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:

  1. Prof. Jeffrey Williamson and Kevin O’Rourke, Globalization and History, MIT, 1999 (this is a “quantitative history” or “cliometric” study and a classic).
  2. 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 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 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 20th 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 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 MobyDick 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.

Essay 8: “Aletheia:” Unhiding Dimensions of Life as Part of a Deep Education

Greek thinkers of antiquity had a deep concept of “unhiding or rescuing truths from oblivion” and this is captured in the Greek word “aletheia” which means reversing Lethe (i.e., forgetfulness).

We claim here that “aletheia” (i.e., “unforgetting”) is in fact a pillar of real education which has a commitment to every kind of holism. The basic truths of a life are indeed part of the whole education. The student needs to see “all of it” from the start.

The Danish thinker Kierkegaard (1813-1855) says in his essay “Repetition” that any person who never at some point “circumnavigates what life is will never really have a life.”

In other words, real education would mean a circumnavigation of what life is with a circumnavigation of what knowledge is in a kind of “double helix.”

Without confronting these circumnavigations from the beginning, one is simply stumbling along in a grades-driven fear-fog.

Hannah Arendt, the German-American thinker who died in 1975, warns us about living a life “like a leaf in the whirlwind of time.”

Henry David Thoreau tells us in Walden he wants to “front” (i.e., confront or face up to) life itself and not come to the end of his life and realize he had not lived.

In the classic American novel, John Marquand’s The Late George Apley, the protagonist realizes when it’s too late that he was brought up to become who he is and was and never really reflected on himself or his life and never really understood anything. He never “saw” anything.

We claim in this educational remediation book that a university education cannot just be a frantic stint in a modern “knowledge factory” with its conveyor belt of grades, semesters, course contents forgotten three days after the course.

Stanley Cavell, the recently deceased Harvard philosopher, in his masterful memoir, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory, he gives us in its title a sense of what must happen (i.e., the insight that I knew little)—if students are not apprised of these deeper dimensions of life right from Day 1, in a process of “unhiding” the whole story and aletheia.

Essay 2: Connectivity and the Need for Meta Intelligence

Arguments without end and our attitude to them:

A reader of this book might ask:

How far does this quest for more holism go?  Are there limits on this type of inquiry?

This is a very good question.  In order to answer this, we quote something from the famous French historian, Michelet, who died in 1874:

“Woe be to him who tries to isolate one department of knowledge from the rest….all science [i.e., knowledge] is one:  language, literature and history, physics, mathematics and philosophy; subjects which seem the most remote from one another are in reality connected, or rather all form a single system.”

(quoted in To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1940, page 8)

Our attitude to such radical system building is non-committal. Rather we say, you the student should pursue flexible forms of increased connection and holism while you acquire knowledge and extend it and not worry about some once-and-for-all system underneath or beyond everything. We propose exercises in holism and all exercises are replaceable with new ones or better ones and there’s no “final layer” or hidden “mind of God” to use Stephen Hawking language. The existence of some underlying or final system is something like an “argument without end” (to use Pieter Geyl language).

This argument is captured by the classic “fight” between Hegel (the person that Marx and Kierkegaard rebelled against and who died in 1831) and Adorno in the twentieth century.

Hegel says: The whole is the true. Adorno (who died in 1969) says: The whole is the false.

We skip all such fights.

Thinking about University Knowledge Again:

One cannot major in every field. One cannot make everything a university offers your specialty or concentration.

“Sartor Resartus:”  The great British critic Thomas Carlyle (who died in 1881), close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote a famous satire called “Sartor Resartus or The Tailor Retailored” where he lampoons a certain Professor Devil’s-crud who teaches at Don’t-Know-Where University and is Professor of Everything.

Obviously, we are not proposing the creation of professors-of-everything and propose nothing more than the heightened ability to “zoom out” of academic fields, topics, lectures, topics, campuses.

A person who has similar intuitions is Alfred North Whitehead of Harvard (died 1947) who says in his essays on education that the real purpose of university education is to enable the learner to generalize better using that person’s field as a help or aid.  The purpose of a university cannot be fields and monographs within fields alone.