Meta Intelligence

Essay 31: Learning to Use Movies & Books or Songs As Off-Campus Universities

Howards End is a 1910 novelistic masterpiece by the great British writer E.M. Forster. It became an excellent Merchant-Ivory movie. The story is set in Edwardian England (1901-1910) and shows the interaction of three families, each representing a section of British society:

The Wilcoxes (Anthony Hopkins is Henry Wilcox) who represent cut-throat new money, with “Thatcherite” views.
The Schlegels (Emma Thompson is Margaret Schlegel) represent the “culture vultures” who are always talking about music, literature, poetry, high-toned pursuits.
The Basts (Leonard Bast is played by Samuel West) who is a lowly clerk in the Porphyrion Fire Insurance Company and part of what one writer (Jack London) called “people of the abyss.” (their job and wage insecurity is all-consuming).

The story involves the storm created by the interaction of these families and the destruction of the marginal clerk Leonard Bast. Surprisingly, the character Margaret Schlegel of the “artiste” family, talks about the centrality of money in their lives:

“You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence. It’s only when we see someone near us tottering that we realize all that an independent income means. Last night, when we were talking up here round the fire, I began to think that the very soul of the world is economic, and that the lowest abyss is not the absence of love, but the absence of coin.”

“…we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most of the others are down below the surface of the sea.”

“I stand each year upon six hundred pounds, and Helen [her sister] upon the same, and Tibby [their brother] will stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewed—from the sea, yes, from the sea.

“And all our thoughts are the thoughts of the six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches; and because we don’t want to steal umbrellas ourselves, we forget that below the sea people do want to steal them, and do steal them sometimes, and that what’s a joke up here is a down there reality.”

There are not only these terrifying lines of cleavage between rich and poor but these cleavages extend to sex and romance as well.

Leonard Bast is seduced by Helen Schlegel (Margaret’s bohemian rebellious sister) who becomes pregnant by him. Paul Wilcox (Henry’s explosive son) beats Bast to death which then brings the social “storm” of the Wilcoxes, Schlegels and Basts, to a climax or denouement.

A close reader of English literature will perhaps have noticed that already in Jane Austen novels, set in a time one hundred years prior to Howards End there is constant talk of annuities.

Already in Jane Austen “the name of the game” is Caribbean sugar while in Howards End the “game” is African rubber (and invested in English real estate), where the Wilcox fortune comes from (think of the Firestone company in Liberia as a classic example of the rise of the rubber business, with the need for rubber for tires.)

Thus we have in these novels an intermingling of families, overseas sources of wealth (West/non-West economic relations), rigid social rituals. (a romance between Helen Schlegel and Leonard Bast, the marginal clerk, is a no-no punished by death.)

Decades before E.M. Forster, there was the novel by Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son which “orbits” money.

Someone once made the comment that Marx and Freud destroyed the Victorian taboos on money and sex and that comment is confirmed largely by such novels as Howards End with the very surprising utterances of Margaret Schlegel (from the family of “culture vultures”), on money and its centrality in their lives and mentalities.

Think of such novels as an “intuitive kind of open university.”

Essay 30: Magic or Sacred Geography as a Kind of Silent Education

Magic and its clone, sacred geography, are all around us and are crucial organizing principles for the way people think. Such emotions are an overlay over all formal education.

For Communists, the grave of Marx in Highgate Cemetery in England is sacred ground. For some German soldiers after WWII who committed suicide on the steps in Feldherrnhalle (“Field Marshall’s Hall”—a display in Munich in Odeonsplatz of large statues of famous military leaders in German history), these statues and their place in Munich “means” something magical or sacred to them. North Koreans have Paektu Mountain which Kim recently ascended in a ritual addressed to the North Koreans. Think of Camelot or Lourdes. Think of sites such as the Lincoln Memorial or Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris or “holy sites” in Jerusalem or Mecca.

Think of magical and sacred things like the three imperial regalia in Japan which Emperor Hirohito fixated on at the end of WWII.

How does this kind of thinking permeate our lives in a way that nobody quite sees clearly:

The left in American politics (Bernie Sanders, Jeffrey Sachs, et al) explicitly or implicitly, think of Scandinavian social and economic systems as a kind of “magic geography” (i.e., defects and problems are not “welcomed” in their idealized visions). On the right, there’s a Singapore paradise of the imagination (what magic geography is) whereas Boris Johnson of England sees a “high wage, low tax” investment utopia which serve as a marvelous locale for the founding of both new businesses and new families. In this vision, men found businesses and women found or establish families, so everybody’s happy.

These competing visions can be traced back as far as you like, but we point to 1974 when Hayek (“the right”) and Myrdal (“the left”) shared the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Professor Niall Ferguson, the conservative Harvard (now Stanford) financial historian (you may have seen his The Ascent of Money PBS mini-series), had a program years ago on educational TV where he walked around places in Chile that he presented as a pension “heaven.” Chile is now kind of falling apart with street riots convulsing Santiago. (Ferguson’s ideal Milton Friedman of Chicago was the main advisor of General Pinochet after the 1973 Chilean coup.

What none of these people see is that social reality is complex and highly changeable and that “magicalizing” one place or system (Sweden, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chile) won’t work because successes that look solid or eternal are often caused by all kinds of “conjunctural” (i.e., of the moment) factors which don’t last “forever.”

Thus, much less “dogmatism” is called for so that one is not “swept along” by “ideological foolishness.” embedded in “magical geography” or its clone “sacred geography.”

Essay 29: Overview Strengthening: Using Meta-Intelligence to Orient Oneself

Let’s do an exercise in “overview building,” one of the key purposes of an education that is meaningful and not just an obstacle course or a maze governed by exams.

Think of the PBS miniseries of a few years ago: Guns, Germs, and Steel. It was a decent overview of history based on Jared Diamond’s famous book by the same name. Guns presumably encapsulates coercion, whether by armies, police or criminals. Germs stand for illness and disease in a germ-based view of sicknesses. Steel is the modern building material that allows skyscrapers, etc.

The viewer of the series might have felt a bit uncomfortable since humans with their “rage to belong, and rage to believe” (to paraphrase William James) make ideas into beliefs and doctrines and are not reducible to material factors like the Jared Diamond trio of guns, germs and steel.

The brilliant 20^th century sociologist Ernest Gellner had a more inclusive encapsulation of human experience or world history when he entitled his own book of this type, Plough, Book, and Sword.

“Plough” gives you settled agriculture (farming, roughly speaking) (i.e., food production not based on hunting). Gellner’s “Book” gives you ideas, doctrines, bibles, epics, stories, collections of documents and speeches, record-keeping beyond clay tablets, and so on. “Sword” gives you coercion à la Jared Diamond’s “guns.”

While Diamond omits “books.” Gellner omits “germs.” Books implies some level of reading and writing.

Ask yourself if you have an improved trio of mega-dimensions to explain human historical pathways or perhaps a quartet. Another trio might be: “Gods, Flags and Families.”

Tolstoy emphasizes the capriciousness of world history and accidents or “random walks” might then well be a plausible candidate for inclusion in our own version of a Diamond/Gellner-type title, as accident or accidentality or randomness.

Essay 28: The World Understood As “Grievance Machine: Missing Education in Symbolic Wounds”

Standard textbooks on history always give a narrative of kings and battles, routs and rallies. Some mention various vested interests.

Books never seem to grasp the deep truth that history everywhere is a national and personal “dignity quest” while food and job/wage insecurity are certainly co-factors that cannot be ignored. Slogans like “Make America Great Again” play to this hunger for another “championship season.”

Amartya Sen of Harvard gives us a useful overview of this “dignity story” when he writes:

“The devastating effects of humiliation on human lives can hardly be exaggerated. The historical ills of the slave trade and colonization (and the racial insults that were added to physical and social injury) have been seen as ‘the war against Africa’ by the Independent Commission on Africa, which identifies Africa’s principal task today as ‘winning the war against humiliation’ (the chosen title of its report). As the Commission argues, the subjugation and denigration of Africa over the last few centuries have left a massively negative legacy against which the people of the continent have to battle. That legacy includes not only the devastation of old institutions and the forgone opportunity to build new ones, but also the destruction of social confidence, in which so much else depends.
“Africa which gave birth to the human race and was responsible for many of the pioneering developments in the growth of world civilization, was turned into a continent of European domination and the hunting ground for slaves to be transported like animals to the New World.”
(Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, 2006, Allen Lane Penguin Books, page 86.)

This has also led to the proliferation of counter-narratives which are perhaps too “Afrocentric” and thus distort things going the other way.

The 20^th century psychologist Bruno Bettelheim and others use the phrase “symbolic wounds” and it must be seen that such wounds lurk everywhere in human society and memory and world history, past and present, which cannot be even remotely grasped without acknowledging the centrality of these scars.

The contemporary French thinker Pierre Nora has tried to explore these nightmare-memories in the collective mind and should be considered in this humiliation/dignity epic tale that governs much of human “thinking.”

Essay 27: Extracting Signals from Noise

We wish to help students “parachute into” or sneak up on mathematics before any “rocket science” (i.e., focus on high school and don’t get lost in the weeds).

Think of square roots. The square root of 4 is 2, of 9 is three of sixteen is 4.

But the moment someone asks: what about the square root of 17, you will find that crystalline simplicity and obviousness are long since gone.

If you “keep your nerve” and calmly get into the “complexity jumps” you may well find it enchanting that numerical understanding has to be coaxed forth and doesn’t offer itself up readily. But why would the physical universe, if it is really mathematical in its very “fabric,” be so ready to “jump away from you” in its complexity?

Go back to the square root of 17. Suppose you disallow logarithms and log tables. Suppose you say that “approximation theory” is too approximate. There’s no HP Scientific Calculator. One insight you might need is that 17 is “not far” from 16 so that the square root must be 4 plus a little. Call this “little” x.

Then (4+x) (4+x) = 17. You solve for x with the quadratic formula you had in high school. If you don’t remember the formula or cannot derive it, you’d have to look it up which might be disallowed in this “game.”

If you stand back, “meta-intelligently” (i.e., asking, “what does this tell me?”), you wonder whether the universe and its math fabric are an endless “onion” of such layers and complexity and not “boil-down-able.”

Another such example is Grandi’s series.

Grandi’s series and its trickiness:

In 1703, the mathematician Luigi Guido Grandi studied the addition: 1 – 1 + 1 – 1 + … ( 1-1, infinitely many, always +1 and –1). You find if you group the numbers in certain valid and legitimate way, you could different results. How can that be?

In mathematics, the infinite series, 1 − 1 + 1 − 1 + ⋯, can also be written:

It is sometimes called Grandi’s series, after Italian mathematician, philosopher, and priest Luigi Guido Grandi, who gave a memorable treatment of the series in 1703. It is a divergent series, meaning that it lacks a sum in the usual sense. (On the other hand, its Cesàro sum is ½.)

One obvious method to attack the series (

One obvious method to attack the series (1 − 1 + 1 − 1 + ⋯) is to treat it like a telescoping series and perform the subtractions in place:

(1 − 1) + (1 − 1) + (1 − 1) + … = 0 + 0 + 0 + … = 0

On the other hand, a similar bracketing procedure leads to the apparently contradictory result:

1 + (−1 + 1) + (−1 + 1) + (−1 + 1) + … = 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + … = 1

Thus, by applying parentheses to Grandi’s series in different ways, one can obtain either 0 or 1 as a “value.” (Variations of this idea, called the Eilenberg–Mazur swindle, are sometimes used in knot theory and algebra.)

Essay 26: Extracting Educational “Signals” from the “Noise” Around You

A student should train him or herself to extract “signals from noise” in the world all around oneself.

For example:

You see the British movie Carrington with Emma Thompson concerning the British painter Dora Carrington. In her “circle,” which overlaps the Bloomsbury Group of such luminaries as Keynes and Bertrand Russell, there’s a scholarly member called Gerald Brenan, who became a world-famous analyst of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939):

“Edward FitzGerald ‘Gerald’ Brenan, CBE, MC was a British writer and Hispanist who spent much of his life in Spain. Brenan is best known for The Spanish Labyrinth, a historical work on the background to the Spanish Civil War, and for South from Granada: Seven Years in an Andalusian Village.”

His basic information is:

Born: April 7, 1894, Sliema, Malta
Died: January 19, 1987, Alhaurín el Grande, Spain
Spouse: Gamel Woolsey (m. 1931–1968)
Movies: South from Granada

Think of Brenan’s book title, The Spanish Labyrinth. Ask yourself if the concept of a national labyrinth is not exceedingly eye-opening. Would it not be very educational to study the features and characteristics of the American, Chinese, or Russian “labyrinths?” Would not any country’s political economy overlaid with its labyrinthian realities be very instructive?

Think of the Trump labyrinth in October 2019, all the players, deceptions, overlapping functions, pressures. paymasters both hidden and overt and obviously it’s all a kind of “deception machine” which is its own labyrinth. Thus, without even having read the Gerald Brenan masterpiece on Spain, the very name of the book is eye-opening and informative in a “meta-intelligent” way (i.e., it tweaks your sense of overview right away).

Another example: you look at a syllabus for a history course on English history and notice a title: The Shaping of the Elizabethan Regime by Prof. Wallace T. MacCaffrey (1968/1971). The very title alerts you to the fact that the evening news right now is about “the shaping of the Trump regime.”

The word “regime” supplants the usual “the administration” and the power politics and musical chairs are constant. The Elizabethan regime had similar features on a smaller scale. The basic phenomena are comparable and apply to all regimes. Your sense of overview becomes stronger by ranging between then (Elizabethan times, Tudor England) and now (Trump regime juggling.)

Take an example from TV: PBS had a Nature program entitled The Queen of Trees which takes one single tree in Africa and shows you the complexity of the micro-ecosystem it lives by:

“Nature reveals the importance of an unlikely partnership between a regal tree and a tiny wasp in The Queen of Trees.

“It may be one of nature’s oddest couples: a tiny wasp that can barely be seen, and a giant fig tree, the sycamore, which shelters a remarkable menagerie of wildlife among its limbs. The wasp and the fig depend on each other for survival. Without the wasp, the tree could not pollinate its flowers and produce seeds. Without the fig, the wasp would have nowhere to lay its eggs.

“The Queen of Trees shows this delicate dance of survival in exquisite detail, including spectacular close-ups of the wasp’s remarkable life inside a ripening fig. To capture such incredible images, filmmakers Victoria Stone and Mark Deeble spent two years camped out near a giant sycamore fig in Kenya’s outback, documenting the tree’s pivotal role as a source of food and shelter for everything from gray hornbills, Africa’s largest bird, to swarms of invading insects searching for food. In a surprising turn, some insects come to the tree’s aid—sparking a battle.”

The intricacies of the tree give you a sense of the limits of knowledge: if we can hardly really understand the “life and times” of one tree in Africa, does the pretense of science that we will one day know everything about everything expressed in rigorous equations, no less (à la Step h en Hawking’s visions) seem suddenly very unlikely and quixotic? The tactics and alliances and “politics” of the tree are “infinitely” complicated by themselves and thus getting an overview of the multiverse seems supremely hubristic.

These three examples show you the process of extracting “signals” from the “university” all around you.

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.