Page 1.3: Sections 16-20
16. SCIENTIFIC MODELS OF TRUTH
Gradually, more peace-oriented, tolerant, and civilized people realized one cause of such continuing and mindless violence was the ancient model of religious truth as THE ONLY truth. The more people were taught only their religious ideas were The Truth, the more likely they were to act intolerantly and even violently towards others. Even today, in 2014, we still see examples of such behavior in the Middle East, where conservative and moderate models of religious truth are still taught to children on a wide scale. Only slowly after 1600 did more and more intelligent people in the West begin letting go of such models of truth, and begin building models of scientific truth.
At first, however, Natural Law was seen as just as eternal and unchanging as religious truth! Early in modern science’s history they were called Laws of Nature, eternally true and forever the same. What’s more, they were based on the assumption some natural objects and events are eternally the same, namely time, space, and matter. Democritus himself probably would have agreed with that assumption. What changed was the method of learning. For liberal scientists experimental testing became the new model of learning such laws, rather than mere reasoning. Such laws were seen as eternal and unchanging as spirit-objects. In short, after 1600, the quest for scientific certainty became more of a felt-possibility, even though attention shifted from spirit-objects to natural objects and events. Naturally some objects and events had to be elevated to the status of eternal and unchanging, or else scientific certainty couldn’t be established. Thus, events like time, space, and matter became as eternal and unchanging as spirit-objects were felt to be. So, once again, the latest lame limerick will help clarify what happened to that idea.
The search for Truth was one of Stanley’s antics.
Surely modern science could cure his panics.
But his jaw sharply dropped,
And his eyeballs popped,
When he learned about something called quantum mechanics!
Two Weaknesses in the Correspondence Model of Truth
In fact, even in ancient times liberal skeptics had already worked out the basic outlines of a more pragmatic model of truth. Experience teaches us natural events often have patterns to them, and so some ideas are more probable than others. However, as religious conservatives gained more and more control of education and social institutions, a correspondence model became the dominant one. Thus, all during the Middle Ages most everyone wanted to believe their religious, educational, and ethical ideas corresponded exactly with nature’s eternal spirit-objects. They didn’t want to see their ideas as merely mental tools use by a ruling elite to largely control their actions, some of which were useful for solving problems and overcoming challenges. They didn’t want to believe their religious ideas were created by their ruling classes to make their living better than most everyone else’s, and those few who did were often quickly eliminated, one way or another. In the 1300s one example was the rebellion of John Ball, and in the 1600s the so-called Levelers were another such movement. In short, with a conservative model of truth, scientific learning was almost completely ignored as a liberating model of truth. Faith in spirit-objects was to be maintained by all means.
Eventually, however, 2 main weaknesses were seen in the old correspondence model of truth. One was a growing awareness of nature itself, and the other was centered in mathematics. For example, how can anyone know their ideas actually correspond to eternal truth in an always-changing nature unless they’re tested and shown to be valid? In short, after 1,000, the idea of actual verification was becoming stronger and more widespread. How can we know if any idea is absolutely certain and eternal in an always changing nature unless it’s tested? How can we know for certain even the sun will rise tomorrow until it actually does, or that gravity is a universally true idea unless we test the idea? In fact, the farther we go out in space the weaker gravity becomes, eventually giving way to repulsion actions, rather than attraction actions; our universe looks like it's expanding, not contracting. Courts too began demanding actual evidence too, rather than trials of ordeal to settle one’s guilt; thus juries were used more often.
There was also a problem with mathematical truth. Many felt math ideas were about as certain as one could get, and yet what place could they have in a correspondence model of truth. In what sense can math ideas be eternally true when all its ideas of perfect circles, squares, and angles don’t correspond to anything? There are no perfect circles, squares, numbers, or angles in nature! In fact, the results of math reasoning, like geometric theorems, were only true and certain if their assumptions were true and certain, but even they too corresponded to no natural objects. If A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A is bigger than C, but where are such eternal objects like A, B, C? There were none. And if they don’t exist, then isn’t math truth too merely another form of human art? So it seems as if their certainty depends on their consistency with their assumptions, not outer events. In the real world there are no exact lines and angles; they’re only roughly approximate. Plato saved mathematics from such thinking by saying its ideas corresponded to an entire realm of eternal and unchanging math-like Spirit-Ideas. In that realm there are indeed perfect circles, and parallel lines never meet. But the more experimental testing demanded some kind of objective evidence for objects, the weaker became such Platonic ideas. Little wonder, for many conservative and moderate kinds of people it looked like science's experimental learning art was indeed the devil's own work, at least until it helped heal their gout and other diseases. In fact, in the 1200s the Church created the Inquisition to stop the growth of all such experimentation, even if it meant arresting the own priests like Roger Bacon.
Early Scientific Models of Truth
While such debates were on-going in European universities, individual scientists in their own home-labs continued learning more about nature, and feeling they were discovering nature’s already existing eternal natural laws. After all, for thousands of years most everyone, rulers and peasants, were taught to believe there were some kinds of eternal and unchanging truth. It not, then how could they explain why nature keeps moving in the same ways year after year, and century after century. Their measuring tools were crude, to say the least, and so it seems as if nature really does have some constant causes in it. Plato called them spirit-objects, Aristotle called them Forms, and early modern scientists called them laws of nature.
Thus, in Western Europe it seemed perfectly reasonable to assume nature too has some eternal and unchanging objects and events, and they can be used to discover nature’s eternal truth. What is the Truth about nature? Is it really a feudal hierarchy of increasingly powerful objects, like Plato and Aristotle said it was? Was all of life confined to the same species for all time, like Aristotle said it was? Or, was nature merely a collection of always evolving, growing, and breaking apart atoms, as Democritus and the Atomists said? Was the truth about nature merely a collection of reliable small truths, describing with math equations how different objects act under different conditions? Could experimental learning really reveal eternal Laws of Nature, and if so, then upon what unchanging natural objects and events must they be based? And of course in back of such questions was the same question about religious truth: What’s the best use for reliable scientific kinds of truth? Are they best used to empower merely a small class of wealthy people, so they can keep taking more and more money from the people, and building more and more weapons, or should science’s truths be used to help everyone live a more healthful and enjoyable life? Conservatives of course opted for the first alternative, and defended what’s called a laissez-faire economic model described by Adam Smith in a 1776 book called The Wealth of Nations. Liberals like John Dewey and Francis Bacon opted for a much more humane 2nd alternative, namely the wealth produced by people should be shared by people, rather than concentrated in the hands of small wealthy upper class. Such concentrated wealth made it easier for them to control the political system and thus keep increasing their wealth, power, and control. That real struggle between those 2 competing economic models of truth continues to this day, with the conservatives winning most of the battles fought since the US was founded in 1776.
No doubt, the growth of modern science was slow. Not many skeptical questions were asked of those who were experimenting with different ideas. Conservative sensed a threat to their power, and so had to clamp down on anyone who disagreed with them. Even in the 1500s Copernicus (d. 1543) had built a very different model of astronomic truth than had been accepted as eternal truth for thousands of years, and yet some 70 later in Renaissance Italy Galileo was charged with teaching such a system. Even so, early modern scientists like Galileo and Isaac Newton were confident such natural laws could be discovered with the help of ideas like time, space, and matter. Many began feeling experimental testing was the best way of discovering and proving which ideas corresponded exactly to what was really happening out there. In short, many still pictured truth like Aristotle had; they wanted to see scientific truth as eternal and constant, so they continued assuming scientific ideas can correspond exactly to eternal and constant natural objects. Upon those naturalistic ‘rocks’ Newtonian science was based. Even though Galileo and Newton's ideas about Natural Laws were shown to be much more reliable than Aristotle’s, they still accepted his general corresponding model of truth as unchanging and eternal; scientists merely discover already existing Truth!
As a result they began thinking some new scientific ideas, like gravity too for example, was a constant force in nature. In fact, moderate German philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804) thought Newton’s work revealed such eternal and unchanging Truth; they must be true because his equations could predict where a planet would be before it got there! The more Newton’s equations helped predict natural events BEFORE they happened, the more eternal and certain became scientific models of natural Truth! Hallelujah! A religion of science was possible, or so they thought! Thus, for one system of eternal spirit-truth, early modern scientists substituted eternal natural truth! Just as Plato had based his model of Truth on constant Spirit-Ideas, so too Newton based his model of scientific Truth on constant and eternally unchanging space, time, and matter; they were as constant and eternal as Plato said spirit-ideas were!
Still, even before Smith published his book, modern skeptics like David Hume had some very challenging questions for all those who believed natural laws could even be known experimentally! How can, he asked, any kind of natural law be proved in an always changing nature when we couldn’t even see one cause producing one result? All we see is, say, a pot of water eventually boiling after being put on a fire; we never see the actual cause of the water boiling! What we call nature law is, thus, merely our habit feeling such laws must exist! In any case, however, any idea of natural law must be tested again and again, to see if it’s still reliable and useful? And so, as we saw earlier, with such questions the word ‘agnostic’ was eventually invented in the 1800s. In an always changing natural world there’s always an element of probability in all models of truth, so Hume felt the only things we can know for certain are our own ideas and sense impressions; it’s raining now, or sugar tastes sweet. In short, it seemed as if the only absolute truth is we can never know absolute Truth. So, how can we really be sure even objects like matter, and events like time and space, really are constant and unchanging? Kant had redd Hume’s work and built a very complex model of psychology to guarantee Newton had really discovered certain and unchanging natural Truth. He called his book the Critique of Pure Reason, but as he admits in the Introduction, he assumed scientific certainty existed even before writing.
But did it? Where was the evidence? The great advantage science had over spirit-certainties was its ideas could be physically tested for their results! However, such testing of Newton’s assumptions had to wait for the development of much more accurate measuring and experimenting tools in the late 1800s, and also the discovery of radioactive substances. What could possibly be making those little clumps of radium glow all by themselves? Once such measuring tools and substances were available, however, it was just a question of time before scientists could show even time, space, and matter weren’t constant objects or events! Even they varied in different circumstances.
For example, something was happening in radioactive matter that was producing light all by itself! In fact, as scientists discovered more about the nature of light, and what happens to matter at very high speeds, the easier it became for young scientists like Albert Einstein (d. 1955) to build a much different model of scientific truth than Newton had built. A whole new Relativity model came to be built as scientists learned more and more about how nature acts and reacts. So, again, it became necessary to ask: What really is the Truth about nature? Is nature completely knowable, or is it indefinite and unknowable much of the time? And what’s more, even if we think we know the truth about something, don’t we still have to test our ideas and feelings again and again, to make sure they’re reliable? After all, as millions of people have begun realizing, nature is continually changing, thus giving an experimental feeling to all our actions and ideas.
In fact, even Einstein himself became rather shocked and disappointed by the results of his own Relativity model of nature. He too believed science could know all of nature’s truths; his famous saying was ‘god does not play dice with the universe’, meaning of course science could know everything exactly! Unfortunately for Einstein, nature never heard of such ideas. Like Newton, he too wanted to believe all natural movements could be known with absolute certainty. He didn’t want to believe the so-called laws of nature, like the law of cause-and-effect, didn’t apply to atomic particles just as certainly as it did to everyday objects and actions, and yet experimental evidence in the early 1900s showed they didn’t obey such a fundamental law of science. Even his most famous equation, E = mc2, seemed to show nature does have some eternally truthful natural laws. After all, it was happening every second in all the universe’s stars, and in nuclear reactions too.
In short, Einstein too wanted scientific truth to be exact and always knowable. Only slowly, with more atomic experimentation, were a new set of probable natural laws necessary to describe their movements. In them certainty was excluded from the realm of possibility! A new quantum physics model of matter and energy soon revealed an atomic world in many ways moving completely differently from the larger world we live in. In fact, in both of those worlds no one could really know for certain what would happen from one moment to the next. Human knowledge was always limited to one’s ideas, but those ideas really didn’t know everything going on in the world!
What do such results mean for the quest for certainty mankind has been engaged in for thousands of years? Well, it meant all of us live in a psychic bubble where degrees of probability are felt, from the highly improbable to the almost certain. The more scientists saw the results of their atomic experiments, the more even natural “laws” like cause-and-effect didn’t exist! For example, it looked like one atomic particle could be in 2 places at the same time!! – something only drug takers might see every once in a while. Thus, there’s always some indeterminacy of truth at both the natural and atomic levels of nature. Because no one can possibly know everything that’s happening, no one can predict exactly what will happen; nature is changing too rapidly for that to happen! So indeterminacy seems to be the truth about nature. Soon after scientists published their findings about atomic movements in the late 1920s, Dewey published his book The Quest for Certainty.
17. DEWEY’S PRAGMATIC MODEL OF TRUTH – PART 1
In this and the following section we look a little more closely at Dewey’s pragmatic model of truth, to see what is looks like in this section, and to see how it can be used to keep improving life in the next section.
As we’ve seen, even in ancient Greece 2 fundamentally different models of truth were built: the conservative and moderate correspondence model, and a more liberal pragmatic model of truth. The first claimed to provide eternally certain truth for some ideas, while the pragmatic model was more fluid, and thus more useful in an always changing world. Conservatives like Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas, and moderates like Aristotle wanted to see the best truth as an exact correspondence between their ideas and already existing eternal objects. That model of truth has inspired philosophers and theologians since then to know absolutely certain Truth, even though those objects often existed in a completely non-material spirit-realm. However, as we’ve also seen, even Plato began feeling the impossibility of that happening with spirit-objects in his dialogue Parmenides.
Thus, more liberal kinds of Skeptics and Sophists needed to build a model of truth useful in the always-changing natural world. For them a practical, or pragmatic, model of truth was more useful. They were interested in knowing how to use practical kinds of natural truths to make life less stressful and more enjoyable. If an idea worked to produce constructive results, then the idea became useful and true. Dewey basically agreed with that more fluid and always-growing pragmatic model simply because modern science began using it to build its always-growing collection of truths. Incidentally, the word pragmatic comes from 2 Greek words pragma and prasso, meaning essentially to practice and achieve.
For liberals like Dewey, if our ideas help us solve our challenges by producing useful and practical results, then those ideas become part of a person’s truth system! What’s more, the more useful they are, the more reliable their truth becomes. The truths about steel making, for example, are useful in many different situations, and thus have become reliable. What’s more, in such a model of truth all our actions are best seen as experiments in testing our ideas and verifying the ideas we think are true, to see how reliable they still might be. Even Plato’s Parmenides shows us how the results of his spirit-ideas had made them unreliable as Truth. And as we saw in section 15, Randel Helms’ portrait of Christianity’s 1st century gospel writings has become a more reliable model of them, simply because it’s based on more objective evidence. Such an organic and growing pragmatic model of truth is like the models lawyers use in courtrooms. It certainly doesn’t reveal the absolute truth, but being true beyond a reasonable doubt is good enough, at least until more evidence is discovered!
As a result, then, the following questions about truth become important: WHICH model of truth feels best to you, and how should that model be used? Should a pragmatic model of truth be used merely to benefit a small wealthy class of people at the expense of everyone else, or should it be used to benefit as many people as possible? And should a correspondence model be used to make people accept a feudalistic status quo where a few live in opulence while most people live in poverty? As we’ve seen, Plato and Aristotle favored that model, while liberal democrats like Protagoras and Democritus favored the second option and most likely wanted everyone to feel what freedom was like.
So, if truth is pictured as an exact and never-changing correspondence between our inner ideas and some unchanging objects already existing out there, then absolute certainty is possible. However, what’s out there, and in us as well, seems to be always changing, as modern physics and psychology remind us. If those are reliable facts, or pragma, then how can we ever be sure our ideas do in fact still exactly correspond to anything out there unless we keep testing them for their reliability? Even Plato’s work seemed to verify that situation; after citing a few problems caused by his spirit-ideas, the then tried to solve them with new definitions and assumptions. In any case, however, it created a piece of philosophic irony worthy of Socrates himself. Even though Plato himself argued for a model of correspondence, he couldn’t escape from using a pragmatic model of truth and testing his ideas when his model produced contradictory results! Continuing to test his ideas eventually showed they produced negative results, as the Parmenides tells us! No doubt, such reasoning about truth encouraged more liberal philosophers to build a more pragmatically useful and growing model of truth based on experimental testing. Even in ancient Greece Skeptics felt such a model of truth was the most useful one in an ever-changing nature.
A Few Results of Pragmatic Testing
Again, the objective results of ideas become the basis for their reliability, value, and truth, not an exact correspondence between ideas and objects. For example, the horribly destructive results of Nazi ideas in the 1930s and ‘40s showed millions of people how dangerous they were, and so they should be actively confronted wherever they’re seen; how else can we minimize such results? In short, then, Dewey’s pragmatic model of truth quickly evolves into models of ethical, political, educational, economic, and artistic models of truth. One important result can then be clearly seen. If Dewey’s ideas about how truth is discovered and tested are added to his idea of experimental learning being our only learning art, then ALL ideas will always have a degree of uncertainty about them! Romans like Pliny said it like this: The only thing for certain is that nothing is for certain! No doubt, in everyday life people normally feel many ideas are certain: the sun will rise tomorrow, water will always boil when heated, clothes will always get soiled when worn, and death happens to everything alive. But, to actually make such ideas true requires the objective evidence testing reveals.
Another result of Dewey’s pragmatic model of truth helps keep us focused on what’s happening here and now, and how reliable ideas can be used to better control future results. In fact, it’s those uses for ideas that often separate conservatives from liberals. If Dewey’s right, then everyone uses a pragmatic testing model of truth, and so how it’s used becomes the major differences between liberals and conservatives. Economic conservatives, for example, generally are more interested in results that increase private wealth, sometimes even polluting the environment and ignoring the public good. As history shows, spirit-ideas have been used for thousands of years to both help control people, and maintain an economic and social feudalistic status quo. For thousands of years, religious conservatives told people their lives and futures depended on knowing spirit-objects, thus creating conservative models of ethical truth people accepted and obeyed. A social result was a continuation of misery, poverty, ignorance, and suffering for most everyone, while a few feudal leaders lived in relative ease and comfort. Liberals, on the other hand, assume increasing the public good is the ultimate test for any idea.
What’s more, as we’ve been seeing, even these days things haven’t changed much, in part because our public schools aren’t formally teaching such pragmatic skills. As mentioned earlier, money and debt have largely replaced spirit-ideas as the means of control, but the general conservative goal remains basically the same – a feudalistic social control protected by wealth. Great concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few are the modern version of conservative economic truth, just as a religious monopoly in the hands of a few was the medieval model of truth. In both cases, however, the ultimate goal remained pretty much the same – to control the wealth of people for the benefit of a few. In fact today wealthy conservatives continue dominating elected officials not only to protect their wealth, but to keep funneling more of the public’s wealth to them, in the form of subsidies and tax advantages! As a result, a conservative wealth-generating political model of truth continues on! Even today, wealthy people live in obscenely extravagant homes, estates, and condominiums while working mostly to make themselves even richer. After World War 2 a global system of financial control was even set up with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. However, another result of using such an economic model of truth sees most everyone continuing to struggle with paying off debts and trying to stay healthy, while even being called lazy by many of those who merely inherited great wealth and economic power!
In order to results the stressful results of that conservative economic model of truth, Dewey’s liberal pragmatic model of truth simply changed the basic assumption about its goal. When he changed the models goal to increasing the public good here and how, he offered people a real choice between 2 different economic models of truth. In such a liberal model of practical truth ideas and actions are used to produce more humane results for more people, and thus make it easier for liberal models of truth to keep growing and evolving, just as new species have been evolving for billions of years now. If there’s any kind of pragmatic truth about natural law, then it’s one of diversity, rather than sameness, and helpfulness towards others rather than obscene selfishness. Thus, even in such a liberal pragmatic model of religious truth, it becomes quite easy to see how new religions keep growing, evolving, and dying out. Religious diversity and evolution is as natural as biological diversity in a biological model of truth. In a correspondence theory of truth, such change and diversity become a real problem. What exactly are such always changing actions corresponding too? After all, how many people today worship Norse, Celtic, or Egyptian gods? All our evolving and growing pragmatic models of truth say such events are completely natural and normal as people continue expanding their models of truth!
Slowly but surely, the results and uses of an experimental model of learning, and the growth of liberal pragmatic models of truth, continue challenging more and more people to reconstruct all old models of truth as an exact correspondence. It’s simply not reliable for all natural events. How can it correspond to objects which don’t yet exist, like new medicines and new habits? On the other hand, organic and growing pragmatic models of truth encourage the experimental creation of new medicines, better habits, and better results for more people. Its model of medical truth recognizes each person deserves the same kinds of treatment as anyone else! Such a liberal assumption is easier to make than conservatives who believe only a few are really the most valuable people. Such natural results are perfectly normal for liberal pragmatic models of truth; they teach us everyone is an individual of equal worth, and so should have the same rights and freedoms as anyone else. Penicillin may be a useful drug, but until each person tests it for themselves, its uses, results, and truth remain unknown. Some people react violently to it! And, as we saw in the previous section, a pragmatic model of scientific truth asks what ideas are there to exactly correspond to at the atomic quantum level of nature?
More About Building Pragmatic Truth
After taking a little breath from reading such thoughts, we can relax a little with some more philosophic history of truth. For example, today it looks more and more like the ancient Sophist Protagoras was right. The more people have looked at mankind’s history over, say, the last few thousand years, the more they felt the truth in his famous saying: mankind’s own actions, habits, and results are the source of every truth! No doubt, had he lived in the 1800s he would have seen that model of truth helping build our strongest kinds of knowledge, scientific knowledge, where its ideas get tested each time they’re used. So, upon science’s most reliable experimental kinds of testing rests Dewey’s modern pragmatic models of truth. He described them with a rather philosophically ugly phrase: Truth is what has a “warranted assertibility.” With phrases like that it’s easy to see why much of modern philosophy has become largely ignored by the public, even though it’s one of life’s most important art-forms. Liberal philosophy at least helps ground a person’s psychic half not only to what’s actually going on in the world, but to ideas that can produce better results for more people.
The phrase cited above means merely testing is the way to keep building all reliable models of truth, especially economic and political. With it yet another very important social result is produced, namely an increased tolerance for those models of truth which produce better results for more people! In short, for Dewey as for Protagoras, truth is human-based, and the more good it does for people here and now, the more usefully reliable it becomes. If an action works for some people, and its use doesn’t harm other people, then it becomes a worthwhile truth for those people, and should be tolerated! Such results help justify tolerance for different ethical and political models of truth. As long as innocent people aren’t harmed, why not let people practice the truths they want? Same-sex marriage is merely one example. And if it doesn’t produce better results for everyone, then improving it becomes everyone’s business. If, for example, the recent Supreme Court rulings by merely 5 conservative justices to give corporations the power to spend unlimited amounts of money to elect people who will do their bidding continue producing more stressful results for more people, then it’s up to them to keep challenging those rulings, or at least not comply with them as much as possible.
Again, pragmatic models of truth depend on the results they produce. If, say, someone tries flying to the moon or knowing when high tide will occur, then they’ll discover Newton’s truths are useful and excellent. However, when they want to build atomic accelerators they should use a different quantum mechanics model of truth; they tell us how much matter will increase in size as its velocity increases. So, why shouldn’t the same model of truth be used to fulfill political, educational, economic, scientific, and artistic desires too? How can such desires be fulfilled? Well, when, for example, people use their political and economic assumptions to keep increasing their power and harming others, then, sooner or later, they should expect to see the same results happen to them. What goes around often comes around.
More About Assumptions and Finding Them
In any model of truth, assumptions become the most important ideas to know. However, almost no one even knows how to recognize an assumption, even though most everyone makes them every day. They’re simply statements using words like ‘all,’ ‘none,’ ‘always,’ ‘only,’ and ‘never.’ Someone may say ‘I’ll never be a success,’ but it’s just an assumption; it expresses more an inner feeling than an outer reality. Also, a little logic and commonsense about assumptions can also help judge one model of truth as better than another. For example, what kinds of results are likely to be produced from a person’s assumptions? If they produce illogical results, then perhaps the assumptions need to be changed. We’ve seen a few of Plato’s illogical results from his spirit-assumptions, and they helped him turn his attention onto more of the political and natural world in his later dialogues. His creation myths and natural ideas in the Timaeus were redd all through the Middle Ages, at least by those few who could read. And such results also helped his young student Aristotle build his own more moderate assumptions about nature, assuming knowledge could only be learning with both sense evidence and reasoning. In Plato’s correspondence model of truth, he merely assumed ONLY reasoning could reveal nature’s eternal Truth. Although it may seem odd to us today, Aristotle’s respect for sense-based learning was an important assumption in philosophy’s history, even though pragmatic liberals like Protagoras had voiced it decades earlier! If nothing else, such philosophic history also shows how strong spirit-based assumptions have been for thousands of years.
Assumptions are just as important to religious thinkers as they are to scientists and liberal philosophers. The 1st writer of John’s gospel, for example, expressed his religious assumptions with his salvation ideas; he assumed the kingdom of god was already in us. Incidentally, the feeling of a person’s inner life was already growing in Sophocles’ plays 4 centuries earlier! At any rate, John’s 1st writer simply used different assumptions about Jesus and his mission than other gospel writers. In short, you don’t have to go to law school to become good at recognizing assumptions and how they’re used. We can just listen to what a person says to see what they are, and then perhaps create better ones to help produce better results! Isn’t that what good psychological counselors do on a daily basis? And, in the Supreme Court cases mentioned above, why not just change the assumption -- all corporations are people -- to corporations are manmade institutions having only the rights and freedoms we say they should have?! With that assumption peaceful civil disobedience and challenges become justified. Even in ancient Greece Socrates was great at showing how peoples' everyday assumptions about life and truth often produced illogical results, and so couldn't be true!
It may sound like a trivial idea, but for building useful models of truth, what’s changed greatly through time is a respect for the evidence of our assumptions! Around the meaning of such evidence debates are built. Assumptions about, say, praying methods of healing are no longer as popular or reliable as they once were, simply because more reliable assumptions about healing have produced more reliable results. Without testing and objective evidence we’ve no defense against any assumption, however fantastic it might be. Someone says there are spirits on the moon observing, tracking, and controlling our every move, just like the National Security Council on earth! However, only with objective evidence for such assumptions can we easily separate truth from mere paranoid feelings. Without objective evidence millions of people can continue being distracted away from the one place their attention should be focused, namely on our natural world and its events here and now! So, without demanding objective evidence for all assumptions and ideas, we remain vulnerable to those with social and economic power to make life as comfortable for them and more stressful for everyone else! Where is the evidence a conservative economic model of truth actually works? History tells us conservatives will continue acting as they do until they’re actively stopped, either by democratic or more violent means. We Deweyan liberals certainly aren’t saying violence is the best response to unreliable assumptions, but in some situations that might be the case, as World War 2 shows us. In short, if any ideas are like Plato’s spirit-assumptions, and have no objective evidence for them, they’re often called conservative religious assumptions. And if they’re based on objective evidence anyone can verify, then they’re called scientific assumptions. One of Dewey’s naturalistic assumptions says nature is always a continuum; it’s reliable because there’s evidence for it.
In today’s world assumptions continue playing an important psychic role. For example, conservative libertarians assume the public good is always best produced without government help and regulations. It’s an assumption very much alive today, however, because of all the stressful social results that assumption has helped produce, liberal Democrats like Dewey built a better working political assumption, namely government actions can and should be used to help those who need help. In fact, the battle between those 2 political assumptions continues to this day. Conservatives love to assume unregulated private business and economic markets are the best way to help people live a better life, while liberals assume government should step in and help those who need help, especially when the for-profit economic system breaks down from time to time, or wealth becomes too concentrated. Through its taxing power government should help equalize wealth, so more people can have more power to make their lives more comfortable. In fact, that liberal assumption was tested on a wide scale all during the Great Depression when huge unemployment and economic stresses were causing a great amount of social chaos. Conservatives have been trying ever since the 1930s to dismantle those useful improvements Democrats like FDR helped make, and have largely succeeded! Seven decades later wealth has become as concentrated as it was in the early 1900s, and all the while conservatives have been saying their economic assumptions and models of truth are the best, even though evidence clearly shows that is not the case. The more corporations have restricted the growth of worker incomes, the smaller the economy has grown.
Conservatives have often been using their assumptions obstructively, rather than constructively. In that respect, modern conservatives continue acting as they have for thousands of years. Political, economic, and religious assumptions have been used to support and maintain a small aristocratic upper class, and to maintain their power and wealth! As a result, they certainly don’t want that situation to change. In fact, many conservatives today continue obstructing any idea controlling, regulating, and limiting their wealth; they simply assume private wealth is always good. The result, however, is to limit the good to a small class of people.
Liberals like Dewey, however, wanted such power and wealth shared more evenly, and used for making everyone’s life more enjoyable, and so a more liberal political assumption was needed. He saw how social tensions have been violently exploding for thousands of years, and were increasing over the past 150 years with the growth of liberal democratic ideas and practices. And more recently such tensions have increased on a global scale as well. It’s mostly done by central banks issuing high interest loans and consulting fees to countries, keeping them in debt, and thus guaranteeing their sources of income. Recently, however, more and more countries have begun experimenting with different economic assumptions, like publicly owned banks for example! In them interest payments stay in the country, state, or city in which it exists, rather than going to already powerful international bankers. In fact, tested results show such public banks are another new economic truth based merely on a different economic assumption about the public good being more valuable than the personal good of a few.
Conservative spirit assumptions too have often helped produce harmful social results. For example, the most dangerous social result of Plato's conservative spirit-assumptions was to leave most everyone ignorant about natural kinds of knowledge. He assumed spirit-objects were the best objects to know. Natural knowledge could only be a 'likely story', not absolute Truth, so why bother intelligently experimenting with nature at all?! He too was obsessed with a quest to know nature’s eternally true objects, as were religious thinkers throughout ancient and medieval times. As a result, conservatives continued using such assumptions to restrict the growth of experimental knowledge, and thus maintain their feudalistic social status quo; people were told it was nature’s eternal truth. Only as people began openly challenging those assumptions and asking for objective evidence were conservatives forced to admit they were just assumptions, and couldn’t be proved! And the more that happened, the easier it became to start building more useful and humane pragmatic assumptions about life and nature.
Now really, are such ideas really such a horrible way of looking at history, truth, and nature? To us Deweyan liberals it’s a completely natural and realistic way of looking at those events. For us, truth is something we create with our assumptions and actions, rather than merely accepting someone else’s assumptions. In fact, that’s the great liberal challenge to people, to see different possibilities from different assumptions, and then test them for their social results. Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s was one example of that on a national scale, and a few conservative Supreme Court Justices continued obstructing and overturning many of its helpful and useful laws.
Such events in fact helped people feel how more liberal political assumptions could help produce better results for more people. Like any model of truth, political truth too rests on an organic, growing, and evolving set of assumptions which are defended by the people at election time. If not, then conservatives will continue using their assumptions to produce results useful to them and their wealthy supporters. In the late 1990’s, for example, conservatives in Congress finally helped overturn one of FDR’s most useful and important banking regulations, called the Glass-Steagle law; that repeal helped set the stage for the worst economic recession in US history, and even more destructive ones in predicted for the future! Real evidence like that should help convince all liberals and independents how important our national elections are, and how important our political assumptions are. Since that recession, such results have given millions of people a feeling for how dangerous conservative economic assumptions and models of truth have been to their own wealth, security, and power. Who knew before Hitler how dangerously destructive Nazi assumptions could be?
In short, the more assumptions are seen and objectively tested, the easier it becomes to see their results. Such results tell us political truth too is as much a human art as is science or painting. They all rest on human assumptions, and the more useful they are to more people, the more truthful they become to us liberals! Even testing the ethical assumption about honesty artfully creates all our truths about it, just as a painting habit creates all our truths about painting. Is such a human-based practical way of looking at truth so horrible, or is it in fact the most accurate of all models? In that model of truth spirit-habits have lasted so long mainly because no better working models of truth were available. People merely accepted such assumptions without really testing them.
In fact, evidence for a growing pragmatic model of truth can be seen all around us, in the great variety of truths in the world today! Devout Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish children all come to believe their religious assumptions are The Truth simply by training and practice; in short, they all practice a pragmatic model of truth. In ancient China too there were said to be 100 different schools, and thus at least 100 different models of truth. In India there may have been even more models of truth than that; Nietzschean H. L. Mencken once described it as the gonad of theology. And as we've seen, Greece too had a healthy variety of 'truth' models, from liberal to conservative. Again, such variety is the natural result of a growing pragmatic model of truth.
For all those who believe truth is really an exact correspondence between ideas and reality, all such models become a great problem. How can such different models of truth possibly correspond to one system of truth, unless that model of truth is pragmatic in nature?! To minimize such questions like that and to maintain their social control, religious conservatives often told their followers everyone else is either wrong or delusional, or else didn’t tell them such different models existed at all! In medieval times a number of different subjects were forbidden even at the university level! As a result, intolerance for other models of truth increased. Even in the US, for example, a largely secular model of truth was used to teach students communist and socialist models of truth were something to fear and even war against, when in fact they were merely different models of truth built with different assumptions.
For us Deweyan liberals, however, there’s no such intolerance problem whatsoever. The only intolerance is for unjustified violence and law-breaking. We see truth only in the results different assumptions help produce. Thus, WE, we humans, all create different models of truth with our different personal assumptions and habits! If that wasn’t the case, then we would all still be practicing the native spirit-habits our ancestors practiced for tens of thousands of years!
So again we see, for Dewey how we use our truths and the actual results they produce are much more important than what they are! Do the results of our assumptions keep separating people into greatly different economic classes, religious tribes, or even sexual tribes, or are they used to increase the feelings of a common humanity between all of us, tolerance for other kinds of peaceful habits, and a shared responsibility to help those who’re trying to build a better world? With such questions it becomes all but obvious: We’re all artists of truth, liberals as well as conservatives; with our assumptions and actions we all artistically build our own set of truths. So, to intelligently judge any one of them, we need to see their objective results, and that can only happen with intelligent experimentation. In short, why not live, and let those peaceful and law-abiding people with different models of truth live too? Gays and lesbians have different models of sexual truth, and their usefulness too depends on the results they produce. So, don't they too deserve the same equal rights and freedoms as anyone else to peacefully practice such truths, as long as other innocent people aren’t harmed? Isn’t the public good most important, and weren’t the same kinds of questions asked about Africans before the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement? If so, then shouldn’t the same kinds of questions be asked about current economic and political assumptions as well? Shouldn’t peaceful atheists and agnostics be tolerated just like any peaceful minority?
Liberal Kinds of Truth
History, as well as current events, is full of examples showing mankind’s superstitious, intolerant, and inhumane actions, and we’ve already seen many of them. For example, non-religious Atomists and Skeptics were simply not tolerated by religious conservatives in ancient Rome. They were the gays and lesbians of the 1st century CE. Rome’s first emperor Augustus actually tried to wipe out any philosophic model of truth which didn’t include the gods; after all, Augustus himself wanted to become a god, like Julius Caesar was proclaimed. Augustus too believed eternal and absolutely unchanging Spirit-Truth was at the top of nature's system, just like emperors were at the top of the political system, chosen by the gods themselves.
Even before Augustus religious people normally assumed gods could mate with humans and create superior children; both Greek and Christian theology is full of such ideas. Centuries before Jesus, many Greeks in fact assumed Pythagoras was such a divine human, as was the god Dionysus, and Christians gradually came to assume the same thing about Jesus; to early Christians like Paul, Jesus was merely god’s anointed one. Eventually, such spirit-assumptions were used to justify priestly habit-arts like reading animal entrails for spirit-messages from the gods, and persecuting or discriminating against anyone who didn’t accept their assumptions! In such a Roman world a few decades before Jesus was born, Lucretius' great Atomistic poem On Nature, as well as Epicurus’ many letters and Democritus’ works were almost completely destroyed; almost.
No doubt, some later emperors weren’t so intolerant, but using one’s assumptions to justify stamping out all different models of truth has become a sign of those who let themselves become addicted to having power over others. Nazi Germany is another recent example, as are many wealthy folks who use their wealth merely to keep increasing it!
Such examples again show us liberals how much educational work we still have in front of us, and teaching others how to spot assumptions and create better ones to help produce more humane and tolerant results. Unless children are taught such habits, the hope of a healthy and vibrant democracy remains merely that, a hope, thus making it easier for conservatives to maintain and increase their feudalistic power. Such educational assumptions and conclusions are becoming more alive and active today for us liberals. They’re important simply because an economic model of truth based on an assumption of concentrated wealth has recently replaced a monopolistic feudal social model based on spirit-assumptions. For us Deweyan liberals, such results again show how important our public schools are for building a more democratic society.
In fact, history teaches us using one's assumptions and models of truth to merely maintain a feudalistic status quo has been producing socially destructive results for thousands of years! Conservative ancient and religious models of absolute Truth have been used to keep democratic habits as weak as possible for thousands of years, as both Plato and Aristotle show us. Liberal Atomist and Sophist democratic assumptions of equality for all would have meant standing Plato’s, Aristotle’s, and Augustine’s assumptions and models of truth on their heads, so to speak!
Using such assumptions live in similar actions and results today. In many US states, for example, conservatives have put voting restrictions in place, helping reduce peoples’ democratic power to better control their own lives and use their common wealth for everyone’s benefit. And, as I write, in California conservative insurance companies are using millions of dollars to air ads attacking one proposition on this fall’s ballot; it would effectively reduce their power to keep taking as much money from the public as they can for health insurance! It’s more evidence for this conclusion: The modern quest for more wealth and power over people has replaced the medieval quest for social power with religious assumptions. For many conservatives today, money has become the new god in modern life. In the following section, then, we’ll continue looking as more results and conclusions from Dewey’s pragmatic model of truth. In fact, it’s helped inspire the following lamentingly lame limerick.
Young Rufus was one of a kind,
A woman felt he was quite a find.
But when he flipped out,
She said with a shout,
That’s not exactly what I had in mind.
18. DEWEY’S PRAGMATIC MODEL OF TRUTH – PART 2
In this section we’ll see how it can be used on some current events, as well as some more results of Dewey’s pragmatic model of truth. What other ideas become meaningful with his assumptions about experimental learning being our ONLY way of learning? In any case, however, his modern pragmatic model of truth is one of liberal philosophy’s greatest gifts to civilization. For example, 3 ideas become more meaningful with a pragmatic model of truth. Not only does it mean experimentation is the best way of testing any idea and assumption, not only does it give us a way to judge how useful different models of truth by looking at their results, but it also helps keep people mentally fluid by simply changing conservative assumptions to better improve both personal and social problems. If, for example, we keep seeing how our own, say, gambling actions keep producing destructive results, then it’s easier to create a new assumption – gambling is harmful to me. Substitute any excessive habit for the word gambling, and it becomes easier to begin consciously improving any destructive habit, and thus increasing our own power.
Another result becomes obvious too. Dewey’s liberal humanistic assumptions and his model of truth helps elevate people to the top level of importance, rather than Fate, god’s plan, a king, queen, emperor, Pope, President, or any group of modern monopolistic corporations, including powerful and wealthy health insurance companies! Why should anyone make a profit from peoples’ sicknesses, diseases, or warfare? The more that happens, the easier it is for such inhumane actions to continue on. Are such results what we want, especially when many other countries already have built better working political and economic models, like public systems of healthcare?
As we’ve been seeing, better models of education become another results of Dewey’s pragmatic model of truth. History, for example, can be a great teacher, but only if its facts aren’t censored and watered down to produce the feeling only one country is right, no matter what it does! Such schoolbook history often ignores how our own country has often used a conservative model of political truth to justify brutal and inhumane actions, as Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of America shows us. Medieval history too gives many examples of how a conservative correspondence model of truth was used. For example, beginning in the 1200s the Church began restricting scientific research of its own monks, like Roger Bacon and Robert Grosseteste. They wanted to start building a more secular model of truth; religious conservatives quickly founded the Inquisition to kill all such research, just as a conservative economic model of truth is used today to kill as much government regulation as possible. Such historic facts about how assumptions are used can help young folks today look around their own nations for similar examples of such inhumane and disrespectful actions, and thus make history live. After all, some history is made each day.
Conservative Economic Assumptions and Their Results
In fact, today much the same kinds of conservative assumptions are at work in many of our large corporate-run universities. According to one article by Noam Chomsky entitled The Death of American Universities, they are now hiring more part-time instructors. Wealth has become the new god for many of them too; if so, they assume wealth is the highest good, rather than education. One result of such assumptions is to increase their profits above all else, even though it also reduces the freedom of professors to speak out about what’s going on in our world today. Such intimidation makes it easier for wealthy donors to keep contributing to them. Tax laws too have been written to allow such donations to be deducted on their tax returns, thus increasing the tax burden for millions of other people! In short, many elite private universities have become corporate players, and so want to keep their cash-flows in place. Some wealthy conservatives are even paying to put more conservative economists on faculties, so only their laissez-faire for-profit model of economic truth will be taught to students who have little experience to see their harmful social results! In such a model of truth the corporation or institution is the highest good, rather than any one individual. When economic education includes such facts, then its history too becomes much more than a static and dead study; it becomes something alive and educationally meaningful for students today.
A recent article by former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich says much the same thing. In an article entitled “How Taxpayers Unknowingly Fund Elite Private Universities as Public School Subsidies Shrink,” he cites how large some of their endowment funds have grown: Harvard, $32 billion, Yale, $20.8 billion, Stanford, $18.6 billion, and Princeton, $28.2 billion. Such funds have been used not to mainly educate more students, but mainly to keep making more money with investments! In fact, it seems most of the students they educate apply for Wall Street and consulting jobs, and thus keep cash flows coming in from public socialized taxes! And so another conservative hypocrisy becomes evident: Socialism is bad except with it makes taking money from the public easier! For us liberal Deweyans, why aren’t such economic realities being taught even at the junior high level? After all, their future taxes might depend on such actions.
To say the least, then, the US is by no means completely liberated from conservative assumptions and the actions they justify. Such assumptions were described in the early 1900s like this: Republican President Calvin Coolidge’s “The business of America is (always) business”; financier J. P. Morgan’s “I owe the public nothing”; and Henry Ford’s “There is something sacred about big business. Anything that is economically right is morally right.” Such economic assumptions are still alive and well today too. In short, cientific models of experimental truth have helped shift the sources of power from land and aristocratic birth to money and inherited wealth. Again, such results tell us money’s become the new form of power, especially for conservatives – the new god if you will, and the less wealth is controlled by higher taxes on the wealthy and used for the public good, the better it is. Until such assumptions are replaced with a more liberal assumption about the public good, conservatives will continue using their wealth and power to keep increasing their wealth and power.
One source of that power is oil. All modern economies need energy, and oil has become its main source. Billions of dollars in profits are made each year from selling it and keeping the economy going, and so naturally any talk of reducing its use is fought against, even though the global warming results of its use may eventually endanger millions of lives around the world! In short, some modern conservatives often act as ruthlessly as religious leaders acted in the Middle Ages; absolutely no challenges to their wealth and social power were permitted. Preserving such examples of uses and abuses of power is history’s ultimate challenge; the more they’re ignored, the more vulnerable people remain to their continued results.
Thus, knowing about Plato's and Aristotle's assumptions and models of truth about nature becomes an important justification for studying philosophic history. It can help people today look at the assumptions at work in their world, see the results they’re producing, and work to improve them for the public good. Without the public, people like J. P. Morgan would never have acquired the wealth they have.
It’s one thing to see how people have used their assumptions in action, but it’s another thing to actually improve those assumptions. For example, it was one thing for people like Plato and Aristotle to assume nature is really a natural hierarchy of increasing worth and importance, from worthless slaves at the bottom to important gods at the top, but it’s another thing to actually replace such assumptions with ones better helping all people live more satisfying lives. For us Deweyan liberals, such changes can best become realized with different kinds of education, teaching people how to focus their power and demand such changes be made. How many CEOs today still assume lowly workers should be paid just enough to live on? The more such conservative assumptions are seen at work today, the easier it becomes for those workers to keep organizing their collective power to demand and get a bigger piece of the wealth their work creates!
The challenge for we Deweyan liberals, then, is to keep educating as many as possible about how such conservative assumptions are still alive in today’s world, as well as teach people how to increase their power with different assumptions! If not, then we face yet another event like history so often records, namely wrecking life for most people while a few have the wealth and power to ride out any economic downturns, even depressions. Economists call such events recessions and depressions, but they all produce stressful feelings for millions. No doubt, such a situation happened during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Millions of people quickly became destitute as a result of weak and non-existent banking regulations, while a few wealthy people continued getting wealthier as their money became even more powerful. In the 1920s conservatives used their assumptions and models of economic and political truth to create a system useful to them, but dangerous to most everyone else, as people saw in the 1930s. As a result, labor strikes became much more common than they are today.
In fact, such conservative economic assumptions have continued working even more efficiently since then!? For that conclusion we now have much objective evidence. For example, in the 1980s many conservative assumptions of Republican President Reagan, and some congressmen, were used to justify reducing taxes on the wealthy, thus increasing their wealth tremendously. They called their economic model Supply Side Economics, but the assumption was that the wealthy create jobs, and so the wealthier they are, the more jobs will be created. However, one result was to make the US the largest debtor nation, rather than remaining the largest creditor nation! As military spending rose, we needed to borrow more money from other countries to pay for those jobs. Also, since then it’s became easier to ship more businesses to foreign countries, where labor costs are much lower, thus increasing profits and earnings for a few even more while wages were kept at the same level!
Deregulating many sectors of the economy was another result of such an economic model; the Savings and Loan banks were one example. Eventually greedy CEOs took more and more of the public’s money with bad loans, and eventually ran their companies into the ground. The results cost taxpayers billions of dollars as customers’ money was federally insured, at least for a while. As liberal economist John Galbraith noted, many thought it's fine for wealthy people to have leisure and recreation for themselves, and for many to spend their days at country clubs and charity dinners, but somehow it's not right to give such leisure enjoyments to the poor. A conservative model of psychology rested on the assumption they wouldn't know how to use it! They would just waste their money on drugs and other useless actions. Such conservative assumptions didn’t need to be tested; they already corresponded to the truth about human nature.
Such examples could be cited many times over, but for us Deweyan liberals the entire modern model of pragmatic truth and testing assumptions always justifies improving such assumptions and their results! Such conservative results as just mentioned show us they’re to be expected when experimental models of testing assumptions, and then voting to keep improving them, are all but consciously ignored in our primary and secondary schools! Without intelligent testing of any assumption, truth often remains like that great Humphrey Bogart line from The African Queen: You pays yer money and you takes yer choice; meaning, if you have enough money, you can buy any form of power. As is often the case, whatever social or economic group you were born into and support helps form you basic assumptions, and thus guides your decisions, rather than looking at the constructive and kind results of different assumptions and models of truth, and using them to make decisions good for others as well, not just yourself or your social class.
Other Examples of Conservative Assumptions
Such a general state of ignorance about how different assumptions are used has been the normal state of affairs for thousands of years. People have allowed a few conservatives to use their assumptions to justify both selfish and destructive results, and thus to maintain a conservative feudalistic status quo above all else! History is full of destructive witch hunts and burnings, murderous persecuting pogroms, holocausts, and even entire wars. In ancient Alexandria, for example, an intolerant, out-of-control Christian mob used their model of truth to justify catching and scraping the flesh from a non-Christian woman mathematician named Hypatia, no doubt to save her soul! They felt she deserved it; she was a heretic; she wasn't a Christian! That evil-witch practiced a Neo-Platonic model of truth! And worse yet, periodically Alexandria's magnificent libraries too were burned by those assuming secular knowledge was an evil thing. Only Christian models of spirit-truth were to be tolerated. With our present great differences in wealth today, such a feudalistic economic system lives on. And what’s worse, the more people feel such events are just ancient history, the easier it becomes to ignore how such assumptions are still working today, as well as how to help improve their results with more focused and concentrated democratic people power. Slowly, it seems, more and more people are becoming more aware of such power.
Even in the US, for many decades now people have been kept greatly undereducated about how such assumptions were affecting their own lives. Until the 1970s men were regularly made to fight both just and unjust wars or else go to jail. In the 1930s the basic conservative political assumption was used to label communists, Socialists, and liberal democrats as evil and dangerous to society. Such conservative assumptions were also used to justify taking billions of dollars from the public to keep building a wealthy and powerful conservative upper class by financing the so-called military-industrial complex of weapons making! Such wealth was built with the help of thousands of dangerous nuclear weapons and missiles, by often forcefully installing greedy business-friendly military dictators around the world, and even waging a brutal and vicious war against tiny Vietnam who merely wanted its independence! Also, during the Cold War in the 1980s people passively continued allowing greedy wealthy folks to get their taxes lowered and thus keep billions of dollars in their pockets. During conservative President Ronald Reagan’s administration (1980-1988) people were told by conservatives the wealthy create jobs. As we’ve seen, that was the assumption: the wealthier a few people are, the more jobs will be created. Taxes were soon lowered on those wealthy folks, thus reducing money available for helping those who needed government help. Much the same assumptions were used in 1993, against Democrats like Bill Clinton who helped raise taxes on the wealthy, only to see an economic boom in jobs. So, in what way was that conservative assumption anything more than blatant propaganda?
No doubt, we’re still a long way from enough people seeing how money is being used to still maintain and strengthen a class-based feudal society. Thus, we Deweyan liberals simply keep working to educate more people about how to build a more stable public’s good, rather than just a good of a few wealthy folks. For example, does anyone really need to make more than a million dollars a year to live on? There's an old conservative saying described something like this: If all the money were redistributed equally, in a short time society would be as feudalistic as it is now. We liberals, however, like to ask: When is the last time such a mere assumption was experimentally tested, to see the actual results, rather than just the imagined results? And if it’s never been tested, then why do conservatives say it’s true?
For us Deweyan liberals, because of our still overly conservative public schools, homes, and churches, most people in the US are still just emerging from their psychically ancient and medieval conservative assumptions, their models of truth, and their obedience to them. When less than 50% of voters accurately vote, it simply tells us half of our democratic power is still unfocused and weak. As a result, conservative assumptions and ideas are still accepted often because people have had little training in verifying such idea, especially religious ones. People wanted to be saved more than they wanted their assumptions challenged in more liberal schools. In the last 4 centuries, however, those assumptions have been challenged as never before, only to see the assumption of personal wealth take its place as the new god. Money became the new source of power, and jobs the way to earn money. In the late 1800s a new wealthy class replaced the old religious ruling class, or merged with them. John Rockefeller assumed god had chosen him to become the world’s richest man. In any case, the new industrial society gave a few people tremendous power to control not only the economy, but those politicians who write the tax laws as well! When Republican President George H. W. Bush said “Read my lips, no new taxes,” he was voicing the will of his wealthy class to keep as much of their wealth as they could. In short, just as people were just beginning to reject the quest for absolute religious Truth and its monopolizing and suppressing uses, they became obedient by a new conservative model of economic truth, where profits for a few became the new god. The model was called laissez-faire economics.
In short, many still haven’t taught themselves how to experimentally build and test new liberal pragmatic assumptions and models of truth, including moral, political, and educational models to help make their own lives more healthful, enjoyable, and democratic. Building public banks, for example, was a liberal economic assumption tested in North Dakota since 1919 – the height of the Progressive era, and yet almost no one today knows about all its good results for the North Dakotans! That’s an educational problem. In fact, that socialistic banking model returns profits to the people, rather than big Wall Street banks. In fact, many nations around the world are also experimenting with that idea. The poor tiny South American country of Bolivia has been experimenting with using the government to run its businesses, and as a result economic growth has been around 5% recently; even the for-profit US economy has been growing at around 2% for many years now.
So again, in those respects, the history of philosophic truth and different assumptions can be as useful today as it ever was. There have been other useful models of truth for many thousands of years, but unless they’re taught to young folks they remain merely dead history. In general, conservatives in Western civilization have been teaching only their own assumptions and models of truth, and thus convincing most everyone to keep supporting, obeying, and submitting to their status quo results of benefiting only a few. In fact, in many places using conservative models of truth still runs deep indeed, even sometimes helping justify killing anyone, including themselves, who doesn’t believe in their model of truth, and thus restricting the needed experimental testing to actually see what results their assumptions actually produce.
Testing More Economic Assumptions
Another current example of testing assumptions is the new US model of socialized healthcare. The old conservative model was a for-profit one, and it helped produce many socially harmful results for millions of people. Also, it gave the wealthy a great advantage in life, by allowing them to pay for the best care and thus stay alive and work longer than most. In fact, such socialized models of healthcare are already working in places like Canada, France, Germany, and Japan, to mention only a few. So why did it take so long for a different model to be tested in the US? Conservatives have been concentrating their power in Washington for centuries! Those benefiting from the old system, like doctors, didn’t want anything changed, and almost few in the US was educated to even see how different socialized healthcare models could be built and tested with different assumptions! Corporate for-profit owned media kept distracting peoples’ attention with daily reports of dogs being saved, car accidents, floods hundreds of miles away, police shootings, and celebrity gossip. That essentially was and is their model of good news.
As a result, for decades the public has been at the mercy of for-profit insurance companies who’ve been free to raise rates whenever they want, just as some universities have raised tuition costs to record highs. They feel government regulation for them is wrong, so both have been free to take as much money from the public as they can. In fact, such insurance companies are now spending millions of dollars to wage a fierce propaganda battle in California to keep their status quo model in place; they want to keep the power to protect their cash-flows. So, Californians now have a real choice this November, 2014, about building a different insurance model, one in which rates can be much better controlled for the public good. And if that result doesn’t happen, then our more fluid pragmatic model of truth says some new ideas need to be tested. More and more people are realizing a conservative model of TV propaganda is aimed merely at maintaining the maximum-profit status quo assumption, no matter who it hurts. In their economic model, Socialism and publicly owned businesses have become the new devil in our maximum-profit model of truth.
With the growth of a Progressive Era’s new democratic model of political truth came the power for people to better regulate and control the results of greedy and selfish people. It’s based on the assumption equality and freedom for all is better than inequality of rights and freedoms. As a result, today voters often have more real choices for better regulating and controlling the all-important maximum-profit economic sector. Sure, there have been some setbacks. A recent Supreme Court ruling giving personhood and free speech to corporations is one example, thus making it easier for conservative economic and political models to keep attacking liberal experiments. For example, their business model of healthcare truth says a few CEOs should have the power to keep making millions of dollars from other peoples’ diseases, as if they have a natural right to do so. The good news for us Deweyan liberals, however, is this: The more people realize how any under regulated economic model of truth makes people more vulnerable to those with economic power, the easier it becomes to elect more liberal people, test different assumptions, and see their results. In fact, a fluid pragmatic model of truth almost demands it.
No doubt, more than ever before, our many new electronic communication tools are helping educate more people about such on-going events. Such educational challenges have become more important since much of the electronic and print media largely works in a maximum-profit system where cash flows must be continually increased. In any case, however, it seems liberal assumptions and models of truth continue growing and challenging people around the world to make choices aimed at improving the public good, rather than the private good of a few. The results are simply more useful to more people. More people are realizing how useful their political power can be when it’s concentrated and controlled; and equally important, such awareness is growing about the importance of public schools systems too. The more they use conservative assumptions about education, the less psychically aware people are of what’s going on in their own worlds here and now! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals, teaching the art of intelligently testing liberal assumptions in our schools, homes, and churches remains the most important educational challenge for a pragmatic model of truth. Without better liberally pragmatic models of education, we’ll continue seeing recent results like a majority voting in 11 US states to deny gays and lesbians equal marriage rights, and conservatives in congress continuing to obstruct the growth of more testing to promote the public good. For us liberal democrats that is certainly not the model of education we want, a model in which our national congress remains largely the servants of a wealthy upper class, and where public taxpayer money continues being used to increase their wealth! In a healthy democratic society masses protests would have helped change the Citizen’s United decision years ago!
Equally certain are we, many conservatives leaders around the world often use brutal force to control democratic outbursts challenging their power. However, as we’re seeing more and more, the more focused and peaceful such democratic power is used, the more difficult it becomes to use force against it. We’re seeing much the same kind of challenges to the political status quo in Hong Kong today. Chinese authorities realize brute force often increases peoples’ will to demand democratic changes be made, to better promote the public good. For us Deweyan liberals, those democratic models of political truth are well worth experimenting with as much as possible. More and more people are realizing precious socialized tax monies can be much better spent to keep improving a country’s economic wellbeing, rather than trying to make other nations practice the same political models we think they should practice, as has recently happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over $20 billion US tax dollars was spent in Iraq to build a different army and police force, and yet it still isn’t working.
Truth's Two Directions and More Challenges
Finally, we can generalize about all models of truth. In reality, both correspondence and pragmatic models of truth are organic and growing within time’s 3 dimensions, past, present, and future. History itself teaches us that fact. For example, for centuries people assumed their Catholic spirit-ideas corresponded exactly with spirit-objects, but eventually that assumption became questionable. A new Protestant assumption justified building many more models of religious truth. In short, even though conservatives and moderates have claimed a so-called moral high ground with a correspondence model of truth, they in fact have been using a pragmatic model of truth to keep building new and different models of religious truth! As a result, more people are feeling Dewey’s liberal pragmatic models of truth are the only useful models in an ever-changing nature. What’s more, they can also be used to keep building the more peaceful and enjoyable world we liberals say can be built if enough people want it. In any case, only future results will determine, say, how much better one religious or business model is, compared to old conservative models.
Current events are teaching us today's more democratic political models of truth are growing. More and more they’re beginning to challenge everyone to test different political assumptions for increasing the public good. At the same time, however, such events are also teaching us conservatives continue fighting to keep their maximum-profit economic model in place. Thus, we liberals need to stay focused on such battles; they will help determine the future for us and our children. As the 5th century of our modern era began unfolding after 2,000, a liberal political model may well become the dominant model around the world; many signs are encouraging; not all of them but certainly many of them. As always, time and more organized actions will tell, but again, the more people are educated to focus and concentrate their democratic power, the stronger it will become. If nothing else, history also teaches us habits are propulsive; they more they’re practiced the stronger they become.
In fact, the future of much of life on earth may depend on such intelligent creation and testing of assumptions. For example, the projected future results of global warming and continued oil use are frightening indeed. Giant US energy corporations are helping the Chinese to use carbon-based energies in their auto and machine factories, even while the US too is one of the worst contributors to atmospheric carbon, thus helping create potentially dangerous global-warming results. Even though they are still future possibilities, a more fluid pragmatic model of truth says we need new models of energy creation and use now, and if we don’t begin testing them, it might produce another massive die-off of life forms! It’s happened many times before. We’re already seeing some results of the old energy model as polar and glacial ice continues shrinking. And the situation becomes even more challenging when we realize we really have no good substitute for oil in our technological model of economics. Nuclear, wind, geothermal, and solar energy models are too dangerous, too expensive, or too small to run a large industrial economy. Fusion energy similar to the sun’s energy remains our best hope, but it too is in an infant stage of development.
To make matters even worse, oil companies have been so busy producing more oil, and consumers busy using that oil, almost no one seems aware of the possible dangerous results. For decades that economic model of truth worked fine, and yet its results are now producing the very results that are so threatening and dangerous. In fact, based on such results, a conservative model of maximum-profit economic truth may turn out to be one of the deadliest economic models of all! Even if everyone stopped using oil to run their cars and factories today, and the atmosphere ceased heating up, the result would almost certainly be economic catastrophe around the world! Hundreds of millions of people would suddenly be without jobs!
The situation is indeed serious, but thanks to a liberally fluid pragmatic model of truth, it’s not hopeless. In that model truth is always evolving. There seems to be no real new models of energy to quickly start producing better results, but that’s only a challenge so far. We may be seeing merely the meltdown of our energy model, with no new one to take its place, but such a reality is calling for some new ideas and assumptions to test. Who knows, one day General Motors may decide to build only electric cars? In any case, however, we Deweyan liberals really can’t trust those conservatives who keep telling us there’s really nothing to worry about; global warming is really not an accurate weather model! Many of them have cash-flows to defend and protect, so they certainly don’t want any of them disturbed! Individuals too are now challenged to build new habit models, so as to help delay such disruptive climate results. They can range from disruptive protests to merely driving less and using solar energies more.
In general, then, we can say all models of truth face 2 ways, both into the past for their origins, and into the future for their results. That situation in fact helps create a new model of scientific truth: the more inventions are made, the more problems are created! Global warming is merely one example of that idea; widespread government electronic surveillance and the spread of disease by air travel are 2 other ones. Thus, the value of both mental and physical flexibility has increased with the growth of modern science. If that pragmatic flexibility doesn’t provide us new energy models to test, then mankind’s future may find itself restricted to places like Antarctica, Siberia, and Greenland.
The more a future-looking skill is practiced, the less dangerous life becomes in the eternal present. In a way, for us Deweyan liberals too, truth is like us; it’s ‘born again’ a little each day! Every day we can experimentally create a newer, better working model of truth to make life better here and now, and thus keep a forward-looking pragmatic model of truth alive and growing on a conscious level, rather than merely a subconscious one.
No doubt, old conservative habits of picturing eternal and constant truth die hard, but they're not indestructible; they were created by people, taught to children by people, and they can be improved by people. It will take a while for conservatives and moderates who assume truth really isn’t an exact correspondence between ideas and reality, but the more liberal we make our schools, and the more children are taught to experimentally use a pragmatic model of truth to solve challenges here and now, the easier it becomes to see both conservative philosophic AND religious models of Eternal Truth are just that – organic and changing models of truth! Best of all, the more people feel such an organic and growing model of truth, the more liberated they become to more intelligently produce better results and thus create their own models of truth on a daily basis.
Such a fluid, growing, and organic pragmatically creative and experimental model of truth is, perhaps, Dewey’s greatest philosophic contribution. Everyone learns all through life, so isn’t a useful learning model in an always changing nature one of the most important models to have? Even though we all face common problems and challenges all through life, a pragmatic model of truth encourages all of us to keep building our own inner models of truth every day all through life. As history so often teaches us, in science, morals, economics, politics, and education, continually growing models of truth are natural and normal. What’s important are the results they produce.
Such a pragmatically liberal model of truth is today helping reconstruct all old conservative and moderate models of life and nature. What results the new pragmatic models will produce of course depends on how people actually use them. If they’re not used to build a better world for more people, then other ideas need to be tested. For example, the more people allow the burning of carbon-based energy sources, the more oil companies will probably continue making as much money as possible and acquiring more power to keep the present system and its dangerous results in place! In fact, I believe some conservatives are actually looking forward to that situation; within their business model are ideas like ‘creative destruction,’ rather than an increased public good.
For us Deweyan liberals, all our scientific, religious, ethical, educational, and economic models of truth show us once again, we humans are the artists of truth, and especially of how they will be used. Plato, for example, assumed mathematics reveals absolutely certain kinds of Truth, but for us Deweyan liberals the ancient mathematician Euclid was an artist. He artfully created merely one model of geometric truth in his Plane Geometry, rather than discovering eternal and already existing geometric truth! What does geometry's truth correspond to other than its own ideas? The only place perfect triangles and circles exist is in our own thinking. In fact, as 19th century mathematics shows, there're an infinite number of geometric models possible; anyone can become a geometric artist by simply choosing a different set of assumptions and then reasoning to see what 'truth' they produce. That is a pragmatic model of truth at work, and with it mathematics becomes an art for measuring size and movement, just as science becomes an art for testing ideas. Such an organic and pragmatic model of math truth helps us create new models when they’re needed, as happened with atomic quantum discoveries. And it can be used to avoid the dangers of carbon pollution in the near future. For sending people to the moon at relatively slow speeds Newton’s equations are still very useful, but for calculating how large atomic particles grow as they approach the speed of light in atom smashers, quantum mechanic’s equations are more useful.
Is Dewey’s pragmatic model of truth too radical? At this point, the question should put a smile on the reader’s face. Isn’t that like asking if modern science’s pragmatic model of truth is too radical? If it isn’t, then we can begin feeling moral, religious, educational, economic, and political models of truth too are all human artistic creations made to give life more stable meanings in an always changing nature. However, because nature’s always changing all ideas too are tested each time we use them. In fact, since the mid-1800s the disastrous social results of an under regulated laissez-faire maximum-profit economic model of truth has helped create other more socialistic models of truth, models that have often produced much better social results for more people. Useful public libraries and public utilities are merely 2 examples of that socialistic model. For us liberals, then, we assume ONLY when ideas of truth are tested and become reliable, when they actually help produce useful results, then they become excellent truth, and not until!
For us Deweyan liberals, no one should be more honored than those who intelligently use their models of ethical truth to keep helping those less fortunate, and show tolerance for all peaceful forms of actions, as long as they help produce constructive and healthful results for as many as possible. For Dewey such future results are the best judge of any model of truth. And so, to help clarify and compress all such ideas, yet 2 more lamely lame limericks are offered.
A man named Dave liked gooses,
Especially for those with large cabooses.
But one day a victim said.
As she punched his head,
Look at the results it produces.
With speeches politician Digby created excitement,
Aids said they were full of profound insightment.
But as his abuses were counted,
And the evidence mounted,
Soon he earned another indictment!
19. FEELINGS WITHIN EXPERIMENTAL LEARNING
At this point it should be obvious: intelligent experimental learning is Dewey’s model for learning excellence in any problem situation. Its trial-and-error/success process is basically how all life-forms learn anything. In humans, however, that process has finally been brought to a more consciously creative and enjoyable level of feeling. It involves all our active senses AND feelings, rather than merely logical reasoning as Plato suggested, or a basically passive process of sense-absorption, like Aristotle suggested. Such conservative and moderate models of learning helped people like Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume build their own versions of learning. As a result, many people even today continue assuming such models of learning are best, and thus never realize they can feel what a more active and enjoyable pragmatic model of learning is like.
What makes us humans so different from all other life forms is the amount of intelligence, foresight, and enjoyment we can feel while satisfying even our ordinary needs and wants. This section will explore a few more of those feelings. With them, we can more easily anticipate future situations, and also enjoy lessening their feelings of stress and frustration. No doubt, such a pragmatic learning model is not widespread yet, but at least its potential feelings can be described. The more a person learns to enjoy thinking about different options, the more their senses and feelings are used intelligently. In this section we take a little deeper look at what Dewey’s experimental learning art can feel like on the inside, while we’re using it. What kinds of inner feelings might its rhythms encourage while we’re trying to solve everyday stresses like, say, getting something healthful to eat, preparing to check out quickly at the grocery store, or show a potential partner we’re really not the klutz we act like most of the time? If Dewey's right, if an experimental trial and error learning model is the only learning model, then what might be some inner rhythms and feelings felt while practicing that art?
For almost all of natural history simple trial-and-error actions helped animals and plants turn some of nature's outer sense-energies into more satisfying inner feelings, and thus keep life satisfying. For example, for plants ultraviolet energy is satisfying, but as they feel those energies they also react to make them even more satisfying; they can adjust their leaves to get more of it. When they do they act as intelligently as any person who learns to take better advantage of useful energies. So, again, what feelings might such actions encourage on the inside, to help us know more about pragmatic learning? To help answer that question we will picture experimental learning as a kind of 3-movement interactive concerto between a person and the outer world.
Obviously on a daily basis everything alive feels some stressful frustration from time to time. Many new parents, for example, quickly learn to hear when their child has food-frustrations at 2:00 o’clock in the morning. Biological needs for food need to be satisfied or life soon ends. Usually most such frustrated feelings are satisfied quickly. In fact, as more and more are learning today, food is not only satisfying, but addictive as well; many people can’t seem to stop eating, and so they’re challenged to better control the addiction or remain to their often painful results.
Other frustrating feelings are also satisfied easily; small frustrations like what to wear, what food to fix, and getting to and from work are usually overcome quickly. In any case, however, for intelligently satisfying any need or want Dewey names 5 experimental 'movements' or ‘steps’ in his book How We Think . They involve noting and accepting one’s frustrating feelings, clarifying what they mean, imagining different ways of reducing them, examining their results, choosing the best idea, and then testing and analyzing the results. Here, however, I’ve reduced them to 3 basic feeling-actions: 1.) feeling a frustrating problem, 2.) creatively imagining different solutions, and then 3.) actively testing an idea to feel what constructive, healthful, and satisfying results are produced.
Learning’s Concerto Begins…
Experimental learning's 1st rhythm is a rather irritating and harsh-sounding one. It’s generally felt as a kind of frustration and tension-causing unease and restlessness. Common feelings are hunger, thirst, excessive noise, bitter tastes, and so on. Plants, for example, feel the need to make more food and thus use solar energy, water, and carbon dioxide to make more food and keep growing. Animals too need to breathe, eat, be safe, and at times reproduce. They're all biological needs. But the more something blocks satisfying those needs, like a lack of water for example, the more stressful life becomes. For example, when it rains and water forces air from the ground, earthworms suddenly can't breathe and so quickly feel experimental learning’s first frustrating movement, much as compulsive gamblers do when they’re not gambling; something just doesn’t feel right. On the outside it looks like a kind of restlessness, and on the inside it’s felt as a desire for something. In short, on the inside experimental learning’s first movement is a kind of muscular tension, and like Maurice Ravel's famous musical piece 'Bolero', such feelings keep increasing if they’re not satisfied. To more easily identify with such feelings, one can imagine how a drug addict feels before looking for more drugs.
Of course, normally such uneasy feelings don’t usually stay frustrating for very long. Worms quickly make their way to the surface, where the problem might then become a hungry bird, and gamblers often get into their car and drive to the nearest casino, after which the results may become needing a better place to live other than their cars. Luckily, for many other people, such physically muscular tensions and mild anxieties are satisfied in less self-destructive ways. To reduce such tensions many people simply open another can of beer or fix another drink -- life is good eh? Others might watch a favorite TV show, and of course sex is another common response to such tensions; and I’m told some actually even read a book to relieve their boredom. Each to their own, aye? Some kids may even learn to satisfy their food tensions with chocolate-covered potato chips! Why is my mouth watering now? But in all such examples some kind of muscular tension is felt at first. Incidentally, that’s why teaching our self to relax whenever at such times is a very useful habit; feeling relaxed makes it easier to start enjoying a learning process and thus gain some control over all our frustrating feelings. After all, when some people can live without food for weeks, how much food does one need right now? In short, when relaxed it’s easier to imaginatively enjoy thinking of different ways of satisfying our frustrations! For example, for those chocolate-covered potato chips we might want to substitute deep fried chocolate-covered ants or grasshoppers!
No doubt, experimental learning's 1st movement can feel like anything from mildly frustrating, to eerily foreboding, to downright terrifying. Frustrated addicts, for example, can even feel severe pain without their drugs, and so experimentally learning to relax and gain some control over our harmful addictions may sometimes take years. For those who like, say, to break the law, sometimes it takes a while to relax when the opportunity presents itself, and to feel how such actions can produce even more frustrating feelings and tensions later on, unless of course you don’t sitting in jail for 15-30 years! It’s yet another reason we liberal Deweyans keep saying obeying just laws is a very important character habit to teach our self; it helps make life less stressful and frustrating.
No doubt, feeling such frustrating tensions have been a normal part of life for billions of years now. Eventually, however, a few ancient Greeks realized satisfying them can be either routine and unintelligent, or creative and more intelligent! That idea became part of Dewey’s learning model too. We can lessen our frustrating tensions destructively, or playfully and constructively. Many Greek thinkers were interested in practicing such intelligent arts while trying to satisfy their needs to know how to live excellently. In fact, Socrates is described as making people feel frustrated about not really knowing something; to him it was a healthy first step to becoming more intelligent. Calmly looking at the results of different ideas could help people lessen their tensions about not knowing something, feel more humble about their ideas, and also test new ideas for satisfying their frustrations. Thus, when treated intelligently such frustrations could help keep intelligently expanding the confined limits of one’s own ignorance.
No doubt, not all people responded so positively to Socrates’s questions, but Plato was certainly one who did. He spent much of his life examining his conservative assumptions, and trying to reduce their frustrating results like those mentioned in the Parmenides. In fact, with such a practical learning process many other Greeks gained more control over their knowledge-tensions by first asking some good questions, and then testing possible answer. Such a questioning art helped make the Greek culture one of the most advanced on earth; they loved to question any idea and look at its results. They used such questions in the second phase of a pragmatic learning process, so as to help lessen and relax their inner frustrating rhythms and melodies of ignorance. Eventually, 3 very different models of life and nature were built into the core of Western civilization, where they remain alive to this day. No doubt, Socrates’s method of questioning wasn’t always used even by his own students; some of them had rather destructive ways of reducing their tensions, but who can control how all people act? At any rate, enjoying thinking about other ways of satisfying our frustrations became an important phase of Dewey’s learning model, felt here as experimental learning's 2nd major movement -- its imaginative and creative movement.
The Music Playfully Turns Inward…
No doubt, Dewey realized the more we teach ourselves to feel enjoyment while thinking of ways to satisfy our tense frustrations, the more we can begin intelligently feeling experimental learning's 2nd major phase. True, some people are just naturally enjoy creative and imaginative thinking; many philosophers fall into that category. But almost certainly everyone has some natural creativity; even non-human animals are sometimes creative. At any rate, the point is enjoying such creative and fun thinking can be delightful as sense-energies are reduced and ideas are more deeply felt and talked about. Of course, the common word is thinking, but we’re able to build many feelings around that skill -- everything from evil and destructive to whimsical joy and happiness, as I’ve been trying to show with all my attempts at humor. With practice the enjoyment of this 2nd movement can keep growing stronger all through life. You’re hungry? How about some delicious earthworm kabobs?
Mainly because our schools, homes, and churches don’t teach such skills, daily life most people most of the time often feels dull and boring. Even when ideas are consciously felt, it often happens so quickly it goes completely unnoticed. Most people probably think hunger-refrigerator without a second thought. Kids, for example, may feel hungry and automatically think chocolate-covered potato chips. Again, it takes a little training and practice to begin smiling and thinking about chocolate-covered ants and beetles. And the more that happens, the stronger one’s routine learning habit-art becomes! Such automatic routine habits quickly help us feel how to satisfy a tense frustration, and quickly begin testing the idea. The inner result is a rather flat and boring inner life, largely devoid of creativity or enjoyment. It’s probably the way most young folks enter college; it certainly was that way for me. Neither my home, school, nor church taught me how much fun playful creative thinking can be. As a result, my college experience was not nearly all it could have been. I never thought about chocolate-covered broccoli or spinach, 2 of the most nutritious vegetables on earth!
In reality, however, learning’s 2nd stage can be the door to feeling a much more creative and sparkling inner mental life. Not only did Dewey feel learning 2nd step, but he also felt how much of a delightfully enjoyable game it could be! Instead of merely acting routinely and unintelligently, he suggested feeling how playfully creative this learning movement could be! No doubt, for most everyone nearly all the time it happens quickly, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It can become a creatively playful and enjoyable part of the process, and when it does learning itself begins feelings more delightful, enjoyable, and dramatic as well! Again, it takes a little practice to begin feeling how to make it more enjoyable, but then again what skill doesn’t require some practice? And best of all, the stronger that playfully creative feeling grows, the easier it becomes to use it in any situation to help reduce any tension and anxiety. Really folks, how many know how to enjoy talking about creatively different sexual ideas with a partner before actually using their routine missionary skills for all of the next 30 seconds?!
Obviously, with stronger tensions and anxieties, like addictions, or even re-shaping any weak, excessive, or unhealthful habit, it may be more difficult to learn how to make this phase more enjoyable and fun. Sometimes it’s even difficult to feel what you really want to learn most of all, where you can learn it, how to pay for it without going into debt for 20 years, or how to get to the nearest casino as fast as possible. For those people, learning to enjoy experimental learning’s 2nd movement may feel odd at best. After all, no one is born with playfully creative learning habits, and so routine thinking habits feel much more natural. How can anyone teach themselves such intelligent habits when they don’t know what they feel like? As a result, it’s difficult for some people to better control harmful habits like disrespecting just laws, or how best to keep helping those less well off than themselves. Without first feeling a mental playfulness sometimes young folks don't realize even their local community college can help them start reducing their frustrations about not knowing how to support themselves. Not everyone needs a Harvard degree. Sometimes routine habits are so strong people don’t feel how useful a mentally playful habit is for freeing themselves from destructive addictions, like excessive and unhealthful gambling for example. Sometimes satisfying those addictive feelings blinds people to feeling how losing all their money at Baccarat means sleeping in their car again. Sometimes it takes a little outside professional psychological help to begin feeling how playfully experimental learning's 2nd movement can be, rather than routinely producing the same frustrating results time after time. Sometimes people need such help learning how to manage, say, angry actions more intelligently. Sometimes people need some help to learn their own playful thinking can help them feel there’re more intelligent places to get a chocolate-covered baked potato besides the local Red Light district!
With such mentally playfully creative inner feelings one begins feeling a more intelligent 2nd movement useful for satisfying any tension and frustration, and thus gaining more control over any boring or routinely destructive actions. Mentally creative playfulness thus feels liberating. It helps us feel we don’t have to keep acting in the same frustrating and stressful ways, unless of course you don’t mind sleeping in your car or stealing to satisfy a drug addiction and allow drug lords and greedy banks to keep racking in millions! With a more mentally playful habit the feeling of personal power continues growing. No doubt, at first it may not feel that way. The old routine habits still want to be satisfied in the same way, and quickly. But the more a mental playfulness is practiced, the better it feels.
Such a new habit helps us feel more like the master of our habits and actions, rather than the slave to our destructive and frustrating ones. When faced with satisfying a need or want, such a mental playfulness helps us feel like there’re many other ways to satisfy them. With the growth of such feelings, however, we slowly become more intelligent ourselves. Even if we don't always test our creative ideas, at least we can begin feeling how enjoyable it is to create them. They give an added depth to Dewey’s idea mentioned earlier: Imagination is the only art making life more than an automatic sameness and routing. Many people feel they deserve to be punished and abused, but with such a mental playfulness anyone who begin feeling there are more intelligent, satisfying, rewarding, enjoyable, and pleasant ways of acting!
As we've seen already, such creative inner feelings have been the main engine for helping us humans continuing increasing our advantages over all other dangerous life forms. Anthropologists, for example, now tell us our ancestors began taming wild dogs about 100,000 years ago; such new habits grew with a little creative thinking. And more recently creative medical ideas have given us more power over dangerous bacteria and viruses. Both those results, and many of the ones in between, were the result of playfully feeling our own inner creativity, promoted of course with the growth of speaking habits. Not having language and talking skills severely limits other life forms to their routine habits of what's worked in the past, rather than playfully imagining what other actions might work better here and now. As a result, we can more intelligently keep satisfying our needs and wants, but again, only if that mentally playful art is practiced! New diseases and health challenges will continue producing tensions about health in an always changing nature.
In short, the more such inner creative habits aren’t taught, the more human life remains on about the same level as the rest of the animal kingdom, that is, on a less-than-intelligent level. Experimental learning’s 2nd movement -- playfully creative thinking – thus becomes a very important part of any learning process; it's often the key to intelligently guiding all forms of intelligent growth and excellence! Do I really need to keep lying to the IRS about my income, keep ignoring how my local schools might become more useful to more students, and how I can call gambler's anonymous for some help in relaxing and playfully thinking of some other ideas to test, and thus avoid the injuries my partner may cause after learning I've yet again lost all our rent money? The good news is most everyone can learn such a mental playfulness, even young children who are just beginning to talk. In fact, isn’t that the best time to start teaching such a useful habit? As parents quickly learn, young children are like learning sponges; they soak up everything they feel and sense. The bad news is most everyone isn’t being taught such a useful mental skill.
In fact, opportunities for such playful thinking exist all through every day! What other more satisfying options are there for the harmful foods I’m eating, carbon-polluting car I’m driving, friends I’m hanging around with, and sex I’m having or not having? Should I just get a bigger paddle for a little brother or sister who keep eating all the chocolate-covered potatoes, or just hide the chocolate!? Such opportunities for some playful thinking exist every day. It’s the stronger unhealthful habits that take a little more time for improving. It may take some time for someone to playfully ask them self if I rub my eyelids with garlic will it cure my crack cocaine addiction? In any case, however, enjoying the creation of such humorous questions is healthful. It increases one’s mental playfulness, making it easier to relax and start learning how to enjoy life without such harmful satisfactions. Since when can’t a little mental playfulness be the first step to building a more satisfying life?
Mental Life as Impulsive Energy
Throughout history, of course, animals, plants, and whatever else was looking for lunch, felt impulsive energies. If not satisfied in one place, they impulsively looked in another place. Thus impulsively plants and animals built satisfying habits. For example, some plants impulsive adjust their leaves to get more sunlight; and even our 350 million year old Devonian fish ancestors learned to satisfy their food needs by impulsively swallowing anything that didn’t run away from them, much like many people do in homes and restaurants today. Such habits became useful; as Dewey says they were conditioned by their surroundings. But as we've seen, the more our human ancestors taught themselves how to stop for a few moments and playfully feel different ways of acting, like how to make better tools and hunt more safely, the easier it became to keep broadening and deepening learning's 2nd movement, and thus make life more satisfying. Sometimes new feeling and ideas produced better results when tested. Didn’t the creation of useful burial habits begin with some impulsive feeling-ideas?
As we’ll see in Part 2, and in Book 2, the art of playful thinking is old indeed, but still not very widespread! For example, in Africa more than 2 million years ago, our half human-half animal H. habilis ancestors couldn't always easily satisfy their food needs. Times were stressful and often frustrating; competition with hungry lions and tigers regularly increased the tension. Then, one day one of those ancestors impulsively felt the possibility of building a useful stone tool to better satisfy its food needs. Ever since, a playfully creative tool-making art has continued encouraging such creative mental impulses to keep growing and increasing its power to make life safer, more enjoyable, and more satisfying. No doubt, some accidental discoveries were made along the way, but probably more often than not playfully creative impulsive ideas were involved too. Probably sometime around 50,000 years ago new spirit-ideas impulsively began growing as a way to help make life feel even more satisfying. And since those Middle Paleolithic times, playful talking skills have continued making life more creative. With their chatting arts those ancestors increased their mental impulsiveness, helping create other useful habits. In fact, for Dewey mentally playful chatting habits became THE greatest invention of all time! In ancient Greece such mental impulsiveness was transformed into liberal, moderate, and conservative models of nature.
What other words might describe the feeling of learning’s imaginative 2nd movement? In his Human Nature and Conduct Dewey used the words ‘impulse’ and ‘instinct’ to describe the same kind of mental feelings. Of course their energy intensities will vary from person to person; no two people are exactly alike; some can impulsively imagine different ideas more easily than others. In any case, however, mental events can be felt as both impulsive and instinctive. Normally impulses are felt as spontaneous and energetic feelings; children, for example, are generally impulsive; they go from object to object impulsively, just to learn more about their world and how the objects in it feel and taste. Adults too feel such body-mind impulses. How many times have you instinctively been drawn to some shiny new shoes and car? Probably everyday people get impulses to go other places, thinking other thoughts, wear different clothes, or eat different foods. Those feelings can all be described as instinctive impulses! They’re all spontaneous energetic feelings; they happen all through life and are a part of human nature. They’re a kind of natural mental playfulness suggesting different feelings to experiment with.
What’s more, impulsively instinctive energies feel projective; they can be felt as energy surges, so to speak, of what to do in certain situations. A supervisor may ask us about, say, a stolen item, and if we took it we may feel the impulsive instinct to lie about it. I like to picture them as little energetic mental sparks and flashes suggesting how to act, but they can also be felt as a natural source of creativity. Most of the time people just rely on their old routine habit-energies to satisfy, say, food tensions: wash a potato, put it in the microwave, get the chocolate out of the fridge, and get ready for a feast. However, every once in a while we may get an impulse for chocolate-covered broccoli and spinach. And if our usual habits are frustrated, if little sister ate all the chocolate for breakfast, then the impulse may be to start looking for a paddle.
A Little Psychological History
Learning to playfully gain some control over our impulsive ideas can begin making any learning process more enjoyable. During experimental learning's 2nd movement little creative inner idea-sparks are felt. It’s normally called thinking. Learning to make it more playful is called enjoyable thinking, and thinking of different ideas is called creative thinking. Unless we learn not to think at all, such impulsive feelings keep bubbling up from our subconscious feelings – all those feelings we’ve felt before. In any case, however, word-power and experience give us the ability to gain more control of our impulsive feelings. They don’t always produce intelligent results, and that’s where the art of mentally seeing results become useful. For that, it just may be helpful to increase our playful impulses with some highly intelligent and deeply philosophic questions: Who the hell ate all the chocolate; how can I turn that little chocolate-gobbling brother of mine into my slave; where the hell is he; how can I make that little scrawny runt get some more chocolate; and what if he eats it all again on the way home? No doubt, it’s easy to see how such deep ethical questions can be used in everyday life. Such events, then, can also produce more enjoyable philosophic questions, like what is the human mind? That question has been asked, and answered, by philosophers for thousands of years!
We’ve already seen how conservatives like Plato, moderates like Aristotle, and liberals like Protagoras answered that question. So now we can broaden our knowledge of early modern philosophy with some ideas from moderates like John Locke (1632-1704) and conservatives like Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716). They built 2 early modern examples of human nature.
In many ways Locke was like Aristotle, even though he didn’t like what conservative medieval Christians had done to his philosophy. Still, Locke agreed with Aristotle: all knowledge is based on sense experience; the mind has no innate knowledge at birth, like Plato and Leibniz said it did. In short, Locke pictured the mind merely as something life’s sense-energies help create. That was definitely a step in the right liberal direction. To him everyone's mind was like a blank paper at birth; for the most part Aristotle would no doubt agree with that idea. Thus, through our senses, and with the help of some mental faculties, like reasoning and imagining, we all learn what we feel we know about the world. No doubt, such ideas caused a bit of a problem when it came to justifying his idea of god; he had been raised by rather strict Puritan parents, so he felt he wanted to justify the idea. Eventually, he built some logical arguments to satisfy himself, but it also shows how weak science’s testing idea was in many early modern thinkers. I’ll leave it to interested readers to see his argument in Book 4, Chapter 10 of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. At any rate, Locke helped get Western civilization’s modern liberal ball rolling, so to speak, soon used by people like David Hume and eventually John Dewey to build his pragmatic model of human nature.
Meanwhile, over in Germany, a modern conservative tradition began with Gottfried Leibniz, one of the most creative thinkers in history. Mainly because most all German rulers were addicted to their political power, and kept a tight control on liberal political writings until very recently after World War 2, most of the great German philosophers remained either radically conservative or moderate, like Immanuel Kant, George Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger who for a while supported the Nazi regime. The one exception to them was Karl Marx who was not only prevented from teaching in Germany, but was exiled and spent much of his life in England.
At any rate, Leibniz set the modern conservative tone about human nature, replacing the liberal model of nature as an infinite collection of atoms with his own model of an infinite number of immaterial self-enclosed mind-soul monads. Plato has supposedly used the word for what we call ideas. For Leibniz everyone is born with their own self-enclosed mind-soul-monad; some are merely more advanced than others. No doubt, such a model helped him accept the fact most everyone else rejected most of the ideas his very creative mind was suggesting to his aristocrat employers.
For Leibniz all our ideas are innate, including the creative ones, which brings up the interesting question: If everyone’s mind-monad remains enclosed and self-contained, then how can anyone possibly learn anything for certain about the always changing natural world? Was that another unsolvable problem? Not to Leibniz. Eventually he said god had so arranged all closed mind-monads to run exactly parallel to natural events! He called his system pre-established harmony. Thus, for him nature and human mental activity were like 2 separate and distinct clocks running exactly the same, and in complete harmony. God had simply created nature like that, and it’s been running like that ever since! With such a model he thus avoided the problem of spirit-matter interaction altogether! For him the problem didn’t exist; each person’s inner mind-monad ran harmoniously with nature’s material monads; problem solved.
Obviously, for liberal Behaviorists like Dewey, all such passive and self-enclosed models of the human mind should be thought of as merely imaginative models helping, more than anything else, justify more quests for philosophic certainty. For both Locke and Leibniz god was just as certain as was scientific law of nature. There was no empirical-sense evidence for either one, and yet both felt philosophic reasoning should be used to guarantee their certainty. Thus, for both learning was basically a passive operation. For Locke people passively absorbed some eternally constant sense-experience, like the shape and movement of objects, and then thought about its meanings, and for Leibniz all knowledge already existed in eternally constant non-material monads. Truth was thus found by merely turning our thoughts inward to see what they are. Again, Dewey called them spectator models of learning. However, the stronger an active experimental learning model grew and celebrated testing of all ideas, the easier it became to reject such early modern passive models of learning. Until actual psychology labs were built before 1900, and people were actually tested to see how learning happens, such early modern psychological models could only reflect Locke’s and Leibniz’s own inner impulsive feelings, many of which were formed during childhood. As a result, for many decades after them, both conservative and moderate philosophers, like Kant and Hegel, felt the mind was somehow different from the rest of the body; it had to be to discover nature’s eternal laws in an always changing nature.
For Dewey, however, both child and adult experimental psychology shows all learning is active and experimental, and its 2nd mentally creative stage can be as actively enjoyed as any other! In fact, such enjoyment was the first step to building any kind of love feelings. For example, during recent Ice Ages a sudden storm or cold spell could drive away the animals providing food. And so to help satisfy their food needs some of our ancestors kept actively experimenting with spirit-rituals, hoping they would keep hunting safe and productive. They wanted their mammoth-kabobs and their own safety too, so they had to actively invent better hunting habits to enjoy the food they liked. They also needed to actively test their creative ideas; would they in fact help put enjoyable liver-kabobs on the fire or not? Sometimes their experiments worked, and sometimes they didn’t, but when they worked they certainly enjoyed the feeling. In both cases, however, the learning was always interactive between people and their world. Much the same kinds of things could be said about children as well. So why has philosophy so often missed the boat with such real-life models of learning? No doubt, most modern philosophers had to avoid upsetting their political superiors, just as modern politicians often serve the needs of their wealthy supporters. Also, as we’ve seen, not only poor Socrates but aristocratic Plato and Aristotle looked down on active kinds of practical learning as distractions from grasping nature’s eternal and unchanging truth with their reasoning.
In a more experimentally scientific world of the last 150 years, however, philosopher-psychologists like Dewey realized learning is a much more active and experimental process on both the inside and outside! So, why not make them both as enjoyable as possible? Why not have as much fun and enjoyment talking about solutions as actively testing some of those ideas? The more those feelings grew in liberals like William James and John Dewey, the easier it became to feel a more reliable Behavioral model of human nature was more useful in an always changing nature; it was especially useful throughout the public education system, where even primary age students can begin feeling its importance. People like Locke and Leibniz, however, felt they needed to justify their own feeling-assumptions, many of which were about conservative religious ideas. Said conservative Leibniz: “Each (atomic) monad has something of the infinite, in that it involves its cause: God. That is to say, it (the human mind-soul-monad) has some trace of (all-knowing) omniscience and (all-powerful) omnipotence.” Dewey suggests treating all such unproved assumptions as philosophic autobiography more than anything else. It makes it much easier to understand their work.
For more experimental-minded people like Dewey and James, excellent learning was best felt as merely an actively goal-directed process of satisfying some biological need or want. What’s more, within such an active process, there are many chances for increasing its enjoyably playful feelings. We can enjoy the physical feelings of actively imagining different ideas just as much as we can enjoy feeling the testing of such ideas. In any case, however, a testing event can be seen as learning’s 3rd stage. Only after paddling little chocoholic sibling, and then getting paddled by a parent, can we feel how intelligent our first impulse really was. In fact, no one is above such testing in an always changing world, no matter how good and reliable an idea may feel at the time. Even when Plato began feeling some puzzling results his Spirit-Ideas created, he then impulsively began creating more ideas to experiment with. Testing them for their results shows how even conservatives are not above using experimental learning’s entire process! However, as testing became a more conscious part of all modern learning events, the main problem for conservatives became the lack of objective evidence for their assumptions about any kind of eternally unchanging objects in nature. Thus, such conservative and moderate assumptions were seen by liberals as merely inner feelings and ideas formed by one’s habits.
Merging Inner Feelings with the Outer World
Modern experimental testing arts thus began reconstructing all old conservative and moderate pictures of learning excellence. For example, because experimental psychology found no evidence for any innate ideas or eternal faculties, like reasoning, the easier it became for Dewey to say the human mind is basically made up of impulses and habits. We’re all born with impulsive energies, and with practice become habits. As a result, the actual physical results of our testing actions also reach out and down into nature itself! Such testing gets us actively out of our own heads and ideas and into nature itself. Leibniz’s entire modern conservative tradition simply rejected such a learning model. For him our non-material mind-soul monads were completely separated and self-enclosed from all outside causes.
For liberal Behaviorists like Dewey, all such problems about how our ideas are best justified reduced to simply actively testing our ideas. Actively testing ideas actually connected inner ideas to nature’s outer results. He thus helped create another genuine model of learning, one much closer to Locke than Leibniz, and thus offered people an important choice in life -- which model felt better to practice? In fact, his pragmatic model of learning created the same kinds of choices many ancient liberal Sophists offered people over 2,000 years ago! Testing ideas is the only way of learning.
Feeling the actual results our actions produce, and then feeling how those results can then be returned to us, is the basis of the common saying, what goes around often comes around! The results of, say, helping others, can then be felt on the inside as others helping us! No doubt, such results may not be as rapid as, say, boiling water may be, but they still can be felt. In fact, what helps make life even more interesting is feeling such results not happening right away; sometimes they’re days or weeks later! And when that happens, another interesting result can happen, namely our own inner character can keep growing. We can begin feeling helping others is a so-called end-in-itself, and is its own reward! Such important character feelings too are an important part of building an excellent character, mentioned, by the way, by Aristotle long ago in his description of how a Greek gentleman acts.
For Dewey, testing actions and their results reach down into nature itself, where tense feelings grew in the first place! Lack of food out there is satisfied by food out there! Even Leonardo felt the importance of such testing feelings more than 4 centuries ago, even though he was probably never paddled for paddling a younger sibling; both chocolate and potatoes weren’t even in Europe at the time! Still, he felt how important it was to test ideas. What’s the result of eating a salad and some yogurt compared to a nice thick salty cow-kabob; how does it feel not to cough your lungs out after you quit smoking; and how does it feel to keep going to the doctor’s to reduce a Mount Everest-high blood pressure reading? And when our testing actions help produce more healthful results, they can actually feel like the 4th movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony -- joyously grand! Imagine how joyful Galileo felt after actually dropping his 2 different sized balls from the Leaning Tower and they hit the ground together! One might even say he used his balls wisely. Such results helped convince him Aristotle wasn’t the best source for scientific truth; he hadn’t tested many of his ideas for their results. And remember how joyful you felt when you finally learned how to ride a 2-wheel bicycle, and remember how joyful it felt every day when no one stole it during the night! Now who says experimental testing isn’t useful?
For Dewey, feeling such testing skills go all the way to the beginnings of life on earth, some 4 billion years ago! It’s called trial-and-error learning. In Paleolithic times, for example, new mammoth hunting ideas were actively tested by actually going out and stampeding a herd over a cliff. The result was less danger to hunters; as anyone knows, one mammoth stomp can quickly ruin your whole day, or your life! And no doubt when an idea worked, enjoying those mammoth-kabobs was much better than trying to eat them with 2 broken arms and legs! In fact, the fossil record shows some Paleolithic people ate too many liver-kabobs; too much vitamin A is toxic and unhealthful, just as too much carbon in the atmosphere today can be dangerous to many life forms including people!
Liberal Uses for Testing
Such testing results have at last begun re-igniting a liberal model of life; in it all people are worthwhile and should have the same equal rights as anyone else. And to more widely produce such results, the government should take an active role. As we’ll see in Book 4, Locke’s small-government libertarian political ideas rejected such a role for government, even though everyone’s taxes helped the government work. Dewey’s liberal political idea, however, said democratic equality was much more difficult without the government’s help; it alone had the power to make life better for millions of people! Government testing of foods, for example, has helped reduce harmful foods for millions of people, as well as keep educating people about the healthful and harmful results different foods and chemicals might produce, like meat's fatty deposits in arteries helping make hearth attacks and strokes more likely, and the dangerous results of eating too much refined sugar! Diabetes is a terrible disease often preventable with better diet habits. And as anyone knows who’s tested the idea of drinking lots of alcohol, feeling that morning-after hangover is not a fun time.
Here’s another important result we can feel during learning's active and testing 3rd movement, namely its infinite little dramatic ‘moments of truth’! No doubt some won’t be welcome; sometimes testing produces results we don’t want to see or are difficult to understand. In any case, however, for us Deweyan liberals, feeling such dramatic tensions while testing can make learning even more interesting and exciting. So, is it any wonder Dewey felt one of our greatest modern challenges is to start teaching such active learning skills to as many young folks as possible, and also how to use them to keep making this world more satisfying for more people! Until that happens, government actions will be needed to keep helping people learn how to best support themselves in an ever changing world.
Experimental learning’s 3rd testing movement brings to every learning situation the feeling of genuine adventure and risk to even daily events. Who knows what'll happen while testing to improve even daily food habits? The wonder drug penicillin was discovered by sheer accident, and it’s been a benefit to millions, but that doesn’t diminish the risk and adventure anyone can feel as they begin testing the idea for themselves! Until tested who knows what the reaction might be? Place your bet and roll the experimental wheel. Who knows what you'll feel when you stop smoking or eating all those mammoth-kabobs? Thus, with a little practice in consciously using an experimental model of learning, everyday events can begin feeling new and interesting, while making learning itself feel like an adventure. Learning’s active 3rd movement can feel that exciting and liberating, even on a daily basis, if, that, we practice feeling such events. Perhaps most liberating of all, it can help us feel even the grandest philosophers and theologians issuing their Grand Edicts of Truth were merely experimenting with their own forceful ideas and feelings, nothing more and nothing less.
In so many ways old conservative and moderate routine ideas and habits keep producing intolerant and anti-democratic results, and more frustrating feelings for millions of people around the world. In Dewey’s day, for example, the situation was much worse than it is today. Old racist ideas and actions not only produced dangerously stressful results for most Africans and other minorities, but arrogant feelings of superiority in white folks. No doubt, we’re still not entirely out of those old ethical woods yet, but at least we know how to keep intelligently challenging those results, and keep increasing more democratic feelings of equality; what goes around can often come around. In fact, many cultures around the world have seen the results of people treating others as they themselves would like to be treated. As a result of testing such ideas, today life has become much more tolerant, satisfying, and peaceful for millions of people, both white and non-whites alike. And, if we can teach more people to feel how important it is to start limiting population growth, it may help produce better results for those millions still living in great poverty. Isn’t that too yet another idea more of us need to be testing?
Here’s yet another important result from the experimental testing of ideas: Truth itself has been democratized and individualized for everyone! That too is a liberating feeling, in general not to conservatives but to liberals. No doubt, some problems and frustrations feel anything like liberating. Einstein, for example, felt all 4 of nature’s basic physical forces -- gravitational, electrical, and strong and weak atomic forces – could be mathematically reduced to one force only, just a Plato felt all goodness could be reduced to one Form of the Good. For years Einstein kept trying but never tested the mathematical ideas of what became the so-called ‘string’ model of nature. Even narrowing down the meaning of those ideas has proved to be a scientific adventure in itself.
No doubt, sometimes the results of testing an idea may feel more frustrating than anything else; sometimes people who stop smoking may feel like they want another cigarette so badly they could kill for it. Different actions produce different results and different feelings in everyone. Some problems may even need our very best ATTENTION AND EFFORTS for life-long periods of time! And sometimes we may never find a good solution; some problems are like Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. But it doesn't mean we can’t learn to make the learning process as enjoyable and fun as we can? Every time we feel such enjoyment while imagining and testing an idea, the more enjoyable the process becomes, thus helping us master of our frustrations more, rather than remaining a frustrated slave to them. Even when our testing produces frustrating results we can still feel other ideas might work. Who knows, maybe we can help someone else more easily feel some better-working idea while testing it? With such enjoyment, however, it becomes more fun to keep testing new ideas. Such feelings are what can help make experimental learning's concerto such a powerful learning tool. As Dewey said, improving life is our only alternative to merely ignoring its challenges and their harmful results!
So many philosophers have felt life’s brutal events like wars and diseases, and so many have worked to make life feel more satisfying. Such motives probably helped Plato build his conservatives models of life and nature, just as they helped Karl Marx, who predicted communism as mankind’s final economic and political solution, or Adam Smith’s self-correcting capitalism. However, even though the motives may have been similar, experimental testing has shown such ideas didn’t actually produce the results they predicted. Thus, for us Deweyan liberals, almost certainly life will never reach such a steady state; in fact I predict just when mankind gets everything arranged just right the sun will explode and end it all. Thus, experimental testing teaches us learning excellence becomes the art of enjoyably finding what will best solve this particular problem at this particular time and in this particular situation! Who feels nature is capable of anything more? If so, then those who teach themselves to feel joy while creating and testing ideas in that kind of nature give themselves a big advantage over those who don’t. Frustration is reduced and becomes more manageable. In fact, with such enjoyable testing habits life can more easily feel ‘born again’ every day!
If so, then the following questions might be useful: How often do I consciously feel such actions in my daily life? How often do I stop myself when I feel a problem’s frustrations and enjoy playing with different idea-solutions? How much love and joy do I consciously feel during my problem-solving habit-arts? How deeply do I CONSCIOUSLY ENJOY my learning challenges and their testing dramas? At our biological world’s nonverbal level, even worms feel the need to test different actions from time to time. How do I know? Have you ever heard a worm complain it didn't enjoy breathing real air during a rainstorm? Maybe only worm psychiatrists know for sure.
Perhaps more than every other life form, we can keep artistically growing the enjoyable and exciting feelings of experimental learning. Instead of subconsciously stumbling along with mere dull and routine trial-and-error actions, we can slowly and surely begin consciously feeling how enjoyable the process can be. We can teach our self to become a more intelligent artist in learning! How much do we enjoy or dislike overcoming our frustrations, thinking more creatively, and enjoy testing our ideas? How much do we playfully celebrate our challenges? How much do we like playfully expanding our own wisdom and personal power? How much do we creatively keep improving our own humane and sympathetic feelings for those less well off than ourselves? And probably most important of all, should we greedily keep all our mammoth-kabobs for ourselves, or should we intelligently share them with the poor and needy Neander-smiths down the road?
Once again, all such thoughts can be condensed into another lampooningly lame limerick:
For robbing banks Murphy was #1.
He even enjoyed casing joints while on the run.
So after catching some lead,
In the ambulance he said,
Who knew learning could be such fun?
20. EXPERIMENTAL LEARNING'S MAJOR WEAKNESS
It’s a very important subject for all those who put objective evidence above faith and mere reasoning. In short, it's important for everyone who's interested in intelligently practicing experimental learning in the real world. As we’ve already seen, experimental learning is not the road to eternally certain Truth; in fact it has a major weakness, and it should be mentioned here at the end of Part 1.
Since ancient Greece philosophers have realized all kinds of excellence are best defined by their limits. Aristotle, for example, defined many examples of practical moral excellence as existing between the limits of excess and weakness. In general his moral model can be described as acting with moderation, and thus avoiding excessive and unhealthful actions. As we’ve seen all through Part 1, even modern Behaviorists often label habits as weak, excessive, and unhealthful; Aristotle would no doubt agree with those ideas. The excellent habit of intelligent courage, for example, can be seen as a kind of mid-point between cowardliness and purely excessive foolishness. And of course today, for us Deweyan liberals, character excellence as a whole depends on the physical limits of each individual person. So, it's important to know our limits, especially the limits of experimental learning and its art of testing ideas. That was one of Plato's problems with his reasoning art -- he wanted it to go beyond its natural limits and into a spirit-realm; eventually, when he realized there were major problems with that goal, he too felt the limits of his experimental method of reasoning. So, what is this major weakness we’re talking about?
No doubt, for Dewey experimental learning it's the best and ONLY learning tool we have while living in an always changing nature. As modern science and technology teach us, it’s the most useful learning tool for digging up new facts about nature ... can you dig it? There’s a serious danger, however. If, for example, we want to test for the results of a joyful habit-art, then actively practicing the art slowly reveals its future results; such results thus build all the art's meanings and feelings. Therein lies the dangerous limit of experimental learning. Only such future results determine how useful our choice was. In short, we don’t really know how useful our idea is at the time we test it, and so there’s always some risk and danger in all our choices! No doubt, some are less risky than others, but there’s always some risk. Even going for a walk has some risk to it. Thus, even our most powerful learning art isn't completely risk free, so it can’t make life completely safe, as Marie Currie and too many others have discovered while using it.
If Dewey's right, then only an idea’s FUTURE RESULTS can tell us how healthful and harmful our creative thinking and ideas were. For example, if we experiment with eating some vegetables our reason tells us are good for us, then there's always an interval of time between testing and feeling the results of that testing! Therein lies experimental learning's great limit and danger. There's always a chance even our best feelings will produce harmful results! A food, say, in a particular body may cause sickness rather than health. If so, then we can learn about nature's goods and dangers only AFTER testing an idea! Only AFTER I eat the vegetables can I feel their good or dangerous results. Only AFTER Marie Currie experimented with radium did she discover its deadly medical results. Only AFTER getting drunk, driving at 80 mph, and neatly wrapping a car around a telephone pole can I feel how dangerous my drinking-and-driving choice was. Only AFTER the idea of equal political rights is tested can we know how much social peace or hostility is produced. Only AFTER a person begins interacting with us can we begin feeling how obnoxious or wonderful they are.
No doubt, the feelings of experimental learning can be happily enjoyed as an end-in-themselves. Children experiment throughout the day just for the feeling of it, but that doesn't always make it a trouble-free learning model, as any parent soon learns. Thus, another very important result seems obvious Watson: When experimentally testing any idea, like beginning a new relationship with someone, why not TAKE CARE!? Only AFTER we experience the results of our actions can we best know how constructive or destructive our choices were. Only AFTER we, say, donate some money to a worthy cause can we learn how much of it was deposited in a numbered Swiss bank account, or used to help others. Thus, intelligent experimental learning helps us feel the importance of making our experiments as reasonably safe as possible!