveness, hegemonial policies, accidents of history, global division of labor and power, and so on.

This implies interrelated “webs of changes,” à la Bronowski, whom we have just seen in the previous essay.

To use this mega-question as a circumnavigatory device in trying to “process the campus” could empower the student and lead to a lifelong quest to understand, part of a full mental life and indeed life itself.