Author: Richard Melson

Knowledge and Self-Knowledge

The educational remedy or fulfillment or reform being proposed here does not want to “suppress the person” acquiring some knowledge at a university. Every student is also a person.

Every person has the problem outlined by Nietzsche (died 1900):

“What have we really experienced?”—or rather, “who are we, really?”

The sad truth is that we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we don’t understand our own substance, we must mistake ourselves; the axiom, “Each man is farthest from himself, will hold for us to all eternity. Of ourselves we are not ‘knowers’…”

(The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956, Francis Golffing, translator, page 149, “Preface” to The Genealogy of Morals, 1887)

The problem of self-knowledge and its relationship to academic knowledge—whether specialized or more general—should be embraced and not dodged or suppressed since every student is also a person and the person-student continuum cannot be avoided or repressed.

Scientism and Its Discontents: Movie About Hawking

Scientism is the view that science is truth and the rest is false, idiotic, or childish.

There’s a wonderful scene in the 2014 movie, The Theory of Everything (Eddie Redmayne plays Hawking) where the young Hawking is courting his wife to be at an evening party and he represents the quest for the theory of everything, hence the name of the movie.

His girlfriend expresses doubts about this and speaks a few words from the William Butler Yeats (died in 1939) poem “The Song of the Happy Shepherd” [full text]:

“Seek, then,
No learning from the starry men,
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass —”

The poet (and Hawking’s fiancee in the film) are suspicious of the science-and-nothing-else cosmologists and astronomers “who follow with the optic glass the whirling ways of stars that pass.”

William Butler Yeats (13 June, 1865–28 January, 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.

Yeats says in his works, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”

Our desire to “re-enchant” education might cause us to modify this Yeats aphorism slightly, “Education is not merely the filling of a pail, but rather the lighting of a fire.”

Education and Donne’s Line “All Coherence Gone”

John Donne (died in 1631) in his poem, “An Anatomy of the World”, captures the fragmentization of everything and the dis-enchantment of the modern,  when he says, “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.”

We want to reshape education to knowingly address Donne’s “foundational complaints” expressed in the poem.

“Then, as mankind, so is the world’s whole frame
Quite out of joint, almost created lame,
For, before God had made up all the rest,
Corruption ent’red, and deprav’d the best;
It seiz’d the angels, and then first of all
The world did in her cradle take a fall,
And turn’d her brains, and took a general maim,
Wronging each joint of th’universal frame.
The noblest part, man, felt it first; and then
Both beasts and plants, curs’d in the curse of man.
So did the world from the first hour decay,
That evening was beginning of the day,
And now the springs and summers which we see,
Like sons of women after fifty be.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world’s spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;”

Past and Present Thinking

History is “forever new” and we keep asking “what’s new?” but the past is “forever suggestive” and so we inquire here as to whether the past gives us interesting echoes of the more recent.

Specifically, we juxtapose the “closing of the gold window” in August 1971 (Nixon) and the British gold standard gyrations between 1925 and 1931, when England left gold (i.e., September 1931).

At the time, under Nixon, the U.S. also had an unemployment rate of 6.1% (August 1971) and an inflation rate of 5.84% (1971).

To combat these problems, President Nixon consulted Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns, incoming Treasury Secretary John Connally, and then Undersecretary for International Monetary Affairs and future Fed Chairman Paul Volcker.

On the afternoon of Friday, August 13, 1971, these officials along with twelve other high-ranking White House and Treasury advisors met secretly with Nixon at Camp David. There was great debate about what Nixon should do, but ultimately Nixon, relying heavily on the advice of the self-confident Connally, decided to break up Bretton Woods by announcing the following actions on August 15:

Speaking on television on Sunday, August 15, when American financial markets were closed, Nixon said the following:

“The third indispensable element in building the new prosperity is closely related to creating new jobs and halting inflation. We must protect the position of the American dollar as a pillar of monetary stability around the world.

“In the past 7 years, there has been an average of one international monetary crisis every year …

“I have directed Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold or other reserve assets, except in amounts and conditions determined to be in the interest of monetary stability and in the best interests of the United States.

“Now, what is this action—which is very technical—what does it mean for you?

“Let me lay to rest the bugaboo of what is called devaluation.

“If you want to buy a foreign car or take a trip abroad, market conditions may cause your dollar to buy slightly less. But if you are among the overwhelming majority of Americans who buy American-made products in America, your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.

“The effect of this action, in other words, will be to stabilize the dollar.”

Britain’s own experience in the twenties is explained like this:

“In 1925, Britain had returned to the gold standard.

(editor: This Churchill decision was deeply critiqued by Keynes.)

“When Labour came to power in May 1929 this was in good time for Black Friday on Wall Street in the following October.

“After the Austrian and German crashes in May and July 1931, Britain’s financial position became critical, and on 21st September she abandoned the gold standard.

“London was still the world’s financial capital in 1931, and the British abandonment of the gold standard set off a chain of reactions throughout the world.

“Strangely enough Germany and Austria maintained the gold standard…”

(Europe of the Dictators, Elizabeth Wiskemann, Fontana/Collins, 1977, page 92-93)

Nixon’s policies gave us the demise of Bretton Woods, while the economic gyrations of 1925-1931 were part of the lead-up to World War II.

The setting is both “infinitely different” across the decades but the feeling of “flying blind” applies to both cases: U.S.A. “closing the gold window,” August 1971 and Britain’s overturning Churchill’s 1925 return to the gold standard, by 1931. One gets the sense of “concealed turmoil” and a lot of “winging it” in both cases. Policy-makers disagreed and they all saw the world of their moments “through a glass, darkly.”

Education and the Problem of Pessimism

Karl Jaspers was part of the great trio or triumvirate of German philosophers of the twentieth century, along with Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt.

Jaspers’s basics are (from Wikipedia):

Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system.

Born: February 23, 1883, Oldenburg, Germany
Died: February 26, 1969, Basel, Switzerland
Education: Heidelberg University
Spouse: Gertrud Mayer (m. 1910–1969)
Awards: Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, Erasmus Prize, Goethe Prize

Our issue is not the interrelations of these three but the issue of Jaspers’s “pessimism,” given that we plan an education that completely “levels” with freshmen from day one and puts on their “plate” the whole truth without hiding or suppressing any dimensions of the life/knowledge fusion which is one of the backbone elements of this educational remedy. Jaspers argues that a unifying perspective of existence is impossible for man for the same reason that the goldfish is ultimately in the water which is in the goldfish bowl which is in the room none of which can be understood by leaving the water. Jaspers writes, “Existenz kennt keine Rundung als Bild…denn der Mensch muss in der Welt scheitern.”

(Philosophie Vol. II, German original, Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1948, page 647)

This means: “Existence cannot be completed or rounded off and formed into a clear and final picture…man is forced into a kind of shipwreck in this world.”

Jaspers sees existence or life as a kind of “task” or “drama” that one stumbles through and not an object that one studies like a copper salt in the chem lab. Life is always “on the run” and stronger than the runner. Every life, no matter how seemingly prestigious, is characterized by (to use Prof. Stanley Cavell’s words) “little did I know” and you might add, “even at the end.”

Orthodox educators argue that freshmen in college are not ready to be burdened by such bleak or lugubrious views but we disagree and argue, as the great Polish educator Janusz Korczak (died in the Holocaust, 1942) sensed, students rise to the challenge the teacher places before them. If you treat them as childish they will behave childishly and if you take them seriously, they will be serious.

Thus, Jaspers’s view on human life as always a confused and confusing shipwreck will not be hidden from view but studied unflinchingly.

Education and the Question of a “Scheme of Things”

The French classic The Thibaults (Les Thibault) from 1922 has a dialog about the presence or absence of “a scheme of things” behind everything. This Roger Martin du Gard (died 1958, Nobel 1937) classic gives us an insight into the relationship between education and this “scheme of things.”

First:

The Thibaults is a multi-volume roman-fleuve (saga novel) by Roger Martin du Gard, which follows the fortunes of two brothers, Antoine and Jacques Thibault, from their upbringing in a prosperous Catholic bourgeois family to the end of the First World War.

Antione, one of the Thibault brothers, has a conversation with a priest at the very end of the novel:

“I talked just now about a Universal Order and a Scheme of Things…actually we’ve as many reasons to question the existence of a Scheme of Things as to take it for granted. From his actual viewpoint, the human animal I am observes an immense tangle of conflicting forces. But do these forces obey a universal law outside themselves, distinct from them? Or do they, rather, obey—so to speak—internal laws, each atom being a law unto itself, that compels it to work out a ‘personal destiny’? I see these forces obeying laws which do not control them from outside but join up with them, but do nothing more than in some way stimulate them…And anyhow, what a jumble it is, the course of natural phenomena! I’d just as soon believe that causes spring from each other ad infinitum, each cause being the effect of another cause, and each effect the cause of other effects.

“Why should one want to assume at all costs a Scheme of Things?

“It’s only another bait form our logic-ridden minds. Why try to find a common ‘purpose’ in the movements of atoms endlessly clashing and glancing off each other? Personally, I’ve often told myself that everything happens just as if nothing led to anything, as if nothing had a meaning.”

Antione shook his head. “that blind appeal—to what? To that problematic Scheme of Things! To a deaf and dumb abstraction, that takes no heed of us.”

(Roger Martin du Gard, The Thibaults, Bantam Modern Classic, 1968, pages 768-770)

All bodies of knowledge like religion, philosophy, science posit a scheme of things which is perhaps subtle or occluded (“The Occluded Imam” or “mystery of the Holy Trinity”) or “the mind of God” (Steven Hawking’s way of getting at this) or “the Method of Absolute Doubt” leading to final certainty (Descartes).

String theory talks this way too.

In our own educational remediation effort, we are agnostic about any Scheme of Things and do not try to link books, lectures, courses to some pre-existing schema or “final layer underlying everything” at all.

Students create an evolving overview by “circum-spective” “walking around” or meta-intelligence and there is no ultimate “Eureka moment” where “everything is illuminated” (to use the title of the contemporary novel by that name.) We also do not deny the possibility of the existence of a Scheme of Things. Education thought of this way is an exploration and quest that does not end and there does not have to be a final “knowledge map“ or “truth atlas” other than home-made student “composite sketches” which are tentative and not final or “apodictic.”

Biology-Watching for Students

Nature Reviews Microbiology

December 2019 Volume 17, Issue 12

EDITORIAL

Hype or hope?
p717 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0283-5
Microbiome research has attracted considerable attention, partially because of the potential to manipulate the microbiome for human health. To fulfil this promise, tractable methods and cautious interpretation of results are needed.
Full Text | Archived PDF

COMMENT

The future of faecal transplants
Edward M. Giles, Gemma L. D’Adamo & Samuel C. Forster
p719 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0271-9
Faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) is now accepted as an effective treatment for Clostridioides difficile infections. With the increasing number of FMT treatments and clinical trials for other indications there is an urgent need for standardized regulations to ensure patient safety and focused development of safer, rationally designed, microbiota-based medicines.
Full Text | Archived PDF

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

Your microbiome is what you eat
Ashley York
p721 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0287-1
Three recent studies highlight how the gut microbiome responds to dietary change, with potential consequences for host–microbiota interactions.
Full Text | Archived PDF

Sublethal antibiotics and a sticky situation
Andrea Du Toit
p722 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0290-6
This study shows that sublethal doses of ciprofloxacin enhanced aggregation of bacterial cells, which resulted in their increased expulsion from the gut by the mechanical activity of the intestine.
Full Text | Archived PDF

Human trial of vaginal microbiome transplantation
Andrea Du Toit
p722 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0291-5
This study reports the feasibility of vaginal microbiome transplantation from healthy donors as treatment for patients suffering from symptomatic, intractable and recurrent bacterial vaginosis.
Full Text | Archived PDF

Designing phagebodies
Andrea Du Toit
p722 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0292-4
A study reports the generation of synthetic ‘phagebodies’ with a broadened host range that were able to target naturally occurring phage-resistant bacterial mutants.
Full Text | Archived PDF

An apple a day helps Bacteroides to stay
Ursula Hofer
pp722 – 723 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0280-8
This study explores the response of the gut microbiota to dietary fibres and presents new biosensors that can measure microbial fibre use in vivo.
Full Text | Archived PDF

Microbial conductors
Andrea Du Toit
pp722 – 723 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0285-3
This study links a histone deacetylase and the gut microbiota to the circadian regulation of host metabolism.
Full Text| Archived PDF

Providing resistance to rotavirus
Ashley York
p723 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0295-1
This study finds that gut segmented filamentous bacteria prevent and cure rotavirus infection in immunodeficient mice.
Full Text | Archived PDF

A probiotic for candidiasis?
Ashley York
p723 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0296-0
A recent study finds that probiotic yeasts can inhibit virulence of several non-albicans Candida species, including mutidrug-resistant Candida auris.
Full Text | Archived PDF

Distinct drivers of functional diversity
Ashley York
p723 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0297-z
This study observed that the functional diversity of core and accessory genes in the soil microbiome are governed by distinct processes.
Full Text | Archived PDF

NEWS & ANALYSIS

The expanding horizons of host–microorganism imaging are clear to see
Patrick G. Inns & Gideon Mamou
p724 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0289-z
This month’s Under the Lens explores how recent developments in sample preparation are aiding and advancing the imaging of host–microorganism interactions.
Full Text | Archived PDF

REVIEWS

Common principles and best practices for engineering microbiomes
Christopher E. Lawson, William R. Harcombe, Roland Hatzenpichler, Stephen R. Lindemann, Frank E. Löffler et al.
pp725 – 741 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0255-9
Microbiome engineering has many potential applications, ranging from agriculture to medicine. In this Review, Lawson, McMahon and colleagues guide us through the design–build–test–learn cycle that has been successful in many disciplines and explain how it applies to microbiome engineering.
Full Text

Diet–microbiota interactions and personalized nutrition
Aleksandra A. Kolodziejczyk, Danping Zheng & Eran Elinav
pp742 – 753 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0256-8
In this Review, Kolodziejczyk, Zheng and Elinav describe the latest advances in understanding diet–microbiota interactions, the individuality of gut microbiota composition and how this knowledge could be harnessed for personalized nutrition strategies to improve human health.
Full Text

Synthetic ecology of the human gut microbiota
Gino Vrancken, Ann C. Gregory, Geert R. B. Huys, Karoline Faust & Jeroen Raes pp754 – 763 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0264-8
Going from description of the diversity and disease associations of the human gut microbiota towards functional understanding and applications is challenging. In this Review, Raes and colleagues present synthetic ecology approaches that reduce the complexity and advance translation of human gut microbiota research.
Full Text

Simple animal models for microbiome research
Angela E. Douglas
pp764 – 775 | doi:10.1038/s41579-019-0242-1
Simple animal models are emerging as valuable tools for microbiome research. In this Review, Douglas discusses the opportunity for microbiome research on the traditional biomedical models Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans and zebrafish. Other systems, for example, hydra, squid and the honeybee, are valuable alternative models to address specific questions.
Full Text

Signs and Meanings: Education and Semiotics

One learns to function in a world of posters, postings, signs, ads, ordinances, notices and indications of “material culture” (i.e. commerce expressed in designs and slogans on walls and buses, subway cars, etc.).

Think of the 1963 movie The Great Escape. There’s a scene where James Coburn’s Australian character is sitting in an outdoor cafe on the French/Spanish border and the waiter comes over to him and pulls him toward the counter and says, “Telephon, monsieur.”

The James Coburn character has no idea why this is happening but mimics the proprietor and son when they duck down. French Resistance fighters in a car gun down the Germans at the cafe and James Coburn’s character “gets it” and asks them for help to get into Spain. As he ducks down you see posted on the wall of the cafe several ad signs for drinks. One of them is “Byrrh”:

“Byrrh is an aromatised wine-based apéritif made of red wine, mistelle, and quinine. Created in 1866 and a trademark since 1873, it was popular as a French apéritif. With its marketing and reputation as a ‘hygienic drink,’ Byrrh sold well in the early 20th century.” (from Wikipedia)

In many French movies or movies set in France, such as Belle de Jour and The Legend of the Holy Drinker from 1988 (in which a drunken homeless man [played by Rutger Hauer] in Paris is lent 200 francs by a stranger as long as he promises to repay it to a local church when he can afford to; the film depicts the man’s constant frustrations as he attempts to do so).

“Byrrh” appears routinely and a French child begins to ‘get the picture’ on what is being signified and how it differs from other notices, commercial or legal or municipal.

Set in Paris, the ad notice “Byrrh” appears in the same way you’d expect to see “Coca-Cola” and know what the sign signifies. “Coke” is a drink and not the fuel coke. How exactly you make these distinctions is unclear to linguists and other language-watchers. It’s a social phenomenon, partly, like mores and manners.

In the movie The Book Thief (a 2013 World War II war drama, starring Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, and Sophie Nélisse, based on the 2005 novel) there’s a moment when you see a sign advertising or reminding you of “Kolonialwaren” (i.e., colonial wares) which was the German way of pointing to a place or store that sold coffee, tea, cocoa, etc. Any German adult of the period would know what “Kolonialwaren” signifies without quite knowing how he or she knows.

A traffic sign (you have to of course realize it’s a traffic sign and not some commercial ad) tells you “Boston 20 m.” You realize or guess it means 20 miles and not 20 meters (since meters are not a typical American measure) nor would it be 20 minutes since that would assume everyone is driving at a speed that gives you 20 minutes, which is far-fetched.

How a person goes from birth to adulthood whereby they spontaneously navigate a welter of different signs and postings, ads and statutes is quite opaque.

Roland Barthes (died 1980) explored this domain of signs (not only physical signs but mythology as a system of signs) all his life:

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth.

Education should not ignore “material culture” (i.e., the history of things) and semiotics (i.e., the world “speaking” to you via designs and signs and words).

Rise and Fall of Families: Education in Literature

There’s an “enchanting” way to get into world literature and that is to see the connecting theme of the rise and fall of families: Dream of the Red Chamber from the eighteenth century is generally acknowledged to be the pinnacle of Chinese fiction and details the slow decline and fall of the Chia family.

A Chinese metaphor is introduced in the course of the novel: a family could be like a dead bug or insect still somehow clinging to a wall without having fallen down yet…this is supposed to give the reader an image of the Chia family as it wanes.

In the great The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington, the Ambersons rise and fall from 1873 (when the financial crisis thrust them upwards whether through dumb luck or shrewdness) to their disintegration over the next decades when the “magnificence” has evaporated completely.

This motif of family decline underlies the Japanese classic The Makioka Sisters of Tanizaki (died in 1965).

Tanizaki writes:

“Meanwhile the family fortunes were declining. There was no doubt, then, that Itani was being kind when when she urged Sachiko to ‘forget the past.’

“The best days for the Makiokas had lasted perhaps into the mid-twenties. Their prosperity lived now only in the mind of the Osakan who knew the old days well.

“Indeed, even in the mid-twenties, extravagance and bad management were having their effect on the family business. The first of a series of crises had overtaken them then.”

(The Makioka Sisters, Seidensticker translation, Vintage Books, 1985, page 8)

Whereas history is often centered on the rise and fall of empires, eras, periods, world orders, literature is often centered on the rise and fall of families, sometimes mostly off on their own, sometimes laid low by historical events and contingencies that overwhelmed or blindsided the family.

Education and “Then and Now” Thinking

The great historian A. J. P. Taylor (the ideal historian in the opinion of Professor Niall Ferguson of Harvard/Stanford) shows us the “comfortableness” of the world for at least some people before “the guns of August” and WWI destroyed that social world:

“Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post-office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. he had no official number or identity card.  He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission.  He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit.  He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home.  For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.  Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service.

“An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence.

“Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those who helped the state who wished to do so.

“The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale:  nearly 200 million pounds in 1913-14, or rather less than 8% of national income.  The state intervened to prevent the citizen from eating adulterated food or contracting certain infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours.  The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13.

“Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment.  This tendency to more state intervention was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905.

Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone. All this was changed by the impact of the Great War.”

(A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945, Oxford, 1965, page 1)

It seems hard to argue that life has become more “charming” since then and this pre-WWI seems much more calm, sane and relaxed than the world of 2019.  Thinking about “then and now” gives us a feel for the decay in some domains despite the cascade of technologies, gadgets, things.