Closing of the American Mind: Teachers and the Cave

Closing of the American Mind, Part 1.

It's like seeing strands of thought, floating up from the pages like a cobra being enticed from his basket with a tune.  These strands weave and spin themselves together, along with ones already present, to create new webs.  Yes, that's a good metaphor, webs, just as the spider that spins them together to glisten in the sunlit dew.  Spin one thread, and tie it to the center, and tie it to the circumference of the web with like strands, until the web is complete, except for this, it never is.

I wish to record the strands coming from this book, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, because so many lines in the book come out as strands of thought and connect to other ones in my head.  Ones that must be tied together in words.  And this is, after all, what this blog is all about.  The number at the start of each section corresponds with the number I have in the book (makes it easier for me to reference it), along with the quote, and then my thoughts. It'll make it less rambly.  Hope this works. 

1. Teaching can be a threat to philosophy because philosophizing is a solitary quest, and he who pursues it must never look to an audience. (20)

Let's go back into Plato's cave for a second.  Say the philosopher, the man with new knowledge, a new outlook on life because he's gone outside and seen the world, goes back in and realizes that his peers don't want to listen to him.  They don't want to learn. They're too busy watching Jersey Shore on the cave wall.  Should you even want to try and reach those students who simply don't care about knowledge or forwarding the human race, but rather would be entertained by those who would create those images? I learned long ago that, even in the 8th grade classes I taught, there are only a handful, probably 5%, that would be interested in leaving the cave.

But enough cynicism. I thought that teaching would be about me imparting the knowledge which I had accumulated to the minds of the students I had in front of me.  Turns out, it's the accumulation of knowledge that I am interested in, not the teaching of it.  I am, as Jung would say, an Introvert. My locus is inside myself. I draw energy from the connection my brain makes from within. I've always told my fellow workers, after I've told a particularly bad joke, that as long as it makes me laugh, I don't care. Because while I entertain the  people that I am around, I do it because it make me feel good.  I learn and process information, I write these blogs, because I want to learn and to amass knowledge.  I want to be, in some respects, much like Faust, although without the whole making a deal with the devil thing.  And the more I learn, the more connections I make between thinkers and writers and life, the further I will be along the road to understanding how the world works.  And I write those things in this blog for those who would like to see what conclusions I've drawn. I've said from the beginning that I really don't care who reads them.  It is your choice. It sounds so selfish, to hold knowledge inside, and you'd be right. But it is man's desire to re-enter the cave and plead and beg his peers to come outside, no matter how much they will ignore him. Teaching, as Allan Bloom talks about later, is something that a philosopher must do in order to achieve the satisfaction in reaching those conclusions. It is the climax of the process.

2. There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech. The soul, so the teacher must think, may at the onset of education require extrinsic rewards and punishments to motivate its activity; but in the end that activity is its own reward and is self-sufficient. (20)

The problem is that education has become less about the speaking to the soul of students and more about teaching to the CRCT test so that the school can receive increased funding. Or, if you talk about college, and Bloom mentions this later, that the training of students into fields that are monetarily successful far outshines any need to enhance the human mind or reach into the soul and turn on that spark that ignites the desire for learning.  It is done by the direct need for rewards, money, fame, power, and less by a need to further their own knowledge. As I said before, only about 5% get to that stage. And those of us who reach that point are destined to stay at college forever (either as student or professor) or stuck in menial jobs, scanning groceries and making subs at Subway. The absolute rarity is that philosopher that can apply his learning, mold the world into something wonderful, become the producers, the makers of mankind.



(I thought of this song as I was writing the last paragraph.)

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So this is how this'll go, and I'll post some along, so that eventually I'll have done the whole book.

The Mouse in the Cave (Plato Blog Pt.2)

 Pleasure, the inevitable by-product of our civilization...A new world, whose only preoccupation will be, how to amuse itself. The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want. ~Inspector Shrink, from Monkees' Head.

Our only preoccupation will be how to amuse ourselves.  That certainly fits, whether we use Huxley's Brave New World or Neil Postman's philosophies.  I think it's quite clear that Inspector Shrink's quote is quite correct.  There are two types of people in this world, people who consume entertainment, and those that support them.  We have lost our ability to produce anything, for the most part.  Some specialization still takes place, the scientists who develop the small microchips in our cell phones, or the antibiotics that cure us from disease.  We make those things.  But put me in front of a rod of molten metal and tell me to make a screw out of it, and I'm dumbfounded.  Certainly, those things are made by robots now anyway.  That way we don't have to get our hands dirty and can spend more time talking about last night's American Idol. I certainly do appreciate the many pieces of machinery that makes my life easier, but I say this with the full knowledge that I am not using that time to forward the progress of man, to payback the makers of society with anything substantial with the time I have saved.  No, I am using it finding things on the Internet, or watching the same reruns on TV over and over again.  I would argue that the vast majority of time American's spend on this Earth is used pursuing ways to amuse ourselves, or working so that we may have the money to  take on that pursuit.

A prime example of this in action, squeezed down to 11 minutes for our inspection, is the Phineas & Ferb episode "Attack of the 50 Foot Sister." Take a moment to watch it on Youtube.  Okay, Candace is obsessed with going to the Midsummer Carnival to enter the auditioning for "Flawless Girl" cosmetics. Along the way she runs into Mr. Odda, who is the host of the Oddball show.  As she realizes, both of these companies make money on taking advantage of the insecurities of today's youth.  One by showing off the aberrant objects of the world to make normal people feel better ("at least I'm not like that,") while the other uses modern communication to project an image of perfection, that which can only be attained by purchasing cosmetics from their company.

On the way, Candace stops to ridicule her brothers, Phineas and Ferb, who are trying to help a friend grow a giant watermelon (at the expense of hanging up the shame curtains).  In this sense, the brothers, using their chemistry lab, are the producers, the makers, as Ayn Rand would put it, of this world, while their older sister ridicules them, until she needs their growth elixir for her own superficial needs.

This seems to be the case in reality, as well.  A recent Facebook status by one of my friends describes complex mathematical calculations he took in order to plant a tree that would provide the correct amount of shade for the house, the garden, etc...  For which he was called a geek, a dork, etc... However, if calculations such as this is not done, the shade can kill gardens, and not enough shade can bring sunlight in on a home and cost hundreds in electricity bills.  The thought processes behind planting a tree, the science behind it, is the antithesis to the people controlling the images in the caves.  For producing, or thinking, saves money, creates time saving efforts that has nothing to do with entertainment.  This is the free man living his own life outside the cave, and for which the self-absorbed inside of it are insanely jealous.

Back to Phineas & Ferb for a minute, the other character in the program who consistently builds machines for himself (usually for superficial reasons, which is a paradox to my theory), is Dr. Doofenshmirtz, the evil scientist. His creations are as awe inspiring as P&F's inventions, but his are supposedly used for world (okay, Tri-State Area) domination. However, the boys' also have a hint of wrongness to them, as Candice is always trying to get them into trouble, as if by them creating a portal to Mars, they are doing something wrong against society, or at least Mom's rules. It's amazing how the inventors and thinkers of the shows on the Disney Channel are ridiculed or stereotyped as wrong or evil.  Stewie is done the same way in Family Guy. Those that think are anti-social, awkward, even evil, and those that are rich are so through no thought of their own.  They are stupid, without morals, and always anti-environmental. It's also interesting that the majority of shows on the Disney Channel, the main characters are head actors(tresses) in bands, on television shows, in fixtures of entertainment for teenagers everywhere. Hannah Montana, for instance. Or Icarly's crew on Nick.

In short, those that create or support entertainment are lauded, and those who produce non-entertaining things, or those that impede entertainment, are ridiculed. All this from children's television. How much of this is internalized and brought into adult culture? Where scientists and thinkers are ridiculed and branded as anti-social or perhaps even evil (or sent off to Iceland as in Brave New World),  while entertainers and those that contribute nothing substantial to mankind are lauded as role-models and heroes.  Would that the construction workers working high upon the Brooklyn bridge get as much praise as Kobe Bryant playing an hour of ball and getting  thousands of dollars. I would rather be the worker, standing on the apex of the bridge, looking out over the ocean and seeing the sun rise upon New York City, and know that below him is a structure that he helped to build, to form with his own hands, than to entertain the masses endless staring at the glowing flames, the images from the screens, the television and the computer, the shadows on the walls.

Plato, The Monkees, and Jumping Dandruff

"The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want" ~Inspector Shrink, from The Monkees Head

If Bill and Ted ever stop by my house in their phone booth, I need to borrow it and bring Plato back to the present and, given my advanced knowledge of Ancient Greek, the conversations we would have.... He would be amazed, I think, with our houses, with the lights and electricity, air-conditioning, all the comforts we have. But I think, after looking at our lives, he would conclude that we haven't progressed much since his days at the Academy, where he would argue with his students and reveal truths about mankind. Specifically, the passage in The Republic, where he creates the analogy of "The Cave."

Imagine Plato sitting in the town square, trying to engage his students in a conversation. Amongst the idyllic manufactured town park, the planted trees, the statues of the local hero, the ancient philosopher sits unable to carry on a lesson in metaphysics, because someone is sitting in their polished crimson sports car blaring music, the female accountant is talking on her cell phone about plans for tonight, the electronics store is showing the football game on the new 50 inch flat screen in the store window. Then there's the kids walking behind their mother, but who often bump into things because they have their heads buried in the latest Pokemon game on their Nintendo DS. But of course, Plato doesn't know all this... all he sees are lights and sounds and images being projected on the walls. For that's what we have, our own walls, projecting unreal images onto themselves and into our minds. We live, unchained, seeing the images that others wish us to see, on the wall.

What Plato doesn't realize is that the metaphor that he used is correct, but incomplete. Seeing the reality of things, the "forms" outside the cave, the man comes back in, tries to tell his friends about the outside world. And it's not that they don't believe him, they simply find it boring. There's so many other wonderful things going on in the images, who cares about the sunlight and the flower and the perfect chair. It's all about the images. So, the man realizes that he now is free, and that he can now take advantage of his knowledge. He goes up to where the images are made, kills the people controlling the fire, and makes his own images. Further, he allows those watching to determine what images they see, as long as they pay him a monthly fee. In the cave then, there are two kinds of people, those that produce the entertainment, and those that consume it.
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A break to tie in the quote at the top.  While looking for the exact wording of the quote above, I chanced upon IMDB's page on the Monkees' movie Head, which had a page of quotes.  Among which was the follow up of Peter Tork's conversation with the philosopher in the sauna.  The swami is included on the Head soundtrack, but Peter's communicating this to his fellow band mates (which is overlooked just as the man in the cave's communication was), is left out.  Here that quote is in it's entirety:

We were talking with the Master regarding the nature of conceptual reality. Psychologically speaking, the human mind, or brain or whatever, is almost incapable of distinguishing between the real and the vividly imagined experience. Sound and film and music and radio. Even these manipulative experiences are received more or less directly and uninterpretative by the mind. They are cataloged and recorded and either acted upon directly, or stored in the memory, or both. Now this process, unless we pay it tremendous attention, begins to separate us from the reality of the now. Am I being clear? For we must allow the reality of the now to just happen, as it happens. Observe and act with clarity. For where there is clarity, there is no choice. And were there is choice, there is misery. But then, why should I speak, since I know nothing?

It further solidifies Peter Tork as the wise fool, the Rousseau-ian Noble Savage, as it were. He becomes the free man, the one who has looked outside of the cave, or, as the Monkees have deemed it, the world in which the band was manufactured, created, and manipulated, and has come back into that world to tell his band mates how they may become free. Of course, much as the metaphor ends for Plato, the Monkees realize they can never be free at all. They are trapped as characters, as images on the wall.  And in real life, the characters of Peter Tork, Davy Jones, and others, become those they portrayed on Television.  As Tork said in the boxing ring, "I'm the dummy. I'm always the dummy."  Moving on...

The entire quote from the inspector is:

Pleasure, the inevitable by-product of our civilization (cut scene of a butcher pounding meat)...A new world, whose only preoccupation will be, how to amuse itself. The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that you may get exactly what you want.

After this, the Monkees are taken into a scene where they are dressed in white, and are encouraged to jump up and down in what looks like hair. They are dandruff you see, for a shampoo commercial. I wonder what Plato's opinions would be on the suppositions made by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World.  A government that not only provides justice and peace, but controls it's subjects through the pleasures it seeks.  Much like baby Robins following a worm dangling from their mother's mouth.  In order to get the entertainment we desire, we would give up our liberties and our freedom and our education all to be happy.  The philosopher kings would be exiled, to Iceland, as Mustapha Mond reveals to Helmholtz Watson at the end, and the commoners will all be perfectly happy never to achieve self-awareness, as long as their free supply of drugs and religion-sex is unabated.  But we were talking about dandruff...

Because the scene where the Monkees become dandruff is as telling as the rest.  Imagine the Three Tenors having to do such exercises just to fulfill a contract.  The Monkees must sacrifice their dignity in order to pursue their music.  Which brings the money they can use for drugs and other entertainment.  They become the amalgamation of society, both consumers and producers of the entertainment they so are addicted to.  As viewers of the images on the cave wall, they become puppets for the image makers, as well as images themselves for others watching on other cave walls.  There is no freedom here.  No sunshine, no perfect forms, only illusion. 
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I guess I need to split this into two posts, because the making, selling, and consuming of entertainment develops into an economy that is quite interesting, and is best laid out in a Phineas & Ferb  episode. 

Faust, Picard, and the Pursuit of Knowledge

What a paradoxical world we live in today. And I say this because the airways above us are filled with whizzing streams of wireless information. Aside the highways are lined cables where voices and rivers of data are flowing endlessly from one corner of the world to another. Our bookstores are filled with novels and volumes of endless trivia enough to fill our minds many times over. The books contradict themselves and each other, but yet we still have the time and patience to peruse through them. The internet and the media tell us what we want to hear, and what they want us to hear, although it is largely one and the same. We have become a society that is saturated with knowledge. One could even come close to say that we are drowning in an ocean of information.

Yet with all the news, sports, media coverage of X baby missing or Y being pregnant and Z bombing A because they don't like how they worship...etc..., I find myself wondering... are we really drowning, or are we simply searching for the information that we need... are we simply parched, adrift on some ocean where there is enough information to fill up the ocean, and yet none to satisfy us.

We spend the first 18 years of our lives going to school (and some of us considerably longer, in college), and learning from teachers and reading books made by the world's most renown thinkers, and then we graduate and go to our workplaces and learn very little more. The information that we receive outside of the academic world is little more than commercial nonsense, or information we need to carry on our jobs, forwarding the causes of society, earning our monies and paying our bills. But there should be something more to it than that. Recently there have been quite a few books come out dealing with general knowledge, and they have been big sellers. Perhaps it is because the publishers realize that common citizens see the few people that continue their educations, and still retain the knowledge in their heads, and then are shown in public on shows like Jeopardy!, and they yearn for that same knowledge. Perhaps they see people much like themselves on shows like Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? and they find themselves ashamed, deep down, and try to regain that learning that has sunken into their unconscious filing cabinets.

Perhaps this is a nostalgic yearning back to the times when academic learning was the primary goal of my life, back to the college days when the philosopher kings gave of their knowledge and I soaked it up like a sponge. I start to feel this way whenever I listen to college lectures that I've downloaded onto my computer and burned them onto CDs. Philosophy, history, literature... and the connections that link thought and reason and emotions together, like neurons firing in the brain... I guess the river metaphor is still applicable here, because neurons form river like systems in the brain that transfer electric currents that contain information, and with continuing education, those neurons form new connections, fire signals from one end of the pathways to another, ceaselessly learning and processing and connecting... it's all quite amazing, and absolutely satisfying.

So how do we get that education throughout our lives? Certainly, in this society, it is impossible to go to college the whole time. Because in this capitalist world, education costs money. Everything costs money. Lots of it. It would be more pleasing to the people who yearn for academic growth to have the philosophers and thinkers be able to give us their knowledge without the hassle of renumeration. Shouldn't the world endevor to give every man, woman, and child on Earth the education that they need to benefit the world, forward the progress of the human race, and make it a better place to live? What would happen if that ability to have a free education, all our lives, were to become a reality? What diseases would be cured? What marvelous works of literature and poetry would come out of the minds of the now uneducated? But maybe this illusion is more meant for the world of Star Trek than real life, for the reality is that an advantage like this is given only to those who can afford it. That the repressed are uneducated and poor because they have nothing to offer the free and rich in the way of recompense when it comes to getting an education.

But is it possible to get a free college education anyway? Certainly there must be a way to learn the knowledge of all humanity without spending lots of money to listen to professors that may or may not know what they are talking about. Thoreau's answer to this was to spend many hours at the public library, providing himself with the education he desired. There was no need to go to Harvard just to get an education, and for those that did, the rows of books at the library housed more knowledge than in the professors tiny brains. So indeed, it is possible to get a college education, through the public and college libraries, without the time and money of going directly to college.

There is, however, one problem. Often the time that it takes to go to the library (especially if it's a college one, the closest good college library is close to an hour away), and actually read the books and do the research is much more than what we have, living in the hectic world that we live in. If you looked at the life that Thoreau lived, he didn't have that problem. Sure there was work to be done, but there wasn't the hectic break-neck speed lifestyle that is so often experienced today. Don't get me wrong, I would do the full educational process with any subject given the resources and the time, but often I have neither. The one point in my daily activities in which I have time to devote to learning something is in my car driving to and from work. This only works with people who are audio learners, and only for people who don't take notes (which is very few people, actually.), but it is the best way I have found to process educational material in my daily routine. And this is done through the miracles of modern technology.

Plato's heirarchy in The Republic gives the highest position to philosopher-kings, whose job it was to rule and to teach, to not own property or marry, but rather to devote their time to both ruling and learning. Now while I'm not saying that is the best way for teachers to be, I do think that now, with the miracles of technology of the 21st century, it is time for college professors and teachers to begin making the plethora of knowledge that they have so painstakingly amassed available to the masses. The Internet is the most democratic device to have ever existed. Not since the days of the Academy in ancient Greece have professors been able to freely discuss ideas with students, educating the masses, and giving the individual the ability to learn and explore his or her own world. The current education system in America, where everyone is supposed to receive the same education, is obsolete and must be redone. Through the technology of today, professors can provide material on any subject at all to anyone in the world that is willing to take the time to understand it. Online assignments, quizzes, and tests, make the grading processes easy, at least as far as the understanding of the knowledge. And when it comes to applying that knowledge by writing essays or contributing to forums or chat rooms, this is when the Internet truly shines. I was fortunate enough to get into the developing stages of the WebCT program at GC&SU, and I can see such potential in the future development of this.

Also at GC&SU, Dr. Viau is among the first professors to use ipods and iTunes to provide material to his interdisciplinary courses. The use of MP3 technology to provide lectures instantly to anyone in the world is the main component of what I think would be a grand university that would rival Wikipedia in scope and stature. An "Open Source University" where professors and teachers would provide lessons and courses on every subject imaginable. It could be done while having normal classes, provided it was prepared well enough. The lectures could then be stored on University servers and linked to the Web. Modern broadband technology makes this possible.

As amazing as this sounds, I have serious doubts about it's implementation. There are already some colleges and programs that have started some of this. I can provide links at a later time, as I explore them. But the old regimes of universities, textbook companies, and state based schools would balk at the loss of revenue from tuition and the total annihilation of the educational system as we know it. Professors would at first resist, wanting to know where their paychecks would come from. But universities would still exist, and be just as wonderful a place as they always have been. They could still charge tuition and have brick and mortar buildings. But the main source of pay for professors would come from the state, whose job it would be to insure the intellectual property of the professors be upheld, as well as see that the needs of those professors be tended to. They should be some of the highest paid employees, much like that of entertainers. Because the results of free education for all citizens world wide would outweigh all investments that were put into revamping and maintaining such an amazing program. There is no reason, given the technology that we now have, why Moon landings should not have already happened. There is no reason why diseases should still linger when the potential knowledge of all the human beings on Earth could be used toward solving the problems that exist currently. And this is done by giving each and every person on this globe the chance to have a free education, to strengthen the natural talents and abilities that every person has, and to become the best individual that any one person could be. You see how idealistic this sounds. And yet how wonderful the rewards would be if it could actually happen.

What it would take now, for starters, is just a few professors starting a web site, much like Wikipedia, to store lectures and courses online for free. It could start in Milledgeville, with the wonderful professors that I miss hearing and talking to on a daily basis. GC&SU has the forward thinking and the ability to start something like this, and has the professors with the knowledge to give every person on this Earth a drink of knowledge. And once people have tasted that, it will become a need for people to expand their horizons.

I can already hear the people exclaiming that I have either proclaimed knowledge much as Faust would have done before making a deal with Mephistopheles, or Manfred, who was warned that the Tree of Knowledge is not the Tree of Life. Some would even warn that I should be careful, that knowledge is a sin that Eve partook of, and that is should be some religious undertaking I should be writing about. And it's true that moderation and balance is key to living any person's life. If we are all parched for knowledge, and our brains have grown weak from disuse, shouldn't we exercise our brains daily by giving it knowledge to process. And what better way to exercise our minds than to use that small portion of dormant time while driving to enhance and better our lives? Our body is our temple, so should not be our minds a temple as well? We cannot focus on exercise and diet and bettering ourselves physically without the exercise of our minds. And if personal growth is the core of living life, bettering one self, one's community, one's world, than isn't what I'm suggesting the best way to start this?

So until the time of Starfleet arrives, until the main goal of life is to better your own life and that of the world around you, rather than just making money, it is enough just to learn a little each day. To use time as wisely as possible to better you own self, mentally, physically...whatever. I'm not the best person to say this, but at least, if my physical life isn't the best in the world, I will still be able to learn and to process information. I hope I am not too egotistic to believe that, in the end, my writings, such as this blog, will allow me to pass on whatever I have learned and thought of to the people out there, so that they might benefit from my learning, from my thoughts and feelings. If that is all I can do, then that is enough.