Tag: education

Essay 105: The Captive Mind Book and Intellectual Danger

The Captive Mind, by Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, is a classic work in the domain of “mental freedom” and resistance to propaganda and every kind of brainwashing. Every nation state is to some extent a “lie factory” and a “deception machine.” A person has to “fend off” this manipulative or ideological power grab.

This very handbook of mini-essays, “Meta Intelligence,” is itself partly a defense of the non-captive mind, in the tradition of the Miłosz book. On the other hand, there’s a danger here “on the other side” since there’s a “free floating intellectual” temptation to take a sneering attitude towards all belief systems and to look down on the average person. There are dangers on all sides of this “non-captivity” of the mind. By embracing globalized and cosmopolitan education and by looking for knowledge connections in lectures, fields, universities, we look for a mental stance which is non-captive but not dismissive of believers. The French have a saying for this sense of intellectual superiority, “de haut en bas,” talking from “high to low,” from top to bottom.

Our purpose is to promote educational understanding, re-enchantment and “homemade” exercises in holism and not to promote superiority attitudes. Herman Melville’s Ishmael, the only survivor in Moby-Dick is tolerant and cosmopolitan and not exclusionary or monomaniacal like Ahab or Starbuck. Ishmael’s receptivity to things is a good model for such improved education, whether by life, whaling ships, academe.

The Captive Mind (Polish: Zniewolony umysł) is a 1953 work of nonfiction by Polish writer, poet, academic and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz.

It was first published in English translation by Secker and Warburg in 1953. The work was written soon after the author’s defection from Stalinist Poland in 1951. While writing The Captive Mind, Miłosz drew upon his experiences as an illegal author during the Nazi Occupation and of being a member of the ruling class of the postwar People’s Republic of Poland. The book attempts to explain the allure of Stalinism to intellectuals, the thought processes of those who believe in it, and the existence of both dissent and collaboration within the post-war Soviet Bloc. Miłosz describes the book as having been written “under great inner conflict.”

Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. Regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born: June 30, 1911, Šeteniai, Lithuania
Died: August 14, 2004, Kraków, Poland
Awards: Nobel Prize in Literature

Essay 95: Education and “Then and Now” Thinking

Ben Shalom Bernanke was Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from February 1, 2006, to January 31, 2014.

In many interviews in financial and economic periodicals, he blurts out the fact that his guide in the years surrounding the Great Recession of 2008, in his decisions by the advice of Walter Bagehot of the Economist of London whose main book is called Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook] from 1873:

Lombard Street is known for its analysis of the Bank of England’s response to the Overend-Gurney crisis. Bagehot’s advice (sometimes referred to as “Bagehot’s dictum”) for the lender of last resort during a credit crunch may be summarized by  as follows:

  • Lend freely.
  • At a high rate of interest.
  • On good banking securities.

(Nonetheless, other economists emphasize that many of these ideas were spelled out earlier by Henry Thornton’s book The Paper Credit of Great Britain [archived PDF].)

Bagehot’s dictum has been summarized by as follows: “To avert panic, central banks should lend early and freely (i.e., without limit), to solvent firms, against good collateral, and at ‘high rates’.”

In Bagehot’s own words (Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook], Chapter 7, paragraphs 57–58), lending by the central bank in order to stop a banking panic should follow two rules:

First. That these loans should only be made at a very high rate of interest. This will operate as a heavy fine on unreasonable timidity, and will prevent the greatest number of applications by persons who do not require it. The rate should be raised early in the panic, so that the fine may be paid early; that no one may borrow out of idle precaution without paying well for it; that the Banking reserve may be protected as far as possible.

Secondly. That at this rate these advances should be made on all good banking securities, and as largely as the public ask for them. The reason is plain. The object is to stay alarm, and nothing therefore should be done to cause alarm. But the way to cause alarm is to refuse some one who has good security to offer… No advances indeed need be made by which the Bank will ultimately lose. The amount of bad business in commercial countries is an infinitesimally small fraction of the whole business… The great majority, the majority to be protected, are the ‘sound’ people, the people who have good security to offer. If it is known that the Bank of England is freely advancing on what in ordinary times is reckoned a good security—on what is then commonly pledged and easily convertible—the alarm of the solvent merchants and bankers will be stayed. But if securities, really good and usually convertible, are refused by the Bank, the alarm will not abate, the other loans made will fail in obtaining their end, and the panic will become worse and worse.

We have to ask ourselves: how is it possible that advice from 1873 (i.e., Bagehot’s Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook] crisis-management for that time) can be applicable in 2008?

Does this confirm the off-handed comment in This Time is Different by Ken Rogoff of Harvard that there must be true-but-opaque deep rhythms in history including financial history? Otherwise advice would be useless due to the passage of time and useful patterns would not be discernible.

In fact, Lawrence Summers at Treasury “deluged” Mexico and Latin America with loans to avert an earlier banking crisis following Bagehot’s advice. The logic is that investors must sense that Mexico, etc. will be bailed out at all costs. The idea is to avert a “downward spiral of confidence” by means of visible massive interventions.

Education should always ponder these “then and now” puzzles as part of a beneficial “argument without end.”

Essay 82: Scientism and Its Discontents: Movie About Hawking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essay 18: What Is Education?

Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) was a Danish thinker at the highest level, a kind of Danish Pascal.

In his Fear and Trembling essay, he asks:

“What is education?  I should suppose that education was the curriculum one had to run through in order to catch up with oneself, and he who will not pass through this curriculum is helped very little by the fact that he was born in the most enlightened age.”

(Kierkegaard, “Fear and Trembling”, Problemata, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954, page 57)

Education at its deepest level is understood here as a process of “catching up with oneself.”

Every student who ever lived and who will ever live is both a student (which is a social role) and a person (an existential task).

Education, if profound, would “put on the table” both modes of going through life and then assign the “homework” of “circumnavigating” a life and an education and hold them together in one’s mind. Catching up with oneself is the effort to fight off and climb out of “lostness.”

Lostness is depicted in such classic American films from 1999 as Magnolia and American Beauty.

One can be lost in a city, in life, or in the cosmos. (Walker Percy’s novel, Lost in the Cosmos, is an exploration of this.)

In the “brutal sociology” of American life and society, there are “winners and losers.” (Remember the scene in the American classic movie, The Hustler, where Paul Newman (“Fast Eddie”) calls George C. Scott (“Bert”) a “loser.”

Catching up with oneself involves the fending off of this brutal American cultural bullying and help the person/student hold on to one’s self and know how to use an education to help in this. Thus, catching up this way achieves and protects one’s self-possession.

The reader may remember the movie classic A Man for all Seasons, in which there’s a scene very relevant to this where “Thomas More” played by Paul Scofield, reminds “Richard Rich,” (the relentless amoral opportunist) that self-possession is the highest good and if one loses that, one loses everything of value. He, “Thomas More,” describes it as a bit of water in your hand that falls on the ground and can’t ever be recovered.

Catching up with yourself is education’s help in keeping a grip on this “water in your hand.”