Page 1.1: Sections 6-10
6. CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS USES
The ability to focus one’s consciousness, so as to become more aware of what’s happening here and now, is another habit-art capable of growing and expanding all through life. With it now we can continue expanding our ideas of psychology and human nature, as well as see more of its excellent uses. After all, just like philosophic variety helped make ancient life in Greece much more interesting and thoughtful, modern psychological models have recently made life more interesting, educational, and diverse. Such diversity may be called psychology’s spice. Its ideas can help make everyday life more interesting and creative.
No doubt, with the growth of industrial capitalism and population numbers, stress and tension have increased tremendously in the last century, especially when compared to just a few centuries ago. As a result, human consciousness, or awareness, has become a more important subject. How can we keep expanding and strengthening such a useful habit-art, and what is it best used for? After all, just a few centuries ago most people lived on low-stress farms. At time the work was difficult but there were plenty of other activities to relieve one’s stressful tensions, like hunting, fishing, and tending the animals and gardens. Over the past century, however, life has become much more urban and industrial, rather than rural, and so to help make such living less stressful, a number of different psychology schools have evolved, each serving the different needs of different people. For conservatives there’s Jungian Analytic psychology; for moderates there’s Freudian and Gestalt psychology; and for liberals there’s Dewey’s Functional Behaviorism, John Watson’s and B. F. Skinner’s Behaviorism, Cognitive Therapy, Behavioral Modification, and others as well, including existential psychology. For those having a strong fear of death, there’s existential therapy; it’s designed to lessen such excessive fears.
In general, however, most psychologies help people learn to relax their neurotic tensions and fears, including Jungian and Freudian talking therapies. Sometimes people just need to talk with someone and be reassured their fears are natural and so they should just learn to relax when they have them. Many tranquilizing pills are also available to help people consciously feel what relaxing is like, so they can practice on their own.
The social problem, however, has been growing such ideas in the public at large, where, unfortunately, our public schools could be, but aren’t much help, teaching young folks how to relax and consciously feel more of life’s possible options and energies. Such relaxing skills can consciously help improve minor psychological tensions, fears, and obsessions.
Group therapies are also popular; they can also be very educational for learning how to consciously and intelligently solve simple personal problems, so as to keep intelligently guiding one’s own growth and development. In short, learning how to build intelligent and independent habit-arts is the goal. In this section, then, we’ll continue seeing more of that new psychology landscape, where consciousness and awareness play a very important role. For Dewey, what’s most important about one’s consciousness is not its ability to produce feelings of absolute Truth and certainty, as has often been the conservative and moderate goals for people, but rather to keep consciousness growing and expanding life’s healthy meanings in an increasing complex and stressful world. For us Deweyan liberals, such growth is the sign of a healthy psyche, rather than building a feeling of knowing nature’s eternally unchanging Truth.
How useful is consciousness and awareness? That question and many others can be easily answered with yet another lamentably lame limerick.
Kate and Susan worked in sales,
And loved to talk of their adventures and tales.
So, after a blind date,
Susan quickly called Kate,
And said his consciousness was as large as a snail’s.
Need I say again, humor is another sign of a healthy consciousness?
For liberal Dewey, teaching our self how to keep building more excellent habit-arts is what healthy psyches do, and it’s always an experimental art. For me limericks are a good source of writing humor, so I keep experimenting with them. So, if we want to keep learning more about expanding our consciousness, how to better savor life’s delightful energies and improve those that aren’t, and how to best help others help themselves, then the more we actively experiment and test our ideas, the more we keep expanding our consciousness. Where have I heard such ideas before? And what’s more, the more our consciousness grows, the more we learn about both ourselves and life.
As a result, politics, economics, and education become continuing area of conscious interest and attention; they are the main institutions controlling many of the options people have in life. Without such focused attention on testing our ideas to better control their results for everyone, consciousness remains merely a flowing stream of personal idea-feelings, as it were. So again, intelligent experimental learning is the great teacher of a healthy consciousness; experimentation helps focus our attention on actively producing certain results. And on a personal level, such testing can also help consciously improve any of our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits!
Yet again we see how useful intelligent experimental testing is for increasing psychological excellence in daily life. The challenge, then, is to carefully build the habit of consciously directing our experimental actions, so they produce enjoyable rather than stressful results. No doubt, such results won’t always be totally controlled; we all live in an always moving world. But, such a habit is also useful for recovering quickly when unforeseen tragedy does occur.
As we began seeing in the last section, for liberal Behaviorists like Dewey our daily actions and habit-growth are not to be taken lightly; such actions can build powerful habits that can come to dominate consciousness. Addictive people, for example, have consciously built unhealthful habits, as anyone addicted to drugs, smoking, alcohol, or unhealthful eating knows. So, again, consciously building the habit of playfully relaxing becomes another sign of psychological health; it helps increase one’s control of weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-energies, and thus helps make life more controlled and enjoyable.
Consciously and intelligently beginning to reshape such harmful habits with playful experimentation is like growing a plant from a seed; it's best to start on a small scale while enjoying such work. In any case, however, a good first step to psychological excellence is becoming more conscious of our own actions and their patterns; consciously knowing more about our own weak, excessive, or unhealthful habits makes improving any of them easier.
The good news is most people only have a few such habits; most habits are probably weak, rather than excessive and unhealthful. However, the more they're practiced the stronger and more intelligent they can become. Routine habits already consciously feel best and most comfortable, so why bother? As a result, they can easily lead to unhealthful and addictive indulgences and all their harmful results. Excessive gambling is one example, as are disrespectful sexual actions. In any case, the key to consciously improving such weaknesses is to keep expanding one’s consciousness of more intelligent, healthful, and helpful actions.
Such work is often one of life’s great challenges, but there’s some good news too. The more we continue expanding our consciousness with more intelligent actions, the more healthful our consciousness becomes. Helping others in some intelligent way is one such excellent habit. And the more we feel what it’s like to act like a psychologically healthy artist, the more confident we consciously become! In effect, then, consciousness is best seen not as a thing, not as a noun, but as an action; it’s perhaps best seen as an adverb – as an actions modifying and changing us in some way. From time to time some of our actions and idea-feelings need to be pruned, so to speak, and consciousness can help in that process if we’ve trained our self to act intelligently.
Our Always Growing Psyche
Consciously feeling enjoyment on a daily basis helps us feel what life is like without harmful stimulant or depressive drugs, and the more that happens, the healthier our consciousness becomes, and the freer we become as well. Healthy freedom, like consciousness, is best thought of as an adverb – it changes and expands our actions to become more intelligent and helpful to both ourselves and others. The more we, say, practice loving a mate, the stronger we make that habit-art; and the more we enjoy practicing eating healthy food, the weaker our consciousness for unhealthy foods becomes. But again, only our experimental actions, starting with short practice times, best help us start growing a healthier consciousness and freedom.
Clearly, then, Dewey’s Behavioral psychology helps people become more conscious of their own routine daily actions and, more importantly, offers a way to keep consciously making them healthier. In short, consciousness of our little daily actions are the key to becoming psychologically healthier by growing better habits of politeness, respect, and helpfulness, not to mention enjoyment and happiness. Now, exactly what about those ideas is really too difficult, obscure, and abstract to understand? Merely our own daily experimental actions are the real engines of improving any habit, including consciousness. Remember: habits are behavioral tools we build with our actions, and a healthy consciousness is one of them. Such habits help direct our actions to produce less stressful tension and more enjoyment, so, obviously, growing such habits requires some conscious practice in our daily lives.
We Deweyan liberals are also realistic about growing such a useful and intelligent consciousness. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying goes, but neither was a weak, excessive, and unhealthy consciousness. As a result, starting that process will almost certainly feel awkward at first. Most everyone hasn’t learned, say, how to make learning fun and enjoyable. For most people learning anything new is a chore and something to be avoided, as any person knows who’s consciously tried to learn how to stop addictive drug-taking, excessive smoking, or over-eating. Many people don’t consciously realize all their habits grew slowly, and so their improvement will almost certainly be slow as well. So, why not become more conscious about such a learning process BEFORE you begin; sometimes such habits take years to improve, and so, again, it may be best to consciously begin experimenting with small practice times. It’ll make enjoyable success easier to feel. Even if a drug-habit is 'kicked' quickly, over a few weeks, the challenge remains of consciously feeling what more intelligent habits are like, so the drug temptation isn’t so powerful. In any case, however, for Dewey consciously playful enjoyment is the key to success.
No doubt, some people can stop an unhealthy habit quickly – cold turkey, as it were, but even they are still challenged to consciously learn what enjoying a healthier habit-art feels like! Those kinds of enjoyably healthy habits take time to consciously build and shape. Thus, for those addicted to, say, excessive smoking, a good way to start building a new consciousness may be with practicing not smoking for a small period, say 15 minutes in the morning. Then, the more you consciously learn to enjoy those 15 minutes without smoking, and feel what a smoke-free life is like, the easier it is to consciously keep expanding and growing those feelings. It’s what can be called growing out of a bad habit. And the more one consciously talks to one’s self or others about practicing such playful enjoyment, the easier it becomes to weaken the bad habit’s energy and forcefulness.
Starting on such a small time scale also makes it easier to learn a new habit if, say, a larger time begins feeling uncomfortable. If not smoking doesn’t feel comfortable for a 30 minute span, then you can go back to a smaller time span, and see if that feels enjoyable. In any case, what makes the process feel awkward and tense are the habit-energies we already consciously feel. For example, people often build smoking patterns for certain times and places, but becoming more aware of those patterns can make it easier to avoid those situations with more enjoyable activities, even if it’s only relaxing and enjoying life’s energies.
Desiring to consciously to build more healthful habits is itself a very useful energy. The stronger it becomes, the quicker we can grow a more healthful consciousness. The enjoyable results of such desire and work help us consciously feel what a more healthful habit feels like on the inside, and also remember such feelings when they're not felt. After all, isn’t that the way all childhood habits grow in the first place? Don’t children learn the habits they feel are most enjoyable and approved of? If so, then consciously telling ourselves such facts can be a big help while learning more healthful habits. Physical health may be a combination of just 2 healthful habits -- diet and exercise; both together are powerful habit-arts. How, for example, can anyone become an excellent athlete unless they consciously practice intelligent diet and exercise habits? But psychological health is often a little more complex, and involves learning the habit-art of enjoyably growing more healthful habits. And perhaps the best news of all is this: as a new habit continues growing it becomes propulsive; it begins working on a subconscious level and feels like a natural part of us.
Psychological Realities
With the conscious growth of psychology as an independent science, and especially Behavioral psychology, such ideas have been growing on a formal level for only about a hundred years. To many people that may sound like a long time, but it really isn’t, not when it comes to teaching millions of people such habits; for that we need the institutional help of our public schools, and they have been less than helpful. After all, around the world we now have billions of people to educate, and that puts a large strain on our public schools. What’s more, considering all the conservative secular and religious schools still out there, often completely ignoring formally teaching such habits and skills, it’s a wonder so many people have begun learning about such practical liberal ideas of psychological health. Still, such skills are growing; more and more people are simply learning to become their own best psychologists with their own intelligent and enjoyable experimental actions. Most people want to become stronger and more competent; they don’t want to remain helpless and ignorant. Knowing something about those realities, Dewey encouraged people to keep consciously building more healthful habits and skills, and make learning them playfully enjoyable and helpful. Continuing to grow such habits is what’s important, rather than yelling at ourselves for not building them before. Self-criticism can be just as excessively harmful as criticism from others. How many times have you heard someone say they hate themselves? Such feelings make enjoyment and happiness that much more difficult to feel.
In any case, it’s important to consciously admit such growth is not always easy to accomplish, especially if we expect to learn everything all at once, like many people do with their New Year's Resolutions. Many people still feel merely making a wish list of new habits will be enough to actually build them! Such thinking is more magical and wishful than anything else. Slow and steady practice on a daily basis wins the psychological race, as the ancient Greek Aesop consciously knew. The growth of democratic habits, like equal rights, is a good modern example. It’s an example of just how tough such growth can be. In the US, centuries of slavery consciously built habits so strong more than 500,000 people we're willing to die for them, rather than learn more democratic habits. What’s more, these days many feel the same way about kindly giving gay and lesbian people their equal rights. All such healthy democratic habits take time to grow.
However, we live in a democratic republic founded on the ideal of equal rights, and so those of us who love our country continue encouraging people to consciously feel such democratic kindness with their own actions. Much of the time it means merely respecting others and minding our own business most of all. The more those healthful democratic habits are consciously practiced, the stronger they grow. Why not consciously learn to feel more relaxed about such ideas? Live and let live, right? Isn’t that too another sign of psychological health?
Dewey's Behavioral psychology is a social psychology; it encourages us to become more consciously aware not only of our own feeling-ideas, but of also their social results. In a sense everyone is a bigot in some way; we all have our own values, but socially denying others their equal rights simply produces results less than democratically excellent. It’s one reason psychology has become more important in today’s world. In ancient China, for example, Confucius listed many habits as helping build superior people -- loyalty, wisdom, courage, generosity, kindness, trustworthiness, and honesty, but teaching such habits to the next generation is as much of a modern educational challenge as it was in 500 BCE, again making us more consciously aware of how important our own public schools are. Overly conservative public schools who continue ignoring such healthful habits on a formal basis in fact make it much more difficult to grow a healthy democracy than it need be. As a result, we need more tax-consuming police, courts, and jails to do what our public schools should be doing on a daily basis, namely teaching students useful democratic habits. Such schools will be another major force in helping consciously build a more vibrant and respectful democratic habits into the next generation. Continuing to ignore consciously teaching such habits only makes life much less than what it could be. People will keep practicing the old conservative superstitious and undemocratic habits they’ve learned unless better habits are taught. We see evidence for that psychological reality almost daily on our streets. At any rate, for us liberal Deweyans psychological excellence isn’t something we’re born with, or that comes from some spirit-god, like Plato thought, but it is something just about anyone can playfully teach them self, one day at a time. That was an important idea to ancient liberal Greeks, and it remains important to this day.
To me such psychological realities are some of Dewey's most encouraging and hopeful. Every day professional psychologists are consciously helping empower more people around the world, but they remain almost completely ignored by the public schools taxes are paying for. Again, the great social challenge is to consciously make such habits a part of everyone's education, at home, in school, and in our churches. That way fewer young folks will enter the adult world with fewer weak habits, and more confidence they know what psychological health is. Whether we realize it or not, every day our daily actions continue creating the person we are and the society we have, and thus our schools become a major factor in teaching such skills. In fact, everyone is re-born a little each day. No one is exactly the same from one day to the next, so why not learn to intelligently guide that natural growth consciously, and keep building more excellent habit-arts? For us Deweyan liberals what’s important is how creative and joyful we are here and now in that process! In short, a healthy consciousness means, in part, feeling our daily actions and their results, and then creatively improving on them one small step at a time. Are our actions overly tensed, selfish, fearful, greedy, and stressful, or graceful, helpful, social-oriented, happy, confident, and flowing? What’s important is how much we’re consciously in control of such habit-growth.
Two Different Kinds of Habits
As we saw in the last section, not all habit-arts are a sign of psychological excellence. Dewey consciously made an important distinction. In general, habits are either routine and uncreative, or creatively intelligent and growing; guess which one he thought was more excellent!
For most of the past billion years or so, give or take a Woden’s Wednesday or 2, most habits were routine. In fact, it’s one reason our own African ancestors became such great hunters; they consciously learned such animal routines, like their eating habits, and thus experimentally learn to track them and lay traps for them. However, the same also applies to many human habits as well; many are routine while some are creatively intelligent.
Obviously, then, in an always moving world the more routine a habit is, the more dangerous it can become. The same results can’t always be expected. What’s more, the more routinely and mechanically we act, the more difficult it becomes to consciously see new dangers and opportunities, as well as feel our own habits reflect nature’s ultimate Truth! Thus, routine habits not only increase boredom, but help make intolerance a real social danger too and intelligence more difficult to practice. After all, everyone has their own set of habits, so tolerance for peaceful ones becomes more excellent as social interactions increase.
In short, routine habits help confine and restrict not only our conscious thinking, but our intelligent experimental growth as well. Consciousness itself thus remains shallow, narrow, and snail-like. In fact, Dewey might say routine habits have been mankind’s greatest weakness since the first stone tool was (OUCH! DAMN STONES!) experimentally built, over 2 million years ago, give or take a Mozambican Monday of 2. For almost all of the last 2 million years our ancestors merely routinely practiced, say, the same simple tool making habits, thus keeping thoughtfully creative impulses limited and weak. The same simple stone chopping and cutting tools were built in the same routine ways for hundreds of thousands of years. However, with the growth of talking arts and the creation of ideas, conscious human life started building an entirely new dimension to it. Consciousness started becoming much more varied, creative, and artistic, as the more recent history of stone tools shows.
A Little Psychological History
The very word conservative is often used to identify people who consciously practice routine habits, like, for example spirit-habits. For them such routine habits and ideas feel right and so should be conserved. For many conservatives they help build some psychic stability into life in an always changing and sometimes harsh nature. Consciously protecting and defending such ideas is thus important to them; they were often felt as life’s eternal Truth, and so should be defended against anyone who denied it. Decades of religious warfare and killing were justified with such routine habits. As Western history amply shows us, entire educational, religious, and social systems were designed to conserve such habits and ideas, often with death for those who denied them. Such routine actions were consciously justified with ideas like absolute Truth and god’s word, even though no one had showed such spirits existed. In short, excessively routine habits make learning more intelligent habits more difficult, if not impossible.
With the conscious growth of experimental science after 1600, however, a more creatively experimental habit-art began growing stronger. We’ll see more about creativity in the next section, but the important point is such a new intelligent habit-art can consciously be learned by most everyone, with, naturally, some daily practice. It can be practiced even around one’s home by looking consciously at how something might be improved. In fact, such practical thinking helped Dewey improve on the routine conservative definition of human nature itself. In Plato’s conscious quest for learning absolutely certain kinds of truth, he artificially divided human nature into a body and a divine reasoning spirit-psyche. From within a conservative Orphic religious tradition, human nature thus often was pictured as a divine spirit-mind in a prison-body. With training, however, Plato felt a small number of people could become conscious of nature’s highest and eternal Spirit-Truths and thus liberate themselves from all cycles of re-birth.
For liberal Dewey, however, such a conservative psychological division was both artificial and arbitrary; it wasn’t the result of experimental testing, but merely the result of Plato’s wanting to know such Spirit-Objects. So, Dewey consciously helped create a different naturalistic psychology with the phrase body-mind! For him consciousness and the body are one and inseparable all through life. After all, there’s really no objective evidence we’re anything else. What’s more, if our conscious mind and body weren’t the same, then drugs couldn’t affect our thoughts and feelings, nor would different kinds of practice help create different kinds of idea-feelings.
With such simple and creative psychological thinking, Dewey felt he was merely being honest with himself; he knew of no objective evidence we are anything else but body-mind. He too remained true to his own feelings. In short, we humans too are completely naturalistic objects; at birth we’re like a plot of fresh earth; from it can be consciously grown just about any habit-art those around us want us to learn. If so, then psychology always has a social element to it, and makes physical practice in a social world the key to learning how to become masters of our self. In short, we are self-determined; we can learn to enjoy and control many, if not all, of our own actions. In such a model freedom too is always a growing skill. No one is ever completely free; our habit-arts and abilities all have their limits, but as they keep growing, so too does our freedom. And for those who need friends, the more peoples’ habits match each other’s, the better their chances are for a friendly relationship to keep growing together.
No doubt, consciously picturing habit-arts as routine and intelligent is important for us Deweyan liberals. No one acts intelligently all the time, but we can use that idea to see ourselves more objectively, and how sometimes our routines need to change with different situations, so we can learn new freedoms.
More Psychological Realities
We Deweyan liberals are also conscious of another fact of life: mankind is, in many ways, still just now stepping out of a very long period where routine conservative habit-arts were quite common, widespread, and even universal! As we’ve begun seeing, they have been practiced for many tens of thousands of years. They existed simply because people were educated to practice them. Such new ideas can help us liberals avoid getting overwhelmed by life. Modern secular Behavioral psychologies have only just begun growing; no doubt, over the next few centuries many more people will be practicing them. For Dewey such routine conservative habits merely reflect the lack of secular public schools and real scientific knowledge, and so the more they consciously grow, the stronger such liberal ideas will grow. After all, hundreds of different religious ideas once consciously said to be absolutely true are now described by many as merely myth and folktale, like old Norse gods like Woden. Like any other idea, physical practice makes such ideas consciously live in our feelings, and so when they're no longer practiced they too become mere mythical ideas! Thus, for us liberal Deweyans, all such routine ideas are merely pictures OF life and nature; unless they're tested and verified they remain mere ideas. And so the consciousness of harmful and disrespectful actions becomes important.
Dewey’s Behavioral psychology is much more humanistic and democratic than either conservative Plato’s or moderate Aristotle’s was. If any habit can be learned and unlearned, then just about anyone can teach themselves to be inventors, architects, political leaders, artists, doctors, nurses, Nobel Prize winners, law-breakers, rapists, robbers, and even homeless people. It all depends on the habits people practice. That’s another result of Dewey’s liberal psychological thinking. On a daily basis almost anyone has the power to consciously and intelligently keep guiding and determining their own habit-arts; we are self-determined. The psychological challenge is to keep making ourselves more intelligently creative than boringly routine. So, yet again, our own conscious actions and habit-arts become the key to improving any of them, from learning to eat more healthful foods, to growing air-cleaning plants, to feeling more confident, to exercising wisely, to acting more joyfully, to working and studying better, and to wisely helping others to help themselves become more intelligent people. Why not consciously pick the one you want to start learning about now? Thanks to our still overly conservative schools and their teaching of academic trivia, even at 30 most people still have many weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits; our conservative public schools largely ignore improving student characters and consciously focus on academic trivia. However, just about anyone can learn at a young age to playfully teach themselves more intelligent and creative habit-arts! How? Making a little plan about practice times might be a good place to start; also telling others what you’re doing and asking for their help and advice might be useful too. Such intelligently skills of self-determination are another part of modern life’s new experimental psychology; the more a skill is practiced, the more it’s consciously learned and controlled. With such an active and intelligent body-mind, feelings of boredom and self-hate need not grow at all.
Seeing Consciousness Naturalistically
Such practical and secular ideas are not at all evil and sinister, at least not to us Deweyan liberals. On the contrary, they’re psychological reality even conservatives have used to condition people for thousands of years. For them Behavioral psychologies are dangerous; they empower people to build their own individual personalities, rather than merely remain obedient and submissive to the same ideas as everyone else. In reality, however, psychologies like Dewey’s are helping life return to its own naturalistic roots. Probably for the last billion years animals have been building useful habits to help satisfy their own needs for food, sex, and safety, but as we’ve been seeing, for thousands of years now conservative spirit-models of the human psyche, like Plato’s and spirit-religions have radically separated mankind’s mental life from our naturalistic bodies. For them it was necessary. Ideas about an afterlife helped control peoples’ actions, and make them more obedient to living in their undemocratic feudal societies. In them a few enjoyed great wealth, social power, and privilege while most people lived in ignorance, poverty, and even slavery. In such societies, ideas about people being punished for their sins and lawlessness were consciously taught to most everyone; people were less rebellious when they consciously practiced such ideas.
Rather than encouraging a kindness, respect, and equality for all kinds of diverse habits and lifestyles, such conservative routine ideas were thus used to divide people into different tribes, and even into different social classes. What’s more, each often felt only their ideas and habits were better than anyone else’s. Because religious and political leaders often felt their habits were superior to those in the ‘lower’ classes, they often demanded a conscious obedience to what they said was The Truth, often implying true happiness and excellence can never be felt in this life. With such conservative psychological models of human nature people were consciously made to submit to their social and religious leaders, and do as they told. Only in the past few centuries has that divided model of human nature been breaking down, mainly because there’s really no objective evidence for it, and people began realizing there’s not much different between people; we’re all just human, all too human. So, we are all body-mind, not body and mind. All the objective evidence we now have is that all people are organic and naturalistic creatures. Such ideas and their political results are basically the worst threat to all conservative psychological, political, and educational models.
Consciously dividing human nature into physical bodies and spirit-minds or souls have been very old conservative and moderate social traditions; philosophers are often conservative people. As we've seen, since prehistoric times people were normally encouraged to consciously picture their dreams as a seeing of spirits, and we‘ll see many cultures have even used powerful hallucinogenic plants to further heighten and intensify such feelings. With such habit-arts it was fairly easy for people to consciously feel they did have 2 vastly different parts to them, a physical body and a longer living mind or soul. Thus, religious leaders could keep people consciously practicing religious habits, and thus maintain some power over them. Both the history of Christianity and other religions shows leaders wanted to monopolize such power, and restrict all forms of diversity and difference. Eventually, life became consciously felt as merely something to pass through on the way to an eternal happiness. It was, and still is, all based on a divided psychology.
Perhaps the most unhealthful result of such a psychological division was to keep people consciously ignoring physical nature, and using its knowledge to make life more healthful and satisfying for everyone. And the more people grew up in filth, poverty, and ignorance, the easily it was for them to consciously accept that situation as normal and right. A fine example of those conditions is the movie Tom Jones. People kept ignoring the best way to keep making life more satisfying for everyone by learning how nature actually works, and then slowly molding it into something better. In fact, our modern world in the 1900s still has examples of both kinds of habits, both conservative and liberal psychological ones.
Today, millions of people no longer consciously fear nature like children fear goblins under their bed at night. A liberal psychological corner has been turned; nature is no longer seen by educated people as evil and corrupt, but rather the source of all useful knowledge and skills. The growth of naturalistic psychologies like Dewey’s Functional Behaviorism have encouraged many people to feel much more comfortable in life and thus feel freer to consciously overcome possible future dangers, like over-population, global warming, sexual diseases, and nuclear weapons. Naturalistic Behavioral psychologies certainly haven’t freed us from all dangers; in fact, no psychology can. For us liberals it’s safe to assume nature will always be dangerously stable. However, such practical psychologies have consciously helped create better ways of improving ourselves, like democratic politics, more liberal models of education, and intelligent experimentation. They’ve helped more people ask how we can build more liberal schools and teach young folks skills and habits useful in the adult world.
In short, the more we learn to consciously feel and cherish the art of intelligently building our own excellent habits and expanding our freedom, the more we continue confidently connecting our self to nature itself. The best way that happens is simply to consciously practice such habits. After all, we are all nature’s children and our physical and mental roots go back billions of years! Re-connecting and re-uniting those roots is yet another new liberal reconstruction going on in our world today. The more we consciously feel how not only all our scientific habits, but our religious and philosophic habits too, depend on evolving and growing habits, the more we feel how the mind and body are really one natural event, not 2. Despite what many conservatives and moderates WANT to believe, for us liberal Deweyans there are as many ways to be ‘saved’ and 'born again' as there are creative, constructive, and productive habit-arts! In short, salvation itself has consciously become more democratized. In fact, each one of us has their own unique way of becoming happier, more joyful, and especially more helpful to those less fortunate, and as always, intelligent experimentation is the key to consciously building such individual body-mind habits.
Is such a liberal, naturalistic, and democratic psychology really too radical? No doubt, it will certain feel that way to those conditioned to build their own conservative and moderate psychic bubbles, so to speak – their personalities. It’s the natural result of being educated to consciously feel only their models of life are the absolute Truth. Nature, however, has always been the source of an incredible diversity. Are such liberal models really evil, or are they just challenging us to consciously see all people as merely individuals, and thus diverse by nature? To us Deweyan liberals the answer is obvious.
We all build our psychic bubbles -- our character habits. We liberals, however, teach ourselves to see everyone's peaceful and constructive actions as tolerable, rather than evil and sinful. And what's more, they help explain why most religions and philosophies weaken and even die out! Aren’t all those now extinct religions just more objective evidence: for any philosophic or religious system to consciously remain active it needs people to actually practice its ideas and habit-arts? If nothing else, both philosophic and religious history teaches us they too come and go while new ones keep evolving. Perhaps more than 60,000 years ago, native burial habits consciously began sculpting and creating a native spirit-idea psychology, but they too have kept evolving continuously since then, thanks to people consciously feeling differently.
We'll see more of their interesting evolution throughout these 5 books. Even in ancient Greece conservative Plato’s 50 years of experimental philosophic thinking consciously caused even his spirit-ideas to evolve and change. Some of that evolution has been preserved so wonderfully in his artful writings, especially the dialogue Parmenides. The older he got, the more he saw his earlier spirit-ideas just created too many problems, and so called for more experimentation. Dewey’s liberal Behavioral psychology merely helps us consciously see any habit can be a growing and evolving skill all through life. Enlightened growth is the goal, not a once-and-for-all enlightenment.
The Subconscious
The more we can focus our conscious awareness of something, the easier it is to keep learning more about it, and the freer we become from the propulsive power of our own routine habits. Human consciousness might thus be pictured as a plant. Both have parts above and below ground, as to speak, but at the same time even they are changing and always growing new roots and leaves, just as new conscious and subconscious feelings and ideas keep growing. Even after Buddhism’s founder, Siddhartha Gautama, became what’s called enlightened, he wanted to become more enlightened by consciously experimenting with building schools where others could practice his habits. Thus 2 questions seem important: Are there relatively stable and changing parts to human consciousness, and if so, then are there excellent ways to keep guiding the growth of both?
The first question asks what do we liberal Deweyans mean by the word ‘subconscious?’ We all know what unconscious means, right? When we’re asleep or in a coma we’re unconscious; we don’t respond to external energies the way we can when we’re awake. But do we have what’s called a subconscious level of awareness, where we try to remember a name, for example, or a past event?
It seems human nature does have a subconscious element to it, and it’s made up of all our meaningful past events, both pleasant and painful. Such events help create our 'below ground' subconscious roots, as it were. For the most part, such memories are fairly stable throughout life. It’s a psychic record of all the events we felt were meaningful to us. If, say, one of our parents gave us the most satisfying feelings, then their habits become imprinted at a subconscious level of awareness; they can be remembered if we want. After all, how many adults naturally act like such parents?
Just like a plant's roots, those subconscious energies keep guiding our conscious choosing, ignoring, loving, hating, and all the other feelings we have about life and what's best. They help build our psychic bubbles, as it were. Meanwhile, however, 'above ground', more precarious changes are consciously happening; they’re like a stream of meanings and feelings from both the world and our subconscious. They are constantly flowing, changing, and growing precariously; how many times have you wondered what made you consciously think of some idea, or remembered some name you hadn’t thought of in years? Such an always changing and precarious consciousness happens on a mental 'above ground' plateau, so to speak. Without a problem or challenge to solve, or a line of reasoning to follow, such conscious thinking is often called daydreaming; with a meditation habit we can even train our self to let go of such thinking and merely feel nature's energies, although like any other habit it takes some practice. However, when we're faced with a problem, like Plato's wanting to know about Spirit-Objects, then our consciousness can be focused, ordered, consistent, and made to feel logical. It’s another social result of communication; it helps us feel someone else’s ideas and feelings. As we’ll see in Book 2, such a consciously logical power began increasing as our native ancestors started building stone tools over 2 million years ago.
Consciousness Becomes Ideas AND Feelings
What’s more, to a degree we can even control our subconscious feelings and ideas. The more we practice the habits of, say, helpfulness, the more we stock our subconscious with those kinds of idea-feelings. In short, even our subconscious can be built with the idea-feelings we practice here and now. For example, the more we rely on drugs to help us relax, the more our subconscious meanings of those drugs becomes part of us; even coffee has some muscle relaxing drugs in it. Also, when their results become unacceptable to us, then we face the challenge to start reconstructing our subconscious feelings and ideas, to make life more livable and healthful. If we're looking for a mate, for example, and our ideas haven't produced satisfying results, then different ideas are called for. Much the same things happen with plants and solar energies; the more they're obstructed, the more the plant adjusts to what's available, so it can keep growing as best it can.
Certainly all plants and animals, including people, feel natural energies; if they couldn’t then they certainly wouldn’t live very long. Feelings are thus a major part of the biological world, and have been for billions of years; for at least the last billion years such feelings were what plants and animals felt and were conscious of; they merely felt nature’s energies, both its satisfying and dangerous ones. However, things started changing psychologically for our native ancestors about 100,000 years ago, give or take a Frig's Friday or 2. With a few new throat mutations our ancestors became capable of making a much greater variety of sounds, and so it became easier to talk and share their feelings among themselves. Because it lessened psychic feelings of isolation, and increased creativity, a talking habit continued growing; their stone tools and burial sites show some of the new ideas they consciously experimented with.
Like most everyone at the time those ancestors lived in small groups, around 30-40 or so, and so it was fairly easy to consciously sense when people felt differently, like after someone died; a depressing fear of death was a widespread feeling in the prehistoric world. So, the more they tried talking about such feelings, and sharing how they felt, the more they emotionally bonded with each other.
In short, those ancestors began creating a kind of conscious life no other animal had ever created, a consciousness of both feelings AND ideas! That new kind of mental dimension would soon create the idea of spirits to help talk about their dream images; many of them were often nightmarishly frightening.
With their talking habits, however, a new mental dimension began growing in the animal world and in the human community; today we are almost the only creatures consciously living with both feelings and ideas; sign language has helped a few apes create a few ideas. The habit-art of vocally sharing ideas and feelings started becoming a much greater dimension of human consciousness. Talking’s habit-art thus began changing mere inner 'underground' subconscious feelings into shared 'above ground' ideas, and the more that happened, the easier it became to overcome life’s fearful and frustrating feelings. For Dewey talking’s habit-art was the most important one ever created! If you're feeling really confident about your reading art and want to test it, you might read Chapter 5 in his book Experience and Nature; it shares some of his feelings about our talking habit, and in Chapter 8 he describes his picture of human consciousness.
In the still very dangerous, isolated, and precarious world of our native ancestors, consciousness thus started becoming a more powerful mental tool. Ideas could be consciously used to build better tools, like sewing needles for example, and make better hunting tools. Thus, talking and chatting consciously helped our ancestors become more imaginative and creative than ever before. Sewing needles are useful, especially if you don't want your butt frozen again during another Ice Age winter. And what’s even more important, consciously creating and imagining new ideas, and then testing them, is a habit-art useful for improving ANY OBJECT AND HABIT-ART! That's the great power our conscious ideas have. However, unless those habits are institutionalized in our public schools, homes, and churches, they remain mere ideas.
No doubt, such creative thinking with ideas grew slowly. Just like a plant's new leaves depend on its roots, new ideas too depend on the subconscious feelings already present, like remembering last winter's frost-bit ears and toes and how animal skins feel warmer. Eventually the new idea of sewing needles was created at least 40,000 years ago; evidently someone accepted the challenge of making life less painful during another Russian-type winter and decided to build a new tool. Quite probably women were involved in the process too; they were often the prehistoric world’s clothes makers. The point is, consciously talking about new ideas increased creativity's art, and helped build new feelings for what might work better here and now, to keep everyone's 4 cheeks all nice and toasty-warm. Slowly and steadily we humans have become much better at consciously using our ideas to keep reconstructing and improving our old routine habit-arts, as anyone knows who’s ever felt their own frozen cheeks. In any case, however, our consciousness of ideas helped make us more mentally flexible, adaptable, and forward-looking than any other animal, even though it sometimes meant killing as many disrespectful and intolerant people as possible. Creative thinking thus often helped make life better and less dangerous. Hunting's old subconscious habit-roots, however, kept nourishing conscious war-like habits too.
Another important psychic result came with talking habits. They helped us become SELF-conscious too! The more our ancestors talked about their own fears and desires, the more they consciously built new feelings and ideas about themselves and others! And the more that happened, the more people could feel themselves as an object, rather than just as a feeling creature. Consciousness became a little more objective. People could mentally step away, as it were, from their own feelings and sense what someone else might be feeling. Sympathy and empathy for others thus grew within native tribes.
That’s not just another trivial fact. The more such talking habits grew, the easier it became to step away mentally from the present time, making it easier to better plan for future problems and challenges; past, present, and future became more deeply felt as people settled down into villages and began growing crops and taming animals for food. How can we become better hunters? How can we better teach our children, and cure our diseases? What causes nature to move as it does? Can we learn to control such causes? How did we get here? What happens after death? Such new questions about the past, present, and future could be more easily felt and answered as talking continued creating ideas of the past, present, and future. We've already seen how some 60,000 years ago the idea of an afterlife was already being felt even within Neandertal tribes. Merely talking about their feelings allowed people to feel them more deeply, and thus make plans to reduce sad feelings in the future with burial ceremonies, and then test them in the real world. Centuries later such skills and habits allowed author Jack London to write some interesting stories from a dog’s point of view, projecting his own feelings into the animal, as did the ancient Greek fable writer Aesop.
Bottom line: for us liberal Deweyan Behaviorists all the tremendous power of human consciousness and sub-consciousness is seen as a completely natural event, and thus always evolving. There’s simply no objective evidence they were created by any spirit just a few thousand years ago. The more our wary, ignorant, and fearful Middle Paleolithic ancestors consciously talked and shared their own fears and hopes, the easier it became to consciously keep working to improve them. Those ancestors even consciously taught themselves to intelligently hunt huge mammoths with teamwork, and by the looks of their skeletons mammoth livers were high on their menus.
In short, it’s not at all strange to see many psychological therapies today are talking therapies; even some ancient liberal sophists practiced the art. Some talked with others, listened to their fears and hopes, and made some suggestions to help lessen life's stressful tensions and make it more enjoyable. When one of Socrates’ friends told him about a problem he had with some women who had just moved into his house, he suggested putting them all to work spinning wool and making useful clothes for sale; it worked too. Such creative talking thus made it easier to consciously keep improving life here and now. When, say, a clan lost its leader and people felt fearful and tense about the death, and the more they planned a burial and chose a new leader, the weaker such fears and tensions became. For Dewey, that kind of intelligent and caring talking remains an excellent use for consciousness. Sadly, almost always our overly conservative public schools discourage such creative and helpful talking habits. For years, students work silently on their trivial book assignments.
Such ideas help answer to our question about how our ideas can consciously be best used. No doubt, the more people share their troublesome feelings, or at least honestly feel them, the easier it becomes to creatively imagine actions that might produce better future results, and then test them. In essence it’s the art of consciously intelligent experimental learning itself. The more our native ancestors tested, say, their creative ideas for a new kind of spear or a different kind of sewing needle, the more they learned about nature and how their ideas worked; modern scientists today act essentially the say way. Science is basically the habit-art of testing ideas.
Again, exactly what about such ideas is too difficult and abstract to understand? In general, down through history it’s been the conservative and moderate philosophers who continued making philosophy more abstract and remote from everyday life with their excessive adolescent quest for absolute certainty. For us Deweyan liberals, however, all ideas are merely mental tools best used to make life better here and now, and tolerance and respect are 2 of them. How many conservatives around the world today still feel god is an absolute certainty, even though no objective evidence exists for it? With such idea-feelings we’re seeing the power of habit more than anything else -- habits taught in human institutions. The more an idea is practiced, the stronger it’s felt. Also, from such examples we can begin feeling the great use of democratic government; it’s a more civilized way of deciding whose ideas will become law, rather than just the personal choice of a monarch, dictator, or an obscenely wealthy upper class.
Obviously, the conscious use of experimental thinking didn’t blossom on a large scale in the prehistoric world, like it has in today’s world, but, again, the more it’s practiced the stronger it grows, as the history of tool-making clearly shows. In short, when our mere inner ideas are consciously tested experimentally, and if they help produce better outer results, then consciousness becomes BOTH a science AND an art! It’s a science because it consciously studies objective results, and it’s an art because it’s something people create and build. Throughout the book we'll see more of Dewey's practical psychological ideas.
7. CREATIVITY
It may seem as if enough has already been said about creativity, even too much, but a few more ideas will be added in this section. No doubt, another loquaciously lame limerick will make the idea perfectly clear to everyone, or not.
A creative chap named Teller saw the world as a mess,
And so wanted to decrease its strains and stress.
But with his equations and work,
He became quite a jerk,
Wondering, what’s a few thousand nuclear bombs, more or less?
Moral: As with any habit-art, including creativity, there are intelligent and dangerous forms of it.
From what’s already just been said it should be fairly easy to start feeling what Dewey meant by excellent creativity; it’s basically the art of seeing and doing routine things somewhat differently to make life better. However, a few more ideas about it can be emphasized. For one thing, our strongest learning art -- experimental learning -- has also helped creativity to become an experimental habit-art. In short, creativity shouldn’t always be seen as just a single mental flash of insight and intuition, as anyone knows who’s invented anything, or even written a book; there are always new models and editions possible. Thus, creativity too should be seen as a testing process.
But secondly, and more importantly, for Dewey creative imagination is one of the most important habit-arts of all! Dewey puts it something like this: Creative imagination is the only art taking us above, beyond, and outside everyday events, thus allowing us to keep improving our own routine habit-arts! To us liberals that’s a pretty important idea; the words ‘only,’ ‘all,’ and ‘none,’ are important words to note. For Dewey, creative imagination is the ONLY habit-art making life more than just a series of routine actions. It’s the art of keeping life and its meanings growing. So, the more we experimentally test what feels like a good creative impulse, the easier it is to feel creativity too as a process of discovering more of life’s great depth and infinite possibilities. As always, such useful results help make a creative habit-art so important, but in any case it should also be remembered, strengthening one’s creative habit-art can happen experimentally any time of any day!
As we’ll see again and again throughout these books, many of Dewey's important definitions about life and nature are deceptively simple, and the same applies to creativity as well. With it he shows again how simple naturalistic philosophy can be. Thus, there’s really no need to keep feeling philosophy is all but another useless and confusing art, as many people feel today. What often makes Dewey’s ideas difficult to understand is his describing them with a vocabulary almost everyone doesn’t have. As a result, it’s difficult to anchor such ideas to our subconscious feelings so we know what he's talking about, and when that happens then understanding what he says is almost impossible.
To show how creativity’s idea has evolved, in ancient Greece people often thought creativity, or any unusual mental ability, was a gift from the gods. For most everyone, whatever happened had a spirit-cause in back of it. The great conservative philosophic experimenter Socrates apparently thought all kinds of excellence, even creativity, could only come from the gods. After all, from Apollo’s shrine at Delphi a priest pronounced him the wisest man in all of Greece, so it was easy to feel the god was helping him. And of course later Christians too normally thought creative people were blessed by god, so they must be special. Creative genius was thus often pictured as a spiritual gift. As a result, however, many also felt the habit-art couldn’t be taught to people, and so wasn’t.
3 Important Ideas: Questions, Questions, Questions
For naturalistic Dewey, however, not only does most everyone have some natural creativity, but intelligent practice can keep making the habit more powerful, spontaneous, and helpful, in short, more excellent. For him creativity is simply the art of mixing and re-combining old ideas and feelings to make new ones, and then of course test them experimentally to see if they're useful. In such ways new tasty food dishes have been created for centuries with the use of different foods and spice combinations, as well as any other invention one cares to name. For example, people normally have routine eating habits, and so asking how they might be improved becomes creativity’s first ‘baby-step’, so to speak. The more we learn to ask such questions, the more creative we can become. The ideas, say, of non-fat food and soy milk have been creatively re-combined to create the new product -- non-fat soy milk! That in turn can be used to solve a high-fat diet problem. In other words, all the ideas we’re conscious of can be playfully combined and re-combined with the help of good questions, questions we don’t yet know the answer to. Just like flour, oil, sugar, and spices can be combined and re-combined to make thousands of different foods, so too questions can help us see how our actions can be creatively improved.
The old routine ideas of relaxation and walking, for example, can become the new creative idea of relaxed walking, and then tested experimentally to see how it feels. Add to that the idea of enjoyment, and we have yet a new creative idea, namely enjoyed relaxed walking. In any case, however, intelligent experimental testing becomes a most important part of any creative learning process. What’s more, substitute any idea for ‘diet’, like excessive smoking or drinking alcohol, and the creative learning process stays just as experimental. For any idea, learning the best results is always within an experimental testing process, even for making one’s sexual habits more creative, respectful, and fun. I’ll leave it to readers to test their own imaginations for that last idea.
In short, creativity has become more than just imagining a new idea. Because our strongest knowledge results only from experimental testing, creative ideas are no exception. After all, don’t we want our creative ideas to produce more healthful and constructive results, rather than destructive and unhealthful ones? What good would the creative idea of a sewing needle be if it didn’t work when tested?
One day the great American inventor Tom Edison combined his old routine ideas of electricity and man-made light to create the idea of a long-burning electric light bulb! His creative imagination pictured electricity flowed through some material that would generate light and yet wouldn’t burn out as quickly as some material did, and thus make light longer. There must be such a material, he thought, but that creative spark was just the beginning. To turn the inner creatively impulsive flash into useful scientific knowledge, his lab workers began trial and error experimentation; for about a year they tested about 70 different materials! Of course it took time; like the city of Moose Jaw, the electric light wasn't built in a day. More creative thinking was needed when an idea didn’t test well until they eventually got a good working model. And of course, even that wasn’t the end of the process; electrical engineers have worked experimentally since then to keep creating better electric light bulbs; neon bulbs eventually became a great improvement.
No doubt, creativity can begin by questioning how some situation could be better in some way. It’s simply the mental habit-art of asking how something might be improved in some way; it often starts with the simple question What if...? What if I went to Saskatoon; would I see electric lights? Because all ideas are organic and fluid mental tools, they can be creatively reconstructed in an infinite number of ways, to help keep making life better. What often separates liberal from conservative creativity is often 2 different phrases on the end of the last sentence; liberals would say ‘better for everyone’ while conservatives would say ‘better for a few.’ In any case, however, not only can our creative ideas help keep improving our outer world, but they also help keep our own inner world alive, active, vibrant, and growing with, of course, the help of experimental testing! In short, for us Deweyan liberals, creativity is certainly not a gift from the gods; it’s a result of playfully intelligent experimentation, both verbally and physically!
Creative ideas too thus work and function as psychological tools, but inventive and innovative mental tools; that’s what separates them from all other ideas. Creative ideas look to keep improving nature in some way, rather than just talking about the way nature is and accepting it, but something else happens in all such creative experimentation; ideas BECOME excellent. Before they’re tested all ideas are just ideas – mental impulses. However, as Dewey points out, if an idea’s results are constructive and helpful, then it BECOMES excellent! In short, creative excellence doesn’t merely discover already existing excellence, it CREATES it! For example, when creative ideas actually help us make an unhealthful habit-art more intelligent -- more healthful and satisfying -- then those ideas become excellent. Like any art, creative testing brings excellent ideas into the world. In any case, however, for us Deweyan liberals all creative ideas don't come from another realm of nature; they're either useful or not in the world, and so creativity too can be a growing habit-art, like any other habit-art.
No doubt, continuing to answer his creative questioning with new inventions kept Tom Edison’s creativity growing throughout his life; however, we needn’t build a special lab like he did to learn a creative habit. Our own daily life can always be creatively improved in some way, and so the more we practice imagining how it might be improved, the more we too become creative artists. Even building a new habit makes us creative artists! In short, creativity too can be both an art and a science; it’s an art because it depends on imagination, and it's a science because its objective results depend on experimental testing.
Thus, seeing psychology as Dewey saw it means, in part, seeing the possibility of new creative meanings all around us! With such a creative habit our normal little everyday actions can become a testing lab on its own, and with practice such testing can become will-power. For example, at dinner one night why not ask your parents how they could improve some food they’re eating, I mean besides putting more salt, sugar, or ketchup on it? In our simple everyday actions we can creatively begin WONDERING AND IMAGINING how our own habits might be improved. I wonder … how much money can I save if I buy my light bulbs in Saskatoon? Who knows, but I’m sure the Saskatoonians would appreciate the business.
Suppose, for example, while walking one day I begin feeling a new creatively impulsive mental spark. Suppose some of my subconscious feelings become a little rearranged and help form a new feeling about my walking habit. Suppose I start feeling how some of my neck muscles stay tense, like my trapezius muscle, and thus feels uncomfortable. And suppose also I ask myself if relaxing its annoying tension would make walking more comfortable, relaxed, and enjoyable. That’s a new creative impulse. But then comes the more difficult part of actually learning to relax that muscle which normally stays tense. That’s the great challenge of every new learning process, namely, forming a new behavioral habit. So, I begin testing the idea for a few steps and see if walking feels more refreshing and enjoyable. If it does I can keep practicing the new walking habit, and if it doesn’t feel better, I can forget about it. In any case, however, it’ll take some time and practice to actually start building any new habit; it’s just part of human nature.
For Dewey, producing better results elevates all creatively experimental testing to psychological excellence. The psychological challenge, then, is to keep making our habits, our lives, and our world more enjoyable for everyone. Such excellence can begin with each person. It often begins at the inner level of feelings, but the more we experiment with frustrating situations, the more our old feelings and habits can be slowly reconstructed to produce more enjoyable and satisfying results. What’s more, the more deeply we feel this psychological reality, the easier the testing process becomes. In short, the really good psychological news is this: what works for a walking habit can work to make ANY habit more satisfying! -- relationships, sex, teaching children, diet, exercise, work habits, and so on. Our creative thinking and testing arts can help keep building a slightly newer self every day, and help our self be re-born every day merely with the help of our own little creative impulses and testing experiments. These are yet more very positive results from Dewey's famous saying -- we know only what we build! Only with such active testing do we become a little more mature and wiser. Without intelligently and creatively wanting to experiment with our little inner creative sparks, they remain merely feelings, rather than real knowledge and wisdom.
Natural Creativity
Right about now many folks with a weak creative habit-art may be asking, why bother? It sounds like too much work. There are ideas I don’t want or need to experiment with; I’m satisfied with most of my actions and habits. Besides, isn't everyone somewhat creative naturally? Don’t we all get some creatively impulsive feelings every day, like how to cheat on our diet or taxes and still feel good about it? No doubt, feeling dissatisfied with some actions and wanting to experiment with a new idea is important, but they also point to another important natural fact of life -- all of us are somewhat creative by nature; new creative ideas often impulsively happen daily. That again is an important part of human nature; without such a natural creativity our species would probably have died out long ago.
Truly, almost everyone normally feels and sees creatively new and different ideas and feelings every day! They’re another normal part of what’s called growth. If they didn’t happen growth would be greatly restricted. So, it’s safe to assume most everyone’s feelings are naturally creative to a certain degree, but Dewey’s Behavioral psychology tells us an uncontrolled subconscious creativity can be better controlled, helping make continued growth easier and life more satisfying.
Often during the day we may feel how something could be better, but then the idea quickly sinks back into our subconscious, often because we have to deal with other things happening around us. Often we feel how something might be more satisfying, more healthful, and more enjoyable, but then lose the feeling; life can be frustrating like that. So for us Deweyan liberals another little psychological challenge is making some kind of objective note of such feelings, so they can be look at and thought about later. It’s a way of making our little subconsciously creative impulses live longer, to see if they might really be worth experimenting with, and thus help better control and guide our healthful growth even more. Some people even carry around a pen and paper to write down their new creative ideas, or use a voice recorder, so they won’t be easily forgotten.
In short, natural creativity exists, but it’s often on a weak subconscious level. Often, all too often, peoples’ naturally creative feelings are soon forgotten or ignored. In fact, people may even see such feelings as little time-wasting annoyances. One trivial example might be a child’s tricycle left in the driveway, blocking the husband from getting home at night. But with a little creative training it can become more than just another frustration. It can become another creative opportunity to playfully teach the art of responsibility to a child? A creative idea might be to hide the tricycle and let the child see what life is like without it. When life gives us lemons why not accept the challenge to make some non-fat, sugar-free, educational lemon pie? Wouldn’t that kind of thinking produce better results than merely yelling at or hitting the child? I wonder if Rembrandt ever painted a picture of such creativity; no doubt Salvador Dali did.
Hopefully the reader’s now beginning to see habit-arts are much more than merely practicing our old routines day after day after day. That’s not what Dewey means by psychological excellence. Creative thinking is the means to keep growing and making life more interesting and vibrant. The more unsatisfying our routine habits are, the more life feels boring, drab, depressive, and perhaps not even worth it. Wanting to test some of our naturally creative impulses is one antidote to such unhealthful feelings. Behavioral therapies, then, are designed to empower people to take more control of their lives here and now, with more satisfying actions. It’s not designed to talk about past traumatic events, like Freudian therapy, or feel a so-called collective unconscious like Jungian therapy, but rather to make life better here and now! For example, how many ways are there to make the drive home more enjoyable and educational -- I mean besides getting drunk first? That little everyday event sounds like a great time to help strengthen one’s creative habit-art, and make the drive more satisfying and educational. Testing Beethoven's music, for example, might help make the commute more satisfying and relaxing here and now.
In short, the more creativity becomes a conscious habit-art, and not just a word, the easier it becomes to solve our stressful problems here and now. We can let life stay unsatisfying and boringly routine, as many ancient Stoic philosophers recommended, or we can begin slowly making life more creatively elegant and enjoyable. It all depends on testing the little creative daily impulses we want to test. With such choosing and testing we in fact learn to control our own growth, and become a more intelligent person. As many people now realize, even the class of morons is composed of individual morons. What many people still don’t realize, however, is how useful it sometimes is to act moronically, that is, beyond ethical and legal laws! Sometimes it’s even necessary to see justice is done, and see people held responsible for their actions. In the quest for justice, sometimes the law is something to moronically ignore.
Again, testing the little creative impulses we choose to test is what elevates any such feeling to a scientific level of objective fact. Feeling the objective results of an idea is what science is all about. I may have a creative impulse to help make life more satisfying, but until it's tested it remains just an inner fantasy-idea. To make it scientific it needs to be tested experimentally. What few people realize, however, is how old the habit-art is. In fact for our own human ancestors it’s well over 2 million years old, give or take a San Paulo picnic or too! As we’ll see a little later on, millions of years ago our African H. habilis ancestors began experimentally testing a creative tool-making feeling (OUCH! DAMN STONES!). It certainly wasn't as complex as, say, a moon-landing, but when the new creative impulse for making a stone tool was felt and tested, then modern experimental science was born! For Dewey, modern science too is an art -- the art of merely testing ideas! Almost no one consciously feels that idea today! In reality, however, it means even ordinary folks can become psychologically scientific artists too when they test the ideas they want to test! In fact, habilis' creative tool-making art helped strengthen not only experimental learning's art, but also the kind and caring-arts of ethical excellence too! The more they built such useful stone tools, and shared new sources of food with others, the closer they moved to a liberal ethical model of excellence. Both the habit-arts of constructive building and sharing in the results of such building remain ethically excellent habits to this day! In short, Dewey’s liberal creativity habit-art can not only keep us growing and learning, but it can also make both our inner psychological life and our outer ethical grow a little more caring, helpful, and excellent each day.
In fact, such a liberally creative learning process has been fueling our human behavioral evolution for over 2 million years, give or take a Saturn Saturday or 2. And what’s more, a much greater number of creative improvements have continued growing since our San ancestors began talking about their feelings during the last 100,000 years! Today, such liberal excellence continues not only celebrating liberal Democritus’ creative atomic ideas, but his politically democratic and ethically humane ideas. Because of their humane and satisfying results, such ideas have continued growing stronger. Of course we’ve created terribly destructive atomic weapons with some tools, but their destructiveness hasn’t been very widespread yet. However, that certainly doesn’t mean that pattern will continue. In fact, it’s another creative ethical challenge all of us can take part in, namely demanding just about all such weapons be destroyed wherever they exist! Only in a few situations can their results ever be constructive and helpful. What better social use for a creative habit-art is there, I mean outside the bedroom?
8. HOW MUCH ARE YOU TESTING?
More about testing? Damn, aren’t we through talking about this idea yet? Well, in a sense the idea is still just beginning to grow for most everyone, and so there’s actually much more to be said about it, especially how the art can be used in both the inner and outer worlds. In fact, testing goes on day-in and day-out; how else can we make our social lives safer and more peaceful? So, this section to is meant to keep increasing the awareness of that important idea, as well as some intelligent responses to it. In fact, nothing gives a person more confidence and self-assurance than reliable knowledge, and so that quest continues in this section.
First, a little review. Our new strongest learning art -- experimental learning -- is a testing process, but besides testing ourselves to keep becoming more intelligent, another important use is in our social world, testing others for their feelings and actions. Many socially conscious people want to know what people will do for, say, $10, and what they’ll do with $10. In fact, there are people who spend much of their life testing people for their weaknesses and strengths. What’s more, no one is exempt; 70 year old rabbis get tested for their honesty just as much as politicians and young folks. Thus, the testing field is practically infinite. Given that reality, what better way to continue celebrating it than with yet another lovely lame limerick, guaranteed to either clear up all doubts and uncertainties, or else completely and thoroughly confuse everyone. You never know, right?
A young woman liked flirting her besting,
To lure bad men into thoughts of nesting.
But while at the altar
She snapped off her halter,
Coyly smiled and said 'Just testing'.
Some Social Testing Is Old Indeed
Such testing was alive and well even in ancient Greece. Conservative Plato writes in his Republic how future leaders in his ideal city-state were to be tested for some 50 years before they were given political power. But the art almost certainly goes back to our ancestral tribes and also the beginning of a more populated social life with the growth of villages, towns, and cities after 8,000 BCE. People needed to know who could be trusted not to harm others, and so testing others became a more important social art, in fact useful to this day.
For us Deweyan liberals, however, 2 habit-arts already mentioned help most everyone pass most all such testing. One is the habit-art of helping others, and the other is judging people by their respectful actions to just laws and people. Both habit-arts are a sign of liberal character excellence, rather than greed, selfishness, and law-breaking. And, again, the best way to keep testing our self with those habit-arts is simply to practice them on a daily basis. With such practice liberal Behavioral psychology fuses nicely with liberal models of ethical excellence. The sooner we learn to build such excellent habits, the more easily we’ll be able to past such tests in many different situations, as well as help others keep improving their own weak and excessive habits. No doubt, many want to become excellent people, and yet don’t have clear ideas about what actions are a sign of such excellence. However, just those 2 ideas show again liberal philosophy and psychology is not complicated rocket science. For learning those kinds of practical knowledge the art of testing is useful day-in and day-out. As we'll see in a later section, such testing can become quite complex, especially in today’s tremendously complex world, but, again, just those 2 habit-arts will help pass just about all social tests.
Testing happens every day of every year. There’s simply no other way to know what a person’s character is like. Is it volatile, relaxed, helpful, indifferent, uncaring, or what? No doubt, in practice testing someone can become involved, complex, and long lasting, but the basic goal of testing is rather easy to see. Suppose, say, someone who looks like the mate of your dreams tells you they love and respect you, but how deep are those feelings? How are they shown in actions? Is such respect shown on a daily basis, or not? In this day and age, many of course want the band on the hand before giving cookie some nookie, so to speak.
So, one tests someone in many little ways to see how they act on a daily basis. Are they attentive, caring, and affectionate, or aloof, unconcerned, and indifferent? Perhaps you call a caterer and set up a beautiful dinner with some nice wine and soft candlelight, and of course some nice music; you may even want to practice the almost lost art of actually dancing together, rather than wiggling around on your own! In short, every action is a small way of revealing how excellent one’s character is. How much do they care and respect others, and how much are they mean and selfish? After all, how can people have a healthy relationship without respect for both themselves and others? In short, intelligent people want to see how someone acts when someone wants nookie without the band on the hand. How much of a child and adult is the person? Obviously, the more someone’s actions are seen, the more information is given about their all-important character habits.
For many people the very important philosophic art of testing starts growing at an early age; even kids subconsciously test their parents to see how much freedom they can have, and what they’ll do in certain situations. Hopefully, with caring parents, they’ll eventually learn to consciously negotiate for more freedom and responsibility, but in any case parents get tested, and obviously the same kinds of testing go on between adults as well. How much will your partner help when you’re broke and sick?
Believe it or not, such democratic kinds of testing between people of all ages and classes are still rather new and modern. For almost all of history parents controlled their children and political and religious leaders controlled the masses. Marriages to usually arranged to acquire more land, money, political power, or just to get rid of their daughters; most people saw women as inferior people. The best educated conservative Greeks like Plato, the Pythagoreans, and liberal sophists and Atomists were notable exceptions. As a result, women merely changed hands from a father to a husband with little regard to compatibility. As a result, even today many people are attracted just to someone else's physical appearance, rather than how much their habits are alike and what the chances are of growing together, rather than merely sharing space together. Such non-testing actions no doubt help explain why some 50% of people have failed relationships, and why adultery is so common; couples often don’t test each other with questions to see how compatible they are about 2 important habit-arts -- money and sex.
Such personal kinds of testing began growing as our modern democratic and independent habits grew. People became freer to marry the person of their choice, and thus become more responsible for guiding your own growth and happiness; will someone else help you keep building the habits you want to build, and if not will they at least keep encouraging you? In such a new democratic world as ours, the art of experimental testing continues becoming more important not only on a personal level but on a social level as well. How can we expect someone to like, say, pickles who doesn't want or need them, unless of course they're pregnant?
No doubt, such testing goes on throughout the business world as well. How helpful will a new worker be for increasing our profits; how much of a thief are they; how friendly to fellow workers are they, and so on. Testing is the only way to answer such questions. In fact, whatever field one chooses to work in, such testing will go on, whether it’s in the military, education, medicine, or whatever. People will be tested to see how much they enjoy their work, and how creatively productive it is.
Again, such testing reveals a person’s most precious possession – a healthy character. Arranging a romantic dinner to test a future mate helps see what their reactions are to a seductive dinner, and again, those responses are the OBJECT of experimental testing! Will they whine and beg for some sex like a little baby? Will they threaten rape if you don’t give in? Will they try to drug you or get you drunk first? Or will they act like a respectful adult, enjoy a nice quiet evening of trying to laugh together and share their likes and dislikes, maybe listen to a little soft music and hold each other close while complimenting you on the great dinner a caterer cooked, talk seriously about what they want from a relationship, ask about the chances for another date, and then go home and take yet another cold shower? For how many people is sex after marriage still an excellent sign of ultimate respect? How much of a respectful and caring adult are you? Does someone make you feel relaxed and at ease or should you keep a loaded gun close? Their reactions are the objects intelligent people see while testing someone, just like they are for scientists creating a new medicine or building a new tool.
To say the least, for some people such a testing habit-art has become a strong skill. People who run institutions are especially interested in testing their employees, and what's more, many of them are also good at testing their employers! How greedy and respectful are they to their workers; what’re my supervisors doing with their money; are they using it to help others or merely building up their own bank account? Often money is a favorite tool for testing one’s character. Some people will kill another innocent person merely for money, not to mention break laws to make as much money as possible; recent banking actions in the housing market is certainly evidence of that! So, again, helping those less fortunate with one’s extra money is, perhaps, the best response with money. Is someone merely stocking their own bank account and buying fancy cars and homes for themself, or helping those less fortunate? How many stories have you redd about how even priests, ministers, and rabbis abused the money they were given in the quest to live like royalty? As many have seen recently, many religious people have even broken sex laws with young men and women, even though they may've taken a vow not to. In short, the need to test people is on-going; one is never completely sure how someone else may act here and now. Who hasn’t seen how even presidents are tested, as Richard Nixon’s presidency taught my generation. Many of his advisors kept testing his character, giving him many different options to choose from, and his reactions showed the depth of his honesty and trustworthiness. Sadly, he failed many of his character tests and thus lost congress's support and trust.
Such examples are meant to convince the reader, building at least those 2 habit-arts mentioned earlier -- respect for others and just laws, and helpfulness for those less fortunate -- is one of the best ways to pass all such testing. Those 2 habits are useful in so many daily situations, it would be practically impossible to list them all. So the question becomes, have you tested yourself to see how weak they are? Believe it or not, there are some people who feel they need to be treated brutally simply because they feel they’re not worthy of being treated any other way! Such abusive and disrespectful actions are often a quick way to the grave; even in ancient Rome disrespectful Emperor Caligula was soon killed by his own guards. In short, those 2 habit-arts are tremendously important skills.
Testing can help improve one’s own character excellence as well! How much do you smile and feel good about yourself while waiting at a crosswalk for the 'Walk' sign, even though others may be breaking the law? How much do you respect people and leave them alone even though they seem so different and not worthy of respect? How much do you respect your own health and pass up that 5th piece of mammoth-meat pizza? How much to you nurture and guide your own happiness by laughing at all the silly things people do, including yourself? The best way to keep building such psychological excellence is to keep practicing and actively feeling what such actions are like, rather than keep indulging yourself like a 4 year old at a birthday party? No doubt, some excessively unhealthful habits are difficult to improve, but the more one practices, the easier it gets!
Becoming more conscious of both our own actions, and those of others is often the first step for making life better? How objectively can we see our self and others? After all, how can we and our world keep becoming a more excellent place to live unless everyone is tested, their resulting actions are seen, and they’re held responsible for their disrespectful and greedy actions?
Why are such character habits so important to each of us? The excessively unhealthful such habit-arts are, the more a person’s life and freedom are endangered, as well as those around them. Thus, simply observing others’ actions is a good way to keep society safe and peaceful, or at least hold people responsible for their actions. Who knows who's really excellent and who isn’t unless their actions are observed? Indeed, life itself can become more enjoyable, satisfying, and fun if one learns some simply habit-arts.
How Much Do You Test?
Nurturing the feeling for liking such a habit-art is like nurturing a likeness for painting, video-game playing, sculpting, writing, cooking, golfing, or driving. Slow and steady, one day at a time, helps build such habits. Thus, the more testing begins with our self, in our own little daily routines, the easier it becomes to nurture its growth; in that way we can become our own best therapist. The more someone tests them self for respecting just laws, the more they can feel how weak or strong it is. That way we can begin growing a feeling for how important our daily actions are; excellent actions build excellent habits builds excellent character, as well as the subconscious feelings for excellence! They in turn make it easier to instinctively feel how excellent our own actions are. For example, how quickly will you give back the extra change a cashier mistakenly gave you, or even correcting someone when they charge you less than the price tag? How honest are you exactly? The more honest you are with life's little events, the easier it becomes to act instinctively honest with life’s more important events! With such actions we become more trustworthy and keep our freedom growing.
The art of planning is another useful result from building a testing habit. Intelligent testing often works best with a little planning. Why not plan to give a little something to charity next paycheck, and then do it? Or plan to leave some extra money lying around while dining with someone you don’t know very well? Such creative testing requires a little creative planning, daring, and audacity to see where others draw their ethical lines, so to speak. Such testing also helps build our own wisdom to make testing a truly fine social art.
What’s more, it also helps us realize even philosophic ideals can easily become a real living part of our daily lives, rather than just being some abstract idea in a college textbook. In truth, the more such liberal philosophic ideas are practiced, the more they'll feel like religious ideas and habits were felt in the medieval world -- supremely important and worthwhile. As people then learned to pray for anything, so we today can learn more useful skills, like even testing teachers, parents, brothers, sisters,or anyone. I once had a high school history teacher who tested student's character habits by wearing short skirts, and sitting on a table with legs crossed; she liked to test students for their responses. I must say, it certainly made history class more interesting, for both male and female students, and on top of all that she had very cute knees too! While teaching, a young female student came to my class after school, I think to turn in an assignment. So I asked her if she wanted a kiss. She said yes, so I gave her a Hershey’s Kiss. She was just testing me.
Why Build Psychologically Excellent Habit-arts?
Again, building such respectful habits simply makes life easier and less stressful. After all, we all carry our character records with us from job to job. Potential employers want to know how a person worked on their last job, so they’ll contact them and get some feedback. Building a psychological set of excellent habits makes working anywhere that much easier, and more interesting as well. Knowing a little about testing others makes it easier for them to become more aware of their weaknesses, and thus better able to improve them. In fact, the more we learn about the weaknesses of our teachers and schools, the easier it is to build better ones! How much are they merely teaching more and more trivial academic facts largely useless in the real world? How much do they want to egotistically be appreciated as the center of attention? How much are they ignoring the formal teaching of more important character habit-arts like joyfully obeying just laws and helping others and their communities? If they are, how might such weaknesses be best improved, and schools be made more democratic? After all, the less children learn what psychological excellence means in action, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone as adults? Is my schools formally teaching excellent habits of honesty, creativity, and humor, or are they merely teaching habits of obedience to their books and teachers; the more that happens, the more boring school becomes.
How psychologically excellent are our churches, synagogues, and mosques? Are they helping others become more humane, independent, and intelligent learners, or just keeping them anchored and obedient to untested spirit-ideas and anti-democratic ethical ideas? How excellent are our community businesses? Are they focused only on maximizing profits, or on helping make workers’ lives less stressful and helping build a healthier community? How much are they celebrating equal rights for all in their hiring practices? In other words, how humane and human-centered are our economic, political, and educational institutions acting here and now? I certainly don’t mean everyone should always be constantly testing all those kinds of people, but even focusing on one person would certainly be better than ignoring the testing art altogether.
To many people who haven’t yet built such a testing habit-art, such ideas may sound devious, sneaky, and unethical. After all, if you can’t trust your teachers, bankers, politicians, rabbis, or parents, then who can you trust, I mean besides your mortician? But again, unless people are held responsible for their greedy and disrespectful actions, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. What’s more, it’s safe to assume every profession has its share of dishonest and greedy people, especially in the business world, and if they’re allowed to keep practicing those habits, they will. So, the sooner they’re discovered and held responsible for their actions, the safer life itself becomes.
Testing others is the only way to discover who will probably break the law, act greedily, or even harm innocent animals and children. The more people see where others draw their ethical lines, then the sooner potential serious problems can be directed to the people who can best help them, like professional psychologists or law enforcement people. Obviously it’s not always easy. Sometimes we’re emotionally attached to people who’ve committed a serious crime, and so doing the most excellent thing isn’t always easy, as many Hollywood films teach us, but the more we all work to make life safer and more secure by testing others, the more life becomes safer and more secure. In short, learning a testing habit-art is another sign of psychological health. How else can we help others become more respectful and caring unless we know how they act?
The more we practice such a testing art, the easier it is to feel how it’s not only an art, but a science as well! The more we see and feel the objective results of testing someone, like leaving a $10 bill on the floor, the more scientific our knowledge of that person becomes! What else are atomic physicists or chemists studying other than the objective results of their experiments? And the more creative we are with our experimental tests, the more a testing artist we become. In short, whether we test a person or an idea, we practice liberal philosophy’s best learning art -- experimental learning. And what’s more, such thinking helps us see how Dewey’s liberal naturalistic philosophy isn’t overly complicated and difficult to understand or use. With such testing actions liberal psychological excellence lives and breathes; it’s not just an idea.
Religious Ideas Can Be Tested Too
In fact, a testing art is already widespread in nature; even African anteaters test termite mounds to see how strong they are; who knows, one day those termites might even get together and build themselves an anteater jail. What’s new is the conscious and intentional human use of such testing habits for everyone; we can consciously build testing plans. Believe it or not, until just a few hundred years ago almost no one even thought about testing their teachers, politicians, religious leaders, or their ideas. For most everyone, obedience to such ideas was the conservative model of psychological excellence for thousands of years. Almost everyone practiced what their teachers and leaders told them to practice. Of course there was an on-going series of small rebellions here and there, but they were quickly put down with overwhelming force and violence; might made such habits right! Obedience was to be maintained above all else. When the manor’s lord said give us so much tax money, and so many children to train for war, people usually obeyed without question. In general that was the conservative social order for thousands of years. As a rule, only those who wanted more social power kept testing those with more power, to see how strong they were. Other than that most everyone else simply did what they were told to do, and let it go at that. Even if a poor man’s daughter or wife was even raped by a rich man, what could they possibly do about it; if they acted to see justice was served their own life might be endangered.
As a rule, then, most everyone merely kept practicing their routine habits of obedience; they often produced the safest results. Almost always people were kept in the social classes they were born into, and also told god had willed it. Also, beautiful and awe-inspiring cathedrals were often built to reinforce such ideas while disease and sickness continued infecting millions, diets and water supplies remained unhealthful and dangerous, war and lawlessness often raged unchecked, people continued enslaving innocent people while living in filth and squalor, and much of the time they were called god’s tests. What little education people got was aimed to keep reinforcing spirit-ideas and obeying routine religious habits. After all, why try to make anything better when god-sent spirits cause disease anyway? Men were so busy farming, and women were usually kept busy with household and child-rearing chores, neither got much of a chance to stop, look around, and ask themselves how can I possibly make my life more equal and satisfying? How can I test all the ideas used to keep people obedient and controlled? Those men who could afford, say, a good pair of boots simply held their noses, walked through the animal and human sewage, and learned to get out of the way when bathroom pots were emptied above them.
However, with the growth of modern experimental testing arts all such ideas and habit-arts became easier to challenge and test. Democratic political ideas of equality and equal rights also began growing just a few centuries ago. Liberal Dewey deeply believed in all such ideas, and so wanted to teach others how the results of such testing would help build more intelligent habits than merely accepting the old conservative model of obedience and faith. With his help, then, a whole world of new ideas and actions began opening up as more and more people began realizing they no longer had to blindly accept and obey all the conservative status quo ideas! Even the most cherished conservative idea of all, namely, spirit-ideas, became subject to some commonsense logical testing.
What Took So Long?
Why did such useful testing arts only begin growing stronger about 4 centuries ago? What took so long for our modern liberal experimental testing habit-arts and democratic ideas to start building our modern scientific and democratic era? That question should now be easy to answer. All psychological habits are propulsive; once learned they keep working until people physically stop practicing them! Thus, conservative habit-arts like obedience to spirit-ideas and a rigid social class structure helped keep such liberal democratic and testing habits weak. Occasionally an aristocrat may have been punished for his disrespectful actions, or even an emperor like Caligula, but in general people were taught to be tolerant of those with social power. As a result, most people weren’t very good at even feeling others should be tested. They often saw people act mean and viciously, but what could they do about it? Not much. What’s more, because education was so focused on teaching conservative spirit-ideas and rituals, almost no one was taught to feel all others should be tested, including upper class political and religious leaders! They would be judged after death.
Only slowly, as democratic, industrial, and experimentally scientific habits grew did more and more people begin feeling we're all just people, with the same weaknesses and strengths, rather than being chosen by a god to play a certain role in life. Thus, only recently has it become easier to test all ideas while building the new liberal Behavioral models of psychological excellence. Even in England conditions remained similar to those just described until the 1800s. Don't look now, but in terms of history that was just like yesterday! Early in that century English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, and early Socialists like Robert Owen, started talking publicly about actually improving English life for everyone. In response, the conservative establishment quickly labeled them social ‘radicals’, as if society would collapse if people had cleaner streets to walk on, cleaner air to breathe, safer drinking water, better schools, work places, and recreational parks to relax in. Making all children go to school was, at first, often said to be an unworkable idea; it would wreck the economy which, at the time, was largely based on child labor, both male and female!
More humane institutions for the mentally disabled were also a liberal ‘radical’ idea, as was the idea of teaching prisoners more useful employment skills. In short, only yesterday, so to speak, did liberals like Bentham and Owen start testing status quo ideas by looking around creatively and imagining how life could produce more humane and human-centered results, rather than merely focusing on always maximizing profits for a few. Even though Dewey raised some valid criticisms of Bentham’s other ideas, his work was definitely a step in the right direction; what step isn't experimental anyway? Compared to what life was like at the time, such liberal ideas were worth testing, and when they did actually produce better social results, they became more worthwhile options for other people to experiment with. We’ll see more about Utilitarian ideas when we look more closely at some ethical models of excellence in Part 2.
Testing Spirit-Ideas
Naturally, with the growth of more liberal psychological ideas like experimental testing, and equal democratic rights, came the idea of testing spirit-ideas too. One result was the new word ‘agnostic’, created in 1869 by the English biologist Thomas Huxley. It helped define the new liberal skepticism growing about all conservative spirit-ideas.
In fact, such skeptical feelings of not knowing something had been felt instinctively by a few even in the ancient world. For example, Hinduism has a long tradition of skepticism about some ideas. In the 400s BCE a man named Sanjaya Belatthaputta had evidently been testing his idea of an afterlife for humans; eventually he openly admitted he had no such knowledge. Also, in the Hindu Rig Veda Nasadiya Sukta admits he too has no knowledge of the universe’s origins; about that idea he was agnostic. Also, liberal Greek sophists were even more specific. Protagoras, for example, openly admitted he was agnostic about knowledge of the gods; the shortness of life and the question’s difficulty prevented it. Evidently he too had been testing his knowledge about the subject, and freely admitted he didn’t know anything about them. All he saw were many different ideas about them.
Then, early in our modern experimental era skeptics like David Hume, critical philosophers like Immanuel Kant, and even Christian existentialists like Soren Kierkegaard admitted the existence of such spirit-objects could not be proved with reason alone. For Kierkegaard only a so-called personally existential ‘leap of faith’ could settle the question for that person! We’ll talk later about faith as a reliable test for such spirit-ideas.
Shortly after Kierkegaard died in 1855, Huxley created the word ‘agnostic’; it’s a combination of 2 Greek words, ‘a’ meaning no or none, and gnosis meaning knowledge; an agnostic is one who has no knowledge about something, mainly because it almost certainly can’t be objectively tested. About the creation of the word Huxley wrote this: “So I … invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of ‘agnostic.’ It came into my head as … antithetic to the ‘gnostic’ of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. … To my great satisfaction the term took.” In short, only after the US civil War ended did an agnostic feeling become a conscious idea; it was created in part to help people admit they really didn’t know about any spirit-object.
To help see why the agnostic idea was created we can run a little logical test here and now. If we merely assume spirit-objects exist, then we can reason about how to learn about them; we can test the idea’s logic. One argument might run like this: IF spirit-objects are defined as completely immaterial and non-physical objects, then to make their presence felt in our material world they must become material themselves. If not, they couldn’t move anything in the natural world, and thus remain unknown. So even if they existed they wouldn’t be able to prove spirit-objects exist! They would need to become material objects in some way, and thus would be no help in proving spirit-objects exist. Also, if spirit-objects are completely non-physical, then, almost certainly, there could be no physical test to show they exist; they wouldn’t be able to produce any physical results! I leave it to the reader to think about such logical tests further. The point is, only very recently have people dared to use such testing on all conservative spirit-ideas, and begun helping liberate people from acting intolerantly to those who don’t accept such ideas.
Even many decades before Huxley created the word agnostic, many conservative spirit-ideas were being tested and found unreliable. For example, soon after the building of ships capable of sailing around the world in the 1500s, the biblical idea of Noah’s Flood was tested; it was said to be an earth-wide event and also said to be god’s eternal Truth. However, the more Christian missionaries sailed to China in the 1600s, and saw how their histories showed no evidence of such a flood, the more such ideas could no longer be accepted as absolute Truth. There was no evidence the Chinese had somehow learned to write and breathe under water for 40 days and 40 nights!
Other results of Christian spirit-ideas, however, produced more positive social results. For example, such ideas helped reconstruct destructive and brutal Viking habits after 1,000 CE, and many Native Americans stopped practicing human sacrifice. In both those cases such actions helped increase the habit of testing their own spirit-ideas, and thus help make them a little more respectful, humble, humane, and less superstitious, even if they were just small improvements.
Even the early Islamic world widely celebrated experimental testing habits. Even as Islamic armies were conquering Arab and Persian peoples in the 600s, experimental testing habits were fairly strong in places of scholarship like Bagdad, North Africa, and Islamic Spain; after the Crusades, however, a conservative Islamic reaction soon set in and religious habits of obedience became more powerful.
Again, the widespread democratic and conscious use of experimental testing are still relatively new habit-arts, and so still not practiced very widely; schools around the world still teach mentally naïve children such objects exist; many even believe they’ll go straight to heaven if they die for a religious cause. Such is the power of education. Only after 1600, when people like Francis Bacon began telling people what life might become with the help of tested ideas, more and more intelligent people saw how right he was. Even a century before Bacon people like Leonardo Da Vinci felt only tested ideas and habits should be considered as our best and most excellent knowledge. As a result, Western civilization's medieval 'cocoon' of conservative ideas slowly began breaking apart, giving birth to a new learning art – experimental testing. With the help of new tools like the microscope and thermometer, and real experimental knowledge of how our bodies actually work, the new knowledge began transforming life as never before. However, Bacon’s liberal challenge still confronts us – how can be best keep the economic and technological results of science from being concentrated in the hands of a few, rather than used to make everyone life more satisfying?
One more example of how valuable such testing arts are can be seen in Chinese history. Thousands of years ago, around the time Augustus became emperor of the Roman Empire and Jesus was learning how to be a carpenter, some very creative and inventive people in China looked around their little corner of the world and saw a widespread health problem -- smallpox. Eventually their creative thinking helped form a plan and then test it. What if we took the material from just one pock infection, dried it out, and then put it into someone’s body? Would it keep them from getting infected? Interesting idea, and so the testing began, and the more it was tested the more reliable it became. Even today the flu shots many get contain part of what could make them sick! In short, the idea helped millions of Chinese avoid that terrible disease and stay much healthier than local shamans could ever make them. Eventually, many centuries later, Europeans began testing the idea too. So it should now be clear; restricting voluntary experimental testing to solve any real social or personal problem is, in effect, to restrict not only knowledge itself, but progress as well! Outlawed marijuana became medically useful to AIDS and cancer patients only after it was tested!
Eventually, such testing arts even began improving religious education in the 1800s; the Church, which had once taught people the Bible was all anyone needs to know, began teaching science and modern medicine in its schools. Thus, billions of religious people today are now living longer and better lives thanks to modern science and its naturalistic testing arts. They've made it much easier to keep satisfying peoples' food, health, and security needs, even though wealth and political power is still much too concentrated in the hands of a few. In any case, however, old conservative spirit-ideas have become less powerful; the local exorcist is rapidly becoming an endangered species.
Psychological Ideals of Economic Excellence
Liberals are now asking another idea be tested, namely, the economic idea of sharing science’s useful inventions with others, rather than demanding more and more money for them. Since the US Civil War an economic aristocracy has been growing stronger, more feudalistic, and less democratic by the day! As we’ll see in Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence, the Industrial Revolution also helped create economic science. Since Adam Smith published his famous book The Wealth of Nations in 1776, economics too has slowly but steadily become divided along conservative and liberal lines. Again, money is helping divide society once again, just a religious ideas and land ownership did in medieval times. Today, conservatives are interested mainly in their own personal profits and wealth, while democratic liberals like Dewey focused on using such collective wealth to make life more satisfying and less stressful for everyone.
What’s more, conservatives often seem to ignore the objective results of their ideas, and thus ignore experimental testing altogether. For many of them, healthy debate about objective results has often been reduced to propaganda; keep telling people the same idea over and over again and pretty soon they’ll believe it’s true! Even in the early days of economic science pessimists like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus kept telling people we’re all doomed; they said we’ll never be able to feed our rapidly growing populations and many will start starving to death. Such propaganda helped others label economics as ‘the dark science.’ They painted a rather gloomy picture of the future.
Luckily, however, such ideas became a challenge to creative thinking, and with the invention and testing of chemical fertilizers and new kinds of foods, such ideas have so far proved not very accurate; who knows what the future holds, however? Even today conservative economists keep telling us disaster is just around the corner; to some of them testing ideas has merely helped confuse people, rather than clarify them. No doubt, many people still don’t have enough good food to eat, but in the meantime birth-control habits are being tested and many have proved useful, as has allowing more women into the business world given many an alternative to merely producing more babies. In short, what did economists like Ricardo and Malthus know about discovering creatively new agricultural arts, or the women's liberation movement, or birth control? Population in Russia and Japan is even declining, and leveling off in other places too. So again, what do people really know about their ideas until they’re actually tested for their results? Only those results can prove any idea reliable and useful. That's how powerful experimental testing is. What conservatives and liberals debate today are the meanings of objective results. No doubt, Ricardo and Malthus were right to point out nature does have limits for we humans; what life form doesn’t have its limits, even for mooching relatives? But until they’re tested who knows where they are?
So, if Dewey’s right about experimental testing – that it’s our only learning art -- then it seems never in the last 2 million years has mankind been in a better position to more confidently keep improving both people and our world. In fact, Dewey himself practiced Christian spirit-ideas for about 30 years before he began testing them for their truthfulness. For him their personal and social results became not only weak and distracting, but because they couldn’t be verified they also kept psychic life narrow and routine.
For us Deweyan liberals, experimental testing habit-arts have already begun helping millions of people build a more robust, constructive, thoughtful, independent, and enjoyable life. After all, if we don’t keep testing our self to build the feelings for more psychologically excellent habit-arts, then it’ll be that much more difficult to act excellently and pass the social tests others give us. What’s more, we Deweyan liberals confidently say to keep growing such habit-arts, our overly conservative public schools need to become more liberalized and useful to their students! If we’re to improve many of our social problems, like crime, unemployment, and racial discrimination, we need to keep experimenting with more liberal educational ideas, rather than merely keep our schools teaching all but useless academic trivia to all students! We need to stop practicing the Romantic educational ideal of teaching all students the same facts, and start experimenting with teaching students the useful skills they want to learn! In short, we need to democratize our public schools, rather than keep them dictatorial and undemocratic. If someone wants to learn more about, say, ‘Shakespeare,’ then they should be free to do so, but to make all students study what most of them have little desire to learn only creates discipline problems, psychic boredom, and perpetuates the feudalistic habits of obedience to the status quo. In any healthy democratic society those are all unhealthful habits.
In short, all our public schools can and should be tested for their actual results, just like all people can be tested for their actions. Since when is any public institution beyond criticism? What social results and personal habits are public schools actually producing? Are our schools preparing children merely to read more books, or help them learn practical skills useful in the real world? Why shouldn’t more young folks, especially in our inner city schools, began feeling what excellent liberal psychological habits are like, and also be encouraged to keep strengthening them once they're out of school? The more they don't learn such skills, the more vulnerable they become to restricting their own freedom as well as become a burden to all honest taxpayers! Why, for example, shouldn’t more students learn how to test the idea of a just law, respect those that are just, and change those that aren’t?
No doubt, many children still don't have such testing arts, but that doesn’t mean they can’t start learning how they feel. The more our public schools teach such skills, the sooner they’ll be learned. If so, our schools will become even more useful institutions than they are now, and help people keep emerging psychologically from any old, blindly routine, dangerous, and harmful habit-arts. The more such intelligent liberal habit-arts are ignored, the more difficult it becomes for anyone to make life all it can be. Testing more liberal educational ideas in our public schools would thus help more young folks build a survival kit of useful habit-arts, like testing ideas and actions, as well as help keep improving both our democratic and ethical ideals too. How much of a testing artist are you, I mean besides for cheesecake, armed robbery, embezzlement, drug dependency, welfare fraud, and bilking the public out of as much money as possible?
9. FROM ACADEMIC FACTS TO ORGANIC ART
In this section I first talk about the organic art of improving my own unhealthful eating habits. I’ve mentioned that art many times already, so if you're feeling nauseous about it, don't worry; why not take a break and have some nice healthy vegetarian pizza and non-fat yogurt? In truth, seeing examples of real psychological improvement helps make that art much more alive, human, and meaningful. After that, then there’s a little more information about an intelligent improvement process, and also the importance of excellent social habits too. So, if you want a little more encouragement for improving a bad habit, why not read this section, and if not skip it? In any case, here’s yet another luxuriously lame limerick to clarify all these ideas.
There once was a man who learned to freeze burgers.
But fixing them to taste created sleaze burgers.
So when as big as a whale,
And breaking scale after scale,
He decided to quit eating triple avocado cheeseburgers.
Actively improving our few character weaknesses with intelligent practice is another fine example of the difference between conservative and liberal models of human nature. The ancient conservative model painted by Plato and Christianity was internally divisive, mystical, and negative while making little logical sense. Plato, for example, believed the gods controlled everything, and yet he set up an educational system to psychologically train the next generation of political leaders. Early Christianity too inherited the same general logical weakness. For them god was all-knowing, and so knew everything everyone would do. At the same time, however, it set up schools to actively teach young folks their ideas and rituals. If Christianity or any similar conservative system was really the absolute Truth about life and nature, then why wouldn’t everyone naturally learn about it, just as everyone learns about gravity? In reality, however, life showed a great deal more variety about such ideas!
For Plato, courageous actions would help strengthen our faculty of will-power, even though the gods controlled all expressions of courage. And for Christians improving any habit also meant exercising an already existing will-power about learning already existing forms of excellence. Obedience to god’s will thus became psychological excellence. At the same time, however, all actions were controlled by god’s plan; thus god knew everything, past, present, and future, thus making ideas like free-will almost impossible to accept. In any case, on a daily practical level controlling one's will was serious business. For Christians, devils kept tempting people to sin against god’s already existing law, even though an all good god had created those spirits knowing full well they would rebel and bring others to their fire kingdom below the earth. All such knowledge was supposedly known by god even before the universe was created, thus ultimately making all of us mere puppets of god, and fulfilling our pre-ordained destinies! For Christianity’s greatest ancient philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, people could resist evil temptations only with the help of divine grace, thus passively praying became a method of improving rebellious habit-arts. As we've begun seeing, however, Dewey's modern Behavioral model of psychological excellence is free from all such internally illogical, inconsistent, and confusing ideas. How can an all-good god knowingly create anything less than good, or even something it knew would become evil? Dewey’s Behavioral models of psychological excellent would thus focus on future healthful results as the best way to start improving any weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-art.
What’s more, for Dewey our will-power grows only with the actions we practice and the habits we learn. In short, there's no objective evidence for a separate mental faculty of will-power; human nature is all organic and holistic. The more we practice, say, acting courageously, the stronger our courageous will-power becomes. And to make that learning process more intelligent, the more we enjoy our practice, the faster we learn a new habit. For Dewey will-power is not separate and distinct from any other habit-art; they're all organic habits. The more habits we grow the more will-power we have. In any case, however, improvement always depends on our own active practice, and the more we teach our self to playfully enjoy that practice, the easier it is to keep practicing and better control of our growth.
For religious conservatives, however, improvement was often felt as an eternal struggle between good and evil, rather than as a playful and enjoyable learning process. Liberals, on the other hand, like to ask why should we keep telling our self we’re evil and sinful just because we don't obey someone else’s ideas, or even allow others to yell at us? What's important for learning any new habit is encouraging feelings and actions; they help us feel more confidence about learning a better skill, like how to enjoy life without harmful drugs, excessive alcohol, or any other harmful object. Such feelings and actions are easy for those who've learned to relax and liberate themselves from negative and pessimistic kinds of thinking and talking.
Well, a conservative might ask, if ideas about psychological excellence don’t come from a spirit-object, then where do they come from? For Dewey such ideas are defined biologically of course! Constructive growth is psychologically excellent! If an action or habit-art promotes constructive kinds of growth, then it BECOMES a value and a good! Learning to help others is another logical idea growing from that idea; it becomes another value if it works. After all, we’re all just people living in a social world, right? In fact, for many today, including many in Hollywood, helping others has become the highest good! Then, after deciding which idea to test, we can act on the idea. What constructive results are we feeling and encouraging? After all, we’re all a part of nature, and so learning how to more intelligently KEEP satisfying our needs and wants becomes a sign of liberal excellence.
Being responsible for our actions is another result of such thinking. The more we practice feeling the results of our improvement actions, the more our feelings of personal responsibility grow. We’re responsible for the direct results our actions create. So, like modern existential philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and his friend Simone de Beauvoir, we Deweyan liberals too celebrate being personally responsible for our own actions! Sometimes they produce excellent results, and sometimes not, but in either case we are the ones responsible for them and their results. If we keep eating sleazy cheeseburgers, for example, then we’re responsible for their harmful results. No doubt, the more those feelings grow, the easier it becomes to feel how important our own daily choices and actions really are.
Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Cow Kabob, or How I Lost My Butt?
Recently, over the past 30 or 40 years, more and more people in the US have been challenged to build more intelligent diet habits. As economic pressures continue rising for most everyone, obesity is becoming a more serious problem for both adults and young folks in the US.
My mother was taught to be a good cook, but most of the foods she fixed were full of unneeded calories, like many fast food restaurants today. Like her mother before her, she too was perhaps 50 or 60 pounds overweight for most of her life. And so naturally she passed such eating habits on to her children; excessively sugary, fatty, and salty foods were a normal part of my diet well into my 20s. Luckily, however, before I was 30 I happened to read a very interesting diet book written by an African American. One of America's great social activists, Dick Gregory, helped write a book called Cookin' With Mother Nature: A Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat. It helped deepen and connect many of the isolated academic facts I learned from biology, and thus make them more meaningful to me. It began giving me some new food options to experiment with to improve my own unhealthful diet habits. So far the results have been positive -- knock wood! In many ways I still feel as healthy as I felt at 16, and I’m 68 now! With the book's help I began connecting some isolated facts about anatomy, evolution, and even fasting into a larger picture of what diet excellence could mean. Intelligent fasting too was talked about as a great way to help get rid of toxic materials my normal diet was creating, like so-called ‘free radicals’, and of course excessive fat. Such ‘radicals’ are often oxygen atoms missing some of their electrons, and thus making them destructive in my body. I was fascinated.
Like most every other ignorant kid I had simply accepted the foods my mother cooked without questioning their long term healthfulness, and so those eating habits had become a routine will power over 20 years, rather than learning about more healthful foods. Mom was a very accomplished cook, but I began seeing some of the possible dangerous personal results of many foods I had learned to routinely eat, like all the many animal meats, sugars, and oils mom cooked. Reading Mr. Gregory's book was thus a kind of diet revelation. Like most high school sophomores -- the word means wise food, by the way -- I had redd my biology book and learned the human intestine was about 6 times longer than the body, but I never asked why that was. Why had such a long intestine evolved over the last 70 million years in our primate ancestors and yet hadn’t evolved in, say, carnivorous animals like lions and tigers? Why were their intestines much shorter, like only about 2 times as long as their bodies? To my delight Mr. Gregory’s book answered such questions.
It turns out about 70 million years ago our early primate ancestors, like lemurs, ate mostly vegetables, seeds, nuts, and fruits, with an occasional side of ants or beetles. As a result, over time those who had longer intestines could absorb more energy from their foods, live longer lives, and thus produce more children. In short, their eating habits encouraged those with longer intestines to keep living longer.
Meanwhile, on the other side of diet-town, the opposite happened to meat-eating animals like lions and leopards. Every few days they feasted on raw animal meat, like gazelle and water buffalo-kabobs. But as a result their intestines didn't grow as long as ours. Why was that? I had studied chemistry in high school too but again it was always academic book chemistry, useful only for the next test or experiment, and hence much of it neglected how such ideas could be used in real life. In short, I hadn't studied much diet chemistry, but again, Mr. Gregory's book again helped me expand such knowledge. What was it about dead animal food that caused lions and tigers to have short intestines, while vegetable-based primates like us evolve longer intestines? For that we can use our imagination and picture ourselves inside one animal cell just after the animal has been killed.
What happens inside the cell? Strange as it may seem, the life-activity keeps working as if nothing has happened; the chemical keep reacting with each other, and so continue living for hours after the animal’s died. However, the normal cell-cleaning blood is no long circulating, and so the cell’s normal toxic waste products remains in billions of its cells, thus making it’s flesh much more toxic than the fresh plants, fruits, seeds, and nuts primates were eating while living in their tree tops. Simply because the animal’s heart is no longer working, the blood is no longer taking all those poisonous toxic materials away from the cells and to be eliminated. Thus animal food is normally much more toxic and dangerous than plant foods, and so those meat-eating animals with shorter intestines would get rid of those toxins much sooner, stay healthier longer, and reproduce more often. Such is the pragmatic natural selection process of intestine length. What’s more, when our native ancestors began cooking animal foods some 500,000 years ago, it often became more toxic! In fact, cooking often produces more toxins than animal flesh normally has, especially if it’s fried in fat.
Needless to say I was stunned after reading such things. I don’t recall any public school class I took where diet was the main subject. Later I came to see why that’s probably the case. Cattle, pig, chicken, sheep, and fish sellers were making billions of dollars each year with such products, so they would have had many economic reasons to see such knowledge wasn’t being taught in our schools. In fact, school cafeterias were big users of their animals and they no doubt wanted that status quo to continue, even though their products weren’t as healthy as other kinds of foods. It’s merely another result of a capitalist economy based on profits, rather than human health.
So, if Mr. Gregory was right, then even by 25 I had been poisoning myself for decades already! Needless to say that scared the hell out of me. As a result, almost immediately I started experimenting with my diet habit and not eating almost all animal foods. Non-fat yogurt was one exception; it's got useful bacteria to help make food absorption even better, and calcium too; in fact, sesame seed milk has more calcium and is far better than cow’s milk! In short, almost overnight I felt almost all animal foods were not only not excellent, but were really harmful to me, and that included fish and chicken-kabobs as well! After stuffing my mouth with such food for almost 3 decades I was already beginning to feel overweight and sluggish.
Such animal-based food was called ‘dead’ food, just because it couldn’t grow more food like itself, while foods like seeds, nuts, and fruit were called ‘live’ foods -- they were capable of growing more food and were thus life-giving. What's more, throw in a few tasty insects and those were the kind of foods our primate ancestors had been eating for the past 70 million years, give or take a Dallas day or two! Thus, for meat-eating animals their habits had selected shorter intestines to be more useful than primates. Was it possible my biology textbook writers didn't talk about such ideas because they might hurt animal-selling profits? Was it possible children’s health were less important than selling more animal food? Welcome to life in a for-profit capitalist system. Such thoughts still feel a little scary today!
At any rate, I continued experimenting with learning to feel different diet habits, even though it wasn't very scientific. I guess you could call it an 'intuitive' trial-and-error method of learning. I didn't really first make a plan and then test it; I just experimented step by step, first by giving up almost all animal foods, and then even vegetable 'junk' foods, like fried potato chips and then much of the gooey sugar-foods; it took a while to keep ignoring them. Also I learned more about intelligently combining vegetable foods for better nutrition, like beans and rice or corn, I learned how certain combinations of plant food are more nutritious. ‘Live’ foods like corn and beans, for example, may be more nutritious together than corn or beans alone.
Then about 15 years later, one summer I decided to experiment with fasting, just to help clean my body from as much of the dangerous fats and toxins I already had eaten. Experimenting with a mostly water 22-day fast was quite an experience; I finally lost my baby fat, so to speak, and my much of my butt too.
Again, I followed Mr. Gregory's advice about fasting; like anything else there are intelligent and harmful ways of fasting. First I drank only pure fresh fruit juices for about a week, during which time I lost about 10 pounds; evidently all the excessive salt I had eaten over the years helped me keep about a gallon of extra water in my body. Then, I drank about a gallon of warmed distilled water daily as my body began burning my stored food reserves, took a hot Epsom-salt bath daily, as well as a distilled water enema daily to which I added fresh lemon juice and some honey, to help clean my lower intestine and keep Vitamin C levels up. Obviously my energy level went way down; mainly about all I could do was walk around the block in the evening, but my mental alertness began noticeably increasing! Then, on day 23 I began drinking fresh warmed grape juice for about another week before I went back to whole foods. Needless to say the grape juice tasted wonderfully, and I still remember how sparkling that first salad tasted, how nice it was to be about 30 pounds lighter, and how much more energy I had. It was indeed a dietary re-birth.
No doubt, over the years I’d occasionally slide back to my old eating-too-much-junk-food routine, but the more I enjoyed 'live' foods, the easier it was to keep eating them, even with some moderate coffee and tea drinks. Did it work? Did I get any objective scientific evidence I was in fact healthier? Well, at one recent medical check-up the doctor said I had the blood of a 30 year old, and I was in my early 60s at the time; the only bad part was he didn't say a 30 year old what; a 30 year old dog would not have been good news.
These days when I walk through a supermarket, or read a restaurant menu, I'm often amazed at how unaware people seem about more excellent foods; hopefully the few vegan and vegetarian restaurants I’ve seen will keep growing. Nutritious 'live' foods are very available even in supermarkets, and yet many people just haven't taught themselves to enjoy them and all the good results they can produce. Again, sesame seeds have more calcium than milk and great Vitamin E, and yet many still ignore them; pistachio nuts too are very nutritious. No doubt, old habits are propulsive until they’re actively changed with different actions. Even in ancient Greece the liberal experimental doctor Hippocrates noticed how food is the best medicine.
Over many millions of years, human bodies have evolved to eat mostly plant foods, rather than animal foods; it’s why our intestines are so much longer than our bodies. That certainly makes some sense. After all, it was practically impossible for our small monkey ancestors to haul a hippopotamus up a tree for hippo-kabobs. In other words, in human evolution the habit-art of eating meat is really a fairly recent one; what's 2 million years of occasional meat-eating compared to 70 million years of vegetable eating, I mean besides about 7%? As a result, most everyone just isn't biologically built for all the meat being eaten in the so-called 1st world; in the poorer 3rd world people still eat mostly vegetable foods and so don't have many cancers and other health and dental problems. Many people eat much more than 3 oz. of meat a day which is said to be a healthy upper limit.
Strange as it may seem, even Old Testament Jews intuitively sensed the benefits of eating such 'live' foods, like sprouted seeds and nuts; they wrote about making bread from sprouted seeds. Eventually I too began increasing respect for my own biology and taught myself to enjoy such food more often; wheat germ too has become a daily part of my diet. Eating far too much animal food on a daily basis, along with too much salt and sugar, also helps explain why deadly bowel cancers and dangerous brain strokes have been increasing since the 1950s. At that time industrial food producers geared up to feeding soldiers continued removing much of the healthy roughage from 'live' and natural foods, like wheat and rice bran. As a result, if became easier to absorb more dangerous oil, feed more cancers in the lower intestines, and also clog more arteries, especially those to the heart and brain. No doubt, such research into the very complex human body is on-going, but gradually even refined white sugar lost its usefulness for me; it's bad for both teeth and prostate glands, so I try enjoying other kinds of sweeteners. If artificial sweeteners aren't bad for me, my prostate might stay healthy. Is merely one’s diet largely the reason over 50% of men will get cancer of the prostate? In fact, I'm feeling so confident I may even live another entire week or two, if I'm lucky!
It's amazing, isn't it? Such excellent diet knowledge has only recently become much more available. Only yesterday afternoon, so to speak, has science begun giving us such useful diet facts, and thus providing more healthful diet options, rather than the status quo ones like ignoring our own bodily health. Thousands of years ago Plato, and later Christianity’s founder Paul of Tarsus, said knowing our own bodies was much less important than knowing spirit-objects, or obsessing about sinning against god given rules. Amazingly, people accepted such ideas, even though no one could even prove god existed! For Christians, another negative idea said even babies were sinful just by being born, and no one can live sin-free even for one day! Even if you thought you could you committed the sin of pride! For many thousands of years now such conservative religious psychological habits simply kept peoples’ attention focused on other things besides useful and healthful diet habits. As Dewey saw, such ideas helped build a highly negative psychological model of excellence, based on merely obeying conservative ideas rather than experimental testing. Even today, as corporate power has grown over the past 50 years, many continue ignoring more healthful actions so they can sell more cow-kabobs.
Today, liberal Behavioral psychology and experimental testing have already helped liberate millions of people from such conservative models of excellence; they’ve given us more enjoyable ways to keep building more intelligent habits. Thus, today many millions are seeing their bodies not as created and controlled by spirits, but as a result of natural evolution already billions of years old, and how it’s helped shape ourselves and the foods best suited for us. No doubt, many today still don't much like their own body-shape, but feeling on a daily basis it’s evil and sinful only makes life worse than it already might be. Luckily, today we live in a world having many more positive tools for improving our lives than Plato and Paul of Tarsus could even dream about. For us liberals they’re no longer seen as true, but as merely conservative reactions to the problems they saw around them.
Some More Behavioral Excellence
Another idea I like about Dewey's and Sartre's existential philosophy is their emphasis on freedom of choice. The more we choose what we want to learn more about, and then act on our choices, the psychically freer we become. Once people begin feeling they can relax and choose to practice more healthful habits, the stronger freedom of choice grows. No doubt, early in his career Sartre was too extreme with this idea; he insisted on believing everyone is always totally free to do whatever they want. Dewey, however, had a much healthier respect for growth and development; how can a person possibly be free to choose what they know nothing about? How could I choose to start building a more healthful diet unless I first learned about more healthful choices in Mr. Gregory’s book?
In short, our own routine habits always keep our freedom limited and confined, often to the same narrow channels of actions; that's what a habit is. Later in life, however, Sartre became a little psychologically wiser; he too began feeling how routine habits continue restricting and limiting one's freedom. For example, on a practical level he wasn't very free to choose not to smoke unhealthful cigarettes; his habit was too strong. For Dewey, however, the more we playfully experiment with our unhealthful habits, the more options we can feel to improve them with more intelligent actions. After all, doesn't such an organic and growing model of psychological freedom best reflect what actually happens in life?
If so, then we can begin feeling how important it is to start learning the art of intelligent self-education. How many people today don’t know how to playfully begin feeling the new habit they want to grow? How many people still don't know how to playfully feel a better habit even for a short time, as well as how to gradually keep increasing the time it’s practiced? For example, how many are bored and unsatisfied with their routine sex habits and yet don’t know about options for experimentally improving them, even though books and video stores are now jammed with such information?
No doubt, many may feel such ways of habit-improvement are too mechanical as a model for psychological excellence; in fact, however, it's a genuine organic art! Such playful work involves not only the process of choosing and planning to build a better habit, but also the organic growing of new knowledge and skills! In short, Behavioral improvement is a holistic art; it’s an organic art we create with our actions! Working joyfully to better grow more helpful feelings and ignore harmful ones is as much a work of art as any painting and sculpture. In short, as Dewey might say, it’s important to notice how any new habit-art esthetically feels; does it feel enjoyable and pleasant, or frustrating and limiting, and if so how can it be made more enjoyable? All feelings are a form of esthetic experience; they all involve our entire body and its senses! It’s yet another idea of Dewey’s model of psychological excellence!
Where To Begin?
No doubt, the toughest habit-art to consciously start improving may be the first one. Why? The whole consciously esthetic feel of the learning process is almost non-existent and therefore weak; most of us like to keep feeling our old routine habits, even though they may not be satisfying any more. As I learned, my diet habits were the strongest and most routine of all; their will-power was strong. As a result, any kind of real improvement took some time to build new feelings, sometimes years! In fact, it took Mr. Gregory about 7 years to build his fruitarian habit of eating 'live' foods. No doubt, for many that may be the bad news, but it becomes good news when we use such knowledge to help grow any new habit slowly and carefully; each meal can become much more important when enjoyably building a more healthful diet habit. In any case, however, everyone's diet habit is just that -- a habit; it’s not determined by anything except our own actions, and so can be improved with the help of enjoyably feeling the results of different actions. That's modern Behavioral psychology's hopeful model for improving any habit one chooses to improve; any habit can produce better results by enjoying more intelligent actions. After all, if it's worth intelligently improving it's worth enjoying; if I can build a more healthful diet habit, then most anyone can!
Here’s an idea that might be useful: you might start learning an improvement process with just one habit before you try tackling any strong habits, like diet, exercise, money, and sex. Maybe you can teach yourself to, say, floss you teeth every night before bedtime, unless of course you’re a sex worker and would floss every hour or so? It’s yet another weak attempt at philosophic humor, but you can see my point.
At first you could say my own diet experiments were intuitive, meaning they weren’t very scientific. I just started experimentally testing some of Mr. Gregory’s ideas. I didn't make any set plan and purposely enjoy the learning process with rewards or 'baby-steps'; I was still psychologically immature in that way. Maybe a better name for my own diet experiments would be hit-or-miss, like most everyone else on earth had been doing for thousands of years. But on the plus side, I also didn't put a lot of pressure on myself to change quickly; I had no timetable for learning better diet arts, except to almost completely stop eating dead animal foods as soon as possible.
Most of our native ancestors, for example, had different arts of improvement. When medical knowledge, for example, was almost non-existent, native peoples used to help others get well with 'trial and error' magical arts of singing, dancing, or maybe driving evil spirits away; sometimes they'd also experiment with certain plants for medicine. Even if someone’s health didn’t improve, however, they still felt the excellent art of helpfulness -- what Confucius called the excellence of jen. And later in ancient times many religious people also continued praying for help to improve someone's health and actions.
Today, however, I've become a little more intelligent about ways of building a better habit, and making the process more enjoyable and scientific. For one thing I’ve kept learning more about biology and health; expert and reliable information is another big motivator to begin experimenting. For example, when I saw a picture of a diseased smoker's lung it made it much easier to stay away from smoking. In short, improving even strong and powerful habit-arts like diet and exercise has become like learning a new athletic skill; they both involve enjoying intelligent muscular practice for short time periods, and then practicing them daily. What, we Deweyan liberals ask, about such ideas isn’t just common sense? Even Yogic meditation and silent mystic contemplation have a tremendously complex muscular structure, as do Islam's mystic Whirling Dervishes; they’re all muscular arts, much like baseball or tennis!
Often intelligent planning can help start the learning process, especially for those who like a set structure. Some people feel more comfortable with making a little plan that feels right for them – practice at certain set times, and not at others. Whether you do or not, the most important thing is to enjoy those practice times and feel comfortable with them. If, say, you're working on building a more healthful diet habit, some people might enjoy starting with only one or two more healthful breakfasts a week. Others may feel comfortable with improving all their breakfasts at once, and others still may feel really confident, respect our 70 million year old plant-food based evolution, and want all their meals to be just like our primate ancestors, except for maybe the insect part of it, unless they could find chocolate covered ants and beetles. I don’t want to burst any bubbles here, but to me insects are just not that appetizing, chocolate covered or not, so I continue brushing all flies away from my mango and papaya ‘kabobs’.
Again, a good question for first time planners might be: what would be easiest and most enjoyable for me to start improving? That might be the best place to start improving any habit. In any case, however, if you’re not enjoying your plan, don’t be afraid to experimentally change it; after all it was only a learning experiment in the first place. Creating a new plan certainly doesn't mean you failed, but rather that you learned something about yourself. So, instead of yelling at yourself or telling yourself you’ll never learn a better habit, just make your plan more enjoyable. Negative actions like yelling at yourself are often the result of those who raised you; in fact, a lack of confidence makes any improvement almost impossible. After that, what’s important is to keep enjoying our new habit, even if it's only for a few minutes. With practice those feelings will become forceful and propulsive themselves – even instinctive. Such feelings are what an improved habit feels like on the inside. And when you start really enjoying say, more healthful breakfasts, and when you're savoring every bite of fresh ripe papaya or cantaloupe, then it's probably time to start tackling unhealthful lunches! Some people start by eating only fruit until lunch.
Building Positive Surroundings
Again, this too is an important part of Behavioral psychology, and shows us how important a positive environment is for learning any new habit-art. Imagine how musically weak even Mozart would have been in a music-poor environment. In short, take the time to build a supportive environment, rather than a critical and unsupportive one. The more unsupportive the world around us is, the more difficult learning becomes. So, listening to and reading ads telling us to keep eating alligator kabobs at our neighborhood deep fryer, or all those fatty and sugary bakery goods, apply named ‘goo’, makes it more difficult to build a more healthful eating habit, and one free of harmful foods? Recent research is showing refined white sugar is definitely not a healthful food to eat on a regular basis. For example, it, and its more potent cousin alcohol, helps increase testosterone; in teens it can thus enlarge skin pores resulting in acne infections. In adults it can damage one’s liver, and in elder males can help increase prostate size.
Behavioral psychologists call such information ‘cues,’ while sugar refiners call them profit-makers. What's a cue? Cues are those esthetic sights and sounds out there we're already conditioned to respond to. How many times did you order a pizza after seeing a pizza commercial? Even pet dogs and cats respond to the cue of an electric can opener; they’ve learned to link that sound-cue with more food. Babies too are soon conditioned by a mother's voice-cue to expect more food. And of course teens and adults too get many food cues from TV commercials, for foods like teeth-dissolving sodas, artery-clogging cow-kabobs and blood pressure increasing salty potato chips. So the more we see cues out there for practicing an unhealthful habit, the more difficult it becomes to learn a better eating habit. Are you cued up yet?
Cues can thus increase impulsive actions – actions we take without really thinking about their harmful results. Such cues help create impulsive actions to eat, say, more fried chicken or fatty muffins, or to have yet another cigarette or beer? Such body-wide impulses are the will-power energies of our routine habits, so intelligent people will learn to feel such impulses and then relax. The word impulse, however, is not very accurate. It implies merely a mental event, when in reality an impulse is a body-wide muscular tenseness to do something. So, again, learning to relax such tenseness helps us become freer of our old impulsive energies. A better phrase might be body-impulse. In any case, learning a new habit-art is often made easier by learning to relax our old impulsive habit energies when we see cues for them. Laughing too is another way to respond to such cues. Both actions make it easier to continue building a better habit-art.
Conservative religious folks have often described such impulses as temptations to sin, but for us Deweyan liberals that idea is no longer seen as excellent. Like every other idea, sin too is a human invention; it was useful for religious leaders. Without the idea of sin there would be no reason to practice spirit-habits.
In any case, however, don't be afraid to recognize cures prompting old impulsive energies. Before breakfast, for example, why not get some more supportive cues from a neighborhood library book about health, showing diseased smokers' lungs, overweight beer drinkers, or diabetic people? Reading about what harmful foods do to your body will also provide more helpful cures when building a more healthful habit-art; it’s simply part of the art of intelligently learning a new habit-art. After all, even just feeling how one bowel cancer operation can really ruin your whole day can be a helpful cue. And if you really want to see a scary cue, then why tape to your fridge the medical bill from one heart-bypass operation, or from one bowel-resection? Who knows? It might even work for junk-food addicted teens, but I’m not guaranteeing that.
There is also what’s called negative conditioning, like eating foods that make one sick. Alcohol worked that way for me, so I gave up drinking it. Or you can even try the ‘Zen approach’ -- simply close your eyes, breathe deeply, and relax whenever you feel such unhealthful impulses. The more one can relax, the faster body-impulses vanish, making it easier to imagine what life-giving foods you'd like to have, like some delicious grapes or fresh oranges. Why is my mouth watering already? Encouraging friends too can be an important part of a positive environment. They’re especially useful for helping us think of other things besides deep-fried ox tails, calves brains, or octopus tentacles! True friends hug us and remind us not to eat any of them, unless of course one has no other food available. All those actions can help create new cues for building a more healthful habit-art. Low-grade nausea can be a good learning tool.
There are also negative conditioning tricks as well. They’re designed to give people a little controlled pain when old impulses keep firing. For example, sometimes putting a nice-sized rubber band on your wrist and snapping it smartly every time you get a harmful impulse to, say, have another cigarette or cow-kabob might be another useful learning tool. Such self-controlled pain just might help exorcise all those nasty little inner cigarette demons you might be feeling. And what’s more, it'll also help turn your wrist to a much more vibrant shade of red. Be careful, however. Self-mutilation can become an excessive habit-art itself, and in that case it might be best to see a professional therapist; believe it or not, some of them like to spank people too! And believe it or not, there are definite limits to how many times can you bang your head against a concrete wall and still live. On the plus side, however, it might help surgeons send their kids to better schools! Like Saturday night at a brothel, college tuition too keeps going up and up, right? What better motivation should anyone need to build a self-love habit?
Creating a step-by-step plan for improving a habit helps us look FORWARD to feeling the results, and, again, those future results are the best objects of knowledge. If those results aren't enjoyably constructive, then it’s time to create a different plan. In fact, there are an infinite amount of enjoyable meanings in everyone’s actions, and so the more we practice feeling them, the more meaningful our life becomes. What else is new? Much the same thing happens to engineers. They too enjoy imagining what new future machines might be built, make a plan for building them, test their plans here-and-now, and sometimes even take tax money when they fail.
Granted, such scientific planning ideas might not sound very exciting and useful, but they in fact help bring subconscious feelings to a more conscious level of awareness. The more that happens, the larger our consciousness grows. Sadly, however, our public schools generally keep ignoring formally teaching anything about feeling such intelligent learning tricks, and feelings are in fact half of human mental life, the other half being ideas. So, building a little plan of improvement helps focus our attention on our feelings, thus helping balance the idea half of consciousness, and helping create a more stable mental health. In fact, our personal feelings are what professional therapists help make us more consciously aware of. In short, planning helps make our present actions more intelligent by focusing on feeling the results of our tested ideas.
In all such Behavioral improvement processes we free ourselves from conservative and moderate psychological models like those of Plato, Aristotle, and many religious thinkers too. In them psychological excellence means learning about and conforming to already existing objects, like Spirit-Objects or eternal Forms, and eternal religious truths. Because they merely assumed there already exists such eternal and unchanging objects and Truth, like Goodness, god, the soul, and sin, they ignore testing their ideas for their usefulness, ignore building a more scientific world, and thus merely obey the conservative social status quo. We Deweyan liberals are free to look at better working future results as the best objects of knowledge; the future results of our diet improvements makes life here and now much more enjoyable. If, say, some plants actually make our air more healthful, then that future result is the best thing to know.
In short, just like all artists and scientists, we Deweyan liberals look forward to creating a more excellent habit-art which doesn't yet exist! What’s more, in that forward-looking creative process we all become psychological artists! To STAY FOCUSED ON ACTIVELY DEEPENING THE PRESENT’S MEANINGS is how mere inner philosophic ideas become ever-growing organic art! With every habit we build we act as a psychological artist, and the more conscious we become of their results, the easier it becomes to keep improving them. With a little good ol' creative planning we begin feeling how life could be better, thus re-uniting the feeling and thinking halves of our psyches! To us liberals that is indeed psychological excellence. In short, merely blindly obeying the ideas someone else says are nature’s eternal and unchanging Truth merely keeps us half human at best and less than human at worse! It keeps us separated from feeling what works best for us!
A Skeptic Speaks Up
Those who are more focused on pleasing and pleasuring themselves may have a negative feeling about such liberal ideas of intelligent personal and social growth. It all may sound like too much work, so why bother? What's the use? Quit tempting us to become more consciously intelligent people will you? We all live for just a few short decades anyway, so why not routinely keep doing whatever we've already been conditioned to feel pleasant, and gracefully move on to our inevitable fate? It’s the easiest stress-free way to live life. Why add the uncomfortable stress of building more intelligent habit-arts and helping others? Life is already stressful enough and most people don’t want to improve anyway?
Many pleasure-loving hedonists may feel that way. Smoke as much crack-cocaine as you want, eat as much harmful food as you want, drink as much alcohol as you want, drop as many pills as you want, who cares? The government will pay the bills anyway, and if not we’ll die a few years sooner. If it feels good, then do it. The famous Scottish skeptic philosopher David Hume was one such hedonist, as were some of Athens' second generation Sophists and many Roman Epicureans too. Don’t people all have a right to regularly indulge their own pleasure-habits, even though it helps shorten their lives? Don’t we all have a right to do whatever we want with our bodies?
To a degree that’s no doubt true, but to us Deweyan liberals, such ideas often reflect the weak arts of learning about excellent habit-arts, and all non-human animals have been practicing for billions of years! They help justify our own habits as well as ignore the challenge to make life better for others, not just a few wealthy folks who often inherit billions of dollars and hire consultants to keep earning even more money while our schools keep teaching academic trivia and homeless people keep sleeping on the streets. Such people have a weak sense of social improvement.
Certainly if that's your choice, then so be it. Feel free, as Sartre would say, but in all probability you’ll also be held responsible for your selfish actions. Luckily, however, not everyone is so self-centered, indulgent, and uncaring about others; they are those who had more caring parents who taught them working for a cause and its better social results are important for psychological excellence too. So, to those people who want to enjoy building more humane and people-centered habits all through life, it’s important to know how best to build such habit-arts. They're the people who feel life for everyone is a great gift, want to leave life a little better than they found it, and don't want to merely satisfy their own personal wants and needs. They’ve learned to reach out, like many robust and confident ancient liberal Greeks did, and work to make life better for those who want a better life. To us Deweyan liberals those actions are a sign of psychological excellence.
In short, it’s not only what you achieve that’s most important, but often what you learn in the process of overcoming a few harmful, weak, or excessive habits! In that process of learning to intelligently and enjoyably guide one’s growth is found the best natural goal of life; continuing to learn about constructively healthful habits is sacred to us Deweyan liberals.
Currently one important social challenge is facing all of us, namely how can we lessen the harmful future results of our own carbon-based energy systems, and begin building a more healthful world for everyone, a world where high standards of living keep growing? How is that possible? How can we keep from destroying our own collective achievements and still make life more satisfying for more people.
Global warming is currently threatening the lives of millions of people within just a few short decades unless we teach ourselves to build more intelligent energy using habits. Indeed, if the environmentalists are right, we’re all facing a corporate-made catastrophe of the first rank within a few short decades. The challenge is how to take more carbon out of the atmosphere than we put into it. Even if your personal habits are relatively healthful, most everyone in the advanced countries is being challenged to reduce their carbon input to as low as possible. Such challenges remind us psychological excellence means much more than merely satisfying our personal habits; it also means improving the harmful social results of our actions as well. In any case, for us liberals it’s a sign of psychological health to feel pleasure beyond a personal level, and onto a social level as well! The following licentiously lame limerick states the problem.
Carbon Dave was said to be mad,
Global warming talk made him sad.
While drilling the soil
For yet more oil,
He thought mass extinction really isn’t so bad.
In short, lucky are they who also keep learning HOW to enjoy helping others live a more satisfying life. For those interested in seeing a very, very funny movie about such baby-step-improving, where the patient eventually ends up exposing his psychiatrist’s weaknesses, then I strongly recommend What About Bob? It's one of my all-time favorite movies! How can film art be any better than when it's joyous, entertaining, and educational as well? I wonder … who'll write a book called Habit Excellence for Dummies, I mean besides this dummy?
10. MORE ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY'S PICTURE
To many ancient Greeks 'Know Yourself' was sacred, and thus excellent, wisdom; many believed it came right from the gods themselves. But as Greek philosophy continued growing the question became what exactly is the self and what's the best way to keep learning about wisdom? If the self had any spirit-parts to it, then they would affect what we can learn, and the same if we’re all naturalistic people. So obviously different philosophers defined the self differently, challenging people to choose which picture felt best. Conservatives like spirit-minded Plato said the 'true' self was a spirit-object that continued living after death, moderates like Aristotle said the 'highest' kind of self is immortal and can grasp nature's Absolute Truth about some things, and liberals like Democritus focused on using his time to celebrate naturalistic kinds of habits, writing and helping others feel more secure about themselves and relaxed in their daily lives. This section, then, may help make our thinking about our self a little more intelligent; either that or completely hopeless—you make the choice.
Why bother about such things now? Well again with Dewey's help a genuine psychological revolution has been growing since the late 1800s, and so most people still don't realize they now have an important choice to make. What's more, psychological pictures about what intelligent learning is, as well as intelligent actions, help make psychology THE most understudied USEFUL art on earth! The more we know about how we work best, and teach our self how to keep learning, the more excellent life can become. For example, how can we learn how to keep improving our world unless we learn how to test, say, all those disrespectful, sex-crazed bosses and give them some of their own medicine, so to speak. Now really, what art could be more useful than that? In other words, what could possibly be more useful to us than knowledge about us, and how to keep improving our self?
Psychology is useful not only for helping others, but in that process we too become a little wiser. Everyone has some habit-arts that could be deepened and made more intelligent, and so the excellent learning art of testing ideas experimentally is very useful knowledge. As Francis Bacon once said ‘Knowledge is Power’ and that of course applies to psychological knowledge as well! The more we know about our self and about the limits we have, the more intelligent and self-confident we become to know what's right and respectful for us. What's more, the less we know about our own habit weaknesses, the less power over our self we have and the more vulnerable we remain to all the games being played in civilization today. And so we'll start with a little advertising psychology as a way to begin knowing our self; after that we'll glimpse a little more of psychology’s history, including an idea called ‘faculty’ psychology; and then look at a few more of Dewey’s Behavioral ideas, like how to keep intelligently improving weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits.
How Can Advertisers Psych People?
In our capitalistic world today psychological knowledge is used around the world in advertising on a daily basis. Advertising has become a major selling tool, using even knowledge about how to put ideas into peoples' subconscious mind. How many people still aren't very aware they're being persuaded to buy more stuff they don’t really need? In fact both radio and television were invented as advertising tools, and filling in between the ads with what's called entertainment, so people will be even more ready to watch and listen to the next commercial. It’s like the old joke I turned on some advertising today and a Talk Show broke out! If money makes the world go ‘round', then psychology helps make the money go ‘round'. So obviously the more we know about such psychological ideas, the more we can learn about ourselves, and the more we learn, the more liberated and freer we become to act more intelligently, rather than more impulsively and ignorantly—what was described earlier as being our master rather than our slave! Knowledge of our own habit-arts thus gives us more power over our self! After all, even Skid-Row hustlers use the same selling techniques for their drugs, as do insurance salespeople and politicians.
The psychological ideas behind such advertising often aim at a subconscious level. It's what's called subliminal advertising, and examples can be seen every day. Its aim is simply to connect with our subconscious feelings and thus buy what's being sold. Even politics has become full of such techniques to ensure people will be re-elected, accept another war, or a new social program. In fact such conditioning has been going on for thousands of years. Medieval religious leaders built their churches on a grand scale, with huge colorful stained-glass windows, not only to impress peasants but to also to make people feel their rituals were indeed holy and sacred ideas; the more people went there the more they subconsciously felt spirit-objects existed and were to be worshiped. And of course ancient peoples built temples for the same purposes, Athens’ Parthenon included. Today, however, probably the most powerful kind of subliminal advertising comes from the business world. As our world becomes more of a global ‘flea’ market every day, millions are bombarded with advertising information about what’s for sale, and to help move the merchandize ads are used to link what people want with what’s being sold. Sexy-looking people are probably advertising’s best-selling tools.
What makes people react to certain kinds of advertising and how does it get people to open their wallets and buy more stuff? Advertisers are master psychologists; because they know what kinds of images and words make people act, it's easy to sell them some idea. They make it their business to know about peoples’ wants and desires, fears and habits, and such knowledge makes their work more intelligent; in fact advertising has become both a science and an art. The more psychological knowledge is used the more scientific it is, and the more colorful and entertaining, the more it's an art. To me New York Times’ Sunday ads are often the best example of advertising fine art. They know who they’re appealing to and what such people want.
What makes people react to certain ads and not to others; their habit-arts of course? People often respond to certain kinds of ads because they’re already conditioned to those ideas. People who have a chocolate habit-art are naturally sensitive to chocolate ads. People who fantasize about having sex with sexy-looking partners are ‘naturally’ conditioned to want what's being sold by such people. And how often have people merely seen the words ‘Free’ and ‘Sale’ and then gone into the store simply because all during their childhood they've gotten stuff for free? Daily, such ideas help sell goods and services around the world. However, intelligent people soon learn the more stuff they take for free, the more dangerous life becomes, and that's another reason it's difficult for people to realize they shouldn't keep anything they haven't honestly earned. In the adult world excellence often mean paying for what one gets, one way or another.
Today advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. Billions are paid each year to advertising companies to lure people into stores around the world. Many magazines too are almost wall-to-wall ads. How many times have people bought something merely because they liked the ad, even though they don’t know why they liked it or if they even needed the product? How many times have people responded to an ad merely because some sexy person said you need and want what I’m selling—CALL NOW!? That's what’s called a ‘hard-sell’ tactic. People who respond to them have been conditioned to quickly obey what others tell them to do. Parents often tell kids 'Go to bed now!' and 'Hurry up and eat all your carrots or you’ll be punished!’ So advertisers know some people will respond to such ads, especially if they hear them day after day. Certain people will respond just by yelling to ‘Call now!’ or ‘Act now!’ For years many kids have been conditioned to build such habits. And of course there are also ‘soft-sell’ and humorous ads too, for those whose parents were more educated.
Besides ‘Sale’ the word ‘Free’ is often used. Why? Well many parents don't teach good work habits to their children, and to honestly work for what they want. So naturally many children get the feeling some things are free; they don't need to work for them. And besides, who realizes the price of what’s ‘free’ has already been added to what’s being sold? In that way too advertisers take advantage of peoples’ weak and unintelligent habit-arts. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but for advertisers the unexamined life is easy to sell to. How many millions of people today are hopelessly lost in debt they'll never be able to pay off simply because their habit is simply to keep buying more stuff? Bankruptcy services have become so competitive even they have advertisements.
How can we teach our self, and others, to build more intelligent habit-arts and stronger characters, rather than keep buying more stuff? Questions like that can only be answered experimentally, to see what works best for each person. Sometimes such habits can be better controlled by simply yelling at our self not to do something; sometimes learning to laugh at such ads works too. Another good first step might be to thoughtfully look at the ads we like. They reveal the subconscious psychological feelings and desires our habits have built into us. Once we start becoming more conscious of those subconscious feelings, then it’s much easier to begin relaxing and gaining some control over them.
Looking thoughtfully at such ads can also lead to some interesting questions. Do I really need another genuine imitation drawing of the Lock Ness Monster? Do I really need that 50th pair of shoes, and another matching pair of Easter Bunny socks and underwear? If we know we’re attracted to pretty salespeople, for example, who tell us how much fun it is to have what they're selling, and can make us feel we really need what they've got, then it becomes easier to focus on their art, rather than the stuff they're selling. In such ways psychological self-knowledge can help liberate and make us freer to better fulfill our needs, rather than merely our wants. The more we know about our own habit-arts, and our own subconscious feelings, the easier it is to act more intelligently. In short, learning to 'know our self' can be a great way to start growing our own psychological knowledge and power. How many people never realize they have an entire psychological lab in their own body-mind?
Among his many talents Dewey was an educator, not a business man or a hustler. To him Behavior psychology was best used to keep intelligently improving weak, excessive, and unhealthful character habits, one at a time and one step at a time, and thus keep becoming our master. In his book Human Nature and Conduct he suggests making a playful game of improving such habits. How much fun can we have happily yelling at the TV when a salesperson smiles and tells us to ‘Hurry, call now!’? How about yelling ‘Hurry up, go to hell now’!? Or how about simply turning off the TV's sound when a commercial comes on, then playing with a little healthful exercising? They’re playful ways to keep control of our own environment and make us a little healthier.
Who Likes to Punish Children?
To Dewey such playfulness was just a part of excellent psychology's new picture. Having some fun during ad-time on TV also helps make life itself more fun. And of course playfulness wasn't the only habit worth improving. Raising children too was a very important habit-art for him. His own children helped him see punishments, for example, or threats of punishment, weren’t as psychologically helpful as friendly warmth, rewards, playfulness, and having fun while improving some habit-art. In short he used his psychology to help make everyone a better self-educator and a more humane and kind person. One story I heard about him went like this one night he noticed some water coming from the bathroom where kids were taking a bath; evidently they didn’t turn off the water. So he went into the bathroom and looked around. Soon one of his kids said, ‘Well just don’t stand there John, get the mop!
Playing with our own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts is an active kind of self-therapy. Over a billion years of natural evolution have sculpted we animals to an active lifestyle, and those who ignore such habits can often soon look like their overfed house pets. The results of such a lifestyle are often much better than, say, merely reading or talking about improving our self, like Socrates and Plato recommended. In general the Greeks savored their playfully active lifestyle; exercise was a common part of the day. Anthropology too has shown how playful practice is often the usual way primitive children learn their habit-arts. Native Americans, for example, began actively teaching their children the life-skills useful as adults. Often they started with learning a simple skill, like how to use a bow and arrow, and then gradually increased their knowledge about the art. As a result they slowly built a habit-art survival kit, so to speak. They might learn how to use a bow and arrow before actually building one of their own. So why shouldn’t the same step-by-step art of playful practice still work today to keep improving our own habits, not only with young kids but adult kids as well? Why not have some fun playfully experimenting with some new tools for improving, say, an excessive spending habit; how about wearing a pair of scissors around your neck, and have some fun cutting up all those new credit cards?
A Little Psychological History of Faculties
If you need a little psychological history CALL NOW! And if you don't call anyway!
Not surprisingly different philosophers too have been painting different psychological pictures for thousands of years, and they've become part of our 3 main traditions—liberal, moderate, and conservative. In particular conservative Plato's and moderate Aristotle's have been dominant for many centuries, thanks to Christian philosophers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For Plato improving one’s habits was often seen as merely a quiet and contemplative reasoning problem, rather than an enjoyably active experimental process, and so a reasoning habit became psychologically excellent. Conservative Greek thinkers like Socrates (469?-399 BCE), and his student Plato (427?-347 BCE), pictured the human psyche as having different faculties; they were more or less separate powers. For Plato plants and animals had a nutritive faculty; it helped them live and grow as well as reproduce. Some animals also had a spirited faculty to make them combative and aggressive. But mankind added yet a 3rd faculty no other animal seemed to have—a rational or reasoning faculty. Naturally conservative Plato pictured it as a divine spirit-power; after death it lives on and returns to the Spirit-World to be reborn again. Thus the path for improving a person’s psyche went through their reasoning faculty. Both Socrates and Plato advertised excellent kinds of eternal and unchanging knowledge could be learned simply with our reason; our reasoning faculty alone would help us see nature’s best truth—Spirit-Truth. In fact Plato’s dialogues can be seen as great advertising not only for a dualistic picture of nature, but for a dualistic psychology as well. Both nature and human nature, he said, have natural AND spirit-powers. A faculty of reasoning was seen as a divine part of us, helping people know what nature’s spirit-Truth really is. He believed many of our ideas, like those of shiny cars and almost-naked women, somehow participate with their eternal Ideas in a spirit-realm. In such a realm there existed the Ideal Woman all women try to imitate. Thus, the more we reason about such Spirit-Ideas, the easier it was to act like them. (Is this another place for another thoughtful question? How did he know there were real Spirit-Objects?)
Such a dualistic picture of faculties helped build Western civilization's first conservative psychological picture, and such faculty pictures have been used for thousands of years! The human psyche was almost always pictured as more or less separate faculties like nutrition, reproduction, growth, willful emotions, memory, and of course reasoning. Moderate Aristotle too created his own list of faculties remembering, willing, sensation, active thinking, passive sensing, and so on. A separate faculty of growth made people grow, a spirited faculty made people courageous, and a rational faculty made people great at reasoning and thinking. Hundreds of years later Augustine even pictured god's mind itself as composed of such eternal Faculties, like perfect goodness, mercy, and power. Thus early Christian psychology reflected Platonic ideas, and god's grace became more important than anything else for salvation and becoming eternally happy in heaven. At the time a widespread social problem was life’s uncontrolled pain and misery, and so a Christian psychology was designed to give people hope for a better life. In the 1700s a Scottish school of psychology even created over 20 human faculties, including self-esteem, gratitude, self-preservation, etc.
So given that picture, then what’s psychological excellence? Plato thought if you wanted to make your reasoning excellent and more easily grasp and behold nature's eternal Spirit-Ideas, then you studied mathematics; it was the best art of pure logical reasoning and to him its ideas were real Spirit-Objects. In another realm there existed perfect and unchanging models of a sphere and a cube. What’s more, if you wanted your memory faculty improved you studied history; military habits made your courage faculty excellent, and so on. (Robert M. Goldenson, ed., The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, V.1, 442-443). Even today many still believe it's the best picture to help educate young folks. Needless to say, Dewey and many other liberal psychologists disagreed. As we'll see in Book 5’s Educational Models of Excellence, experiments in the early 1900s showed the word 'faculty' merely names one skill of our organic body-mind rather than a separate power. Playfully learning just about any habit-art makes us better as reasoning. In short, many learning activities we all practice daily can also teach the arts of reasoning, memory, and courage. For example, simply building anything strengthens our reasoning skill, even if it’s only a day-old slice of pizza, while sometimes eating such a meal demands real courage!
For Socrates and Plato psychological excellence depended mainly on proper reasoning; the Greeks were great talkers and those habits increased their feelings for reasoning. For Socrates there seemed to exist some unchanging kinds of knowledge and only they produced the best kinds of virtue, or excellence. What’s more, once your reason really led you to see and behold such Truth, then it automatically caused you to act excellently. For example, once you had really beheld what Courage was, then you would automatically act courageously, no questions asked. So Plato often describes Socrates as showing people how weak their reasoning really was; they weren’t grasping unchanging kinds of Truth. As a result people didn’t really know what Goodness or Courage was simply because they hadn’t reasoned about enough about them. Thus he kept talking with young men to convince them they really didn’t know what goodness or courage was. Otherwise people only knew merely shadow-like ideas, rather than perfect and eternal Truth. When they knew such knowledge, then they would then see how phony many ideas really are, forget about that shiny new chariot and the almost-naked woman selling them, and concentrate on improving their own character habits. And later, when Catholic theologians like Augustine painted their pictures of life they said Church rituals were necessary for eternal and perfect happiness; they made it easier for poor, uneducated people to at least feel such eternal Truth, even if they couldn't reason about them. However, the problem was no one's reasoning seemed able to actually grasp and behold such knowledge, from Plato’s day to our own.
Of course Socrates' war-torn environment also played its part in his use of a reasoning habit. As the brutal and disastrous Peloponnesian War continued wasting young Greek lives, peaceful and gentle Socrates reacted; it seems he tried to help. War was making men less rational, not more rational. So, in between 3 battles he was in he tried helping young Athenian men to think more rationally about what they were doing, rather than just acting impulsively. What really is courage and wisdom, he asked? Is it just obeying the people in power, or is it standing up against such people and refusing to hurt anyone? For Socrates it took some real courage to practice such wisdom; his reasoning told him it was better to be hurt than to hurt someone else! In advertising language those were the idea he tried selling, and by questioning others he experimented with the art. Sadly it didn’t seem to do much good. The war continued wasting lives for almost 30 years, former students acted more brutally than ever, and it no doubt probably made Socrates many democratic enemies. However, when the dust finally settled and peace was declared, a faculty picture of psychological excellence slowly became the classical conservative and moderate picture. We all are born with a number of separate faculties or powers, but because of our material bodies such inborn powers need certain kinds of practice to strengthen them. For Plato we're all born with a divine reasoning faculty and with reasoning practice we can remember what those divine Spirit-Ideas are.
Plato was a dedicated and pious man; many admired and revered him for it; he may have sacrificed to the gods on a daily basis. He wanted to learn all he could about such Ideas and so he needed as much help as he could get. A record of some reasoning experiments is preserved in his dialogues. If Apollo, the god of reasoning and wisdom, helped Socrates become the wisest man in Greece, then perhaps it would help him know nature’s eternal Spirit-Ideas, become truly excellent, and perhaps not have to be born again into our world of pain, sorrow, and misery.
How do we know such Spirit-Ideas really exist? Well don't we all have, say, an inborn idea of equality, and if not then how can we even talk about such ideas when no things in the natural world are equal? Where can we possibly get all our universal ideas from, like woman, equality, and justice if they don't already exist in a spirit-realm? Thus Plato said our divine reasoning faculty can participate with such Spirit-Objects simply because it too is a Spirit-Object! Only contemplative reasoning helps us remember all those Ideas we're born with! No doubt to many his spirit habit-arts were strong, but to others, including Aristotle, Epicurus, and many Sophists they were excessive! It all sounded so logical and reasonable, and yet why couldn’t anyone ever learn what their real natures were? (Is this another place for a thoughtful question? Why can’t the word ‘equal’ merely help us better trade our goods with other people?)
Only recently, only since the 1850s, have the results of Plato’s faculty ideas become much less useful than those of Behavior psychology, even though its practical ideas were felt by ancient Greek liberals. In fact a liberal behavioral picture of psychology was painted by some ancient Sophists while Plato was growing up. Protagoras, for example, was what today would be called a secular humanist and as he traveled around he encouraged his students to focus on actively making themselves more intelligent and skillful with practical advice, rather than merely keep reasoning about otherworldly objects; after all they may not even exist! To him and Dewey too any kind of excellence is the result of active and intelligent practice, and the more they’re practiced the stronger they grow. What mattered most was how intelligent peoples' practice was; was it merely routine or creatively testing new ideas. Sadly, however, such a liberal picture just wasn't what people with social power wanted to hear. Many rulers, for example, wanted to become a god themselves, so how could they deny such objects couldn’t be known.
With his dualistic faculty psychology Plato also celebrated another long-lived psychological idea INNATE ideas. It's had a very long life in Western civilization. Even when such ideas eventually evolved into instincts in the 1800s Nietzsche used such ideas freely, as did Freud in the 1900s; self-preservation was often pictured as an innate, inbuilt instinct. And of course between ancient and modern times conservatives and moderates continued seeing innate ideas as excellent psychology. Conservative Christians like Augustine pictured feelings of original sin, guilt, and conscience as innate ideas; we're all born with them. And even as modern astronomy and physics were beginning in the 1600s conservative Rene Descartes too said we have innate ideas of god, and the best way to learn about such ideas is merely reasoning with clear and distinct ideas! Such non-experimental ideas were yet another reason scientific psychology has evolved so slowly.
Reincarnation was another result of Plato’s dualistic psychology. Another man he greatly admired was the great mathematician Pythagoras, and he himself talked of having former lives. However, when our divine reasoning faculty re-entered another material body at birth, all such innate Ideas became blurred and too weak to see clearly. Thus conservative philosophic reasoning became a way of remembering what their innate knowledge was, and if we didn't learn what they were, then we might be born again into another frustration-filled life.
Of course innate ideas were useful in religion and politics too. We’re all destined to be what we are simply as a result of such ideas. Thus staying obedient to those in authority was seen as ethical excellence. Kings, queens, and popes were said to be chosen by god to rule over people, and so people shouldn’t revolt or even democratically vote to replace them, unless they were really obnoxious. Roman tyrants like Caligula were simply murdered by their own guards, not voted out by the people. Thus Plato's psychology of innate ideas helped keep people from even wanting a democratic government, and it pretty much stayed that way for well over 2 thousand years. Routine habits too are propulsive.
Aristotle too honored some of those ideas. Like the liberals he talked more about habits and how they can teach practical kinds of excellence, but he also suggested our reasoning faculty may be eternal and able to grasp and behold eternal, unchanging Truth. In short, he too painted a faculty picture of psychology; like Plato he called an active reasoning faculty divine and immortal. Thus his more moderate picture was somewhere between liberal Sophists who celebrated only habits, and Platonic dualists who felt only Spirit-Objects were excellent. In other words he too, like many liberals, believed we can train our muscles to feel what many different kinds of excellence are; such practical knowledge wasn’t the highest kind of excellence, but we can at least feel some kinds of excellence.
Some More Colors of Dewey’s Behavior Psychology
Once again, Dewey's Functional Behaviorism celebrates intelligent, playful, and experimental practice to best keep feeling psychological excellence. It’s not always an easy art to master; as many people know, some of their habits are powerful indeed; just ask any alcoholic, drug addict, or heavy cigarette smoker. What’s more, many people just don’t know how to play with their habits and so they need to experiment and find different ways to start growing some more healthful ones. Sometimes people need to get angry with themselves first before they begin building a better habit. But what’s most important is to keep experimenting until you find something enjoyable besides smoking or taking drugs or getting drunk. Instead of listening to all those folks saying CALL NOW!, why not begin feeling there’s something you’ve always wanted to learn about but haven’t had the time until now. Such feelings can be the key to becoming our master, rather than remaining our slave. Some of your fellow shopping addicts may think you’re crazy, but others may want to go for a walk with you and find out how you grew yourself out of your addiction. Only from such excellent experimental practice best grows our own excellent habits and consciousness as well.
How many people still think having more money is the key to their psychological health, and yet don’t realize how guilty and defensive many rich folks feel? Haven’t you learned to enjoy improving your habits yet, without spending a lot of money? The more we playfully experiment with enjoying life without money, the weaker we make our own excessive spending habit, and the more we can help others help themselves. And the more that happens the more kindly our body-mind becomes. The more we accept and keep 'free' objects we haven’t honestly earned, the more vulnerable we become to losing them later, perhaps in painful ways as well! About the only thing free is the air and if politicians keep spending the way they have, even that might soon change. Such assertive, bold, audacious, creative, and enjoyable playfulness is much more a part of Dewey’s psychological excellence than either Plato’s or Aristotle’s. Aristotle too thought mere contemplation could reveal nature’s highest Truths, but of course Dewey disagreed; there’s simply no evidence for such Truths. Like any other idea general ideas are idea-tools, not a reflection of eternal objects. Nature gives us no evidence anything is unchanging and eternal, and if that's true, then what’s important is to keep learning about excellence, rather than convince our self we already are excellent.
In the 1800s conservative faculty psychology's ‘umbilical’ was finally cut from philosophy and became an experimental science of its own, thanks to people like Dewey and his psychology teacher William James. Darwin's work showed habits were the fundamental biological reality, rather than psychological faculties for knowing eternal Truth. As a result the focus shifted to what habits are best to learn and how they’re best learned. So, liberal university experimenters started testing their own psychological ideas to see which ones worked best. Thus men like James and Dewey got more freedom to start painting a new modern psychological picture and also think about what habits are most useful, like experimental learning. Psychology's focus shifted from picturing a set of separate faculties to a much more organic and nature-oriented picture of life; it also made it much easier to explain why just a few minutes with someone can reveal what their whole character may be like? All a person's habits are organic and related to each other. As a result the old innate faculty psychology became much less reliable. Unlike Plato and Aristotle thought, no one is a born slave and almost everyone can easily begin learning whatever they want if they playfully take one small intelligent step at a time.
So since then the main social problem has been educating more people to feel psychology's new modern ideas of intelligent self-determination and experimentally testing such ideas. In that respect Behavioral psychology is still in its infant growth stages. Only in the late 1800s, as U.S. soldiers continued pushing Native Americans onto land no one else wanted, psychology started becoming more of a science at eastern universities. William James at Harvard was one of the first scientific psychologists. He even experimented with the idea of his soul after he died, but the results were negative. Then Dewey, first at Chicago and then at Columbia in New York, began describing himself as a Functional Behaviorist and became a leading spokesman. With his help it continued growing and being refined, and in a few short decades of experimentation psychologists began discovering many useful ideas and techniques for guiding, nurturing, and encouraging peoples’ own self-taught excellence. For example an idea called ‘Programmed Learning’ was built by Behaviorist B.F. Skinner. He helped people learn complex arts merely by breaking them down into small baby-steps, just like a child learns best how to make a bow and arrows; that kind of one-step-at-a-time process helped make improving any habit easier, more fun, and more successful. So, once again, if Dewey’s right, if self-education is the best way for people to keep guiding their own kinds of excellent growth, and make it more intelligent for today's rapidly changing modern industrial world, then it just makes sense to begin teaching such habits on a widespread educational level. The sooner students learn to intelligently guide their own growth, and why some habits are more excellent than others, then the sooner we can begin lessening some of the many important social problems we have today. The more students know such habit-arts, the easier it becomes to continue reconstructing their dangerous ones.
To say the least, such creative and experimental self-teaching is still a relatively new art. After all almost all parents are still basically only a little past childhood themselves when they started having their own children, and so often the most important educators—parents--remain the weakest educators. As a result what children usually learn are merely the traditional habits thought important to learn. In short, people having a choice of which habits they want to make excellent is still a relatively new art; in much of the world today women are still controlled by men, and where they aren't many men still wish they were.
So far schools haven't been much help; in much of the world today children are taught the habits others in power want them to know, like how to figure a person's taxes, keep practicing routine habits, and sometimes even what spirit to pray to for headache relief. Thus the one institution useful for peacefully making life a constant reconstructive intelligent process still often remains merely a place for learning how to keep the social status quo. Instead of building more cross-cultural interactions between people, and feeling how we're all just people with different habits, people often convince themselves their habits are Absolute Truth. Instead of helping each other learn from one another, much of mankind still celebrates only their own lifestyle, and when life becomes too boring or too diverse they might load up a car with explosives and go for a drive.
No Matter How Humble, A Person's Home Can Help
No doubt for many people it's psychically flattering to believe their own religious, political, and social customs are in fact Absolute Truth, handed down from some divine source and signaling our some group of course. But for us liberal Deweyans such pictures of truth are definitely not part of psychology's new modern picture, much less excellent. For us only testing ideas for their results produces truth, and only for that time and place too! In other words, what's important today are the actual results of our psychological ideas? Do they confine our growth or liberate it, make us less or more tolerant, helpful, healthful, and more intelligent?
However, even in ancient Greece many also began feeling how a person's environment helps play an important role in what they learn; history's Greek 'father' Herodotus mentioned several different habits in different countries. Such ideas helped liberal Sophists like Protagoras say 'man is the measure of all things'. Modern Behavioral psychology too has celebrated that idea of cultural relativity, again based also on Darwin's evolutionary work. Even for ancient Greeks it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see aristocratic kids learned aristocratic habits, while poor kids learned shoe making or carpentry. Today our expanded knowledge of biological life has merely produced more evidence for such ideas. Today it’s normal to imagine for billions of years a creature's natural environment helped shape and condition those animals and plants in it. For example, dangerous meat-eating animals helped condition plant-eating animals to build their safety habits, like either defending themselves, running away, or hiding. And in Greece even conservative Plato realized how important our environment is for the habits we learn; it can help corrupt or encourage excellent habits. Thus where we live and who we live with is often just as important as knowing what and how to practice any kind of excellence.
In his great book Republic Plato describes how he would educate his guardian philosopher kings and queens, teaching them a number of different skills in a number of different situations, like working at a job, and of course studying as well. Learning both kinds of skills happened best when they were put into such situations requiring work and study; in a sense all of life would then become a kind of school. But it seems he never went beyond that basic idea to make one's environment as pleasant and rewarding as possible; it was a natural result of his wanting his guardian rulers to say focused on Spirit-Ideas. If someone made a mistake they were out.
Today many liberals don't emphasize Plato’s favorite subject very much, mathematics; faculty psychology is no longer seen as excellent. But one's environment remains important to us Deweyan Behaviorists too. What opium smoker, for example, could learn a more intelligent habit while living in an opium den? And for those who've playfully declared war on their unhealthful smoking habit, just seeing daily one picture of a diseased smoker's lungs helps make it easier to keep experimenting with growing a non-smoking habit. Even in medieval times Churchmen too knew how important a person’s surroundings were to building their kinds of excellent habits, like praying, chanting, remaining celibate, and of course acting piously and humbly. The more they built monasteries to live in and practice only those arts, sometimes for 12 hours a day, the easier it was to build such habits.
And so today another very important part of psychological excellence is actively building a helpful, rewarding, and encouraging environment for the habits you want to build. Why allow those who don't encourage your growth into your world? That kind of building involves choices and work here and now, and on an existential level—a personal level—it helps make learning that much easier. If, for example, 2 people choose to build a relationship only between themselves, then obviously it’s helpful to build a place where other people aren't usually allowed. Then, after that, it's often a question of practicing habits together, having fun, and enjoying each other. For me a more excellent diet became a challenge, and so the more healthful foods I kept around the house, the easier it was to build a better diet and feel more healthful. In short, it became much easier to reconstruct my eating habit when no one in my environment ate less than the best foods, like meat and almost all animal products; I’ve never regretted it either. No doubt it would have been much more difficult if I had kept living with a modern-day T-Rex.
What happens after 2 people start learning to play, say, golf together? They can begin playfully experimenting even around the house. How much fun can they have learning the golf swing rhythm, and then going out on a course, enjoying the day, swinging at that cute little ball and seeing it roll all of 2 feet down the fairway? How enjoyable can it feel to miss every damn 3 foot putt? How much fun can it be to take 100 shots on a 9-hole course? What masochist invented that damn game anyway? If you can learn to share some laughs together, even when it’s frustrating, chances are your relationship will keep growing together. And if not, scratch golf off and go on to idea #2—polka dancing! No doubt some ideas will work better than others, and the more we need such a relationship the more we’ll keep rewarding our self and arranging our environment to encourage building it. What better way is there to teach our self how satisfying life can be while shopping for the latest polka music?
Rewards Help build Psychological Excellence Too
Probably at least since Plato’s day people have felt how important it is to reward someone who's building a new habit-art. Why keep punishing and yelling at yourself when you don't practice your new habit, unless of course it helps? If it doesn't, then why not experiment with giving yourself a little reward instead. The following little story, taken from Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish may help us better feel how important rewards are.
A little five-year-old boy came home from his first day at school. His wise mother of course wanted to encourage him to keep going to school and learning as much as possible, and so she made his favorite snack. While he enjoyed his raisons and fresh baked whole wheat bread with honey they talked.
"So," she said smilingly, "what did you do in school today? Tell me all about it."
"Oh," he said nonchalantly, in between enjoying the raisons one at a time. "I learned to write today."
"Oh my goodness that’s marvelous," gushed his smiling mother, and she reached over and touched him lovingly. "And so tell me now, what exactly did you write?"
The boy thought for a few seconds while he continued chewing, and then answered rather sadly. "Who knows?” he asked. “The teacher didn't teach me to read yet!" No doubt similar stories can be found in every culture.
The man known to the world as William Shakespeare also saw how important results for learning new skills and habits; in that respect his Taming of the Shrew can be seen as yet another example of medieval Behavioral therapy. There he said “No profit grows where no pleasure’s taken.” That remains good advice, but it's still interesting to see how at that time learning was tied more to negative results, rather than merely explaining what's expected to someone, and then rewarding them for it. For example, when his shrewish wife Kate hits him on the head with a bed warmer Petruchio merely wrecks her bed, rather than telling her about a more intelligent response and then wrecking her bed. Certainly for Dewey too no habit grows easily where no pleasure’s taken in practicing it, but such stories can help us feel more deeply how important rewards and talking about what's expected of someone else have also become important parts of psychological excellence. No doubt, sometimes learning a new habit-art can be a slow and frustrating process, like golf, but the more we teach our self to expect mistakes, and also enjoy hitting that occasional perfect shot, the sooner we learn such skills.
So maybe we can offer a little summary of psychological excellence so far. At first it’s good to keep practice-times short and enjoyable, at least until you’re comfortable within the practice time and are having some fun with the new habit. And if you need some motivation rewarding yourself after practice might help. It’s why primary school often starts with just half-days and lots of playing and singing. It might sound childish but why not try that with any new habit-art? I'm sure other golfers would love to hear a medley of all your polka tunes. And it might make it easier to watch that 4th tee shot sail once again into the water hazard. Eventually, however, as you build that first learning plateau, and your confidence begins growing so you practice at other times during the day, then maybe any satisfying feelings can become their own reward, making it a so-called end-in-itself, like feeling good just to hit a good shot every once in a while, or just to be walking around and getting some great exercise. After all, aren’t rearranging your ankle-bones while learning to ski, or missing every 2 foot putt, really their own rewards?
Don’t Forget To Have Some Fun!
Creating an easy, playful step-by-step plan may be the most intelligent way to start building a new, improving you. If you choose to make your diet more excellent, for example, you might start with breakfast only, work on making it more healthful, and of course enjoying its new feelings and tastes; one suggestion is to eat only fruit until lunch. And if you want to teach yourself to snow-ski, then learning how to walk with the skis, and not rip your knees apart, might be a good first step. No doubt some people can learn habits faster than others, but the important thing is to learn at your own comfortable rate! And of course anyone who makes fun of you for having more snow on your butt than on your skis can be politely thrown off the mountain! How many echoes will it make anyway? Why not even count the number of times they bounce on the way down?
Remember when you were a kid and you taught yourself how it felt to roller skate without breaking your butt? Well what made it so easy to learn all your childhood skills—jumping rope, hopscotch, ice skating, archery, and becoming a chocolate addict? Wasn’t it all the fun you had practicing? The more you practiced the faster you learned. Dewey’s Behavioral psychology wants to keep those actively playful learning habits alive all through life, not just in childhood! For him all life is a continual growing process, or can be if we accept Dewey’s new modern picture of it. If it’s a natural continuum, then why not preserve the best habit-arts all through life? At the same time, however, why not keep making them more intelligent than before? And then, how much can we help others intelligently enjoy life more, and make it more satisfying, even when they break their leg in four different places skiing down the expert slope on the first day?
Once again, for Dewey perhaps the greatest obstacle for learning excellent habits is our routine ones. Normally parents reward children for acting in certain ways; it increases their enjoyment and encourages more practice. What kid doesn’t love to be rewarded, adored, and approved of? Indeed those are enjoyable feelings. But for Dewey there's a danger our habits will become too routine; in an always changing world that can be dangerous. We humans are like many other animals; we're basically lazy too, so our habits may become too propulsive and automatic. In that case we teach our self to become a slave to our habits, rather than an intelligent master. Why are they dangerous? They help convince us nothing bad can happen, so we often become too lazy, over-confident, and feel everything’s okay. That feeling can be deadly simply because nature is always changing. So every once in a while it might be good to step back, take a look at possible dangers, and reconstruct such feelings as fast as possible.
For Dewey that’s an important part of psychological excellence—seeing what could be dangerous and then avoiding it. Growing that kind of mental habit may feel strange at first, but it helps keep us in the ‘here and now’, and many modern psychologists say that’s the best psychic place to be. If so, then it’s another important part of character excellence. People are like gardens; they can keep growing and being re-born every day, but...only if we keep avoiding all the dangers life has! If those beautiful snowy mountains help keep breaking your young skiing bones, then it might be more intelligent to junk those skis and try wine-making or helping your local police keep nabbing those who keep breaking the law. Who knows? You could even combine the 2 and become a great wine-sipping detective. But in any case learning goes on all through life, so why not keep focused on where it all happens, I mean here and now? You can get better at it just like a painter gets better at painting, one day at a time and one brush stroke at a time? Inch by inch life’s a cinch, or so mother used to say! And best of all, the more we keep expanding ours habits and testing new ideas, the easier it becomes to keep learning new meanings, feelings, and ideas of both satisfactions and dangers. Welcome to the 'zen' of learning—the playful art of learning's continuum.
How can we keep our habit-arts from becoming too routine and repetitive? As we've already seen, for that Dewey suggests a creativity antidote, like merely mixing and matching ideas until we find one we feel like exploring. For that focusing on what we’re doing here and now is useful; how can we see create new ideas unless we see what our habits are? If you’re like me, at first you won’t get creative new ideas every five minutes, or even every day, but new feelings and meanings can always be felt NOW and smart people jot them down before they forget them! Some days are just more creative than others; some days new ideas just seem to keep erupting. For example, you might see an interesting exercise you want to add to you habit, so you try it. Sometimes it might feel great and sometimes you might need to have your spine put back in place, but in either case you can test the idea and see what happens. So why not stay alert and active and keep all your senses open. Sometimes I surprise even myself, and at other times feel like a genuine dummy. Even if what we're aiming to learn doesn't happen as fast as we hoped, if that beginner’s ski slope results in your first full-length body-cast, even if we gain 20 pounds from all our chocolate rewards, they all help us learn more about our self. Is the un-skied life still worth living? And why not learn to give the candy to someone else and let them gain the 20 pounds?
For those and many more reasons we’ll see later Dewey's psychological picture of Functional Behaviorism continues looking bright. It doesn’t aim to confine and enslave people, like much of ancient and medieval psychology did, but rather to liberate and keep increasing one’s freedom. No doubt its best quality may be this it works! Its rewarding and playful practicing arts can definitely help improve any weak, excessive, and harmful habit, and thus keep making our self more excellent. Who knows? You may even learn to conquer that chocolate addiction, starting tomorrow of course, and if not just make sure your health insurance covers chocoholics, if you’re still one of the lucky ones who has health insurance! The more we learn to constructively savor and enjoy life without harmful addictions, like fried foods, the more we feel Dewey's kind of psychological excellence and self-mastery.
What habit-arts in particular should be improved? That's a very important ethical question, and we'll see some of those ideas a little later. But once some basic excellent habits are strong, then much of psychological excellence becomes personal—existential if you like college-sounding words. Only individuals can best answer such questions, and just imagine the fun you can have telling all your friends you've begun some existential analysis and are planning on donating all your neuroses to the Smithsonian Institute? Suppose, for example, you accept the challenge to quit trying to kill yourself and stop smoking a pack a day; good existential choice. Behavioral psychology can help. Besides ‘reward’ therapy there’re also a number of ‘negative’ learning techniques, like the ones Petruchio practiced on Kate; it’s called negative conditioning and controlled pain is its tool. How’s it work? Well why not simply put a rubber band around your wrist and snap it every time you just think of smoking? Will it work? Why worry? If it doesn’t, just imagine how cute you’ll look with 2 red swollen wrists. Or just imagine how you can be the hit of every party as you yell at the top of your lungs every time you snap that rubber band, ‘OUCH, damn cigarettes!’ How can life get any better than that?
Perhaps the greatest thing about Behavioral excellence is this All of daily life can be felt as a kind of experimental school. The more we playfully experiment a little today, right now, at home, at work, or anywhere, the more we learn to feel what excellence is like. Just put that rubber band on and start snapping away. For a painful divorce, however, you may want to put several thick rubber bands around your waist. In other words don't help your therapist's children go to college, but instead start your own self-therapy sessions and playfully start teaching yourself another excellent existential habit-art. You can begin NOW! (OUCH! Damn husband!) Some say it’s guaranteed to help you forget about that bum and get on with your life. And of course don't forget those rewards! Wrists seldom become too sore to take hold of another fresh fruit-topped tart, do they? And for those people who aren't so pain oriented, loving actions too can be a great encouragement for both young children and adult-children. Just put a rubber band around their neck and snap it when they sass back. However, you may learn a loving emotional bond works better. When a child or husband misbehaves, why not withdraw one’s love until they promise never to do that again? And of course it’s also helpful to let them know what you expect of them and what excellence means to you.
The more one begins feeling here is the best place to practice, and now is the best time to practice, then the sooner more intelligent habit-arts will themselves become propulsive, second nature, force of habit, and shear will-power! That to me is a great feeling--the feeling of self-mastery; it's a very old liberal idea of excellence, going all the back to ancient Greece’s most famous traveling Sophist-teacher Protagoras. Some say he was even as smart as Pericles’ wife, Aspasia. Such control and mastery can feel good in and of itself. When I finally learned to playfully laugh at just the thought of smoking then I knew I had artfully mastered my old self-destructive habit. A warning however if you’re building a new jogging habit you might not want to practice in the boss’s office, unless of course he starts pawing you! In that case I suggest a swift kick to the groin with either your right or left combat boot! It'll do wonders for your confidence as you wait in the unemployment line.
I look forward to the day when everyone has that much confidence and fun as well. Life is too short to take disrespect and rudeness from anyone, but it takes some practice to learn how to return such disrespect. The great African baseball pitcher Satchel Page offered this advice why not learn to move with ease and grace, even as your boss's gonads are lifted up into his liver; it can be yet another art of psychological excellence. Such smooth, relaxed, and rhythmic movements help make life and learning much easier and less tension-filled, especially while your wrists are healing from all those rubber band welts. When a secretary GRACEFULLY launches the disrespectful boss’s family jewels into a low-earth orbit it somehow makes life all worthwhile, doesn’t it? YEOOOW! Damn combat boots! Sometimes disrespect is best corrected with disrespect; it may be the holistic approach to therapy. No doubt the sooner we playfully learn that graceful art the sooner we can feel its healing excellence. Heck, why not even bronze your favorite pair of combat boots when they finally wear out? After all, if we don't nurture our own graceful sense of pride and dignity, then who will? The sooner we teach our self to sensuously enjoy and playfully savor such grace, and to help others learn the art, then the sooner we’ll know what some of Dewey’s psychological excellence can feel like. What are you waiting for; millions today are already practicing such arts. Often these days people don't get mad, they get even, create another happy memory, and then get on with their life. In other words, why give yourself more roadblocks than necessary? Far too many still seem to have forgotten how excellent simple kindness can be.
6. CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS USES
The ability to focus one’s consciousness, so as to become more aware of what’s happening here and now, is another habit-art capable of growing and expanding all through life. With it now we can continue expanding our ideas of psychology and human nature, as well as see more of its excellent uses. After all, just like philosophic variety helped make ancient life in Greece much more interesting and thoughtful, modern psychological models have recently made life more interesting, educational, and diverse. Such diversity may be called psychology’s spice. Its ideas can help make everyday life more interesting and creative.
No doubt, with the growth of industrial capitalism and population numbers, stress and tension have increased tremendously in the last century, especially when compared to just a few centuries ago. As a result, human consciousness, or awareness, has become a more important subject. How can we keep expanding and strengthening such a useful habit-art, and what is it best used for? After all, just a few centuries ago most people lived on low-stress farms. At time the work was difficult but there were plenty of other activities to relieve one’s stressful tensions, like hunting, fishing, and tending the animals and gardens. Over the past century, however, life has become much more urban and industrial, rather than rural, and so to help make such living less stressful, a number of different psychology schools have evolved, each serving the different needs of different people. For conservatives there’s Jungian Analytic psychology; for moderates there’s Freudian and Gestalt psychology; and for liberals there’s Dewey’s Functional Behaviorism, John Watson’s and B. F. Skinner’s Behaviorism, Cognitive Therapy, Behavioral Modification, and others as well, including existential psychology. For those having a strong fear of death, there’s existential therapy; it’s designed to lessen such excessive fears.
In general, however, most psychologies help people learn to relax their neurotic tensions and fears, including Jungian and Freudian talking therapies. Sometimes people just need to talk with someone and be reassured their fears are natural and so they should just learn to relax when they have them. Many tranquilizing pills are also available to help people consciously feel what relaxing is like, so they can practice on their own.
The social problem, however, has been growing such ideas in the public at large, where, unfortunately, our public schools could be, but aren’t much help, teaching young folks how to relax and consciously feel more of life’s possible options and energies. Such relaxing skills can consciously help improve minor psychological tensions, fears, and obsessions.
Group therapies are also popular; they can also be very educational for learning how to consciously and intelligently solve simple personal problems, so as to keep intelligently guiding one’s own growth and development. In short, learning how to build intelligent and independent habit-arts is the goal. In this section, then, we’ll continue seeing more of that new psychology landscape, where consciousness and awareness play a very important role. For Dewey, what’s most important about one’s consciousness is not its ability to produce feelings of absolute Truth and certainty, as has often been the conservative and moderate goals for people, but rather to keep consciousness growing and expanding life’s healthy meanings in an increasing complex and stressful world. For us Deweyan liberals, such growth is the sign of a healthy psyche, rather than building a feeling of knowing nature’s eternally unchanging Truth.
How useful is consciousness and awareness? That question and many others can be easily answered with yet another lamentably lame limerick.
Kate and Susan worked in sales,
And loved to talk of their adventures and tales.
So, after a blind date,
Susan quickly called Kate,
And said his consciousness was as large as a snail’s.
Need I say again, humor is another sign of a healthy consciousness?
For liberal Dewey, teaching our self how to keep building more excellent habit-arts is what healthy psyches do, and it’s always an experimental art. For me limericks are a good source of writing humor, so I keep experimenting with them. So, if we want to keep learning more about expanding our consciousness, how to better savor life’s delightful energies and improve those that aren’t, and how to best help others help themselves, then the more we actively experiment and test our ideas, the more we keep expanding our consciousness. Where have I heard such ideas before? And what’s more, the more our consciousness grows, the more we learn about both ourselves and life.
As a result, politics, economics, and education become continuing area of conscious interest and attention; they are the main institutions controlling many of the options people have in life. Without such focused attention on testing our ideas to better control their results for everyone, consciousness remains merely a flowing stream of personal idea-feelings, as it were. So again, intelligent experimental learning is the great teacher of a healthy consciousness; experimentation helps focus our attention on actively producing certain results. And on a personal level, such testing can also help consciously improve any of our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits!
Yet again we see how useful intelligent experimental testing is for increasing psychological excellence in daily life. The challenge, then, is to carefully build the habit of consciously directing our experimental actions, so they produce enjoyable rather than stressful results. No doubt, such results won’t always be totally controlled; we all live in an always moving world. But, such a habit is also useful for recovering quickly when unforeseen tragedy does occur.
As we began seeing in the last section, for liberal Behaviorists like Dewey our daily actions and habit-growth are not to be taken lightly; such actions can build powerful habits that can come to dominate consciousness. Addictive people, for example, have consciously built unhealthful habits, as anyone addicted to drugs, smoking, alcohol, or unhealthful eating knows. So, again, consciously building the habit of playfully relaxing becomes another sign of psychological health; it helps increase one’s control of weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-energies, and thus helps make life more controlled and enjoyable.
Consciously and intelligently beginning to reshape such harmful habits with playful experimentation is like growing a plant from a seed; it's best to start on a small scale while enjoying such work. In any case, however, a good first step to psychological excellence is becoming more conscious of our own actions and their patterns; consciously knowing more about our own weak, excessive, or unhealthful habits makes improving any of them easier.
The good news is most people only have a few such habits; most habits are probably weak, rather than excessive and unhealthful. However, the more they're practiced the stronger and more intelligent they can become. Routine habits already consciously feel best and most comfortable, so why bother? As a result, they can easily lead to unhealthful and addictive indulgences and all their harmful results. Excessive gambling is one example, as are disrespectful sexual actions. In any case, the key to consciously improving such weaknesses is to keep expanding one’s consciousness of more intelligent, healthful, and helpful actions.
Such work is often one of life’s great challenges, but there’s some good news too. The more we continue expanding our consciousness with more intelligent actions, the more healthful our consciousness becomes. Helping others in some intelligent way is one such excellent habit. And the more we feel what it’s like to act like a psychologically healthy artist, the more confident we consciously become! In effect, then, consciousness is best seen not as a thing, not as a noun, but as an action; it’s perhaps best seen as an adverb – as an actions modifying and changing us in some way. From time to time some of our actions and idea-feelings need to be pruned, so to speak, and consciousness can help in that process if we’ve trained our self to act intelligently.
Our Always Growing Psyche
Consciously feeling enjoyment on a daily basis helps us feel what life is like without harmful stimulant or depressive drugs, and the more that happens, the healthier our consciousness becomes, and the freer we become as well. Healthy freedom, like consciousness, is best thought of as an adverb – it changes and expands our actions to become more intelligent and helpful to both ourselves and others. The more we, say, practice loving a mate, the stronger we make that habit-art; and the more we enjoy practicing eating healthy food, the weaker our consciousness for unhealthy foods becomes. But again, only our experimental actions, starting with short practice times, best help us start growing a healthier consciousness and freedom.
Clearly, then, Dewey’s Behavioral psychology helps people become more conscious of their own routine daily actions and, more importantly, offers a way to keep consciously making them healthier. In short, consciousness of our little daily actions are the key to becoming psychologically healthier by growing better habits of politeness, respect, and helpfulness, not to mention enjoyment and happiness. Now, exactly what about those ideas is really too difficult, obscure, and abstract to understand? Merely our own daily experimental actions are the real engines of improving any habit, including consciousness. Remember: habits are behavioral tools we build with our actions, and a healthy consciousness is one of them. Such habits help direct our actions to produce less stressful tension and more enjoyment, so, obviously, growing such habits requires some conscious practice in our daily lives.
We Deweyan liberals are also realistic about growing such a useful and intelligent consciousness. Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying goes, but neither was a weak, excessive, and unhealthy consciousness. As a result, starting that process will almost certainly feel awkward at first. Most everyone hasn’t learned, say, how to make learning fun and enjoyable. For most people learning anything new is a chore and something to be avoided, as any person knows who’s consciously tried to learn how to stop addictive drug-taking, excessive smoking, or over-eating. Many people don’t consciously realize all their habits grew slowly, and so their improvement will almost certainly be slow as well. So, why not become more conscious about such a learning process BEFORE you begin; sometimes such habits take years to improve, and so, again, it may be best to consciously begin experimenting with small practice times. It’ll make enjoyable success easier to feel. Even if a drug-habit is 'kicked' quickly, over a few weeks, the challenge remains of consciously feeling what more intelligent habits are like, so the drug temptation isn’t so powerful. In any case, however, for Dewey consciously playful enjoyment is the key to success.
No doubt, some people can stop an unhealthy habit quickly – cold turkey, as it were, but even they are still challenged to consciously learn what enjoying a healthier habit-art feels like! Those kinds of enjoyably healthy habits take time to consciously build and shape. Thus, for those addicted to, say, excessive smoking, a good way to start building a new consciousness may be with practicing not smoking for a small period, say 15 minutes in the morning. Then, the more you consciously learn to enjoy those 15 minutes without smoking, and feel what a smoke-free life is like, the easier it is to consciously keep expanding and growing those feelings. It’s what can be called growing out of a bad habit. And the more one consciously talks to one’s self or others about practicing such playful enjoyment, the easier it becomes to weaken the bad habit’s energy and forcefulness.
Starting on such a small time scale also makes it easier to learn a new habit if, say, a larger time begins feeling uncomfortable. If not smoking doesn’t feel comfortable for a 30 minute span, then you can go back to a smaller time span, and see if that feels enjoyable. In any case, what makes the process feel awkward and tense are the habit-energies we already consciously feel. For example, people often build smoking patterns for certain times and places, but becoming more aware of those patterns can make it easier to avoid those situations with more enjoyable activities, even if it’s only relaxing and enjoying life’s energies.
Desiring to consciously to build more healthful habits is itself a very useful energy. The stronger it becomes, the quicker we can grow a more healthful consciousness. The enjoyable results of such desire and work help us consciously feel what a more healthful habit feels like on the inside, and also remember such feelings when they're not felt. After all, isn’t that the way all childhood habits grow in the first place? Don’t children learn the habits they feel are most enjoyable and approved of? If so, then consciously telling ourselves such facts can be a big help while learning more healthful habits. Physical health may be a combination of just 2 healthful habits -- diet and exercise; both together are powerful habit-arts. How, for example, can anyone become an excellent athlete unless they consciously practice intelligent diet and exercise habits? But psychological health is often a little more complex, and involves learning the habit-art of enjoyably growing more healthful habits. And perhaps the best news of all is this: as a new habit continues growing it becomes propulsive; it begins working on a subconscious level and feels like a natural part of us.
Psychological Realities
With the conscious growth of psychology as an independent science, and especially Behavioral psychology, such ideas have been growing on a formal level for only about a hundred years. To many people that may sound like a long time, but it really isn’t, not when it comes to teaching millions of people such habits; for that we need the institutional help of our public schools, and they have been less than helpful. After all, around the world we now have billions of people to educate, and that puts a large strain on our public schools. What’s more, considering all the conservative secular and religious schools still out there, often completely ignoring formally teaching such habits and skills, it’s a wonder so many people have begun learning about such practical liberal ideas of psychological health. Still, such skills are growing; more and more people are simply learning to become their own best psychologists with their own intelligent and enjoyable experimental actions. Most people want to become stronger and more competent; they don’t want to remain helpless and ignorant. Knowing something about those realities, Dewey encouraged people to keep consciously building more healthful habits and skills, and make learning them playfully enjoyable and helpful. Continuing to grow such habits is what’s important, rather than yelling at ourselves for not building them before. Self-criticism can be just as excessively harmful as criticism from others. How many times have you heard someone say they hate themselves? Such feelings make enjoyment and happiness that much more difficult to feel.
In any case, it’s important to consciously admit such growth is not always easy to accomplish, especially if we expect to learn everything all at once, like many people do with their New Year's Resolutions. Many people still feel merely making a wish list of new habits will be enough to actually build them! Such thinking is more magical and wishful than anything else. Slow and steady practice on a daily basis wins the psychological race, as the ancient Greek Aesop consciously knew. The growth of democratic habits, like equal rights, is a good modern example. It’s an example of just how tough such growth can be. In the US, centuries of slavery consciously built habits so strong more than 500,000 people we're willing to die for them, rather than learn more democratic habits. What’s more, these days many feel the same way about kindly giving gay and lesbian people their equal rights. All such healthy democratic habits take time to grow.
However, we live in a democratic republic founded on the ideal of equal rights, and so those of us who love our country continue encouraging people to consciously feel such democratic kindness with their own actions. Much of the time it means merely respecting others and minding our own business most of all. The more those healthful democratic habits are consciously practiced, the stronger they grow. Why not consciously learn to feel more relaxed about such ideas? Live and let live, right? Isn’t that too another sign of psychological health?
Dewey's Behavioral psychology is a social psychology; it encourages us to become more consciously aware not only of our own feeling-ideas, but of also their social results. In a sense everyone is a bigot in some way; we all have our own values, but socially denying others their equal rights simply produces results less than democratically excellent. It’s one reason psychology has become more important in today’s world. In ancient China, for example, Confucius listed many habits as helping build superior people -- loyalty, wisdom, courage, generosity, kindness, trustworthiness, and honesty, but teaching such habits to the next generation is as much of a modern educational challenge as it was in 500 BCE, again making us more consciously aware of how important our own public schools are. Overly conservative public schools who continue ignoring such healthful habits on a formal basis in fact make it much more difficult to grow a healthy democracy than it need be. As a result, we need more tax-consuming police, courts, and jails to do what our public schools should be doing on a daily basis, namely teaching students useful democratic habits. Such schools will be another major force in helping consciously build a more vibrant and respectful democratic habits into the next generation. Continuing to ignore consciously teaching such habits only makes life much less than what it could be. People will keep practicing the old conservative superstitious and undemocratic habits they’ve learned unless better habits are taught. We see evidence for that psychological reality almost daily on our streets. At any rate, for us liberal Deweyans psychological excellence isn’t something we’re born with, or that comes from some spirit-god, like Plato thought, but it is something just about anyone can playfully teach them self, one day at a time. That was an important idea to ancient liberal Greeks, and it remains important to this day.
To me such psychological realities are some of Dewey's most encouraging and hopeful. Every day professional psychologists are consciously helping empower more people around the world, but they remain almost completely ignored by the public schools taxes are paying for. Again, the great social challenge is to consciously make such habits a part of everyone's education, at home, in school, and in our churches. That way fewer young folks will enter the adult world with fewer weak habits, and more confidence they know what psychological health is. Whether we realize it or not, every day our daily actions continue creating the person we are and the society we have, and thus our schools become a major factor in teaching such skills. In fact, everyone is re-born a little each day. No one is exactly the same from one day to the next, so why not learn to intelligently guide that natural growth consciously, and keep building more excellent habit-arts? For us Deweyan liberals what’s important is how creative and joyful we are here and now in that process! In short, a healthy consciousness means, in part, feeling our daily actions and their results, and then creatively improving on them one small step at a time. Are our actions overly tensed, selfish, fearful, greedy, and stressful, or graceful, helpful, social-oriented, happy, confident, and flowing? What’s important is how much we’re consciously in control of such habit-growth.
Two Different Kinds of Habits
As we saw in the last section, not all habit-arts are a sign of psychological excellence. Dewey consciously made an important distinction. In general, habits are either routine and uncreative, or creatively intelligent and growing; guess which one he thought was more excellent!
For most of the past billion years or so, give or take a Woden’s Wednesday or 2, most habits were routine. In fact, it’s one reason our own African ancestors became such great hunters; they consciously learned such animal routines, like their eating habits, and thus experimentally learn to track them and lay traps for them. However, the same also applies to many human habits as well; many are routine while some are creatively intelligent.
Obviously, then, in an always moving world the more routine a habit is, the more dangerous it can become. The same results can’t always be expected. What’s more, the more routinely and mechanically we act, the more difficult it becomes to consciously see new dangers and opportunities, as well as feel our own habits reflect nature’s ultimate Truth! Thus, routine habits not only increase boredom, but help make intolerance a real social danger too and intelligence more difficult to practice. After all, everyone has their own set of habits, so tolerance for peaceful ones becomes more excellent as social interactions increase.
In short, routine habits help confine and restrict not only our conscious thinking, but our intelligent experimental growth as well. Consciousness itself thus remains shallow, narrow, and snail-like. In fact, Dewey might say routine habits have been mankind’s greatest weakness since the first stone tool was (OUCH! DAMN STONES!) experimentally built, over 2 million years ago, give or take a Mozambican Monday of 2. For almost all of the last 2 million years our ancestors merely routinely practiced, say, the same simple tool making habits, thus keeping thoughtfully creative impulses limited and weak. The same simple stone chopping and cutting tools were built in the same routine ways for hundreds of thousands of years. However, with the growth of talking arts and the creation of ideas, conscious human life started building an entirely new dimension to it. Consciousness started becoming much more varied, creative, and artistic, as the more recent history of stone tools shows.
A Little Psychological History
The very word conservative is often used to identify people who consciously practice routine habits, like, for example spirit-habits. For them such routine habits and ideas feel right and so should be conserved. For many conservatives they help build some psychic stability into life in an always changing and sometimes harsh nature. Consciously protecting and defending such ideas is thus important to them; they were often felt as life’s eternal Truth, and so should be defended against anyone who denied it. Decades of religious warfare and killing were justified with such routine habits. As Western history amply shows us, entire educational, religious, and social systems were designed to conserve such habits and ideas, often with death for those who denied them. Such routine actions were consciously justified with ideas like absolute Truth and god’s word, even though no one had showed such spirits existed. In short, excessively routine habits make learning more intelligent habits more difficult, if not impossible.
With the conscious growth of experimental science after 1600, however, a more creatively experimental habit-art began growing stronger. We’ll see more about creativity in the next section, but the important point is such a new intelligent habit-art can consciously be learned by most everyone, with, naturally, some daily practice. It can be practiced even around one’s home by looking consciously at how something might be improved. In fact, such practical thinking helped Dewey improve on the routine conservative definition of human nature itself. In Plato’s conscious quest for learning absolutely certain kinds of truth, he artificially divided human nature into a body and a divine reasoning spirit-psyche. From within a conservative Orphic religious tradition, human nature thus often was pictured as a divine spirit-mind in a prison-body. With training, however, Plato felt a small number of people could become conscious of nature’s highest and eternal Spirit-Truths and thus liberate themselves from all cycles of re-birth.
For liberal Dewey, however, such a conservative psychological division was both artificial and arbitrary; it wasn’t the result of experimental testing, but merely the result of Plato’s wanting to know such Spirit-Objects. So, Dewey consciously helped create a different naturalistic psychology with the phrase body-mind! For him consciousness and the body are one and inseparable all through life. After all, there’s really no objective evidence we’re anything else. What’s more, if our conscious mind and body weren’t the same, then drugs couldn’t affect our thoughts and feelings, nor would different kinds of practice help create different kinds of idea-feelings.
With such simple and creative psychological thinking, Dewey felt he was merely being honest with himself; he knew of no objective evidence we are anything else but body-mind. He too remained true to his own feelings. In short, we humans too are completely naturalistic objects; at birth we’re like a plot of fresh earth; from it can be consciously grown just about any habit-art those around us want us to learn. If so, then psychology always has a social element to it, and makes physical practice in a social world the key to learning how to become masters of our self. In short, we are self-determined; we can learn to enjoy and control many, if not all, of our own actions. In such a model freedom too is always a growing skill. No one is ever completely free; our habit-arts and abilities all have their limits, but as they keep growing, so too does our freedom. And for those who need friends, the more peoples’ habits match each other’s, the better their chances are for a friendly relationship to keep growing together.
No doubt, consciously picturing habit-arts as routine and intelligent is important for us Deweyan liberals. No one acts intelligently all the time, but we can use that idea to see ourselves more objectively, and how sometimes our routines need to change with different situations, so we can learn new freedoms.
More Psychological Realities
We Deweyan liberals are also conscious of another fact of life: mankind is, in many ways, still just now stepping out of a very long period where routine conservative habit-arts were quite common, widespread, and even universal! As we’ve begun seeing, they have been practiced for many tens of thousands of years. They existed simply because people were educated to practice them. Such new ideas can help us liberals avoid getting overwhelmed by life. Modern secular Behavioral psychologies have only just begun growing; no doubt, over the next few centuries many more people will be practicing them. For Dewey such routine conservative habits merely reflect the lack of secular public schools and real scientific knowledge, and so the more they consciously grow, the stronger such liberal ideas will grow. After all, hundreds of different religious ideas once consciously said to be absolutely true are now described by many as merely myth and folktale, like old Norse gods like Woden. Like any other idea, physical practice makes such ideas consciously live in our feelings, and so when they're no longer practiced they too become mere mythical ideas! Thus, for us liberal Deweyans, all such routine ideas are merely pictures OF life and nature; unless they're tested and verified they remain mere ideas. And so the consciousness of harmful and disrespectful actions becomes important.
Dewey’s Behavioral psychology is much more humanistic and democratic than either conservative Plato’s or moderate Aristotle’s was. If any habit can be learned and unlearned, then just about anyone can teach themselves to be inventors, architects, political leaders, artists, doctors, nurses, Nobel Prize winners, law-breakers, rapists, robbers, and even homeless people. It all depends on the habits people practice. That’s another result of Dewey’s liberal psychological thinking. On a daily basis almost anyone has the power to consciously and intelligently keep guiding and determining their own habit-arts; we are self-determined. The psychological challenge is to keep making ourselves more intelligently creative than boringly routine. So, yet again, our own conscious actions and habit-arts become the key to improving any of them, from learning to eat more healthful foods, to growing air-cleaning plants, to feeling more confident, to exercising wisely, to acting more joyfully, to working and studying better, and to wisely helping others to help themselves become more intelligent people. Why not consciously pick the one you want to start learning about now? Thanks to our still overly conservative schools and their teaching of academic trivia, even at 30 most people still have many weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits; our conservative public schools largely ignore improving student characters and consciously focus on academic trivia. However, just about anyone can learn at a young age to playfully teach themselves more intelligent and creative habit-arts! How? Making a little plan about practice times might be a good place to start; also telling others what you’re doing and asking for their help and advice might be useful too. Such intelligently skills of self-determination are another part of modern life’s new experimental psychology; the more a skill is practiced, the more it’s consciously learned and controlled. With such an active and intelligent body-mind, feelings of boredom and self-hate need not grow at all.
Seeing Consciousness Naturalistically
Such practical and secular ideas are not at all evil and sinister, at least not to us Deweyan liberals. On the contrary, they’re psychological reality even conservatives have used to condition people for thousands of years. For them Behavioral psychologies are dangerous; they empower people to build their own individual personalities, rather than merely remain obedient and submissive to the same ideas as everyone else. In reality, however, psychologies like Dewey’s are helping life return to its own naturalistic roots. Probably for the last billion years animals have been building useful habits to help satisfy their own needs for food, sex, and safety, but as we’ve been seeing, for thousands of years now conservative spirit-models of the human psyche, like Plato’s and spirit-religions have radically separated mankind’s mental life from our naturalistic bodies. For them it was necessary. Ideas about an afterlife helped control peoples’ actions, and make them more obedient to living in their undemocratic feudal societies. In them a few enjoyed great wealth, social power, and privilege while most people lived in ignorance, poverty, and even slavery. In such societies, ideas about people being punished for their sins and lawlessness were consciously taught to most everyone; people were less rebellious when they consciously practiced such ideas.
Rather than encouraging a kindness, respect, and equality for all kinds of diverse habits and lifestyles, such conservative routine ideas were thus used to divide people into different tribes, and even into different social classes. What’s more, each often felt only their ideas and habits were better than anyone else’s. Because religious and political leaders often felt their habits were superior to those in the ‘lower’ classes, they often demanded a conscious obedience to what they said was The Truth, often implying true happiness and excellence can never be felt in this life. With such conservative psychological models of human nature people were consciously made to submit to their social and religious leaders, and do as they told. Only in the past few centuries has that divided model of human nature been breaking down, mainly because there’s really no objective evidence for it, and people began realizing there’s not much different between people; we’re all just human, all too human. So, we are all body-mind, not body and mind. All the objective evidence we now have is that all people are organic and naturalistic creatures. Such ideas and their political results are basically the worst threat to all conservative psychological, political, and educational models.
Consciously dividing human nature into physical bodies and spirit-minds or souls have been very old conservative and moderate social traditions; philosophers are often conservative people. As we've seen, since prehistoric times people were normally encouraged to consciously picture their dreams as a seeing of spirits, and we‘ll see many cultures have even used powerful hallucinogenic plants to further heighten and intensify such feelings. With such habit-arts it was fairly easy for people to consciously feel they did have 2 vastly different parts to them, a physical body and a longer living mind or soul. Thus, religious leaders could keep people consciously practicing religious habits, and thus maintain some power over them. Both the history of Christianity and other religions shows leaders wanted to monopolize such power, and restrict all forms of diversity and difference. Eventually, life became consciously felt as merely something to pass through on the way to an eternal happiness. It was, and still is, all based on a divided psychology.
Perhaps the most unhealthful result of such a psychological division was to keep people consciously ignoring physical nature, and using its knowledge to make life more healthful and satisfying for everyone. And the more people grew up in filth, poverty, and ignorance, the easily it was for them to consciously accept that situation as normal and right. A fine example of those conditions is the movie Tom Jones. People kept ignoring the best way to keep making life more satisfying for everyone by learning how nature actually works, and then slowly molding it into something better. In fact, our modern world in the 1900s still has examples of both kinds of habits, both conservative and liberal psychological ones.
Today, millions of people no longer consciously fear nature like children fear goblins under their bed at night. A liberal psychological corner has been turned; nature is no longer seen by educated people as evil and corrupt, but rather the source of all useful knowledge and skills. The growth of naturalistic psychologies like Dewey’s Functional Behaviorism have encouraged many people to feel much more comfortable in life and thus feel freer to consciously overcome possible future dangers, like over-population, global warming, sexual diseases, and nuclear weapons. Naturalistic Behavioral psychologies certainly haven’t freed us from all dangers; in fact, no psychology can. For us liberals it’s safe to assume nature will always be dangerously stable. However, such practical psychologies have consciously helped create better ways of improving ourselves, like democratic politics, more liberal models of education, and intelligent experimentation. They’ve helped more people ask how we can build more liberal schools and teach young folks skills and habits useful in the adult world.
In short, the more we learn to consciously feel and cherish the art of intelligently building our own excellent habits and expanding our freedom, the more we continue confidently connecting our self to nature itself. The best way that happens is simply to consciously practice such habits. After all, we are all nature’s children and our physical and mental roots go back billions of years! Re-connecting and re-uniting those roots is yet another new liberal reconstruction going on in our world today. The more we consciously feel how not only all our scientific habits, but our religious and philosophic habits too, depend on evolving and growing habits, the more we feel how the mind and body are really one natural event, not 2. Despite what many conservatives and moderates WANT to believe, for us liberal Deweyans there are as many ways to be ‘saved’ and 'born again' as there are creative, constructive, and productive habit-arts! In short, salvation itself has consciously become more democratized. In fact, each one of us has their own unique way of becoming happier, more joyful, and especially more helpful to those less fortunate, and as always, intelligent experimentation is the key to consciously building such individual body-mind habits.
Is such a liberal, naturalistic, and democratic psychology really too radical? No doubt, it will certain feel that way to those conditioned to build their own conservative and moderate psychic bubbles, so to speak – their personalities. It’s the natural result of being educated to consciously feel only their models of life are the absolute Truth. Nature, however, has always been the source of an incredible diversity. Are such liberal models really evil, or are they just challenging us to consciously see all people as merely individuals, and thus diverse by nature? To us Deweyan liberals the answer is obvious.
We all build our psychic bubbles -- our character habits. We liberals, however, teach ourselves to see everyone's peaceful and constructive actions as tolerable, rather than evil and sinful. And what's more, they help explain why most religions and philosophies weaken and even die out! Aren’t all those now extinct religions just more objective evidence: for any philosophic or religious system to consciously remain active it needs people to actually practice its ideas and habit-arts? If nothing else, both philosophic and religious history teaches us they too come and go while new ones keep evolving. Perhaps more than 60,000 years ago, native burial habits consciously began sculpting and creating a native spirit-idea psychology, but they too have kept evolving continuously since then, thanks to people consciously feeling differently.
We'll see more of their interesting evolution throughout these 5 books. Even in ancient Greece conservative Plato’s 50 years of experimental philosophic thinking consciously caused even his spirit-ideas to evolve and change. Some of that evolution has been preserved so wonderfully in his artful writings, especially the dialogue Parmenides. The older he got, the more he saw his earlier spirit-ideas just created too many problems, and so called for more experimentation. Dewey’s liberal Behavioral psychology merely helps us consciously see any habit can be a growing and evolving skill all through life. Enlightened growth is the goal, not a once-and-for-all enlightenment.
The Subconscious
The more we can focus our conscious awareness of something, the easier it is to keep learning more about it, and the freer we become from the propulsive power of our own routine habits. Human consciousness might thus be pictured as a plant. Both have parts above and below ground, as to speak, but at the same time even they are changing and always growing new roots and leaves, just as new conscious and subconscious feelings and ideas keep growing. Even after Buddhism’s founder, Siddhartha Gautama, became what’s called enlightened, he wanted to become more enlightened by consciously experimenting with building schools where others could practice his habits. Thus 2 questions seem important: Are there relatively stable and changing parts to human consciousness, and if so, then are there excellent ways to keep guiding the growth of both?
The first question asks what do we liberal Deweyans mean by the word ‘subconscious?’ We all know what unconscious means, right? When we’re asleep or in a coma we’re unconscious; we don’t respond to external energies the way we can when we’re awake. But do we have what’s called a subconscious level of awareness, where we try to remember a name, for example, or a past event?
It seems human nature does have a subconscious element to it, and it’s made up of all our meaningful past events, both pleasant and painful. Such events help create our 'below ground' subconscious roots, as it were. For the most part, such memories are fairly stable throughout life. It’s a psychic record of all the events we felt were meaningful to us. If, say, one of our parents gave us the most satisfying feelings, then their habits become imprinted at a subconscious level of awareness; they can be remembered if we want. After all, how many adults naturally act like such parents?
Just like a plant's roots, those subconscious energies keep guiding our conscious choosing, ignoring, loving, hating, and all the other feelings we have about life and what's best. They help build our psychic bubbles, as it were. Meanwhile, however, 'above ground', more precarious changes are consciously happening; they’re like a stream of meanings and feelings from both the world and our subconscious. They are constantly flowing, changing, and growing precariously; how many times have you wondered what made you consciously think of some idea, or remembered some name you hadn’t thought of in years? Such an always changing and precarious consciousness happens on a mental 'above ground' plateau, so to speak. Without a problem or challenge to solve, or a line of reasoning to follow, such conscious thinking is often called daydreaming; with a meditation habit we can even train our self to let go of such thinking and merely feel nature's energies, although like any other habit it takes some practice. However, when we're faced with a problem, like Plato's wanting to know about Spirit-Objects, then our consciousness can be focused, ordered, consistent, and made to feel logical. It’s another social result of communication; it helps us feel someone else’s ideas and feelings. As we’ll see in Book 2, such a consciously logical power began increasing as our native ancestors started building stone tools over 2 million years ago.
Consciousness Becomes Ideas AND Feelings
What’s more, to a degree we can even control our subconscious feelings and ideas. The more we practice the habits of, say, helpfulness, the more we stock our subconscious with those kinds of idea-feelings. In short, even our subconscious can be built with the idea-feelings we practice here and now. For example, the more we rely on drugs to help us relax, the more our subconscious meanings of those drugs becomes part of us; even coffee has some muscle relaxing drugs in it. Also, when their results become unacceptable to us, then we face the challenge to start reconstructing our subconscious feelings and ideas, to make life more livable and healthful. If we're looking for a mate, for example, and our ideas haven't produced satisfying results, then different ideas are called for. Much the same things happen with plants and solar energies; the more they're obstructed, the more the plant adjusts to what's available, so it can keep growing as best it can.
Certainly all plants and animals, including people, feel natural energies; if they couldn’t then they certainly wouldn’t live very long. Feelings are thus a major part of the biological world, and have been for billions of years; for at least the last billion years such feelings were what plants and animals felt and were conscious of; they merely felt nature’s energies, both its satisfying and dangerous ones. However, things started changing psychologically for our native ancestors about 100,000 years ago, give or take a Frig's Friday or 2. With a few new throat mutations our ancestors became capable of making a much greater variety of sounds, and so it became easier to talk and share their feelings among themselves. Because it lessened psychic feelings of isolation, and increased creativity, a talking habit continued growing; their stone tools and burial sites show some of the new ideas they consciously experimented with.
Like most everyone at the time those ancestors lived in small groups, around 30-40 or so, and so it was fairly easy to consciously sense when people felt differently, like after someone died; a depressing fear of death was a widespread feeling in the prehistoric world. So, the more they tried talking about such feelings, and sharing how they felt, the more they emotionally bonded with each other.
In short, those ancestors began creating a kind of conscious life no other animal had ever created, a consciousness of both feelings AND ideas! That new kind of mental dimension would soon create the idea of spirits to help talk about their dream images; many of them were often nightmarishly frightening.
With their talking habits, however, a new mental dimension began growing in the animal world and in the human community; today we are almost the only creatures consciously living with both feelings and ideas; sign language has helped a few apes create a few ideas. The habit-art of vocally sharing ideas and feelings started becoming a much greater dimension of human consciousness. Talking’s habit-art thus began changing mere inner 'underground' subconscious feelings into shared 'above ground' ideas, and the more that happened, the easier it became to overcome life’s fearful and frustrating feelings. For Dewey talking’s habit-art was the most important one ever created! If you're feeling really confident about your reading art and want to test it, you might read Chapter 5 in his book Experience and Nature; it shares some of his feelings about our talking habit, and in Chapter 8 he describes his picture of human consciousness.
In the still very dangerous, isolated, and precarious world of our native ancestors, consciousness thus started becoming a more powerful mental tool. Ideas could be consciously used to build better tools, like sewing needles for example, and make better hunting tools. Thus, talking and chatting consciously helped our ancestors become more imaginative and creative than ever before. Sewing needles are useful, especially if you don't want your butt frozen again during another Ice Age winter. And what’s even more important, consciously creating and imagining new ideas, and then testing them, is a habit-art useful for improving ANY OBJECT AND HABIT-ART! That's the great power our conscious ideas have. However, unless those habits are institutionalized in our public schools, homes, and churches, they remain mere ideas.
No doubt, such creative thinking with ideas grew slowly. Just like a plant's new leaves depend on its roots, new ideas too depend on the subconscious feelings already present, like remembering last winter's frost-bit ears and toes and how animal skins feel warmer. Eventually the new idea of sewing needles was created at least 40,000 years ago; evidently someone accepted the challenge of making life less painful during another Russian-type winter and decided to build a new tool. Quite probably women were involved in the process too; they were often the prehistoric world’s clothes makers. The point is, consciously talking about new ideas increased creativity's art, and helped build new feelings for what might work better here and now, to keep everyone's 4 cheeks all nice and toasty-warm. Slowly and steadily we humans have become much better at consciously using our ideas to keep reconstructing and improving our old routine habit-arts, as anyone knows who’s ever felt their own frozen cheeks. In any case, however, our consciousness of ideas helped make us more mentally flexible, adaptable, and forward-looking than any other animal, even though it sometimes meant killing as many disrespectful and intolerant people as possible. Creative thinking thus often helped make life better and less dangerous. Hunting's old subconscious habit-roots, however, kept nourishing conscious war-like habits too.
Another important psychic result came with talking habits. They helped us become SELF-conscious too! The more our ancestors talked about their own fears and desires, the more they consciously built new feelings and ideas about themselves and others! And the more that happened, the more people could feel themselves as an object, rather than just as a feeling creature. Consciousness became a little more objective. People could mentally step away, as it were, from their own feelings and sense what someone else might be feeling. Sympathy and empathy for others thus grew within native tribes.
That’s not just another trivial fact. The more such talking habits grew, the easier it became to step away mentally from the present time, making it easier to better plan for future problems and challenges; past, present, and future became more deeply felt as people settled down into villages and began growing crops and taming animals for food. How can we become better hunters? How can we better teach our children, and cure our diseases? What causes nature to move as it does? Can we learn to control such causes? How did we get here? What happens after death? Such new questions about the past, present, and future could be more easily felt and answered as talking continued creating ideas of the past, present, and future. We've already seen how some 60,000 years ago the idea of an afterlife was already being felt even within Neandertal tribes. Merely talking about their feelings allowed people to feel them more deeply, and thus make plans to reduce sad feelings in the future with burial ceremonies, and then test them in the real world. Centuries later such skills and habits allowed author Jack London to write some interesting stories from a dog’s point of view, projecting his own feelings into the animal, as did the ancient Greek fable writer Aesop.
Bottom line: for us liberal Deweyan Behaviorists all the tremendous power of human consciousness and sub-consciousness is seen as a completely natural event, and thus always evolving. There’s simply no objective evidence they were created by any spirit just a few thousand years ago. The more our wary, ignorant, and fearful Middle Paleolithic ancestors consciously talked and shared their own fears and hopes, the easier it became to consciously keep working to improve them. Those ancestors even consciously taught themselves to intelligently hunt huge mammoths with teamwork, and by the looks of their skeletons mammoth livers were high on their menus.
In short, it’s not at all strange to see many psychological therapies today are talking therapies; even some ancient liberal sophists practiced the art. Some talked with others, listened to their fears and hopes, and made some suggestions to help lessen life's stressful tensions and make it more enjoyable. When one of Socrates’ friends told him about a problem he had with some women who had just moved into his house, he suggested putting them all to work spinning wool and making useful clothes for sale; it worked too. Such creative talking thus made it easier to consciously keep improving life here and now. When, say, a clan lost its leader and people felt fearful and tense about the death, and the more they planned a burial and chose a new leader, the weaker such fears and tensions became. For Dewey, that kind of intelligent and caring talking remains an excellent use for consciousness. Sadly, almost always our overly conservative public schools discourage such creative and helpful talking habits. For years, students work silently on their trivial book assignments.
Such ideas help answer to our question about how our ideas can consciously be best used. No doubt, the more people share their troublesome feelings, or at least honestly feel them, the easier it becomes to creatively imagine actions that might produce better future results, and then test them. In essence it’s the art of consciously intelligent experimental learning itself. The more our native ancestors tested, say, their creative ideas for a new kind of spear or a different kind of sewing needle, the more they learned about nature and how their ideas worked; modern scientists today act essentially the say way. Science is basically the habit-art of testing ideas.
Again, exactly what about such ideas is too difficult and abstract to understand? In general, down through history it’s been the conservative and moderate philosophers who continued making philosophy more abstract and remote from everyday life with their excessive adolescent quest for absolute certainty. For us Deweyan liberals, however, all ideas are merely mental tools best used to make life better here and now, and tolerance and respect are 2 of them. How many conservatives around the world today still feel god is an absolute certainty, even though no objective evidence exists for it? With such idea-feelings we’re seeing the power of habit more than anything else -- habits taught in human institutions. The more an idea is practiced, the stronger it’s felt. Also, from such examples we can begin feeling the great use of democratic government; it’s a more civilized way of deciding whose ideas will become law, rather than just the personal choice of a monarch, dictator, or an obscenely wealthy upper class.
Obviously, the conscious use of experimental thinking didn’t blossom on a large scale in the prehistoric world, like it has in today’s world, but, again, the more it’s practiced the stronger it grows, as the history of tool-making clearly shows. In short, when our mere inner ideas are consciously tested experimentally, and if they help produce better outer results, then consciousness becomes BOTH a science AND an art! It’s a science because it consciously studies objective results, and it’s an art because it’s something people create and build. Throughout the book we'll see more of Dewey's practical psychological ideas.
7. CREATIVITY
It may seem as if enough has already been said about creativity, even too much, but a few more ideas will be added in this section. No doubt, another loquaciously lame limerick will make the idea perfectly clear to everyone, or not.
A creative chap named Teller saw the world as a mess,
And so wanted to decrease its strains and stress.
But with his equations and work,
He became quite a jerk,
Wondering, what’s a few thousand nuclear bombs, more or less?
Moral: As with any habit-art, including creativity, there are intelligent and dangerous forms of it.
From what’s already just been said it should be fairly easy to start feeling what Dewey meant by excellent creativity; it’s basically the art of seeing and doing routine things somewhat differently to make life better. However, a few more ideas about it can be emphasized. For one thing, our strongest learning art -- experimental learning -- has also helped creativity to become an experimental habit-art. In short, creativity shouldn’t always be seen as just a single mental flash of insight and intuition, as anyone knows who’s invented anything, or even written a book; there are always new models and editions possible. Thus, creativity too should be seen as a testing process.
But secondly, and more importantly, for Dewey creative imagination is one of the most important habit-arts of all! Dewey puts it something like this: Creative imagination is the only art taking us above, beyond, and outside everyday events, thus allowing us to keep improving our own routine habit-arts! To us liberals that’s a pretty important idea; the words ‘only,’ ‘all,’ and ‘none,’ are important words to note. For Dewey, creative imagination is the ONLY habit-art making life more than just a series of routine actions. It’s the art of keeping life and its meanings growing. So, the more we experimentally test what feels like a good creative impulse, the easier it is to feel creativity too as a process of discovering more of life’s great depth and infinite possibilities. As always, such useful results help make a creative habit-art so important, but in any case it should also be remembered, strengthening one’s creative habit-art can happen experimentally any time of any day!
As we’ll see again and again throughout these books, many of Dewey's important definitions about life and nature are deceptively simple, and the same applies to creativity as well. With it he shows again how simple naturalistic philosophy can be. Thus, there’s really no need to keep feeling philosophy is all but another useless and confusing art, as many people feel today. What often makes Dewey’s ideas difficult to understand is his describing them with a vocabulary almost everyone doesn’t have. As a result, it’s difficult to anchor such ideas to our subconscious feelings so we know what he's talking about, and when that happens then understanding what he says is almost impossible.
To show how creativity’s idea has evolved, in ancient Greece people often thought creativity, or any unusual mental ability, was a gift from the gods. For most everyone, whatever happened had a spirit-cause in back of it. The great conservative philosophic experimenter Socrates apparently thought all kinds of excellence, even creativity, could only come from the gods. After all, from Apollo’s shrine at Delphi a priest pronounced him the wisest man in all of Greece, so it was easy to feel the god was helping him. And of course later Christians too normally thought creative people were blessed by god, so they must be special. Creative genius was thus often pictured as a spiritual gift. As a result, however, many also felt the habit-art couldn’t be taught to people, and so wasn’t.
3 Important Ideas: Questions, Questions, Questions
For naturalistic Dewey, however, not only does most everyone have some natural creativity, but intelligent practice can keep making the habit more powerful, spontaneous, and helpful, in short, more excellent. For him creativity is simply the art of mixing and re-combining old ideas and feelings to make new ones, and then of course test them experimentally to see if they're useful. In such ways new tasty food dishes have been created for centuries with the use of different foods and spice combinations, as well as any other invention one cares to name. For example, people normally have routine eating habits, and so asking how they might be improved becomes creativity’s first ‘baby-step’, so to speak. The more we learn to ask such questions, the more creative we can become. The ideas, say, of non-fat food and soy milk have been creatively re-combined to create the new product -- non-fat soy milk! That in turn can be used to solve a high-fat diet problem. In other words, all the ideas we’re conscious of can be playfully combined and re-combined with the help of good questions, questions we don’t yet know the answer to. Just like flour, oil, sugar, and spices can be combined and re-combined to make thousands of different foods, so too questions can help us see how our actions can be creatively improved.
The old routine ideas of relaxation and walking, for example, can become the new creative idea of relaxed walking, and then tested experimentally to see how it feels. Add to that the idea of enjoyment, and we have yet a new creative idea, namely enjoyed relaxed walking. In any case, however, intelligent experimental testing becomes a most important part of any creative learning process. What’s more, substitute any idea for ‘diet’, like excessive smoking or drinking alcohol, and the creative learning process stays just as experimental. For any idea, learning the best results is always within an experimental testing process, even for making one’s sexual habits more creative, respectful, and fun. I’ll leave it to readers to test their own imaginations for that last idea.
In short, creativity has become more than just imagining a new idea. Because our strongest knowledge results only from experimental testing, creative ideas are no exception. After all, don’t we want our creative ideas to produce more healthful and constructive results, rather than destructive and unhealthful ones? What good would the creative idea of a sewing needle be if it didn’t work when tested?
One day the great American inventor Tom Edison combined his old routine ideas of electricity and man-made light to create the idea of a long-burning electric light bulb! His creative imagination pictured electricity flowed through some material that would generate light and yet wouldn’t burn out as quickly as some material did, and thus make light longer. There must be such a material, he thought, but that creative spark was just the beginning. To turn the inner creatively impulsive flash into useful scientific knowledge, his lab workers began trial and error experimentation; for about a year they tested about 70 different materials! Of course it took time; like the city of Moose Jaw, the electric light wasn't built in a day. More creative thinking was needed when an idea didn’t test well until they eventually got a good working model. And of course, even that wasn’t the end of the process; electrical engineers have worked experimentally since then to keep creating better electric light bulbs; neon bulbs eventually became a great improvement.
No doubt, creativity can begin by questioning how some situation could be better in some way. It’s simply the mental habit-art of asking how something might be improved in some way; it often starts with the simple question What if...? What if I went to Saskatoon; would I see electric lights? Because all ideas are organic and fluid mental tools, they can be creatively reconstructed in an infinite number of ways, to help keep making life better. What often separates liberal from conservative creativity is often 2 different phrases on the end of the last sentence; liberals would say ‘better for everyone’ while conservatives would say ‘better for a few.’ In any case, however, not only can our creative ideas help keep improving our outer world, but they also help keep our own inner world alive, active, vibrant, and growing with, of course, the help of experimental testing! In short, for us Deweyan liberals, creativity is certainly not a gift from the gods; it’s a result of playfully intelligent experimentation, both verbally and physically!
Creative ideas too thus work and function as psychological tools, but inventive and innovative mental tools; that’s what separates them from all other ideas. Creative ideas look to keep improving nature in some way, rather than just talking about the way nature is and accepting it, but something else happens in all such creative experimentation; ideas BECOME excellent. Before they’re tested all ideas are just ideas – mental impulses. However, as Dewey points out, if an idea’s results are constructive and helpful, then it BECOMES excellent! In short, creative excellence doesn’t merely discover already existing excellence, it CREATES it! For example, when creative ideas actually help us make an unhealthful habit-art more intelligent -- more healthful and satisfying -- then those ideas become excellent. Like any art, creative testing brings excellent ideas into the world. In any case, however, for us Deweyan liberals all creative ideas don't come from another realm of nature; they're either useful or not in the world, and so creativity too can be a growing habit-art, like any other habit-art.
No doubt, continuing to answer his creative questioning with new inventions kept Tom Edison’s creativity growing throughout his life; however, we needn’t build a special lab like he did to learn a creative habit. Our own daily life can always be creatively improved in some way, and so the more we practice imagining how it might be improved, the more we too become creative artists. Even building a new habit makes us creative artists! In short, creativity too can be both an art and a science; it’s an art because it depends on imagination, and it's a science because its objective results depend on experimental testing.
Thus, seeing psychology as Dewey saw it means, in part, seeing the possibility of new creative meanings all around us! With such a creative habit our normal little everyday actions can become a testing lab on its own, and with practice such testing can become will-power. For example, at dinner one night why not ask your parents how they could improve some food they’re eating, I mean besides putting more salt, sugar, or ketchup on it? In our simple everyday actions we can creatively begin WONDERING AND IMAGINING how our own habits might be improved. I wonder … how much money can I save if I buy my light bulbs in Saskatoon? Who knows, but I’m sure the Saskatoonians would appreciate the business.
Suppose, for example, while walking one day I begin feeling a new creatively impulsive mental spark. Suppose some of my subconscious feelings become a little rearranged and help form a new feeling about my walking habit. Suppose I start feeling how some of my neck muscles stay tense, like my trapezius muscle, and thus feels uncomfortable. And suppose also I ask myself if relaxing its annoying tension would make walking more comfortable, relaxed, and enjoyable. That’s a new creative impulse. But then comes the more difficult part of actually learning to relax that muscle which normally stays tense. That’s the great challenge of every new learning process, namely, forming a new behavioral habit. So, I begin testing the idea for a few steps and see if walking feels more refreshing and enjoyable. If it does I can keep practicing the new walking habit, and if it doesn’t feel better, I can forget about it. In any case, however, it’ll take some time and practice to actually start building any new habit; it’s just part of human nature.
For Dewey, producing better results elevates all creatively experimental testing to psychological excellence. The psychological challenge, then, is to keep making our habits, our lives, and our world more enjoyable for everyone. Such excellence can begin with each person. It often begins at the inner level of feelings, but the more we experiment with frustrating situations, the more our old feelings and habits can be slowly reconstructed to produce more enjoyable and satisfying results. What’s more, the more deeply we feel this psychological reality, the easier the testing process becomes. In short, the really good psychological news is this: what works for a walking habit can work to make ANY habit more satisfying! -- relationships, sex, teaching children, diet, exercise, work habits, and so on. Our creative thinking and testing arts can help keep building a slightly newer self every day, and help our self be re-born every day merely with the help of our own little creative impulses and testing experiments. These are yet more very positive results from Dewey's famous saying -- we know only what we build! Only with such active testing do we become a little more mature and wiser. Without intelligently and creatively wanting to experiment with our little inner creative sparks, they remain merely feelings, rather than real knowledge and wisdom.
Natural Creativity
Right about now many folks with a weak creative habit-art may be asking, why bother? It sounds like too much work. There are ideas I don’t want or need to experiment with; I’m satisfied with most of my actions and habits. Besides, isn't everyone somewhat creative naturally? Don’t we all get some creatively impulsive feelings every day, like how to cheat on our diet or taxes and still feel good about it? No doubt, feeling dissatisfied with some actions and wanting to experiment with a new idea is important, but they also point to another important natural fact of life -- all of us are somewhat creative by nature; new creative ideas often impulsively happen daily. That again is an important part of human nature; without such a natural creativity our species would probably have died out long ago.
Truly, almost everyone normally feels and sees creatively new and different ideas and feelings every day! They’re another normal part of what’s called growth. If they didn’t happen growth would be greatly restricted. So, it’s safe to assume most everyone’s feelings are naturally creative to a certain degree, but Dewey’s Behavioral psychology tells us an uncontrolled subconscious creativity can be better controlled, helping make continued growth easier and life more satisfying.
Often during the day we may feel how something could be better, but then the idea quickly sinks back into our subconscious, often because we have to deal with other things happening around us. Often we feel how something might be more satisfying, more healthful, and more enjoyable, but then lose the feeling; life can be frustrating like that. So for us Deweyan liberals another little psychological challenge is making some kind of objective note of such feelings, so they can be look at and thought about later. It’s a way of making our little subconsciously creative impulses live longer, to see if they might really be worth experimenting with, and thus help better control and guide our healthful growth even more. Some people even carry around a pen and paper to write down their new creative ideas, or use a voice recorder, so they won’t be easily forgotten.
In short, natural creativity exists, but it’s often on a weak subconscious level. Often, all too often, peoples’ naturally creative feelings are soon forgotten or ignored. In fact, people may even see such feelings as little time-wasting annoyances. One trivial example might be a child’s tricycle left in the driveway, blocking the husband from getting home at night. But with a little creative training it can become more than just another frustration. It can become another creative opportunity to playfully teach the art of responsibility to a child? A creative idea might be to hide the tricycle and let the child see what life is like without it. When life gives us lemons why not accept the challenge to make some non-fat, sugar-free, educational lemon pie? Wouldn’t that kind of thinking produce better results than merely yelling at or hitting the child? I wonder if Rembrandt ever painted a picture of such creativity; no doubt Salvador Dali did.
Hopefully the reader’s now beginning to see habit-arts are much more than merely practicing our old routines day after day after day. That’s not what Dewey means by psychological excellence. Creative thinking is the means to keep growing and making life more interesting and vibrant. The more unsatisfying our routine habits are, the more life feels boring, drab, depressive, and perhaps not even worth it. Wanting to test some of our naturally creative impulses is one antidote to such unhealthful feelings. Behavioral therapies, then, are designed to empower people to take more control of their lives here and now, with more satisfying actions. It’s not designed to talk about past traumatic events, like Freudian therapy, or feel a so-called collective unconscious like Jungian therapy, but rather to make life better here and now! For example, how many ways are there to make the drive home more enjoyable and educational -- I mean besides getting drunk first? That little everyday event sounds like a great time to help strengthen one’s creative habit-art, and make the drive more satisfying and educational. Testing Beethoven's music, for example, might help make the commute more satisfying and relaxing here and now.
In short, the more creativity becomes a conscious habit-art, and not just a word, the easier it becomes to solve our stressful problems here and now. We can let life stay unsatisfying and boringly routine, as many ancient Stoic philosophers recommended, or we can begin slowly making life more creatively elegant and enjoyable. It all depends on testing the little creative daily impulses we want to test. With such choosing and testing we in fact learn to control our own growth, and become a more intelligent person. As many people now realize, even the class of morons is composed of individual morons. What many people still don’t realize, however, is how useful it sometimes is to act moronically, that is, beyond ethical and legal laws! Sometimes it’s even necessary to see justice is done, and see people held responsible for their actions. In the quest for justice, sometimes the law is something to moronically ignore.
Again, testing the little creative impulses we choose to test is what elevates any such feeling to a scientific level of objective fact. Feeling the objective results of an idea is what science is all about. I may have a creative impulse to help make life more satisfying, but until it's tested it remains just an inner fantasy-idea. To make it scientific it needs to be tested experimentally. What few people realize, however, is how old the habit-art is. In fact for our own human ancestors it’s well over 2 million years old, give or take a San Paulo picnic or too! As we’ll see a little later on, millions of years ago our African H. habilis ancestors began experimentally testing a creative tool-making feeling (OUCH! DAMN STONES!). It certainly wasn't as complex as, say, a moon-landing, but when the new creative impulse for making a stone tool was felt and tested, then modern experimental science was born! For Dewey, modern science too is an art -- the art of merely testing ideas! Almost no one consciously feels that idea today! In reality, however, it means even ordinary folks can become psychologically scientific artists too when they test the ideas they want to test! In fact, habilis' creative tool-making art helped strengthen not only experimental learning's art, but also the kind and caring-arts of ethical excellence too! The more they built such useful stone tools, and shared new sources of food with others, the closer they moved to a liberal ethical model of excellence. Both the habit-arts of constructive building and sharing in the results of such building remain ethically excellent habits to this day! In short, Dewey’s liberal creativity habit-art can not only keep us growing and learning, but it can also make both our inner psychological life and our outer ethical grow a little more caring, helpful, and excellent each day.
In fact, such a liberally creative learning process has been fueling our human behavioral evolution for over 2 million years, give or take a Saturn Saturday or 2. And what’s more, a much greater number of creative improvements have continued growing since our San ancestors began talking about their feelings during the last 100,000 years! Today, such liberal excellence continues not only celebrating liberal Democritus’ creative atomic ideas, but his politically democratic and ethically humane ideas. Because of their humane and satisfying results, such ideas have continued growing stronger. Of course we’ve created terribly destructive atomic weapons with some tools, but their destructiveness hasn’t been very widespread yet. However, that certainly doesn’t mean that pattern will continue. In fact, it’s another creative ethical challenge all of us can take part in, namely demanding just about all such weapons be destroyed wherever they exist! Only in a few situations can their results ever be constructive and helpful. What better social use for a creative habit-art is there, I mean outside the bedroom?
8. HOW MUCH ARE YOU TESTING?
More about testing? Damn, aren’t we through talking about this idea yet? Well, in a sense the idea is still just beginning to grow for most everyone, and so there’s actually much more to be said about it, especially how the art can be used in both the inner and outer worlds. In fact, testing goes on day-in and day-out; how else can we make our social lives safer and more peaceful? So, this section to is meant to keep increasing the awareness of that important idea, as well as some intelligent responses to it. In fact, nothing gives a person more confidence and self-assurance than reliable knowledge, and so that quest continues in this section.
First, a little review. Our new strongest learning art -- experimental learning -- is a testing process, but besides testing ourselves to keep becoming more intelligent, another important use is in our social world, testing others for their feelings and actions. Many socially conscious people want to know what people will do for, say, $10, and what they’ll do with $10. In fact, there are people who spend much of their life testing people for their weaknesses and strengths. What’s more, no one is exempt; 70 year old rabbis get tested for their honesty just as much as politicians and young folks. Thus, the testing field is practically infinite. Given that reality, what better way to continue celebrating it than with yet another lovely lame limerick, guaranteed to either clear up all doubts and uncertainties, or else completely and thoroughly confuse everyone. You never know, right?
A young woman liked flirting her besting,
To lure bad men into thoughts of nesting.
But while at the altar
She snapped off her halter,
Coyly smiled and said 'Just testing'.
Some Social Testing Is Old Indeed
Such testing was alive and well even in ancient Greece. Conservative Plato writes in his Republic how future leaders in his ideal city-state were to be tested for some 50 years before they were given political power. But the art almost certainly goes back to our ancestral tribes and also the beginning of a more populated social life with the growth of villages, towns, and cities after 8,000 BCE. People needed to know who could be trusted not to harm others, and so testing others became a more important social art, in fact useful to this day.
For us Deweyan liberals, however, 2 habit-arts already mentioned help most everyone pass most all such testing. One is the habit-art of helping others, and the other is judging people by their respectful actions to just laws and people. Both habit-arts are a sign of liberal character excellence, rather than greed, selfishness, and law-breaking. And, again, the best way to keep testing our self with those habit-arts is simply to practice them on a daily basis. With such practice liberal Behavioral psychology fuses nicely with liberal models of ethical excellence. The sooner we learn to build such excellent habits, the more easily we’ll be able to past such tests in many different situations, as well as help others keep improving their own weak and excessive habits. No doubt, many want to become excellent people, and yet don’t have clear ideas about what actions are a sign of such excellence. However, just those 2 ideas show again liberal philosophy and psychology is not complicated rocket science. For learning those kinds of practical knowledge the art of testing is useful day-in and day-out. As we'll see in a later section, such testing can become quite complex, especially in today’s tremendously complex world, but, again, just those 2 habit-arts will help pass just about all social tests.
Testing happens every day of every year. There’s simply no other way to know what a person’s character is like. Is it volatile, relaxed, helpful, indifferent, uncaring, or what? No doubt, in practice testing someone can become involved, complex, and long lasting, but the basic goal of testing is rather easy to see. Suppose, say, someone who looks like the mate of your dreams tells you they love and respect you, but how deep are those feelings? How are they shown in actions? Is such respect shown on a daily basis, or not? In this day and age, many of course want the band on the hand before giving cookie some nookie, so to speak.
So, one tests someone in many little ways to see how they act on a daily basis. Are they attentive, caring, and affectionate, or aloof, unconcerned, and indifferent? Perhaps you call a caterer and set up a beautiful dinner with some nice wine and soft candlelight, and of course some nice music; you may even want to practice the almost lost art of actually dancing together, rather than wiggling around on your own! In short, every action is a small way of revealing how excellent one’s character is. How much do they care and respect others, and how much are they mean and selfish? After all, how can people have a healthy relationship without respect for both themselves and others? In short, intelligent people want to see how someone acts when someone wants nookie without the band on the hand. How much of a child and adult is the person? Obviously, the more someone’s actions are seen, the more information is given about their all-important character habits.
For many people the very important philosophic art of testing starts growing at an early age; even kids subconsciously test their parents to see how much freedom they can have, and what they’ll do in certain situations. Hopefully, with caring parents, they’ll eventually learn to consciously negotiate for more freedom and responsibility, but in any case parents get tested, and obviously the same kinds of testing go on between adults as well. How much will your partner help when you’re broke and sick?
Believe it or not, such democratic kinds of testing between people of all ages and classes are still rather new and modern. For almost all of history parents controlled their children and political and religious leaders controlled the masses. Marriages to usually arranged to acquire more land, money, political power, or just to get rid of their daughters; most people saw women as inferior people. The best educated conservative Greeks like Plato, the Pythagoreans, and liberal sophists and Atomists were notable exceptions. As a result, women merely changed hands from a father to a husband with little regard to compatibility. As a result, even today many people are attracted just to someone else's physical appearance, rather than how much their habits are alike and what the chances are of growing together, rather than merely sharing space together. Such non-testing actions no doubt help explain why some 50% of people have failed relationships, and why adultery is so common; couples often don’t test each other with questions to see how compatible they are about 2 important habit-arts -- money and sex.
Such personal kinds of testing began growing as our modern democratic and independent habits grew. People became freer to marry the person of their choice, and thus become more responsible for guiding your own growth and happiness; will someone else help you keep building the habits you want to build, and if not will they at least keep encouraging you? In such a new democratic world as ours, the art of experimental testing continues becoming more important not only on a personal level but on a social level as well. How can we expect someone to like, say, pickles who doesn't want or need them, unless of course they're pregnant?
No doubt, such testing goes on throughout the business world as well. How helpful will a new worker be for increasing our profits; how much of a thief are they; how friendly to fellow workers are they, and so on. Testing is the only way to answer such questions. In fact, whatever field one chooses to work in, such testing will go on, whether it’s in the military, education, medicine, or whatever. People will be tested to see how much they enjoy their work, and how creatively productive it is.
Again, such testing reveals a person’s most precious possession – a healthy character. Arranging a romantic dinner to test a future mate helps see what their reactions are to a seductive dinner, and again, those responses are the OBJECT of experimental testing! Will they whine and beg for some sex like a little baby? Will they threaten rape if you don’t give in? Will they try to drug you or get you drunk first? Or will they act like a respectful adult, enjoy a nice quiet evening of trying to laugh together and share their likes and dislikes, maybe listen to a little soft music and hold each other close while complimenting you on the great dinner a caterer cooked, talk seriously about what they want from a relationship, ask about the chances for another date, and then go home and take yet another cold shower? For how many people is sex after marriage still an excellent sign of ultimate respect? How much of a respectful and caring adult are you? Does someone make you feel relaxed and at ease or should you keep a loaded gun close? Their reactions are the objects intelligent people see while testing someone, just like they are for scientists creating a new medicine or building a new tool.
To say the least, for some people such a testing habit-art has become a strong skill. People who run institutions are especially interested in testing their employees, and what's more, many of them are also good at testing their employers! How greedy and respectful are they to their workers; what’re my supervisors doing with their money; are they using it to help others or merely building up their own bank account? Often money is a favorite tool for testing one’s character. Some people will kill another innocent person merely for money, not to mention break laws to make as much money as possible; recent banking actions in the housing market is certainly evidence of that! So, again, helping those less fortunate with one’s extra money is, perhaps, the best response with money. Is someone merely stocking their own bank account and buying fancy cars and homes for themself, or helping those less fortunate? How many stories have you redd about how even priests, ministers, and rabbis abused the money they were given in the quest to live like royalty? As many have seen recently, many religious people have even broken sex laws with young men and women, even though they may've taken a vow not to. In short, the need to test people is on-going; one is never completely sure how someone else may act here and now. Who hasn’t seen how even presidents are tested, as Richard Nixon’s presidency taught my generation. Many of his advisors kept testing his character, giving him many different options to choose from, and his reactions showed the depth of his honesty and trustworthiness. Sadly, he failed many of his character tests and thus lost congress's support and trust.
Such examples are meant to convince the reader, building at least those 2 habit-arts mentioned earlier -- respect for others and just laws, and helpfulness for those less fortunate -- is one of the best ways to pass all such testing. Those 2 habits are useful in so many daily situations, it would be practically impossible to list them all. So the question becomes, have you tested yourself to see how weak they are? Believe it or not, there are some people who feel they need to be treated brutally simply because they feel they’re not worthy of being treated any other way! Such abusive and disrespectful actions are often a quick way to the grave; even in ancient Rome disrespectful Emperor Caligula was soon killed by his own guards. In short, those 2 habit-arts are tremendously important skills.
Testing can help improve one’s own character excellence as well! How much do you smile and feel good about yourself while waiting at a crosswalk for the 'Walk' sign, even though others may be breaking the law? How much do you respect people and leave them alone even though they seem so different and not worthy of respect? How much do you respect your own health and pass up that 5th piece of mammoth-meat pizza? How much to you nurture and guide your own happiness by laughing at all the silly things people do, including yourself? The best way to keep building such psychological excellence is to keep practicing and actively feeling what such actions are like, rather than keep indulging yourself like a 4 year old at a birthday party? No doubt, some excessively unhealthful habits are difficult to improve, but the more one practices, the easier it gets!
Becoming more conscious of both our own actions, and those of others is often the first step for making life better? How objectively can we see our self and others? After all, how can we and our world keep becoming a more excellent place to live unless everyone is tested, their resulting actions are seen, and they’re held responsible for their disrespectful and greedy actions?
Why are such character habits so important to each of us? The excessively unhealthful such habit-arts are, the more a person’s life and freedom are endangered, as well as those around them. Thus, simply observing others’ actions is a good way to keep society safe and peaceful, or at least hold people responsible for their actions. Who knows who's really excellent and who isn’t unless their actions are observed? Indeed, life itself can become more enjoyable, satisfying, and fun if one learns some simply habit-arts.
How Much Do You Test?
Nurturing the feeling for liking such a habit-art is like nurturing a likeness for painting, video-game playing, sculpting, writing, cooking, golfing, or driving. Slow and steady, one day at a time, helps build such habits. Thus, the more testing begins with our self, in our own little daily routines, the easier it becomes to nurture its growth; in that way we can become our own best therapist. The more someone tests them self for respecting just laws, the more they can feel how weak or strong it is. That way we can begin growing a feeling for how important our daily actions are; excellent actions build excellent habits builds excellent character, as well as the subconscious feelings for excellence! They in turn make it easier to instinctively feel how excellent our own actions are. For example, how quickly will you give back the extra change a cashier mistakenly gave you, or even correcting someone when they charge you less than the price tag? How honest are you exactly? The more honest you are with life's little events, the easier it becomes to act instinctively honest with life’s more important events! With such actions we become more trustworthy and keep our freedom growing.
The art of planning is another useful result from building a testing habit. Intelligent testing often works best with a little planning. Why not plan to give a little something to charity next paycheck, and then do it? Or plan to leave some extra money lying around while dining with someone you don’t know very well? Such creative testing requires a little creative planning, daring, and audacity to see where others draw their ethical lines, so to speak. Such testing also helps build our own wisdom to make testing a truly fine social art.
What’s more, it also helps us realize even philosophic ideals can easily become a real living part of our daily lives, rather than just being some abstract idea in a college textbook. In truth, the more such liberal philosophic ideas are practiced, the more they'll feel like religious ideas and habits were felt in the medieval world -- supremely important and worthwhile. As people then learned to pray for anything, so we today can learn more useful skills, like even testing teachers, parents, brothers, sisters,or anyone. I once had a high school history teacher who tested student's character habits by wearing short skirts, and sitting on a table with legs crossed; she liked to test students for their responses. I must say, it certainly made history class more interesting, for both male and female students, and on top of all that she had very cute knees too! While teaching, a young female student came to my class after school, I think to turn in an assignment. So I asked her if she wanted a kiss. She said yes, so I gave her a Hershey’s Kiss. She was just testing me.
Why Build Psychologically Excellent Habit-arts?
Again, building such respectful habits simply makes life easier and less stressful. After all, we all carry our character records with us from job to job. Potential employers want to know how a person worked on their last job, so they’ll contact them and get some feedback. Building a psychological set of excellent habits makes working anywhere that much easier, and more interesting as well. Knowing a little about testing others makes it easier for them to become more aware of their weaknesses, and thus better able to improve them. In fact, the more we learn about the weaknesses of our teachers and schools, the easier it is to build better ones! How much are they merely teaching more and more trivial academic facts largely useless in the real world? How much do they want to egotistically be appreciated as the center of attention? How much are they ignoring the formal teaching of more important character habit-arts like joyfully obeying just laws and helping others and their communities? If they are, how might such weaknesses be best improved, and schools be made more democratic? After all, the less children learn what psychological excellence means in action, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone as adults? Is my schools formally teaching excellent habits of honesty, creativity, and humor, or are they merely teaching habits of obedience to their books and teachers; the more that happens, the more boring school becomes.
How psychologically excellent are our churches, synagogues, and mosques? Are they helping others become more humane, independent, and intelligent learners, or just keeping them anchored and obedient to untested spirit-ideas and anti-democratic ethical ideas? How excellent are our community businesses? Are they focused only on maximizing profits, or on helping make workers’ lives less stressful and helping build a healthier community? How much are they celebrating equal rights for all in their hiring practices? In other words, how humane and human-centered are our economic, political, and educational institutions acting here and now? I certainly don’t mean everyone should always be constantly testing all those kinds of people, but even focusing on one person would certainly be better than ignoring the testing art altogether.
To many people who haven’t yet built such a testing habit-art, such ideas may sound devious, sneaky, and unethical. After all, if you can’t trust your teachers, bankers, politicians, rabbis, or parents, then who can you trust, I mean besides your mortician? But again, unless people are held responsible for their greedy and disrespectful actions, the more dangerous life becomes for everyone. What’s more, it’s safe to assume every profession has its share of dishonest and greedy people, especially in the business world, and if they’re allowed to keep practicing those habits, they will. So, the sooner they’re discovered and held responsible for their actions, the safer life itself becomes.
Testing others is the only way to discover who will probably break the law, act greedily, or even harm innocent animals and children. The more people see where others draw their ethical lines, then the sooner potential serious problems can be directed to the people who can best help them, like professional psychologists or law enforcement people. Obviously it’s not always easy. Sometimes we’re emotionally attached to people who’ve committed a serious crime, and so doing the most excellent thing isn’t always easy, as many Hollywood films teach us, but the more we all work to make life safer and more secure by testing others, the more life becomes safer and more secure. In short, learning a testing habit-art is another sign of psychological health. How else can we help others become more respectful and caring unless we know how they act?
The more we practice such a testing art, the easier it is to feel how it’s not only an art, but a science as well! The more we see and feel the objective results of testing someone, like leaving a $10 bill on the floor, the more scientific our knowledge of that person becomes! What else are atomic physicists or chemists studying other than the objective results of their experiments? And the more creative we are with our experimental tests, the more a testing artist we become. In short, whether we test a person or an idea, we practice liberal philosophy’s best learning art -- experimental learning. And what’s more, such thinking helps us see how Dewey’s liberal naturalistic philosophy isn’t overly complicated and difficult to understand or use. With such testing actions liberal psychological excellence lives and breathes; it’s not just an idea.
Religious Ideas Can Be Tested Too
In fact, a testing art is already widespread in nature; even African anteaters test termite mounds to see how strong they are; who knows, one day those termites might even get together and build themselves an anteater jail. What’s new is the conscious and intentional human use of such testing habits for everyone; we can consciously build testing plans. Believe it or not, until just a few hundred years ago almost no one even thought about testing their teachers, politicians, religious leaders, or their ideas. For most everyone, obedience to such ideas was the conservative model of psychological excellence for thousands of years. Almost everyone practiced what their teachers and leaders told them to practice. Of course there was an on-going series of small rebellions here and there, but they were quickly put down with overwhelming force and violence; might made such habits right! Obedience was to be maintained above all else. When the manor’s lord said give us so much tax money, and so many children to train for war, people usually obeyed without question. In general that was the conservative social order for thousands of years. As a rule, only those who wanted more social power kept testing those with more power, to see how strong they were. Other than that most everyone else simply did what they were told to do, and let it go at that. Even if a poor man’s daughter or wife was even raped by a rich man, what could they possibly do about it; if they acted to see justice was served their own life might be endangered.
As a rule, then, most everyone merely kept practicing their routine habits of obedience; they often produced the safest results. Almost always people were kept in the social classes they were born into, and also told god had willed it. Also, beautiful and awe-inspiring cathedrals were often built to reinforce such ideas while disease and sickness continued infecting millions, diets and water supplies remained unhealthful and dangerous, war and lawlessness often raged unchecked, people continued enslaving innocent people while living in filth and squalor, and much of the time they were called god’s tests. What little education people got was aimed to keep reinforcing spirit-ideas and obeying routine religious habits. After all, why try to make anything better when god-sent spirits cause disease anyway? Men were so busy farming, and women were usually kept busy with household and child-rearing chores, neither got much of a chance to stop, look around, and ask themselves how can I possibly make my life more equal and satisfying? How can I test all the ideas used to keep people obedient and controlled? Those men who could afford, say, a good pair of boots simply held their noses, walked through the animal and human sewage, and learned to get out of the way when bathroom pots were emptied above them.
However, with the growth of modern experimental testing arts all such ideas and habit-arts became easier to challenge and test. Democratic political ideas of equality and equal rights also began growing just a few centuries ago. Liberal Dewey deeply believed in all such ideas, and so wanted to teach others how the results of such testing would help build more intelligent habits than merely accepting the old conservative model of obedience and faith. With his help, then, a whole world of new ideas and actions began opening up as more and more people began realizing they no longer had to blindly accept and obey all the conservative status quo ideas! Even the most cherished conservative idea of all, namely, spirit-ideas, became subject to some commonsense logical testing.
What Took So Long?
Why did such useful testing arts only begin growing stronger about 4 centuries ago? What took so long for our modern liberal experimental testing habit-arts and democratic ideas to start building our modern scientific and democratic era? That question should now be easy to answer. All psychological habits are propulsive; once learned they keep working until people physically stop practicing them! Thus, conservative habit-arts like obedience to spirit-ideas and a rigid social class structure helped keep such liberal democratic and testing habits weak. Occasionally an aristocrat may have been punished for his disrespectful actions, or even an emperor like Caligula, but in general people were taught to be tolerant of those with social power. As a result, most people weren’t very good at even feeling others should be tested. They often saw people act mean and viciously, but what could they do about it? Not much. What’s more, because education was so focused on teaching conservative spirit-ideas and rituals, almost no one was taught to feel all others should be tested, including upper class political and religious leaders! They would be judged after death.
Only slowly, as democratic, industrial, and experimentally scientific habits grew did more and more people begin feeling we're all just people, with the same weaknesses and strengths, rather than being chosen by a god to play a certain role in life. Thus, only recently has it become easier to test all ideas while building the new liberal Behavioral models of psychological excellence. Even in England conditions remained similar to those just described until the 1800s. Don't look now, but in terms of history that was just like yesterday! Early in that century English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, and early Socialists like Robert Owen, started talking publicly about actually improving English life for everyone. In response, the conservative establishment quickly labeled them social ‘radicals’, as if society would collapse if people had cleaner streets to walk on, cleaner air to breathe, safer drinking water, better schools, work places, and recreational parks to relax in. Making all children go to school was, at first, often said to be an unworkable idea; it would wreck the economy which, at the time, was largely based on child labor, both male and female!
More humane institutions for the mentally disabled were also a liberal ‘radical’ idea, as was the idea of teaching prisoners more useful employment skills. In short, only yesterday, so to speak, did liberals like Bentham and Owen start testing status quo ideas by looking around creatively and imagining how life could produce more humane and human-centered results, rather than merely focusing on always maximizing profits for a few. Even though Dewey raised some valid criticisms of Bentham’s other ideas, his work was definitely a step in the right direction; what step isn't experimental anyway? Compared to what life was like at the time, such liberal ideas were worth testing, and when they did actually produce better social results, they became more worthwhile options for other people to experiment with. We’ll see more about Utilitarian ideas when we look more closely at some ethical models of excellence in Part 2.
Testing Spirit-Ideas
Naturally, with the growth of more liberal psychological ideas like experimental testing, and equal democratic rights, came the idea of testing spirit-ideas too. One result was the new word ‘agnostic’, created in 1869 by the English biologist Thomas Huxley. It helped define the new liberal skepticism growing about all conservative spirit-ideas.
In fact, such skeptical feelings of not knowing something had been felt instinctively by a few even in the ancient world. For example, Hinduism has a long tradition of skepticism about some ideas. In the 400s BCE a man named Sanjaya Belatthaputta had evidently been testing his idea of an afterlife for humans; eventually he openly admitted he had no such knowledge. Also, in the Hindu Rig Veda Nasadiya Sukta admits he too has no knowledge of the universe’s origins; about that idea he was agnostic. Also, liberal Greek sophists were even more specific. Protagoras, for example, openly admitted he was agnostic about knowledge of the gods; the shortness of life and the question’s difficulty prevented it. Evidently he too had been testing his knowledge about the subject, and freely admitted he didn’t know anything about them. All he saw were many different ideas about them.
Then, early in our modern experimental era skeptics like David Hume, critical philosophers like Immanuel Kant, and even Christian existentialists like Soren Kierkegaard admitted the existence of such spirit-objects could not be proved with reason alone. For Kierkegaard only a so-called personally existential ‘leap of faith’ could settle the question for that person! We’ll talk later about faith as a reliable test for such spirit-ideas.
Shortly after Kierkegaard died in 1855, Huxley created the word ‘agnostic’; it’s a combination of 2 Greek words, ‘a’ meaning no or none, and gnosis meaning knowledge; an agnostic is one who has no knowledge about something, mainly because it almost certainly can’t be objectively tested. About the creation of the word Huxley wrote this: “So I … invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of ‘agnostic.’ It came into my head as … antithetic to the ‘gnostic’ of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. … To my great satisfaction the term took.” In short, only after the US civil War ended did an agnostic feeling become a conscious idea; it was created in part to help people admit they really didn’t know about any spirit-object.
To help see why the agnostic idea was created we can run a little logical test here and now. If we merely assume spirit-objects exist, then we can reason about how to learn about them; we can test the idea’s logic. One argument might run like this: IF spirit-objects are defined as completely immaterial and non-physical objects, then to make their presence felt in our material world they must become material themselves. If not, they couldn’t move anything in the natural world, and thus remain unknown. So even if they existed they wouldn’t be able to prove spirit-objects exist! They would need to become material objects in some way, and thus would be no help in proving spirit-objects exist. Also, if spirit-objects are completely non-physical, then, almost certainly, there could be no physical test to show they exist; they wouldn’t be able to produce any physical results! I leave it to the reader to think about such logical tests further. The point is, only very recently have people dared to use such testing on all conservative spirit-ideas, and begun helping liberate people from acting intolerantly to those who don’t accept such ideas.
Even many decades before Huxley created the word agnostic, many conservative spirit-ideas were being tested and found unreliable. For example, soon after the building of ships capable of sailing around the world in the 1500s, the biblical idea of Noah’s Flood was tested; it was said to be an earth-wide event and also said to be god’s eternal Truth. However, the more Christian missionaries sailed to China in the 1600s, and saw how their histories showed no evidence of such a flood, the more such ideas could no longer be accepted as absolute Truth. There was no evidence the Chinese had somehow learned to write and breathe under water for 40 days and 40 nights!
Other results of Christian spirit-ideas, however, produced more positive social results. For example, such ideas helped reconstruct destructive and brutal Viking habits after 1,000 CE, and many Native Americans stopped practicing human sacrifice. In both those cases such actions helped increase the habit of testing their own spirit-ideas, and thus help make them a little more respectful, humble, humane, and less superstitious, even if they were just small improvements.
Even the early Islamic world widely celebrated experimental testing habits. Even as Islamic armies were conquering Arab and Persian peoples in the 600s, experimental testing habits were fairly strong in places of scholarship like Bagdad, North Africa, and Islamic Spain; after the Crusades, however, a conservative Islamic reaction soon set in and religious habits of obedience became more powerful.
Again, the widespread democratic and conscious use of experimental testing are still relatively new habit-arts, and so still not practiced very widely; schools around the world still teach mentally naïve children such objects exist; many even believe they’ll go straight to heaven if they die for a religious cause. Such is the power of education. Only after 1600, when people like Francis Bacon began telling people what life might become with the help of tested ideas, more and more intelligent people saw how right he was. Even a century before Bacon people like Leonardo Da Vinci felt only tested ideas and habits should be considered as our best and most excellent knowledge. As a result, Western civilization's medieval 'cocoon' of conservative ideas slowly began breaking apart, giving birth to a new learning art – experimental testing. With the help of new tools like the microscope and thermometer, and real experimental knowledge of how our bodies actually work, the new knowledge began transforming life as never before. However, Bacon’s liberal challenge still confronts us – how can be best keep the economic and technological results of science from being concentrated in the hands of a few, rather than used to make everyone life more satisfying?
One more example of how valuable such testing arts are can be seen in Chinese history. Thousands of years ago, around the time Augustus became emperor of the Roman Empire and Jesus was learning how to be a carpenter, some very creative and inventive people in China looked around their little corner of the world and saw a widespread health problem -- smallpox. Eventually their creative thinking helped form a plan and then test it. What if we took the material from just one pock infection, dried it out, and then put it into someone’s body? Would it keep them from getting infected? Interesting idea, and so the testing began, and the more it was tested the more reliable it became. Even today the flu shots many get contain part of what could make them sick! In short, the idea helped millions of Chinese avoid that terrible disease and stay much healthier than local shamans could ever make them. Eventually, many centuries later, Europeans began testing the idea too. So it should now be clear; restricting voluntary experimental testing to solve any real social or personal problem is, in effect, to restrict not only knowledge itself, but progress as well! Outlawed marijuana became medically useful to AIDS and cancer patients only after it was tested!
Eventually, such testing arts even began improving religious education in the 1800s; the Church, which had once taught people the Bible was all anyone needs to know, began teaching science and modern medicine in its schools. Thus, billions of religious people today are now living longer and better lives thanks to modern science and its naturalistic testing arts. They've made it much easier to keep satisfying peoples' food, health, and security needs, even though wealth and political power is still much too concentrated in the hands of a few. In any case, however, old conservative spirit-ideas have become less powerful; the local exorcist is rapidly becoming an endangered species.
Psychological Ideals of Economic Excellence
Liberals are now asking another idea be tested, namely, the economic idea of sharing science’s useful inventions with others, rather than demanding more and more money for them. Since the US Civil War an economic aristocracy has been growing stronger, more feudalistic, and less democratic by the day! As we’ll see in Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence, the Industrial Revolution also helped create economic science. Since Adam Smith published his famous book The Wealth of Nations in 1776, economics too has slowly but steadily become divided along conservative and liberal lines. Again, money is helping divide society once again, just a religious ideas and land ownership did in medieval times. Today, conservatives are interested mainly in their own personal profits and wealth, while democratic liberals like Dewey focused on using such collective wealth to make life more satisfying and less stressful for everyone.
What’s more, conservatives often seem to ignore the objective results of their ideas, and thus ignore experimental testing altogether. For many of them, healthy debate about objective results has often been reduced to propaganda; keep telling people the same idea over and over again and pretty soon they’ll believe it’s true! Even in the early days of economic science pessimists like David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus kept telling people we’re all doomed; they said we’ll never be able to feed our rapidly growing populations and many will start starving to death. Such propaganda helped others label economics as ‘the dark science.’ They painted a rather gloomy picture of the future.
Luckily, however, such ideas became a challenge to creative thinking, and with the invention and testing of chemical fertilizers and new kinds of foods, such ideas have so far proved not very accurate; who knows what the future holds, however? Even today conservative economists keep telling us disaster is just around the corner; to some of them testing ideas has merely helped confuse people, rather than clarify them. No doubt, many people still don’t have enough good food to eat, but in the meantime birth-control habits are being tested and many have proved useful, as has allowing more women into the business world given many an alternative to merely producing more babies. In short, what did economists like Ricardo and Malthus know about discovering creatively new agricultural arts, or the women's liberation movement, or birth control? Population in Russia and Japan is even declining, and leveling off in other places too. So again, what do people really know about their ideas until they’re actually tested for their results? Only those results can prove any idea reliable and useful. That's how powerful experimental testing is. What conservatives and liberals debate today are the meanings of objective results. No doubt, Ricardo and Malthus were right to point out nature does have limits for we humans; what life form doesn’t have its limits, even for mooching relatives? But until they’re tested who knows where they are?
So, if Dewey’s right about experimental testing – that it’s our only learning art -- then it seems never in the last 2 million years has mankind been in a better position to more confidently keep improving both people and our world. In fact, Dewey himself practiced Christian spirit-ideas for about 30 years before he began testing them for their truthfulness. For him their personal and social results became not only weak and distracting, but because they couldn’t be verified they also kept psychic life narrow and routine.
For us Deweyan liberals, experimental testing habit-arts have already begun helping millions of people build a more robust, constructive, thoughtful, independent, and enjoyable life. After all, if we don’t keep testing our self to build the feelings for more psychologically excellent habit-arts, then it’ll be that much more difficult to act excellently and pass the social tests others give us. What’s more, we Deweyan liberals confidently say to keep growing such habit-arts, our overly conservative public schools need to become more liberalized and useful to their students! If we’re to improve many of our social problems, like crime, unemployment, and racial discrimination, we need to keep experimenting with more liberal educational ideas, rather than merely keep our schools teaching all but useless academic trivia to all students! We need to stop practicing the Romantic educational ideal of teaching all students the same facts, and start experimenting with teaching students the useful skills they want to learn! In short, we need to democratize our public schools, rather than keep them dictatorial and undemocratic. If someone wants to learn more about, say, ‘Shakespeare,’ then they should be free to do so, but to make all students study what most of them have little desire to learn only creates discipline problems, psychic boredom, and perpetuates the feudalistic habits of obedience to the status quo. In any healthy democratic society those are all unhealthful habits.
In short, all our public schools can and should be tested for their actual results, just like all people can be tested for their actions. Since when is any public institution beyond criticism? What social results and personal habits are public schools actually producing? Are our schools preparing children merely to read more books, or help them learn practical skills useful in the real world? Why shouldn’t more young folks, especially in our inner city schools, began feeling what excellent liberal psychological habits are like, and also be encouraged to keep strengthening them once they're out of school? The more they don't learn such skills, the more vulnerable they become to restricting their own freedom as well as become a burden to all honest taxpayers! Why, for example, shouldn’t more students learn how to test the idea of a just law, respect those that are just, and change those that aren’t?
No doubt, many children still don't have such testing arts, but that doesn’t mean they can’t start learning how they feel. The more our public schools teach such skills, the sooner they’ll be learned. If so, our schools will become even more useful institutions than they are now, and help people keep emerging psychologically from any old, blindly routine, dangerous, and harmful habit-arts. The more such intelligent liberal habit-arts are ignored, the more difficult it becomes for anyone to make life all it can be. Testing more liberal educational ideas in our public schools would thus help more young folks build a survival kit of useful habit-arts, like testing ideas and actions, as well as help keep improving both our democratic and ethical ideals too. How much of a testing artist are you, I mean besides for cheesecake, armed robbery, embezzlement, drug dependency, welfare fraud, and bilking the public out of as much money as possible?
9. FROM ACADEMIC FACTS TO ORGANIC ART
In this section I first talk about the organic art of improving my own unhealthful eating habits. I’ve mentioned that art many times already, so if you're feeling nauseous about it, don't worry; why not take a break and have some nice healthy vegetarian pizza and non-fat yogurt? In truth, seeing examples of real psychological improvement helps make that art much more alive, human, and meaningful. After that, then there’s a little more information about an intelligent improvement process, and also the importance of excellent social habits too. So, if you want a little more encouragement for improving a bad habit, why not read this section, and if not skip it? In any case, here’s yet another luxuriously lame limerick to clarify all these ideas.
There once was a man who learned to freeze burgers.
But fixing them to taste created sleaze burgers.
So when as big as a whale,
And breaking scale after scale,
He decided to quit eating triple avocado cheeseburgers.
Actively improving our few character weaknesses with intelligent practice is another fine example of the difference between conservative and liberal models of human nature. The ancient conservative model painted by Plato and Christianity was internally divisive, mystical, and negative while making little logical sense. Plato, for example, believed the gods controlled everything, and yet he set up an educational system to psychologically train the next generation of political leaders. Early Christianity too inherited the same general logical weakness. For them god was all-knowing, and so knew everything everyone would do. At the same time, however, it set up schools to actively teach young folks their ideas and rituals. If Christianity or any similar conservative system was really the absolute Truth about life and nature, then why wouldn’t everyone naturally learn about it, just as everyone learns about gravity? In reality, however, life showed a great deal more variety about such ideas!
For Plato, courageous actions would help strengthen our faculty of will-power, even though the gods controlled all expressions of courage. And for Christians improving any habit also meant exercising an already existing will-power about learning already existing forms of excellence. Obedience to god’s will thus became psychological excellence. At the same time, however, all actions were controlled by god’s plan; thus god knew everything, past, present, and future, thus making ideas like free-will almost impossible to accept. In any case, on a daily practical level controlling one's will was serious business. For Christians, devils kept tempting people to sin against god’s already existing law, even though an all good god had created those spirits knowing full well they would rebel and bring others to their fire kingdom below the earth. All such knowledge was supposedly known by god even before the universe was created, thus ultimately making all of us mere puppets of god, and fulfilling our pre-ordained destinies! For Christianity’s greatest ancient philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, people could resist evil temptations only with the help of divine grace, thus passively praying became a method of improving rebellious habit-arts. As we've begun seeing, however, Dewey's modern Behavioral model of psychological excellence is free from all such internally illogical, inconsistent, and confusing ideas. How can an all-good god knowingly create anything less than good, or even something it knew would become evil? Dewey’s Behavioral models of psychological excellent would thus focus on future healthful results as the best way to start improving any weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-art.
What’s more, for Dewey our will-power grows only with the actions we practice and the habits we learn. In short, there's no objective evidence for a separate mental faculty of will-power; human nature is all organic and holistic. The more we practice, say, acting courageously, the stronger our courageous will-power becomes. And to make that learning process more intelligent, the more we enjoy our practice, the faster we learn a new habit. For Dewey will-power is not separate and distinct from any other habit-art; they're all organic habits. The more habits we grow the more will-power we have. In any case, however, improvement always depends on our own active practice, and the more we teach our self to playfully enjoy that practice, the easier it is to keep practicing and better control of our growth.
For religious conservatives, however, improvement was often felt as an eternal struggle between good and evil, rather than as a playful and enjoyable learning process. Liberals, on the other hand, like to ask why should we keep telling our self we’re evil and sinful just because we don't obey someone else’s ideas, or even allow others to yell at us? What's important for learning any new habit is encouraging feelings and actions; they help us feel more confidence about learning a better skill, like how to enjoy life without harmful drugs, excessive alcohol, or any other harmful object. Such feelings and actions are easy for those who've learned to relax and liberate themselves from negative and pessimistic kinds of thinking and talking.
Well, a conservative might ask, if ideas about psychological excellence don’t come from a spirit-object, then where do they come from? For Dewey such ideas are defined biologically of course! Constructive growth is psychologically excellent! If an action or habit-art promotes constructive kinds of growth, then it BECOMES a value and a good! Learning to help others is another logical idea growing from that idea; it becomes another value if it works. After all, we’re all just people living in a social world, right? In fact, for many today, including many in Hollywood, helping others has become the highest good! Then, after deciding which idea to test, we can act on the idea. What constructive results are we feeling and encouraging? After all, we’re all a part of nature, and so learning how to more intelligently KEEP satisfying our needs and wants becomes a sign of liberal excellence.
Being responsible for our actions is another result of such thinking. The more we practice feeling the results of our improvement actions, the more our feelings of personal responsibility grow. We’re responsible for the direct results our actions create. So, like modern existential philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and his friend Simone de Beauvoir, we Deweyan liberals too celebrate being personally responsible for our own actions! Sometimes they produce excellent results, and sometimes not, but in either case we are the ones responsible for them and their results. If we keep eating sleazy cheeseburgers, for example, then we’re responsible for their harmful results. No doubt, the more those feelings grow, the easier it becomes to feel how important our own daily choices and actions really are.
Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Cow Kabob, or How I Lost My Butt?
Recently, over the past 30 or 40 years, more and more people in the US have been challenged to build more intelligent diet habits. As economic pressures continue rising for most everyone, obesity is becoming a more serious problem for both adults and young folks in the US.
My mother was taught to be a good cook, but most of the foods she fixed were full of unneeded calories, like many fast food restaurants today. Like her mother before her, she too was perhaps 50 or 60 pounds overweight for most of her life. And so naturally she passed such eating habits on to her children; excessively sugary, fatty, and salty foods were a normal part of my diet well into my 20s. Luckily, however, before I was 30 I happened to read a very interesting diet book written by an African American. One of America's great social activists, Dick Gregory, helped write a book called Cookin' With Mother Nature: A Natural Diet for Folks Who Eat. It helped deepen and connect many of the isolated academic facts I learned from biology, and thus make them more meaningful to me. It began giving me some new food options to experiment with to improve my own unhealthful diet habits. So far the results have been positive -- knock wood! In many ways I still feel as healthy as I felt at 16, and I’m 68 now! With the book's help I began connecting some isolated facts about anatomy, evolution, and even fasting into a larger picture of what diet excellence could mean. Intelligent fasting too was talked about as a great way to help get rid of toxic materials my normal diet was creating, like so-called ‘free radicals’, and of course excessive fat. Such ‘radicals’ are often oxygen atoms missing some of their electrons, and thus making them destructive in my body. I was fascinated.
Like most every other ignorant kid I had simply accepted the foods my mother cooked without questioning their long term healthfulness, and so those eating habits had become a routine will power over 20 years, rather than learning about more healthful foods. Mom was a very accomplished cook, but I began seeing some of the possible dangerous personal results of many foods I had learned to routinely eat, like all the many animal meats, sugars, and oils mom cooked. Reading Mr. Gregory's book was thus a kind of diet revelation. Like most high school sophomores -- the word means wise food, by the way -- I had redd my biology book and learned the human intestine was about 6 times longer than the body, but I never asked why that was. Why had such a long intestine evolved over the last 70 million years in our primate ancestors and yet hadn’t evolved in, say, carnivorous animals like lions and tigers? Why were their intestines much shorter, like only about 2 times as long as their bodies? To my delight Mr. Gregory’s book answered such questions.
It turns out about 70 million years ago our early primate ancestors, like lemurs, ate mostly vegetables, seeds, nuts, and fruits, with an occasional side of ants or beetles. As a result, over time those who had longer intestines could absorb more energy from their foods, live longer lives, and thus produce more children. In short, their eating habits encouraged those with longer intestines to keep living longer.
Meanwhile, on the other side of diet-town, the opposite happened to meat-eating animals like lions and leopards. Every few days they feasted on raw animal meat, like gazelle and water buffalo-kabobs. But as a result their intestines didn't grow as long as ours. Why was that? I had studied chemistry in high school too but again it was always academic book chemistry, useful only for the next test or experiment, and hence much of it neglected how such ideas could be used in real life. In short, I hadn't studied much diet chemistry, but again, Mr. Gregory's book again helped me expand such knowledge. What was it about dead animal food that caused lions and tigers to have short intestines, while vegetable-based primates like us evolve longer intestines? For that we can use our imagination and picture ourselves inside one animal cell just after the animal has been killed.
What happens inside the cell? Strange as it may seem, the life-activity keeps working as if nothing has happened; the chemical keep reacting with each other, and so continue living for hours after the animal’s died. However, the normal cell-cleaning blood is no long circulating, and so the cell’s normal toxic waste products remains in billions of its cells, thus making it’s flesh much more toxic than the fresh plants, fruits, seeds, and nuts primates were eating while living in their tree tops. Simply because the animal’s heart is no longer working, the blood is no longer taking all those poisonous toxic materials away from the cells and to be eliminated. Thus animal food is normally much more toxic and dangerous than plant foods, and so those meat-eating animals with shorter intestines would get rid of those toxins much sooner, stay healthier longer, and reproduce more often. Such is the pragmatic natural selection process of intestine length. What’s more, when our native ancestors began cooking animal foods some 500,000 years ago, it often became more toxic! In fact, cooking often produces more toxins than animal flesh normally has, especially if it’s fried in fat.
Needless to say I was stunned after reading such things. I don’t recall any public school class I took where diet was the main subject. Later I came to see why that’s probably the case. Cattle, pig, chicken, sheep, and fish sellers were making billions of dollars each year with such products, so they would have had many economic reasons to see such knowledge wasn’t being taught in our schools. In fact, school cafeterias were big users of their animals and they no doubt wanted that status quo to continue, even though their products weren’t as healthy as other kinds of foods. It’s merely another result of a capitalist economy based on profits, rather than human health.
So, if Mr. Gregory was right, then even by 25 I had been poisoning myself for decades already! Needless to say that scared the hell out of me. As a result, almost immediately I started experimenting with my diet habit and not eating almost all animal foods. Non-fat yogurt was one exception; it's got useful bacteria to help make food absorption even better, and calcium too; in fact, sesame seed milk has more calcium and is far better than cow’s milk! In short, almost overnight I felt almost all animal foods were not only not excellent, but were really harmful to me, and that included fish and chicken-kabobs as well! After stuffing my mouth with such food for almost 3 decades I was already beginning to feel overweight and sluggish.
Such animal-based food was called ‘dead’ food, just because it couldn’t grow more food like itself, while foods like seeds, nuts, and fruit were called ‘live’ foods -- they were capable of growing more food and were thus life-giving. What's more, throw in a few tasty insects and those were the kind of foods our primate ancestors had been eating for the past 70 million years, give or take a Dallas day or two! Thus, for meat-eating animals their habits had selected shorter intestines to be more useful than primates. Was it possible my biology textbook writers didn't talk about such ideas because they might hurt animal-selling profits? Was it possible children’s health were less important than selling more animal food? Welcome to life in a for-profit capitalist system. Such thoughts still feel a little scary today!
At any rate, I continued experimenting with learning to feel different diet habits, even though it wasn't very scientific. I guess you could call it an 'intuitive' trial-and-error method of learning. I didn't really first make a plan and then test it; I just experimented step by step, first by giving up almost all animal foods, and then even vegetable 'junk' foods, like fried potato chips and then much of the gooey sugar-foods; it took a while to keep ignoring them. Also I learned more about intelligently combining vegetable foods for better nutrition, like beans and rice or corn, I learned how certain combinations of plant food are more nutritious. ‘Live’ foods like corn and beans, for example, may be more nutritious together than corn or beans alone.
Then about 15 years later, one summer I decided to experiment with fasting, just to help clean my body from as much of the dangerous fats and toxins I already had eaten. Experimenting with a mostly water 22-day fast was quite an experience; I finally lost my baby fat, so to speak, and my much of my butt too.
Again, I followed Mr. Gregory's advice about fasting; like anything else there are intelligent and harmful ways of fasting. First I drank only pure fresh fruit juices for about a week, during which time I lost about 10 pounds; evidently all the excessive salt I had eaten over the years helped me keep about a gallon of extra water in my body. Then, I drank about a gallon of warmed distilled water daily as my body began burning my stored food reserves, took a hot Epsom-salt bath daily, as well as a distilled water enema daily to which I added fresh lemon juice and some honey, to help clean my lower intestine and keep Vitamin C levels up. Obviously my energy level went way down; mainly about all I could do was walk around the block in the evening, but my mental alertness began noticeably increasing! Then, on day 23 I began drinking fresh warmed grape juice for about another week before I went back to whole foods. Needless to say the grape juice tasted wonderfully, and I still remember how sparkling that first salad tasted, how nice it was to be about 30 pounds lighter, and how much more energy I had. It was indeed a dietary re-birth.
No doubt, over the years I’d occasionally slide back to my old eating-too-much-junk-food routine, but the more I enjoyed 'live' foods, the easier it was to keep eating them, even with some moderate coffee and tea drinks. Did it work? Did I get any objective scientific evidence I was in fact healthier? Well, at one recent medical check-up the doctor said I had the blood of a 30 year old, and I was in my early 60s at the time; the only bad part was he didn't say a 30 year old what; a 30 year old dog would not have been good news.
These days when I walk through a supermarket, or read a restaurant menu, I'm often amazed at how unaware people seem about more excellent foods; hopefully the few vegan and vegetarian restaurants I’ve seen will keep growing. Nutritious 'live' foods are very available even in supermarkets, and yet many people just haven't taught themselves to enjoy them and all the good results they can produce. Again, sesame seeds have more calcium than milk and great Vitamin E, and yet many still ignore them; pistachio nuts too are very nutritious. No doubt, old habits are propulsive until they’re actively changed with different actions. Even in ancient Greece the liberal experimental doctor Hippocrates noticed how food is the best medicine.
Over many millions of years, human bodies have evolved to eat mostly plant foods, rather than animal foods; it’s why our intestines are so much longer than our bodies. That certainly makes some sense. After all, it was practically impossible for our small monkey ancestors to haul a hippopotamus up a tree for hippo-kabobs. In other words, in human evolution the habit-art of eating meat is really a fairly recent one; what's 2 million years of occasional meat-eating compared to 70 million years of vegetable eating, I mean besides about 7%? As a result, most everyone just isn't biologically built for all the meat being eaten in the so-called 1st world; in the poorer 3rd world people still eat mostly vegetable foods and so don't have many cancers and other health and dental problems. Many people eat much more than 3 oz. of meat a day which is said to be a healthy upper limit.
Strange as it may seem, even Old Testament Jews intuitively sensed the benefits of eating such 'live' foods, like sprouted seeds and nuts; they wrote about making bread from sprouted seeds. Eventually I too began increasing respect for my own biology and taught myself to enjoy such food more often; wheat germ too has become a daily part of my diet. Eating far too much animal food on a daily basis, along with too much salt and sugar, also helps explain why deadly bowel cancers and dangerous brain strokes have been increasing since the 1950s. At that time industrial food producers geared up to feeding soldiers continued removing much of the healthy roughage from 'live' and natural foods, like wheat and rice bran. As a result, if became easier to absorb more dangerous oil, feed more cancers in the lower intestines, and also clog more arteries, especially those to the heart and brain. No doubt, such research into the very complex human body is on-going, but gradually even refined white sugar lost its usefulness for me; it's bad for both teeth and prostate glands, so I try enjoying other kinds of sweeteners. If artificial sweeteners aren't bad for me, my prostate might stay healthy. Is merely one’s diet largely the reason over 50% of men will get cancer of the prostate? In fact, I'm feeling so confident I may even live another entire week or two, if I'm lucky!
It's amazing, isn't it? Such excellent diet knowledge has only recently become much more available. Only yesterday afternoon, so to speak, has science begun giving us such useful diet facts, and thus providing more healthful diet options, rather than the status quo ones like ignoring our own bodily health. Thousands of years ago Plato, and later Christianity’s founder Paul of Tarsus, said knowing our own bodies was much less important than knowing spirit-objects, or obsessing about sinning against god given rules. Amazingly, people accepted such ideas, even though no one could even prove god existed! For Christians, another negative idea said even babies were sinful just by being born, and no one can live sin-free even for one day! Even if you thought you could you committed the sin of pride! For many thousands of years now such conservative religious psychological habits simply kept peoples’ attention focused on other things besides useful and healthful diet habits. As Dewey saw, such ideas helped build a highly negative psychological model of excellence, based on merely obeying conservative ideas rather than experimental testing. Even today, as corporate power has grown over the past 50 years, many continue ignoring more healthful actions so they can sell more cow-kabobs.
Today, liberal Behavioral psychology and experimental testing have already helped liberate millions of people from such conservative models of excellence; they’ve given us more enjoyable ways to keep building more intelligent habits. Thus, today many millions are seeing their bodies not as created and controlled by spirits, but as a result of natural evolution already billions of years old, and how it’s helped shape ourselves and the foods best suited for us. No doubt, many today still don't much like their own body-shape, but feeling on a daily basis it’s evil and sinful only makes life worse than it already might be. Luckily, today we live in a world having many more positive tools for improving our lives than Plato and Paul of Tarsus could even dream about. For us liberals they’re no longer seen as true, but as merely conservative reactions to the problems they saw around them.
Some More Behavioral Excellence
Another idea I like about Dewey's and Sartre's existential philosophy is their emphasis on freedom of choice. The more we choose what we want to learn more about, and then act on our choices, the psychically freer we become. Once people begin feeling they can relax and choose to practice more healthful habits, the stronger freedom of choice grows. No doubt, early in his career Sartre was too extreme with this idea; he insisted on believing everyone is always totally free to do whatever they want. Dewey, however, had a much healthier respect for growth and development; how can a person possibly be free to choose what they know nothing about? How could I choose to start building a more healthful diet unless I first learned about more healthful choices in Mr. Gregory’s book?
In short, our own routine habits always keep our freedom limited and confined, often to the same narrow channels of actions; that's what a habit is. Later in life, however, Sartre became a little psychologically wiser; he too began feeling how routine habits continue restricting and limiting one's freedom. For example, on a practical level he wasn't very free to choose not to smoke unhealthful cigarettes; his habit was too strong. For Dewey, however, the more we playfully experiment with our unhealthful habits, the more options we can feel to improve them with more intelligent actions. After all, doesn't such an organic and growing model of psychological freedom best reflect what actually happens in life?
If so, then we can begin feeling how important it is to start learning the art of intelligent self-education. How many people today don’t know how to playfully begin feeling the new habit they want to grow? How many people still don't know how to playfully feel a better habit even for a short time, as well as how to gradually keep increasing the time it’s practiced? For example, how many are bored and unsatisfied with their routine sex habits and yet don’t know about options for experimentally improving them, even though books and video stores are now jammed with such information?
No doubt, many may feel such ways of habit-improvement are too mechanical as a model for psychological excellence; in fact, however, it's a genuine organic art! Such playful work involves not only the process of choosing and planning to build a better habit, but also the organic growing of new knowledge and skills! In short, Behavioral improvement is a holistic art; it’s an organic art we create with our actions! Working joyfully to better grow more helpful feelings and ignore harmful ones is as much a work of art as any painting and sculpture. In short, as Dewey might say, it’s important to notice how any new habit-art esthetically feels; does it feel enjoyable and pleasant, or frustrating and limiting, and if so how can it be made more enjoyable? All feelings are a form of esthetic experience; they all involve our entire body and its senses! It’s yet another idea of Dewey’s model of psychological excellence!
Where To Begin?
No doubt, the toughest habit-art to consciously start improving may be the first one. Why? The whole consciously esthetic feel of the learning process is almost non-existent and therefore weak; most of us like to keep feeling our old routine habits, even though they may not be satisfying any more. As I learned, my diet habits were the strongest and most routine of all; their will-power was strong. As a result, any kind of real improvement took some time to build new feelings, sometimes years! In fact, it took Mr. Gregory about 7 years to build his fruitarian habit of eating 'live' foods. No doubt, for many that may be the bad news, but it becomes good news when we use such knowledge to help grow any new habit slowly and carefully; each meal can become much more important when enjoyably building a more healthful diet habit. In any case, however, everyone's diet habit is just that -- a habit; it’s not determined by anything except our own actions, and so can be improved with the help of enjoyably feeling the results of different actions. That's modern Behavioral psychology's hopeful model for improving any habit one chooses to improve; any habit can produce better results by enjoying more intelligent actions. After all, if it's worth intelligently improving it's worth enjoying; if I can build a more healthful diet habit, then most anyone can!
Here’s an idea that might be useful: you might start learning an improvement process with just one habit before you try tackling any strong habits, like diet, exercise, money, and sex. Maybe you can teach yourself to, say, floss you teeth every night before bedtime, unless of course you’re a sex worker and would floss every hour or so? It’s yet another weak attempt at philosophic humor, but you can see my point.
At first you could say my own diet experiments were intuitive, meaning they weren’t very scientific. I just started experimentally testing some of Mr. Gregory’s ideas. I didn't make any set plan and purposely enjoy the learning process with rewards or 'baby-steps'; I was still psychologically immature in that way. Maybe a better name for my own diet experiments would be hit-or-miss, like most everyone else on earth had been doing for thousands of years. But on the plus side, I also didn't put a lot of pressure on myself to change quickly; I had no timetable for learning better diet arts, except to almost completely stop eating dead animal foods as soon as possible.
Most of our native ancestors, for example, had different arts of improvement. When medical knowledge, for example, was almost non-existent, native peoples used to help others get well with 'trial and error' magical arts of singing, dancing, or maybe driving evil spirits away; sometimes they'd also experiment with certain plants for medicine. Even if someone’s health didn’t improve, however, they still felt the excellent art of helpfulness -- what Confucius called the excellence of jen. And later in ancient times many religious people also continued praying for help to improve someone's health and actions.
Today, however, I've become a little more intelligent about ways of building a better habit, and making the process more enjoyable and scientific. For one thing I’ve kept learning more about biology and health; expert and reliable information is another big motivator to begin experimenting. For example, when I saw a picture of a diseased smoker's lung it made it much easier to stay away from smoking. In short, improving even strong and powerful habit-arts like diet and exercise has become like learning a new athletic skill; they both involve enjoying intelligent muscular practice for short time periods, and then practicing them daily. What, we Deweyan liberals ask, about such ideas isn’t just common sense? Even Yogic meditation and silent mystic contemplation have a tremendously complex muscular structure, as do Islam's mystic Whirling Dervishes; they’re all muscular arts, much like baseball or tennis!
Often intelligent planning can help start the learning process, especially for those who like a set structure. Some people feel more comfortable with making a little plan that feels right for them – practice at certain set times, and not at others. Whether you do or not, the most important thing is to enjoy those practice times and feel comfortable with them. If, say, you're working on building a more healthful diet habit, some people might enjoy starting with only one or two more healthful breakfasts a week. Others may feel comfortable with improving all their breakfasts at once, and others still may feel really confident, respect our 70 million year old plant-food based evolution, and want all their meals to be just like our primate ancestors, except for maybe the insect part of it, unless they could find chocolate covered ants and beetles. I don’t want to burst any bubbles here, but to me insects are just not that appetizing, chocolate covered or not, so I continue brushing all flies away from my mango and papaya ‘kabobs’.
Again, a good question for first time planners might be: what would be easiest and most enjoyable for me to start improving? That might be the best place to start improving any habit. In any case, however, if you’re not enjoying your plan, don’t be afraid to experimentally change it; after all it was only a learning experiment in the first place. Creating a new plan certainly doesn't mean you failed, but rather that you learned something about yourself. So, instead of yelling at yourself or telling yourself you’ll never learn a better habit, just make your plan more enjoyable. Negative actions like yelling at yourself are often the result of those who raised you; in fact, a lack of confidence makes any improvement almost impossible. After that, what’s important is to keep enjoying our new habit, even if it's only for a few minutes. With practice those feelings will become forceful and propulsive themselves – even instinctive. Such feelings are what an improved habit feels like on the inside. And when you start really enjoying say, more healthful breakfasts, and when you're savoring every bite of fresh ripe papaya or cantaloupe, then it's probably time to start tackling unhealthful lunches! Some people start by eating only fruit until lunch.
Building Positive Surroundings
Again, this too is an important part of Behavioral psychology, and shows us how important a positive environment is for learning any new habit-art. Imagine how musically weak even Mozart would have been in a music-poor environment. In short, take the time to build a supportive environment, rather than a critical and unsupportive one. The more unsupportive the world around us is, the more difficult learning becomes. So, listening to and reading ads telling us to keep eating alligator kabobs at our neighborhood deep fryer, or all those fatty and sugary bakery goods, apply named ‘goo’, makes it more difficult to build a more healthful eating habit, and one free of harmful foods? Recent research is showing refined white sugar is definitely not a healthful food to eat on a regular basis. For example, it, and its more potent cousin alcohol, helps increase testosterone; in teens it can thus enlarge skin pores resulting in acne infections. In adults it can damage one’s liver, and in elder males can help increase prostate size.
Behavioral psychologists call such information ‘cues,’ while sugar refiners call them profit-makers. What's a cue? Cues are those esthetic sights and sounds out there we're already conditioned to respond to. How many times did you order a pizza after seeing a pizza commercial? Even pet dogs and cats respond to the cue of an electric can opener; they’ve learned to link that sound-cue with more food. Babies too are soon conditioned by a mother's voice-cue to expect more food. And of course teens and adults too get many food cues from TV commercials, for foods like teeth-dissolving sodas, artery-clogging cow-kabobs and blood pressure increasing salty potato chips. So the more we see cues out there for practicing an unhealthful habit, the more difficult it becomes to learn a better eating habit. Are you cued up yet?
Cues can thus increase impulsive actions – actions we take without really thinking about their harmful results. Such cues help create impulsive actions to eat, say, more fried chicken or fatty muffins, or to have yet another cigarette or beer? Such body-wide impulses are the will-power energies of our routine habits, so intelligent people will learn to feel such impulses and then relax. The word impulse, however, is not very accurate. It implies merely a mental event, when in reality an impulse is a body-wide muscular tenseness to do something. So, again, learning to relax such tenseness helps us become freer of our old impulsive energies. A better phrase might be body-impulse. In any case, learning a new habit-art is often made easier by learning to relax our old impulsive habit energies when we see cues for them. Laughing too is another way to respond to such cues. Both actions make it easier to continue building a better habit-art.
Conservative religious folks have often described such impulses as temptations to sin, but for us Deweyan liberals that idea is no longer seen as excellent. Like every other idea, sin too is a human invention; it was useful for religious leaders. Without the idea of sin there would be no reason to practice spirit-habits.
In any case, however, don't be afraid to recognize cures prompting old impulsive energies. Before breakfast, for example, why not get some more supportive cues from a neighborhood library book about health, showing diseased smokers' lungs, overweight beer drinkers, or diabetic people? Reading about what harmful foods do to your body will also provide more helpful cures when building a more healthful habit-art; it’s simply part of the art of intelligently learning a new habit-art. After all, even just feeling how one bowel cancer operation can really ruin your whole day can be a helpful cue. And if you really want to see a scary cue, then why tape to your fridge the medical bill from one heart-bypass operation, or from one bowel-resection? Who knows? It might even work for junk-food addicted teens, but I’m not guaranteeing that.
There is also what’s called negative conditioning, like eating foods that make one sick. Alcohol worked that way for me, so I gave up drinking it. Or you can even try the ‘Zen approach’ -- simply close your eyes, breathe deeply, and relax whenever you feel such unhealthful impulses. The more one can relax, the faster body-impulses vanish, making it easier to imagine what life-giving foods you'd like to have, like some delicious grapes or fresh oranges. Why is my mouth watering already? Encouraging friends too can be an important part of a positive environment. They’re especially useful for helping us think of other things besides deep-fried ox tails, calves brains, or octopus tentacles! True friends hug us and remind us not to eat any of them, unless of course one has no other food available. All those actions can help create new cues for building a more healthful habit-art. Low-grade nausea can be a good learning tool.
There are also negative conditioning tricks as well. They’re designed to give people a little controlled pain when old impulses keep firing. For example, sometimes putting a nice-sized rubber band on your wrist and snapping it smartly every time you get a harmful impulse to, say, have another cigarette or cow-kabob might be another useful learning tool. Such self-controlled pain just might help exorcise all those nasty little inner cigarette demons you might be feeling. And what’s more, it'll also help turn your wrist to a much more vibrant shade of red. Be careful, however. Self-mutilation can become an excessive habit-art itself, and in that case it might be best to see a professional therapist; believe it or not, some of them like to spank people too! And believe it or not, there are definite limits to how many times can you bang your head against a concrete wall and still live. On the plus side, however, it might help surgeons send their kids to better schools! Like Saturday night at a brothel, college tuition too keeps going up and up, right? What better motivation should anyone need to build a self-love habit?
Creating a step-by-step plan for improving a habit helps us look FORWARD to feeling the results, and, again, those future results are the best objects of knowledge. If those results aren't enjoyably constructive, then it’s time to create a different plan. In fact, there are an infinite amount of enjoyable meanings in everyone’s actions, and so the more we practice feeling them, the more meaningful our life becomes. What else is new? Much the same thing happens to engineers. They too enjoy imagining what new future machines might be built, make a plan for building them, test their plans here-and-now, and sometimes even take tax money when they fail.
Granted, such scientific planning ideas might not sound very exciting and useful, but they in fact help bring subconscious feelings to a more conscious level of awareness. The more that happens, the larger our consciousness grows. Sadly, however, our public schools generally keep ignoring formally teaching anything about feeling such intelligent learning tricks, and feelings are in fact half of human mental life, the other half being ideas. So, building a little plan of improvement helps focus our attention on our feelings, thus helping balance the idea half of consciousness, and helping create a more stable mental health. In fact, our personal feelings are what professional therapists help make us more consciously aware of. In short, planning helps make our present actions more intelligent by focusing on feeling the results of our tested ideas.
In all such Behavioral improvement processes we free ourselves from conservative and moderate psychological models like those of Plato, Aristotle, and many religious thinkers too. In them psychological excellence means learning about and conforming to already existing objects, like Spirit-Objects or eternal Forms, and eternal religious truths. Because they merely assumed there already exists such eternal and unchanging objects and Truth, like Goodness, god, the soul, and sin, they ignore testing their ideas for their usefulness, ignore building a more scientific world, and thus merely obey the conservative social status quo. We Deweyan liberals are free to look at better working future results as the best objects of knowledge; the future results of our diet improvements makes life here and now much more enjoyable. If, say, some plants actually make our air more healthful, then that future result is the best thing to know.
In short, just like all artists and scientists, we Deweyan liberals look forward to creating a more excellent habit-art which doesn't yet exist! What’s more, in that forward-looking creative process we all become psychological artists! To STAY FOCUSED ON ACTIVELY DEEPENING THE PRESENT’S MEANINGS is how mere inner philosophic ideas become ever-growing organic art! With every habit we build we act as a psychological artist, and the more conscious we become of their results, the easier it becomes to keep improving them. With a little good ol' creative planning we begin feeling how life could be better, thus re-uniting the feeling and thinking halves of our psyches! To us liberals that is indeed psychological excellence. In short, merely blindly obeying the ideas someone else says are nature’s eternal and unchanging Truth merely keeps us half human at best and less than human at worse! It keeps us separated from feeling what works best for us!
A Skeptic Speaks Up
Those who are more focused on pleasing and pleasuring themselves may have a negative feeling about such liberal ideas of intelligent personal and social growth. It all may sound like too much work, so why bother? What's the use? Quit tempting us to become more consciously intelligent people will you? We all live for just a few short decades anyway, so why not routinely keep doing whatever we've already been conditioned to feel pleasant, and gracefully move on to our inevitable fate? It’s the easiest stress-free way to live life. Why add the uncomfortable stress of building more intelligent habit-arts and helping others? Life is already stressful enough and most people don’t want to improve anyway?
Many pleasure-loving hedonists may feel that way. Smoke as much crack-cocaine as you want, eat as much harmful food as you want, drink as much alcohol as you want, drop as many pills as you want, who cares? The government will pay the bills anyway, and if not we’ll die a few years sooner. If it feels good, then do it. The famous Scottish skeptic philosopher David Hume was one such hedonist, as were some of Athens' second generation Sophists and many Roman Epicureans too. Don’t people all have a right to regularly indulge their own pleasure-habits, even though it helps shorten their lives? Don’t we all have a right to do whatever we want with our bodies?
To a degree that’s no doubt true, but to us Deweyan liberals, such ideas often reflect the weak arts of learning about excellent habit-arts, and all non-human animals have been practicing for billions of years! They help justify our own habits as well as ignore the challenge to make life better for others, not just a few wealthy folks who often inherit billions of dollars and hire consultants to keep earning even more money while our schools keep teaching academic trivia and homeless people keep sleeping on the streets. Such people have a weak sense of social improvement.
Certainly if that's your choice, then so be it. Feel free, as Sartre would say, but in all probability you’ll also be held responsible for your selfish actions. Luckily, however, not everyone is so self-centered, indulgent, and uncaring about others; they are those who had more caring parents who taught them working for a cause and its better social results are important for psychological excellence too. So, to those people who want to enjoy building more humane and people-centered habits all through life, it’s important to know how best to build such habit-arts. They're the people who feel life for everyone is a great gift, want to leave life a little better than they found it, and don't want to merely satisfy their own personal wants and needs. They’ve learned to reach out, like many robust and confident ancient liberal Greeks did, and work to make life better for those who want a better life. To us Deweyan liberals those actions are a sign of psychological excellence.
In short, it’s not only what you achieve that’s most important, but often what you learn in the process of overcoming a few harmful, weak, or excessive habits! In that process of learning to intelligently and enjoyably guide one’s growth is found the best natural goal of life; continuing to learn about constructively healthful habits is sacred to us Deweyan liberals.
Currently one important social challenge is facing all of us, namely how can we lessen the harmful future results of our own carbon-based energy systems, and begin building a more healthful world for everyone, a world where high standards of living keep growing? How is that possible? How can we keep from destroying our own collective achievements and still make life more satisfying for more people.
Global warming is currently threatening the lives of millions of people within just a few short decades unless we teach ourselves to build more intelligent energy using habits. Indeed, if the environmentalists are right, we’re all facing a corporate-made catastrophe of the first rank within a few short decades. The challenge is how to take more carbon out of the atmosphere than we put into it. Even if your personal habits are relatively healthful, most everyone in the advanced countries is being challenged to reduce their carbon input to as low as possible. Such challenges remind us psychological excellence means much more than merely satisfying our personal habits; it also means improving the harmful social results of our actions as well. In any case, for us liberals it’s a sign of psychological health to feel pleasure beyond a personal level, and onto a social level as well! The following licentiously lame limerick states the problem.
Carbon Dave was said to be mad,
Global warming talk made him sad.
While drilling the soil
For yet more oil,
He thought mass extinction really isn’t so bad.
In short, lucky are they who also keep learning HOW to enjoy helping others live a more satisfying life. For those interested in seeing a very, very funny movie about such baby-step-improving, where the patient eventually ends up exposing his psychiatrist’s weaknesses, then I strongly recommend What About Bob? It's one of my all-time favorite movies! How can film art be any better than when it's joyous, entertaining, and educational as well? I wonder … who'll write a book called Habit Excellence for Dummies, I mean besides this dummy?
10. MORE ABOUT PSYCHOLOGY'S PICTURE
To many ancient Greeks 'Know Yourself' was sacred, and thus excellent, wisdom; many believed it came right from the gods themselves. But as Greek philosophy continued growing the question became what exactly is the self and what's the best way to keep learning about wisdom? If the self had any spirit-parts to it, then they would affect what we can learn, and the same if we’re all naturalistic people. So obviously different philosophers defined the self differently, challenging people to choose which picture felt best. Conservatives like spirit-minded Plato said the 'true' self was a spirit-object that continued living after death, moderates like Aristotle said the 'highest' kind of self is immortal and can grasp nature's Absolute Truth about some things, and liberals like Democritus focused on using his time to celebrate naturalistic kinds of habits, writing and helping others feel more secure about themselves and relaxed in their daily lives. This section, then, may help make our thinking about our self a little more intelligent; either that or completely hopeless—you make the choice.
Why bother about such things now? Well again with Dewey's help a genuine psychological revolution has been growing since the late 1800s, and so most people still don't realize they now have an important choice to make. What's more, psychological pictures about what intelligent learning is, as well as intelligent actions, help make psychology THE most understudied USEFUL art on earth! The more we know about how we work best, and teach our self how to keep learning, the more excellent life can become. For example, how can we learn how to keep improving our world unless we learn how to test, say, all those disrespectful, sex-crazed bosses and give them some of their own medicine, so to speak. Now really, what art could be more useful than that? In other words, what could possibly be more useful to us than knowledge about us, and how to keep improving our self?
Psychology is useful not only for helping others, but in that process we too become a little wiser. Everyone has some habit-arts that could be deepened and made more intelligent, and so the excellent learning art of testing ideas experimentally is very useful knowledge. As Francis Bacon once said ‘Knowledge is Power’ and that of course applies to psychological knowledge as well! The more we know about our self and about the limits we have, the more intelligent and self-confident we become to know what's right and respectful for us. What's more, the less we know about our own habit weaknesses, the less power over our self we have and the more vulnerable we remain to all the games being played in civilization today. And so we'll start with a little advertising psychology as a way to begin knowing our self; after that we'll glimpse a little more of psychology’s history, including an idea called ‘faculty’ psychology; and then look at a few more of Dewey’s Behavioral ideas, like how to keep intelligently improving weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits.
How Can Advertisers Psych People?
In our capitalistic world today psychological knowledge is used around the world in advertising on a daily basis. Advertising has become a major selling tool, using even knowledge about how to put ideas into peoples' subconscious mind. How many people still aren't very aware they're being persuaded to buy more stuff they don’t really need? In fact both radio and television were invented as advertising tools, and filling in between the ads with what's called entertainment, so people will be even more ready to watch and listen to the next commercial. It’s like the old joke I turned on some advertising today and a Talk Show broke out! If money makes the world go ‘round', then psychology helps make the money go ‘round'. So obviously the more we know about such psychological ideas, the more we can learn about ourselves, and the more we learn, the more liberated and freer we become to act more intelligently, rather than more impulsively and ignorantly—what was described earlier as being our master rather than our slave! Knowledge of our own habit-arts thus gives us more power over our self! After all, even Skid-Row hustlers use the same selling techniques for their drugs, as do insurance salespeople and politicians.
The psychological ideas behind such advertising often aim at a subconscious level. It's what's called subliminal advertising, and examples can be seen every day. Its aim is simply to connect with our subconscious feelings and thus buy what's being sold. Even politics has become full of such techniques to ensure people will be re-elected, accept another war, or a new social program. In fact such conditioning has been going on for thousands of years. Medieval religious leaders built their churches on a grand scale, with huge colorful stained-glass windows, not only to impress peasants but to also to make people feel their rituals were indeed holy and sacred ideas; the more people went there the more they subconsciously felt spirit-objects existed and were to be worshiped. And of course ancient peoples built temples for the same purposes, Athens’ Parthenon included. Today, however, probably the most powerful kind of subliminal advertising comes from the business world. As our world becomes more of a global ‘flea’ market every day, millions are bombarded with advertising information about what’s for sale, and to help move the merchandize ads are used to link what people want with what’s being sold. Sexy-looking people are probably advertising’s best-selling tools.
What makes people react to certain kinds of advertising and how does it get people to open their wallets and buy more stuff? Advertisers are master psychologists; because they know what kinds of images and words make people act, it's easy to sell them some idea. They make it their business to know about peoples’ wants and desires, fears and habits, and such knowledge makes their work more intelligent; in fact advertising has become both a science and an art. The more psychological knowledge is used the more scientific it is, and the more colorful and entertaining, the more it's an art. To me New York Times’ Sunday ads are often the best example of advertising fine art. They know who they’re appealing to and what such people want.
What makes people react to certain ads and not to others; their habit-arts of course? People often respond to certain kinds of ads because they’re already conditioned to those ideas. People who have a chocolate habit-art are naturally sensitive to chocolate ads. People who fantasize about having sex with sexy-looking partners are ‘naturally’ conditioned to want what's being sold by such people. And how often have people merely seen the words ‘Free’ and ‘Sale’ and then gone into the store simply because all during their childhood they've gotten stuff for free? Daily, such ideas help sell goods and services around the world. However, intelligent people soon learn the more stuff they take for free, the more dangerous life becomes, and that's another reason it's difficult for people to realize they shouldn't keep anything they haven't honestly earned. In the adult world excellence often mean paying for what one gets, one way or another.
Today advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. Billions are paid each year to advertising companies to lure people into stores around the world. Many magazines too are almost wall-to-wall ads. How many times have people bought something merely because they liked the ad, even though they don’t know why they liked it or if they even needed the product? How many times have people responded to an ad merely because some sexy person said you need and want what I’m selling—CALL NOW!? That's what’s called a ‘hard-sell’ tactic. People who respond to them have been conditioned to quickly obey what others tell them to do. Parents often tell kids 'Go to bed now!' and 'Hurry up and eat all your carrots or you’ll be punished!’ So advertisers know some people will respond to such ads, especially if they hear them day after day. Certain people will respond just by yelling to ‘Call now!’ or ‘Act now!’ For years many kids have been conditioned to build such habits. And of course there are also ‘soft-sell’ and humorous ads too, for those whose parents were more educated.
Besides ‘Sale’ the word ‘Free’ is often used. Why? Well many parents don't teach good work habits to their children, and to honestly work for what they want. So naturally many children get the feeling some things are free; they don't need to work for them. And besides, who realizes the price of what’s ‘free’ has already been added to what’s being sold? In that way too advertisers take advantage of peoples’ weak and unintelligent habit-arts. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living, but for advertisers the unexamined life is easy to sell to. How many millions of people today are hopelessly lost in debt they'll never be able to pay off simply because their habit is simply to keep buying more stuff? Bankruptcy services have become so competitive even they have advertisements.
How can we teach our self, and others, to build more intelligent habit-arts and stronger characters, rather than keep buying more stuff? Questions like that can only be answered experimentally, to see what works best for each person. Sometimes such habits can be better controlled by simply yelling at our self not to do something; sometimes learning to laugh at such ads works too. Another good first step might be to thoughtfully look at the ads we like. They reveal the subconscious psychological feelings and desires our habits have built into us. Once we start becoming more conscious of those subconscious feelings, then it’s much easier to begin relaxing and gaining some control over them.
Looking thoughtfully at such ads can also lead to some interesting questions. Do I really need another genuine imitation drawing of the Lock Ness Monster? Do I really need that 50th pair of shoes, and another matching pair of Easter Bunny socks and underwear? If we know we’re attracted to pretty salespeople, for example, who tell us how much fun it is to have what they're selling, and can make us feel we really need what they've got, then it becomes easier to focus on their art, rather than the stuff they're selling. In such ways psychological self-knowledge can help liberate and make us freer to better fulfill our needs, rather than merely our wants. The more we know about our own habit-arts, and our own subconscious feelings, the easier it is to act more intelligently. In short, learning to 'know our self' can be a great way to start growing our own psychological knowledge and power. How many people never realize they have an entire psychological lab in their own body-mind?
Among his many talents Dewey was an educator, not a business man or a hustler. To him Behavior psychology was best used to keep intelligently improving weak, excessive, and unhealthful character habits, one at a time and one step at a time, and thus keep becoming our master. In his book Human Nature and Conduct he suggests making a playful game of improving such habits. How much fun can we have happily yelling at the TV when a salesperson smiles and tells us to ‘Hurry, call now!’? How about yelling ‘Hurry up, go to hell now’!? Or how about simply turning off the TV's sound when a commercial comes on, then playing with a little healthful exercising? They’re playful ways to keep control of our own environment and make us a little healthier.
Who Likes to Punish Children?
To Dewey such playfulness was just a part of excellent psychology's new picture. Having some fun during ad-time on TV also helps make life itself more fun. And of course playfulness wasn't the only habit worth improving. Raising children too was a very important habit-art for him. His own children helped him see punishments, for example, or threats of punishment, weren’t as psychologically helpful as friendly warmth, rewards, playfulness, and having fun while improving some habit-art. In short he used his psychology to help make everyone a better self-educator and a more humane and kind person. One story I heard about him went like this one night he noticed some water coming from the bathroom where kids were taking a bath; evidently they didn’t turn off the water. So he went into the bathroom and looked around. Soon one of his kids said, ‘Well just don’t stand there John, get the mop!
Playing with our own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts is an active kind of self-therapy. Over a billion years of natural evolution have sculpted we animals to an active lifestyle, and those who ignore such habits can often soon look like their overfed house pets. The results of such a lifestyle are often much better than, say, merely reading or talking about improving our self, like Socrates and Plato recommended. In general the Greeks savored their playfully active lifestyle; exercise was a common part of the day. Anthropology too has shown how playful practice is often the usual way primitive children learn their habit-arts. Native Americans, for example, began actively teaching their children the life-skills useful as adults. Often they started with learning a simple skill, like how to use a bow and arrow, and then gradually increased their knowledge about the art. As a result they slowly built a habit-art survival kit, so to speak. They might learn how to use a bow and arrow before actually building one of their own. So why shouldn’t the same step-by-step art of playful practice still work today to keep improving our own habits, not only with young kids but adult kids as well? Why not have some fun playfully experimenting with some new tools for improving, say, an excessive spending habit; how about wearing a pair of scissors around your neck, and have some fun cutting up all those new credit cards?
A Little Psychological History of Faculties
If you need a little psychological history CALL NOW! And if you don't call anyway!
Not surprisingly different philosophers too have been painting different psychological pictures for thousands of years, and they've become part of our 3 main traditions—liberal, moderate, and conservative. In particular conservative Plato's and moderate Aristotle's have been dominant for many centuries, thanks to Christian philosophers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For Plato improving one’s habits was often seen as merely a quiet and contemplative reasoning problem, rather than an enjoyably active experimental process, and so a reasoning habit became psychologically excellent. Conservative Greek thinkers like Socrates (469?-399 BCE), and his student Plato (427?-347 BCE), pictured the human psyche as having different faculties; they were more or less separate powers. For Plato plants and animals had a nutritive faculty; it helped them live and grow as well as reproduce. Some animals also had a spirited faculty to make them combative and aggressive. But mankind added yet a 3rd faculty no other animal seemed to have—a rational or reasoning faculty. Naturally conservative Plato pictured it as a divine spirit-power; after death it lives on and returns to the Spirit-World to be reborn again. Thus the path for improving a person’s psyche went through their reasoning faculty. Both Socrates and Plato advertised excellent kinds of eternal and unchanging knowledge could be learned simply with our reason; our reasoning faculty alone would help us see nature’s best truth—Spirit-Truth. In fact Plato’s dialogues can be seen as great advertising not only for a dualistic picture of nature, but for a dualistic psychology as well. Both nature and human nature, he said, have natural AND spirit-powers. A faculty of reasoning was seen as a divine part of us, helping people know what nature’s spirit-Truth really is. He believed many of our ideas, like those of shiny cars and almost-naked women, somehow participate with their eternal Ideas in a spirit-realm. In such a realm there existed the Ideal Woman all women try to imitate. Thus, the more we reason about such Spirit-Ideas, the easier it was to act like them. (Is this another place for another thoughtful question? How did he know there were real Spirit-Objects?)
Such a dualistic picture of faculties helped build Western civilization's first conservative psychological picture, and such faculty pictures have been used for thousands of years! The human psyche was almost always pictured as more or less separate faculties like nutrition, reproduction, growth, willful emotions, memory, and of course reasoning. Moderate Aristotle too created his own list of faculties remembering, willing, sensation, active thinking, passive sensing, and so on. A separate faculty of growth made people grow, a spirited faculty made people courageous, and a rational faculty made people great at reasoning and thinking. Hundreds of years later Augustine even pictured god's mind itself as composed of such eternal Faculties, like perfect goodness, mercy, and power. Thus early Christian psychology reflected Platonic ideas, and god's grace became more important than anything else for salvation and becoming eternally happy in heaven. At the time a widespread social problem was life’s uncontrolled pain and misery, and so a Christian psychology was designed to give people hope for a better life. In the 1700s a Scottish school of psychology even created over 20 human faculties, including self-esteem, gratitude, self-preservation, etc.
So given that picture, then what’s psychological excellence? Plato thought if you wanted to make your reasoning excellent and more easily grasp and behold nature's eternal Spirit-Ideas, then you studied mathematics; it was the best art of pure logical reasoning and to him its ideas were real Spirit-Objects. In another realm there existed perfect and unchanging models of a sphere and a cube. What’s more, if you wanted your memory faculty improved you studied history; military habits made your courage faculty excellent, and so on. (Robert M. Goldenson, ed., The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, V.1, 442-443). Even today many still believe it's the best picture to help educate young folks. Needless to say, Dewey and many other liberal psychologists disagreed. As we'll see in Book 5’s Educational Models of Excellence, experiments in the early 1900s showed the word 'faculty' merely names one skill of our organic body-mind rather than a separate power. Playfully learning just about any habit-art makes us better as reasoning. In short, many learning activities we all practice daily can also teach the arts of reasoning, memory, and courage. For example, simply building anything strengthens our reasoning skill, even if it’s only a day-old slice of pizza, while sometimes eating such a meal demands real courage!
For Socrates and Plato psychological excellence depended mainly on proper reasoning; the Greeks were great talkers and those habits increased their feelings for reasoning. For Socrates there seemed to exist some unchanging kinds of knowledge and only they produced the best kinds of virtue, or excellence. What’s more, once your reason really led you to see and behold such Truth, then it automatically caused you to act excellently. For example, once you had really beheld what Courage was, then you would automatically act courageously, no questions asked. So Plato often describes Socrates as showing people how weak their reasoning really was; they weren’t grasping unchanging kinds of Truth. As a result people didn’t really know what Goodness or Courage was simply because they hadn’t reasoned about enough about them. Thus he kept talking with young men to convince them they really didn’t know what goodness or courage was. Otherwise people only knew merely shadow-like ideas, rather than perfect and eternal Truth. When they knew such knowledge, then they would then see how phony many ideas really are, forget about that shiny new chariot and the almost-naked woman selling them, and concentrate on improving their own character habits. And later, when Catholic theologians like Augustine painted their pictures of life they said Church rituals were necessary for eternal and perfect happiness; they made it easier for poor, uneducated people to at least feel such eternal Truth, even if they couldn't reason about them. However, the problem was no one's reasoning seemed able to actually grasp and behold such knowledge, from Plato’s day to our own.
Of course Socrates' war-torn environment also played its part in his use of a reasoning habit. As the brutal and disastrous Peloponnesian War continued wasting young Greek lives, peaceful and gentle Socrates reacted; it seems he tried to help. War was making men less rational, not more rational. So, in between 3 battles he was in he tried helping young Athenian men to think more rationally about what they were doing, rather than just acting impulsively. What really is courage and wisdom, he asked? Is it just obeying the people in power, or is it standing up against such people and refusing to hurt anyone? For Socrates it took some real courage to practice such wisdom; his reasoning told him it was better to be hurt than to hurt someone else! In advertising language those were the idea he tried selling, and by questioning others he experimented with the art. Sadly it didn’t seem to do much good. The war continued wasting lives for almost 30 years, former students acted more brutally than ever, and it no doubt probably made Socrates many democratic enemies. However, when the dust finally settled and peace was declared, a faculty picture of psychological excellence slowly became the classical conservative and moderate picture. We all are born with a number of separate faculties or powers, but because of our material bodies such inborn powers need certain kinds of practice to strengthen them. For Plato we're all born with a divine reasoning faculty and with reasoning practice we can remember what those divine Spirit-Ideas are.
Plato was a dedicated and pious man; many admired and revered him for it; he may have sacrificed to the gods on a daily basis. He wanted to learn all he could about such Ideas and so he needed as much help as he could get. A record of some reasoning experiments is preserved in his dialogues. If Apollo, the god of reasoning and wisdom, helped Socrates become the wisest man in Greece, then perhaps it would help him know nature’s eternal Spirit-Ideas, become truly excellent, and perhaps not have to be born again into our world of pain, sorrow, and misery.
How do we know such Spirit-Ideas really exist? Well don't we all have, say, an inborn idea of equality, and if not then how can we even talk about such ideas when no things in the natural world are equal? Where can we possibly get all our universal ideas from, like woman, equality, and justice if they don't already exist in a spirit-realm? Thus Plato said our divine reasoning faculty can participate with such Spirit-Objects simply because it too is a Spirit-Object! Only contemplative reasoning helps us remember all those Ideas we're born with! No doubt to many his spirit habit-arts were strong, but to others, including Aristotle, Epicurus, and many Sophists they were excessive! It all sounded so logical and reasonable, and yet why couldn’t anyone ever learn what their real natures were? (Is this another place for a thoughtful question? Why can’t the word ‘equal’ merely help us better trade our goods with other people?)
Only recently, only since the 1850s, have the results of Plato’s faculty ideas become much less useful than those of Behavior psychology, even though its practical ideas were felt by ancient Greek liberals. In fact a liberal behavioral picture of psychology was painted by some ancient Sophists while Plato was growing up. Protagoras, for example, was what today would be called a secular humanist and as he traveled around he encouraged his students to focus on actively making themselves more intelligent and skillful with practical advice, rather than merely keep reasoning about otherworldly objects; after all they may not even exist! To him and Dewey too any kind of excellence is the result of active and intelligent practice, and the more they’re practiced the stronger they grow. What mattered most was how intelligent peoples' practice was; was it merely routine or creatively testing new ideas. Sadly, however, such a liberal picture just wasn't what people with social power wanted to hear. Many rulers, for example, wanted to become a god themselves, so how could they deny such objects couldn’t be known.
With his dualistic faculty psychology Plato also celebrated another long-lived psychological idea INNATE ideas. It's had a very long life in Western civilization. Even when such ideas eventually evolved into instincts in the 1800s Nietzsche used such ideas freely, as did Freud in the 1900s; self-preservation was often pictured as an innate, inbuilt instinct. And of course between ancient and modern times conservatives and moderates continued seeing innate ideas as excellent psychology. Conservative Christians like Augustine pictured feelings of original sin, guilt, and conscience as innate ideas; we're all born with them. And even as modern astronomy and physics were beginning in the 1600s conservative Rene Descartes too said we have innate ideas of god, and the best way to learn about such ideas is merely reasoning with clear and distinct ideas! Such non-experimental ideas were yet another reason scientific psychology has evolved so slowly.
Reincarnation was another result of Plato’s dualistic psychology. Another man he greatly admired was the great mathematician Pythagoras, and he himself talked of having former lives. However, when our divine reasoning faculty re-entered another material body at birth, all such innate Ideas became blurred and too weak to see clearly. Thus conservative philosophic reasoning became a way of remembering what their innate knowledge was, and if we didn't learn what they were, then we might be born again into another frustration-filled life.
Of course innate ideas were useful in religion and politics too. We’re all destined to be what we are simply as a result of such ideas. Thus staying obedient to those in authority was seen as ethical excellence. Kings, queens, and popes were said to be chosen by god to rule over people, and so people shouldn’t revolt or even democratically vote to replace them, unless they were really obnoxious. Roman tyrants like Caligula were simply murdered by their own guards, not voted out by the people. Thus Plato's psychology of innate ideas helped keep people from even wanting a democratic government, and it pretty much stayed that way for well over 2 thousand years. Routine habits too are propulsive.
Aristotle too honored some of those ideas. Like the liberals he talked more about habits and how they can teach practical kinds of excellence, but he also suggested our reasoning faculty may be eternal and able to grasp and behold eternal, unchanging Truth. In short, he too painted a faculty picture of psychology; like Plato he called an active reasoning faculty divine and immortal. Thus his more moderate picture was somewhere between liberal Sophists who celebrated only habits, and Platonic dualists who felt only Spirit-Objects were excellent. In other words he too, like many liberals, believed we can train our muscles to feel what many different kinds of excellence are; such practical knowledge wasn’t the highest kind of excellence, but we can at least feel some kinds of excellence.
Some More Colors of Dewey’s Behavior Psychology
Once again, Dewey's Functional Behaviorism celebrates intelligent, playful, and experimental practice to best keep feeling psychological excellence. It’s not always an easy art to master; as many people know, some of their habits are powerful indeed; just ask any alcoholic, drug addict, or heavy cigarette smoker. What’s more, many people just don’t know how to play with their habits and so they need to experiment and find different ways to start growing some more healthful ones. Sometimes people need to get angry with themselves first before they begin building a better habit. But what’s most important is to keep experimenting until you find something enjoyable besides smoking or taking drugs or getting drunk. Instead of listening to all those folks saying CALL NOW!, why not begin feeling there’s something you’ve always wanted to learn about but haven’t had the time until now. Such feelings can be the key to becoming our master, rather than remaining our slave. Some of your fellow shopping addicts may think you’re crazy, but others may want to go for a walk with you and find out how you grew yourself out of your addiction. Only from such excellent experimental practice best grows our own excellent habits and consciousness as well.
How many people still think having more money is the key to their psychological health, and yet don’t realize how guilty and defensive many rich folks feel? Haven’t you learned to enjoy improving your habits yet, without spending a lot of money? The more we playfully experiment with enjoying life without money, the weaker we make our own excessive spending habit, and the more we can help others help themselves. And the more that happens the more kindly our body-mind becomes. The more we accept and keep 'free' objects we haven’t honestly earned, the more vulnerable we become to losing them later, perhaps in painful ways as well! About the only thing free is the air and if politicians keep spending the way they have, even that might soon change. Such assertive, bold, audacious, creative, and enjoyable playfulness is much more a part of Dewey’s psychological excellence than either Plato’s or Aristotle’s. Aristotle too thought mere contemplation could reveal nature’s highest Truths, but of course Dewey disagreed; there’s simply no evidence for such Truths. Like any other idea general ideas are idea-tools, not a reflection of eternal objects. Nature gives us no evidence anything is unchanging and eternal, and if that's true, then what’s important is to keep learning about excellence, rather than convince our self we already are excellent.
In the 1800s conservative faculty psychology's ‘umbilical’ was finally cut from philosophy and became an experimental science of its own, thanks to people like Dewey and his psychology teacher William James. Darwin's work showed habits were the fundamental biological reality, rather than psychological faculties for knowing eternal Truth. As a result the focus shifted to what habits are best to learn and how they’re best learned. So, liberal university experimenters started testing their own psychological ideas to see which ones worked best. Thus men like James and Dewey got more freedom to start painting a new modern psychological picture and also think about what habits are most useful, like experimental learning. Psychology's focus shifted from picturing a set of separate faculties to a much more organic and nature-oriented picture of life; it also made it much easier to explain why just a few minutes with someone can reveal what their whole character may be like? All a person's habits are organic and related to each other. As a result the old innate faculty psychology became much less reliable. Unlike Plato and Aristotle thought, no one is a born slave and almost everyone can easily begin learning whatever they want if they playfully take one small intelligent step at a time.
So since then the main social problem has been educating more people to feel psychology's new modern ideas of intelligent self-determination and experimentally testing such ideas. In that respect Behavioral psychology is still in its infant growth stages. Only in the late 1800s, as U.S. soldiers continued pushing Native Americans onto land no one else wanted, psychology started becoming more of a science at eastern universities. William James at Harvard was one of the first scientific psychologists. He even experimented with the idea of his soul after he died, but the results were negative. Then Dewey, first at Chicago and then at Columbia in New York, began describing himself as a Functional Behaviorist and became a leading spokesman. With his help it continued growing and being refined, and in a few short decades of experimentation psychologists began discovering many useful ideas and techniques for guiding, nurturing, and encouraging peoples’ own self-taught excellence. For example an idea called ‘Programmed Learning’ was built by Behaviorist B.F. Skinner. He helped people learn complex arts merely by breaking them down into small baby-steps, just like a child learns best how to make a bow and arrows; that kind of one-step-at-a-time process helped make improving any habit easier, more fun, and more successful. So, once again, if Dewey’s right, if self-education is the best way for people to keep guiding their own kinds of excellent growth, and make it more intelligent for today's rapidly changing modern industrial world, then it just makes sense to begin teaching such habits on a widespread educational level. The sooner students learn to intelligently guide their own growth, and why some habits are more excellent than others, then the sooner we can begin lessening some of the many important social problems we have today. The more students know such habit-arts, the easier it becomes to continue reconstructing their dangerous ones.
To say the least, such creative and experimental self-teaching is still a relatively new art. After all almost all parents are still basically only a little past childhood themselves when they started having their own children, and so often the most important educators—parents--remain the weakest educators. As a result what children usually learn are merely the traditional habits thought important to learn. In short, people having a choice of which habits they want to make excellent is still a relatively new art; in much of the world today women are still controlled by men, and where they aren't many men still wish they were.
So far schools haven't been much help; in much of the world today children are taught the habits others in power want them to know, like how to figure a person's taxes, keep practicing routine habits, and sometimes even what spirit to pray to for headache relief. Thus the one institution useful for peacefully making life a constant reconstructive intelligent process still often remains merely a place for learning how to keep the social status quo. Instead of building more cross-cultural interactions between people, and feeling how we're all just people with different habits, people often convince themselves their habits are Absolute Truth. Instead of helping each other learn from one another, much of mankind still celebrates only their own lifestyle, and when life becomes too boring or too diverse they might load up a car with explosives and go for a drive.
No Matter How Humble, A Person's Home Can Help
No doubt for many people it's psychically flattering to believe their own religious, political, and social customs are in fact Absolute Truth, handed down from some divine source and signaling our some group of course. But for us liberal Deweyans such pictures of truth are definitely not part of psychology's new modern picture, much less excellent. For us only testing ideas for their results produces truth, and only for that time and place too! In other words, what's important today are the actual results of our psychological ideas? Do they confine our growth or liberate it, make us less or more tolerant, helpful, healthful, and more intelligent?
However, even in ancient Greece many also began feeling how a person's environment helps play an important role in what they learn; history's Greek 'father' Herodotus mentioned several different habits in different countries. Such ideas helped liberal Sophists like Protagoras say 'man is the measure of all things'. Modern Behavioral psychology too has celebrated that idea of cultural relativity, again based also on Darwin's evolutionary work. Even for ancient Greeks it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see aristocratic kids learned aristocratic habits, while poor kids learned shoe making or carpentry. Today our expanded knowledge of biological life has merely produced more evidence for such ideas. Today it’s normal to imagine for billions of years a creature's natural environment helped shape and condition those animals and plants in it. For example, dangerous meat-eating animals helped condition plant-eating animals to build their safety habits, like either defending themselves, running away, or hiding. And in Greece even conservative Plato realized how important our environment is for the habits we learn; it can help corrupt or encourage excellent habits. Thus where we live and who we live with is often just as important as knowing what and how to practice any kind of excellence.
In his great book Republic Plato describes how he would educate his guardian philosopher kings and queens, teaching them a number of different skills in a number of different situations, like working at a job, and of course studying as well. Learning both kinds of skills happened best when they were put into such situations requiring work and study; in a sense all of life would then become a kind of school. But it seems he never went beyond that basic idea to make one's environment as pleasant and rewarding as possible; it was a natural result of his wanting his guardian rulers to say focused on Spirit-Ideas. If someone made a mistake they were out.
Today many liberals don't emphasize Plato’s favorite subject very much, mathematics; faculty psychology is no longer seen as excellent. But one's environment remains important to us Deweyan Behaviorists too. What opium smoker, for example, could learn a more intelligent habit while living in an opium den? And for those who've playfully declared war on their unhealthful smoking habit, just seeing daily one picture of a diseased smoker's lungs helps make it easier to keep experimenting with growing a non-smoking habit. Even in medieval times Churchmen too knew how important a person’s surroundings were to building their kinds of excellent habits, like praying, chanting, remaining celibate, and of course acting piously and humbly. The more they built monasteries to live in and practice only those arts, sometimes for 12 hours a day, the easier it was to build such habits.
And so today another very important part of psychological excellence is actively building a helpful, rewarding, and encouraging environment for the habits you want to build. Why allow those who don't encourage your growth into your world? That kind of building involves choices and work here and now, and on an existential level—a personal level—it helps make learning that much easier. If, for example, 2 people choose to build a relationship only between themselves, then obviously it’s helpful to build a place where other people aren't usually allowed. Then, after that, it's often a question of practicing habits together, having fun, and enjoying each other. For me a more excellent diet became a challenge, and so the more healthful foods I kept around the house, the easier it was to build a better diet and feel more healthful. In short, it became much easier to reconstruct my eating habit when no one in my environment ate less than the best foods, like meat and almost all animal products; I’ve never regretted it either. No doubt it would have been much more difficult if I had kept living with a modern-day T-Rex.
What happens after 2 people start learning to play, say, golf together? They can begin playfully experimenting even around the house. How much fun can they have learning the golf swing rhythm, and then going out on a course, enjoying the day, swinging at that cute little ball and seeing it roll all of 2 feet down the fairway? How enjoyable can it feel to miss every damn 3 foot putt? How much fun can it be to take 100 shots on a 9-hole course? What masochist invented that damn game anyway? If you can learn to share some laughs together, even when it’s frustrating, chances are your relationship will keep growing together. And if not, scratch golf off and go on to idea #2—polka dancing! No doubt some ideas will work better than others, and the more we need such a relationship the more we’ll keep rewarding our self and arranging our environment to encourage building it. What better way is there to teach our self how satisfying life can be while shopping for the latest polka music?
Rewards Help build Psychological Excellence Too
Probably at least since Plato’s day people have felt how important it is to reward someone who's building a new habit-art. Why keep punishing and yelling at yourself when you don't practice your new habit, unless of course it helps? If it doesn't, then why not experiment with giving yourself a little reward instead. The following little story, taken from Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish may help us better feel how important rewards are.
A little five-year-old boy came home from his first day at school. His wise mother of course wanted to encourage him to keep going to school and learning as much as possible, and so she made his favorite snack. While he enjoyed his raisons and fresh baked whole wheat bread with honey they talked.
"So," she said smilingly, "what did you do in school today? Tell me all about it."
"Oh," he said nonchalantly, in between enjoying the raisons one at a time. "I learned to write today."
"Oh my goodness that’s marvelous," gushed his smiling mother, and she reached over and touched him lovingly. "And so tell me now, what exactly did you write?"
The boy thought for a few seconds while he continued chewing, and then answered rather sadly. "Who knows?” he asked. “The teacher didn't teach me to read yet!" No doubt similar stories can be found in every culture.
The man known to the world as William Shakespeare also saw how important results for learning new skills and habits; in that respect his Taming of the Shrew can be seen as yet another example of medieval Behavioral therapy. There he said “No profit grows where no pleasure’s taken.” That remains good advice, but it's still interesting to see how at that time learning was tied more to negative results, rather than merely explaining what's expected to someone, and then rewarding them for it. For example, when his shrewish wife Kate hits him on the head with a bed warmer Petruchio merely wrecks her bed, rather than telling her about a more intelligent response and then wrecking her bed. Certainly for Dewey too no habit grows easily where no pleasure’s taken in practicing it, but such stories can help us feel more deeply how important rewards and talking about what's expected of someone else have also become important parts of psychological excellence. No doubt, sometimes learning a new habit-art can be a slow and frustrating process, like golf, but the more we teach our self to expect mistakes, and also enjoy hitting that occasional perfect shot, the sooner we learn such skills.
So maybe we can offer a little summary of psychological excellence so far. At first it’s good to keep practice-times short and enjoyable, at least until you’re comfortable within the practice time and are having some fun with the new habit. And if you need some motivation rewarding yourself after practice might help. It’s why primary school often starts with just half-days and lots of playing and singing. It might sound childish but why not try that with any new habit-art? I'm sure other golfers would love to hear a medley of all your polka tunes. And it might make it easier to watch that 4th tee shot sail once again into the water hazard. Eventually, however, as you build that first learning plateau, and your confidence begins growing so you practice at other times during the day, then maybe any satisfying feelings can become their own reward, making it a so-called end-in-itself, like feeling good just to hit a good shot every once in a while, or just to be walking around and getting some great exercise. After all, aren’t rearranging your ankle-bones while learning to ski, or missing every 2 foot putt, really their own rewards?
Don’t Forget To Have Some Fun!
Creating an easy, playful step-by-step plan may be the most intelligent way to start building a new, improving you. If you choose to make your diet more excellent, for example, you might start with breakfast only, work on making it more healthful, and of course enjoying its new feelings and tastes; one suggestion is to eat only fruit until lunch. And if you want to teach yourself to snow-ski, then learning how to walk with the skis, and not rip your knees apart, might be a good first step. No doubt some people can learn habits faster than others, but the important thing is to learn at your own comfortable rate! And of course anyone who makes fun of you for having more snow on your butt than on your skis can be politely thrown off the mountain! How many echoes will it make anyway? Why not even count the number of times they bounce on the way down?
Remember when you were a kid and you taught yourself how it felt to roller skate without breaking your butt? Well what made it so easy to learn all your childhood skills—jumping rope, hopscotch, ice skating, archery, and becoming a chocolate addict? Wasn’t it all the fun you had practicing? The more you practiced the faster you learned. Dewey’s Behavioral psychology wants to keep those actively playful learning habits alive all through life, not just in childhood! For him all life is a continual growing process, or can be if we accept Dewey’s new modern picture of it. If it’s a natural continuum, then why not preserve the best habit-arts all through life? At the same time, however, why not keep making them more intelligent than before? And then, how much can we help others intelligently enjoy life more, and make it more satisfying, even when they break their leg in four different places skiing down the expert slope on the first day?
Once again, for Dewey perhaps the greatest obstacle for learning excellent habits is our routine ones. Normally parents reward children for acting in certain ways; it increases their enjoyment and encourages more practice. What kid doesn’t love to be rewarded, adored, and approved of? Indeed those are enjoyable feelings. But for Dewey there's a danger our habits will become too routine; in an always changing world that can be dangerous. We humans are like many other animals; we're basically lazy too, so our habits may become too propulsive and automatic. In that case we teach our self to become a slave to our habits, rather than an intelligent master. Why are they dangerous? They help convince us nothing bad can happen, so we often become too lazy, over-confident, and feel everything’s okay. That feeling can be deadly simply because nature is always changing. So every once in a while it might be good to step back, take a look at possible dangers, and reconstruct such feelings as fast as possible.
For Dewey that’s an important part of psychological excellence—seeing what could be dangerous and then avoiding it. Growing that kind of mental habit may feel strange at first, but it helps keep us in the ‘here and now’, and many modern psychologists say that’s the best psychic place to be. If so, then it’s another important part of character excellence. People are like gardens; they can keep growing and being re-born every day, but...only if we keep avoiding all the dangers life has! If those beautiful snowy mountains help keep breaking your young skiing bones, then it might be more intelligent to junk those skis and try wine-making or helping your local police keep nabbing those who keep breaking the law. Who knows? You could even combine the 2 and become a great wine-sipping detective. But in any case learning goes on all through life, so why not keep focused on where it all happens, I mean here and now? You can get better at it just like a painter gets better at painting, one day at a time and one brush stroke at a time? Inch by inch life’s a cinch, or so mother used to say! And best of all, the more we keep expanding ours habits and testing new ideas, the easier it becomes to keep learning new meanings, feelings, and ideas of both satisfactions and dangers. Welcome to the 'zen' of learning—the playful art of learning's continuum.
How can we keep our habit-arts from becoming too routine and repetitive? As we've already seen, for that Dewey suggests a creativity antidote, like merely mixing and matching ideas until we find one we feel like exploring. For that focusing on what we’re doing here and now is useful; how can we see create new ideas unless we see what our habits are? If you’re like me, at first you won’t get creative new ideas every five minutes, or even every day, but new feelings and meanings can always be felt NOW and smart people jot them down before they forget them! Some days are just more creative than others; some days new ideas just seem to keep erupting. For example, you might see an interesting exercise you want to add to you habit, so you try it. Sometimes it might feel great and sometimes you might need to have your spine put back in place, but in either case you can test the idea and see what happens. So why not stay alert and active and keep all your senses open. Sometimes I surprise even myself, and at other times feel like a genuine dummy. Even if what we're aiming to learn doesn't happen as fast as we hoped, if that beginner’s ski slope results in your first full-length body-cast, even if we gain 20 pounds from all our chocolate rewards, they all help us learn more about our self. Is the un-skied life still worth living? And why not learn to give the candy to someone else and let them gain the 20 pounds?
For those and many more reasons we’ll see later Dewey's psychological picture of Functional Behaviorism continues looking bright. It doesn’t aim to confine and enslave people, like much of ancient and medieval psychology did, but rather to liberate and keep increasing one’s freedom. No doubt its best quality may be this it works! Its rewarding and playful practicing arts can definitely help improve any weak, excessive, and harmful habit, and thus keep making our self more excellent. Who knows? You may even learn to conquer that chocolate addiction, starting tomorrow of course, and if not just make sure your health insurance covers chocoholics, if you’re still one of the lucky ones who has health insurance! The more we learn to constructively savor and enjoy life without harmful addictions, like fried foods, the more we feel Dewey's kind of psychological excellence and self-mastery.
What habit-arts in particular should be improved? That's a very important ethical question, and we'll see some of those ideas a little later. But once some basic excellent habits are strong, then much of psychological excellence becomes personal—existential if you like college-sounding words. Only individuals can best answer such questions, and just imagine the fun you can have telling all your friends you've begun some existential analysis and are planning on donating all your neuroses to the Smithsonian Institute? Suppose, for example, you accept the challenge to quit trying to kill yourself and stop smoking a pack a day; good existential choice. Behavioral psychology can help. Besides ‘reward’ therapy there’re also a number of ‘negative’ learning techniques, like the ones Petruchio practiced on Kate; it’s called negative conditioning and controlled pain is its tool. How’s it work? Well why not simply put a rubber band around your wrist and snap it every time you just think of smoking? Will it work? Why worry? If it doesn’t, just imagine how cute you’ll look with 2 red swollen wrists. Or just imagine how you can be the hit of every party as you yell at the top of your lungs every time you snap that rubber band, ‘OUCH, damn cigarettes!’ How can life get any better than that?
Perhaps the greatest thing about Behavioral excellence is this All of daily life can be felt as a kind of experimental school. The more we playfully experiment a little today, right now, at home, at work, or anywhere, the more we learn to feel what excellence is like. Just put that rubber band on and start snapping away. For a painful divorce, however, you may want to put several thick rubber bands around your waist. In other words don't help your therapist's children go to college, but instead start your own self-therapy sessions and playfully start teaching yourself another excellent existential habit-art. You can begin NOW! (OUCH! Damn husband!) Some say it’s guaranteed to help you forget about that bum and get on with your life. And of course don't forget those rewards! Wrists seldom become too sore to take hold of another fresh fruit-topped tart, do they? And for those people who aren't so pain oriented, loving actions too can be a great encouragement for both young children and adult-children. Just put a rubber band around their neck and snap it when they sass back. However, you may learn a loving emotional bond works better. When a child or husband misbehaves, why not withdraw one’s love until they promise never to do that again? And of course it’s also helpful to let them know what you expect of them and what excellence means to you.
The more one begins feeling here is the best place to practice, and now is the best time to practice, then the sooner more intelligent habit-arts will themselves become propulsive, second nature, force of habit, and shear will-power! That to me is a great feeling--the feeling of self-mastery; it's a very old liberal idea of excellence, going all the back to ancient Greece’s most famous traveling Sophist-teacher Protagoras. Some say he was even as smart as Pericles’ wife, Aspasia. Such control and mastery can feel good in and of itself. When I finally learned to playfully laugh at just the thought of smoking then I knew I had artfully mastered my old self-destructive habit. A warning however if you’re building a new jogging habit you might not want to practice in the boss’s office, unless of course he starts pawing you! In that case I suggest a swift kick to the groin with either your right or left combat boot! It'll do wonders for your confidence as you wait in the unemployment line.
I look forward to the day when everyone has that much confidence and fun as well. Life is too short to take disrespect and rudeness from anyone, but it takes some practice to learn how to return such disrespect. The great African baseball pitcher Satchel Page offered this advice why not learn to move with ease and grace, even as your boss's gonads are lifted up into his liver; it can be yet another art of psychological excellence. Such smooth, relaxed, and rhythmic movements help make life and learning much easier and less tension-filled, especially while your wrists are healing from all those rubber band welts. When a secretary GRACEFULLY launches the disrespectful boss’s family jewels into a low-earth orbit it somehow makes life all worthwhile, doesn’t it? YEOOOW! Damn combat boots! Sometimes disrespect is best corrected with disrespect; it may be the holistic approach to therapy. No doubt the sooner we playfully learn that graceful art the sooner we can feel its healing excellence. Heck, why not even bronze your favorite pair of combat boots when they finally wear out? After all, if we don't nurture our own graceful sense of pride and dignity, then who will? The sooner we teach our self to sensuously enjoy and playfully savor such grace, and to help others learn the art, then the sooner we’ll know what some of Dewey’s psychological excellence can feel like. What are you waiting for; millions today are already practicing such arts. Often these days people don't get mad, they get even, create another happy memory, and then get on with their life. In other words, why give yourself more roadblocks than necessary? Far too many still seem to have forgotten how excellent simple kindness can be.