Page 1.2: Sections 11-15
11. PSYCHING OUR SELVES
More about psychological excellence? How much more can there be after that last section? Well, even Freud admitted he didn’t understand the female psyche; could it be many of his female patients were just playing with him?
In this section we continue coloring in more of Dewey’s model of psychological excellence; he was a great psychologist himself, maybe even as great as his first wife Alice. There are, in fact, a few more ideas worth mentioning. Also, we’ll continue seeing how different conservative and liberal psychological models are, as well as look at some history of their ideas and feelings. So, once again, what better way to get everyone’s thinking off on the right track than with another lackadaisically lame limerick? They help make philosophy more fun, don’t they? They’re also another way words can be played with; in fact I think I’m addicted!
A young woman hired for her sexilence,
Avoided its usual hexilence.
But as they hauled here away
The cops heard her say,
But I'm starting to feel its excellence!
Ready for another pop quiz? What’s the moral of that limerick? (Hint: It’s not hire better lookouts!)
What, Me Worry?
We all practice our habits daily. Sometimes, however, one's practice is a little weak, warped, and not as sharp as it might be. Often, young folks are raised in homes where adults practice excessive habit-arts, like worrying for example. Sometimes it’s called paranoia -- feeling someone’s always out to harm us. For us liberal Deweyans, however, all such feelings are the result of excessive bodily tensions. In fact, many children are imprinted with such tensions day in and day out, making it more difficult to focus on what they’d like to learn. Sometimes people can be, as Freud said, wound too tightly on the inside. As a result, it’s often difficult to overcome our own worrisome and depressed feelings, and creatively imagine how such tense feelings might be relaxed so we can better concentrate on and enjoy what’s happening here and now. For many people coffee and/or cigarettes help relax such tensions. Sometimes such worrisome feelings and thoughts even keep people awake at night, and so relaxing such body-mind tensions often becomes one of life's major challenges. Sometimes the feelings are hormonally caused, and sometimes they’re on-going, but again intelligently experimenting with relaxing solutions is the preferred Behavioral challenge. If one solution doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to try something else.
No doubt, some things need to be thought about, like how to avoid unwanted results, serious injuries, and how to make our lives more satisfying. So if staying worried, tense, anxious, and fearful is a big problem, then why not work on that first? Why not test some different solutions, like taking some anti-depressant drugs, or learn some relaxing techniques in a yoga class? Sometimes even being with more relaxed people can be useful. After all, modern psychology's revolution has centered around helping people re-focus and re-mold their own unhealthful tensions, feelings, and ideas; they just have different methods of getting to that goal.
Behavioral psychology, however, helps people fuse and unite what old conservative psychologies often separated and isolated -- a natural body from a spirit-mind. Both Plato and Aristotle, plus many conservative religions after them, have encouraged such a divided model of human nature. For Dewey, however, the best psychological model organically unites body and mind into body-mind. For him body and mind are merely 2 sides of the same coin, so to speak; they're biologically fused and united from birth to death. Thank goodness. It makes learning to let go of ordinary bodily tensions and their mental worries easier by merely learning to relax and let go of such tensions. Too many people still haven’t taught themselves to use only the muscles they need to move gracefully. I remember feeling excessively tense merely standing and waiting for a walk light.
For many today body-mind tensions make life feel less than satisfying than it could be. No doubt, in many people such tensions are felt early in life. With their worrisome tensions parents easily imprint sensitive children; it all happens over a number of years on a subconscious behavioral level, but eventually it begins affecting the child’s life too. So, if worried, tense, and anxious people were a part of your environment, then almost certainly you too will have such tensions. Just being around worried people makes us more worried and tense! Luckily for most people sexual orgasm is a readily available natural way to relax such tensions, but again, the challenge is to remain relaxed throughout the day. Unless it’s used to help build a more relaxed habit-art, it’s just a temporary solution like coffee or cigarettes.
In any case, often teenagers have already learned such excessively tense habits from their parents, and so learning to more intelligently control such tensions becomes another educational challenge. Feeling worried about, say, not being able to live up to parents' expectations helps make suicide a real option for many young people; it's now the greatest cause of death for young folks. And so again we see how useful it might be to start teaching such psychological realities in our public schools. How much more useful would our traditional schools and churches be if they regularly helped young folks learn how to relax, become less worried, and also how to intelligently relate to people who are helping cause such tense feelings?! Shouldn’t such training too become an important part of public schooling? If not, then why not? What good is it to have an educated worker whose tensions keep disrupting those around them?
What’s standing in the way of such educational reform? Mainly, it’s a still rather undereducated public. Many educators too still believe their job should be teaching academic facts, not psychologically excellence habits. Instead, the focus in school and church is often fixed on either dry and abstract logical problem solving, or reading about Absolutely True miraculous stories from the past. As a result, most young folks finish their public school careers with overly tense habit-arts helping confuse, weaken, and un-balance their body-mind habits and ideas; they’re psychologically undereducated. Wouldn’t it be better for public health in general to focus on those kinds of problems in our public schools, before they become serious problems later in life? That’s a very logical question to ask, isn’t it? Why not begin the road of psychological excellence even before junior high? Why not teach young kids to begin consciously feeling their own weak, excessive, and unhealthful tensions and their action, and also how to start improving them? Exactly what is so harmful about that kind of knowledge?
Another more serious form of such worrisome tensions is called obsessive-compulsive behavior. In fact, most young folks don’t even realize how dangerous such actions can become, or even how useful it is to take a little psychological inventory of their own habits once in a while, to see how healthful or weak they might be. In short, why not turn more young folks into more psychologically aware people? If not, then young folks often enter the adult world being psychologically naïve about their own habits, and worse yet, acting intolerant of those with different habits. As a result, many find it difficult to even find joyful work, much less keep it after being hired, or building a healthy relationship with someone else. Young folks often don’t know about their own body-minds. So, businesses too could be much more involved in public education; keeping people employed who know they need such work would cut down on training costs, as well as benefit from happier workers. After all, even those who pray and worship still need to practice useful works habits to become more excellent people!
Learning About One’s Money and Sex Habits
Two things often causing problems in the real world are feelings about money and sex habits, or is it having enough money for sex -- sometimes I get the two ideas confused. Many young folks who haven’t been taught to talk with a mate about their own sexual and money habits often have problems later on. Too often young folks naïvely assume their partners have the same sex and money habits they do. That assumption can lead to many relationship problems later, and sometimes a stressful divorce. What’s more, many young folks are intolerant of different sex and money habits, and so believe only their ideas are the right ones. In today’s world that assumption is becoming increasingly naïve. Life teaches there are many different sex and money habits, and so learning more about them makes life less tense and frustrating. Some couples might need a good marriage counselor to help learn more about those kinds of variety. Sometimes the result may mean each going their own way, but for many just becoming more aware of those differences can lead to more relaxed and excellent feelings. Sometimes couples can learn to become more tolerant of their partner’s sexual and economic feelings, even though at first that might be a difficult learning process. Some people find it difficult to allow a partner to control their own orgasm or spending habits. Sometimes it’s so difficult the relationship needs to end. In any case, however, such tensions can be lessened by simply talking to one another about such habits before anyone makes a commitment to a relationship. Teaching such psychological realities in our public schools would help make life less frustrating and more enjoyable.
That last idea about allowing a partner to control their own orgasm may sound strange to some, but it too is yet another modern sign of respect for someone else’s sexuality, not to mention simple kindness. In any case, however, talking about such ideas, sharing one’s feelings with a partner, and then agreeing on a common plan might be a good first step to make a relationship less worrisome and more enjoyable. And if a partner isn't willing to talk about their sexual and money habits, then chances are they're not interested in sharing and friendship. Who knows? Such talking experiments might even open humor's door as well. Who wouldn’t smile at a partner who puts on an engineer’s cap and says it’s time for the train to enter another tunnel, or ask if they’re ready for another dynamite explosion? What woman wouldn’t like to get some motor oil for her birthday? Is that another funny spending habit or what?
For meddlesome people, like nosy in-laws, how funny would it be to see how they react when they discover you've suddenly been called away on another vacation? Or see how your children react when they learn it's time to earn some honest money of their own. Or feel how much better sex is when you let your partner tell you what feels best, rather than just satisfying your own needs. Who can't have some fun playing someone else's sex 'slave'? Experimenting with such ideas just might help strengthen everyone’s confidence to intelligently take more control of their own life and enjoy it more. If you have a money problem and like to eat, why not open a restaurant? There are so many great self-help books at your local library and they too can help encourage you to keep testing ideas for improving your own psychological excellence.
Above all, such psychological knowledge and skills helps us keep in touch with the feeling side of consciousness; that’s an important habit young folks often are naïve about. What’s bothering you, how do you feel about life, and how can it become more satisfying? After all, if you're not comfortable with your own feelings, how can you be comfortable with others, or even with life? Long before talk-show psychologists learned the importance of a person's feelings, Dewey said feelings are about half of the human body-mind itself! The other half can be seen as ideas. So, ignoring our feelings ignores half of our psychic world and how it might be improved. If you feel irritated about your in-laws, lazy spouse, or children’s actions, then why not be honest with yourself, set up a meeting, tell them how you’re feelings, and then start testing some solution-ideas for their results. Sometimes you might learn your feelings are excessive, but often such talk will help make life more satisfying and enjoyable. In short, why keep worrying and staying tense when you can use the ideas of Behavioral psychology to experimentally produce more satisfying results? Such ideas were created to give people more power and control of their lives, so why not learn to use them intelligently to keep improving your own tense and frustrating feelings? Being honest about your feelings is another important part of psychological excellence; if you’re not honest with your own feelings, if you don’t talk about what’s bothering you, then it’s practically impossible to keep improving them, and more difficult to care about others’ feelings? An ancient Greek motto was Know Yourself, but today it might be Respect Yourself and Others; there’s an important difference between those 2 ideas. What good is it for slaves to know themselves when they still remain slaves? The lack of such questions in the ancient world is what helped make it so undemocratic and authoritarian. The more you learn to respect yourself and your feelings, and respect those with peaceful and constructive feelings around you, the easier it is for them to give respect to you. And if they don’t, then how can any relationship last?
Strange as it may seem, for many people it’s easy to keep ignoring their feelings and just keep telling them self they don't really deserve a better life. Many women often feel their own feelings just aren’t that important. It’s often called gunny sacking our feelings, and keeping them from others, even the frustrating ones. Some people were raised by gunny sacking parents, and thus never shared their feelings with others. Others who were physically punished on a regular basis may have a weak self-image, low self-esteem, and low respect. As a result, they feel they shouldn’t tell anyone how they’re feeling. They feel as if they don’t deserve to be happy. How many people actually feel life is meant to be frustrating and painful, or their being punished as the result of their own sinful and bad natures? Sometimes when people are asked how they feel about themselves, they’ll just admit they probably deserve to be punished from time to time and there’s really nothing they can do about it. Often many women and some late-maturing men have such problems, but once again all such feelings are organic and so can be improved with more intelligent communication skills and experimentation.
A Little Psychological Evolution
As we’ve already seen, around 100,000 years ago human consciousness began growing its idea side with the help of talking habits. As that art grew, human consciousness became both feelings AND ideas. Then, around 50,000 years ago, spirit-ideas were used to create burial arts to make life less tense and more enjoyable. Such ideas soon became the most useful mental tool for native peoples to use for improving their lives. If, say, animal spirits could be made friends with, then they might help bring more food to the tribe. Much more recently religious statues, carvings, prayer, and worship were used to help control spirits and make life feel better and more satisfying. Then, around 2,500 years ago in Greece, a small confident and liberal minority begin anchoring their feelings and ideas to a spiritless nature and their own habits and skills. They realized intelligent human actions are the best way to improve any frustrating feelings. As they did Western science and philosophy was born. Thus, Western civilization’s 2 great psychological traditions of excellence, conservative and liberal, began growing and competing with each other for followers; Aristotle added his moderate model of thinking as well. They each wanted to convince people their models of life and nature were best, and for that logic and reasoning became useful. Thus evolved liberal and conservative models of psychology. In his dialogues, upper class conservative Plato showed how much he reacted to that new liberal spiritless model. For him psychological excellence could only result from knowing eternal and unchanging spirit-ideas; in fact to him they were the only ideas worth knowing; the more a person remembered such innate ideas, the easier excellence became. In such ways psychology became an important part of all philosophic models of excellence. Eventually conservatives like Parmenides and Plato said our feeling-senses should, in fact, be entirely ignored; only reasoning with ideas can lead us to excellence of any kind! Only they could really free us from living in a painful natural world.
Conservative Catholic Christians eventually painted a much more negative psychological model of excellence. They had to justify their religious bureaucracy and priesthood, and so they said we’re all born with sin, keep sinning throughout life, and thus need priests and rituals to be forgiven. For them, psychological excellence meant anchoring their feelings and actions to ideas of faith, hope, and love for a story about a savior-god; it became Eternal Truth; no one could be saved for a heavenly reward without such feelings. What’s more, who in the ancient world didn’t want a perfectly satisfying eternal life in heaven? Only with such feelings could such a result happen, but the reward could only happen after death, and only with god’s saving grace. Such ideas and feelings were useful in a pre-scientific age, when almost nothing was known about nature or human nature, and how to keep improving it experimentally with more intelligent practice.
No doubt, those ideas have had a long and varied history, as we’ll see more clearly in Book 4. However, as Dewey points out in his Reconstruction in Philosophy, often such conservative ideas of Truth were used to justify social brutality, to dominate peoples' thinking, to restrict their own personal growth, to keep them tied to the Church and its rituals, and keep more intelligent experimental thinking to an absolute minimum. In short, religious conservatives didn't want to keep liberating people and encouraging them to keep growing more powerful scientific or democratic habits; they had great amounts of social power and they wanted to keep it as long as they could. Public executions and lengthy religious wars among different Christian sects, as well as between Christians and Muslims, were often justified with such conservative ideas. On a psychological level most everyone continued feeling disease was god’s punishment for sin, so prayer and worship were the best solutions to relieve such depressive ideas.
Needless to say, based on their terribly disruptive social results those conservative kinds of psychological excellence are no longer justified to us Deweyan liberals, whether they’re secular or religious models of psychology. Almost always such conservative actions didn't help liberate people’s constructive feelings or experimental ideas. On the contrary, violence and fear was often used to stop the free expression of any different feelings and ideas, even when they could help make life more loving and peaceful. Religious conservatives wanted people to remain dependent on their spirit-rituals, rather than peoples’ own independent and intelligent habits; any different ideas were false and thus weren’t tolerated. Even today secular conservatives still feel a feudally arranged social and economic hierarchy, in which only a few are most dominant, is psychically the best social system for everyone! Children should be educated to serve and obey that system. Only in the last few hundred years have liberals like John Dewey offered a much different liberal model of psychological excellence, using like democratic equality and equal rights. Thus, the great psychological challenge today is educating enough people to make life better for all law-abiding people, and not just a few wealthy folks.
Needless to say, to us Deweyan liberals such conservative models of psychological excellence have become excessive and unhealthful for most people. As we’ve been seeing, his psychological model celebrates people intelligently liberating themselves from any of their weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts, to better become their own masters. As we’ll see in Part 2, such liberal models of excellence go back to ancient Greek liberals like Democritus and Protagoras. They both celebrated democratic forms of government and constructive habits, where all citizens had an equal voice and freedom to say what their government should do. No doubt, some people are more expert about some things than others, but most everyone is capable of judging how such knowledge should be used. After all, we all belong to the same species, have basically the same needs, and so should have the same rights and freedoms as anyone else. Also, for those ancient liberals everyone should be free to keep improving their lives, as well as helping others become more intelligent about improving their lives. In short, our daily actions are important, like respect, fair and honest business arts, and of course scientific experimentation as well. Greedy habits not only warped a person’s character, but made life more stressful for everyone. As a result, today experimental science’s most powerful knowledge has not only helped people to grow much healthier feelings and ideas about life with a little intelligent daily practice, but it’s also allowed a few to monopolize the new economic part of life. Again, such personal and social challenges have been on-going for thousands of years, and keeping education about them as important as ever.
More Modern Ideas of Psychological Excellence
Today we Deweyan liberals can also see psychological excellence as a balancing and strengthening of our constructive feelings and habits in the natural world. After all, the natural world is where we all live, where all our descendants will live, and so where we should focus our energies for improving any of our destructive and unsatisfying feelings and habits! For us there's no need to feel ‘all life is an illusion,’ as Buddhism suggests, or that we all have past-life Karmic sin determining what our life is now! To us modern liberals such conservative status-quo feelings and ideas have become both excessive and unhealthful; excessive because there’s no objective evidence for such a Karmic system, and unhealthful because they keep diverting our attention away from experimentally making our life more satisfying and rewarding here and now! If 2 people from different tribes or castes loving care for each other, why shouldn’t they be free to make their lives more satisfying? As we'll see later in the section on Reincarnation, there is such a thing as bad and good 'karma', karma with a small ‘k’; it’s created by our own unlawful and disrespectful actions, as well as our kind and helpful actions too. Such ideas help us become more aware of our own actions, as well as create more social stability and peacefulness. But to merely project that idea into a universal Karmic system is simply not justified by the evidence. And again, such conservative ideas needlessly divert attention from experimentally building more constructive and helpful habits here and now. Thus we Deweyan liberals frankly ask, why continue acting as if there is another world beyond this one when no one even knows for sure either Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Buddhist spirit-models exist?
Since nature began encouraging our early ancestors to evolve first larger brains about 1 million years ago, and then much later talking habits, both feelings and ideas have been used to build many different models of psychological excellence. Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Christian, Muslim, and Hebrew are merely a few, not to mention the hundreds of other minor psychological models. However, what’s most important for us Deweyan liberals is to focus on our actions in the natural continuum we all live in. Why should merely a few wealthy people who often inherited their fortunes continue acting greedily and making life more stressful for millions of other people? There’s really no reason besides the fact they often control the politicians who write our inheritance tax laws. Thus, for us liberal Deweyans elections and voting habits have become much more important to build for actually making our world more democratic and fair. Why shouldn’t we encourage more and more people to focus more and more on this tremendously complex nature we're all a part of, as well as peaceful ways to make it more satisfying here and now? If so, then BOTH feelings AND ideas become 2 excellent psychic tools for helping make life more healthful, enjoyable, and satisfying. Feelings help us sense problems and frustrations, as well as the positive results of our experiments, and ideas help us creatively and inventively imagine who life might be better. Conservatives who say either reason or faith is needed to make life better are simply denying what human nature has become over the last 100,000 years.
Another important question becomes where can I start building the healthy habit of having more fun in life, rather than continually acting excessively and persistently serious? How much enjoyable fun can I have learning to let go of my worry-tensions, my excessive eating impulses, exercising more joyfully, building more satisfying sexual habits, or perhaps helping someone learn more pleasurable habits? An experimental idea like guiding some alone and afraid young person to those who love to help such people might be tested and its results felt; how did the experience feel, and how helpful was it? If it didn’t feel enjoyable and didn’t help anyone else, then we can try experimenting with someone else, trying to help them relax more, let go of our tense worries, and start enjoying life more. Who knows, if enough people demand their elected representatives pass a 95% inheritance tax on those inheriting more than, say, $100,000 might even help make democratic equality something more than just 2 words! Modern medical history tells us how one researcher once tried over 600 experiments before he finally found the drug he was looking for. That's what I call dedication to psychological and creative excellence. If at first your 2 left feet don’t enjoy polka dancing, then maybe try helping some homeless kids.
Natural Creativity
The good news is probably everyone has some natural creativity, even many lazy and useless teenage ‘worms’ still living off their parents, or even some beer-guzzling spouses. Quite naturally ideas keep rearranging themselves every so often. For example, a beer-drinker had a naturally creative impulse one day to solve the problem of not having a can opener for another beer. Eventually he invented the opener-free pop-top can! Obviously some people naturally have more creativity than others, but even that important habit-art can be improved with some daily practice. With intelligent practice almost anyone’s creativity can become stronger.
Dewey defined creativity as merely an imaginative forming of ideas aimed at improving life in some way. Thus again he showed how one of psychology’s most important ideas is merely a natural habit-art useful in our daily lives, rather than reserved only for so-called geniuses. The more we ask our self ‘what if…’ during the day, the easier it becomes to think creatively. True, many philosophers have hidden their creative thoughts within mountains of difficult sentences and long words; the conservative German philosopher George Hegel was, perhaps, the best example of that idea. In practice, however, creative thinking can often be as easy as putting on one’s socks. For example, feeling the harmful results of our diet can help us creatively plan less fatty, less salty, less sugary, more healthful meals, and then test the idea experimentally. Believe it or not folks, a little creative experimentation can even get kids to eat their spinach and broccoli when a tasty dip is also available. Also, creatively combining plant foods more intelligently is another way to put creative thinking to use; it’s certainly helped me feel and be healthier. These days I've learned to savor and enjoy nutritious fruits like oranges, grapes, and mangos, rather than fattening cheesecake and pizza. In short, the more we practice re-combining and forming new ideas, the more creative we become; what about non-fat cheesecake yogurt on a big bowl of grapes? Believe it or not it’s not just for pregnant women anymore! We might not all be geniuses, or pregnant women, but most everyone can become more creative with their thinking. The great thing about Behavioral psychology is this: The more you try making an enjoyable and fun game of it, the easier it gets.
Even little daily creative experiments help keep our feelings and ideas anchored and connected to life and nature here and now! Every time we step outside, for example, our feelings of warmth connect us to that solar furnace more than 90 million miles away! Even when the in-laws visit, feelings are felt, especially if they brought some non-fat cheesecake yogurt with them. Why don’t they do that every time? Simply feeling how we can naturally create a new idea is the beginning of a creative process itself. The longer they’re felt, the easier it becomes to think about their results and how to actually test those results. Liberal psychological excellence is also about savoring rather than repressing those feelings, as well as learning to have some fun with them too. Why not happily hide all the cheesecake yogurt the next time those free-loading in-laws visit?
Wherefore Art Thou Liberal Schools?
Once again, perhaps the worst news is this: Such simple and enjoyable habit-arts aren’t taught enough in our public schools, homes, and churches. Our ‘masters of the public education world’ are doing as much damage to our society by what they don’t teach, as ‘master of the Wall Street world’ are doing to our economic system. Such education masters would rather force children to learn many irrelevant and useless academic facts as they can, thus helping create many of the tax-draining social problems we have had since before the country was founded in 1776! Instead of teaching classes like psychological excellence and even humorous writing, kids should be forced to read depressing 19th century novels and spend an entire year learning how to prove useless geometric theorems and solve equally useless algebraic equations. Is it any wonder young folks graduate after 12 years and know practically nothing about psychological excellence, much less how to easily build such habits? Is it any wonder not knowing how to work joyfully and creatively often urges young folks to turn to drugs or alcohol to let go of their worrisome tensions and feel better about themselves? Is it any wonder parents worry if junior or sis starts the day with a couple of brandy shots over some ice cream, or if they find some cocaine or meth-amphetamine under the mattress? Those and other excessively dangerous drugs can not only damage a person for life and keep them from actually growing more excellent habits, but also even lead to destructive habits and suicide.
Thus, a very important practice question becomes how can people build a better educational system? Obviously, building such liberal educational institutions is a slow step-by-step process; different ideas must be tested in each school, to slowly learn what works best and what doesn’t, as we’ll see more clearly in Book 5, Educational Models of Excellence. In any case, however, the challenge to build such schools is now facing everyone who doesn’t accept the current status quo slave-like educational system. The more children are made to obey their teachers, and learn what they have little interest in learning, the more slave-like education becomes! That’s just another one of Dewey’s creative educational ideas. Why shouldn’t children be free to even learn how to enjoying just walking down the street? It’s a habit-art useful throughout life. In fact, the more parents are educated in our conservative public schools, churches, and homes, the more they’ll continue believing that model of education is really the best one. And the more that happens, the less creative educational thinking can become. The more any new habit is joyfully savored and felt, the better chance it has of growing all through life.
Teaching our self how to feel more healthful satisfactions and pleasures is another of Dewey’s creative educational ideas. Simply because they often don't get such psychological training in school or at home, young folks simply have fewer intelligently healthy options in life, unless of course they can pay for a psychologist’s help, and most people can’t. If people don’t know how to practice a relaxed creativity, how to enjoy life’s simple pleasures, and how important it is to wisely help others, then it’s practically impossible to practice those arts. How can we practice what we don’t know, even though it might be an important part of psychological excellence? Unless habits of enjoyable learning aren’t taught in our educational institutions, even if it’s only felt for a few minutes at a time, then how can students begin feeling learning itself can be enjoyable? What greater gift can we give students than that?
Traditionally, for thousands of years conservatives have restricted such feelings to spirit-objects, if they were celebrated at all. Plato’s feelings, for example, were solidly anchored to knowing only spirit-objects; he called them Ideas. He felt the natural world and all its delightful pleasures were really a huge distraction for contemplating such Ideas; the natural world and its enjoyably pleasant feelings were simply actions to be ignored, and Christianity too continued to celebrate such ideas with the obedient idea of faith. Thus, those who anchored their feelings to the nature world, like the liberal Sophists and Atomists, became philosophic enemies to conservatives. Augustine and his Church too carried on many of Plato's ideas; sexual pleasure, for example, anchored us to the world, rather than to god and salvation, therefore it was to be allowed only with certain narrow limits. However, the more such feelings were anchored to spirit-objects, the more ignorant and disconnected people stayed from their own healthy impulses and instincts. Many felt their true selves were spirit-objects, and thus completely different from nature.
Eventually, however, experimental science and technology began reconstructing such routinely negative and divisive conservative feelings and ideas, as we’ll see more clearly in Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence. As those new learning habits grew, they continued challenging conservative models of excellence, and still do to this day. In the last 4 centuries people began realizing there are indeed so many more positive kinds of satisfactions and pleasures than merely dominating others, enforcing such ideas with destructive force, and feeling power's intoxication. Naturally, in such a more liberal world, religious feelings and ideas have grown less reliable. In the 1500s Protestants, for example, said everyone should become their own priest, but in practice even they were often just as intolerant and violent as Catholics had been. And of course today it seems many conservative Muslims too are feeling threatened by modern secular habits, as happened in Iran in 1979 after the US and Britain brought the secular Shah of Iran to power in 1953. What the future results will be of living in such a new and modern liberal world is anyone’s guess, but until our educational institutions become more liberal, there no doubt will be many more violent confrontations between liberals and conservatives. In short, why not work to make that process more intelligent with more liberal schools, so the evolution will be more peaceful than destructive?
More About Gracefulnesss
In the lasts section we touched on this idea of building a graceful habit-art. Do our actions often feel excessively unbalanced, odd, awkward, and tiresome? For many people such feelings are often the result of their own ungraceful habits. Who really knows how to even relax at work or at home? If anything, women seem to practice the habit more than men. So much attention is now paid to making money, money, money, people often learn overly tense and ungraceful movements, making anything quickly feel like it’s too stressful. Rather than feeling refreshed with graceful and relaxed work, excessive tension can make any activity just too tiring, often producing negative feelings. The more muscles we use for just simple tasks, the more awkward and frustrating life can soon feel. And if that habit continues growing, it can often make people look like many stooped over people today, feeling death is the only release from their tense bodily coil, so to speak. Thus relaxing drugs can become even more of an option. What might such awkward feelings be trying to teach us to build a more graceful habit-art? Maybe we've simply lost the playfully graceful childhood art of happily feeling what we're doing -- of simply moving gracefully instead of tensely. In fact, such excessively tense feelings may help form what’s called a naturalistic free-will problem.
In ancient Italy, for example, conservative Catholic theologian Augustine saw our will-power as always free to make any choice, much like Jean Sartre believe last century. For us Deweyan Behaviorists, however, it’s really a rather naïve way of looking at human nature; it’s probably based on the randomness of human mental life. Such thinking randomness helped people feel we’re really free to think and do anything. Liberal Dewey, however, saw human will-power and freedom not as an absolute freedom, but rather as an organic growing habit-art; the more habits we practice and learn, the larger and stronger our will power and freedom becomes. And of course, the more excellent habits we practice, the more excellent choices we become freer to make. In short, intelligent habits keep growing our free will, while routine habits keep it narrow.
If so, then another important psychological question becomes how free are we to keep teaching ourselves more satisfying habits like gracefulness and respect? How free are we to keep improving an excessively tense and unsatisfying habit of worrying? Just observing a healthy tension-free child may help us start to re-learn that art; after all, at one time nearly everyone was an un-tensed, loose, and graceful child. When Jesus, for example, the eldest of at least 7 brothers and sisters, saw that beautiful and innocent childhood gracefulness in his younger siblings, he may have felt what the second writer of John's gospel described as an inner kingdom of heaven – loose, innocent, and graceful! If so, then to Jesus childlike innocence was the kingdom of heaven, and it may have helped him feel more confident to preach about such an accepting innocence to his fellow Jews; to some degree everyone had already subconsciously felt it in childhood.
Such relaxed, graceful, and joyful innocence is just as useful today as it was in Jesus’s day; life in that time and this could be stressful. Behavior psychology teaches us the less people keep practicing such a habit, the more they lose their freedom to practice moving gracefully and happily. Such relaxed feelings are still important today, and perhaps even more important in today’s more complicated world. As one of America's most famous actors once said, Brains aren't everything! How right he was!
The excellent and useful habit-art of tension-free gracefulness can be practiced and strengthened all through life. In fact, few other habits may be better to practice, among them perhaps are respect and helpfulness. They’re probably at least as useful as gracefulness. People normally carry around certain pockets of tension. Some carry it in their face; their brow is always wrinkled. I carried mine in my upper back and neck regions, in what’s called my trapezius muscle. Learning to relax such awkward-feeling tension was a slow process. Still, gracefulness can feel just as joyfully intoxicating as anything else, except perhaps maybe non-fat mint yogurt! So, if you think you’re ready to start learning more about that habit-art, then why not make a plan for experimentation, and then test the plan? For me learning to feel even somewhat relaxed without drugs took some time and practice, but I definitely feel it was worth it. Being a gifted athlete I became excessively tense early in life, but the more I practiced relaxing without drugs, the easier it got.
Eastern-type meditating and Tai Chi are also 2 other tools useful for teaching people to feel more relaxed and move more gracefully. If nothing else is working, then why not experiment with them too? They're not for everyone, but you're not everyone and they might work for you. Years ago I experimented with a meditating art called Bompu Zen; it's a secular form of meditating, aimed at merely relaxing and focusing one’s body-mind. It definitely did help heighten my sense-feelings for here and now, but it was just a doorway, so to speak. When I wasn't meditating I still had a tension problem in my upper back and neck regions. Eventually I began doing some Yoga stretching exercises like a shoulder stand; it was useful for stretching out those tense muscles.
Then, one day my relaxing habit seemed to automatically leap to a more intense feeling plateau; one day it felt like all my upper back tensions just let go and relaxed. That was a really good feeling; I finally felt what it was like to be more relaxed than ever before, and relaxing has been easier ever since. For me, meditation and yogic stretching exercises are seen as merely helping create different levels of feeling leading up to that intense feeling of relaxed freedom! It made me feel I really could become more relaxed throughout the day, if I just kept relaxing those muscles if they felt tense. Much to my delight, these days my more relaxed feelings of freedom continue growing stronger and more willful the more I enjoy practicing them. In fact, it helps make all of life that much more enjoyable, pleasant, and worth living. Life has become more of a liberating celebration, but it took some time and practice; it certainly didn’t happen overnight. Still, what more marvelous gift we can give to our self, I mean besides another bowl of fat-free, sugar-free mint chocolate chip ice cream? If even graceful house pets like dogs and cats stretch out many times during the day, then can’t they too help teaching their masters the same useful habit-art?
Again, over a billion years of natural evolution has finally made we humans both feeling AND thinking creatures. So, why not make both habit-arts as intelligent as we can? Why let one dominate us more than the other? To us Deweyan liberals it seems unnatural. Ideas are useful for imagining how we might act even better, and feelings are useful for detecting the results of our experiments in making life less frustrating, less worrisome, and more satisfying! After all, isn’t life itself really a kind of adventure; who really knows what might happen if we keep testing our ideas while playfully feeling like a carefree kid again? It seems the older I get, the more important it becomes to preserve the best feelings of childhood, like looseness and gracefulness; they're the same and yet different at the same time -- that's what I call useful psychological knowledge. No doubt, for those who've had a rough childhood and weren't allowed to play much at all, it may take a while to feel life more joyfully, but it can be learned in a more encouraging environment.
Learning to gracefully let go of our useless tensions and increase our enjoyable feelings can also help us gain more control over any excessive habit. If our habit-arts become too excessive they may even produce destructive results, like hatred of our self or others. In some cases people can even become what’s called obsessive-compulsive about some things, and in effect keep narrowing their freedom and will power. For example, some people who excessively feel germs may end up washing their hands hundreds of times a day and become compulsively neurotic. Also, people who feel they can't be late for anything may become neurotically compulsive about time and look at their watch every few minutes. Admittedly they're not very serious problems, but Dewey knew it's good to teach young folks about such healthful character habits, as did Behaviorism's founder John Watson. After all, the younger a person is when such habits begin growing, the easier it is to begin consciously learning and talking about them; that way it’s easier to notice when they become harmful and dangerous, both in others and ourselves.
Where’s the harm in learning to become our own best therapist, and thus gain some control over our freedom and will power? The more young folks build their freedom to feel a healthy psychic balance, the easier it'll be to keep balancing their own feelings, rather than relying on government or religious or professional help. No doubt, sometimes it might be necessary, but with more knowledge about psychological excellent it’ll be easier to improve our own weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits.
In any case, all our actions and habits contribute building everyone’s character, so why not consciously start teaching that psychological art even to young children? How much are our schools, homes, and churches teaching young folks to CONSCIOUSLY learn about such psychologically excellent habits? How much are they teaching children to enjoy and relish living life without drugs or other crutches? How much are they helping liberate children from their own harmful habits? Such habits are no less important today than they were in Augustine's day, almost 1600 years ago; most of us still live in cities where respectful character habits are useful.
In short, by nature we are all feeling and thinking creatures; we can no more deny our feelings and ideas than a painter can deny color or a composer deny sound. Long ago Socrates said 'The unexamined life is not worth living'. And the phrase Know Yourself was such an important idea to the ancient Greeks it was inscribed in stone at what they felt was the navel of the entire world – their god Apollo’s shrine at Delphi! It’s kind of amazing when you think of it. Among all their other cultural achievements, those amazing Greeks found time to also contemplate the world’s navel too.
Two Other Interesting Ideas about Nature
No doubt, most everyone’s felt these 2 ideas perhaps a thousand times before, but to bring those subconscious feelings to an idea level of consciousness, and thus psychically anchor us to nature’s basic rhythms, we should mention two more of Dewey’s ideas. For thousands of years philosophers have asked themselves what is nature and human nature like; that ideas might best describe them.
For thousands of years conservatives have said both are made of material and spiritual objects. Liberal Dewey, however, was more naturalistic. Basically he saw all of nature and human nature as having 2 natural rhythms and energies. He said nature is both precarious and stable! In short, nature is BOTH supportive AND deadly, friendly AND dangerous, or satisfying AND frustrating. Many of our conservative ancient and medieval ancestors personified such natural energies and called them good and evil. They were educated to believe supportive and stable kinds of energies were caused by good spirits, while dangerous and frustrating energies were called evil spirits. Today, however, with the help of modern science, it’s become much easier to merely admit nature and human nature itself has both precarious and stable energies. We can feel such precarious mental energies by noticing how our ideas keep floating around from subject to subject, and how stable some are by thinking about the same objects again and again.
Once again, those 2 simple ideas, when placed at the core of Dewey’s liberal model of nature, help keep us focused on building intelligently constructive stable kinds of habits, rather than destructive ones. Such habits can reduce nature’s precarious energies, and make them less dangerous; they can’t be eliminated completely, but better controlled. For us liberals, life is a great gift and so we want to keep feeling it as long as possible; excellent habit-arts help increase the chances of avoiding natural dangers, as well as increase supportive situations. And with new biological ideas it’s even easy to picture how deep such psychological roots can go, probably well over 600 million years, give or take a New York minute or 2! At least for that long creatures have felt nature’s dangers and satisfactions. Those who could reduce life’s dangers continued growing and feeling life’s energies, and those who couldn’t were soon eliminated. In short, the art of psychological excellence often means acting to reduce precarious and dangerous situations, as well as increasing stable and satisfying ones. Why? Because nature itself is both precariously dangerous and stably satisfying! Learning which is which, and how to wisely use such energies is the art of intelligence itself!
No doubt, even with science’s help nature still has many dangerous objects, some might even argue science has increased life’s dangers, but in any case, seeing dangerous objects are not used to produce dangerous results remains another one of life’s great challenges. Today, for example, science and technology are helping create a very serious danger called global warming, and a few decades ago it helped create terribly dangerous atomic weapons. Are we, like Freud thought, hopelessly doomed to kill ourselves off, or has it become more important than ever to see intelligent and caring people be given the corporate and military power to help make life less dangerous and more supportive for everyone? An important question becomes can such people be put into positions of power? How can that goal be accomplished, is an equally important question?
As people well know, there are still many dangers in nature and dangerous habits in people, and probably always will be, but we at least now have some very useful psychic tools for reducing such dangers. Such tools like experimental learning are yet more weapons to help reduce such dangers as well as keep increasing life’s satisfactions, both socially and personally. And perhaps best of all, intelligent habit-arts are much more dependable and reliable than spirit-ideas and much more controllable too, but only if enough young folks are educated to consciously practice them! If not, then Freud may be right; we are doomed to annihilate ourselves. If so, however, then there’re some good reasons to feel more optimistic like Dewey felt.
Those who keep learning more humane and people-oriented habits are much more capable of reducing life’s dangers than those today who’ve been conditioned since childhood to focus almost exclusively on acquiring more and more money, money, money! For over 100 years now they are the ones who’ve given capitalism the odious and foul-smelling feudalistic aromas now permeating so much of modern life. More humane and respectful people, however, keep opening life up to new and better possibilities for everyone, not just a lucky few to be born into wealthy families. Thus, again, it seems what's important is to keep sharing the fruits and profits of work with others, so life can become more stable and less precarious, and more intelligent too. In short, what's important is HUMANIZING MODERN LIFE AND ECONOMICS! For us Deweyan liberals, anchoring our feelings and ideas to such possibilities is what’s most important and psychologically excellent.
So, again, we see the important of education. How psychologically confident, free, and robust are you to help start producing such results? How eager are you to begin playfully experimenting with more intelligent rhythms and energies in your daily life, like health, exercise, gracefulness, helping others help themselves, building peace, and civilizing and humanizing our greedy corporations too?! How strong is your experimental will-to-psychological-excellence on both a personal and social level? How deeply do you feel such challenges and their importance? How much are you psychically anchored to making your natural life less dangerous, and more satisfactory? The more we happily accept such challenges, the more life itself can become more satisfying for everyone!
12. CONSERVATIVE EXPERIMENTS WITH FAITH
No doubt, to many people Dewey’s rejection of knowing any kind of spirit-object is at least interesting, and at most too radical. We do in fact support and celebrate religious institutions who help other people, but the idea anyone can know anything about spirit-objects with certainty has become much less believable. For us Deweyan liberals, the most we can know about such objects is that, almost certainly, nothing can be known about them. In short, our knowledge is confined to the natural world, and faith is not a reliable learning tool for such knowledge.
How can we make such bold statements when in fact most people probably believe they know something about spirit-objects? This and the following section will continue answering such questions. They talk about 2 different definitions for the idea of faith. In this section we’ll also talk about how conservative have used faith, and in the next section how Dewey suggested we use it. In short, this section's for all those people who might believe using faith to justify belief in spirit-objects is the best way to justify all their ideas of absolute Truth. In practice, however, using faith like that often allows only some people to learn about spirit-truth, and then pass on their ideas to the faithful community. Religious history is full of such examples, Paul of Tarsus and Augustine of Hippo being 2 examples. In effect, however, that conservative use for faith has helped justify the great variety of spirit-models we have today, over hundreds in fact.
So, the question naturally becomes, how good has the idea of faith been for actually increasing all our natural goods of life, like science, medicine, technology, democracy, and equal rights? Did it promote such liberating goods or did it merely justify the social status quo? Before we liberals judge an idea reliable, we should know what the results are it helps produce. For example, is it used to bring people of different faiths together so more people can be educated to help themselves and feel their shared humanity, or is it used to keep separating and dividing human society into different tribes and religions? In this section, then, we’ll look more closely at how some conservatives have used the idea of faith in both the inner and outer worlds.
To begin deepening our ideas about faith we’ll first glance at one of Christianity's most important early thinkers, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 CE). His work helped popularize many of Plato’s ideas within a Christian model of life and nature. At the same time, however, he also used experimental thinking to answer some very puzzling logical contradictions his faith was causing; they all grew from the Christian definition of god’s nature. The problem of free will is one such puzzle. Then, in the next section we’ll look briefly at what kinds of ideas liberal Dewey had faith in. So, once again we get the mental ball rolling, so to speak, with yet another laconically lame limerick; it will help clarify all those ideas all at once, or so I’d like to think.
Once a theologian named Raith,
Wrestled with logic and questions, post haste.
In his ideas he basked,
And then coyly asked,
Why bother with evidence when people have faith?
Augustine’s Inner World
Augustine of Hippo committed himself to the young Catholic model of life and nature at the age of 32, after experimenting with different religious models, living with a woman while in his 20s, and even fathering a son by her. With his feelings of sinful guilt he went on to become one of Christianity's greatest theologians. His religious habits began forming early in life. His possessively pious mother Monica was a Catholic and so early in life Augustine began feeling conservative spirit-ideas of sin, forgiveness, and salvation. His mother brought him to the church as a child, but his acceptance of its ideas on faith was gradual; his father was a pagan who converted on his deathbed.
As he grew older Augustine began experimenting, so to speak. While still in his 20s, and ‘shopping’ around for secular and religious models to practice, he often tasted the forbidden fruits of 'good and evil', leading a rather secular and sexually pleasant life as a Latin teacher in North Africa. In the collapsing Roman Empire at the time there were still many different religious models to experiment with, like the cult of the Great Mother, mystic neo-Platonic models created by Plotinus ( d. 270 CE), as well as a variety of Christian-like models too, like Manichaeism. In fact, Plotinus was so otherworldly and psychically riveted to spirit-ideas he felt ashamed to have a body at all! In a science-poor world, such were the excesses some people went to. Anyway, Augustine eventually fathered a child with his loving mistress, even though she was from a socially lower class. In his Confessions he describes praying to be saved from his sinful life, but not right away! During his 20s they enjoyed a loving relationship even though they never married; Monica would never allow it.
Then, around 30, he began feeling psychically out-of-focus, shall we say, and internally divided; it could be described as an existential identity crisis. The basic choice was between 2 very different life-models, the secular and the religious. His feelings of sin, guilt, and redemption began growing more powerful after he left his common-law wife and moved to Milan where he hoped students would be more interested in learning about Latin rhetoric and logic. His desires for pleasurable sex and carnal love began conflicting with his longing for spiritual forgiveness and redemption. For about 2 years he grew increasingly anxious and tense. His pleasurable sexual habits encouraged him to enjoy his new concubine, but his growing inner feelings of sin increased tensions and desires for redemption and eternal life. In short, his psyche – what conservatives call the soul -- felt divided and conflicted. Two conflicting models of life were vying for dominance.
No doubt, adding to the stress was Monica, who had been a Catholic Christian for years; Augustine, however, kept resisting. Finally, at 32, he tearfully breaks down in Milan and submits to Catholicism. Soon afterwards he and his son and was baptized; he accepted completely the celibate life of a Catholic churchman and its faith in the Church’s ideas. Monica had finally won out. Many of his extreme guilt-ridden feelings were described in Western civilization’s first autobiography, the poignant Confessions. To show how strong his sense of sin had become, he writes how depraved and deeply sinful he was for merely stealing a few pieces of fruit when he was a child. Thus, for him faith in Catholic ideas became the best way to relieve his growing desires for forgiveness and salvation in a world where pain, misery, suffering, ignorance, disease, arrogance, excessive pride, and many other habits often made life a hell-on-earth. However, his faith did little, if anything, to actually improve all those excessive and unhealthful habits, for over 1,400 more years! It was good at encouraging people’s sense of guilt and salvation, but there its usefulness seemed to end. Like Plato before him, the best knowledge could only be about spirit-objects, not natural objects, and faith was needed to justify such beliefs; there was no way to prove with certainty such knowledge even existed. Indeed, such faith has led many to call Plato the first Christian.
During Augustine’s lifetime there was also a great amount of social chaos too. Many barbarian tribes from Europe kept reducing much of the Roman Empire to rubble, including Augustine’s home town. As a result, many faithful Romans began blaming the Christians; many faithful to the Roman gods said they were really punishing Romans because many had accepted the Christian faith; Roman gods simply allowed uncivilized barbarian hordes to finally wreck what was left of their beloved empire. So, to help justify Christian ideas and habits, Augustine turned his great mind to defending his faith in his famous City of God. Augustine spent about 20 years writing it, and saying the most lasting empire was the tribe of Catholic followers; all earthly empires collapse sooner or later. No doubt, during those years, in the early 400s CE, he began feeling many of Christianity's philosophic contradictions, many of which grew merely from their definition of god’s nature. The problem of free-will was one such idea.
Free Will vs. Determinism
What was the contradiction? It involved some basic ideas of god and human free will. From the Jewish tradition Christians inherited the idea of one god which became an all-knowing, all-good, all-merciful, all-just, and all-powerful god. However, from the early Christian tradition it also inherited the idea of a free-will; upon those 2 foundational but contradictory ideas the Church was built; together they created a most disturbing contradiction. Eventually Augustine saw a seemingly impossible problem to answer. How can anyone really have a free-will if god already knows all things, past, present, and future? Clearly, answering that question would require some new and creative experimental thinking with the idea of faith.
First of all, what is faith? In fact, there are 2 meanings of the word. One meaning is simply trusting some natural event will happen, like having faith the sun rise tomorrow, or if you jump in the air you will return to earth. The other meaning of faith is much more radical; it means to accept some idea even though there was no objective evidence for it! That was the meaning of faith Augustine used, indeed, had to use if he was to justify all of the Church’s spirit-ideas. He too knew there was no objective evidence for them. In short, he used that radical supernatural meaning of faith to dissolve the contradiction between free-will and god’s knowing everything. Said another way, he used a faith not based on logic or real experience, but rather one based on merely accepting an idea, however contradictory it seemed to be.
The 2 roots of the problem – free will and god’s knowing everything – had separate histories of their own. Ideas about god’s knowledge evolved within the Hebrew tradition, and free will evolved in the liberal Greek tradition. A few hundred years before Jesus was born, a Greek liberal idea of 'free-will' sprouted. The liberal Greek Atomist Epicurus (d. 270 BCE) said every once in a while nature’s atoms swerve and thus create the possibility for different choices to exist. Before that philosophers as different as Democritus and Plato saw everything as completely determined, either by cause-and-effect natural atoms or by spirit-gods. For Plato all people were merely puppets of the gods. Thus, all actions are determined by gods or atoms. Epicurus broke with that tradition; he said humans have real choices in life because atoms can sometimes ‘swerve’ and change their coarse; no doubt, the feeling of having real choices was strong for many people. People often felt they had real alternatives and choices in life, and so Epicurus described how such choices could happen with a nature made of atoms.
Centuries later, by the time Jesus was born, the idea of free will had found its way into the Hebrew tradition as well. While Jesus lived conservative Jewish Sadducees said god directs only his chosen nation, not everyone's personal choices in life; thus mankind has some real freedom. But also in that tradition grew the idea of god’s omniscience; most Jewish folks believed their god was all-knowing about past, present, and future events, even knowing when one single bird dies!
Eventually Augustine felt the contradiction between those 2 ideas. Catholics of course accepted the Jewish idea of a personal, all-caring, all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful father-god. But if it was true, if god does in fact know all things, then how can anyone have any kind of ‘free-will’? What’s more, faith in those 2 ideas created a number of other contradictions as well. For example, if free will really didn’t exist, then how could anyone really deserve heaven or hell? What kind of divine justice could that be? Also, if god was all-merciful, then how could it possibly build a plan where some people are unmercifully condemned to hell even before they’re born? How could an all-merciful god make that happen? In short, how can an all-powerful and all-good god possibly condemn some people to hell even before they were born?
Also puzzling was this question. If people really did have a free will, and can really choice between genuine alternatives, then how can god really know all things? In short, having faith in god’s nature and the idea of free will was creating a number of puzzling contradictions with Catholic ideas. Once again, if a spirit-god knows all past, present, AND future events, then how can anyone justly deserve heaven or hell? What’s more, if people are already destined for either heaven or hell before the universe was even created, then all the Church’s rituals are useless! God’s knowledge already knew who would be saved and who wouldn’t! For people like Augustine who weren’t afraid to thinking about such ideas and ask such questions, such reasoning created serious belief problems. Why should anyone accept a religion founded on logical absurdities, contradictions, inconsistencies, and unsolvable mysteries? Another contradiction said there are really 3 separate gods in only one god!
Augustine accepted the challenge to justify his faith in believing god knows all things, and also people have a free will to choose different alternatives. No doubt, he felt the contradiction deeply. His Church needed both ideas, but how could both possibly be true? How could god know all things and yet give humans a free will? In what sense is the human will-to-choose free when god knows all things? And what's more, getting rid of either idea was also out of the question; it seemed as if there was no way to resolve the contradiction, or was there? Was there a way for Catholics to believe both ideas, namely we all have a free-will and god knows all things? Was there a way to believe an all-good, merciful, and powerful god can destine some people for eternal hell-fire, and yet for all people have a free will? Was there a way for people to believe an all-good and merciful god actually condemns innocent people to eternal pain and suffering before they’re even born? And equally important, was there a way for people to feel the Church’s rituals were effective even though god knew who would be saved and who wouldn’t? No doubt, at one time Augustine asked himself such questions.
Experimentation Begins
As he bravely faced the free will contradiction, he no doubt experimented with different ideas to solve it; how could it be otherwise? If it wasn't answered well, if he couldn’t convince non-Catholics both contradictory ideas weren’t really a problem, then they might simply look for another more satisfying religion, one that wasn’t full of contradictions. That results was very important as Christianity was still growing. What’s more, if mankind was created in god’s image, and god was the supreme rational spirit, then why shouldn’t men be able to reason their way out of every absurd contradictions? Why should an absolutely True religion have any absurd mysteries at all? For someone who believed the Catholic religion was the absolute Truth about life and nature, Augustine at least thought about such questions. Were earlier Christian theologians like Tertullian (d.220 CE) right? Was the best way to answer all such problems to say I have faith in Christian ideas because they’re absurd?
No doubt, as he studied all such questions he prayed for some divine guidance and enlightenment; his motives were probably good. To help people feel less tense in an often violent and dangerous world, he wanted people to easily believe an all-knowing, all-just, and all-good god really existed and cared for them, and at the same time all people were free to earn heavenly bliss after death if they faithfully accepted Jesus as their savior. In fact, Paul of Tarsus had said by faith alone is anyone saved! No matter how poor and suffering a person was, no matter how wretched of a sinner, they could still freely choose to earn their heavenly reward with faith alone! But, again, in what sense could that happen if god knew who would have faith and who wouldn’t even before the universe was created? Like Plato, Christianity too seemed to merely make everyone god’s puppets!
So, much like a good chess player studies his position, looks for any useful future results, and then makes his move, almost certainly Augustine too thought experimentally about future results and the best way to dissolve such obvious contradictions. If he denied god’s goodness, then the result would be unacceptable to many who wanted god’s help now and then; and if he denied free will, then he would be denying a feeling most everyone had. No doubt, he soon saw he needed both ideas. After that conclusion was reached, it was just a question of saying people should have faith in both ideas. Thus, again, the idea of faith as trusting in what, almost certainly, couldn’t be verified became a useful idea. It helped produce the result he wanted, namely making it easy for the Church to keep recruiting new members. All they needed was faith in all such contradictory ideas. The more people were encouraged to merely accept as such ideas as absolute Truth, not bother about their contradictions, and just feel good while worshipping god, the easier it was for them to join and stay in the Church. In short, Church rituals and habits were the best way to dissolve any contradictory feelings.
In fact, that solution too went back to Plato himself. He peppered his writings with many mythical stories he knew couldn’t be proved but were still believable. His Timaeus, for example, describes many traditional Greek religious myths about how the universe was created. So, although Augustine didn’t create the idea of faith, he still found it useful. Even the existence of god itself must be accepted on faith. By definition, all spirit-objects are completely beyond physical nature, and so they cannot move anything in our natural world unless they too become physical. In effect, then, the spirit and the natural are 2 realms touching at no point whatsoever! How could they? They have nothing in common to touch! Thus, faith as the acceptance of what cannot be proved became the only way to believe god exists; what tests could prove a spirit-realm even existed? To openly borrow a line from one Hollywood wit -- only two words describe such tests, IM-POSSIBLE! To us Deweyan liberals that conclusion is all but certain. Such mysterious ideas are either accepted on faith, or they’re rejected as merely yet another man-made model of life and nature.
Faith: a Useful Idea
No doubt, in Augustine's day, and for centuries afterward, accepting ideas merely on faith, even though there was no objective evidence for them, helped dissolve all troubling contradictions. Any idea could be accepted on faith. Faith has remained a useful idea for thousands of years. After all, people wanted to believe the Church’s rituals could actually help them win a blissful life for all eternity, and so many already wanted to have faith in Augustine’s Church. In short, peoples’ propulsive habits created the feeling of wanting to live forever; the very nature of habits is a propulsive energy.
Eventually Augustine’s experimental solution said, in effect, have faith in, and accept, both ideas, even though both can’t be true or have any objective evidence! In short, ignore and don't worry about any logical contradictions; like so many other spirit-ideas it’s a mystery beyond our puny human understanding. In fact, in Augustine’s day faith and acceptance of spirit-ideas was still a very strong habit-art for most everyone. Many people could and did merely accept many different religious ideas as mysteries; in Socrates’s day one religious model was even called the Eleusinian mysteries. Thus, almost no one ever asked how completely non-physical spirits could ever interact with physical objects and cause miracles to happen. As we’ve already seen, Plato was one of them, and his Parmenides mentions some serious contradictions he never really answered, yet he continued believing in spirit-objects. It's yet another example of how propulsively strong some habits can be.
Seven centuries later in Augustine’s day life hadn’t changed much. In a science-weak world most everything was still far beyond anyone’s understanding. With no good secular public education systems or experimental science to speak of, the lights were slowly going out on the Greek hope of using reason and experimentation to know nature’s absolute Truth. Religious conservatives like Augustine saw how dangerous that hope was to building a new religion. Luckily for him simply faithfully accepting the idea ‘everything happens according to god’s plan’ was still a very common habit-art. Because the art of experimental learning and testing one’s ideas for their objective results was still very weak, most everything remained a mystery. Who really knew why anything happened out there?
Why did an all-good and powerful god condemn many innocent people to suffer for all eternity when they all could have been instantly saved? No one knew, and what’s more, almost no one asked such questions. Things just happen, so accept it. Faith simply said it was a mystery and it’s all part of god’s plan. As we’ll see more clearly later in Part 2, and again in Book 2, probably from Middle Paleolithic times about 50,000 years ago, our native ancestors began acting as if nature’s movements like death were spirit-caused; people died because their spirit went away. It also helped explain why dreams happened, how nature worked, and how it might be improved with spirit-rituals. Such habits continued on into Augustine time, thus making it easy for people to even accept contradictory ideas, like god knows all things and people have a free will. Most everyone still practiced habits making logical contradictions acceptable.
In fact, at least 5 mysterious contradictions were eventually clarified for Catholics. Another one was explaining how a spirit-god can possibly impregnate a teenage Jewess called Merriam living in a small village called Nazareth. At the time, probably most people felt gods could and did impregnate women after becoming material humans. Greek mythology is full of such stories, merely accepted on faith. In short, don’t ask us to explain Christianity, just accept our ideas on faith, support the only one and true church, and if you do you’ll become one of the saved. Only our ideas are nature’s eternal and absolute Truth.
With such social habits in place Augustine’s faith-based solutions weren’t very controversial. Generally uneducated people easily accepted what they were told by those with social authority, rather than thoughtfully questioned and examined. People wanted salvation, not thinking, reasoning, and debate. Only as the habit-arts of logical thinking and scientific experimentation started growing in the 1500s did more people become sensitive to such contradictions. In fact, those modern kinds of learning habit-arts began growing soon after 1,000 CE, helping make Augustine’s faith-solutions more unacceptable. The newly forming European universities began teaching such logical habit-arts. Even some friars in the Church, like Roger Bacon, began experimentally testing some ideas, for which he was promptly arrested. Most everyone still worried more about where their next meal would come from than how it’s possible for god to know all things and yet for people to still be free to choose anything; forget about free will and pass the beans, bread, and wine. The lack of secular schools also helped make the average Roman much more interested in free bread and free circuses than free-will.
Needless to say, Augustine's free-will problem didn’t go away; in fact it’s alive and well to this day. As our modern world was budding over 800 years after Augustine, Catholicism’s main medieval reformer, Thomas Aquinas (d. 1275), looked at the same contradiction. The solution he experimented with at least said there was a mystery about god's being all-just. To him an all-just god had indeed predestined some people to heaven and some to hell even before they were born, but, he said, it really wasn't unjust, it was merely a conditional necessity! Conditional necessity? It was an interesting phrase, but in reality it meant another impossible idea, namely an unnecessary necessity! Today such contradictory phrases is called an oxymoron. How could anything be both unnecessary and necessary at the same time? Again, no one knows, and most people didn’t care. Most people cared more about feeling they would get to heaven than trying to understand oxymoronic phrases like that.
No doubt, many today would call all such ideas nonsensical religious spin, and using faith to justify them merely another way social control is maintained over people. If there is an all-good and all-loving god, then why should it choose to hide its absolutely certain spirit-Truths within 5 contradictory ideas? No doubt, that could be mystery #6. Less than 300 years after Thomas, Martin Luther had faith about 100 of the Church’s ideas were wrong, published them, and thus launched the Protestant Reformation.
On the plus side, however, Thomas was much more tolerant and humble than Augustine. If a person’s reasoning, said Thomas, can't accept Christian ideas on faith, then it would be wrong to become a Christian. It’s a fine example of how much stronger and more humbler conservative logic and reasoning had become since Augustine’s time.
From Faith in Free Will to Faith in Religious Monopoly
Professor Elaine Pagels shows in her delightful book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, how obedience to the Church slowly became ethical excellence for all those who believed in spirit-objects. For Dewey too, the more ideas are practiced, the stronger they become. For example, to help justify a baptism ritual, Augustine told people to faithfully believe everyone is born with original sin; somehow such unjust shared guilt was inherited from Adam and Eve. Thus, they needed to be baptized by a priest, and the more it was practiced, the more it became an ethical habit. Why an all-merciful and just god could even design a plan of life with that idea in it was, again, another contradictory mystery. In effect it merely increased peoples’ dependency on church priests while lessening people’s free will. It encouraged the need for a baptism ritual to be saved.
In effect, such ideas helped decrease the realm of free will even more. As local Christian sects continued growing, like the Donatists in North Africa, Augustine gradually became more intolerant of their free choices. He said they shouldn’t be allowed to exercise their free will; it put their souls in danger of damnation! They should be obedient to the Church of Rome. Thus, more and more, faith in his ideas as absolute Truth helped create an excessive ethical feeling of intolerance for those with different habits and faiths; the same things happens in the Muslim world even today. Such intolerance then must use naked force against anyone who doesn’t obey. In short, Augustine didn’t want a religious or political democracy, but rather a religious monopoly! Today, many corporate captains of industry and finance want the same kinds of monopolistic power many religious conservatives have wanted for thousands of years. Democratic voting could only be used by Church Bishops who met from time to time and voted on which ideas they wanted to make absolute Truth. Thus, Augustine too came to put his faith in military ‘might’ to make his spirit-ideas ‘right’!
Conservative Plato too had become less and less tolerant as he grew older; both he and Augustine came to see mankind as hopelessly lost in their own sinfulness, corruption, degeneration, and ignorance. What else could Augustine feel about other religious models of life and nature? His own sinful and rebellious life was seen as proof of human sinfulness. After all, even Plato fell back onto religious obedience as ethical excellence, that is, on not exercising one’s creative free will, but only doing something those with more social authority told them to do. More and more during Augustine's life those actions became part of the newly Christianized Roman government.
Thus, the older he got the more faith Augustine put in force to stamp out any and all people whose free will had built different faiths and even models of Christianity. Despite talking about all the benefits of love, he too wanted a religious monopoly and was willing to kill for it. So, with his help, Christianity's social role included eliminating all those who freely choose a different model of life and nature; only his habits were right and so others must be made to obey. In response to some Christian sects who freely practiced their independence, Augustine responded with force. For example, to wipe out the moderate Donatist Christians in North Africa apparently Roman officials were bribed, but in any case troops were sent, and until his death he railed against Britain's moderate Pelagian Christians. All Christians must submit and obey Rome's Churchmen. Like Plato, such a strong and powerful government was justified merely with faith and acceptance as being the best way to eliminate all religious diversity; gradually free will became much less important than the Church’s military might!
Eventually, in the 1500s and 1600s, science and its new experimental learning art began increasing the naturalistic ideas people can have faith in. Democracy was one such choice, as was equal rights, and also using government to protect individual rights and make life safer and more enjoyable for everyone. In fact today, with the growing threat of global warming and all its potentially disastrous results, more people are feeling democratic voting and government should become an even stronger part of the solution; too many politicians are now controlled by wealthy folks to maintain the economic status quo.
In Augustine’s day, people had more faith in spirit-ideas, but it also helped create a kind of knowledge trap. For example, the more faith people had in the Church's rituals to cure their diseases, the more they ignored having faith in experimenting with useful natural kinds of knowledge -- scientific knowledge! And the more such knowledge was ignored, the more people remained vulnerable and trapped by their diseases, thus again relying more on church rituals. Even in the 1400s some people suggested killing evil witches would please god and make it stop killing people with plague; such killing continued on for decades, all of course justified by faith.
In effect, then, accepting some ideas merely with faith in Church rituals made it easier to create some really harmful social results, like staying in a knowledge trap. The more faith people had in one religious model, the more difficult it became to break out of such a psychic trap and imagine having faith in some more productive ideas, like experimental learning and testing. Faith in only Augustine’s options and choices not only perpetuated such knowledge traps for centuries, but similar kinds of faith also helped delay the growth of science in India and China as well. In effect, then, faith in only one’s habits kept people indoctrinated rather than educated. It's probably one reason people like Karl Marx eventually said religion was a kind of psychic opium; it kept people trapped and confined in the same kinds of routine superstitious habits. For Dewey, however, any kind of routine habit-art could be dangerous, especially those assumed to be always true! Faith in such habits tended to keep people undereducated and obedient, rather than becoming more intelligent and independent, and focused on building a more satisfying world for everyone.
Beginning about 4 centuries ago, slowly but surely such social results became intolerable. Many came to see progress was the result of being liberated from faith in spirit-ideas, rather than chained to them. They came to see the idea-tool of faith in only one model of spirit-truth helps create some very excessive and dangerous social results. Many began seeing Augustine’s kind of faith, as merely acceptance without any evidence, as a way to keep controlling peoples’ actions and thinking. They came to see such faith as merely a way to justify certain habits, many of which justified brutal and inhumane actions as well. In short, faith became seen as merely an idea helping justify the habits people already have.
In reality, the faith-based Christian model of life is as dependent on personal habits as is any other model of life. After all, how much faith can a Muslim have in Hindu or Christian ideas? And if that’s true, if religious faith merely describes different habit-arts, if it’s just the RESULT of someone's habits, then, again, how can faith really know any spirit-Truth? In short, all faiths and their ideas seem to have naturalistic limits; if they go beyond our natural world, then they become merely another model of life and nature, not eternal Truth. If so, its power to justify violence in the natural world becomes all but unbelievable. Faith in spirit-ideas needs to be verified if it’s to be believable at all. The more our faith feels like absolute Truth, the more unhealthful feelings and actions it can produce; it remains a challenge for religious conservatives to this day. Even today many such conservatives will not tolerate any challenge to their own faith and beliefs.
Both modern anthropology and Behavioral psychology seem to verify such ideas. Anthropologists, for example, report how, in different cultures, children are encouraged to first build different religious habit-arts, and then to logically justify them with faith in those ideas! Such studies have found there are, in fact, thousands of different faiths still alive today, thus making religious variety the natural result, not religious monopoly. Honest Catholics too have admitted the power of Behavioral psychology. One reportedly said give me children until they’re five and they’ll be Catholics forever! To us Deweyan liberals that honest Behavioral observation says much about what Augustine’s faith really is: accepting certain feelings on faith are more the RESULT of habit-arts learned in childhood than any kind of spirit-truth! Augustine's own life too gives some evidence for it, as does Thomas Aquinas; Thomas was educated in a monastery!
If so, then it seems quite reasonable to picture faith as just another word for justifying certain habit-arts! I, for example, have faith and trust in science and experimental testing as the only intelligent way to solve any problem, and those feelings began growing during my childhood. However, there's one very large difference between scientific and religious faith; scientific faith in, say, nature's continuum or experimental learning is verifiable, and thus much more reliable than spirit kinds of faith.
13. LIBERAL EXPERIMENTS WITH FAITH
At this point you may be wondering, why bother about such ideas? Aren't they all really just ancient history? Who today should care about Augustine’s faith centuries ago, or what he used it for? In fact, however, such ideas and uses are living today; they're not just ancient history; so long as they’re practiced they’re living history! As Dewey noted, the present is merely the result of past habits. For many millions of conservatives today such ideas and uses of faith are still producing destructive results, as we see even today in the Middle East. In fact, radical people of many major faiths still insist only their models of faith are absolute Truth, and all others are to be eliminated; they’re religious monopolists, rather than tolerant religious democrats. Such radicals exist is Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism, and their actions often make life more intolerant, stressful, and extremely dangerous given the great numbers of destructive weapons available, including nuclear ones.
Here’s merely one example of such conservative faith. Christian majorities in more than 10 US states have voted to deny law-abiding gays and lesbians the right to marry the person of their choice. Merely with no real evidence for their faith, they dogmatically assume such a right will promote evil and sinful results for everyone! Thus, intolerant faith based on a lack of evidence is still helping create social dangers, tensions, and stresses. And that’s not to mention what some people are doing to keep denying women's equality, in places like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, or even democratic rights in China, Russia, and the US! To this day, many conservative Republicans faithfully believe an idea expressed shortly after the US was founded: only those who own the country should run the country for their benefit.
In short, conservative ideas and used of faith are anything but irrelevant and meaningless history. Today intolerant, petty, narrow, stressful, and even deadly actions are still being justified with the same conservative ideas of faith Augustine practiced 1600 years ago. As a result, then, it becomes very important for us liberals to define more socially healthful models of faith, so people will have a real choice about where their faith should lie. In short, just as there are now different models of learning, so too there are now different models of faith. Which one sounds best to you?
Clearly, many people still don’t have faith in liberating everyone's talents and gifts; instead, they continue using their conservative models of faith. For us Deweyan liberals, however, the more people learn how a liberal model of faith can actually help produce more constructive and intelligent kinds of actions and growth, the better everyone’s life can become. Those kinds of social results are an important part of Dewey's liberal model of faith in intelligent and respectful experimental ideas and actions! In short, rather than faithfully believing in what can't be proved, he challenged people to have faith in actions that produce constructive and respectful results! Faith in those kinds of ideas can be tested for their results and thus provide us with some objective evidence for or against them, rather than merely keep using conservative models of faith. Thus, our democratically scientific faith can more reliably help actively justify building the wisest habits into our characters! What’s more, such faith helps deepen our thinking not only about life and how it works, but also about new ways to keep improving it with better educational systems! After all, if Augustine could only experiment with his 'free-will' problem, then doesn't everyone have the freedom to intelligently experiment with different models of faith, to see if they produce better personal and social results? And if that's true, then we liberals have a duty to create a new definition and model of faith, helping produce more peaceful and constructive social results! If we don't, then we too help keep people confined to their own potentially dangerous ideas and habits of faith. Without better working models of faith, it’s easier for peoples’ thinking to remain too confined, narrow, traditional, and unintelligent.
Besides the dangerous psychic result of intellectual arrogance, and feeling only our model of faith is the absolute Truth, conservative kinds of faith also help people ignore how experimental all such ideas really are. The history of how different religions and faiths have grown and withered is the best motivation for building a more liberal naturalistic model of faith! For example, few people today have faith in the Norse gods, and yet at one time many thousands of people had faith they existed and could help people. Augustine too wanted to believe only his faith was eternal and absolute Truth, and yet as mankind came to experimentally learn more about nature, it became merely one model of faith rather than eternal Truth. What’s more, the same kind of conservative model is being taught to many children around the world today; they’re being told others want to destroy their religion, and thus they should even sacrifice their lives to stop them. Such fearful ideas may be natural in an increasingly interactive world, but that certainly doesn’t justify destructive actions. Once again, what distinguishes one model of faith from another are the disrespectful, violent, and destructive actions they justify. In short, believe what you want, but your faith ends where another person’s body begins. If you, say, force women to do what they don’t freely choose to do, then for us liberals your faith is dangerous, unacceptable, and challengeable. Our new democratic faith says each individual should have the freedom to do what they want, as long as its results produce peace and stability.
Dewey’s New Liberal Model of Faith
So, what might Dewey’s liberal faith look like? Well, for one thing, it restricts its knowledge to the natural world. Our faith says that’s where we can have the most control of. As a result, Dewey's faith in experimental learning and testing is centrally important to his liberal model of life and nature. Not only does such learning encourage the growth of our best knowledge, but it also promotes a much more humble feeling about truth than a conservative model. Once again, people should have faith all ideas are best seen merely as mental tools to help solve problems; unlike conservatives, we don’t believe our ideas actually see and behold eternal and unchanging kinds of Truth. As history often tragically shows, faith in the idea of absolute Truth has often been used by conservative religious leaders merely to keep their social power over others, rather than liberate people to keep building a more democratic and respectful world.
No doubt, many conservative religious faiths also celebrate caring for and helping others here and now; that idea also remains an important part of liberal faith as well. For example, soon after Jesus’ death, Christian leaders began experimenting, as best they could, with building a model of faith helping relieve human suffering and pain. Their ideas of eternal heavenly rewards, and the belief god could help them with their problems became important parts of Christian faith. Until modern science began giving people the power to build more reliable, effective, and powerful ways of making life more enjoyable after 1600, much of life was, in fact, painfully tragic. No doubt, many thousands in the ancient and medieval worlds often felt it would have been best if they had never been born. Depression, despair, and sorrow were widespread social feelings. Scientific ideas really began actively changing such feelings less than 200 years ago! Thus, for only a very short time has a new liberal faith in science and experimental testing been actively growing, and limiting its faith to learning more about naturalistic ‘good and evil’! Still, considering the great changes that new liberal model of faith has produced, it’s understandable why so many religious conservatives are still reacting so defensively against it; their basic faith in life has become challenged as never before. An almost completely newer, more robust, more confident, more independent, and more powerful kind of human consciousness itself continues growing and liberating people from conservative models of faith.
No doubt, not all of science’s results are proving constructive and helpful. In fact, if some of its results like carbon pollution aren’t changed quickly, we may be seeing some rather dreadful results in the next few decades. Also, look at what Nazis and Communists sometimes used their scientific technology for, like killings millions out of fear and frustration. Nuclear armaments too continue casting their ominous and deadly shadow over the world. So, it’s not at all strange to see conservatives rejecting liberal kinds of faith based on those results! To many conservatives such faith can even be seen as a kind of insanity!
Vietnam too is yet another example of how scientific knowledge can be used for terribly destructive purposes; Vietnam may not recover from all the destruction for another 100 years! So, how can such faith in using experimental knowledge and science be justified when people allow it to used so destructively and inhumanely? How can we liberal have faith our government will act wisely when homeless people continue living on streets while a few wealthy folks bask in oriental splendor and keep focusing on making more and more money for themselves? No wonder conservatives still say we need faith in god to help guide people more intelligently.
As Dewey noted decades ago, the use of any scientific invention can produce its own problems and challenges, prime among them is our military-industrial complex, as well as Wall Street. No doubt, he would be the first to condemn all such destructive and greedy uses for science; they are not the result of what even the earliest builders of the new liberal faith wanted. People like Francis Bacon’s humane model faith told him scientific knowledge should be used to make everyone life more secure and enjoyable. Undereducated and unorganized people simply trusted such knowledge would be used to everyone’s benefit, rather than for created a small obscenely wealthy upper class. A merely 30,000 people control most of the US’s wealth! But again, Dewey’s liberal faith says only human actions can solve human problems with more intelligent habits and actions, rather than merely accepting such results as god’s will and being spirit-caused. As we’ve seen, faithfully accepting such a conservative model of faith has been an intellectual and social drag on civilization, progress, and human liberation. In short, faith in science and experimentation isn’t the problem, it’s how people use such knowledge that can be dangerous! About that idea our faith is firm. In fact, as we’ll see in Book 2’s Native Models of Excellence, the challenge of using scientific knowledge constructively has been present in our ancestral clans since the first stone tool was invented well over 2 million years ago! Should such tools be used to provide more food for everyone, or kill those who disagree with us?
No doubt, using experimental knowledge wisely and humanely isn’t always easy, as US history often shows. In much of the 1900s it was often used to merely dominate people economically, both at home and in many other countries. Thus, it’s helped build a small wealthy class of people who have much too much power over millions of others. What’s more, many of them saw a faith in communism and socialism as the major threats to their monopolistic power, and so continued using much of their wealth to make people feel only our system was best and everyone else’s was evil. Their new conservative model of faith told them they had a perfect right to keep making and keeping as much money as possible. In the 1950s conservative Republicans used their newspapers and TVs to attack ‘atheistic communism’ the same way many conservative Muslims today use the phrase ‘the evil West,’ or Augustine might have described the Donatist Christians. They were evil and we were good.
Using their faith in those ways, for propaganda purposes, are what we liberals oppose with a more humane model of faith. For us such faith merely continues justifying the social and economic status quo; its results today are much like they were in the Middle Ages; a small ruling class dominates most everyone else. Today, they often convince people to support weapons makers with their taxes, and thus continue making the rich richer and life more dangerous for millions of people. We see the result today in ideas like perpetual war instead of perpetual peace. Our more humane liberal model of faith asks why not better educate young folks with the skills for living in a democratic republic, where equal rights and freedoms are practiced, rather than just talked about. Why not have faith in attacking those who are actively attacking us, rather than attacking peaceful acting people? Why not live, and let live? Why not have faith in our own intelligent voting action, and feel they can help build a better world for all of us? In fact, those kinds of constructive, peaceful habits are where conservative and liberal pictures of faith can share a common canvas, so to speak.
Growing Naturalistic Faith
Constructive and peaceful results help energize liberal kinds of faith. They help build a human and humane community, rather than one divided and opposed. When, say, a Muslim and Jew have faith they can actively make the world a little better world together, they in fact help a liberal faith to grow. After all, only the last few years of genetic research has shown our human family really is a family; real genetic evidence today allows us to have faith for believing we’re all descended from 2 small African ancestral clans. As a result, it’s easier than ever for educated people to have faith we’re all related and really deserve to have the same equal rights as anyone else. The sports world too is helping grow that new democratic model of faith. In ancient Greece about the only thing women could do during the Olympics was watch, but today women are now competing in all sports, including sumo wrestling. Women’s tennis had for decades been almost completely monopolized by white women until 2 athletic parents experimentally taught 2 of their daughters how to enjoy and have fun playing the game! Heck, even I encourage it, as long as they’re better than me.
In short, the new liberal faith is in liberation of choice and equal rights, not restricting them. No doubt, many religious conservatives reject such a model of faith, but there’s really no objective evidence to believe it’s wrong to allow it. In fact, a growing model of faith says all models of faith restricting peaceful human choices and freedoms are no longer wisest; such conservative faiths build the illusion only some habits are absolutely true and should always be defended. Faith in such growing kinds of freedom is only rejected by those who believe only their model of faith is the right one and all other models are evil and bad.
Within the past 200 years all the great kinds of natural reconstructions in our modern world have been the result of a growing faith in naturalistic arts and sciences, and using them for human liberation. Such faith merely offers another model to choose from. Christianity, for example, hasn’t died out because the world’s become more democratic and liberal; its faith has simply become more civilized and respectful. That growth trend has accelerated in the past 4 centuries, but it’s far from becoming a universal faith. Still, such secular-minded people who have faithfully worked to keep making life better have thus become the new secular saints of our new and more liberal era; such people now have faith in our common humanity and experimental improvement, rather than merely perpetuating a feudalistic status quo.
In the early 1900s the US Progressive Movement greatly strengthened such a faith. In the 1800s the Industrial Revolution helped create some very harsh and stressful living conditions for many even in the prosperous US. Like many other industrial countries a few people became very wealthy while too many sunk into great poverty and ignorance; filthy and disease-ridden slums were a part of most every US city. Liberals like Dewey simply asked, what good was such obscene amounts of wealth for a few when life remained truly painful for millions? Very wealthy men like financier J.P. Morgan openly said he owed the public nothing, roughly half his wealth was used to build his art collection, and then build museums to house it. Long ago even Aristotle saw how socially dangerous such a faith was; he saw how extremes of wealth and poverty help breed social discontent and even revolutions. Today we liberals know such faith means more than mere acceptance of an idea; it also means continuing to work patiently and intelligently for more equality, rather than less. With such a faith voting in elections becomes one of the most important habits to energize; electing those to better control those few wealthy greedy folks constantly working to make themselves even wealthier becomes as important to us as church-going was to medieval people.
Dewey felt the need for a more liberal democratic faith in freedom and equality. In the early 1900s millions of poor folks were flooding into the US from Europe and overwhelming government services. Even buying safe and healthful food was a common challenge. People needed decent housing, schools where skills useful in a democratic society were taught, like language, character, political, and labor skills. People had faith the US was a land of opportunity, but they needed to energize and activate such faith into useful habits of knowledge and skills. Immigrants had faith in the new democratic country, but if they didn’t vote wisely, then what good was such faith? It remained just an inner feeling.
As more schools were built and useful skills taught, the faith in secular kinds of actions also grew. Ex-African slave Booker T. Washington, for example, had faith in the importance of practical education for newly freed slaves. Eventually his faith in such educational experiments helped build Alabama's Tuskegee Institute almost from the ground up. With the help of wealthy donors he helped teach many newly freed African children how to intelligently use their freedom here and now. He faith focused on teaching practical skills like carpentry, brick-making, and scientific agriculture in addition to character excellence and some traditional school subjects. He knew learning just academic knowledge and facts wasn’t nearly enough to live intelligently in a democratic republic. Even in conservative and aristocratic Russia and China a new democratic faith was growing, and still is, despite the lack of democratic choices. And, of course, since then such faith in practicing Progressive kinds of political reforms has become a normal part of life; even I get to vote on important state constitutional issues in California.
Around 1900 in Chicago Jane Addams became one of Dewey's heroes; she helped shape his liberal activist model of democratic faith. She helped increase the faith people could have in women and their power for constructive actions; her liberal faith was focused on helping people learn to help themselves in a modern democratic state. No doubt, here work at Hull House was on a rather small scale, but it helped people have faith in their own actions for making the government work for them, rather than only for the rich and powerful. In the early 1900s, as Dewey was experimenting with some educational ideas as his University of Chicago Lab School, a few miles to the north Addams and many other brave and caring people were experimenting with helping immigrants learn more about living life intelligently in America. Their faith was in educating others to intelligently solve their own problems, often with government help. Dedicated social workers like Addams had begun experimenting to teach such habits at Hull House. There they helped undereducated immigrants feel how they could make their own daily lives more meaningful and satisfying; their faith was education-based. In fact she probably helped Dewey feel more deeply liberal causes like women's equal rights, practical forms of adult education, and how to get government more involved with helping to solve social problems like white terrorism, equal housing, building better sanitation services, more honest police services, and eventually, during World War 1, promoting more intelligent international policies of peace and cooperation. Indeed, such liberal kinds of human-centered faith were helping create true secular heroes. No doubt, much progress was rolled back during Prohibition, when criminal gangs corrupted the government with their wealth, but during the Depression such a faith in government was increased once again.
As most everyone knows today, our modern Age of Science has helped increase peoples’ faith in naturalistic knowledge and solutions; it's earned that faith. No doubt, Augustine himself would be as greatly shocked to see today’s modern world as a young boy might be to see his mother naked for the first time; everything would look new and strange! But again, by itself such faith means nothing until it’s used and energized with actions, either constructive or destructive. As we’ve seen, Dewey was a Behaviorist, and so the more people keep using naturalistic kinds of faith for constructive and helpful experiments, the more a liberal model of faith is strengthened; it simply justifies our most reliable way of producing more satisfying results.
In short, liberal models of faith simply have different limits on its uses than traditional conservative models. They use their faith mainly to maintain a socially divided feudalistic status quo, whereas we liberals use it to reduce inequality and dangerous situations here and now with, of course, experimental planning and testing! As a result, today more and more people realize our new liberal model of faith justifies BOTH the building of a more humane world and people as well. Beavers, for example, change both nature and themselves while building their high mountain dams amidst silently serene and majestic mountain peaks, and also stocking them with food for the winter. They obviously don’t have the same kinds of conscious faith we have, but both create a valid Behavioral alternative to more conservative models of faith. For conservatives who say their faith has risen above the animal level, we liberals say our naturalistic faith, by focusing on building a better future here and now, tends to produce much better results for everyone.
Modern liberal models of faith are best used to support peoples' constructive and respectful experimental habits. Intelligently making our natural world more satisfying for everyone is where our liberal faith lies. In fact, such faith has enabled us to harness more of nature's powers for human good than at any other time in the entire history of life on earth, long before there even were any beavers! Such faith has indeed produced the truly amazing world we live in today. But at the same time, our liberal faith also tells us there are no guarantees life will continue improving for everyone, and will be without its own new challenges. On the contrary, our faith tells us new inventions will always create new results, some of which may be dangerous. Thus, we continue tracking the results of our actions, and working to minimize any harmful results. Such actions and ideas make our liberal faith a growing and living one, not a static and routine one.
Experimental learning also creates our faith in our own intelligent SELF-DETERMINATION and SELF-DIRECTION, rather than merely accepting ultimately un-provable ideas. For faith in a spirit-will we substitute faith in self-determining actions, actions respecting others’ peaceful and constructive work. Today more people simply have more faith for intelligently making their will power stronger while carefully building more intelligent habits. For many today it’s no longer a question of having complete freedom to choose what’s best, but of continuing to INCREASE OUR FREEDOM to know what’s best for us and our world. What's more, having faith in myself as a habit-artist helps me feel more confident I can keep SELF-determining my own growth, as well as feeling more responsible for my own actions. No one else is responsible for my own choices and actions besides myself and, to a degree, my parents who trained me; we have been liberated from a faith in the devil, or god, or previous life Karma.
In short, we liberals have faith in intelligently enjoyable practice. Because I've taken some time to practice a little tennis and golf, I have faith I can now stumble around a tennis court or golf course about as well as most people! Young children, on the other hand, have practiced little, have few habits, and as a result have little faith in their own actions; their freedom or will-power is still rather small. As a result, they often need some positive encouragement to increase their faith in themselves and their actions. In short, liberal faith says both freedom and free-will grow stronger as habit-arts keep growing; they are what increase our freedom, not faith in a spirit’s help. Once again, for us Deweyan liberals, our faith is in our own actively intelligent habits and actions! It’s focused and centered on wisely guiding and SELF-determining our own helpful growth and excellence. The more we experiment with that art, the stronger our faith in it grows. As a famous song says, the world will always welcome lovers as time goes by.
For us liberals like Dewey, our faith really has no philosophic need to even ask why some people will be condemned to hell as a ‘conditional necessity’, or to seek forgiveness for our sins, or seek spiritual ‘grace’ for eternal bliss, whatever that is. All those kinds of ideas haven’t been verified, so why have faith in them? In fact, such ideas help distract our attention from the much more important task of building a better and more equally satisfying world for everyone! In short, intelligently tending our natural world is the most important goal of all. The more we thoughtfully look at its actions, the easier it becomes to learn how to keep improving them. After all, here and now in the natural world is where we find our greatest challenges, victories, and defeats; where else but in the natural world can anyone look like such a tennis or golf fool? Our work here and now is our most sacred work; even painful events can be educational. Here and now is where 4 billion years of natural evolution can be felt and even savored if we so choose; sometimes, in fact, it feels like I'm that old.
We have faith in the intelligent art of self-mastery! Such faith keeps happily encouraging us one step at a time while, say, building a better diet habit, stress-reducing exercise habits, enjoyable work and recreation habits, and relaxing hobbies. The more I learn to relax and enjoy a round of golf, for example, the more faith I build to master my own useless tensions and fears. In fact, today I can safely say I have almost no fear any of my clubs are really possessed by ‘evil’ spirits, or even any spirits. Rather than faithfully believing life is a hopeless struggle to avoid sinning, we know we’ll make mistakes; they’re a normal part of a learning process. The important thing is to learn from them and not make the same mistake again, rather than yell at our self for making another mistake. As the great actress Mae West once said: I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it. And, when I’m good I’m good, but when I’m bad I’m better! We liberals have faith in humor and enjoyment, rather than in sin and damnation.
Increasing one’s faith in the usefulness of those kinds of habits is another modern challenge. Most people are still just becoming liberated from conservative models of faith. In fact, with more liberal kinds of faith Augustine’s faith in nature as the home for legions of evil, corrupting spirits has been weakening for the part few centuries! Such faith too depends on people’s habits. The less they’re practiced, the easier it becomes to grow more liberal kinds of faith, like excellent liberal character habits too. No doubt, many people faithfully choose to listen to and practice such conservative ideas, but history teaches us such faith depends on one’s habits, not spirit-causes. The cause of such faith, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, in evil-tempting spirits, in a spirit-god’s cosmic plan, or in a Karmic accounting house. The cause is in our own actions and habits here and now! So say we Deweyan liberals, and, as always, results are what approve or condemn such faith. Again, the more we create respectful and generous results, the easier it becomes to have faith in them as the best tools for building a more excellent character and world.
More Comparisons and Contrasts
Saying life has changed greatly since Augustine's day might just be the greatest understatement ever uttered, so remember, you redd it here first! I may have found my real talent after all -- philosophic understatement! Is it any different than philosophic underwear? Probably not much. Seriously though, faith in naturalistic experimental testing arts as the best method for producing our strongest knowledge has encouraged masses of people to begin feeling their own independent, intellectually robust, kinder, more helpful, and more intelligently self-directing powers! For us liberals practicing those kinds of ideas is most important. We need forgiveness for our sins against god much less than we need to keep educating young folks to practice freedom-expanding habits like experimental learning. Who doesn’t need some help learning how to use all of today’s marvelous new educational tools, so the faith in self-education can keep growing? Recently computers, iPhones, and the Internet have greatly democratized education itself, thus helping increase our faith for making our self-directed growth even easier. Intelligent problem-solving itself has become easier by having more useful tools available. In Augustine’s day such tools were non-existent, so excellent information was more or less a collection of myths and stories. Faith in spirit-objects reflected those learning habits, and the more only priests and nuns became teachers, the more faith people had in only one conservative spirit-model.
Today, however, learning about reliable knowledge and facts has become an electronically communal democratized event, thanks to all our newly built electronic tools. So, what's educationally most important these days is having faith just about any fact can be learning about quickly; research has become much easier. Using such tools makes it easier for people to have faith in their own learning powers, rather than in spirit-objects no one seems to know anything about. Thus, using such learning tools often makes solving problems much easier, like quickly finding which travel-agent can ship obnoxious in-laws to Siberia! And if you wanted to have some more philosophic fun to test your encourage your new found faith, you might call such events another in a series of existential solutions! Now who wouldn’t like to sound as educated as that?
No doubt, our modern world still has millions of people practicing a conservative model of faith; for them our world is still awash in evil spirits which must be defeated even it means sacrificing one’s life. As we’ve been seeing, our modern liberal model of faith has only recently begun celebrating much more tolerant, peaceful, and respectful habit-arts. It says almost certainly there never has been, doesn’t now exist, or will ever exist only one model of faith. In fact, the whole history of life on earth can teach us old traditional habit-arts and ideas of faith are being continually re-constructed, re-defined, and re-born to better fit an always changing world. For example, before 1940 most everyone faithfully believed science and technology would never produce a life-threatening situation, but both atomic weapons and fossil-fuel energies have changed that rather naïve model of liberal faith. Liberal political faith too has changed greatly over the past 200 years as Dewey and others began creating more faith in democratic forms of self-government. In fact, some people are even questioning how useful it might be to re-write our Constitution every 200 years, just to make it work better in a different working world. After all, institutional ‘freezing’ and fossilizing of any kind, whether it’s political, educational, or religious can be a great social danger in an ever-changing world. No doubt, people, like dinosaurs, feel most comfortable with their routine habits, but the results of those actions are what make them useful, not how faithfully they’re practiced. Besides, why should only one group of politicians at one time have all the fun of building a new constitution?
No doubt, sometimes it’s difficult to have faith in our own testing habits as the best learning method. Sometimes the results aren’t always obvious. As a result, we may feel we really don’t know how to produce the best results for everyone; sometimes we may feel it’s best to lie to someone who wants to hear only one version of the truth. Sometimes we may feel it’s best to break some law if someone’s life is endangered. But such events help build a much more flexible model of faith, one more useful in an always changing nature. As noted earlier, Dewey said it like this: excellence always varies in changing conditions. For example, in the 1800s it took some real courage for US abolitionists to keep challenging others to see slavery as a monstrous institution, even though it was faithfully practiced for centuries. And again in the 1950s and 60s such courage was needed again to end unfair laws against Africans. But as a result of such courage, faith in the idea of democratic equal rights kept growing much stronger. Even in the early 2,000s racism is still not completely wiped out, but by actively confronting it, it's been growing weaker in much of the world. Such actions also increase our liberal faith in progress as the result of intelligent actions.
For many millions today, a liberal faith is now focusing more and more on liberating gays and lesbians from all the forms of unjust and slave-like laws they’ve been living with for centuries. Such a liberal faith today sees such people not as sinfully dangerous immoralists, or hopelessly perverted, but rather as merely practicing different sexual habits, many of which are more satisfying to more people than traditional heterosexual ones. So, once again our liberal faith in intelligent self-determination keeps growing by showing people how denying any peaceful and helpful group their equal rights only hurts themselves and their nation. How can we live up to our constitutional ideals of seeing all peaceful people as deserving their equal rights unless we have the faith and courage to practice such ideas in our schools, churches, and homes? Again, only such actions can keep building a more liberal model of faith. Our new liberal democratic faith asks why not trust every law-abiding person to have the same equal rights and freedoms as everyone else?
No doubt, many conservatives today will still feel such liberal models of faith are completely unjustified and dangerous. They have a perfect right to feel that way. However, the more they actually work to prevent such equality from happening, the more they deny the very faith energizing our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, namely, the idea of all law-abiding people deserve equality under the law. Such conservatives may also feel many of their ideas are sacred, and should be felt by everyone, or at least a majority of people. For us Deweyan liberals, however, such a spirit-model of faith is no longer as desirable or defendable as it once was. If nothing else, it’s disrespectful of other faiths. It also tends to produce disconnection, alienation, and anger among people, rather than tolerance and human respect.
We Deweyan liberals also have faith nature is a continuum. What does that mean? Well, it means from our 540 million year old Cambrian star-fish ancestors, to our 500 million year old Ordovician fish ancestors with backbones, to our 2 million year old African habilis ancestors, and through all the ancestors in between, nature has been evolving continually. Our natural continuum also tells us life itself is a continuing reconstructive process, and so again the great psychological challenge is to learn how to guild such growth intelligently rather than routinely. The more such ideas are practiced, the stronger our faith in them becomes. In fact, Dewey’s imaginative faith told him there’re an infinite number of life-improving ideas to be tested and experimented with! So, if something is unsatisfying, then we’re free to begin changing it. Our faith encourages anyone to start joyfully and intelligently experimenting with improving any of our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts? How deep is your faith in yourself to begin feeling such a natural continuum? How strong is your faith to begin helping those who’re trying to help themselves? Who knows, you may even begin feeling you can better control those evil and devilish cheesecakes, cigarettes, and drugs; stranger things have happened, haven’t they?
In any case, however, nature’s continuum is an idea of liberal faith capable of being verified and tested as we go through life. It’s not something we must accept merely because someone says it’s true. Our great history of evolution, now over 4 billion years old, is more evidence for that kind of liberal faith. How many billions of creatures before you kept actively experimenting in their daily lives to make the most of life, from Cambrian sea creatures to modern day beavers living high up in their serene and beautiful mountain ponds?
Faith in Constructive Art
Faith in the power of artistically creative actions is another important part of Dewey’s liberal model. The famous French existential philosopher Jean Sartre (d. 1980) had faith life begins on the other side of despair, even though it was a destination he seems rarely to have reached himself, if that other side was joyful and enjoyable. Dewey, however, had faith in actually saying how to get from despair to more enjoyable kinds of feelings. The power of constructive art was one such way.
Here’s one example. After Franklin Roosevelt lost the use of his legs from polio he became depressed; it was a natural reaction. Up to then he had lived a rather active life, and greatly enjoyed the freedom of easy and carefree movement. So, while he was adjusting to his more restricted health condition he began artfully building a stamp collection. It gave him the chance to divert is psychic despair into learning more about life, and in that process he became a little different person. Such a creative art helped him feel he could keep learning new skills, and perhaps even walk again.
No doubt, some may feel stamp collecting really isn’t that creative or artistic, but isn’t building any new habit a work of art? Aren’t all habits works of biological art; aren’t they all something we build, and thus become body-mind art; and don’t they produce some object we build? If art is anything that’s built, then isn’t even a stamp collection a work of art, or even a child’s mud pie? They may not be as useful as a building or a highway, but they’re still art and so should be encouraged! Such constructive art has the power to keep us growing, learning, and expressing our feelings, and the more such subconscious feelings become conscious, the easier it is to first accept them, and then perhaps work to make any of them more satisfying and enjoyable.
Besides actually building a new work of art, such work also has the power of making life more joyful and enjoyable! In fact, the more such objects are built, the easier it becomes to experience a joyful feeling. Once, after seeing her portrait painted by the great artist Pablo Picasso, the model said she didn’t look anything like that at all. No, replied Picasso, but you will. Such a joyful playfulness can be another important result of one’s artistic creations. Despair may not be something everyone gets entirely over, but one’s creative impulses and experimentation can make life more enjoyable. And, once a person feels they have the power to build a joyful habit-art, then life itself can become more joyful rather than depressing. Slow and steady wins the race. More than 10 years later, Franklin Roosevelt would become the greatest liberal president the US has ever seen.
If Dewey's right, then faith in active and intelligent artful work, here and now, is another way to build a liberal faith in ourselves and our natural world. It can all begin with the simple art of choosing what kind of artist we want to become, and then enjoying the learning process. How should I go about intelligently learning a new art? Questions like that are a sign of our liberal model of faith in one’s learning power, and it can keep opening the door to an entire universe of new feelings, ideas, and enjoyments; it can even warn us of too much ice cream on that second piece of cheesecake; have faith it’s probably not good for your heart.
So, the choice is yours. What kind of faith will you build, conservative or liberal or a combination of the 2? After all, if you don’t have some faith in yourself, then who will? So, to finally end all questions about faith, yet another laboriously lame limerick has been artfully built, or so I like to think.
A future CEO was a little confusing,
How should the word faith be wisely using? It sounded not odd,
To say money was god,
While helping people was rather bemusing.
14. WHAT IS DESIRE-ABLE?
Almost certainly it’s not another languidly lame limerick, but just in case you’ve learned to enjoy them a little, here’s another one to ponder and smile at.
A young man with habits un-desire-ABLE,
Would often spend time getting higher-ABLE.
Now really he thought,
As more junk he bought,
What could possibly be more desire-ABLE?
In this section I’ve experimented a little with the format. Up to now it’s been mostly descriptive prose, but in this section the reader is challenged to have a little fun with what philosophers call creatively inductive reasoning! This section challenges readers to see what Dewey said was desire-ABLE -- that is, what is worthy to be desired. Most people know what desire is, but few, if any, have thought about what is desirable. Is, for example, excessive sugar a desirable part of a healthy diet?
In fact, Plato describes Socrates using such an inductive teaching method to both make people more humble about what they know, and also to learn more about what they both assumed were eternal and unchanging objects of Truth. In this section, however, I’ve used a few examples from early modern thought to illustrate Dewey’s idea about what he thought was desirable; they include people like Galileo, Thomas Hobbes, Rene Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and of Dewey himself. No doubt, such experimentally inductive kinds of reasoning, also called intuitive thinking, have been a part of philosophy since even before Socrates, but creatively inductive reasoning is also another important part of experimental learning. After identifying another challenge to improve, inductive reasoning is used to project possible solutions to test. And of course it’s useful in other ways as well. For example, from a few experimental results scientists then try to induce or intuit a general rule or pattern for all of nature, and then use such knowledge to perhaps make life better outside the lab. If, as the latest lame limerick tells us, people may desire what produces undesirable results, then the question is what should be desired becomes rather important.
On a subconscious level, people often use inductive reasoning every day. Obviously induction is the reverse of deduction, but it really isn’t the 1st cousin of seduction; will the bad philosophic jokes ever end? Anyway, it sounded witty when I wrote it.
Induction-deduction is another one of those reverse operations, like addition and subtraction, and multiplication and division. From a few individual events people often induce and intuit a general ethical rule, like honesty is the best policy, or helping others is the highest good. Then they use such generalities to deduce how they should be used in their own daily actions. In Socrates’s case, however, he used it to learn what he assumed existed, namely universal ethical ideas; he wanted to, say, know what goodness and courage were always and forever, and what they were in all situations. Plato describes Socrates experimenting inductively in many of his dialogues. When, for example, he challenged someone to define an idea’s unchanging meaning and essence, like friendship or courage, he was asking people to think inductively. From their few individual experiences of friendship or courage could they mentally grasp their eternal and unchanging meanings? When one idea proved unacceptable, he would simply ask for another idea to experiment with, and so on. Not surprisingly, the so-called Socratic dialogues often end without finding such ideas. If nothing else, however, such talk would help deflate the knowledge many people assumed they had. An army general should know what courage is, and yet Socrates convinces him his ideas are not very accurate.
Granted, many philosophers don't look for such unchanging essences today, however, the experimentally inductive art of thinking is still an important part of solving any problem. In fact, all problems and challenges are overcome with the help of some inductive thinking; if one idea doesn't work, we usually try another one. No doubt, even Neandertals used the art to keep building their useful knowledge about edible plants and burial arts; the more they didn't die from eating, say, a mushroom, the more the idea of edible grew. And the more people thought they lived on after death, the less fearful of death they became.
Again, we illustrate Dewey’s idea of what is desirable with some modern philosophic history. The general question to be answered is what is desirable? Is there an idea or habit-art most excellent to desire, and if so then what is it? We’ll see Dewey's answered to that question at the end of the section. Meantime, you can test your own inductive and intuitive thinking skills by looking at a few modern philosophers and what they felt was desirable. So, how quickly you can induce -- guess -- what Dewey said deserves to be desired? His answer may surprise you. It surprised me, but then again at my age every time I wake up I’m a little surprised I’m still alive!
No doubt, my understanding of philosophy's history certainly isn't as deep as Dewey's was, but reading more of his work certainly helped. It now seems to me every century since the 400s BCE has seen the growth of one or more new ideas and discoveries, and they in turn helped create some problems for other philosophers. As we've been seeing, in Socrates' day liberal Democritus all but stunned the conservative establishment with his intuitions about a spiritless, democratic, and atomistic model of life and nature. They created many new problems for people like Plato and Aristotle whose habits caused them to see nature differently; in fact, since then Western intellectual life has never been the same. Ancient liberals like Democritus and Protagoras began questioning spirit-ideas and habits used for some 50,000 years! They helped create a major turning point in Western civilization.
Then, a few decades before Jesus was born, a Roman atomist named Titus Lucretius Cares wrote a long poem called On Nature. It quickly became a poem conservative Churchmen loved to hate; with their help most every copy of it was destroyed, and so was lost for over 1,000 years. However, a few rare copies were buried in a few Church libraries in northern Europe, and in the early 1400s were rediscovered by an Italian cleric; as wealthy liberal Italians wanted more examples of ancient manuscripts, they soon kept the Renaissance blooming. Obviously, the more they were copied and circulated, the more problems it created for conservatives everywhere; what really was the truth about nature? Was it like Aristotle said, composed of 4 basic elements, or was Democritus right; were even those elements all a collection of tiny atoms, including humans as well? It’s been a basic problem for science ever since. Today the question is pretty much settled in favor of atomism, but the on-going problem is how to use such atomic-level knowledge to keep making life more interesting and enjoyable. Would you believe chairs made out of mushrooms are already a reality?
In fact, much the same kind of intellectual battle has continued throughout the just ended 20th century. The idea of democratic equal rights for all law-abiding citizens, biological evolution, scientific relativity, atomic power, the evils of excessive economic greed in a small upper class, as well as climate change continue creating many similar social and personal problems for everyone! If, for example, we quit using fossil fuels, what will happen to the economy? Many have even reacted violently against some ideas, but such social problems encouraged Dewey and others to help form some new institutions to deal more effectively with racial violence and free speech rights; the NAACP and the ACLU were two results.
Since then both have encouraged more active habits in people at the street level as well, where all such violence and freedom occurs. No doubt, from our modern era's birth in the 1600s, the on-going separation between conservative and liberal models of life and nature has grown wider and wider. Again, the initial spark fueling all such social problems was Democritus' Atomism. (Hint: If you've guessed correctly what Dewey said is desirable, why not skip the rest of this section and get ready for grad school?)
Galileo’s Problems
In the early 1600s modern science was just beginning; its celebration of experimentally testing ideas for their reliability was just blooming, but even so, every now and then scientists felt like saying yippee-yippee when they inductively found a general law of nature from a few experimental results; Galileo was one of them. Centuries earlier, with Thomas Aquinas’s help, the Church blindly accepted many of Aristotle's scientific ideas about nature, like the earth being at the universe’s center. Math professor Galileo, however, began sensing some of Aristotle’s ideas were just flat wrong. He then used his inductively creative reasoning to show experimentally how wrong some ideas were. For example, Aristotle said if objects didn’t weigh the same they would fall at different speeds, so Galileo supposedly dropped his 2 differently weighted balls from Pisa’s famous Leaning Tower to test the idea; they hit the ground at the same time; problem solved. Aristotle wasn’t the great scientific authority the Church said he was. For Galileo it was another yippee-yippee moment. Not only was it another nail in Aristotle’s scientific coffin, but it was also another piece of nature's puzzle scientists were trying to put together. (Hint #1: What’s most desirable is not pizza, unless of course you're starving to death somewhere.)
Such discoveries quickly became a big problem for conservative Christians whose habit was to picture nature the way Aristotle pictured it, like some kind of eternal evergreen tree, with most people at the bottom and god at the top. After all, if nature obeyed the same mathematical equations everywhere, then nature was radically different from Aristotle's and the Church's model of it. Incidentally, in the 1800s Charles Darwin would challenge Aristotle’s idea of plant and animal species being eternal and everlasting by inducing a universal law of evolution.
Needless to say, modern philosophic problems didn't stop with Galileo; in fact they were just beginning. Soon other intelligent people like Thomas Hobbes CONSCIOUSLY accepted the challenge to question conservative religious and ethical ideas as well; was our material world really matter in motion, was pleasure really the best ethical idea, and if so, then how should our political institutions work to make life safer for everyone? Obviously, religious conservatives weren’t very happy to hear such questions? Many continued believing their ideas and institutions were inspired by god through the Church; they were all part of a cosmic testing plan, so people could earn their eternal salvation, like the story of Job showed. Obey and accept and you shall be saved; no more work, no disease, just bliss for the rest of time. To all those whose life was painful and frustrating, those were welcomed ideas. However, the new experimental learning art used by Galileo, and of course Lucretius’s atomistic poem, continued creating more problems for conservatives. Was experimental knowledge the most desirable kind, or was faith in spirit-objects? Life was helping educate a new kind of person, one who demanded evidence rather than just faithful acceptance and obedience; to say the least such events were a growing problem for conservatives. More and more they faced the fact, only with reliable and tested knowledge could, say, medical problems be more intelligently solved, rather than relying merely on prayer. Thus, slowly the problem of reliable knowledge began growing. (Who’s ready to take another guess at what’s most desirable?)
Thomas Hobbes’ Problems
While Galileo kept walking around Pisa and playing with his balls, a bold and confident English intellectual named Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) showed how people can accept one progressive scientific idea, namely an atomistic nature, and yet keep another conservative political one, a monarch with absolute power. Like so many early liberal philosophers Hobbes celebrated Lucretius’s new atomistic model of nature; all of nature was merely matter in motion. But he also didn’t want to rebel against the conservatives who had been supporting him. The main social problem in his day was warfare, both in England and on the continent. So, using his inductive reasoning said they could be solved by building a political model in which the monarch was given almost supreme power to say what was right and what was wrong; in short, Hobbes might best be described as a scientific progressive and a political conservative. The monarchy shouldn’t be changed unless it couldn’t keep the peace!
As Plato was growing up he was deeply affected by the Greek war between the Athenian empire and the Spartan empire. Hobbes too was deeply affected by the English Civil War in the 1640s, as well as the very destructive Thirty Years War in Europe (1618-1648). Eventually, he too used his inductive thinking skill to build generalized scientific and political ideas of what life and nature should look like. He began writing his very shocking book called Leviathan; it was published when Hobbes was 63, in 1651. In it he celebrated Democritus' atomic model of nature; all of nature is but matter in motion, including people as well. However, to best control peoples' selfish, aggressive, and war-like habits he said only when people are awed and fearful of a ruler's power to punish, only then would people be free to live more pleasurably in their nations and respect others' natural rights, like life and liberty. Needless to say, such creatively inductive thinking produced a host of new problems for conservatives and moderates, just as Democritus’s thinking did in the 400s BCE, and Charles Darwin’s inductive thinking did in the 1800s. For both conservatives and liberals Hobbes created a number of major new problems.
For example, he challenged the entire conservative dualistic model of nature by celebrating Democritus’ atomistic ideas he learned from Lucretius; for Hobbes spirit ideas and feelings were merely the product of religious habits. Such liberal ideas had recently been reawakened as On Nature continued circulating in educated circles. No doubt, for all those who had suffered from religious and civil wars, those ideas were liberating; nothing seemed to be settled as tens of thousands of people were killed defending their religious ideas. As a result, people like Hobbes began questioning the ideas helping justify such violence, namely a religious quest for certainty.
While tutoring for a royal family Hobbes had gone to Italy and learned more about Galileo's work, and then around the tender age of 40 began teaching himself Euclid’s geometry; that was another new idea in the 1600s. At the time the specialized language called mathematics had finally evolved to the point where its equations could describe natural patterns of movement much more easily than it could in ancient times. As a result, scientific ideas could be described according to natural math equations, rather than spirit-ideas! For religious conservatives from that day to this such materialistic models of nature have remained the mother of all philosophic problems, just like Democritus’s model had been to Plato and Lucretius' had been to Augustine. In a world where most everyone still built very strong spirit-habits, and where Catholic churchmen were still burning many heretics and witches for just talking about such ideas, Hobbes boldly created another materialist model of nature. In it all of nature was merely a huge matter-in-perpetual-motion machine, not much different from what happens nightly in ‘Red Light’ districts around the world. Thankfully, Hobbes didn’t worry too much about heretic-burning churchmen or Red Light districts; England's Henry 8 solved that problem decades earlier by removing Catholics from England, seizing their great amounts of Church property, and changing wives when he wanted.
Quite naturally, then, in such a chaotic and violent social world it was all but inevitable for Hobbes to paint a very dark picture of human nature; it would become another problem for liberal philosophers who wanted to see human nature differently. For more politically liberal people like John Locke (1632-1704) Hobbes’s psychology was much too dark and pessimistic, even though many of his ideas were secular. For example, Hobbes talked about how human nature was basically selfish and ego-centered, helping make life basically 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'; other than that, however, it was OK! Such ideas helped him solve the problem of explaining all the on-going violent wars and killing he kept seeing all around him. Basic human nature kept making destruction a constant part of life; such inductive generalizations seemed obvious to Hobbes. For liberals, however, such pessimistic models of human nature became a problem; they wanted to see people as more rational and intelligent, so they could justify more democratic forms of government; they wanted to celebrate intelligent reasoning, tolerance, and allowing people to have certain equal rights.
Thus, for liberals too, Hobbes created political problems. With such a psychological model -- some would call it realistic -- he built his anti-democratic political model of excellence, with a ruler having absolute power to keep people awed and fearful of attacking anyone else, unless of course they were attacked first. In short, to solve the problem of violent social chaos, and bring more order and stability to life, Hobbes, like Plato, said an absolutely powerful ruler is best; only such a ruler could stop men from constantly tearing each other to bits, and thus protect peoples’ natural rights, like life and liberty! (Hint #2: What’s desirable is not killing all philosophers, even though at this point you may want to.)
And that wasn't all the problems Hobbes solved and created at the same time. His ideas about people having natural rights, like security, created still more problems for conservatives; they in fact helped justify revolution. What a shock that must have been to the conservative aristocratic establishment. All during the Middle Ages churchmen like Augustine and Aquinas kept saying all rulers were chosen by god, and so unless they’re really much more obnoxious than rude in-laws, people shouldn’t rebel; they should merely suffer through it; after all, it was god's will. Hobbes, however, had studied his ancient Greek history; he had redd how liberal Sophists said people, not gods, form governments as a contract among themselves, to better protect their life and liberty, and increase life's pleasures. So Hobbes too said people, not gods, create all governments, and if any ruler failed to preserve the peoples’ natural rights, then citizens had a perfect right to issue them a one-way ticket to retirement under Westminster Abbey!! In fact, Charles 1 was beheaded and suffered such a fate. Clearly many conservatives didn't feel like yelling yippee-yippee about Hobbes’s revolution ideas; atomistic science was giving them enough problems already.
In any case, however, Hobbes was much like ancient Democritus; he helped shift almost the entire focus of medieval thinking from god-centered to human-centered! How far did he go? He certainly lived up to his reputation for creatively inductive radical thinking, except in politics; in that way he still was a medievalist. He agreed with Henry 8; the monarch's power should be absolute even over religious leaders, in order to best keep the peace for everyone. To many conservatives, however, all the problems created by the re-birth of liberal Greek humanism, atomism, and skepticism were about as welcome as the plague at a wedding. (Hint #3: What's desirable is not ‘radical’ thinking, although you’re getting warmer.)
Rene Descartes’ Problems
It wasn’t long before conservatives found a defender to answer many of the problems Hobbes created. Such a person was Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Jesuit-educated, god-fearing, mathematical genius Descartes accepted the problem of answering Hobbes’ atomistic challenges. Like Plato, he too wanted to show how people can know the Christian model of nature was absolutely certain and true, and much of his solution was Platonic. He too said a certain kind of clear and distinct reasoning with reliable innate and inborn ideas could really justify Christianity as absolute Truth. Fewer challenges were bigger than that, but he used his creatively inductive thinking to first reach what felt like an absolute true generalization, and then deduce a number of equally certain truths. The whole model began forming with what’s called Cartesian doubt. His plan was to first doubt every idea he could until he discovered just one absolutely certain idea. Then with it and his innate ideas, he could build an absolutely certain Christian model of life and nature. He wanted to prove god existed, it cares for people, and it would never allow its Truth to be destroyed. With such creatively inductive thinking Descartes became the father of modern conservative philosophy; he endorsed the new science of mathematical mechanics Galileo had created, as well as the new science of physiology, while also defending his religious faith. With his work a new type of conservative began emerging.
Just as it had in ancient Greece, science in Descartes’ day had progressed to the point where new atomistic models of life and nature were becoming more obvious. From Galileo's work in mechanics and moving bodies he induced all of nature works according to general mathematical laws, not god’s will; where in that model was there any room for divine miracles, or even god controlling natural movements? Such work promoted a model of god as a kind of cosmic mathematician! Thus, Descartes accepted the problem of justifying the new experimental knowledge while also preserving the old Christian model of life and nature. In short, he felt challenged to use his inductive reasoning creatively, and show how both those ideas could still be accepted; he too wanted to keep expanding his own ideas about life and nature. How could nature and life be described now that science had begun wrecking Aristotle's model of a natural hierarchy, with god at the top, and how could people know their Christian spirit-ideas were really absolutely True? What place could religion possibly have in a completely atomic nature moving by natural mathematical laws? And so again, in his quest for certainty Descartes thought the method of doubt could be useful. He tried to inductively discover just one absolutely certain idea, and then use it to deduce more absolutely certain truths about life and nature. That way the certainty of both science and Christianity could be justified. After all, mathematicians since Pythagoras had been creating general math rules for thousands of years, like the idea equal numbers added to equal numbers always produce equal numbers! The Pythagorean theorem too was as useful in Descartes’ day as it was in ancient times.
Slowly and carefully Descartes’s philosophic creativity began growing. He studied his Plato while also seeing the results of new scientific research. Eventually he solved his philosophic problems by mixing together some ancient spirit-ideas and modern scientific ideas. The result was Descartes' early modern dualistic model of nature. Like every good conservative since Plato he too wanted to justify spirit ideas, especially Christian ones, and like Aristotle scientific ideas of certainty as well. For that he eventually said everything BUT mankind's mind-soul was merely matter in motion; all animal bodies were merely matter-in-motion, but humans were created with a mind-soul into which innate ideas were put. Thus, new sciences like physiology were justified as well as religious ideas. For him, like for Plato, only the human mind was a spirit-object. (For those who think they know now what Dewey said was desire-able, read on anyway! You might keep learning something.)
Descartes’s first philosophic problem seemed easily solved. How could he discover one absolutely certain general idea, an idea no one could doubt? We’ve been seeing how big a problem that was for conservatives and moderates. So, he would sit in front of his fireplace wrapped in warm robes and ask himself what ideas could be doubted; some ideas he didn’t know for sure, and so were easily doubted. Other ideas he said could be the result of some evil demon, and so could also be doubted. Among such doubts he confidently sailed. He also often stayed in bed until noon to meditate and be alone with his thoughts; in fact early in life his inductive creativity helped him build a new branch of mathematics called analytic geometry; with it all equations could be pictured on a graph. Then, later on he also wrote some very interesting and charming books about his philosophic meditations; many undergraduate students as well as professors still read them today.
Eventually, however, he felt one general idea was absolutely certain and could not be doubted at all; I think, therefore I am. His own existence felt like a philosophic certainty, and with a few more religious ideas he didn’t doubt, he would then built his new model of life and nature. And so, like Plato before him, with merely contemplative reasoning, the universe’s eternal and unchanging Truths would be learned! Both obviously true math and religious ideas seemed to say it was possible, but how could he prove them? That was a problem he wanted to solve. In the 1200s Thomas Aquinas believed god's existence could be proved with 5 different proofs, which were inspired by Aristotle, but the more Aristotle's scientific thinking was weakened by experimental testing, the more conservatives like Descartes were challenged to inductively create a new model. Luckily he didn’t have much else to do with his mornings, or evenings for that matter; he inherited enough money to live on, and so his work kept him out of trouble for a while anyway. After he published his Meditations, however, criticisms began forming. In fact, he burned some of his writings he felt were too radical. At any rate, he too was another one of those philosophers Dewey had in mind when he wrote The Quest for Certainty. For most of philosophy’s history both conservative and moderate thinkers wanted to discover absolutely certain Truth, rather than mere reliably probable kinds of truth; it had been the main even before Plato and Aristotle.
Confident Descartes kept his nightgown and sleeping cap on and continued meditating and writing. Damn Hobbes and the materialists and get busy. Again, his solution to the problem of absolute certainty was I think, therefore I am. In short, he felt his own existence was beyond all doubt, and so it must be absolutely certain; even if he was being deceived by an evil demon he was still thinking. But, as usual that idea was soon criticized: how did he know even that idea wasn’t an illusion caused by some evil demon? Wasn’t it possible some such demon could fool everyone into thinking they and the world really existed, and yet didn’t? Wasn’t it possible some evil spirit was really tricking him and everyone else as well? So, if you see bumper stickers like I fish, therefore I am, or I donate, therefore I am, you might be inspired to create your own version of Descartes’s idea. What gives you the feeling of value and usefulness?
After that, then, Descartes faced the problem of explaining how Christian ideas could be absolutely True. For that he simply said our mind-souls have some innate ideas, like Christian ideas of god for example. No such model of god could possibly allow such evil deception on a grand scale, and so people can feel certain of both science and religion. Such reasoning helped him solve his problem of how people can really believe their religious ideas are absolute Truth. How else can we know such Truth unless those ideas are already in us at birth? In effect, then, Plato was right. People can feel certain such ideas were put in us at birth.
Thus, it seemed perfectly clear to him his ideas of god's nature and goodness guaranteed Christianity’s certainty! People like Hobbes must be wrong; no all-powerful god could possibly allow such deception on a grand scale? That too felt impossible and beyond all doubt. Because god must be all-good, it couldn’t deceive us about the Bible's basic truths! How could all religions be merely a collection of social habits? That possibility was just too horrible for Descartes to even think about, even in bed. In effect, then, he too endorsed the ancient Platonic idea of innate-inborn ideas, or faculties; it helped 'solve' some philosophic problems, at least until lunch and before people started criticizing his ideas. (Hint #4: No, what's desirable is not staying in bed until noon, at least not for everyone! I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination to say who those people are.)
John Locke’s Problems
Moderate John Lock (1632-1704) became Descartes main critic. For Locke, Descartes depended too much on his reasoning; for Locke Aristotle was right; all knowledge comes through our sensing of the world, and not by meditative reasoning. A simple examination of young babies and toddlers shows us none of them have any innate ideas. Thus, the more moderate democratic Englishman accepted the problem of building a more sense-based model of learning, and also the conservative political problems Hobbes created too. After all, sense-based experimental science, as practiced by Isaac Newton (1643 -1727), had created a model of nature based completely on so-called natural laws, rather than theological ideas. With Newton’s laws one could predict the position of a planet well into the future, and prediction was the one supreme test revealing the existence of excellent knowledge and natural law! So, it seemed obvious to Locke’s inductive thinking, the best universal idea of knowledge must be based on the senses, not reasoning alone, as Descartes said. After all, almost daily in the 1600s independent researchers were learning more and more reliable facts about life and nature, so Locke accepted the challenge to build a more moderate model of learning. It was as if the whole first century of our modern era, the 1600s, was causing explosions of reliable knowledge on a grand scale. Such knowledge even extended to China and the Americas as well. The more people learned about all those native tribes in the Americas, the more obvious it became religious Truth too was based on learning and habits, rather than innate ideas. Still, because he was raised by pious Puritan Christians, Locke too wanted to defend Christian ideas as the Truth.
His problem became building such a model of life and nature. First, in order to challenge Descartes’s ideas, he simply rejected anyone having innate ideas at birth. His inductive thinking told him that idea just didn’t fit the facts and so couldn’t be accepted. Eventually Locke asked where's the evidence for such ideas, and if there isn’t any, then how can we be sure they’re absolutely true? Good question. And if the idea has no evidence, then why should anyone accept it? Again, a good question. The much more liberal and tolerant world millions of us live in today is one result of such Lockean boldness centuries ago. (Hint #5: No, what's desirable is not philosophic debate, but you're getting warmer.)
Locke asked why not just accept what we see about everyone at birth and as adults? Thus, his inductive reasoning created the general idea everyone's mind is as blank as a clean slate at birth, like Aristotle said! Certainly, just observing newborn and young children is all the evidence anyone should need. Only as children learn new habits, as well as talking and reasoning, do their ideas begin growing and maturing. What's more, they also reflect the ideas and feelings of those who raised them, rather than revealing absolute kinds of Truth; all the new native tribes seemed to make that idea almost certain. In short, adults have no innate ideas about god or souls; all they have are feelings and they vary from culture to culture, and tribe to tribe. No doubt, such creatively inductive generalizations were useful to express Locke’s feelings. What’s more, some uneducated people have clean-slate minds all through life! In short, for Locke all our knowledge comes from natural sense-experience itself, not innate ideas! However, he also wanted to say some religious ideas were absolutely certain.
In some of his work, then, Locke took a few more liberal baby-steps towards Dewey's liberal models of excellence. Not surprisingly, however, Locke still believed many of the religious ideas he learned as a child could be justified. For example, he based his belief in god on what’s called a cosmological argument. It went something like this: If something exists it has a cause; the universe exists; therefore, it has a cause commonly called god. In short, Locke believed a god exists and could be proved with logical arguments alone! What’s more, like Plato he too wasn’t tolerant of atheists; he saw them as too socially disruptive. In short, his religious ideas often reflected his own Puritan beliefs. However, defending such ideas was to become even more difficult with the work of David Hume (1711-1776). As we’ve seen, even in the 1600s religious diversity was becoming more and more a problem for both conservatives like Descartes and moderates like Locke. Why would a Christian god allow such diversity, or even such violence to exist when it was both powerful enough to stop it and merciful enough to want to stop it? What’s more, wasn’t it possible for the universe to be eternal, like Democritus and modern physics seems to say? Little wonder, then, the main preoccupation with philosophers in our modern era has been knowledge problems: How do we justify what we think we know? Are some ideas inspired by god, or merely our own actions?
David Hume’s Problems
Into those kinds of problems sailed David Hume (1711-1776), perhaps the greatest skeptic the English-speaking world has ever produced! As religious habits and ideas continued being questioned for their certainty in the 1700s, a so-called Enlightenment Movement swept over Western Europe and the British Isles. Such a Renaissance began growing in Italy, then went to France, England, and the Americas. Many of the US Founders were Deists like Democritus; god created the universe and then left it alone. After living in England for a while Voltaire (d. 1778) said they have no religion whatsoever!
Precocious, atheist, and skeptic Hume was one of the movement’s principal contributors. With his help the medieval Age of Faith effectively ended for liberal humanists at least. The new faith was in teaching enough people to govern themselves intelligently. Dewey eventually joined the liberal pragmatic movement blossoming in the late 1800s. In fact, his Behavioral model of psychological excellence, described in Human Nature and Conduct, criticized Hume's faculty model of psychology, but that's another story.
The problem Hume accepted was to make sense-based learning models like Locke’s even more logical; he concluded Locke was just too inconsistent with his ideas. How could any sense-based learning model ever be used to justify only Christian ideas of life and nature, or any spirit-model? Why should any model be truer than any other? Correcting Locke’s inconsistent reasoning became Hume’s problem.
For example, upon what sense-evidence could anyone base the idea of god creating the universe? Even Aristotle said the universe is eternal and uncreated, so who was right? Again, describing how we learn what we know became Hume’s problem. What ideas can we feel are most certain? If, for example, all our simple ideas are really learned from sense-experience, like gold is yellow, and all our more complex ideas are built from them while sense-experience is always changing, then how can we be sure even scientific laws are eternal Truth, including laws like cause-and-effect? Hume’s questions seemed to throw a gigantic philosophic monkey wrench into even knowing scientific laws of nature are eternally certain! What’s more, what's true for scientific ideas must also be true for religious ideas; how do we know any of them truly reflects spirit-objects? In short, Hume’s creatively inductive thinking told him human knowledge is a very limited and narrow thing; people think they know much more than they can prove. So, again, what can we know for certain?
No doubt, Locke sensed such problems with sense-based knowledge, but he justified their certainty with ideas like cause-and-effect. Because cause and effect exists as a law of nature, sense-experience must be caused by something, and so we can feel certain the outer world really does exist. For Hume, however, Locke made a logical mistake; cause-and-effect events are merely another kind of habit; no one can prove every event has a cause, so why believe it’s always true? Thus, with such skeptical kinds of thinking Hume produced a whole new set of learning problems for conservatives and liberals. What an awkward time in philosophy's history that was. Scientists like Newton were creating reliable and useful models of nature, and yet skeptics like Hume said all such ideas were the result of habits like association. People merely see fire and boiling water together, and then incorrectly assume all fire can make water boil; they assume too much when they think there exists universal laws like cause-and-effect really exist. Incidentally, modern physics has shown such laws at the atomic level do not exist!
So, merely a few decades after Locke, the great Scottish skeptic began creating even worse learning problems for everyone. Almost by nature, and still in his teens, Hume was a philosophic idol-breaker, like Voltaire, Rousseau, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. In fact, learned and smart Hume couldn’t even find a teaching job in the still-conservative controlled universities, but he kept writing anyway. Even though much of his philosophic work was rejected by the public, eventually he taped into their reading tastes with a History of England, and kept indulging in his many gourmet meals.
Hume’s inductive creativity audaciously attacked philosophy’s and science's ‘sacred cow’ itself -- the universal law of cause-and-effect. He doubted absolute certainty could ever be known about anything in the outer world; it seemed we can be certain only about our own ideas and sensations, that was it! Mathematics was certain because it's just about ideas, not real objects! So, beyond our own heads we can be certain of nothing! After all, when has anyone even seen a perfect square or circle? Thus, for Hume, both science and religion were both based merely on habits and assumptions, not unchanging objects or eternal laws of nature. How could anyone know atoms even existed, much less they were unchanging? Because no one can really observe any example of cause-and-effect, how can any idea based on it be absolutely certain? How can we even be certain the fire under a pot of water is really the cause of the water’s eventual boiling? Just because it’s happened before doesn’t mean it must always happen. And with similar reasoning, how can we be sure the sexual encounter we’re about to have in any Red Light district is entirely risk free and safe? Does anyone ever actually see one thing causing something else? We merely see the water start boiling again and again, and so we form a habit about cause-and-effect – fire always causes water to boil. In outer space, where gravity is small, the water would just float away. Thus, for both conservatives and liberals who craved and hunted for absolute certainty, even for scientific natural laws, Hume's models of learning definitely created major problems for everyone! They eventually became a problem for Dewey too! His Behavioral model of human nature was designed to improve on Hume’s so-called atomistic faculty psychology.
Against his better judgment, commonsense, and in his less skeptical moods, Hume's own skeptical feelings felt unreal; it almost completely separated people from the outer world. He often felt his own ideas were just too radical and went too far, but where had he gone wrong in his thinking? Eventually, Dewey felt a problem with Hume’s psychological model, and even his quest for absolute certainty. Give up the quest for certainty even in science, and replace it with ideas ranging from almost certain to almost impossible, and many learning problems vanish like a morning mist. In his model ideas become everything from highly probable scientific facts to highly improbable theological ideas.
In any case, since Hume Western civilization has continued growing more secular oriented and less obsessed with finding absolute Truth, but not right away. As we’ll see in Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence, more secular free-thinkers like Karl Marx sprouted and grew like mushrooms in the 1800s; Marx claimed to have discovered absolutely certain and inevitable economic Laws of Nature! Many now know how reliable they are, but just like Christian ideas gave fearful and sorrowful people more hope for the future, so too Marx’s economic ideas gave hope for a better life to all those who were working for slave wages and living from hand to mouth, as it were. Most everyone wasn’t allowed to share in the great profits from their work, like the factory owners did. After all, such real social problems had been building more hopeful philosophic and religious models for thousands of years.
With Dewey’s more practical thinking, however, slowly more and more people began realizing the quest for absolute certainty was really unjustified. For one thing it was often used to merely dominate and control others, as well as make people intolerant of people with different habits. After all, what practical difference does it make if someone is a Baptist, a Puritan, a Lutheran, a Catholic, a Muslim, an agnostic, a Druid, an Atomist, or a worshipper of apple pie? As long as people remain free to do as they see fit, what’s the problem? And as even Socrates saw, such ideas of certainty created an arrogant feeling in those who thought they knew the truth.
For Dewey, however, what’s most important is accepting the challenge to build practical and useful habits, like respecting just laws, intelligently working to improve unjust laws, and also helping those less well off! To speak metaphorically, if someone else’s apple pie is simply different, then why not eat what you want and let others eat what they want? In fact, intelligent kinds of tolerance remain a problem to this day, even though fewer people believe sin exists and is the result of a devil’s work. After all, people have always had different habits, so why not respect their peaceful and constructive choices, even for different kinds of apple pie? As long as those choices don’t create social problems for others, what's it anyone else's business?
John Dewey’s Problems
I’ve played with these events from philosophy’s history perhaps too much, but the intent was to show what Dewey thought was desirable. Have you guessed it yet? It’s simply this: problems are desire-able! They’re worthy of being desired; if we don’t keep asking new questions and discovering new problems, then we stop growing and learning. Accepting a challenge-problem is really the first step to knowing more about our self and our world! If all those philosophers I just mentioned didn't first accept someone else's ideas as a problem and challenge, and as less than excellent, then they couldn't even start thinking about improving them, listing their weak results, and begin inductively creating their own models of life and nature. If Plato and Aristotle too hadn’t accepted the problem of building different philosophic models from liberals like Democritus and Protagoras, they might not have written anything! With the help of inductive kinds of thinking, from individual examples to general laws, philosophic thinking too has continued growing and evolving as a result of new problems and challenges. Thus, a democratic educational problem remains a challenge. Why shouldn’t we teach people to build their own philosophies of economics, ethics, ecology, medicine, exercise, diet, and any other natural study, even of yoga, and how to test each one for their results?! Only in such an experimental learning process does anyone keep growing.
No doubt, to many people it may sound strange to hear problems are desirable. For many people, problems, both large and small, are often felt to be a big pain in the butt and thus are something to be avoided. But that’s certainly not the only response. Relaxing, and telling our self here’s a chance to test and expand my own inductive thinking skills, is certainly another response to both large and small problems. Once such feelings begin growing, and the usefulness of problems is felt more deeply, then it becomes easier to even enjoy and relish solving the problems we choice to accept. After all, what greater freedom in life is there? No doubt, sometimes problems just go away and obnoxious people go home, but other times some problems don’t solve themselves, and so give us a chance to keep building our intelligent character excellence.
Again, for Dewey problems and challenges are nature's fuel for growth, and have been since life began over 3 billion years ago! Thomas Edison, for example, became a great inventor because he taught himself to ask interesting questions, create problems for himself, but then also create solutions! As we've seen, his electric light problem took over a year to solve. So, if we can teach our self to first relax and not feel frustrated about a problem, and then begin playing with some INTELLIGENT AND CONSTRUCTIVE solutions, then we can start feeling what intelligent experimental learning is all about. Who knows? We might even teach ourselves to attack our challenges with gusto, joy, gladness, warmth, and of course some creativity. It’s another of life’s on-going challenges -- to act as playfully intelligent as possible; who knows what results might be produced? No doubt, like anything else that kind of habit-art takes a while to build, but it can be done; I'm still working on it too. Intelligently playing with our problems experimentally helps keep growing our best knowledge and self-confidence. Plato, for example, discovered sometimes the answer to a question about spirit-objects is ‘Who knows?’ At first it was probably difficult to accept, but eventually he moved on to describing other kinds of events with more humility. In any case, he never would have discovered such feelings if he first wouldn’t have accepted the problem of knowing what spirit-objects are like!
Dewey eventually built his argument for such a neat little evolutionary model of experimental learning in his great book The Quest for Certainty. I’ve taken many of his ideas and arguments from there and used them in these pages, but it’s still well worth reading. I think it’s one of Dewey’s better books, and, who knows, after reading this book it may be even easier to read and understand one of the greatest liberal philosophers who ever lived. In it he asks a very practical Humian-like question: In an always moving and changing world what practical good does it do to convince our self any idea is absolutely certain, whether it’s about spirit-objects or natural objects? There are no certainties seems to be the only certainty! In fact, natural history shows us life has gone on for over 3 billion years without such ideas, so how necessary are they? They seem necessary mainly to those who want social power over others, or those who feel insecure about their own ideas. Even the most intelligent fish, amphibian, reptile, mammal, or primate could live well without such ideas. In fact, it may be easier to keep living and making life better without them; often the quest for certainty keeps us from seeing what might produce better results, like equal rights and opportunities! Didn't Buddhism’s founder Siddhartha Gautama live a productive and helpful life without bothering about absolutely certain knowledge? His creatively inductive Eight-Fold Path is just some more practical advice he felt was excellent for living here and now, as are many Biblical and Koranic ideas. If any of them are useful for building a better, more tolerant world for all of us, then why not test them? And if they don't, if they only make life more dangerous and stressful, then why keep using them? It may be difficult to convince some young folks to learn that habit, and force may be necessary, but as the ancient Greeks learned, war teaches many useful ideas too, like don’t practice it!
An experimental model of solving problems helps us be 'born again' each day. No doubt, sometimes the outer results of our testing might not be felt right away; sometimes the results of, say, helping others may take weeks to be felt, or even missed altogether, but the inner result of a stronger and more humane character can and even should be felt immediately. After all, such results are what make intelligent experimental learning an art as well as a science; science is the art of testing ideas, while the art of creatively inductive thinking helps create those ideas worth testing. In that sense Dewey's model of ethical excellence too is both an art and a science; testing ideas like helping others makes it a science, and imagining ways to help others makes it another human art. So, if Dewey’s right and experimental testing is the way everyone learns, animals and obnoxious-acting people included, then it also teaches us, if we discover an idea doesn’t work very well, we can use a little artful inductive reasoning and creatively imagine what might work better. Even Edison and his lab mates artfully imagined different ideas to test, thus making invention too both an art and a science.
Such a model of desirability also increases the feelings of freedom upon which all healthy democracies rest. It encourages everyone to learn how to attack any problem intelligently. The lack of that freedom helped turn many ancient Persians into slaves of the king; his will was absolute, even to the point of burying alive those who he said should be killed. And even Plato sensed the danger of such democratic habits, and said no one should do anything unless they were told to. Teaching people to desire their own problems and solutions was also avoided on a social scale during the Middle Ages; people were regularly taught to pray for their solutions, rather than actively test different ideas.
Today we liberal Deweyans are asking, shouldn't most everyone be taught such active problem-solving habits? Shouldn’t most everyone we allowed to choose the kinds of problems they’d like to work on – personal, social, scientific, economic, and artistic; pick a problem, any problem? No doubt, all our problems won’t be solved immediately, and in fact many problems solve themselves if left alone. In fact, I've tried that solution with my dirty laundry, but unfortunately it didn't work very well. So far my best solution is to simply wash them wherever I have time, or just throw them away and get cleaner clothes; thrift stores seem grateful for the business! Now, who really can’t appreciate such creative thinking? I’ve also learned vegetarian foods are generally better for my health, and that feeling began growing once I began questioning my diet habit. What kinds of problems might it create, and how could they be avoided?
Those are just some personal results from Dewey’s model of desirability, but the more I consciously used it, the deeper grew my feelings for both experimental science and artful inductive thinking; both inductive and intuitive thinking is an art. What’s more, most anyone can slowly and steadily teach themselves to become scientifically artful problem-solvers here and now! After all, no one is born desiring problems, or even knowing how to write lame limericks, even though it feels like a natural gift to me. In any case, however, it’s just another idea Dewey felt was excellent and might be valuable to others. We're all here for a few short years, so why not learn to enjoy life intelligently? Maybe that's why I keep reminding myself: Hey dummy, you won’t solve every problem! Your clothes will keep getting dirty. Now there’s a general idea for everyone, right?
Finally, to all those who feel inductive philosophic generalizations are really useless in the real world, I’ll offer the following thoughts. As the ancient Greeks proved, the freedom to choose the problems they saw as desirable was at the hearth of the world’s first democratic system in Athens. For a few decades such freedom produced a society like no other before or since. If so, then our very own public schools must be judged as undemocratic when they reduce student freedom to learn what STUDENTS FEEL ARE DESIRABLE, and instead dictate what they should desire to learn more about! In short, the more student freedom is restricted to desire only what someone else says they should desire, the more their emotional commitment to learning is separated from learning itself! Teachers often see the results too in the form of disruptive behavior or psychic withdrawal, commonly called boredom. Thus, if Dewey’s general idea of desirable is valid, then our own public schools are teaching undemocratic slave-like habits of obedience rather than democratic habits of freedom and choice! As a result, election results like only 50% voting and widespread voter apathy become serious problems for all liberal democrats. Is it any wonder, for thousands of years conservatives have controlled public education, and for thousands of years democracy has been almost non-existent? One conclusion at least seems obvious: a healthy and vibrant democracy should begin in our public schools, where students are free to desire what they want to learn about.
15. EARLY CHRISTIAN MODELS OF TRUTH
After the invention of an internal combustion engine in the late 1890s there were created many different car makers like Ford and Pontiac. How was the new engine to be used, to build luxury cars for the rich or simple cars for the people? They wanted to discover what the truth was about automotive excellence. They competed with each other and eventually 2 became most powerful, Ford and General Motors.
Thanks to many New Testament scholars, a similar situation occurred a few decades after Jesus died. Many gospels were written about him and his mission. Was he really the messiah, or anointed one, Jews had been expecting for decades? Such gospels offered different theological models about Jesus and what his life really meant, including some revisions of earlier documents that became examples of eternal Christian Truth. In time basically 2 general theological models became accepted, a rather mystical Platonic model, as can be seen throughout John’s gospel, and a more moderate Aristotelian institutional model seen in the so-called Synoptic gospels – Mark, Matthew, and Luke. Synoptic is a Greek word meaning to look the same. In this section, then, we’ll see a little of that early evolution of Christian truth, and how a Catholic Platonic model eventually became dominant with Augustine’s help; trust spirit-objects exist and you shall be rewarded.
Along with that model came a ritual model of Christian truth too. God inspired 4 ancient gospel writers to celebrate certain events in Jesus’s life, both his teachings and his miracles, and they became the model for church rituals, like baptism, holy communion, marriage, and ideas like Jesus’s second coming and the resurrection of the death. Thus, worshipping a Jewish religious leader named Jesus became important. The 4 gospel writers were eventually said to be part of Jesus’s inner circle, and they faithfully recorded the eternal and unchanging truths about him, his work, and his mission. The standard model said he was the only son of god whose death redeemed mankind from its sins and once again opened the gates to eternal heavenly life for those who believed in him.
However, with the recent work of modern biblical scholars, that model of truth is no longer the only one available or acceptable. Not only have other gospels been found – a Gospel of Thomas in 1945 and even a Gospel of Mary – but analysis of the 4 standard gospels themselves has shown many inconsistencies and even contradictions in them. As a result, even interested layman like myself can now look at those 4 gospels much more objectively, and see real examples of their evolution within 100 years of Jesus’s death probably in 30 CE. This, and the following 2 sections, then, will look more closely at 2 of philosophy’s most important questions – what is truth, and how should it be used? In this section we’ll look at some highlights of Christian theological evolution; in the next we see how a scientific model of truth evolved since 1600, and after that we’ll see some of Dewey’s ideas about truth.
Thanks to conservative Platonic and moderate Aristotelian ideas about nature having some eternal and unchanging spirit-objects or Forms in it, most everyone today feels truth is some kind of correspondence between ideas and those eternal objects or events which already exist. Gospel writers too wanted their ideas to correspond with eternal theological truth as god inspired them; the truth of their models was said to be guaranteed by god itself. In fact, a correspondence model of truth has been the accepted model of conservative and moderate thinkers for thousands of years. Even modern philosophers like Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) argued for a correspondence model of truth for most of his life; such a model went back at least to Aristotle. However, the more experimental science started producing more reliable kinds of knowledge and facts about our ever-changing nature, the more a new and forward-looking liberal model of truth needed to be inductively created! In fact, that more liberal pragmatic and practical model of truth began growing in ancient times with the help of liberal humanists like Protagoras, and skeptics like Carneades (214-129/8 BCE) who actually ran Plato’s Academy for a while. In a way it made sense; Plato was quite skeptical about any natural knowledge being eternal and unchanging.
What is truth? Sometimes the simplest questions can produce very complex answers, as Plato’s and Aristotle’s work shows us. Early Christian models of truth too quickly became a variety of different models; how was Jesus’s life and fate to be seen and used? As we’ve been seeing, Plato’s and Aristotle’s psychologies of human nature were purposely designed so eternal and unchanging objects could be known. What’s more, even though they agreed such knowledge was all but useless, they wanted to show the liberal sophists and skeptics were wrong; eternal Truth could be known. To religious conservatives, however, there was always of question of how such truth should be used. What kind of rituals should be built? To use an on-going example, we not only want to know when obnoxious in-laws are arriving, but also how to get them back home as well. Obviously, even successful criminals know a lot of useful facts and truths, but when they use them to break just laws or harm innocent people, then their truth seems far from excellent; if nothing else they cause peoples’ taxes to be wasted on prisons and police forces. So, both reliable facts and their future results are needed for excellent truth, otherwise we have no way to judge even people like Hitler and Mussolini. That pragmatic model of truth became an alternative to the standard correspondence one. So, what were some of the main causes of Christian evolution in the 1st century? (Hint: it didn’t have anything to do with stocks and bonds.)
We'll look mainly at those 4 early Christian models of truth called the gospels. First, however, to once and for all clear away all doubts and confusions, I offer yet another linguistically lame limerick. Either it'll reveal the absolute Truth about truth once and for all, or confuse everyone; I'm just not very sure which. As usual the truth is probably somewhere in between.
Seeking truth a young man like a saint,
Sought mightily what it is, and ain't.
But as he filled his head
He grinned and said,
Damned if it ain't the useful pictures we paint.
Now who says the lowly limerick isn’t an important philosophic tool?
Conflicting Models of Christian Truth
What is truth? To see how it’s an organically growing and evolving set of accepted truths, we can focus on some recent work of modern New Testament scholars. Much of it is very interesting, especially about events in Christianity’s early 1st century, when many of its models of truth were forming and evolving. How did people want to see Jesus and what was his real message? For example, soon after Jesus’s death, new convert Paul of Tarsus began building his first model of truth. To him Jesus was the son of god who died for everyone’s sins and would soon return to rule in a new earthly kingdom. The earliest gospel of Mark, probably written soon after 70 CE, also reflects this idea: “… some … standing here … will not taste death before they see the kingdom of god already come …” Mk 9: 1
We also learn from its geographic mistakes the writer didn’t know the area and so couldn’t have been in Jesus’s inner circle; almost certainly he used some other sources like the Book of Daniel as well as what’s called today the Q document. That was a collection of sayings and actions of Jesus. What’s more, based on its style and word choice, Mark’s author was probably a Greek-speaking non-Jewish convert to the new Jesus movement, probably living in Syria, perhaps Antioch. In any case, like Paul, Mark’s model of Christian truth mentioned one of the most troubling ideas in Christian theology, namely, Jesus would soon return to earth to rule over a new kingdom of god. Many Jews believed they were in fact living in the so-called End Times, when massive kinds of destruction would then give way to a new kingdom of god. However, as Jesus’s return and the kingdom idea kept not happening, later writers like Matthew, Luke, and John would either keep postponing the event, or even say it was wrong!
However, the idea was useful to many moderate Christians and so has remained a part of their truth-model. For one thing, it gave hope to all those suffering poor people who wanted to feel their lives would be saved quickly from all of life’s stresses, pains, and frustrations. In leper colonies, for example, people lived like shunned animals, and outside of them life wasn’t much better. The Roman occupiers were taxing people heavily, and often making life a hand-to-mouth affair. Also, when scientific learning and its reliable facts were still in an infant stage, so to speak, most people were still very vulnerable to natural and social dangers like violence, disease, and brutality. Such human-based problems continued challenging people like Paul to build a more hopeful model of truth; he wanted to use Christian truth to build more churches where people could feel better about life, as he understood the word better. As we've seen, long into prehistoric times group and individual spirit-rituals like healing and burial ceremonies were practical ways of solving human problems; often they seemed to work, and so continued on.
Modern religious scholar Randel Helms’s book Who Wrote The Gospels has painted a very interesting and convincing new model of gospel evolution in its all- important 1st century, much of which I’ve used here. It’s a fascinating new look at how the gospels evolved, what philosophic ideas were actively used, and who probably wrote them. Helms naturalizes many of the events surrounding the gospels by pointing to some obvious inconsistencies and citing other sources used by different writers. As a result, it becomes easier to see how Christian models of truth were the result of a completely naturalistic evolution.
How much has scholarly thinking about the gospels changed? Some scholars like John Crossen in his book Jesus even questions the story about Jesus’s appearing before Pilate, like the gospels all said he did. In all probability, he says, no high ranking Roman governor like Pilate would've interrupted his nap, much less his breakfast, to deal with a lowly pious Jewish carpenter who upset the religious establishment in Jerusalem by whipped some Temple money-changers and also claimed to be the long-awaited anointed one – the messiah. In fact, several such messiahs had already been killed before and also after Jesus lived. To even low-ranking Roman officials such people were seditious rabble rousers and so should be cruelly killed as a sign of shear Roman power and might. In short, even minor Roman officials felt such people deserved crucifixion; only the emperor could give power to anyone. Eventually, however, the Christian model of truth became attractive to Romans as well, and so the gospels said the Jews were really responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion; for centuries they were hunted and killed as Christ killers.
Obviously we have no independent evidence Jesus was condemned by someone besides Pilate, but it shows how far some modern biblical scholars are prepared to go to paint a more naturalistic model of what most probably happened to Jesus the man. In fact, such scholarship reached another plateau in the early 1900s with Joseph Klausner’s Jesus of Nazareth. Incidentally, cleansing the outer business section of the Temple was Jesus’s only act of social defiance, prompting scholar Reza Aslan to picture Jesus as an early model of a growing radical Zealot movement in Israel; only 2 religious sects are never criticized in the gospels, the Essenes and the Zealots. Even Luke records Jesus asking at the last supper how many swords they have, as well as telling them to get more! Lk 22: 36-39. At least 2 questions then become obvious: why would someone who really predicted his death in Jerusalem have need of any swords, and was dying there really Jesus’s intention? If so, why did both Mark and Matthew record him crying out from the cross, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” Mk 15: 34 and Mt 27: 46? Both of them record how Jesus felt betrayed and forsaken by god as he was dying. In fact, it was such a troubling fact about Jesus to later writers like Luke and John they promptly changed it. For John, Jesus' last calm words on the cross become "It is fulfilled." Jn. 19: 30. And Luke rewrites it to read: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Lk 23: 46, as if Jesus really meant to die in Jerusalem. What really happened at the crucifixion? The gospels seem to contradict each other.
According to the traditional synoptic gospel models of Jesus in Mark, Matthew, and Luke, for a short time around 30 CE Jesus performed many miraculous signs and taught many religious ideas to show people he really was the messiah-savior. Many times he’s referred to as rabbi, a Hebrew word for teacher. Again, many Jews were expecting a messiah to first destroy their Roman oppressors, and then usher in a new earthly kingdom of heaven, ruled by Jews. Written almost certainly after 70 CE, those 3 gospels basically describe a Pauline model of truth: Faith in Jesus and the church’s ideas are what’s most needed for salvation. Jesus was the true messiah who founded a number of new rituals, created many miraculous signs, purposely let himself be arrested in Jerusalem, willingly suffered the horrible death of crucifixion as a payment to god for mankind's sinfulness, rose from the dead, assumed a new bodily form, dwelt among his disciples for a while, ascended into heaven, and would soon return to judge all people and create an earthly kingdom of god. Just believing those ideas would entitle anyone to eternal bliss after death. Those 3 gospels show a progression from Jesus as a Prophet to a divine being. Paul too believed Jesus would be returning to earth soon, and establishing such a kingdom, however, many scholars today now feel the entire last chapter of the earliest gospel Mark, the resurrection chapter, was itself merely added later to the original document, to give people yet another sign Jesus was in fact the hoped-for messiah.
Again, however, the more time passed and the world stayed the same miserable place it had been for most people, a newer model of Christian truth was needed. What was really the truth about this new kingdom Christians and Jesus returning soon to found it? The earliest synoptic gospel Mark was almost certainly written soon after all of Palestine was sacked and burned by the Romans in 70 CE. The patriotic Zealot movement had grown since Jesus’s day, and began openly revolting again Roman rule. Many like Mark’s author saw the resulting war as the beginning of the so-called End Times, but still Jesus didn’t return. Mark alone names some 70 events the End Times were near. So, a new model of that Christian idea would be needed; what exactly was the truth about a second coming?
What’s more, Mark’s author seems to have based many of his ideas on still earlier sources, like the Book of Daniel and a source called Q; quelle is the German word for source. After all, the longer the second coming was delayed, the more gospels writers needed to depend on earlier works describing what happened. In any case, however, actual events on the ground showed Jesus’s second coming still wasn’t a reality, even as late as 80 CE. In 66 and again in 70 Roman soldiers almost completely destroyed Israel, the Zealot movement, and most of the people living there; still Jesus did not return. In fact, with Rome’s victory the conservative Jerusalem branch of the new Jesus movement, led by Jesus’s own brother James, was destroyed, thus opening the way for Paul’s mission to the gentiles to become dominant. After all, the Roman Empire had many more poor and suffering people than Israel. Before he died, probably in the 60s, Paul would declare Jewish law useless to new Christians.
Still, over time, the similar synoptic gospels, and eventually a much more mystical model of Jesus’s truth called John’s gospel, were accepted as being divinely inspired, even though there were many other contradictions as well. So, in what sense could they all be divinely inspired? For example, Mark described Jesus cursing a fig tree, and its withering the next day. Matthew, however, wanted to a more powerful Jesus, and so says the fig tree withered immediately. In fact, most people already believed in miraculous events, and so the contradiction was easily overlooked.
Another major contradiction between the synoptics and John involved what’s called the Secrecy Motif. All the synoptic writers seemed obsessed in describing Jesus as repeatedly telling his disciples not to tell anyone about all the miraculous signs of his power, even about raising dead people to life again! Why would he do such a thing? How could Jesus possibly believe his followers could keep such tremendous events secret and not tell anyone? Today perhaps a billion cell phones would instantly light up if even one such event actually happened. And even after Jesus’s death some women are told to tell no one about his own rising from the dead! Both Matthew and Luke quickly change that story; in them the women hurry and tell the disciples. But in the gospel of John, however, the Secrecy Motif is completely absent! From the very beginning of his ministry others and Jesus openly proclaim his messiah-ship! It was forcefully declared by John the Baptist at the beginning of Jesus’s mission. “Look, there is the lamb of god.” Jn 1: 36. And “The woman said to (Jesus), “I know that Messiah – that is Christ – is coming; and … he will explain everything.’ Jesus said, ‘That is who I am, I who speak to you.’ Jn 4: 25-26. Clearly, the belief in divine inspiration for all the gospels seems to be more of a selling-point to potential converts than anything else.
Why have such obvious gospel contradictions and problems been overlooked for centuries? Again, almost no one in the world could read, and so for thousands of years such contradictions were never mentioned by religious leaders who simply told vulnerable young children their version of religious truth. And it wasn’t just Christians, or even religious leaders. Not only Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish leaders told innocent children about their religious models, but until only recently even secular democracies and public schools regularly taught children god is helping their country fight their enemies, most especially the godless communists. As a result, children continue believing they should obey their government and fight whenever they’re told to!
Many more contradictory ideas could be cited within the synoptics. For example, both Mark and Matthew feel more comfortable calling Jesus the son of man, rather than the son of god. At Mark 6: 4 even Jesus refers to himself as a prophet. Also, Mark describes Jesus as questioning someone calling him good; only god is good he says. Mk 10: 18. Matthew, however, changes the story; Jesus replies why do you ask me that? Obviously, to those who wanted a model of Jesus as the son of god wouldn’t want to repeat a story about Jesus denying his divinity! In such ways other gospel contradictions can be easily seen. Again, most people already worshipped gods, so why not a son of god too? For centuries most everyone was educated by priests teaching orthodox ideas, not actually reading the gospels themselves, so such contradictions weren’t even felt. In the early 1500s Martin Luther would openly question obeying his church’s ideas after reading the gospels themselves. One result was the Protestant Reformation.
John’s Gospel
This brings us to the very intriguing and mysterious gospel according to John; it’s almost completely outside the synoptic tradition itself. Perhaps a few decades after Jesus died, most probably in Alexandria’s Jewish community, a number of Jews began recognizing Jesus as the hoped-for messiah. As they did one writer would construct what today is called the Signs gospel, somewhere around 50 CE; it’s a document now lost, but embedded in John’s gospel itself. Who embedded it? The first writer of John’s gospel embedded it; he was a much more subtle mystical Jewish convert to the Jesus movement. While mentioning a few of Jesus’s miracles to help convince Jews Jesus was indeed the hoped-for anointed messiah, he also wrote a much more mystical version of Jesus and his mission, one that was yet again rewritten some years later, probably in a more moderate Christian community, perhaps Ephesus in western Turkey. His version of John’s gospel is the one we have today.
In the mystical version of John, the ideas of salvation and a second coming are radically changed. That version is thought to end with Chapter 20 of the gospel. In general, it describes a few miraculous signs Jesus performed, but in it Jesus is now portrayed as fulfilling all the scriptural predictions, and thus becoming a new Moses who was both a teacher and healer. However, that model of salvation was profoundly individualistic in its thinking. Eventually, it wasn’t acceptable to those moderate Christians who wanted more emphasis on religious rituals; without them no church could survive for very long. And so over its mystical ideas another writer rather clumsily added ideas much more acceptable to church rituals and institutional growth. For churches outside of Egypt such rituals made it easier to keep people faithful and loyal; religious practice promotes religious feelings.
With the first writer of John, mystical Platonic and Gnostic ideas were added to the Christian model of truth, where they remain to this day. As we’ve already seen, for Plato the body is in fact dangerous to those who seek to know eternal Spirit-Truth; Gnostics merely continued using that idea. For both Gnostics and Neo-Platonists, that kind of mystical thinking was eternal Truth. In that model the spirit was seen as everything, and the flesh nothing. Thus, John’s mystic writer offered a radically different model of Christian truth and Jesus’s mission. In fact, Jesus rising from the dead was the only sign people needed to become truly born again. There was no need for a second coming or any rituals for that matter. A saving spirit was already in each of us, just as Plato believed spirit-ideas were already within us at birth. Clearly, such mystical ideas were too radical to keep a church growing amongst poor uneducated people. In John’s 21st chapter he even admits to being such an author. His rewritten version helped make church rituals important, like baptism and eating bread and wine during their meetings; they were said to be necessary to get certain spiritual help and rewards. After all, such rituals were already in place in Turkey and Greece within the first Christian communities founded by Paul, and eventually became the orthodox truth.
John’s mystical writer offers a radically different picture of the so-called kingdom of god. Jesus, no doubt, grew up in a devoutly pious Jewish family and culture, and being the first born male was ‘given to god’ as it were. That made it easier to teach all younger brothers and sisters. Naturally such actions guided the formation of all his habits and ideas, one of which was something called the Kingdom of God. However, describing what that idea meant exactly became another challenge for early Christian gospel writers; it could be used in at least 2 different ways? Should it be used to describe an earthly kingdom soon to come? Or should it be used in a more democratic way, to mean something much more personal and internal? What exactly was this kingdom of god? What was The Truth about it? It seemed the most Jesus could do was describe it metaphorically, with simple parables uneducated people would easily understand. It can come suddenly like a thief in the night, or it’s like a small mustard seed becoming a huge tree. But exactly what did those ideas mean? Was it an external events, or what it something completely internal? Those were questions followers would like to have answers to. Slowly, over many decades, Church leaders at conferences would democratically vote on what the Truth really was.
Scholars like Helms now think soon after Jesus’s death a much more mystical Alexandrian Jewish convert to the new Jesus-movement began writing what came to be called the gospel of John. Mystical gnostic ideas were already popular in Egypt at the time, and so at least there his model of Christian truth was much more popular, even picturing Jesus as one who could even easily pass through walls! To one who was born again, the flesh meant nothing, the spirit meant everything. Thus, in such a model all miraculous signs merely pointed to the reality of feeling saved, and thus not needing any more rituals or ideas about a final judgment, a second coming, being raised from the dead when the world ends, living in an earthly Kingdom of God, and being baptized. In fact, such a picture of salvation meant the end of traditional Christian theology!
Probably writing within that new Jewish Christian community at Alexandria, a very devout and intelligent convert used such ideas to build his own model of Jesus and its meaning for people here and now. It remains a large part of the gospel to this day. It celebrated salvation as happening here and now, not later and after some hoped for second coming of Jesus. At one inductive flash of insight, he did away with all the problems of the second coming, like when it would happen. No doubt, he also used the Signs document, but for him all talk about miraculous signs and wonder-working completely missed the real truth of Jesus' salvation teaching. With his version of salvation as an inner feeling, there would be no need for a second coming, no need to believe people should eat Jesus' flesh and drink his blood, even if it was only bread and wine, and no need to be baptized. All those rituals were not only useless but distracted attention from Jesus’s real message – the kingdom of god is already within us! In short, the most important thing for John’s 1st writer was one's inner feelings about being saved; those were the key to true salvation, and being released from death; everything else was really of no use, including the world and our physical bodies. The most real spirit-kingdom of god was already within everyone! Like Plato, spirits were the highest form of reality; the natural world was but a mere shadowy reflection of that powerful spirit-world, and thus was an illusion at best. Thus, merely have faith, believe in Jesus, feel born again, and you will enter that kingdom now. Everything of the flesh and this world is really of no importance whatsoever; all that mattered was feeling the spirit's presence in us. For John’s 1st writer Jesus was never even baptized and was simply referred to as a sacrificial lamb of god. Later, both Augustine and Martin Luther would come to feel that model of Christian truth, namely, one based on faith alone! To Augustine too, Plato and the Neo-Platonists saw religious truth better than anyone. Incidentally, Friedrich Nietzsche thought John’s gospel was the most accurate picture of Jesus, and so concluded early Christianity was really a western version of Buddhism.
For John's 1st writer, synoptic gospels had gotten Jesus' message all mucked up with talk of signs and miracles. As experience was showing, for all those trying to guess when the second coming would happen, there would always be a problem with making one’s ideas of truth actually correspond to reality! And the more that correspondence didn’t happen, the more they would thus miss the deeper spiritual meaning of Jesus’s life, namely the kingdom of god within them! So again, what was the truth about Jesus? If supposedly divinely inspired writers disagreed so radically among themselves, then who could one trust for the truth? In any case, 2 rather different models of Jesus became accepted as the eternal Truth, when in fact they conflicted with each other in fundamental ways.
In fact, centuries earlier Plato said basically the same thing as John’s 1st writer. Everyone is born with some spirit-ideas, and it’s up to each of us to discover what their truth is. Centuries later such mystical assumptions were helping build what in Jesus’s day was called a Gnostic model of religion, one as different from Aristotle as John was from Mark’s, Mathew’s, and Luke’s moderate ones! Another example can be cited. In John Jesus is bold and assertive with Pilate, rather than meek and humble as the synoptics portrayed him. “Pilate said, ‘So, then you are a king?’ Jesus replied, ‘It is you who say I am a king. I was born for this, I came into the world for this, to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice. ‘Truth?’ asked Pilate. ‘What is truth?’ Jn 18: 37-38. Jesus does not answer. For such mystics truth is not something discussed; it’s something lived and felt! How could he explain to a rationalistic non-Jew what a mystic feeling of salvation was like?
Again, however, what was THE Truth about Jesus? What really happened? How can supposedly god-inspired gospel writers possibly build such different versions of the same events? And these certainly weren’t the only contradictions the early Church faced. The apostle Paul, for example, wrote some epistle-letters describing his model of Christian truth and Jesus’ mission. He was both a very well educated Roman citizen and Jewish Rabbi, or teacher, a title, by the way, often applied to Jesus himself. Was Jesus the man merely a pious Pharisaic Rabbi with a messianic consciousness?
In any case, Paul knew the legends about a Jewish messiah who would suffer and die to liberate Israelites from sin and soon rule in a new earthly kingdom of god. Even though he had never met Jesus, and in fact had persecuted many of his followers, he eventually came to feel Jesus was the hoped–for Jewish messiah, called to save the Jews first and then the gentiles. “As it says in scripture, ‘Anyone who is upright through faith will live.’” Romans 1: 17. So, what was the truth about salvation? Was mere faith needed, or were rituals and good works needed too? Such a dualistic tension has been a part of Christian truth from the beginning.
So, for moderate Christians wanting church rituals and Jesus worship, something had to be done with all such mystic versions of Jesus’s mission, especially gospels like John’s. That model was too dangerous for church-building Christians. Even though most everyone couldn’t read, and thus didn’t feel such contradictions, many people could. A re-write of John was in order. Helms calls John’s second writer John 2; his additions would put many moderate ideas back into John’s first edition, and can be seen clearly in the gospel we have today. Two examples can be mentioned; they occur at John 12:47 and 12:49, and at 5:19 and 5:22.
Probably by the end of the first century, then, it seemed obvious to Church leaders the first version of John’s gospel needed a re-write. It suggested gospels like Mark’s, Matthew’s, and Luke’s missed the whole point of salvation and Jesus's mission. For mystical Christians at Alexandria the mystical personal model of salvation felt best; Jesus’s being raised from the dead was all the proof people needed to know their own spirit was the most important thing of all; only it could help someone feel saved and born again here and now, rather than at some unknown future time. Even looking for miraculous signs merely made it more difficult to feel saved here and now. Like Plato, the kingdom of truth was already inside each of us waiting to feel ‘born again’, waiting to grasp and behold the everlasting Truth. That was John’s model of Christian Truth; its only knowledge was the feeling of salvation; all such reported signs and wonders merely pointed to the reality of a spirit-world, just as conservative Plato had said centuries before. Even later church writers said such mystic Christian had been living in Alexandria.
There were also problems picturing Jesus himself. What was he really like? Was he merely a healing and teaching human prophet profoundly disillusioned when he found himself being crucified, as both Mark and Matthew often portray him? Or was he a truly divine being? We’ve seen how Mark pictured Jesus as always secretive about his mission and his healing miracles, often telling his disciples to tell no one what he’d done. But they also report acts of a rather chauvinistic human Jewish rabbi, like, for example, confining his mission only to the House of Israel! In fact, both Mark and Matthew had no trouble describing Jesus’s outright contempt for gentiles – religiously pious Jewish patriots like Jesus saw unclean gentile Romans and tax-collectors as sinners; they even report him calling a gentile woman’s child a dog! Mk 7: 27. Such events clearly show how humanly Jewish Jesus really was. He also expressly tells his disciples not to go into gentile houses or territory with their message of repentance! Mt 10: 5-6. John’s 1st writer, however, wanted a different model of Jesus. As we’ve seen, in his gospel the secrecy motif vanishes, as does the ‘dog’ event even in Luke. No doubt, John’s 1st writer felt such a model would more easily convince others of its truth. So again, what was the truth about Jesus? Incidentally, recently Albert Schweitzer concluded knowing who Jesus really was was impossible from the gospels alone.
Such an evolving model of Jesus as painted by the synoptic writers often shows a human side. For example, Jesus certainly seems to know what the very dangerous police-state reality was around him. He probably realized even to speak against the government was dangerous, let alone proclaim his own messiah kingship openly and boldly, even if it was a religious kingship not of this world; quite probably, embedded in their portraits lies the truth about Jesus the man, as was his bewildered anguish from the cross. After all, his own ‘cousin’, the Essene John the Baptist, was beheaded for merely criticizing his Rome-appointed governor! Those kinds of events are probably accurate. The synoptic writers also report Jesus finally revealing his messianic mission to his own curious disciples on a mountaintop far to the north, in what is now Lebanon, again, telling them to tell no one! At that point they began seeing Jesus differently, namely as a messiah figure. John simply wanted to see Jesus differently, in order to voice the mystic feelings of a Jewish audience in Alexandria.
Was John's gospel really re-written? No doubt, most anyone can verify it for themselves. In fact it's obvious in many places, 2 of which were mentioned earlier. What’s more, many scholars now believe the entire last chapter of John, as well as many other places throughout the gospel, show clear evidence of a 2nd writer; in fact he even admits it in the last chapter! In fact, in the 2 examples mentioned above, at John 12 and 5, it’s clear how the truth of a mystic Jesus for John’s 1st writer was immediately changed to portray a less radical Jesus, thus making church rituals useful to avoid being judged badly and condemned at the Last Judgment.
In any case, with John’s 2nd writer the document finally became more church and ritual friendly. Probably a few decades after 90 CE, the first version of John was rewritten, making it more compatible with Paul's earlier church-friendly ideas. Thus, in spite of all the internal differences within the 3 synoptic gospels, and the differences within John itself, they all became divinely inspired Christian truth -- said to be the inspired ‘word of god’. In fact, they were the 4 chosen from many other Christian versions of the truth.
Obviously, for many centuries after that, such ritual-based models of Christian truth were useful. They encouraged people to actively worship Jesus and support the Church wholeheartedly; they also show how subconscious uses of Behavioral psychology were also commonly known. No doubt, church leaders sensed how the more people actively practiced church rituals, the more they felt their truth, and the more hopeful their lives became, at least on the inside. However, as Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus used different rituals to produce different feelings, it showed, once again, all such models of truth depend on habits and actions, and often, much too often, on military actions as well.
Needless to say, any kind of destructive uses for religious truth were definitely not the kinds of uses Dewey would call excellent or intelligent, unless of course situations like self-defense called for it. He was too much of a liberal democrat for that; everyone should be free to worship the god they feel, rather than anyone else’s god. For him, religious variety is the truth. Without feeling that model of religious truth, it remained easy for Muslims to conduct religious wars in Asia, Africa, and Europe in the 700s CE, and for Christians to go on Crusades after 1,000 CE. And of course European intra-Christian wars in the 1500s and 1600s largely determined religious truth with military might; which army would god really favor?
In short, because there was no objective way to test such spirit-models of truth and see their results, their feelings of absolute Truth too remained based merely on behavioral habits and feelings learned in childhood, which often included war and killing non-believers. The more children practiced their religious habits, the more deeply they were felt. As a result, many religious adults never learned to practice the religious excellence of love their leaders often talked about and said was the highest ethical excellence; the greatest of these is love, said Paul. Love meant tolerantly respecting the other person, and certainly not killing them for believing different ideas.
Thus, many religious models of truth have been repeatedly used to justify violent and destructive actions, sometimes for centuries, and as we’ve seen with Augustine and the Donatists. Even Hindus and Muslims have warred against each other, justified by their religious ideas. In that respect, then, religious models of truth weren’t much different from Caesar's using the idea of Roman cultural superiority to justify slaughtering thousands of Celts in France a few decades before Jesus was born. Hitler’s holocaust, Stalin’s purges, Pol Pot’s brutality, and even the Vietnam carnage were also justified with their own secular models of absolute truth; god was on the side of those battling those who denied god existed. The results of such dogmatic thinking about absolute Truth have slowly been waking people up to how such models of truth are used to make a few arms makers wealthier, while killing and crippling many others. Let’s hope those people now have enough social power never allow such warfare again. Some religious leaders still don’t care who gets killed, as long as they can keep defending commonly accepted religious ideas of truth, or religious-based secular ideas of truth