Meta Intelligence

Essay 33: How to Jump From a Field to a Larger Understanding: The Example of Globalization

In a university, one is trained to “inspect” fields. That produces what might be called a “monographic” intelligence.

Our purpose is to show and promote something ancillary to this, what might be called a “circum-spective” intelligence (i.e., using the specialized knowledge as one “brick” in a larger structure of understanding).

Let’s do an example:

Think of all the descriptions and analyses of something called globalization. An objective evaluation of the literature on this show two analyses that stand out and tower above the rest:

Prof. Jeffrey Williamson and Kevin O’Rourke, Globalization and History, MIT, 1999 (this is a “quantitative history” or “cliometric” study and a classic).
Elhanan Helpman, Understanding Global Trade, Harvard, 2011 (a masterpiece of trade-based analysis)

Both of these authors are Harvard professors in economics and deserve the high regard that such books have won them. In these two books, there are several technical disagreements of which the deepest is that Williamson focuses on the emergence of one world market price (say for wheat) and argues that this “price convergence” is the best measure of globalization. Thus at a certain point wheat of a certain kind (hard, durum, etc.) was price at the same world rate whether the wheat came from Kansas, Canada, Argentina or Ukraine. The world is then a global price-making market mechanism. This price convergence then extends to their kinds of prices as globalization processes deepen. Williamson explicitly considers other approaches to globalization such as trade share of GDP as confusing.

Helpman, on the other hand, uses export plus imports/over GDP as his measure, clearly disagreeing with the Williamson approach of prices and not trade shares.

Interestingly, both scholars conclude that something we call globalization begins to “show up in the data” in the 1820s. Thus, Marco Polo-type stories are colorful and “multinational” but have little to do with actual (i.e., data based) globalization as we see it, looking backwards from 2020.

Both of these books are classic works and show the intricacies and utility of the “cliometric” approach (i.e., explaining the past quantitatively, using data from economics).

However, there’s a deep perspectival omission in both works:

As the novels of Balzac (1799-1850) show there begins to “co-evolve” with this globalization story a parallel story of global colonization and empire-building by the European powers. Algeria is seized in 1830 and culminates in the brutal Algerian War of 1954-1962. Without de Gaulle‘s supreme prestige as the savior of France, the French would have gone to a destructive civil war and the defeat in French Indochina at Dien Ben Phu. 1954 almost lead to endless strife based on events on the other side of the world. Balzac’s novels are often set in the 1820s and mention a deepening involvement of France with North African empire-building.

This culminates in Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami from 1885, which centers on the inexorable rise of an unethical “manipulation machine,” who returns from North Africa as a penniless soldier and after many twists and turns makes several killings in North Africa in various shady schemes which he gets wind off via his journalism contacts. In other words, the rise of Western industrial technology (from railroads to cars to planes) conquers the world one way while the European colonial armies conquer the world another way.

The peoples like the Vietnamese and Algerians “see” the world in colonial terms with colonialism backstopped by industrial technology. Their quest for dignity begins with this analysis and not with the analysis which says industry and science are primary and colonialism a footnote.

It is this fundamental clash of historical interpretations on a worldwide scale which bedevils the changing relationship between the West and the non-West and is more profound than the econometric differences between a Prof. Williamson and a Professor Helpman.

By seeing how these layers and stories are “entwined” gives you a deeper and wide-angle vision which one field—economics or cliometrics—can’t offer because it is one brick or building block in a larger story. Fields have to be “opened up” in this way, which is the mission of this book.

Essay 32: Movies Novels and Songs as an “Open University”

This essay is a continuation of the previous one and will show you how a novel gives you a backdoor or side window into education.

The novel Howards End (1910) by E.M. Forster has two foci that it orbits, in a kind of ellipse, like a planet. One focus is social mores of different strata of society, the buccaneering money families (Wilcoxes), the artistic and culture (based on inheritances such as the Schlegels) and the “people of the abyss,” the marginal insurance clerk Leonard Bast. The other focus is money and wealth.

Henry Wilcox warns the Schlegel sisters (Margaret and Helen) that the insurance company, the Porphyrion Fire insurance Company their new friend (the poor clerk Leonard Bast) works for might go bankrupt or “smash” in British lingo:

“The Porphyrion’s a bad, bad concern.—Now don’t say I said so. It’s outside the Tariff Ring.”

“I thought an insurance company never smashed,” was Helen’s contribution. “Don’t the others always run in and save them?”

“You’re thinking of re-insurance,” said Mr. Wilcox mildly. “It is exactly there that the Porphyrion is weak. It has tried to undercut, has been badly hit by a long series of small fires, and it hasn’t been able to reinsure. I’m afraid that public companies don’t save one another for love.”

This advice turns out to be fear-mongering and Leonard Bast quits his job at the Porphyrion and can’t find new work and is desperate since he’s part of the ‘people of the abyss.’”

Later on Henry Wilcox (Anthony Hopkins in the film) reverse himself and says that now the Porphyrion is ‘safe as houses.’”

The Tariff Ring referred to above has nothing to do with the tariffs we think of in 2020, duties on Chinese or Canadian or European goods.

The Tariff Ring refers to a consortium of insurance companies which agree not to undersell each other. You can think of this as price-fixing if you like or perhaps as price-stabilization whereby the insurance companies are creating “reinsurance” by these means of dealing with one another in this block or consortium.

The Tariff refers to the price of the policy, the rate, the premium, to carry the insurance. The word tariff has several meanings and one must not confuse these tariffs (cost of insurance policy for the insured) with import duties, whether for protectionist or revenue motives.

A current leading global practitioner of modern reinsurance is Munich RE. You should go to their website and use this essay as a way to link to this whole world of insurance and reinsurance.

This shows you how a novel or movie serves as an “open university” if you get into this flexibly “circum-spective” frame of mind (i.e., real and deep learning without “silos”).

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.