Author: Richard Melson

Education and the Question of Fecklessness

We propose in Meta Intelligence an education that is completely global and cosmopolitan from Day 1.

The problem with education as a confusing area of activity is revealed to us in an episode of the great Japanese novel, The Makioka Sisters.

The Makioka Sisters (細雪 [Sasameyuki], “Light Snow”) is a novel by Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (died in 1965) that was serialized from 1943 to 1948. It follows the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family’s attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko.

In the novel, there’s a description of a “failed educational odyssey:”

“Mimaki was an old court family. The present viscount, the son, was well along in years. Mimaki Minoru, son by a concubine, was a graduate of the Peers School and had studied physics at the Imperial University, which he left to go to France.  In Paris he studied painting for a time, and French cooking for a time, and numerous other things, none for very long.

“Going on to America, he studied aeronautics in a not-too-famous state university, and he did finally take a degree, it seemed.

“After graduation, he continued to wander about the United States, and on to Mexico and South America. With his allowance from home cut off in the course of these wanderings, he made a living as a cook and even as a bellboy. He also returned to painting and even tried his hand at architecture.

“Following his whims and relying on his undeniable cleverness, he tried everything. He abandoned aeronautics when he left school.”

(The Makioka Sisters, Vintage Books, 1985, Seidensticker translation, page 473-474)

This person winds up dabbling in architecture after his return to Japan.

This episode in Tanizaki’s great novel gives us a “flashlight” or “searchlight” into the whole problem of educational confusion.  Is this simply a case of one person’s “fecklessness?”  Is this just a case of what’s called “failure to launch” (see the movie by this name)?

Or is it partly perhaps that education as a “lockstep system” of schools, exams, courses, semesters, quizzes and grades is very “inhospitable” to “searchers?”

If we call everyone who “stumbles around” a dilettante and a feckless failure, we might be unnecessarily “binary,” exclusionary and unaware of the problem of “cold educational ecosystems” which punish exploring for those who are not “born specialists.”  Winners and losers are too polarized as an educational judgment, perhaps.

The classic German novel about youthful confusions is Fontane’s classic Irrungen, Wirrungen (Trials and Tribulations, 1888) and perhaps an argument could be made that the coldly “binary view” of “successes” versus “the feckless” causes the loss of many young people who had various kinds of emotional resistance to education as an “Olympics” of sorts, with “winners and losers.”  This might be seen as a kind of overly narrow kind of “edu-brutality” which is intolerant of more difficult adjustment stories for young people, which are not uncommon.

Neuroscience by Itself Limited

Senators John McCain of Arizona and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts died in recent years of brain tumors (such as gliomas and glioblastomas). It is perfectly reasonable to wonder if neuroscience, neuropathology and brain science might one day be able to vaporize tumors without damaging the “host” brain at all.  Who could possibly be against such progress?  After all, if you had an impacted wisdom tooth and could choose between seeing an oral surgeon at a major hospital or going to a dentist at the time of Plato, you would choose the oral surgeon. 

These truths obscure a deeper problem in all “reductivist” sciences namely the relationships between the brain and the mind and the person.  This was anticipated by Gabriel Marcel (died 1973) when he wrote in his journal that he puzzled all his life over the conundrum that “I both have a body while I am a body…having and being are twined around each other.”

The outstanding French philosopher Paul Ricœur (died in 2005) gives us a useful hint:

“To the extent that the body as my own constitutes one of the components of mineness, the most radical confrontation must place face-to-face two perspectives on the body—the body as mine, and the body as one body among others.  The reductionist thesis in this sense marks the reduction of one’s own body to the body as impersonal body.

“The brain indeed differs from many other parts of the body, and from the body as a whole in terms of an integral experience, inasmuch as it is stripped of any phenomenological status and thus of the trait of belonging to me, of being my possession.  I have the experience of my relation to my members as organs of movement (my hands), of perception (my eyes), of emotion (the heart), or of expression (my voice).  I have no such experience of my brain. In truth, the expression ‘my brain’ has no meaning, at least not directly: absolutely speaking, there is a brain in my skull, but I do not feel it. It is only through the global detour by way of my body, inasmuch as my body is also a body and as the brain is contained in this body, that I can say ‘my brain.’

“The unsettling nature of this expression is reinforced by the fact that the brain does not fall under the category of objects perceived at a distance from one’s own body. Its proximity in my head gives it the strange character of non-experienced interiority.  Mental phenomena pose a comparable problem.”

(Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Other, University of Chicago Press, 1994, page 132)

In other words, the removal of brain tumors such as glioblastomas or the alleviation of migraine headaches in headache clinics is one level of activity and is perfectly valid and neuro-scientific. On the other hand, the relation between brain, mind, body and self is a complete mystery as sensed by Gabriel Marcel and Ricœur.  It is not mechanistic and we lack the language to captures such resonances.

Money and funding and prestige and their relationship to science keep obscuring the deeper truths.  This is also why excellent TV shows on PBS, such as the recent The Brain Series with Charlie Rose, led by the marvelous Professor Eric Kandel (Columbia University Nobelist) comes across as overly narrow—too narrow and curiously unsatisfying.  At a certain point, ‘mechanistic’ descriptions of phenomena like creativity are not convincing.

The education we visualize and promote here would happily straddle neuroscience and those levels of understanding that are beyond it.

Nietzsche’s Insights Used for Educational Improvement

Nietzsche (died in 1900) said things that are strangely relevant for our educational quest:

1. “ALWAYS IN OUR OWN COMPANY”

“Everything that is of my kind, in nature and in history, speaks to me, praises me, spurs me on, comforts me—everything else I don’t hear or forget right away.  We are always only in our own company.”

(The Gay Science, Number 166, page 135)

Nietzsche sensed the tendency towards solipsism in people. This reminds us of William James in his classic essay, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.”

One immediately senses then the need for a many-sided cosmopolitan education to combat this “we are always only in our own company.”

2. “BEING DEEP AND SEEMING DEEP”

“Those who know they are deep strive for clarity.

“Those who would like to seem deep to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd takes everything whose ground it cannot see to be deep:

it is so timid and so reluctant to get into the water.”

(The Gay Science, Number 172, page 136)

3. “THE THINKER”

“He is a thinker: that means he knows how to make things simpler than they are.”

(The Gay Science, Number 189, page 139)

There is a way to make things simpler than they are without distortion and oversimplifying (i.e., the skill for “essentializing”).  Thinking means partly:  finding the right way to simplify, as suggested here by Nietzsche.

(The Gay Science, [originally 1882/1887], Cambridge University Press, Bernard Williams, editor, 2001)

Historical Understanding as a Moving Target: Modernity

Daniel Defoe (died 1731) was a great English writer whom you remember from such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

He was also a very astute economy-watcher and published numerous tracts and studies on the British economic scene of the 1720s, such as:

Now normally we associate British industrialism from the 1760s or thereabouts as the launching of modern England with the transport revolutions (railways to cars and buses and subways and cars and planes) and the communications revolution (telegraph to phone to internet to cellphones) and so on.

The very distinguished English historian Christopher Hill shines an alternative light on this trajectory into the modern when he writes: “The England around which Daniel Defoe was beginning to tour at the end of our period (1720s) was very different from that through which James I rode in 1603. We are already in the modern world—the world of banks and cheques, budgets, the stock exchange, the periodical press, coffee-houses, clubs, coffins, microscopes, shorthand, actresses and umbrellas.”

“It is a world in which governments put first the promotion of production, for policy is no longer determined by aristocrats whose main economic activity is consumption. The country as a whole has become far richer. The amount raised in taxes has multiplied by twenty-five.”

(Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714, Norton 1966, page 307)

In the 1720s of Defoe’s commercial travels in England, the techno-industrial revolutions are still far off. And yet Professor Hill states “we are already in the modern world.”

Lastly: if you see the miniseries on TV, Moll Flanders, based on Defoe’s novel, the phrase “the wheel of fortune spins again” is a motif in the series and one gets the feeling that the society is very changeable and “modern transitory,” where, as Marx put it, “All that is solid melts into air.”

Thus so-called “modernity” can be thought of as a “moving target” for our historical understanding.

Movies as a Second University

Head in the Clouds is a 2004 Canadian–British war drama film written and directed by John Duigan. The original screenplay focuses on the choices young lovers must make as they find themselves surrounded by increasing political unrest in late-1930s Europe.

There’s a very informative scene in the movie where Penélope Cruz’s (the famous Spanish actress) character in the movie, suddenly says she has to go back to Spain because of the Asturias miners’ ferment which involves her family directly.  “The Asturian miners’ strike of 1934 was a major strike action, against the entry of the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA) into the Spanish government on October 6, which took place in Asturias in northern Spain, that developed into a revolutionary uprising. It was crushed by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco.

Francisco Franco controlled the movement of the troops, aircraft, warships and armoured trains used in the crushing of the revolution.  While the insurrection was brief, historian Gabriel Jackson observed “In point of fact, every form of fanaticism and cruelty which was to characterise the Civil War occurred during the October revolution and its aftermath: utopian revolution marred by sporadic red terror; systematically bloody repression by the ‘forces of order’; confusion and demoralisation of the moderate left; fanatical vengefulness on the part of the right.”

The revolt has been regarded as “the first battle of” or “the prelude to” the Spanish Civil War.

Notice that miners have often been in the vanguard of radical labor unrest. This includes Thatcher’s England.

Remember the violent strikes in the Thatcher years and the Thatcher/Scargill feud:  “Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British trade unionist.  He was President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002.  Joining the NUM at the age of nineteen in 1957, he became one of its leading activists in the late 1960s.  He led an unofficial strike in 1969, and played a key organizing role during the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter of which helped in the downfall of Edward Heath’s Conservative government. His views are described as Marxist.

“A decade later, he led the union through the 1984–85 miners’ strike, a major event in the history of the British labour movement. It turned into a fierce confrontation with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in which the miners’ union was defeated.  A former Labour Party member, he is now the party leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which he founded in 1996.” (from Wikipedia)

Remember too, the Ludlow Massacre: “The Ludlow Massacre was a domestic massacre resulting from strike-breaking. The Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel and Iron Company guards attacked a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914, with the National Guard using machine guns to fire into the colony. Approximately 21 people, including miners’ wives and children, were killed. The chief owner of the mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely excoriated for having orchestrated the massacre.

“The massacre, the seminal event of the Colorado Coal Wars, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 21 people; accounts vary. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, which lasted from September 1913 to December 1914. The strike was organized by the miners against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, owned by the powerful Rockefeller family; Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, and Victor-American Fuel Company.” (from Wikipedia)

The movie Matewan gives a glimpse of the Battle of Matewan (also known as the Matewan massacre) which was a shootout in the town of Matewan in Mingo County and the Pocahontas Coalfield mining district, in southern West Virginia.  It occurred on May 19, 1920 between local coal miners and the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency.

Lastly, the movie Confidential Agent, based on Graham Greene’s writings, is a story about various participants in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) trying to convince British coal-miners and coal-mining companies to stop selling coal to the Franco royalists who will use the coal to work metal into gun and planes and steel for the military.

One has in a sense come full circle since 2012 to see a renewed Asturias, Spain, miners revolt and ferment: “The 2012 Asturian miners’ strike was an industrial dispute involving more than 8,000 coal miners in the Spanish autonomous community of Asturias.”

The geographer David Featherstone has described the strike as “one of the most dramatic forms of anti-austerity protest to emerge in the wake of the crisis of 2007–2008.”

The tremendous tensions between haves and have-nots in Europe before WWII, is also alluded to in the movie Julia. “Julia is a 1977 American Holocaust drama film directed by Fred Zinnemann, from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent. It is based on a chapter from Lillian Hellman’s book Pentimento about the author’s relationship with a lifelong friend, ‘Julia,’ who fought against the Nazis in the years prior to World War II.”

In Julia, Vanessa Redgrave’s character tells Jane Fonda’s: “There’s a lot of interesting progressive experimentation going on in Floridsdorf.”  This scene goes unnoticed by the average movie viewer but is very informative since Floridsdorf was a section of Vienna that was trying all kinds of progressive communal social forms in the thirties, all of which, like the Asturias miners’ ferment in Spain, was crushed by right wing violence.

In other words, one can get a sense of Europe “seething” with left-right tensions before WWII, with the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939 as a kind of “overture” to all of it.

The current turmoil in Spain over the removal of Franco (died in 1975) remains to a less monumental site is tied up with all these fights of yesteryear and all the violent atrocities that accompanied the suppression of all progressive movements under the all-purpose “rubric” of anti-Communism.

Machlup and Knowledge-Watching

Fritz Machlup is an underappreciated emigre economist from Vienna. His 1962 book, The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1962), is a “bible” of knowledge-watching and the zones where knowledge meets information, where Machlup was very prescient.

Fritz Machlup was an Austrian-American economist who was president of the International Economic Association from 1971–1974.  He was one of the first economists to examine knowledge as an economic resource, and is credited with popularizing the concept of the information/knowledge society.

Born: December 15, 1902, Wiener Neustadt, Austria
Died: January 30, 1983, Princeton, NJ

Machlup distinguishes five types of knowledge:

  1. Practical knowledge
  2. Intellectual knowledge
  3. Small-talk and pastime knowledge
  4. Spiritual knowledge
  5. Unwanted knowledge

These five kinds of knowledge are discussed and analyzed in Machlup’s The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States starting on page 21 (and are discussed in Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post Industrial Society, 1976, Basic Books, page 175).

The more comfortably one can link types 1, 2, and 4 in the list above, the more “together” one’s understanding might become.  One does not have to be “dismissive” of Type 3.

Pleasant diversions are a a part of life and have their honorable place. One reason (to give a simple example) we’re drawn to poets like Wallace Stevens is that they seem to “sit comfortably” in their various (knowledge) roles: insurance salesman, poet, thinker and don’t “line up” or “array” these types of knowledge in a conflictual way but seem to “smile down” on all of them finding beauty everywhere.

Workaday knowledge might not have to “fight with” other kinds of knowledge. Insurance, say, is a form of risk-management and risk is essential to life and economics, as we have seen elsewhere.  Economics looks at cost-benefit–risk-uncertainty all together when it goes beyond the narrow confines of academe to become a fuller quest.  Cost-benefit analysis by itself is too restrictive.  Start with Machlup as a highly intelligent “backdoor” into these domains of knowledge, information, learning, social contexts.  This would help give you a handy additional “flashlight” on schooling in society including universities and campuses.

The Issue of Deep Rhythms in History: Second Look

We have already seen, in the previous essay, that world violence against the vulnerable is a deep and constant theme or rhythm in world history, one that is “dutifully” avoided. (This avoidance may be called another rhythm all its own.)

In the realm of finance (Kenneth Rogoff’s book This Time is Different is about financial rhythms and cycles), we also sense deep echoes and rhythms:

Consider this entry on the medieval Florentine banking houses the Bardi and Peruzzi:  “These Florentine families gave their names to two great banking houses of the 14th century, commanding assets far greater than those of the later and more famous Medici bank.  They advanced loans to European monarchs, most notably Edward I, who used the money to finance his campaigns in the Hundred Years’ War.  He and his successors reneged on his debts in 1345, which led to bankruptcy for the Bardi and Peruzzi forms and sent shock waves through the European economy.

The Medici rules Florence from 1434-1494, long after these Europe-wide shocks.  Bond finance (governments borrowing from their own people as well as outsiders) to finance wars emerged out of insecurity on all sides of war finance and culminated in the brilliance of the Rothschilds (as Prof. Niall Ferguson’s contemporary two-volume history of this family shows).

Thus, wars and war finance have many centuries of gestation and provenance and defaults and shock waves were well known in the European economy of the fourteenth century long before the Medici and their famous patronage of the arts and their prominence in Papal politics.

One might argue that these are rhythms and echoes that have to do with deep structures like militarily organized violence (wars) and political organizations from kingdoms through states.

If you combine these two essays (56/57) you get a money-and-violence super-rhythm which goes on today.

Consider the Larousse entry on the Frescobaldi family:

“One of several banking families in 14th-15th century Florence with European-wide interests. 

“Their clients included Edward II of England, whose wars with Scotland they financed in exchange for customs revenues.

“The royal default on debts led to a crisis for the Frescobaldi bank in 1311.”

(Larousse Dictionary of World History, ed. Bruce Lenman, Houghton Mifflin, 1995, page 343)

This also shows you war-and-finance had a major destabilizing role in Europe long before our modern period and constitutes a potential rhythm or proto-rhythm.

Are There Deep Rhythms in History?

Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard wrote a very intriguing book in recent years with the title, This Time Is Different with the implication that fundamental discontinuities (i.e., this time is different) are questionable, if one looks deeply enough.  In the introduction of the book, the author raises the questions of “deep rhythms in history” without answering his own question.  Here’s a potential organizing principle: the world is always a system of violence directed at the weak. Take this entry from the Larousse Dictionary of World History:

Arawaks

The original inhabitants of the Bahamas (Lucayos) and the Greater Antilles (Taínos) who practiced a subsistence agriculture based on seafood, game, maize and cassava using Neolithic technology.  They live mainly in coastal settlements of large villages with caneyes (family houses) and bohios (chiefs’ houses) and had a hierarchical politico-religious structure based on a hereditary ruler, the cacique, who possessed a ceremonial stool (dulho).  A priestly caste-controlled worship of gods of place and nature (zemis) and ceremonies which led to heaven (coyaba). 

They were exterminated as a people by the Spaniards after 1519.

The words maize, tobacco, potato, hammock, canoe and hurricane all derive from the Arawak language.

If we think of the Rohingas of Myanmar, the Yazidis, the Tutsis in Rwanda, and the Darfur people in Sudan, of recent decades, we see a deep rhythm in history: the destruction of the unprotected.  Notice that the first Jewish ghetto in Europe (Venice) was established in 1516 around the time that the Arawak murders begin on a systematic basis.

This never-really-discussed basic rhythm of group violence has been glorified (e.g., The Iliad of Homer, the Aeneid of Virgil, the Old Testament, Scandinavian sagas, Japanese “war tales” such as the Heike Monogatari, etc.)

The omission in all education of this world-violence theme gives students a false sense of “how the world got to now.”

Movies as an Off-Campus “Open University:” Antonioni’s La Notte (The Night, 1961)

Michelangelo Antonioni was an Italian film director, screenwriter, editor, painter, and short story author.  

Antonioni died on July 30, 2007 (aged 94) in Rome, the same day that another renowned film director, Ingmar Bergman, also died.

He is best known for his “trilogy on modernity and its discontents”—L’Avventura, La Notte, and L’Eclisse from the early sixties.

One “hidden pillar” of the world Antonioni depicts in his movies is that “you are what you read.” This gives the viewer a “meta-intelligent” (latent overview signal) handle on the world being depicted:

In La Notte of 1961, Antonioni starts with an image of the Pirelli Tower in Milano, the most famous skyscraper of its time in Italy. In contrast to the impressiveness of the building, the characters in his movies are trying to “navigate” boredom and the enveloping sense of ennui.

One of the characters in the movie is said to be reading the masterpiece by Herman Broch, The Slkeepwalkers:

The Sleepwalkers (original title Die Schlafwandler), is a 1930s novel in three parts, by the Austrian novelist and essayist Hermann Broch. 

Opening in 1888, the first part is built around a young Prussian army officer; the second in 1903 around a Luxembourger bookkeeper; and the third in 1918 around an Alsatian wine dealer.  Each is in a sense a sleepwalker, living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and waking.  Together they present a panorama of German society and its progressive deterioration of values that culminated in defeat and collapse at the end of World War I.

Antonioni implies the characters he depicts are a new version of “sleepwalker.”

When the movie starts, the characters played by Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau visit a friend in the hospital who mentions his new work on Adorno.  Adorno (1903-1969) was a German-Jewish theoretician who wants to understand how the world has gone off the rails leading to WWII and the death factories of the Nazis.  He argues that this is connected (paradoxically) to the relentless rationality of “The Enlightenment” and works in a “dialectical” way (i.e., something becomes its opposite).

In the movie, there’s a scene where the author played by Mastroianni is at a book talk concerning his new book.

In other words, the world Antonioni is depicting, a kind of “odyssey” of ennui made confusing by gleaming architecture such as the Pirelli Tower of Nervi (built from 1955-1958) shown in the opening shot of the movie.

The books mentioned in the movie confirm the director’s “you are what you read” motif.

The recent book: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark is consistent with this sense of things.

Incomplete One-Field Analysis

Prof. Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago is an outstanding paleontologist/evolutionary theorist and has written marvelous books such as Your Inner Fish:  A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.

“Cleverly weaving together adventures in paleontology with very accessible science, Neil Shubin reveals the many surprisingly deep connections between our anatomy and that of fish, reptiles, and other creatures.  You will never look at your body in the same way again—examine, embrace, and exalt Your Inner Fish!”

Prof. Shubin has done outstanding work in trying to understand post-dinosaur mammalian history and timelines.  (Rise of the Mammals was a recent PBS program that is relevant.)

What is inadequate about all such “bones-and-stones” approach to “how we got here” is that the human creature is ultimately downstream from culture as expressed in language (epic poems) and images (e.g., the Lascaux caves in France, say) and fossils, as wonderfully intelligent as the detective work is, are one flashlight and not the system of “searchlights” one really needs to understand anything.

The very first lines of Homer’s great epic, the Odyssey shows you this:

“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer…”

(Quoted from Robert Fitzgerald’s translation.)

Here one sees the cultural soul of the human: the invocation of muses, gods, the telling of stories, the singing of songs, contending and wandering.

All evolution: cosmic, earthbound, whatever, does not capture the essence of humanity as the first words of Homer’s Odyssey where words, songs, stories take us into the human while the fossils and fossil archaeology are fascinating material infrastructure, as Prof. Shubin’s outstanding skeletal digs and “detective work” show us.