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.

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.