PART 3: THE NEW OUTER WORLD
Page 1.7, Sections 1-5
1. NEW LIBERAL MODELS OF LIFE AND NATURE
Part 3 will first describe in more detail some of the new scientific models of life and nature Dewey helped build with new information and facts about our world and our own evolution. Only quite recently has enough become known about philosophy’s history to build a record of human mental evolution, usually beginning with the ancient Greeks. However, recently a great amount of new information has been discovered about native habits of thinking and acting much older than the ancient period beginning in 500 BCE. This longer period of human evolution is called here our native period, and it goes back perhaps 2 million years! This period has recently become a very important part of our new liberal scientific model of life and nature.
Some of that new information will be described in this and the following 2 sections, but be prepared; much of it is vastly different from religious models of life and nature most have been taught to accept. It’s thus helped keep conservative and moderate models of life and nature feeling more natural. Only recently, within the past 200 years, has this new scientific information make both those philosophic models quite intellectually unjustifiable, as we’ve been seeing throughout these pages. For example, only yesterday, so to speak, have Darwin’s new evolutionary ideas of life started replacing old conservative and moderate models of life Plato and Aristotle first began building in ancient Greece. In short, it’s turning out the liberal models of life and nature early Greek thinkers like Anaximander and Empedocles, liberal Atomists like Democritus, and secular humanists like Protagoras saw far more clearly into life’s depths than spirit-minded conservatives like Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, and even moderates like Aristotle.
Much about these new liberal scientific models of life and nature has already been mentioned, but Part 3 aims to describe more fully these new models, to help people see more clearly why they’re now much more reliable and acceptable. They’re begun changing life in many different ways, and often for the better, thus putting liberal models on a much firmer intellectual foundation than anything even ancient Greek liberals could imagine. Democritus’s atomic model has proved far more useful for improving life than either Plato’s or Aristotle’s.
From what’s already been said about experimental learning, modern anthropology, and Behavioral psychology, we’ll continue seeing how liberal models of life and nature simply make much more sense than those other models. In Part 3 we’ll also see some of the liberal religious, educational, political, and economic results of these new models of life. Perhaps the most important result is to base one’s ideas on real evidence, rather than un-provable assumptions. With that idea our modern world has started becoming much less spirit-focused and much more evidence-focused. These days such objective evidence is regularly demanded for accepting any kind of idea. That’s a great change in itself. For thousands of years many conservatives and moderates often ignored finding evidence for their assumptions about life and nature, but recently those philosophic models have become merely models of life and nature, rather than reliable models. So, in Part 3 we’ll continue looking at our new liberal models of life and nature, so more people can better defend themselves against those who still say their conservative and moderate models are best. If nothing else, such knowledge will also help make choosing which tradition to support more intelligent and easier. As Aristotle too saw thousands of years ago, the actual results of our actions can help us begin feeling some of our weaknesses and strengths; for Dewey, however, there were many other reasons to question many of Aristotle's other ideas.
Science’s New Model of Nature and Human Evolution
Many in the West have already been taught orthodox Christianity’s traditional religious model of life and nature. In general it goes something like this. About 6,000 years ago a spirit-god with a master-plan for everyone and everything began creating the entire universe in 6 days by merely willing its ideas to become reality. God saw his creation was good and so rested on the 7th day. However, with the creation of the first 2 people on day 6, life grew increasingly more complicated. Our world has many dangerous and destructive objects in it, and so the conservative model had to explain how such events came about. The story said the first man was seduced to eat of some forbidden fruit by the first woman who god had created from the man’s rib, and so they both disobeyed the creator-spirit’s order not to eat of the fruit of the tree of good and evil. In effect, they weren’t to know about nature’s goods and evils; they were to remain ignorant of science itself and experimental knowledge. In short, the so-called Garden of Eden was a place where scientific knowledge didn’t exist; all needs were satisfied without trial-and-error work. As a result of such disobedience, however, somehow all their descendants inherited the curse of death, suffering, and work for Adam and Eve’s disobedience. What’s more, in the spirit's plan some people were chosen to be saved with the spirit's grace-power even before they were born; the rest would suffer eternal pain in hell. How an all-just and all-merciful god could even let that happen was rarely asked. As we’ve already begun seeing, however, during the past 200 years an almost completely different model of life and nature has emerged from the new sciences of geology, anthropology, and genetic science.
For example, much geological evidence now suggests our earth is more than 4 BILLION years old; it was formed slowly as heavier atoms kept forming clumps of matter while swirling slowly around our early sun. Eventually here at the earth simple life forms evolved naturally as our early oceans were heated up and basic chemicals like carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, and some small amounts of other atoms, kept combining and recombining. Many millions of years after that early plant organisms evolved to make food with sunlight’s help, and as they did they began causing some major changes on our earth and air. For example, powerful oxygen molecules were created by the early plants, called stromatolites, and in turn they began reacting with all the iron atoms in the oceans. Again, for many millions of years huge deposits of iron ore were created around the earth, and when iron atoms were no longer available, free-floating oxygen began seeping into the air. Eventually it helped air-breathing oxygen-burning animals like ourselves evolve. When we stop absorbing oxygen in our lungs we quickly cease living.
Eventually, our earth reached a relatively stable period about 600 million years ago; before that a giant worldwide blanket of ice nearly killed off all life forms. Since then, however, life forms have continued evolving first in our great oceans, and then eventually land plants and animals evolved too. Those interested in seeing a more detailed documentary about such evolution might want to watch Australia’s First 4 Billion Years; it has a wealth of information about the many different stages and events of natural evolution, most of which are preserved in the geological strata on or close to that continent. It also has some information about another new geological idea, called continental drift. It turns out our continents have been drifted into and away from each other for billions of years! At one time a dinosaur could walk from Europe to the US! When I was a university student in the 1960s continental drift was the newest geological idea. Such events are also briefly described in Book 2’s Native Models of Excellence. In short, our earth is vastly older than 6,000 years, and has preserved some of its slow evolutionary results in some of its rocks. All the billions of chemical reactions automatically going on in all humans today is a result of that biological evolution. A few ancient Greeks began sensing a little of that natural evolution, but only recently has it moved from mere theory to reliable fact!
The New Model of Human Evolution
On a human level, our own evolution can now be traced back over 2 million years to our first tool-making African ancestors, named Homo habilis; the name refers to their tool-making habits. Those little half-human, half-ape ancestors discovered they could build simple stone tools and thus more easily find more food sources for themselves, like the highly nutritious marrow buried in most animal bones.
For Dewey, however, the most important human invention in all of natural history began evolving about 100,000 years ago; they’re called speaking habits. With the help of some small vocal improvements our ancestors found it easier to form a variety of different sounds, and thus start building the mental world of ideas! Talking also greatly increased the friendly tribal feelings between people, and so helped reduce the psychic feelings of isolation. Such talking habits also made team hunting habits easier to build, as well as solving problems easier too. And much to the surprise of many, even our Neandertal cousins probably evolved talking arts too! As our sapien ancestors were walking out of Africa sometime around 60,000 years ago, Neandertals were burying some of their dead with tools and objects useful for living on after death. No doubt, their talking arts too were used to help reduce the fear of death so many native peoples normally feel.
As ice sheets were growing in the Northern hemisphere around that time, drought in Africa helped reduce the number of our sapien ancestors to, perhaps, a few thousand! At the time our entire species almost became extinct! However, a small number of those ancestors, related to the San and Hadza tribes of today, felt confident enough to begin looking for better living conditions. Since then their descendants have walked onto every continent except Antarctica. Genetic studies recently conducted in the 1990s in different places around the world have even traced the routes our ancestors took to Asia, Australia, Europe, and finally the Americas about 15,000 years ago. In short, such genetic studies firmly establish the fact all humans today are descended from those few African sapien ancestors! Once again, it turns out liberal Democritus was right; we are all members of the same species, and thus all deserve the same rights and freedoms as anyone else. However, putting that idea of human kinship into the muscles, feelings, and habits of everyone remains to this day a major educational challenge.
As mentioned earlier, during this time human religious evolution reached its early stage of believing spirits exist and life would go on after death. For one thing, modern anthropologists now have real evidence Neandertals began using spirit-ideas at least 60,000 years ago in Iraq and other places where they lived. Only slowly is that early spirit-history now becoming common knowledge for most people, and as it does more have begun growing a deeper feeling for our own mental evolution; it’s become much grander and more majestic than anyone could have imagined.
No doubt, one of the more surprising recent finds of anthropologists was the discovery of spirit-evidence in some Neandertal graves. Neandertal remains were first discovered in the mid-1800s, and for decades people thought they were an inferior race of humans. However, when some anthropologists were digging in some Iraqi caves they found some evidence even Neandertals believed something inside people would live on after death; they found tools and food and even some useful plants in some graves. More graves like that have been found too. Needless to say, this idea of long-living spirits became, and remains, the foundational idea of all conservative religious and philosophic models of life.
Naturally, modern anthropologists wanted to find out why the idea of spirits evolved, and also how they were used by native peoples. What might have caused our native ancestors to invent such an idea? Answers to such questions have helped build a much clearer picture of native life, as well as religious evolution too. It turns out native peoples around the world believe they see spirits in their dreams! The belief in spirits was based on such events! For native peoples dreams are not just dreams, like we normally say today, but rather the seeing of real material spirits!
What’s more, the study of modern native cultures around the world tells us they used spirit-ideas to help solve many of life’s challenges, like sickness, food supplies, and even hunting success. For example, many native hunters used spirit-ideas to make their weapons more powerful. In any case, however, it seems clear now during the last 60,000 years all such spirit-ideas and rituals have been evolving and growing, of which our more recent Christian religions are examples. So, again, since Darwin's biological research work in the 1830s, a great amount of information about our native ancestors has found much evidence showing how all the conservative religious spirit-models of life and nature now need to be reconstructed, to better fit this great amount of new information. Not only have our own ancestors been physically evolving over the past 2 million years from our own little habilis ancestors, but within the past 100,000 years there’s been much mental evolution as well, one of which was the invention of spirit-ideas. No doubt, the burial business today remains grateful for such ideas.
We’ve also seen earlier how such spirit-ideas were sometimes used by our native ancestors. They not only helped explain their dream experiences, but also how natural events worked too. For many natives and ancient peoples such spirits were felt to control and produce many natural events, like rain, lightning, floods, earthquakes, as well as useful and satisfying events. After all, if spirits really controlled natural events like rain and animal movements, then friendly spirits might help make hunting or farming better by scaring off sinister and unfriendly spirits. No doubt, such ideas reflect native feelings of helplessness in a still science-less world, as well as the desire to make life more satisfying and enjoyable. Almost certainly even our own African ancestors sensed their own weaknesses and ignorance about most everything, even their dreams; what were they really?
Naturally, all such spirit-ideas depended on talking habits, and, again, for Dewey the invention of talking habits was the most important mental evolution in all of natural history. As talking habits began evolving after 100,000 years ago, any event could be talked about, and as they were an entirely new dimension of mental life evolved. In effect, talking habit-arts created the mental world of ideas. In effect talking helped turn subconscious feelings into conscious ideas, and they in turn could be used as mental tools to help build more habits aimed at making life more satisfying and rewarding. For example, the more those frightening nightmares were talked about, the easier it became to put useful objects in someone’s grave, so they wouldn’t be angry and frighten the living. Today, the use of grave headstones is a descendent of such thinking; stones on top of a body would help keep the person’s spirit in the earth.
As any infancy is, mankind's long infancy too often felt awkward and powerless, not to mention frustrating much of the time, especially during Ice Age living conditions. The most recent one lasted from about 100,000 years ago to about 12,000 years ago. And because they probably carried their spirit-ideas with them, all their descendants kept experimenting with spirit-rituals to see if they could help make life better; eventually some people became spirit-specialists called shamans. After all, who wants to hunt dangerous animals when friendly spirits might make it easier? And because such rituals sometimes seemed to work, they remained a part of native cultures around the world? Such spirit-ideas not only helped answer many of life's questions, but when life actually was difficult and dangerous they encouraged the hope for making it better and more satisfying. Sometimes the mammoth or bison hunt was successful.
Such new facts and information about native cultures around the world now helps us liberal build a much more scientific model of human evolution. There’s no evidence one man was ever created by a spirit-god, or one woman was created from one of his ribs! There is, however, much evidence to show our own species evolved slowly over millions of years from ape-like animals in east Africa. Thus, anthropology has become a much more reliable source of information about our own evolution. Moreover, only yesterday, so to speak, has such evidence been found for both our physical and psychological evolution during the last 5 million years, give or take a Sunday or two. Studying carefully their fossilized remains, burial sites, stone tool evolution, living spaces, skeletons, pollen seeds, tree rings, modern native habit-arts, and even their genes too have all added their facts to science's new 'Garden of Eden' model, located in east Africa’s Great Rife Valley. Hadza peoples live there to this day!
In short, it’s looking like for most of the last 60,000 years almost all native peoples used spirit-arts and simple stone tools to help solve many of life’s challenges, like for food needs, hunting success, marriages, clan stability, health, and of course personal success. During what’s called the Middle Paleolithic period (100,000 to 35,000 years ago) our native ancestors naturally wanted to make sure they didn't break any bones or become part of an animal’s dinner, and so spirit-rituals evolved also for hunting; after all, it was dangerous and often not very successful. Sometimes hunters would return empty-handed, sometimes wounded, and sometimes become a lion or tiger's human kabob.
Our native ancestors often used their spirit-rituals like we use an insurance policy, namely to ease the shock of disaster and failure. Exactly when such spirit-rituals started we don't know, but in Middle Paleolithic times talking habits made people more creative and so many different rituals naturally evolved. Ferocious wild animals like huge cave bears and dangerous saber-toothed tigers, not to mention all those quite unfriendly wholly mammoths, pretty much attacked who and what they wanted, especially helpless children and the elderly. Such stressful daily tensions, plus the usual gang of diseases and lack of effective medical knowledge, also increased frustration and worrisome stress; people rarely lived past 50, and some fossil evidence shows 40 years old WAS old! And what’s even more interesting, many native peoples eventually discovered and used a variety of hallucinogenic plants to help relieve life’s stressful tensions. In the US some native tribes living around white settlers with deadlier weapons often used such plants religiously. They helped create the feeling there was nothing to really worry about and everything was fine. Again, no one knows exactly how old such spirit-rituals are, but there’s some evidence some hallucinogenic mushrooms were used many thousands of years ago during religious ceremonies, and in India an entire book of their Rig Vada is devoted to such a plant called soma.
No doubt, for women too routine spirit-habits were useful, and they were encouraged when they found more food, got more animal skins to make warm Ice-Age clothes, had healthy children, and helped their families keep growing. Obviously, the more such routine spirit-rituals seemed to work, the easier it became to keep using them in daily life. Even into ancient Greece and Rome rulers normally sacrificed to spirit-gods for their help, even though no one could prove such spirits existed! Athens’s great Parthenon in fact was built as a temple-home for protective spirit-goddess Athena. And of course in the Middle Ages people continued worshipping at their local churches, hoping to make life better; if people didn't have the tools and habit-arts to actually make life more satisfying, then the next best thing was to focus on a better life after death. If nothing else, such examples also show how difficult it is to think creatively unless one is trained in that art.
Routine spirit-ideas also had another very practical use for our native ancestors: they helped explain many of life’s events. Eventually such ideas were used the way scientific ideas are used today. Spirit-ideas helped our native ancestors satisfy the need to know how life and nature really worked. After all, it feels much better to have some explanation than no explanation. For example, spirit-ideas helped explain common events like fainting, comas, sleep, shaman trances, and even death itself -- the person’s spirit simply left its body, and when it didn’t return death happened. With such ideas, and their occasional encouragement with satisfying results, routine magical spirit-habits continued growing more diverse and varied, probably not quickly but over thousands of years a great variety of such rituals evolved, as anthropologists have recently discovered.
That is some of science’s good news. The bad news was such routine spirit-habits kept most everyone from learning more about how our natural world actually works, and then use that knowledge to actually build more objects making life better! Our native, ancient, and even medieval ancestors normally stayed focused on such spirit-causes and rituals, rather than studying natural events themselves. Like all habits, spirit-habits are energetically propulsive. For example, the stronger their spirit hunting rituals became, the more difficult it was to imagine how some animals like goats and sheep could be tamed and then used for food. Obviously such naturalistic ways of creative thinking became more difficult as spirit-rituals were practiced. Such routine thinking and acting thus helped keep actions confined to the same routine ways of acting, even for tens of thousands of years! In fact, as the study of modern native cultures has recently taught us, our native ancestors often feared making any changes to their routine habits, feeling they might upset some spirit and thus make matter worse! Thus, much of human life became routinely felt as a place where spirits controlled most, if not all, natural movements. In fact many conservative Christian and Indian sects have kept similar ideas to his day -- god’s plan or Karmic power controls everything!
As we’ll see in the following 2 sections, animism is a word used by some early English anthropologists to describe those native kinds of spirit-habits, and with the growth of Behavioral psychology it’s become easier to see how propulsive such habits could become. For example, even today Japan’s original Shinto religion still pictures nature as having many thousands of animistic spirits within it – they’re felt to animate all of nature itself. And as we’ve been seeing, such thinking even found its way into ancient conservative and moderate philosophic thinking too. Even Aristotle, for example, not only pictured planets and stars as moved by their own internal psyches, but he also tells how philosophy’s 'father' Thales (c.585 BCE) said the gods are in all things! Such animistic thinking was present as philosophy began growing in the early 500s BCE. Also Greek, Roman, Norse, and Hindu mythology gives us yet more objective examples of such spirit thinking; even Romans often believed a great variety of spirit-gods controlled much of nature itself. Soothsayers often traveled with Roman armies and redd animal entrails for good or bad omens. Lightning, for example, wasn’t just lightning; it was often seen as a spirit’s destructive weapon.
Another interesting idea about our new scientific model of human life says our native ancestors had a widespread fear of death itself; nightmares often felt like dead spirits were angry, and they might even kill people or even get people to kill other people. As a result, many native peoples truly feared death. As we’ve already seen, such feelings were so powerful burial ceremonies became a way of lessening such fears around 60,000 years ago! Putting helpful items into a grave might make the person’s spirit less angry, friendlier, and therefore less threatening. No doubt, many also felt comforted by the thought life would continue on after death. Thus, making human life more hopeful and less fearful in effect helped make life itself feel more satisfying; even if someone was caught by some hungry lion or tiger life would somehow go on. In short, both their dreams and their own propulsive spirit-habits created the feeling life would go on after death in one form or another. We’ll see some examples of such ideas in Book 2, Native Models of Excellent.
Add to this new model of human development the fact of long periods of stressful Ice Age weather, and Middle Paleolithic life becomes much less than satisfying. Tribes depending on animal herds for food would need to keep moving on a regular basis as new grazing grounds were needed. As if dangerous wild animals weren’t enough, nature chipped in too. In fact, for much of the last 2 million years huge, gigantic ice sheets covered much of Asia, Europe, and North America. Naturally, such ice formations reduced the amount of atmospheric water, and thus caused drought conditions in many other places, like eastern Africa. Huge amounts of ice sometimes lasted for thousands of years! At one time Manhattan Island was covered by a huge ice sheet hundreds of feet thick! If you think parking is tough today, just imagine what it was like back then! How do you park your pet wholly mammoth 1,000 feet off the ground, and by the time you get done what stores are still open? Well, if nothing else at least bartenders saved money on ice cubes. Is it any wonder alcohol too has been used as a sedative for thousands of years?
If nothing else, the great variety of spirit-arts around the world shows our ancestors were both creative and experimental with their actions; that was the good news. Again, however, the bad news was such creativity was narrowly and routinely confined to a spirit-model of life and nature! Our native ancestors kept trying to control and make life better, but spirit-ideas and habits helped ignore experimenting with natural events to discover scientific relationships. As Dewey points out, that result was perhaps the worst one of spirit-thinking; they kept diverting peoples’ attention from studying natural movements here and now, and thus experimenting to build more intelligent, useful, and reliable NATURAL knowledge.
Again, the more the art of controlling animals was tied to routine hunting rituals, the less people experimented with taming animals for food, and the less that happened, the more difficult life remained. In short, routine spirit-habits kept more excellent habits from growing. Excellent habit-arts help us learn more about what's happening here and now; they're flexible and adjustable, rather than merely routine. They focus on studying natural movements here and now, learning more about natural cause-and-effect relationships, help make plans to produce more constructive, helpful, and satisfying results, and most importantly, help test plans for their actual results! No doubt, such intelligent experimental learning habits certainly weren’t ignored; they were often practiced. The entire art of tool-building depends on such creative thinking, but eventually they too were surrounded with spirit-rituals. Continuing to practice routine spirit-rituals thus made it more difficult to build more intelligent habit-arts, like farming, taming and raising herds of animals, mental-working, and perhaps even making more tangy sauces for their bear and saber-toothed tiger kabobs. After all, animal flesh and muscle is really tasteless. As history often teaches us, such routine habits can easily feel like nature’s absolute Truth. In the following 2 sections, then, we’ll look a little more closely as this crucially important stage of human evolution.
2. MORE ABOUT NATIVE MODELS OF LIFE AND NATURE
In this and the following section we’ll continue seeing more about a very important period in human development, in particular the religious habits of our native ancestors of the last 60,000 years. Obviously it’s still very much a work in progress and many gaps need to be filled in, but enough is now know to begin sketching some of its highlights. With Dewey's help I'll also continue sketching our new model of human evolution with information about their working and speaking habits. In some ways they too can be models of excellence still worth practicing today, especially their tool making and experimental speaking habits. After all, even their spirit-habits had to grow experimentally, and focus on helping others feel more at home in our natural world. As we’ll see, some native habits helped lay a behavioral foundation for later philosophic thinking in ancient Greece, in all 3 of its traditions, and so our native ancestors are important for those reasons too. In Book 2’s Native Models of Excellence we’ll look even more closely at their work.
First of all, why bother? Why study our long-dead ancestors? What can they possible teach us about excellence today? I'll put it this way. If Dewey's right, if nature is an on-going continuum of events, then our present world is the result of past events and movements; so to know more about them and their models of excellence helps us see their weaknesses and strengths today, making it easier to then build our own improved modern versions of excellence. In short, information about our native ancestors helps color in Dewey's practical models of excellence too. Thus, those ancestors are worth knowing something about. Again, if all events have a naturalistic origin, then we should be able to more intelligently guide ourselves today if we know about past experiments and their results. This and the following section will continue sketching such a model of life and nature, if for no other reason than almost no one today knows very much about it.
Modern anthropology itself is such a new study and science most everyone today knows next to nothing about it. Obviously liberal Dewey thought both anthropology and Behavioral psychology were discovering very important new facts about life and nature, and would help liberate people from their old conservative and moderate habit-arts, so they would be better able to live in our modern democratic and scientific world. As we've already seen, many conservative and moderate habits are still practiced by millions today, simply because they were the only habits they were taught. Thus, learning more about that period of human evolution when religious ideas and habits began growing helps us see ourselves more objectively, clearly, and intelligently.
How new is modern anthropology? Until just a few hundred years ago almost nothing was known about our native ancestors, much less the habits they were practicing during the last 100,000 years. Many believed, and still believe, the traditional conservative myths about a spirit creating all of nature and then creating 2 people only a few thousand years ago, and from their children began growing the entire human race. Thanks to anthropological science, however, such a religious model of human history is no longer intellectually credible or defendable on scientific grounds. Anthropology has since given us a much more reliable model of human evolution based on a great amount of scientific evidence gathered over the past 2 centuries. What’s more, it’s certainly not the first time conservative religious myths have been challenged. We’ve already seen how such spirit-ideas were openly questioned in ancient Greece by a few liberal philosophers; they weren’t afraid to challenge both Plato and Aristotle to defend their ideas with some reasoned arguments. Then, after 1500, many more people began challenging all the accepted conservative models of life and nature. At that time ship building skills had advanced to the point where explorers could more easily find out more about their world and the people in it! They began sailing out into the world and a few missionaries even began studying the native peoples they met.
Also, in the last 200 years people actually started digging into the earth and uncovering some of the objects and bones our native ancestors left behind, a few even going back millions of years! As a result of such events more intelligent people began questioning their old religious myths and assumptions. Quite recently we've simply found much better evidence to build more reliable models of human evolution and their habits. For example, many people simply assumed a perfectly good and merciful god existed and had made a plan for all time, but the more people learned how many native cultures there were in the world, they began asking themselves how such a god could even allow almost everyone on earth to remain ignorant about how to be saved and allowed into heaven. Why would such an all loving god purposely keep almost everyone completely ignorant about Christianity's absolute Truth? Also, how and why would such a god even allow people to keep fighting wars and other tribes when it could just as easily have made mankind a peaceful and respectful creature? How could a god allow such things and yet remain all good and all merciful, not to mention allow diseases and plagues to keep killing innocent people? How could such a god allow such things to happen and endanger so many souls?
As a result of such questions, many people began looking more skeptically and scientifically at conservative and moderate models of life, with the help of anthropological research. Many early Romantics, like Jean Rousseau (1712-1778), often saw such native peoples as pure and innocent noble savages who hadn’t been corrupted by civilization’s stifling institutions. For him such religious and aristocratic systems helped keep most people ignorant and poor. He said such native peoples were evidence for how corrupt civilized life could be on pure and innocent human nature. However, the more native cultures were studied, the less romanticized they became; much of native lives too revolved around the arts of war with neighboring tribes. Then, as war became profitable in the ancient world, it became the brutal and vicious art it is today. No doubt, until that economic situation changes, war will continue being a sad and tragic fact of life.
Some Native Examples of Excellence
So, what were some native habits we still consider excellent today? One of them involved the building of philosophic models! Ethnology is a branch of anthropology devoted to studying modern day native tribes around the world, and they soon discovered they too had built many different models of life and nature. As a result, an almost completely different model of early human life began emerging, a model almost completely different from the religious models most everyone normally were taught. Thanks to our more secular universities today, such models are becoming much more commonly known, but much still needs to be done. Most everyone still has almost no knowledge of human evolution. So, naturally, many continue practicing the same old routine conservative spirit-habits our native ancestors have been practicing for perhaps many tens of thousands of years. As we’ve seen, the first graves indicating spirit-ideas are about 60,000 years old.
Never before has so few began challenging so many to see ourselves so differently. How many people today feel they're actually the descendants of small ape-like tool-making ancestors called Homo habilis (it means roughly ‘the same tool builders’). How many people today know those ancestors lived in East Africa over 2 million years ago? And more importantly, how many realize some of them practiced the same kinds of creative and testing habits now pictured by us liberals as experimental learning?! Even back then some of those small-brained creatures wanted to keep reconstructing life and making it more satisfying! Slowly but surely they realized simple little stone cutting and hammering tools could help get more food for themselves and their kin, and also kindly share it with them, rather than caring only about themselves. Such a liberal model of excellence is very much alive and well today! The excellent ethical art of helping others has a very long human history in the native world, much longer than the art of destroying each other. Such experimentally intelligent, constructive, and kind naturalistic habit-arts were present at the birth of our human genus over 2 million years ago, and been celebrated by modern liberals like Dewey as another form of human excellence; it was part of his naturalistic ethics. Such creative, constructive, and kind native habits can still help us keep improving our world as new knowledge is used to make better tools, and more so if such habits are taught to our young folks.
Slowly those little fearful habilis ancestors and their descendants Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, and a few closely related Neandertals, continued accepting life’s challenges to kept making it more satisfying and less fearful with helpful tools, like spears, axes, knives, and eventually clothing, needles, bows and arrows, pottery, metal tools, and so on. For over 2 million years our native ancestors kept experimentally building better tools and habits for hunting, scavenging, using fire, making shelters, and many other practical arts as well.
No doubt, many such creatively experimental habits and skills grew agonizingly slow, over hundreds of thousands of years, but after 100,000 years ago our ancestors learned to talk more about life and nature, and thus increase their creativity as well. Based on the tools they left behind, routine tool building habits were much more widespread and comfortable. They all helped make living in Ice Age conditions for thousands of years much more bearable, especially learning how to control fire and then much later how to make animal-skin clothes. At isolated sites in Europe and Asia, for example, some of our erectus ancestors may have learned how to use fire for cooking and battling ferocious animals, but certainly after 500,000 years ago many different tribes from China to Europe knew how to use fire as a very helpful tool. Back then knowing that habit-art was about the same as knowing how to build atomic weapons today; mastering the art of controlling fire took courage, intelligence, and of course some experimentation too.
Thus, for almost all of the last 2 million years our hunting, scavenging, and food-gathering ancestors’ attention was focused onto satisfying their needs in our natural world, and onto its challenges here and now. Those behavioral models of excellence remain useful to this day! Much evidence suggests their tool making habits were learned as anyone learns any new habit, that is, experimentally with trial-and-error work. Thomas Edison and his team of engineers experimentally built an electric light the same way our habilis ancestors built their cutting and hammering stone tools, experimentally. As we’ve already seen, until around 60,000 years ago those early ancestors remained psychically centered and anchored onto simple creative building arts as they learned to talk with one another.
Talking Habits: The Greatest Native Invention
As we saw in the last section, almost certainly around 60,000 years ago our native ancestors reached a level of talking and thinking where they could begin building what would become our conservative spirit-model of life and nature. Even native Neandertals helped nurture the building. Starting around 100,000 years ago some of our native ancestors acquired the ability to make a wide variety of sounds, and thus begin increasing their talking skills. Why did Dewey think that skill was the most important skill ever invented in all of natural history?
As mentioned earlier, the more our native ancestors taught themselves to talk, the more they built for themselves an altogether new and more powerful dimension of consciousness, the dimension called ideas! The more our native ancestors talked about their feelings with others, the more they created the mental tools called ideas! No doubt, that process grew slowly, but eventually it was to help build native models of a spirit-world, an idea upon which all modern religions rest.
Today, almost everyone takes their talking skills for granted; they’ve become second nature, so to speak. But that wasn’t always the case. For Dewey, when words and ideas are shared they become specialized social tools capable of greatly increasing creativity and hence experimentation. The more our native ancestors talked with each other, the easier it became to focus on the future results of their actions, and that skill too remains extremely useful to this day. By helping our ancestors see the possible results of their actions before acting, their ideas helped build more useful habits, and so increase their power to keep making life more satisfying and controlled. The more they talked about the possible future results of their actions, the easier it became to build more intelligent hunting plans. Today scientists use the same kinds of mental habits.
Obviously at first such forward-looking creative talking wasn’t very widespread; almost nonexistent might be closer to reality. But because they were so useful to the small number of our ancestors who walked out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, they continued spreading to the entire human race. Every human tribe today has language and communication skills. The great weakness, however, was to routinely keep practicing the same talking skills, and especially talking about spirit-objects. As modern anthropologists have recently found out, most people like to merely keep practicing their same safe talking routines, and not think too much about logical problems or weaknesses.
Probably over many tens of thousands of years both our Neandertal ‘cousins’ and our own sapien ancestors in Africa learned to talk more and more with their own tribe's people. In the process, however, for the first time in the entire 4 billion year history of life itself ideas began evolving! For one thing, ideas are organic; they can be made to grow and evolve just like any habit, so they could be used to imagine any situation and thus help create more intelligent ways of acting. For example, on a psychological level every kind of situation could be looked at in a different way. Merely talking about ideas allowed our native ancestors to, as it were, mentally step out of time, and also to compare past results with present and possible future ones! Talking about, say, how they might make death less troubling to other people helped create burial arts themselves! Talking about inner feelings of fear and frustration could help create new ideas for reducing such results. In any case, however, the talking habits of our native ancestors became more creative, caring, and experimental; our world today is one result of such creative talking and testing habits. What’s more, the educational results for such reasoning should be obvious. The less creative problem solving habits are taught in our schools, even our primary schools, the less people feel how their own intelligent talking habits can help make life better here and now.
Native Religious Models
Dewey’s naturalistic model of thinking and talking also helps explain how a conservative religious model of life and nature evolved tens of thousands of years ago. It wasn’t because early mankind had a special relationship with a spirit-god, or was inspired by it; it was simply because spirit-ideas could be talked about and experimented with to see any useful and satisfying results. One result was the creation of burial arts. Talking about their dreams helped our native ancestors create the idea of spirit-objects, and then create burial habits to help people feel less afraid and fearful about those who had died. In any case, however, talking skills slowly but surely turned human consciousness into a 2 dimensional event, where both feelings AND ideas existed. What’s more, almost certainly, women played an important role in building such talking skills; their brains may even be wired for such a skill.
As we’ve seen, death was for many native peoples a very mysterious and dreadful event. Why did it happen? What made people become suddenly cold and lifeless? And even more mysteriously, why did people sometimes dream a dead person was chasing them, or hunting them? As such feelings were talked about they became spirit-ideas, thus helping form the first religious systems in the world. Again, around 60,000 years ago Neandertals began leaving evidence of that new model of life and nature, discovered in the Iraqi Shanidar cave between 1957-61. And around 50,000 years ago some burial in Spain also show signs of spirit-ideas. In any case, however, when they began burying some of their tribe's dead people as if they were going to live on and perhaps go to another kind of life, they began building what is called here a conservative spirit-model of life. Plato would eventually become its ancient philosophic leader and after him Augustine its early medieval Christian leader. No doubt, what those Neandertals actually thought about their dreams can never be known with certainty, but from their grave sites a highly probable thinking model can be built. Spirit-ideas would certainly explain all their dreams and eventually such ideas were used by many native peoples to describe natural movements themselves. Once spirit-ideas were created, then experimenting with spirit-rituals became a natural way of trying to make life more satisfying and less fearful.
As anthropologists continued digging around in northern Iraqi and Israelie, they began finding specially built graves from long ago, graves seemingly built with real love and affection. They found caves where people had been carefully buried, often with helpful objects placed AS IF the dead would continue living on! If so, then they probably felt such objects would make the person's spirit friendly, rather than angry, and thus not cause nightmares. Just as Neandertal ancestors had built new stone tools and habits, so too later ones almost certainly began building humanity’s early religious systems. If so, then it means our present conservative spirit-habits began growing within a much older naturalistic non-spirit, experimental tool-making tradition. Until Plato defined spirits as completely non-physical objects, spirits were seen as material objects.
Such ideas about religious evolution are still quite new and even controversial, and so to many people it may feel ‘radical’. After all, it challenges so many conservative religious ideas. However, when have new ideas ever not felt radical? Hundreds of years ago, for example, people were so frightened to picture the earth as not the center of the universe they sometimes killed others for just saying it! Today that idea has become almost universally accepted. As a rule most people just don't like to have their ideas challenged, and yet without such challenges there would no new learning or real progress at all! In short, from such new ideas often grow more intelligent people.
No doubt like every other idea, the idea of living on after death almost certainly evolved slowly, but around the native world spirit-ideas were based on their dreams; for that there's much evidence from modern native peoples. So, why the idea of personal spirits evolved is fairly easy to see. The more people became emotionally tied to each other with talking and sharing habit-arts, the easier it was to share their feelings about their dreams; to native people such dreams must have felt at first like very strange and mysterious events. What were they? Why did some people keep seeing images of those who had died? Sometimes people dreamed of those already dead; how could that be? How could they ‘see’ such people unless something inside people kept living on after death? Such events were made less mysterious by spirit-ideas. The more they talked about their mysterious dream-experiences, the easier it was to create the idea of spirits; dreams built feelings and when talked about helped build spirit-ideas. How do we know? Well, just about all native peoples today say their dreams prove spirits exist! And so it’s now quite reasonable to believe spirit-ideas helped build the first native religious models of life and nature. And what’s more, such ideas could also be used to help explain any natural movement like winds, rain, storms, other animals, and anything else. Everything could be seen to have its own spirit-cause, as Japanese Shintos still believe.
Using Spirit Ideas
Slowly but surely spirit-ideas became more useful. For one thing they were useful for creating stories about how human got here and where they came from. Many Australian aborigines, for example, believed some non-human animal helped create humans. Once the spirit-idea was created, then it became free to be used in many different ways. Eventually they were used to build magical healing, hunting, marriage, and art rituals too. In short, spirit-ideas eventually came to dominate just about every natural event; anything could be caused by spirits! No doubt, sometimes such mythical stories were useful and therapeutic. Sometimes they helped calm fearful feelings about death by explaining what it 'really' was, namely one’s spirit merely leaving its body. In such ways spirit-ideas slowly made life more meaningful for our native ancestors; they gave them another tool for making life better and more enjoyable, and helped them feel more connected to nature itself, instead of feeling alone and separated. What devout person today doesn't feel connected to nature's most powerful object while praying? However, the science of anthropology is now helping build a more liberal naturalistic model besides that conservative one, one based on real objective evidence our native ancestors left behind. In fact, modern science is now building new models for just about all of life with much more reliable naturalistic ideas.
Throughout the native world, the more dreams were talked about the easier it was to turn them in to spirit-causes, and because nature's a continuum such habit-arts continued into Greek, Roman, and medieval times. In ancient Greece religious conservatives named Orphics believed one’s body was like a prison cell for a spirit; both Socrates and Plato embraced such an idea. In Rome many believed powerful spirit-gods controlled entire sectors of nature, like the weather, war, and hunting, just as a few powerful Romans controlled large sectors of life. And of course in medieval times most everyone continued believing an all-powerful and loving god controlled all natural movements. Today millions of people regularly call such ideas mythology, and yet for centuries they were felt as the absolute Truth about life and nature. How can we explain such events unless we simply say that’s the way young folks were educated to think and act?
Such conservative ideas and habits began growing within the cultures of our native ancestors; it’s now an accepted fact for educated people. We now have a great amount of objective evidence to support that idea. For our native ancestors all of nature itself was often seen as a kind of stage controlled by spirit-objects; that idea too is still being taught to children in many places today. How many children today are still told everything happens according to a god's plan, or according to nature's own Karmic laws, or by many different spirits? However, more and more people are being taught to see such ideas began growing with our native ancestors many thousands of years ago. Anthropologists call such a model of life 'animistic'; it’s the model of nature where all events are animated by spirit-objects. Quite probably our African San ancestors, called Bush people today, brought such ideas with them out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, and they've been evolving ever since. The movie The Gods Must Be Crazy features some of their ideas. As a result, only recently have dreams become merely visual images occurring during sleep, and thus a result of a person's inner feelings. What’s more, recurring dreams have become a sign some psychological feeling is on-going.
Probably few anthropologists today would deny our native ancestors of the Middle Paleolithic period (100,000-35,000 BCE) began acting as if spirits existed. Obviously there's a difference of opinion about what they believed exactly, but that they believed nature has spirits within it is now a generally accepted idea. They were useful. Spirit-ideas were used for comforting grieving tribal members who had lost someone close to them, and the more they were used, the stronger tribal kinship feelings grew. For Dewey all such small communities have kind feelings for other members, and that was often true in small native communities of some 30-40 people. If so, then such helpful communal actions as burial ceremonies would have been very useful.
If Dewey's liberal models of life and nature are accurate and trustworthy, and many educated people admit they are, then spirit-ideas too helped build more sympathetic feelings for each other! As we've seen Aristotle's and Democritus' practical ethics too reflect many similar feelings about friendship and generosity, only on vastly different scales of nature. For Aristotle true excellence could only be practiced by a few, but for Democritus they could be practiced by most everyone. From even some Neandertal graves similar feelings can be justified. In some of them we find evidence for truly humane feelings, and helping someone who’s died live comfortably in their new life. Again, to native peoples around the world death is often a very stressful and fearful event; who could know for sure what unfriendly spirit caused someone else's death, or might cause their own death? In any case, for Dewey and many other liberals, such spirit-arts became the psychic foundation for conservative philosophers like Plato and all supernatural religions today.
How might such spirit-habits have evolved? Well, what was life like 60,000 years ago? The more I redd about it, the more thankful I became I wasn't born back then. Back then life was truly much more dangerous and stressful that today, and what's more, people had only a few tools to overcome such dangers, like crude stone-tipped spears and axes, and of course fire too. They also lacked almost all the useful and reliable knowledge about life and nature we have today. In short, almost their entire survival kit of habits was different. If they hadn't learned to control fire a few hundred thousand years ago we might have become just another extinct species. After all, how would you like to live in a world with fierce animals all around, often have little or no food, and of course no creature comforts like we have today. Who can live today without reality television, pizza, ice cream, and Super Bowls? About the best part of life back then was something many people don’t have today -- full employment! Back then everyone who was able to work did; even children had their jobs. Still, theirs was indeed a much more dangerous and stressful world than even many poor people know today.
Imagine, if you can, walking through some of our great National Parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite in the springtime, but with one major difference -- many more dangerous animals were constantly hungry and people were definitely on the menu, especially children. Saber-toothed lions and tigers, huge giant cave bears, as well as grizzly and ordinary bears were often looking for their next dinner-kabob! It was as if people walked around wearing a sign saying 'Daily Lunch Special: Raw Humans'. Merely going out for an evening stroll could be like trying to cross a busy city street during rush-hour. Poisonous plants too could be anywhere; who knew what would happen after eating some pretty fresh mushrooms? And what’s more, severe Ice Age weather, starting around 75,000 years ago, no doubt made starvation in Europe and Asia a real daily threat. In such a world life was certainly no picnic; after all, how good could any life be without fried chicken, hog jowls, and sweet potato pie for desert? Answer: Not very good at all.
As a result, native life was much more stressful than it is now; senses and attention were keenly focused from waking until sleep. Almost certainly they felt and reacted deeply to many dangerous natural events, as well as odd and unusual events. After all, danger and even death could be anywhere. Even an unseen rainstorm might cause a deadly flash-flood. And helping make life even worse was their own deeply felt powerlessness and ignorance for overcoming dangerous animals, sicknesses, pains, and death; infant mortality was probably pretty high. After all, how confident would you feel if all you had to defend yourself against a hungry cave bear with just a crummy wooden spear and a torch? Group hunting became necessary. Even with torches, trying to oust a huge cave bear from its home was very dangerous work. A 12-foot tall, thousand pound cave bear could swat spears aside like toothpicks and then feast on another human-kabob. If it wouldn’t have been for their fire torches life would have been much worse. Our native ancestors knew how to use fire and that was their ‘atomic’ weapon against which every animal was helpless, but how safe did it make walking 10 miles to another campsite? Even after getting to their next camp some animals still attacked at night while people slept; no wonder they had nightmares. As a result, stressful feelings of impotence, helplessness, and danger were, almost certainly, a part of everyday life. The less people knew, the more death could be anywhere, and so everything was somewhat dangerous. Is it any wonder magical spirit-arts evolved? They helped make people feel there was another kind of life beyond this one.
Almost certainly life for our native ancestors was quite stressful and frustrating. Living close to giant continental glaciers didn't help much either, which reached their peak around 30,000 years ago, as our sapien ancestors began moving into Europe from central Asia. Life in much of Europe at that time must have been like living in a refrigerator. Today people stroll through their local supermarket and casually get a week's worth of frozen fish-sticks and pizza, but back then food was often a daily problem, as was sickness. And to make a bad situation worse, no one had almost no real knowledge about, or cure for, any sickness in children or adults, and so that too added to life's stresses. And perhaps worst of all, no one had any really dependable knowledge about why anything happened; they saw storms one day, hungry animals the next, and freezing cold the next and no real explanation for why any of it happened. No doubt, such events were very psychically frustrating. So, slowly spirit-ideas were used to explain natural movements: all of nature is a spirit-theatre. That was the so-called native animistic model of life and nature.
Again, modern native life supplies the objective evidence for such an idea; animism was practiced by nearly everyone, and it’s taught us how very superstitious and fearful our native ancestors were. Later on totemic models of life and nature evolved. In any case, however, if spirits controlled all events, then any action might cause a spirit to become angry and make life even worse; for many native peoples such fears were paralyzing, both physically and psychically. Early white settlers in North America realized natives refused to farm because they might anger earth spirits! In such a psychic animistic world why experiment with anything when it might anger some spirit? Also, many ancient Chinese felt the same way about trying to improve anything, as did many other cultures. Thus spirit-habits of thinking and acting helped produce many counter-productive results; they helped justify routine, uncreative habits, generation after generation, like healing and hunting rituals; they were the habits European explorers began seeing as they sailed out into the world in the 1500s. Many native Mexicans saw men riding horses as gods themselves!
For us today, only with some accurate information is it possible to feel a little of what life was actually like for our native ancestors. Without such information almost no one can feel native fears about food, sickness, animal attacks, and death; for most people they’ve all but been erased with the help of our modern scientific tools. Food production and housing have become much more organized and controlled, and thus less stressful for most everyone. For those who feared death in prehistoric times life was very different. Who wouldn’t feel good about believing their own spirit would live on after death? It helped satisfy the feeling of wanting to keep living. And this important fact should also be mentioned: sometimes spirit-rituals seemed to work; sometimes the sick got better after a healing ceremony, and sometimes hunters brought back more mammoth kabobs after a hunting ritual. Without such encouraging results every so often it became easier to believe spirits really existed. Even when the results weren’t so good, they could easily be explained as the result of some unfriendly spirits. Again, Dewey said it like this: life is both stable and dangerous.
Modern Science Begins Studying Native Peoples
In the early 1900s, as more reliable information about native peoples continued growing rapidly, the great French ethnologist Lucian Levy-Bruhl began building a model of native life. He began picturing native peoples as having basically 2 radically different kinds of habit-arts -- natural and spirit-arts. Of course since the first stone tools were built over 2 million years ago, naturally constructive habits like tool making helped create the feelings for thinking and acting logically and naturalistically. For example, if some early habilis ancestor wanted to build a certain kind of stone tool, then a certain sequence of natural actions were needed, like first having good stone and then the right building actions to shape the stone; in such ways were ways of natural logic built. Such naturalistic cause-and-effect work thus laid the sub-conscious foundation for all logical thinking. Keep hitting the right kind of stone at the right place and in the right way, and a useful hunting tool can help solve the problem of finding more food.
Incidentally, we can notice something else here too. Such constructively useful work-habits were another reason Dewey made them the center of his educational models, as we’ll see later in this section, and in more detail in Book 5’s Educational Models of Excellence. As we’re now seeing, such practical constructive naturalistic habits have been helping our ancestors for millions of years feel how life could be improved and made more satisfying with the right kind of work. Eventually in ancient Greece and elsewhere such work habits and their subconscious logical feelings began encouraging most Greek thinkers to start feeling mere logical reasoning alone could discover what they felt were nature’s eternal and unchanging objects. In that process many came to reasonably question other scientific, moral, political, and artistic habits as well; philosophic art was one result. Ancient conservatives like Plato wanted to know how useful logical thinking was for knowing such eternal objects he assumed must exist. Could this thinking really ‘participate’ with nature’s most stable objects, and thus know nature’s unchanging truth? Both Plato and Aristotle were very interested in that second question. The point is, such feelings for constructive and logical thinking began growing millions of years earlier as naturalistic tool making habits became an important part of native life. In fact, such naturalistic tool-building arts also encouraged our modern experimentally scientific ideas of logical cause-and-effect thinking.
Levy-Bruhl eventually used that word ‘PARTICIPATION’ to describe a second kind of habit our native ancestors began using besides their naturalistic ones. What did that mean? Essentially he wanted a word to describe their spirit-habits, and so he felt participation was the best one. Basically it's a non-logical kind of habit, relying on magical bonding humans to friendly spirits, to help produce useful results like regaining one’s health, or bringing more food-animals to hunt. For example, when a native hunter makes a new weapon he often tries to participate with friendly spirits to magically make the weapon more powerful for killing animals; many natives call it giving the weapon mana-power. With such magical rituals natives try to participate with the powers and spirits they feel govern nature. Today such habits are also called animistic and totemic rituals; they formed the foundation for religious models of nature.
What’s more, the same kinds of rituals are practiced today when people pray; they feel they're participating with some kind of spirit-object who can change the course of natural events. In short, with the growth of spirit-ideas, there came into human life 2 rather different ways of acting, one based on natural cause-and-effect reasoning, and the other on magically participating with spirit-objects. The first eventually evolved into modern experimental science, and the second into religious habits. Though both aimed at making life more satisfying, they were radically different. Tool making, for example, encouraged cause-and-effect logical thinking, while participation actions caused magical kinds of thinking. If I could magically please a spirit with dancing, worshipping, or offering some sacrifice, then it might magically cause my sick friend to get well, or bring us more animals for food.
When did our native ancestors begin trying to 'participate' with spirit-objects? No one knows for sure, but probably sometime during the last 60,000 years is a good estimate. No doubt, once again dreaming played an important part in their evolution. For example, when someone’s dreams were about animals it became easy to imagine they too had spirits, and when they were killed and eaten it encouraged the feeling their spirits were friendly. And if that were true, then maybe there were ways to make animal spirits friendlier, perhaps by painting their images on cave walls and building statues of them. When people today promise to act better if their prayers are answered, then it's essentially the same kind of magical habit. Whenever they evolved, however, modern anthropologists like Levy-Bruhl began seeing both natural and spirit-habits were indeed very common within the native world, and still are in many places today. In fact, almost everywhere explorers went in the 1500s they saw very superstitious native peoples who practiced their own kinds of magical spirit-arts, hoping to ‘participate’ with nature's spirits and gain their help for making life more satisfying and enjoyable.
No doubt, such magical habit-arts of participation helped native peoples begin seeing spirits not only as a part of nature, but as a cause of natural movements too; that's another important idea. If spirits really caused natural movements, then people might be able to convince them to help make life more satisfying; it’s the basic assumption of all conservative religions today. And so, having almost no useful tools or natural knowledge of their own, it seemed reasonable to try participating magically with spirit-objects! Who knows? If spirits could tell us things while we sleep, then maybe we could PARTICIPATE with them in other ways, and perhaps get them to help make life better in some way. The point is, even though such magical thinking was practical, the assumptions behind naturalistic and magical habits were very different. Naturalistic work could be much better controlled than magical work, and produce much more reliable results more often.
Certainly, our native ancestors faced many of the same challenges we face today. Who doesn't need help finding new foods, curing diseases, meaningful work, and a life without fear and stress? Eventually to help calm their fears of angry spirits bothering them, even Neanderthal peoples experimented with putting some helpful items into a person's grave, hoping to magically make their spirit less frightening and friendlier, perhaps even helping us get more food, healthy children, and a healthy life. After all, if all those actions too were controlled by spirits then what have we got to lose? Such thoughts must have seemed quite logical enough once the idea of spirits was created.
In fact, natives often use spirit-ideas to explain many other natural events -- mysterious events. Besides explaining dreams they helped explain fainting, comas, and even sleep and death itself -- one’s spirit merely left its body for different lengths of time, and sometimes even visited us in our dreams. If so, then for many today it's also easy to see how such native spirit-ideas could have evolved into the immortal human soul; all that remained for people like Plato was to picture spirits not as natural objects, like native pictured them, but as a completely different supernatural object. We’ll see more about Plato’s work a little later.
Until only recently almost every culture on earth had some kind of rituals aimed at participating with spirit-objects to make life more satisfying. Healing dances, for example, aimed at using friendly spirits to scare disease spirits away, or taking them out of a sick person by a shaman. However, they had a great weakness too. The more powerful those magical habits became, the easier it was to keep ignoring the real causes and results of natural events, namely natural objects! That result, no doubt, was the most harmful one of such magical spirit-habits. Many believed spirits could cause events in the natural world at any time and any place; peoples’ nightmares, toothaches, and even diseases, for example, were caused by angry spirits, rather than fearful feelings and harmful bacteria. In fact, such magical habits were quite common in ancient Israel too, as we’ll see a little later.
Again, the point is, such ideas and habits almost certainly began growing in native cultures many thousands of years before there was an Israel. Native peoples began feeling even storms, earthquakes, and animal actions had spirit-causes, and such magical ideas have stayed alive for most everyone until only very recently. In fact, turning away from such spirit-ideas and towards naturalistic ones like inventing better tools to see and kill harmful bacteria and even viruses, has marked the beginning of our modern period. Only as more people gave up such magical habits and ideas did they help build our modern scientific culture, now growing around the world, and with it our strongest knowledge – experimental, scientific knowledge. As we’ve seen, before then diseases and many other natural events were often treated by trying to participate with spirit-objects; for many native peoples spirits caused such events, often in revenge against someone. Thus grew the widespread superstitious feelings in the native world. Even in ancient Greece and Rome priests often examined a sacrificial animal’s organs to discover what message a spirit-god might be sending them; even birds’ flights were often seen as an omen from the gods. Ancient Greeks too believed certain people at their Oracle at Delphi would participate with the god Apollo, often to predict future events.
Slowly, probably over many thousands of years, our native ancestors talked and practiced naturalistic tool making habits and participatory spirit ones. History also teaches they kept experimenting with both kinds of ideas until only recently. For example, in many European caves today we can still see some of their art work aimed, almost certainly, at participating with animal spirits to make them friendlier; if so, they too used magical and religious ideas. For we Deweyan liberals, and many others as well, such habits formed the basis for ancient religious and conservative philosophic models of life and nature. In fact, conservative Plato too used the word 'participate' when he described how true philosophers like himself could use their reasoning and feelings of love to know nature’s most real objects – Spirit-Ideas. Levy-Bruhl may’ve taken the word ‘participation’ from him, but the magical habits of participation are much older than Plato ever imagined. In his books Republic and Symposium he used the word to describe how a reasoning faculty could lovingly learn about he assumed were nature’s already existing and perfect Spirit-Objects.
Exactly how, when, and where did native peoples begin participating with spirit habit-arts? You might as well ask who invented the first bow and arrow. Obviously no one knows for sure; some anthropologists think they (spirit-arts, not bows and arrows) began growing in Siberia, spread south into China, and then west into Europe. Personally I believe our San ancestors brought some spirit-rituals out of Africa with them as early as 90,000 years ago. On Israel’s Mt. Carmel, for example, burials that old have already been found. Wherever they first evolved, what's important is to see why they began evolving. For we Deweyan liberals they evolved to help make life more enjoyable and satisfying.
As anthropologists like Levy-Bruhl learned, such spirit-ideas were all based on dream events; to native peoples dreams were real evidence such spirits existed. In fact it's practically impossible to overemphasize how meaningful dreaming was to our native, ancient, and medieval ancestors! In fact, as they dreamed their dreams and nightmares many no doubt felt such events were even MORE real and important than waking experience! One can easily imagine people waking up from a nightmare and wondering why they were being terrorized by some spirit. Why was that relative’s spirit chasing me; what does it mean, what did I do to anger it so much, and how can I keep it away? Throughout native cultures even today people often believe their dreams are real spirit events. In Middle Paleolithic times, however, when talking and speaking arts were just growing, their dreams must've seemed even more confusing, mysterious, and baffling! Probably only very slowly did their subconscious dreams become conscious spirit-ideas sometime before 60,000 years ago, when grave evidence begins suggesting people believed some life form would live on after death.
After such ideas and rituals began growing, then it was just a question of time before spirit-controlling specialists called shamans evolved and became 'medicine' men and women who regularly participated with spirits. Some Eskimo shamans believed their spirits could go into the sea and participate with animal spirits. Among other things, shamans often used magical rituals to help cure sicknesses and the fearful feelings spirits ‘caused’. Other research has also shown sometimes shamans played tricks too; they sometimes tricked others into believing they have special magical powers. At times even Jesus acted like such a shaman, healing people by magically driving away evil spirits; he often was described as curing people like Merriam of Magdala by first driving her ‘evil spirits’ away, in her case 7 such spirits. The Old Testament too records how some people sometimes thought even stones housed spirits; sleeping on a stone pillow, for example, might cause its spirit to tell someone about the future. We’ll see more about magical stone-spirits a little later.
The more people were taught to see their dreams as spirit-events, the easier it became to see soul-spirits everywhere! After all, everything in nature and the heavens keeps moving and so some force must be causing even those movements. Aristotle too thought the stars and planets have their own eternal and unchanging self-moving causes. As a result of picturing natural events like that, it was easy to feel nature itself has some kind of inbuilt logic and rationality to it, put there by some kind of powerful spirit. Socrates seems to have believed it, as did Plato and Aristotle, but more recently it’s become just another example of projecting our own feelings into nature, and making it look like what we want it to look like. In fact, until modern medical arts started evolving in the 1600s -- just 'yesterday' really -- healing arts often involved magically removing harmful spirits from the body; even George Washington was bled to remove disease-causing fluids. In any case, however, we Deweyan liberals think it’s important to see how HUMANISTIC native magical arts were; they encouraged people to kindly and sympathetically help others, and that art remains excellent to this day. What has finally changed are the scientific tools for helping others, like Behavioral psychology and modern medicine. They have slowly become naturalistic sciences.
No doubt, compared to us today our native ancestors were almost helpless against most of life’s dangers, helpless both physically and mentally. As a result their spirit-habits helped make life more bearable in many ways. Many natives Levy-Bruhl studied thought spirits could make life both better AND worse; even Augustine’s ancient Catholic model of nature was full of good and evil spirits – called angels and devils. So again, spirit-ideas and magical rituals gave people some hope they could make life better; with the proper actions friendly spirits might allow hunters to find some good tool-making stone as well as help kill more animals. In any case, however, with the help of such habit-arts even early spirit-ideas were used to help make life better. True, for many thousands of years life was surrounded, filled, and overflowed with magical ways of participating with spirit-objects; slowly even a ritual ‘logic’ evolved around the feeling spirits could be persuaded to help their followers and worshippers with prayers, sacrifices, and good works; the Bible is full of such stories about god both helping and punishing the Israelites.
As a result, to this day every human culture still has different amounts of both naturalistic AND participatory habit-arts; today they’re called science and religion. But only in the last few centuries have we begun realizing how much more powerful experimental research and thinking can be for actually building a better world. Only recently have scientific experimental habits become our strongest knowledge-arts simply because they now produce our most reliable knowledge and useful results. If we want to defeat our enemies, then we need better weapons and a more effective psychology. Such a psychology also suggests we should be helping those who’re less well off than we are, and helping those who’re trying to help themselves, rather than just putting them in debt to us and keeping them that way. In any case, however, for almost all of the last 50,000 years people have been trying to magically participate with what felt like spirit-objects, but in the process, however, neglecting learning more about naturalistic kinds of cause-and-effect relations, and then using that reliable knowledge to experimentally make life more satisfying and less dangerous. For Dewey that was the worst result of magical spirit-habits.
Things Are Changing
Dewey certainly wasn’t the first person to feel that way. In fact during Europe’s Enlightenment of the 1700s tens of thousands of people began feeling liberated from such magical ideas. They began seeing some of the negative results such ideas kept producing, like keeping people ignorant and meekly accepting their feudalistic social system. Today, of course, those feelings continue growing. Even though many people continue trying to participate with spirit-objects, many more have liberated themselves from such habits. Many people still pray to feel forgiven for what they’ve been told are their sins, but many others no longer believe such models of life and nature. Religious people are certainly free to keep practicing such habits, but for many they’re no longer seen as necessary or even desirable; much like many old inventions or religions, such conservative ideas are no longer desirable; they’re merely assumptions. After all, who worships Greek, Roman, or Norse gods these days? As we’ve seen earlier, even in ancient times liberals asked how any natural object can possibly 'participate' with any supernatural object. For many native peoples that wasn't a problem; for them spirits were defined as natural, not supernatural objects, and so participating with them seemed completely logical and natural. Only after Plato defined spirits as completely different supernatural objects did the idea of 'participation' begin creating some real serious philosophic problems, many of which he himself never solved! In fact, for years he struggled in vain trying to logically explain how natural objects can EVER participate with spirit-objects.
After him, then, Christian philosophers like Augustine also struggled to understand how non-physical spirits can ever participate with natural objects; they’re completely and totally different kinds of objects. Eventually he said understanding such events are beyond all reasoning and logic; they just happen. And even though he realized there’s no evidence for such spirit-objects, he said just have faith they exist, and are somehow both in and beyond this world at the same time! In other words, ignore logic and just accept the idea; people wanted to feel they would go to heaven after they died, and so they did.
No doubt, in the 400s CE such simple philosophic questions and difficulties bothered almost no one; they wanted eternal happiness more than anything else. But again, the more people accepted such ideas, the less they studied how nature actually works, and so the less they learned about more reliable scientific knowledge. Only ancient liberals like Democritus, and humanist sophists like Protagoras had no such problems; for liberal Democritus and Epicurus only atoms and space were eternal, and our reasoning should focus on making our few precious years of life more enjoyable and pleasant. Around the world today such liberal naturalistic habit-arts and ideas continue growing. Today some engineers are now able to make reliable machines using atomic switches and pathways, and chemists now build new medicines to lessen the damage our own harmful habits often produce.
In at least one important way, however, we today are still very similar to those native ancestors. Both they and we could be naturalistic, pragmatic, and practical! Both their tool building habits, and their magical spirit-arts were practical habits; they both aimed at improving life here and now, just like our modern scientific tools. Such practical kinds of thinking remain useful forms of excellence to this day, and almost certainly for all days to come! Like us they too wanted useful practical and pragmatic knowledge both to make life more satisfying as well as less dangerous. As a result, our native ancestors were almost forced to keep experimenting with spirit-rituals; sometimes they seemed to work, and thus gave people some hope, and isn’t some hope better than no hope? Sometimes hunters were successful and so their magical rituals seemed to work; it was a kind of psychological conditioning good teachers and parents still use today. They too reward children for acting like they want; it’s called behavioral conditioning. Such occasional rewards were enough to keep our native ancestors experimenting with magical rituals like worship, animal sacrifice, and religious habits. And as we'll see a little later, for Dewey, as native naturalistic habit-arts of tool making and experimental research continued growing and reaching new plateaus of excellence, as they did in ancient Greece and many other countries since then, then they helped create our practical liberal tradition in philosophy as well -- a tradition focusing on naturalistic kinds of events and excellence.
The following, again from Dewey's Ethics, mentions some similar ideas about spirits, and also some of the harmful results such habits can produce. It mentions too how such habits eventually affected all of life’s events; magical spirit-arts to many of our native ancestors were like science is to us today. In the native world
“Natural evils, plagues, defeats, earthquakes, etc., are treated as quasi-moral, while moral evils are treated as more than half physical. Sins (become) infectious diseases, and natural diseases are malicious interferences of a human or divine (spirit) enemy. Morals are materialized, and nature (itself) is moralized …..
Now it’s hardly necessary to point out the (result) of such (ideas) ... restricting the freedom and responsibility of the individual person. Man is hemmed in as to thought and action on all sides by all kinds of mysterious forces working in unforeseeable ways. This is true enough in his best estate. When to this limitation is added a direction of energy into magical channels, away from those controllable sources of evil ..., the amount of effective freedom possible is slight. This same misplacing of liability holds men accountable for acts they have not committed, because some magic tendency for evil is imparted to them. (Thus) famine, pestilence, defeat in war are evils to be remedied by sacrifice of goods or persons, or by ritualistic ceremonies ....
The working presumption of society, up to a comparatively late stage of its history, was that every harmful (result) is evidence of evil disposition in those who were in any way concerned. This limitation of freedom was accompanied by a counterpart limitation of responsibility ... Animals and even inanimate objects which do injury are baleful things and come under disapprobation and penalty. Even in civilized Athens there was a survival of the practice of holding inanimate things liable. If a tree fell on a man and killed him, the tree was to be brought to trial, and after condemnation cast beyond the civic borders, i.e., outlawed. Anyhow, the owner of an offending article was almost always penalized. Westermarck, with reference to the guilt of animals, cites an instance, dated in 1457, 'when a sow and her six young ones were tried on a charge of their having murdered and partially eaten a child; the sow, being found guilty, was condemned to death, the young pigs were acquitted on account of their youth and the bad example of their mother." (458-459)
So, to us Deweyan liberals mankind has only yesterday, so to speak, begun emerging from such a superstitious psychic world. It’s no one’s fault; mankind has simply learned to build more naturalistic tools to help make life better. By simply focusing on naturalistic kinds of habits much of mankind has been steadily building a better tool kit, in spite of the fact a few wealthy greedy folks have gaining control over it, and keep using it to increase their own wealth and political power. For example, construction machines useful for building affordable housing for poor folks are instead used to build housing for wealthier people. Helping those 2 economic segments of society is one difference between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans.
In any case, Dewey’s liberal model of life and nature helps explain why modern science has grown only slowly for almost all of human evolution, and will continue to do so unless we educate children to practice experimental learning on any constructive and helpful idea. To this day many people still believe if they participate with spirits humbly, then natural events will be helpful, not harmful. To us Deweyan liberals, however, our new models of human history have become much more reliable than all mythical stories put together! In the next section we'll just glance at a few more animistic rituals some native peoples practiced.
A native man with native powers,
Visited a city and its concrete towers.
As his last watch was pawned
A thought finally dawned,
Some kids here are more lost than ours!
3. MORE ABOUT ANIMISTIC ARTS
In this section we continue describing more of our native ancestors’ animistic spirit-ideas and habits. Mainly because such information is still so very new, it’s bound to be educational for many people even in 2015. After all, only within the last few decades have anthropologists, explorers, and missionaries begun actually learning about such habit-arts. Granted, the picture is still far from complete, but they will be described even in more detail in Book 2’s Native Models of Excellence, and in Book 3 native totemic spirit-ideas and habits will further color in life for our native ancestors.
As we've seen, Dewey thought many native habit-arts remain an important part of modern models of excellence, especially their creative and constructive tool making habits. Where we can be more cautious, however, is with their spirit-arts. In any case, however, if he was right, if all modern forms of religions slowly evolved from native spirit-habits, then we ought to find many examples of that idea, and perhaps also see how they helped shape philosophy’s 3 main traditions in ancient Greece. We’ll see more of that picture in the next section.
As we saw in section 2, towards the end of the 1800s English anthropologists began calling native spirit-arts examples of animistic thinking. A lot of informative about native cultures began making it clear most of them felt spirits caused all of nature’s movements; powerful and controlling spirits were felt to be dancing here, there, and everywhere, making nature act the way it does. To them, in many ways all of nature was alive, not just animals and plants. And naturally, the more such habits were practiced, the more reasonable the idea became. What’s ‘reasonable’, of course, varied from place to place, but they all seem to depend on the way native children are educated with the habits their adults practiced. For example, in the native Aztec culture it became reasonable to watch prisoners of war killed in public ceremonies; people were told by their priests burning their human hearts would keep their gods from destroying the entire universe. And as we saw earlier, Japanese Shinto followers celebrate some 8,000 nature-spirits, as did ancient Romans and Greeks who also named thousands of animistic spirits! And of course philosophy’s ‘father’ Thales (c.600 BCE) may’ve also believed the gods are in everything, or more accurately a moving force was in everything; he thought it was water.
We can even reasonably imagine how such ideas and practices were used. Imagine, for example, a native with a painful toothache; of course he really doesn’t know why. He only knows his abscessed tooth hurts like hell. So he goes to the tribe’s shaman medicine person who looks at the swelling. Because spirit-ideas were already being used the shaman explains the situation 'reasonably'; he says some animal's spirit is actually attacking his mouth, perhaps the angry spirit of some animal he ate. To get well the spirit must be driven away, so the shaman may just perform some ritual healing, or he may even help drain the abscess.
Again, we can imagine someone having a recurring nightmare about an angry dead parent, or for a few moments feeling real dread and fear at the sudden death of a clan member, and then thinking it must have been caused by some unknown hostile spirit who perhaps is still close. And so in such ways an ENTIRE UNIVERSE of spirit-powers became felt as real objects. Dewey, of course, saw such habit-arts growing from the way people act with one another socially. Clan members could be friendly or frustrating, and so it was easy to begin feeling all of nature has similar powers or spirits. Said Dewey: "Since we 'call' things by their names, why should they not answer? And if they assist us ... are (they not) friendly ...? 'Animism' is thus the (result) of (extending social relations) ... to ... natural things ... Its ... constant form is poetry, in which things and events ... directly communicate with us."
If so, then eventually any object can easily be felt as pulsating with similar spirit-powers, from the starry heavens above to the fiery depths below! Simply because all of nature keeps moving it must be in some sense alive. Once those idea-feelings are working, people can easily begin feeling the entire universe is constantly moved by friendly and hostile spirit-powers! It’s essentially the foundational idea of Christianity. Also, eventually some creative native ancestors suggested they might be controlled with certain friendly actions. After all, if tool-making and hunting could be controlled with certain actions, then why not friendly and hostile spirits? Thus, ritual dancing and singing eventually became part of native religious excellence, as did other more gruesome habits. Even in some parts of ancient rural Greece human sacrifice was practiced, and of course animals were often sacrificed too, even in ancient Israel; many believed god likes the smell of burning fat. In fact, the Bible described how even child sacrifice could be practiced. Obviously, today most everyone would call such habits barbaric, but at the time spirit-customs and habits made such actions feel right and reasonable. Only slowly did the more civilized idea of personal righteousness begin replacing such ideas in ancient times. The Bible’s book of Isaiah records how such ideas were evolving in ancient Israel.
No doubt, all such animistic superstitions evolved experimentally; after all, what other options did they have to cure their sick or help provide food? Obviously, it was practically impossible for our native ancestors to build schools and research universities while moving from one hunting area to another every few months. And, the more people practiced such animistic habits, the less freedom they had to experiment with learning other kinds of knowledge. I don’t know about you, but if I’d have lived in Neolithic times I certainly would have wanted all the help I could get to keep, say, a hungry 700 pound saber-toothed lion from giving me an unscheduled lobotomy? As Woody Allen once quipped, my brain is my second favorite organ! Respectfully, however, I disagree; all of me is my favorite.
However, even in that situation, there was at least one good result of such animistic habits. They all promoted the art of experimental learning and testing by focusing on the results of their actions! If a person got well after a healing dance, then they continued experimenting with it. Like any habit-art, the more its results were positive, the more it could be experimented with, and thus keep native imaginative thinking and testing alive and elastic, so to speak. For example, when hunters imagined wearing animal skins might make animal spirits friendlier and easier to kill, then experimenting with that idea became easier. And when more animals were killed, it became easier to keep practicing the habit. It became easier to imagine the spirit-power of an animal’s skin was friendly with the same animals.
With such elastically creative experimentation it also became easier to imagine painting animals' pictures on deep underground cave walls; they might make living animals friendlier and easier to kill. Also, it became easy to imagine how making a miniature model of an animal and perhaps even stabbing it might help hunters become more successful. Such sculptures have already been found. Given the belief in animistic spirits, it’s easy to imagine feeling as if such voodoo magic might make life better. With such experiments it's even easy to imagine every thought we ever think is caused by real and alive spirits, at least as real as anything in the world, and often times MORE real! Even ancient Greeks believed their gods, like the half-human, half-divine god Dionysus, could control peoples' thoughts and feelings. And again, even conservative Plato wasn’t afraid to say humans are really just puppets of the gods; such ideas are definitely in the animistic tradition. In any case, however, possibly the worst result of such habits was their confining and restricting human thought outside those basic animistic assumptions and feeling! The more they were practiced, the less energy could be spent experimenting with non-animistic natural kinds of actions!
Probably something very much like those animistic feelings and ideas may have been the normally excellent model of life our Neolithic ancestors practiced. What’s more, simply because such animistic spirit-ideas were practiced by most everyone, they remained strong and propulsive right through the Middle Ages and into our modern era. Even in the 1700s most people thought devils kept hitting churches with lightning to burn them down, or it was a punishment from god for their sinfulness. Even after Ben Franklin invented the lightning rod some religious people accused him of taking away god’s power to punish people; how dare he keep divine justice from happening?
Such animistic feeling-ideas probably began growing tens of thousands of years earlier. They helped make life feel meaningful and reasonable, and thus helped people feel more at home in nature. In medieval times many people continued thinking even the air was full of demons and spirits. From those kinds of psychic assumptions we are all just emerging these days. We Deweyan liberals certainly don’t feel devil-possessed because we admit we know nothing about supernatural spirits; we simply base our new models of life and nature on objective evidence rather than just feelings. In fact to us it’s another example of how strong habits can be when people are willing to die for some spirit-objects no one has ever seen or proved to exist! To us liberals it’s another tragic result of early religious training.
Such animistic habits continued on simply because people kept practicing them; no more useful and reliable actions were available. Until quite recently there was still much unforeseen pain and sickness, fears about death, not having enough food to eat, and also reliably useful knowledge about how the world really worked! In native times, when icy conditions were common about 30,000 years ago, wouldn’t you too have wondered where the hell all that ice came from? And wouldn’t you have felt better after being told an Ice Spirit created it? Why did that lightning bolt almost fry my butt last night? A sky-spirit must be angry with me. Such animistic thinking made people feel they really knew what was happening and could possibly control some events themselves, just like people today think their doctor can help reverse the harmful results of their own unhealthful habits with some pill. In such ways, and for such reasons, animistic spirit-rituals became the world's first conservative models of life and nature. From them almost certainly grew all the many religious forms still practiced today.
Almost certainly such powerlessness and ignorance helped create much psychic stress and frustration. Is there anything more terrifying and frightening than not knowing why things happen, or more stressful than ignorance about how to end painful events? Is there anything more dreadful than being psychologically ‘naked’ in nature, stripped psychically bare and helpless before all of life’s pains and dangers? And what's even worse, KEPT psychically naked from knowing practically nothing about natural cause and effect events? In fact, what could be more stressful than a naked impotent ignorance almost completely incapable of preventing sickness, sudden injury, and painful or sudden death, to say nothing of finding enough food and getting rid of frightening nightmares? In short, native life was a fertile field for those creative natives who weren’t afraid to experiment with animistic ideas. In such a world, magical animistic ideas and habits became tools for relieving such stressful feelings. In fact, experimentally building a very large number of such spirit-habits was all but inevitable; talking habits increased the imaginative powers of our native ancestors, just like some people today can verbally imagine what they'd like for their next meal. As we’ve seen, with their daily actions some shamans taught themselves to become spirit-artists, just like Cézanne taught himself to become a painting artist and Beethoven a musical artist. Again, such animistic arts helped people feel joined and married to life, rather than merely living through a hostile few years; in such ways animistic ideas brought meaning, reason, and stability to life.
Again, occasional success kept such ideas and habits going. Sometimes after a ritual ceremony the sick got healthier and hunters brought back lots of tasty mastodon kabobs, rather than merely those damn skinny rabbit and bird-kabobs; who wouldn't get tired of eating crow, fricasseed or not? Thus, luck and chance certainly played its part, as it always does. However, as our modern era began unfolding after 1600, the weak results of such habits kept urging people to experiment with natural kinds of skills and knowledge. Understanding more about how nature really works became the fundamental assumption of modern science.
No doubt, its growth too was a slow process. Around 12,000 years ago hunters became so good they killed off many of the larger game animals, like giant sloths, wholly mammoths, giant bison, and many others. Thus, our native ancestors were almost forced to creatively invent some new food-getting habits, like raising tame animals and also growing plant foods. More useful natural arts and skills like making better metal tools evolved slowly too. Because those more useful natural habits only evolved a few thousand years ago, it too helps us feel how difficult it sometimes is to imagine new learning opportunities and experimentally keep building better habits for ourselves. It’s yet another very important lesson to learn from our native ancestors; too many routine actions can limit one’s creative thinking! The more deeply we can feel how they creatively started experimenting with farming and agricultural skills, the more inspired we can become to keep such practical experimental actions alive and growing! In short, today the need continues to keep building more naturalistic habit-arts as modern science helps nature keeps changing ever more rapidly. After all, exactly how many new flavors of yogurt, pizza, and frog’s legs can there be? And also, in how many other ways can philosophy be made enjoyable and fun to read? Creativity’s playing field is infinite!
Many supposedly enlightened people today may think such animistic habit-arts were all just a big waste of time. Look at how long they delayed more powerful scientific habit-arts from growing. I guess that’s one way to look at it, and Dewey often looked at them like that. But, he also saw other results weren’t completely useless. As we’ve been seeing, they helped keep experimental learning alive and growing. Animistic habits may’ve been useless for actually controlling events in the world, and thus help delay science's growth, but they were sometimes used in constructive and helpful to people, and thus strengthened the feelings for human welfare and safety. Some graves, for example, may be seen as loving works of art; they were sometimes carefully stocked with fine weapons, useful foods, tools, and other items for what they thought would be the person’s life after death. The humanistic result was to make life less fearful. In short, human wellness was often promoted by such animistic actions. Just like ancient Egyptian tombs, many native graves too teach how much they cared about keeping the world safe and on-going for people. In that sense even Neandertal graves have been quite educational for us today. They sometimes showed they cared about others’ problems, even helping people heal their broken bones. More excellent caring and practical than that it’s tough to be.
If our new information is right about our animistic native ancestors, then life’s natural events like pain, fear, and ignorance helped encourage magical animistic arts and discourage scientific ones. Many needs were satisfied only on a daily basis, and because of it there just wasn’t much time left over to experiment with more creative naturalistic ideas, like building better tools to study natural movements. The more time spent hunting and making clothes, the less time there was to collect and test plants for curing sickness, or experiment with animal-taming or farming arts. And making matters even worse, only a few useful animal species are tamable for farming and herding work! Again, it was just a lucky coincidence many such animals happened to live in the Middle East, like cows, horses, hogs, goats, and sheep. Have you ever tried taming a fox or building a kangaroo or zebra herd? Have you ever tried making a chicken plow a field, or milk a kangaroo? Imagine trying to tame a lion or a cheetah to pull a plough, or trying to use elephant skin to make a new suit of clothes. Thus people who lived along the world's great waterways in the Middle East were just naturally luckier than most other native peoples; such natural events thus helped determine where civilization first began growing. In South America lamas and alpacas were also easily tamable, as well water buffalo in the Far East. In case you haven’t noticed yet, corn just doesn’t grow as well in the desert as it does along, say, the Nile’s banks.
Even so, as civilizations grew spirit-habits remained routine and strong, and they do in many places to this day. However, as farming skills became more important around 10,000 years ago, native animistic habits slowly evolved, first into nature gods of, say, the sky and earth, and then within the Hebrew tradition into the idea of a universal god of all creation. For example, the Hebrew god Yahweh was at first a sky god, responsible for weather events, but eventually evolving into a god of the entire universe. To us Deweyan liberals such religious history is liberating, and it also increases our amazement that science's natural kinds of experimental learning skills evolved as early as they did in ancient Greece. Luckily they did, however, as their naturalistic tool making and colony building habits kept being experimented with and expanded, first with the help of metal technology, and eventually producing consciousness expanding tools like telescopes and microscopes.
Centuries before that, however, in ancient Greece natural knowledge reached another level of power and usefulness, and with its help increased the confidence of a few secular thinkers to begin building an entirely natural liberal model of life and nature. With them Western civilization’s liberal tradition began growing. We’ll see much more about that crucially important and liberating psychic step in the next section and also in Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence. As Dewey said, creative Greek artisans and workers who gradually learned more about practical naturalistic kinds of knowledge, like metal working and ship building, eventually began helping the first liberal philosophers begin building a very different model of life and nature than their native animistic ancestors. Then, with the help of Plato and Aristotle in the 300s BCE, Western civilization’s conservative and moderate models became more distinct and clarified.
To take us to that next very important ancient level of human evolution the following comparative ideas might be helpful. There were to be many differences in those models, but also many similarities. After all, life and nature keep evolving in a continuum. For example, perhaps no ancient Greek better reflects and celebrates more native kinds of spirit-ideas than conservative Plato. There are a number of similarities between his conservative model and native ones. Some of them are mentioned below by M. Cary in the book Life and Thought in the Greek and Roman World. Paraphrasing, for spirit-minded conservatives:
l. The most obvious similarity is assuming all events are spirit-caused, or spirit-controlled. They generally differed about how spirit-objects caused events, but both believed they did. Skins of animals continued being worn as a way to magically absorb animal abilities, and also the belief in harmful spirits continued on.
2. Both our native animistic ancestors and Plato believed no event was merely physical and there was always some spirit-object involved somehow.
3. Thus, neither generally saw the possibility of mere accidents or chance events.
4. For both, thinking too was often spirit-caused, even practical ideas. For many conservative Greeks the Titan god Prometheus was felt to teach mankind all our practical arts. Plato rejected that traditional idea, but that some ideas can somehow participate with eternal Spirit-Objects, like mathematical objects, seemed obvious to him. Advice from the gods came to people with dreams, omens, and oracles where some people directly received information from spirit-objects. Magical actions and rituals were quite common in native, Greek, and Roman times. Guthrie also reports, “Many in ancient Greece believed some laws – burial of the dead and worship of the gods – were in fact directly inspired by the god’s themselves!” (The Sophists, 111, 120) No doubt, such ideas have been used for thousands of years to keep people obeying spirit-ideas.
5. For both animistic natives and Plato, spirit-ideas continued ignoring natural kinds of knowledge. Of his more than 30 dialogues only 1, the Timaeus, bothers to describe a conservative model of nature, and what it’s composed of, namely eternal Pythagorean numbers and shapes. Even so, for Plato natural knowledge and science can be nothing more than a likely story. Such feelings were common for our native ancestors too.
6. Both animistic and Platonic thinking worked to keep the social status quo in place. Plato’s political works often projected past habits into the present as the best way to ensure future social stability. In ancient Greece too, people often felt spirits of the dead remained imprisoned in, or close to, the person’s grave they came from.
7. Both models of life and nature celebrated routine habits and customs, feeling only they could be excellent, and
8. For many of our native ancestors and Plato novelty and change were feared and discouraged. As we’ve seen, for many native peoples any kind of change might provoke and anger ancestral spirits and thus create disaster; many ancient Chinese had the same feelings. Plato’s political models also discouraged innovation and foreign interactions as much as possible; they were feared and dreaded. (301-311)
As we’ll see in Book 4’s Modern Models of Excellence, when Hernando Cortez and his horsemen and canons landed in Mexico in the early 1500s, many natives feared the gods had returned to conquer them. And in Plato’s last political treatise, the Laws, even public officials are tightly controlled, especially those traveling into foreign lands! Thus, new ideas and innovations were to be kept to an absolute minimum! We Dewey liberals simply take such comparisons as yet more evidence all of nature is a continuum, and if so then excellence should remain focused where many of our native ancestors focused it, on practical actions helping people with reliable and useful knowledge to keep improving what they have here and now.
4. LIBERAL MODELS OF EXCELLENCE
Sometimes young folks get discouraged when they realize more liberal democratic habit-arts often take centuries to become accepted social customs; racial equality and same-sex marriage are just 2 such examples today, not only in the US but in most of the world! Such feelings reflect an ignorance of how important public education is even today; the more conservative it remains, the more difficult social equality becomes. Without public schools to teach such new democratic ideas it's taken some 4 centuries for even some people to feel democratic equality and experimental learning are too excellent habit art. Thus, many young folks quickly become disgusted with their political system, and too easily accept the power wealthy folks still have over others. They often don’t realize all new ideas and customs can keep can’t keep easily growing without more liberal public schools.
In this section, then, we’ll look at the ancient Greek beginnings of our liberal tradition. Perhaps the most important factors in that development was the growth of many new naturalistic arts, of which farming and animal taming were the most important. Around 8,000 BCE the arts of growing food and raising tame animals were taken to new levels in the Middle East, as well as southern and eastern Asia. Probably a few intelligent women started the Middle Eastern revolution. In what is now Iraq such women began experimenting with GROWING grain food rather than just gathering it; who'd a thunk it? Eventually the social results would be revolutionary, of which slavery was one.
Middle Eastern peoples were lucky in one naturalistic way. There were a number of easily tamable and useful animals, thus making food even more available. As a result populations began growing as never before. Soon villages became towns, then cities, and sometimes even empires. Spirit-shamans too grew into ancient priestly-ruling castes, occasionally producing charismatic leaders who united nearby cities into nations, like in Egypt, Babylonia, India, China, and the Americas; they usually didn’t last very long but then again what empire does? They all relied on new agricultural arts to feed and clothe their people. Something like 10 of the world’s 14 most useful farming animals were native to the Middle East. As a result, human populations where fresh water was plentiful, like Egypt, Iraq, India, and China began growing larger than most other places, and what's more, social classes of rich and poor evolved too. Even today tensions between rich and poor continue defining many modern ideas of excellence, and even help give some young folks a reason to practice 'Robin Hood' habits. Just today, for example, I read a story about how a Swiss judge fined a wealthy man $290,000 for a speeding ticket; a few years ago those feisty, independent, democratic Swiss voted to give their judges such power; who’d a thunk it? In the US, however, wealthy folks often keep working to control as much of their incomes as possible.
More food helped create productive and creative artisan classes of people as well, and they continued adding to mankind’s naturalistic knowledge. Many taught themselves to use the gold and silver taken from others to make shiny and glitzy jewelry, useful pottery, and of course better metal weapons. Iron working became common in the 500s BCE. Precious metals would soon after be made into coins so business transactions could be much easier; slaves too were also useful for mining such metals. Much later, to Scandinavian Vikings, such jeweled trinkets became the economic basis for political power itself, just like it still is for huge US corporations today; the more wealth they have, the more political power they can control. Today even in serious economic recessions, powerful corporations can keep increasing their prices as unemployment grows.
Examples of the growth of new naturalistic customs and habits can be easily seen in ancient Greece too. Western philosophy's liberal democratic model of life and nature grew slowly over 2 centuries, from roughly 600 BCE to 400 BCE. Once it did begin flowering with the work of one of the greatest liberal philosophers of all time, Democritus of Abdera, it caused such an uproar in conservative and moderate circles, within the short space of 3 generations all 3 of Western civilization’s main philosophic models were built, based on the work of Plato and Aristotle. Then, after Aristotle's death in 323 BCE, ancient Greeks had real philosophic choices. Many liked the liberal non-spirit models built by Democritus, Epicurus, and of course the humanist sophist Protagoras. Many of their ideas would soon find many followers in upper class Rome and even the early Islamic world where religious ideas hadn’t yet become strong. In fact, liberal Greek models of life and nature were the first to be built, and not in Athens. In the Ionian colonies of western Turkey, especially Miletus, and from the northern city-state of Abdera, such liberal thinking began sinking deep roots soon after 600 BCE.
Such liberal non-spirit secular customs and habits had been growing for hundreds of years before Democritus was even born, probably around 460 BCE. They represented the constructive and practical habits Greek artisans had been practicing, as well as our human ancestors too, like tool making! As city-states continued growing, foreign tribes kept moving into Greece from the north, and more business arts were needed to supply Greece with its need for grain and other farm products. Also, it needed outlets for its olive and wine exports, and so Greek colonies began to be built for business purposes around both the Mediterranean and Black Seas, starting around 900 BCE. They also helped relieve population pressures. Both Miletus and Abdera were 2 such colonies.
Needless to say, for building such colonies Greeks needed to focus on practical habits of excellence. Until the 800s BCE the Greeks went through a mini-Dark Age of their own, but as that ended colony building became almost a mania, and from them grew an even greater respect for naturalistic knowledge. For example, as Ionian Greeks migrated across the Aegean to western Turkey and built cities like Miletus, it soon became a kind of New York, with its port busy, busier, and busiest! Businessmen from around the Mediterranean needed more places to trade the goods Semitics and Africans had. Slowly more and more city-states were built. Marseilles, for example, was built to increase trade with the French Celts, in Sicily Syracuse was built, and in Italy Naples, among hundreds of other colonies; even some Black Sea colonies traded with Russian tribes. It was a growing secular culture. No doubt, many native spirit-habits were carried over into ancient times, like worship and sacrificial ceremonies, but the growth of secular habits and customs reached a new level of growth and importance, especially in Ionia and similar city-states.
By necessity, then, many middle class Greek businessmen became much more practical minded, secular-oriented, confident, courageous, and wealthy as well. Then, as now, wealth produces a certain kind of social power. As a matter of fact, Homer’s famed Trojan War tale, the Iliad, supposedly fought over a Greek woman called Helen, was most likely fought around 1200s BCE to open up new trading opportunities for Mycenaean Greeks on Turkey's western coast. Being located close to the southern Black Sea entrance, Troy easily controlled much of that trade, as well as trade in the small cities around it. There’s even some archeological evidence for these ideas too.
No doubt, such practical naturalistic habits and customs helped strengthen the all-important Ionian Greek confidence to depend on their own experimental judgments and actions, as Ionian Homer describes in the Odyssey. Even common sailors began developing their own democratic sense of self-worth and equality. In effect, then, such habits continued the naturalistic ones our native ancestors had been practicing for many thousands of years. Such constructive building habits naturally focused on using more of nature to help build such cities and trading routes; soon after 600 metal coins were invented. As we'll see a little later, Dewey too thought such constructive activities were the best way to educate all young folks; they can help build confidence in learning, and that feeling is one of the most important feelings to have. What constructive project isn’t educational and doesn’t build confidence in some way? The Odyssey too encouraged Greek kids to focus on their present challenges and act with courage, reason, independence, and intelligence, making a plan first and then testing it.
As Dewey points out in his Reconstruction in Philosophy, as those colony cities were being built they encouraged practical, vibrant, talkative, and curious questions about nature itself. The Greek psyche was thus elevated to new levels of awareness. Did nature really have spirits in it, controlling its movements, or was mankind really the most constructive, talkative, and creative animal on earth? Thus, for probably hundreds of years before 600 BCE, and the first philosopher Thales, social and business arts were growing the feeling mankind was the builder of all things, even religious habits. After all, the more the Greeks sailed to other cities, and saw foreigners sail into Miletus, the more they saw a great variety of spirit-ideas, and they couldn’t all be right! Slowly, more and more Ionians felt nature just might be a completely spirit-less realm where excellent reasoning and experimental ideas would keep making mankind stronger and more intelligent. In such ways those Ionian Greeks began building a level of naturalistic respect and technology above many other cultures; even Egyptians were basically content to stay home, care for their own country, and keep their social status quo.
As hundreds of new trading colonies began sprouting up all over the Mediterranean and Black Sea, more naturalistic kinds of habits were encouraged, even in the 800s BCE. Then, probably in the 700s BCE, Homer's Odyssey celebrated a new kind of personal excellence -- an experimental Greek individual capable of meeting life’s challenges with their own intelligence and creativity. Such people weren't afraid to confidently sail into uncharted seas, face new challenges, interact with many different kinds of people, thus producing a new kind of independent individual, capable of feeling equal to anyone else. The sprouting of Western civilization’s first democratic habits began soon after 600 BCE, reflecting the growing confidence of ordinary people to take more democratic control of their lives. Naturally, such habits helped some curious Ionians to ask: what really was the truth about life and nature? In time other philosophic questions would be added: What really is ethical excellence; how can we best know about it; what really is political excellence and artistic beauty? Such questions soon helped form philosophy’s classic challenges, or their first baby steps, so to speak. Soon after such questions were asked, answers began being experimented with, and in Ionia were answered with naturalistic ideas, not spirit ones. For the first Ionian philosophers the 'divine' was pictured with common natural ideas, like water, air, or even fire. In fact, soon after 400 BCE, thoughtful innovation reached such a peak even conservative Plato became an adventurous thinker -- a philosophic conquistador! He would do nothing less than reconstruct the entire model of popular Greek religion and conservative thinking!
With such naturalistic habits, much like today bold and confident early Ionian Greeks began openly rejecting all native spirit-ideas before building Western civilization’s first liberal models of life and nature. To them all the many different spirit-models were merely experiments in thinking about life and nature, and made to feel real by rituals and ceremonies. In a few decades such liberal questions and answers took human thinking to a much different level than most all native peoples practiced. In time, such naturalistic ideas and feelings would help build Western civilization’s first atomic models of life and nature, thanks to Democritus’s work in the later 400s BCE. And almost immediately after that, competitive conservative and moderate Greek ideas and feelings would flower with Plato and Aristotle’s work.
As more and more Greeks continued learning about the world around them, they became more confident about their own reasoning abilities and habits; constructive work builds confidence. Within the span of just 3 generations even the search for philosophic truth became competitive. In fact, such competitive habit-arts were already a big part of Greek life even in the 800s BCE, and helped create the first Olympic Games shortly afterwards. Indeed, athletic champions were rewarded with free food for the rest of their lives. No doubt, today many would say some of their games were much too excessive; Olympic boxers, for example, often fought till one was dead; certainly for the loser that was excessive. And also, Spartan mothers normally told their sons to come back from war either holding their shield or being carried on it. Throw in the fact Greek religious habits never became more than locally controlled, and it becomes fairly easy to see how a diverse number of very robust, shaman-like philosophic schools quickly evolved, beginning in the early 500s BCE, and continued flourishing throughout the wide and growing Greek world, from Ionian Turkey to Italy and Sicily.
Those first philosophic shamans competed to win students and followers with their new ideas and models of life and nature. In the 400s BCE kind and modest Socrates not only learned to physically wrestle with others, but mentally wrestle with them as well, often debating competitively with them, and with his charm hoping to attract more students to his conservative cause. Even Plato accepted the challenge to compete artistically against good liberal writers like Democritus and Protagoras, and even moderates like the mysterious weeping philosopher Heraclitus; even Socrates confessed he didn’t know exactly what Heraclitus was trying to say.
Such competitive feelings throughout the Greek world naturally produced a great variety of philosophic models created with different assumptions and ideas. With them most anyone could build their own models of philosophic excellence, or as some might say today, their Rorschach interpretations of life. They answered the question what patterns do you see in life’s on-going events? Heraclitus, for example, saw constant change, and Democritus said it was caused by atoms, not spirit-causes. As a result of such mental freedom a host of new and interesting philosophic models emerged, were criticized by those with different assumptions and ideas, and then rebuilt with their own Rorschach versions of what nature really was composed of, how it changes, and eventually what it means for ordinary people living day-to-day lives. Both Democritus and Socrates began making ethics an important philosophic study.
That was some of the good news from early Greek thinkers. The bad news, however, was many of them began feelings mere reasoning could somehow mentally grasp and behold what nature really was. Thus, their early philosophic art remained tied merely to different assumptions. Eventually, liberals like Democritus merely assumed atoms must exist, and they can’t be divided into smaller parts. Conservatives like Plato assumed there existed an entire realm of Spirit-Objects which somehow helped mold and form our natural world into the shapes and forms he saw. And moderates like Aristotle assumed such eternal and unchanging Forms were material objects within nature; knowing them was the best goal and object for philosophic thinkers.
In general, however, Atomists and Sophists were freest of all unproven and un-provable assumptions, especially Plato’s and Aristotle’s. They were thus freest to rely on actual experimental research and knowledge to build their models of life and nature modern science finally began studying after 1600. Only when liberal philosophers based their thinking on real tested and reliable evidence and results did their models become the basis of modern science itself.
At Miletus Thales said water was nature’s one constant; somehow it was changed into air and matter. Students at his school soon criticized that idea, but a kind of liberal philosophic dye was cast, so to speak, by those early Ionians. All their answers were based on naturalistic ideas that could be tested and verified, unlike spirit-ideas. For obvious reasons they were called materialistic monists, simply because they reduced all of nature to one material substance. No doubt, colony building helped create the art of simplifying complex events. Then, in the latter 400s BCE, Democritus offered his atomistic model of nature, thinking a great variety of different atoms could easily create the world and the changes we see around us merely by combining and recombining with other atoms! For over 2,000 years conservatives and moderates have had that philosophic enemy to combat and defeat, and continued doing so even after 1600! After that, however, they would be fighting a losing battle; even today most conservatives readily admit atoms exist and make up everything we see around us, including ourselves. Plato's and Aristotle's philosophic models would eventually became welded to Christian models of life, first with Augustine in the early 400s, and then with Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s.
Again, such liberal growth was all naturalistic. Some rather unique social conditions in Ionian Turkey, at Miletus, encouraged the first liberal models to begin challenging the already widespread native spirit models of gods and goddesses actively directing nature’s movements. At that city very large trading and shipping businesses helped people focus on moving goods from all around the Mediterranean. Thus, a healthy natural diversity was seen on a daily basis. Soon a few curious and thoughtful Ionians began asking themselves what’s the one underlying substance in all of nature? And besides that assumption, they also assumed mere reasoning could learn what it was. Both assumptions would eventually prove unreliable, but they were used to build Western civilization’s first liberal models of life and nature, or rather the first ones we know of.
The Ionians
So, from around 600 BCE to around 300 BCE the Greek world had what may be called a Renaissance, or re-birth. Their growing natural knowledge of the world around them and within Greece even began unearthing some strange looking rocks with animal and plant imprints in them, and in some rather strange places. For example, high up on some mountains were found fossil imprints of sea shells. How could something like that possible happen? At Miletus one of Thales’s students, a man named Anaximander, brilliantly suggested an evolutionary model of life and nature! The accepted model of human life said nature doesn’t evolve but rather stays the same, and yet how could that model explain odd-looking sea animals found in mountain top rocks? Anaximander simply changed that conservative assumption. He simply assumed the earth was always changing, and at one time mountain earth was under water; mystery solved.
About 200 years before Plato, Anaximander began building Western civilization’s first liberal evolutionary model of nature. Many Ionians simply weren’t taught to accept conservative spirit-assumptions about nature. After looking at some fossils and where they were found he boldly suggested all of life and nature are changing and evolving, not only our earth but ourselves as well. For him humans weren't molded into existence, fully formed, by any spirit-god or demiurge, like Plato later said we were. Amazingly enough, Anaximander even said some fish eventually evolved into people! Evidently he had compared fish and human skeletons. Over 2 thousand years later scientists began finding much objective evidence for that idea, now considered to be fact and not just theory. Who knows what he would have said about dinosaur fossils? No doubt, Greek kids would've been just as fascinated by them as kids are today, and conservatives just as embarrassed; how could the Bible say nothing about such creatures who lived for millions of years?
Slowly but surely such practical and naturalistic ideas kept growing, more people began feeling more confident about their own abilities, and also about such knowledge being the most excellent and reliable of all for actually making life better. Knowledge about how to turn trees into ships helped change the way Greeks started thinking about life and nature. And, such knowledge also made it easier to keep experimentally testing new naturalistic ideas and assumptions, like how better irrigation canals could be built to increase food production, and using the mud children played with to make bricks for building useful homes and cities.
As such knowledge continued growing around the Mediterranean a few of those curious practical-minded Ionians began building the world’s first scientific models of life and nature. For them it was entirely reasonable to picture all of life as the result of only one natural object! After all, such simplified thinking had been practiced for centuries earlier as an important part of building new colonies in foreign lands. Simplify, simplify, simplify! It could have been the motto of many ancient Greeks.
As a result, experimental thinking became stronger. Thanks to Aristotle’s work, 3 Milesians are remembered for starting to paint such liberal pictures -- Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. They were among the first of many liberal experimental thinkers. So, what was so important about 3 Ionians saying water, some undefined substance, or air was nature’s ultimate constant? Well, for one thing, such answers began shattering native spirit-models of life and nature, and thus re-focusing attention onto our natural world. And most important of all, all of those naturalistic ideas could actually be tested for their reliability and truthfulness, and so could become much more reliable than native spirit-rituals. Aristotle said Thales simplified all of nature to be water, and so it was easy to test that idea; could water really produce earth or air? Evidently some of his own students did test the idea, and then suggested their own answers. Later on even Heraclitus would say fire is the one constant in all of nature, probably meaning the process of change itself. Even in the 500s BCE abstract thinking was still a difficult art. After all, a number for nothing, or 0, was invented many centuries later. Eventually Democritus choose atoms for building his liberal models of life and nature, and they’re finally were verified by modern scientists.
As we've seen, after the Milesians a liberal humanist movement started growing too on the mainland. Protagoras became the most famous example; his ideas became a favorite target for Plato himself. The movement attracted a number of very talented people who weren’t afraid to help teach others arts and skill useful in a democratic world. As they did, conservatives like Socrates began reacting. Later in life he felt there existed some eternal and unchanging objects, like a person’s spirit for example, which he almost certainly believed would live on after death. Being very religiously pious he reacted against the liberal movement in general, and those like Democritus who said even god was composed of atoms, lived a great distance from the earth, and knew nothing of what was happening here at the earth. Incidentally, studies of native cultures have shown such skeptical ideas about spirits were practiced there too. Conservatives like Socrates and Plato, and of course moderates like Aristotle, quickly answered such bold and confident challenges to their own feelings, assumptions, and ideas.
Democritus: The Founder of Western Liberalism
Those 3 confident, vibrant, and talkative Milesians began building a new science and art – philosophic thinking and logic. They began justifying their feelings and assumptions with logical arguments, definitions, objective evidence, and proofs. Some 300 years later the geometry many high school students study today was also put into a systematic form of reasoning, from the simplest assumptions to more complex ideas. What’s more, Milesian naturalistic thinking continued spreading north to new colonies like Abdera, where liberal Atomists like Democritus – Greece’s Laughing Philosopher -- continued ignoring spirit-ideas completely. He was about 10 years younger than Socrates, give or take a week or 2, and grew up in a wealthy household in liberal northern Greece, right around the corner from Ionia in western Turkey. After traveling a great deal, bold and confident Democritus’s Atomic models of life simply felt best to him. He had traveled perhaps more than any other ancient philosopher and as a result his naturalistic models of nature and human nature simply reflected the events he’d seen and felt while traveling. If he didn't invent the word 'atom' he probably knew who did, supposedly his teacher Leukippus. In fact, many US founding fathers had similar deistic ideas to Democritus, including Tom Paine, probably Thomas Jefferson, and many others too. Deism is the idea god cares nothing about life on earth and thus allows people the freedom to make it as they see fit. The Bible’s Book of Job reflects similar ideas.
Democritus’s democratic ideas of equality were also irksome to conservatives like Plato and even moderate aristocratic Greeks like Aristotle. To them probably only agnosticism and atheism were worse. Democritus saw how Athens's power depended on its navy and her brave and courageous sailors; if they could die for their city-state, then why shouldn't they have a right to say how it should be governed? Similar ideas were used to lower the US voting age to 18 in the early 1970s. Eventually Democritus felt all people are related and akin to each other, rather than being divided into, say, superior aristocrats and naturally inferior shop keepers, barbarians, and slaves. Thus, he defended and celebrated democratic equality as the best, most natural, and most respectful political system. It alone sees most every citizen as best able to suggest laws useful to everyone, as well as being capable of wisely judging whether such laws are good or bad Democracy also challenged citizens to stay informed about what was going on both in their own and other countries as well. How else can democracy stay the best political system unless people are educated to keep learning more about their world? In time, however, an undemocratic educational system promoted democracy’s downfall; only a few wealthy students could afford to become better educated. Most kids merely learned to read and do simple arithmetic, and then go into the family business. Even in democratic Athens citizens were often herded together to listen to their leaders debate different laws.
Democritus was truly one of the ancient world’s philosophic wizards, more than equal to either Plato or Aristotle. With his amazingly modern-sounding ideas he not only accepted the atomic model of nature, but greatly expanded it into astronomy, ethics, and politics. For him atoms and space made nature open and infinite in both time and space, and thus liberated people to feel physical objects should be used for reasonable amounts of enjoyment and pleasure, rather than fearing spirits could attack anyone at any time. What’s more, because all people belong to the same human species, we should all be treated equally, thus making democratic political forms reflect nature itself. Even while he lived liberal playwrights like Euripides began calling for slavery’s abolishment! At the time it was truly a radical idea, given slavery’s widespread use. As mentioned many times earlier, both Plato and Aristotle would say slavery is a normal and natural part of nature, and so should be accepted; neither one developed very strong democratic feelings and compassion for mankind. Aristotle was also no women’s libber either. What’s more, sadly today forms of slavery still exist, perpetuated by our own academic obsessed public schools, where not teaching young women some useful employment skills continues making them vulnerable to drug addicts who aren’t afraid to turn them into addicts and then sex slaves to support their own drug habits too. Even after drug-addicted pimps get out of jail they’re immediately back on the streets looking for more vulnerable young women runaways to enslave.
As we’ve seen, such naturalistic habits had continued growing for thousands of years in native cultures, with their tool making and hunting habits. Eventually they helped build more useful farming habits. In fact, Democritus saw how religious rituals were an important part of planting and harvesting times, and so said religious ideas themselves began growing with farming arts. Eventually, as rulers, priests, and wealthy folks were relieved from working, leisure time increased for them all; advanced Iraqi astronomical knowledge was merely one result. They divided years into 365 days, days into 24 hours, hours into 60 minutes, and minutes into 60 seconds! Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle were all from wealthy families too. Also, more spirit-oriented priests became freer to keep wondering about all the constant star-patterns they kept seeing; were they really ancient gods, returning year after year to keep controlling movements here at the earth? If you've ever asked yourself the same question about obnoxious in-laws, then you know how some ancient priests may've felt.
In any case, slowly but surely more secular-oriented people began seeing more of nature's material patterns and relationships. They began realizing mankind is the best builder in all of nature; we build ships, new cities, bridges, roads, farms, and businesses, so why not believe our ancestors also built all the different religions we see today? The gods didn’t have anything to do with it; there wasn’t even any evidence they even existed, so why think they do? One rather feisty early philosopher named Zenophanes even pointed out certain African tribes make their gods to look like them, and so if horses or lions could make statues of gods they would look like horses and lions!
More About the Liberal Movement
At Miletus spirit-minded priests were much less powerful than they were in other parts of the Greek world, like Athens where Plato grew up and southern Italy where some conservative Pythagorean communities existed. To many Athenians the gods were very real, and were seen as simply more powerful human beings. Thus, in Ionian Greece it became much easier to picture life naturalistically. Thales was a curious man and he supposedly had been to the great Iraqi city of Babylon, talked with its scholars and priests whose job was to watch the heavens and make sure everything was happening the way it should. Evidently he also studied their astronomy notes, and later may have even predicted an eclipse around 586 BCE; if so it helped show even supposedly random celestial events had recurring patterns to them.
Dewey saw Thales’s work as more the beginnings of science than philosophy, but he also saw him as a sign of growing naturalistic habits and ideas. Again, Greek artisans and businessmen had become confident enough to start feeling they could control their own destinies, rather than relying on sacrificing cows, chickens, wine, or horses to the gods for their help. Slowly but surely more colonists liberated themselves from such ideas, like Xenophanes who said no one will ever know what god is like. Gradually such feelings helped create some more interesting questions, like what was the most excellent form of government; how should people practice ethical excellence; what knowledge was most excellent; was there any eternal and unchanging ethical truth, and if so what was it; what was the best kind of education for people, and was it the same as that for rulers; what really is beauty; was it too built into nature or just in the 'eye of the beholder'? And so in the 400s BCE, during Socrates' lifetime, with the help of such questions and the leisure to answer them, ancient classical philosophic art began taking shape. Their models would be about knowledge, nature, ethics, politics, education, and art. And the more such questions were asked, the easier it was for liberal, practical, and naturalistic people to begin challenging all conservative spirit-models, at least for a few centuries.
As Democritus traveled about he saw how many people feared a life after death, and what bad things might happen to them, and so having democratic feelings he wanted to help people get over such fears and anxieties. Why worry about what no one knows for sure? Why not focus instead on practical challenges, like making some money, being useful to others, and enjoying more of life; for him life without an occasional feast was like a long journey without an inn. Like many today, people back then also felt money could make everything better and so warfare often became just another way to become richer. For Democritus, however, religion evolved merely as a way to make sure the harvest would be good; if it was people rejoiced, and if it wasn’t they wondered what they did to anger the gods. For him those were unnecessary feelings.
As in native times, many ancient peoples too were fearful; wouldn't you be if you were ignorant, poor, and powerless living in a dangerous world? In his greatest book Experience and Nature, Dewey quotes Homer for one example of what many commonly felt then and now: "A thousand woes traverse the abode of man; the earth is gorged with them and the sea is filled; day and night bring grief. They come in silence for prudent (god) Zeus has taken away their voice." And at another place Homer says peasant serfs are always fearful wherever they go! Who today can’t feel the very deep sadness, psychic pain, stress, and anxious feelings energizing those ideas, especially in the uneducated and poor lower classes? For many, a thousand woes were a normal part of life, and so kind and sympathetic liberals like Democritus wanted to help liberate people from such fears by learning more practical habits, and also seeing life as a completely natural series of events, many of which could be seen before they happened and thus become better controlled. After all, many other people had traveled around and saw people had many different ideas about the gods, and so who really knew for sure anything about spirit-objects? As we’ve seen, the religious cult of Dionysus offered relief with ritual orgies; with them the god-man might make them more powerful, or at the least more relaxed.
Again, a philosophic variety soon grew, and continued growing until the Christian Emperor Justinian said enough and closed all the competing schools in the early 500s CE. That educational event usually marks the separation between the ancient and medieval eras, just as education today marks the difference between civilized and uncivilized people, or excellence and something less. Before Justinian, however, many secular, practical liberals called Sophists and Atomists continued celebrating as excellent their kinds of helpful natural knowledge, the same kind of wise and inventive excellence Homer described in the Odyssey, even though it too is full of gods and goddesses helping or hurting people. Believe it or not, some liberal Greek Sophists even set up counseling services for people with personal problems; they and people like Socrates liked to help people solve their personal problems. Personally, however, I think they all should have focused instead on creating healthful foods, like non-fat pizza and ice cream, to go along with their wine. Who can possibly worry about much after finishing such a pizza with an ice cream and Chardonnay chaser! How therapeutic is your diet philosophy?
Thus, in the early 500s BCE a psychic split occurred in Greek culture, a split between naturalistic and spirit habit-arts. Liberal Ionians celebrated natural kinds of knowledge, while mainlanders and Pythagoreans celebrated spirit-habits. Eventually naturalistic thinking would lead to liberal Democritus. He work stunned the conservative establishment with its spiritless atomistic models of life and nature; they had no supernatural objects in them, nor did many of the humanistic Sophist models either. Plato was so bothered by such ideas he spent his adult life trying to show how wrong such thinking was. Compared to his conservative models, liberal ones were like night and day. Clearly the liberal gauntlet was down in the 60-odd books Democritus may have written, of which only a few fragments remain. Thanks to Aristotle and many others, however, many of his basic thoughts were preserved, and even more clearly with the Roman poet Lucretius's atomistic masterpiece, On Nature.
Almost no one today even recognizes Democritus’s name, much less realizes how really brilliant, bold, and modern his ideas were in the 400s BCE; it’s the result of conservative control in Western civilization for almost all of its history. Liberal Greek ideas were immediately attacked by both Plato and Aristotle, somewhat like socialism and communism were constantly attacked by conservatives in the US in the 1940s and ‘50s, and like ideas of gay and lesbian equal rights are attacked today. In ancient times slavery was as widespread and as common as sunshine, but for kind-hearted and sympathetic Democritus treating all people equally was justified with biological ideas; we’re all human, and belong to the same species. For centuries even conservatives objected to such liberal ideas, but again, it’s practically impossible to destroy completely any idea, especially ones about equality. Most people not only are equal in talent and ability, but also want to be equally too, at least for political and educational purposes.
As mentioned earlier, democratic ideas and equality even found their way into Christian models of decision making. The more powerful the Church became, the more it needed to have just one theological model of life and nature. As a result, church councils of bishops met from time to time and voted democratically on what their model of absolute Truth should look like. And they also used the liberal idea of equality, but defined it only on a supernatural level; all people are equal in god’s eyes. The fact god itself remained merely an assumption didn’t seem to bother many people. Only when contacts with the advanced Muslim world began growing in the 700s were some rational arguments for god’s existence created by theologians like Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s, based on some of Aristotle’s arguments.
Liberal ideas of democratic equality also helped increase feelings for peace and cooperation; why keep killing each other and making life more stressful when we’re all just people trying to get along peacefully? The results of constructive cooperation were much better than results from war. In short, live, let other peaceful, law-abiding people live, and share the same rights equally!
Thus, it wasn't very difficult at all for liberals like Democritus to celebrate philanthropic humanism -- acting kindly and sympathetically towards those less fortunate, even slaves; he had a liberal 'heart' both Plato and Aristotle never grew. In any case, with Democritus’s help liberalism’s 4 foundational ideas became part of Western civilization: equal rights; separation of church and state; government economic management; and international justice. Only a mere 2,000 years later would liberals like Dewey finally become freer to start building on those foundational ideas. Again, many early liberal Christians shared some of those ideas, like democratic self-rule for example; Augustine, however, confined democratic arts only to the Church's bishops, and justice to how the Church enforced its models of 'right' with its might.
Then, a few decades after Democritus' death around 370 BCE, liberal philosophy found another leader in Epicurus (d. 270 BCE). In Athens he felt most comfortable with liberal atomistic ideas, and from his garden-school his students took his ideas first into the Roman Republic, and also into the Middle East, into Syria and even Iraq. However, in Rome many took his simple-pleasures-are-best ethical ideas to excessive limits, especially many secular upper class Romans. Taxes from conquered peoples, including Israelis, helped liberate many Romans from work and so many became free to indulge their pleasures to excess! Eventually, such excesses went even into emperor households, helping convince people conservative religious models of life were best. When Rome’s empire was finally smashed by warring barbarian tribes, more sin-conscious Christians like Augustine began building a religiously conservative society, with the mission of redeeming all of sinful mankind, with violence if necessary! Even today many radical religious conservatives continue such habits. Many liberal ideas celebrated even by Christians like John Chrysostom were all but extinguished until the Renaissance movement became unstoppable in the 1500s.
In the eastern part of the empire, however, liberal and moderate philosophers were treated more kindly, even after Islam started growing in the 600s. For centuries in Iraq, for example, some Arab scholars openly accepted Democritus' ideas about focusing on learning more naturalistic knowledge with experimental learning. Within a few decades they helped take Islamic civilization to many levels beyond what medieval Christianity had achieved. During this time Islamic culture had a solid and growing secular side to it, helping build the world's most advanced culture, from which Christian Europe would again begin seeing more of life’s possibilities. Muslim scholars helped create a culture envied by many others, including Christian Crusaders, and eventually bring their books by Aristotle into the West for translation.
Also worth mentioning about Greece is their language’s great usefulness in describing many new ideas. In a world still practicing warfare on almost a yearly basis, the art of adapting one’s speaking habits to better fit always changing war and business situations helped create a very fluid and flexible language. Then, after defeating the more powerful Persian forces in the early 400s BCE, it became easier for people like Democritus, Plato, and Aristotle to turn their talking skills on building Western civilization’s 3 basic philosophic traditions. Their very fluid and adaptable language made such building possible. That, plus the Greek love of competitive debate and criticism made it easy for Greek thinkers to continue challenging their old traditional ideas and models of life and nature. With their fluid talking skills new logical questioning and answering skills also evolved, and with them grew the tool conservative and moderate thinking would use to build their new models of life and nature -- contemplative reasoning. That, coupled to, of course, an already competitive and robust zest to keep learning, exploring, and asking new questions helped make Greece the educational capital of the Western world. In all of those new models people became curiouser and curiouser about nature and mankind itself. The eventual result would be modern science’s birth after 1600.
More Liberal Feelings
Into this sketch of ancient thinking grew a liberal humanist movement in the 400s BCE, called Sophism, and after them a Skeptical movement also became important. Members of those movements were psychically robust and secure enough to celebrate liberal ideas like agnosticism. For the most important Sophist, Protagoras (d. 420? BCE), mankind is the measure of all things, even of religious systems. And he celebrated democracy as the best political model. There’s a story about his friend Pericles asking him to write a code of laws for a new colony. As we’ve seen, even in the late 500s BCE people like Xenophanes openly admitted they knew nothing about spirit-objects, nor could know nothing for certain! What Protagoras did claim to know, however, were the humanistic arts of practical excellence -- the same kinds of useful secular habits Dewey celebrated too. For Protagoras what is best to know is practical useful knowledge! Like Confucius in China, and Buddhism’s Siddhartha Gautama in India, what's best to know are useful character habit-arts; they are the core of ethical excellence and the sign of an educated person. Habits like respect for others, and helping them become better people were celebrated as ethical excellence. After all, the results of such actions best tells us how excellent they are. Such liberals were thus pragmatic, practical, and anchored their philosophic thinking to the always-changing natural world; anyone could only know it best. Protagoras, for example, regularly encouraged people to teach themselves useful arts, like how to speak well in public, with confidence and self-assurance; what ideas are best to celebrate, like peace, kindness, helpfulness, and democracy; many different ways of defending themselves in court should they ever be sued; and also how to intelligently run their own households. Some even taught people how to make their own clothes, shoes, and jewelry.
In today's world such practical habit-arts are becoming more important than ever as spirit-models grow less important. Why? Well, as more and more giant corporations put themselves beyond normal economic and political controls, they can keep increasing prices for their goods even during recessions, and thus make life much more stressful for many others. Luckily the farming sector is still somewhat less monopolized, or who knows what might happen to the price of non-fat yogurt tomorrow. For ancient Greeks, however, such monopolistic wealth was less of a problem. Most people expected wealthy folks to use their money to build military forces, so everyone would be more secure and better protected from their enemies. Today, however, wealthy people have managed to shift that responsibility to less wealthy taxpayers, and thus become freer to build their own huge fortunes, and even pay politicians to tell people their taxes are too high? After all, the less tax money available to useful social programs like Social Security and Medicare, the more money becomes available for wealthy pocketbooks!
As a general rule such liberal Sophists and Skeptics were much more confident and comfortable in the natural world, with all its changing and fluid movements. Even Thales, for example, supposedly made a fortune when he saw the olive crop would be large, and then bought up as many olive presses as he could. Also, focusing on what’s happening here and now made it easier to physically test their ideas, and also practice the modern excellence of helping people at the poorer end of the economic spectrum; both Plato and Aristotle coldly ignored them. In short, many ancient liberal Atomists, Sophists, and Skeptics focused on life's little everyday problems and challenges; rather than rejecting physical work they often embraced it! Even Democritus was said to work for a time as a common laborer, and as mentioned earlier, others helped counsel people with their problems and offer practical ideas to test. Such liberals simply celebrated how ordinary people could learn to make their own lives better without spirit-habits, worrying about life after death, and not always having more money. They liked teaching people the art of making the most of life here and now with what they have. As Pericles said, it’s no disgrace to be poor; what is disgraceful is not working to make yourself richer.
As a result, with the growth of such liberal movements experimental learning continued growing. Doctors like Hippocrates consciously practiced it for much of his life, carefully gathering data on results of medicines, and carefully observing patients and their symptoms! Once again, however, it’s practically impossible to keep such liberals ideas and habits in place unless they continue being taught to young folks. Even in our modern era, such knowledge is still consciously weak and often ignored in many of our public schools, as if obeying the teacher and learning many trivial academic facts is what makes a person educated. There’s more about liberal kinds of education later on.
Some Liberal History Since the Greeks
Without such educational systems in the ancient world, liberal models of life and nature were doomed to grow weaker and weaker. Such ideas were simply a threat to all forms of concentrated conservative economic, political, and educational power. After all, conservative models of life and nature had been in control of cities for centuries before the Greek liberal movement even started, like in Egypt, Persia, and even Greece itself! Naturally, conservatives wanted to keep their status quo power. Like any habit, power too can become addictive, so conservatives didn’t want to encourage or allow any challenges to their power, especially liberal democratic challenges. In short, the first liberal models of life and nature were true strangers in a strange land; they were like many of the first English pioneers in North America -- many died quickly. That would be the fate of most ancient liberal philosophic models, helped greatly by being excluded from schools in the Middle Ages.
The situation was different in the ancient world. For example, after Alexander founded Alexandria, Egypt in the 300s BCE, liberal scholars from all over the Mediterranean migrated there and continued their naturalistic studies. So many wonderful achievements were made there too, like building very close estimates for the earth’s and moon’s size and distances. Medical and mechanical research kept growing too; another math wizard of the ancient world, Archimedes, said with the proper lever he could move the earth. But, as we’ll see in Book 3's Ancient Models of Excellence, conservatives often reacted violently to such work, as if it was always evil and sinful. For many like Augustine and even Plato such knowledge was not only less than best, it was in fact dangerous, and should be stopped even with violence if necessary. After all, if god had wanted such knowledge known it would have told mankind to learn it, but within the Judeo-Christian tradition god was pictured as forbidding anyone to know about both good and evil, and they were the very goals of modern science itself!
Thus, many religious conservatives felt such liberal knowledge needed to be stopped from growing. On more than one occasion radical conservatives oversaw the burning of Alexandria’s magnificent libraries, where thousands of priceless manuscripts were stored. In such events much of Democritus’s and Aristotle’s work was probably destroyed. For conservatives in the Platonic tradition, human excellence should only stay focused on knowing and learning about spirit-objects, even though such objects could only be fully known after death!
In general, then, most people in the ancient world just weren’t ready for liberal models of life and nature. The work of Atomists like Democritus and Epicurus, Skeptics like Carneades, and Sophists like Protagoras were either destroyed or allowed to rot. No doubt, for a while liberal Atomism was popular among the educated Roman upper classes, encouraging them to see INTELLIGENT pleasures as the greatest ethical good, as well as humbly learning more about life's simple little naturalistic truths: inch by inch life’s a cinch; a stitch in time saves nine; and if you're not obedient to your social betters then you may just get a good swift knock on the head, if you were allowed to keep your head! In fact, a kind of steam engine was invented in ancient times, but it was seen as more of a toy than a possible labor-saving machine. Even still, some liberal ideas did find their way into Stoic and Christian thought too, especially ideas of equality and helping those less well off. However, the more challenges it had to its power after 1200, the more the Church began working to silence as many opponents as it could, one way or another; it started its infamous Inquisition.
Many religious rulers and priests in the ancient world just didn't want to hear liberal ideas, like all people are related and thus equally deserve the same human and political rights as everyone else! For Greeks most all Persians were mere slaves to the ruler, and later on Christian kids were educated to believe only their religious ideas are excellent, and so everyone else should be made to practice them. They just didn’t want to hear liberal ideas like any form of slavery is an insult to human dignity, whether it's economic, physical, or religious slavery; all religions are human inventions; all learning is experimental; everyone deserves a good secular education; and democracy is political excellence!
While they practiced it, however, the more robust and independent liberals kept focusing on improving life here and now, and experimentally testing their ideas about how nature works. The more that happened, however, the more nervous religious conservatives became. For many of them people just weren't meant to be educated, they were meant to be controlled and focus on their salvation. India’s conservative caste system encouraged such ideas all through society. Even many Greek aristocrats like Plato and Aristotle simply looked down on all such practical naturalistic knowledge and social equality. They could only be the result of less-than-the-best reasoning. What mattered most to them was knowing and beholding nature’s eternal and unchanging objects, even though such knowledge was basically useless in daily life! Only such knowledge could produce absolutely eternal Truth, discovered only with intuitive reasoning, and finally defeat their liberal opponents, much like Olympic athletes defeated their opponents!
Such is but a brief sketch of life in ancient Greece. However, it’s almost impossible to completely destroy what so many people believe in. As mentioned earlier, a few years before Jesus was born, the Roman Atomist Lucretius’s On Nature described in great detail the Atomist model of life and nature. Even though Emperor Augustus worked to destroy all such work, somehow a few copies managed to survive and eventually find their way into a few dusty monastery libraries in France and Germany. There they were discovered in the early 1400s and soon printed on the newest invention, the moveable type printing press. Thus, from such beginnings both modern science and liberalism began growing once again during the Italian Renaissance. Scholars and powerful merchants and bankers like the Medici’s taught themselves to read and actually started learning about their own history. And what's more, such liberal ideas like experimental science keep growing today simply because they’ve begun giving mankind real power to keep making life more enjoyable for everyone. Many wealthy folks haven’t allowed scientific knowledge to work that way yet, preferring instead to make as much personal wealth as possible from new inventions; science’s potential for helping all people is still there, however.
Along with the renewed growth of liberal ideas has come the growth of democratic political forms. As mentioned earlier, the Church kept such forms of government alive all though the Middle Ages, when their bishops would meet from time to time and vote on what their eternal truth would be. Thus, eventually, instead of merely accepting the aristocratically social and political status quo practiced by conservatives for thousands of years, more people began challenged them to keep learning more about the world and educating more and more people with more scientific ideas and habits. And, as the Industrial Revolution began creating huge fortunes for a few people, in the late 1800s British liberals began demanding their government start working to better control such great wealth and use more of it to help those in need. Such socialistic political forms quickly became the enemy of US conservatives, and remain so to this day; money addictions need to be satisfied just as heroin addictions need to be satisfied.
In fact, for liberals the great political question today is how much power should the government allow a small wealthy upper class to have over millions of other people. A rather small group of people now own much of the world’s wealth! Over the past 40 years, since 1970, that situation has gotten progressively worse! Today a few large corporations have gained monopolistic control over more and more of the economy as well as the political system, thus transforming a competitive economic system into something better described as corporatocracy! Today, merely a few large oil companies have liberated themselves from just about any kind of economic competition with smaller companies! As a result of such monopolistic power they can simply keep raising their prices even during current recession, and make everyone’s life that much more stressful and frustrating. Energy prices affect the price of all other goods, and yet many prices have remained the same and even increased!
Ancient Athenians too felt the stressful results of such an economic system, where a few families controlled too much farm land, thus causing too many people to be sold into slavery to pay their debts! Even then wealthy folks often controlled the price of food, and at one time Pericles ordered food prices controlled, so people wouldn’t go hungry. However, controlling wealthy power was much easier then; much of life was lived on a local level, whereas today wealthy folks live far removed from most everyone else. In Greece, then, it was fairly easy to make the wealthy pay for everyone’s security by making them pay to build the Athenian navy. In any case, such history teaches us such practical challenges are on-going; they’re still with us today! In the early 1970s, for example, conservative Republican President Nixon used his government to better control the economy, by ordering both wages and prices frozen for a while, so inflation and unemployment wouldn’t become too large, and so poor folks would vote for him in the next election. It was one way to control soaring energy prices. Life's a series of experiments, isn't it?
Another drag on liberal science and naturalistic knowledge was slavery. Think about it for a minute. What need was there to learn more about mechanics and building labor-saving machines when slaves were much more useful and much easier to acquire? As we saw earlier, Aristotle even recommended forcing some people into slavery; for him some people were slaves by nature! In his moderate model of life and nature liberal ideas of equality were simply replaced by models based on authority, of which there were many examples: men having authority over their wives, children, and slaves; elected official having authority over citizens; generals having military authority over soldiers; and even rulers have authority over many cities. He thus felt slaves could be defined as merely organic tools for use by their owners; it was right and natural.
In time such ideas were elevated to eternal and unchanging Truth, rather than merely expressing the feelings and ideas of the Greek aristocratic class. In the process, however, liberal ideas about equality and democracy would be ignored, especially by those few who had social and religious power! Not completely however. Some Athenian slaves were often much more clever than many citizens, so they were allowed to run important businesses and even buy their freedom. Even Plato may have been sold as a slave at one time. That was some of the good news. The bad news was sometimes war itself was justified by saying more slaves would be the result; in Athens there were in fact many more slaves than citizens! Even today slavery may now be outlawed, but forms of it are still practiced in the business world! Economic slaves are created when business owners take their factories to countries where workers are still unorganized, work cheaply, and thus help create larger profits! Such slave-like habits go back to ancient times. In short, the more slaves were used, the less need there was for naturalistic knowledge to build machines reducing the need for human power; who needs machines when slaves liberated many wealthy people from having to do any useful work, Plato and Aristotle included?
Obviously such a greatly divided Athenian social structure helped create a radical psychic separation between different classes of people, including Plato and Aristotle. No doubt, one of the most damaging results for them was to keep thinking the experimental learning habits of the lower classes could create only inferior kinds of knowledge! For both Plato and Aristotle learning how to make better shoes, clothes, grow more food, make more sparkling trinkets, build more religious temples, and of course make more war weapons could never compare with learning about what they assumed were nature’s eternal and unchanging objects of knowledge. Why bother with trivial knowledge when the 'highest' knowledge -- eternal and unchanging knowledge celebrated by their class -- could never be known with experimental learning, but only with contemplative reasoning? So, rather quickly that learning model became common for conservatives and moderate even into the 1900s. The philosophic school called Phenomenology is one such example, as is Freudian psychology. Both Plato and Aristotle called reasoning the most excellent model of learning; Aristotle even called it the highest kind of happiness. Well, at least some of us liberals still have the mighty limerick to battle our opponents, even if the limericks are lusciously lame.
A conservative theologian pounded his fist,
But Sophist Jerome was unimpressed with his list.
Show me spirits are real,
And how they feel,
And maybe then I’ll believe they really exist.
5. ANCIENT PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS OF EXCELLENCE
In this and the following 2 sections we continue summarizing much of what’s already been said about the 3 most important Greek philosophers – liberal Democritus, conservative Plato, and moderate Aristotle. In many ways they continued many traditions of our native ancestors, like spirit-habits and believing some objects in nature don’t change. However, they also made many genuine improvements with their models of life and nature, thus helping create the ancient era. In this section we focus on describing their psychological models, much of which was mentioned in Part 1.
Not surprisingly, different philosophers have been building different psychological models of human nature for thousands of years, often without any objective evidence for their assumptions and ideas. Indeed, they were often built mostly to justify many of their other ideas. In ancient Greece, however, those 3 models helped form Western civilizations 3 main philosophic traditions -- liberal, moderate, and conservative. What’s more, conservative Plato's and moderate Aristotle's psychological models have dominated western thinking until only recently, thanks to Christian philosophers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. No doubt, the main psychological difference between liberal and other models revolved around the objects of knowledge; were they merely more intelligent habits helping make life better, as the liberals said, or were they focused on learning about eternal and unchanging objects, as conservatives and moderates said?
Learning About Changing and Unchanging Objects
As we’ve seen earlier, both Plato and Aristotle assumed excellent knowledge could only be about eternal and unchanging objects, and using contemplative reasoning as the best learning method. In contrast, for liberal humanist sophists like Protagoras and the amazing Atomist Democritus, the main object in life was to build useful habits so a person’s life could become better able to act more intelligently and reasonably. Thus, for liberals like them enjoyably active experimental practice was the best method of acquiring such new habits; only practice makes perfect. Thus, in general liberal Greeks carried on the constructive and practical habits of our native ancestors, while conservatives like Plato aimed at participating with eternal spirit-objects with one’s reasoning faculty, while moderates like Aristotle aimed at knowing the eternal natural objects helping form life and nature itself; today he would probably be more likely to accept the idea of DNA than Plato would.
Those 2 main kinds of native objects, changing and unchanging, thus found their way into ancient Greek thinking too, only with much greater detail and description, especially about the human psyche, or as Christians later called it the human soul. For example, conservative Greek thinkers like Plato (d. 347 BCE), pictured the human psyche as having a number of different faculties; they were more or less separate powers. For him plant, animal, and human psyches all have a nutritive faculty; it helped them live and grow as well as reproduce. Some animals and people also have a spirited faculty making them combative and aggressive. However, only humans had a 3rd faculty in their psyches no other animal had -- a rational or reasoning faculty; later on Plato added some more faculties as well. With his idea of an eternal reasoning faculty Plato continued the spirit tradition of many native peoples, while making one very important change, namely picturing the reasoning faculty as entirely non-physical; for him it was like the divine spirit world itself – eternal and non-physical. Thus his psychology may be called a dualistic one. For him it was a logical necessity. If a reasoning faculty wasn’t like nature’s spirit-objects, then how could it ever know anything about them? Naturally, after death it lives on, returns to the Spirit-World, absorbs all its eternal knowledge, and then often is returned to live another life in another body. His religious inspiration, the Orphics, described the body as a prison for the divine psyche.
Thus, for Plato the path for improving a person’s life depended greatly on a reasoning faculty, as it had for Socrates. Both he and Plato believed excellent kinds of eternal and unchanging ethical ideas were learned only by a reasoning faculty; only it could purify one’s reasoning psyche, and thus make it unnecessary to be re-born into another lifetime of pain, suffering, and ignorance. Why was that task so difficult? This was the usual explanation. Somehow one’s physical body blocked the reasoning psyche from remembering the divine spirit-knowledge it had absorbed before it entered another body. As we saw earlier in Part 1, however, Plato eventually discovered such a psychological model helped create many seemingly unsolvable results, and thus question the truthfulness of all such models. How, for example, is it possible for a physical body to affect in any way a completely non-physical reasoning faculty, or any other non-physical object? They’re 2 completely different kinds of objects! Thus, for thousands of years the so-called Mind-Body problem has been troubling conservatives ever since Plato. In fact, Socrates may be seen as the true inheritor of native thinking; according to Aristotle Socrates believed such faculties and their eternal objects were material objects, like many native peoples believed.
In any case, for Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, a reasoning spirit-faculty alone can help us participate with, mentally grasp, and behold nature’s highest truths – the real nature of eternal and unchanging objects. In fact, Plato’s dialogues can be seen as experiments in describing such a model of life and nature, seeing the many problems it created, and then also describing what he felt was the best political and educational systems to promote such learning. In any case, however, Plato took a basically dualistic native psychological model of human nature and made it a radical dualistic matter-spirit model, where spirit-objects and a reasoning faculty were completely non-physical.
Like native peoples in general, Plato too assumed nature and human nature have both natural AND spirit elements in them. Eventually he admitted all natural objects have their eternal spirit-forms in that realm, or else we couldn’t even think about them; even ordinary objects like mud and hair somehow participate with their eternal Spirit-Objects. In such a spirit realm there existed the Ideal Woman all women are a model of. What’s more, the more we reason about such Spirit-Ideas, the easier it is to absorb their knowledge and act more intelligently. As we’ve seen, our native ancestors based such spirit-ideas on their dream experiences, but for Plato mathematical knowledge was the best evidence such eternal objects existed, especially geometry. How could we know, say, parallel lines never meet unless our reasoning faculty had grasped such eternal truth? Incidentally, Democritus too greatly respected the art of reasoning. After all, what else but reasoning could see the eternal truth of atoms and their nature? So, for him and Aristotle, there are 2 kinds of knowledge, sense-based practical knowledge and reasoning-based eternal knowledge.
With the Catholic Church’s help such a faculty model of psychology remained popular for thousands of years, even though there was no objective evidence such faculties really existed! Again, such a dualistic model of psychology was needed to justify many of the Church’s other spirit-ideas, like knowing god’s nature. So it continued being used to describe human nature. However, problems with the idea of psychic faculties continued plaguing the model. Even into the 1700s intelligent people kept making different lists of how many faculties really existed; sometimes the list grew to 20 or more. It was yet another result of not using experimental testing to even test and verify the idea of faculties. As we’ve seen earlier, in the 1700s a Scottish school of psychology listed over 20 human faculties, including self-esteem, gratitude, and self-preservation. Even Plato had expanded his original list of 3 to include willful emotions and memory.
Moderate Aristotle too created his own list of faculties: remembering, willing, sensation, active thinking, and passive sensing, among others. Simply because experimental learning wasn’t practiced in psychology until the late 1800s, there could be no objective evidence to contradict them. Thus, it was perfectly safe to say a separate psychic faculty of growth made people grow, a spirited faculty made people courageous, and a strong rational faculty made a few philosophers great at reasoning and thinking. After all, animistic natives had been saying there were separate spirits for all natural events, so why not human events too?
Hundreds of years after Plato, the early Catholic theologian Augustine even pictured god itself as having eternal faculties like perfect goodness, mercy, love, knowledge, and power. Thus, early Christian psychology reflected Platonic ideas, while another faculty called god's grace became more important than anything else for salvation and eternal heavenly happiness. As vicious barbarian tribes finally broke through Roman defenses, and began destroying much the Romans had built, the resulting social chaos increased life’s uncontrolled pain and misery. Augustine’s Christian models of life and nature seemed designed to give people hope for a better life after death by talking about how the earthly Christian community represented an eternal city of god.
Like the math-oriented Pythagoreans before him, Plato too built a school where such ideas could be expanded. For example, Plato felt math studies would help train one’s reasoning faculty to more easily grasp and behold nature's eternal math Spirit-Ideas; math studies were felt to be the best preparation for participating with his eternal Spirit-Ideas; they were the best example of pure logical reasoning. He felt in a spirit-realm there existed perfect and unchanging models of a sphere, a cube, and other geometric models; how else could we know their eternal properties? And so with such a psychological model, if you wanted your memory faculty improved, you studied history; military habits made your courage faculty excellent, and so on. Even today many in our public schools still believe a faculty model of psychological is the best for educating young folks. Needless to say, Dewey and many other liberal psychologists disagreed, based on the results of actually testing a faculty model of psychology. In Book 5’s Models of Educational Excellence, we’ll see how the faculty model was eventually tested, and found to be completely without any objective evidence. Thus, since the early 1900s, liberal Behaviorists have felt confident saying words like 'faculty' merely name one skill of our organic body-mind, rather than a separate psychological power. Objective testing of faculties showed playfully learning just about any habit-art makes us better as reasoning, rather than just studying math. In short, many learning activities we all practice daily help teach the habit-arts of reasoning, memory, and courage. For example, simply building anything strengthens our reasoning skill, even if it’s only a new kind of pizza or a soapbox racer, and sometimes eating such a meal or driving such racers makes kids more courageous too!
Again, for Socrates and Plato psychological excellence depended mainly on proper reasoning; the Greeks were great talkers and builders, and those habits increased their feelings for logical reasoning. Aristotle felt his logical writings were his best contribution to philosophy. For Socrates only reasoning could discover eternal kinds of ethical truths, and thus make us more intelligent people; knowledge is excellence. Once your reasoning faculty grasped and beheld the eternal nature of Courage, then it automatically caused you to act courageously, no doubt about it. In many of his dialogues Plato describes Socrates as showing people how weak their reasoning really was; they weren’t able to define those unchanging kinds of Truth. Thus, few, if any, really knew what Goodness or Courage was simply because they hadn’t reasoned in the right way to mentally grasp their eternal definitions. Again, he assumed they must exist or we couldn’t even think about them. Such assumptions are yet more evidence for native assumptions about thinking. Many natives believe just thinking about harming someone would actually harm them!
Thus, Socrates kept talking with young men to convince them they really didn’t know what they thought they knew. Later on, Plato describes an old conservative myth in which most people know merely shadow-like forms, rather than perfect and eternal Truth. When they knew that knowledge, then they would act accordingly, ignore objects like shiny new chariots, the almost-naked women selling them, and instead concentrate on using their knowledge to create city-states where true justice and peace were practiced. And later, when Catholic theologians like Augustine built their models of life and nature, they said Church rituals were necessary for people to deserve such eternal and perfect knowledge, as much as was humanly possible. Thus, they both made it easier for poor, uneducated people to more easily imagine how they could become perfectly happy after they died, even if they couldn't know about such objects. Eventually, however, in the 1600s, even some religious people began asking how can any spirit-object like the soul possibly interact with a physical object like the body? Thus, more modern models of life and nature became necessary, as we’ll see in Book 4.
No doubt, Socrates' war-torn environment also played its part in his emphasis on a reasoning habit. As the brutal and disastrous Peloponnesian War continued wasting young Greek lives over decades, peaceful and gentle Socrates reacted; maybe it was his way of helping end such violence. War was making men less rational and intelligent, rather than more so. So, in between 3 battles he was in, he tried helping young Athenian men think more rationally about what they were doing, rather than just acting impulsively and obediently. What really is courage and wisdom, he asked? Is it just obeying the people in power and killing other Greeks, or is it standing up against such people and refusing to hurt anyone? For Socrates it took some real courage to practice such wisdom; most people simply didn’t want their ideas questioned at all! Pacifistic Socrates’s reasoning told him it was better to be hurt than to hurt someone else!
Sadly, however, such work didn’t produce the results he wanted. The war continued wasting lives for almost 30 years, and even some former students acted more brutally than ever against liberal democrats. The result was to make him more democratic enemies; while talking with young folks he often criticized democratic ideas and practices as much less than excellent. However, when the dust finally settled and peace was declared in 404 BCE, his student Plato began learning why he should build e a faculty model of psychology. In it he said we’re all born with a number of psychic faculties or powers, but because we have material bodies such inborn powers need certain kinds of practice to strengthen them; mathematics will best strengthen our reasoning faculty, so we can then mentally grasp and behold nature’s eternal Truth.
No doubt, Plato was a religiously pious man; many admired and revered him for it; he may have offered sacrifices to the gods on a daily basis, especially Apollo, the god of reason. He wanted to learn all he could about such Ideas and so he probably continued experimenting with traditional religious ideas. In fact, a record of his reasoning experiments is preserved in his dialogues. If Apollo, the god of reasoning and wisdom, helped Socrates become the wisest man in Greece, then perhaps it would help him know what he too assumed were nature’s eternal Spirit-Ideas. With their knowledge he too would become truly excellent, and thus avoid being born again into our world of pain, sorrow, and misery. No doubt, the psychic need for salvation, and to feel saved, was a widespread and natural response to a world where real scientific knowledge and its useful tools were almost non-existent!
Innate Ideas
How might people like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle have justified their belief in eternal and unchanging objects? Well, they might say, don't we all have an inborn idea of equality; no one teaches it to us, and yet even ignorant slave boys can understand if 2 lines are equal or unequal. So, if such Spirit-Ideas don’t exist, then how can we even talk and reason about such ideas when no things in the natural world are equal? In fact, from where can we possibly get all our universal ideas, like woman, equality, justice, courage, and wisdom if their eternal meanings don't already exist? Don’t all people know what equality is, and just use different sounds to express its meaning? Thus, Plato probably felt justified in saying a divine reasoning faculty can participate with such Spirit-Objects after its body dies, simply because it too is a Spirit-Object! And not only that, but only contemplative reasoning can help us remember all those universal Ideas we're born with! Obviously, many others disagreed with such reasoning, including Aristotle, Epicurus, Sophists, and Skeptics. To them such conclusions were unnecessary and excessive! If it were true, then why couldn’t anyone ever learn what their real natures were? Why can’t the word ‘equal’ merely help us better trade our goods with other people, or help us build a society without slavery?
In any case, with his dualistic faculty psychology Plato celebrated another long-lived conservative idea: INNATE ideas. It's had a very long life in Western civilization. Even when such ideas eventually evolved into instincts in the 1800s, atheist Nietzsche used such ideas freely, as did Freud in the 1900s; he often pictured self-preservation as an innate, inbuilt instinct; Freud even suggested people may have a death instinct too. In fact, during the long medieval interval between ancient and modern times, conservatives and moderates continued seeing innate ideas as perfectly acceptable. Conservative Christians like Augustine pictured feelings like original sin, guilt, and conscience as innate faculties; we're all born with them. And even as modern astronomy and physics were beginning in the 1600s conservative Rene Descartes too said we all have innate ideas of god in us at birth, and the best way to learn more about them is merely reasoning with clear and distinct ideas! Such reasoning led him to believe his own existence was an example of absolutely certain knowledge! Such habits were yet another reason experimental Behavioral psychology has evolved so slowly.
As we’ve seen earlier, reincarnation too was another result of Plato’s dualistic psychology. He greatly admired the mathematician Pythagoras and his followers living in southern Italy; he had even talked of having former lives. There’s a story about his asking a man to stop beating a dog because he knew him in a former life. And of course the belief was and is very popular in India. So, to many people it seemed entirely reasonable to believe when our divine reasoning faculty re-entered our material body at birth, all such innate Ideas became blurred and too weak to see clearly; the idea is even preserved in the Jewish tradition. Thus, with Plato’s help conservative philosophic reasoning became a way of remembering what our innate knowledge really was, and if we didn't, then we might be born again into another frustration-filled life.
Innate ideas were useful in religion and politics too. Such ideas predestine us to become what we are, either because of past-life sins or god’s plan. And either way, staying obedient to those with political authority was often pictured as ethical excellence. Kings, queens, and popes were said to be chosen by god to rule over people, and so people shouldn’t revolt or even democratically vote to replace them, unless they were really dangerous. Roman tyrants like Caligula were simply murdered by their own guards, not voted out by Romans. What’s more, Plato's psychology of innate ideas helped keep people from even wanting a democratic government; nature itself has created people unequal, and one should simply accept that fact and not demand equal right! In India such ideas were even used to create social castes where people would live out their entire lives, sometimes being allowed to work at only the worst jobs in society all their lives. Aristocratic Nietzsche greatly admired such a social system while attacking any kind of liberal ideas of equality and equal rights. Such examples are yet more evidence of how socially dangerous some conservative ideas are for any kind of political and educational progress, and have been for thousands of years.
Aristotle was a bit more liberal; reading Democritus no doubt made him so. Like the liberals Aristotle too talked more about habits in his psychological model, and how they teach practical kinds of excellence. Like many liberals, he too believed we can train our muscles with practice to feel many different kinds of excellence. No doubt, such practical knowledge wasn’t the highest and best kind, but it can at least help us feel some practical kinds of excellence. On the other hand, studying and teaching at Plato’s Academy for some 20 years also convinced him our reasoning faculty is probably eternal and thus able to grasp and behold eternal, unchanging objects or Forms as he called them. For example, we’re able to mentally see a universal Form of mankind helps make people what they are. Even though he admits psychology is one of the most difficult subjects, he too built a faculty model of it, and like Plato he too called an active reasoning faculty divine and immortal. One can well imagine him feeling more than a little uncomfortable while writing his De Anima, or On the Psyche. In any case, he thought it best to build a moderate model somewhere between liberal Sophists and Atomists who celebrated only habits, and Platonic dualists who felt eternal Spirit-Objects existed and could be known with a reasoning faculty.
Only recently, only since the late 1800s, have such faculty models of psychology become much less believable and reliable than a Behavioral model of psychology, where only habits and enjoyable practice are celebrated. In truth, however, such a liberal Behavioral model of psychology was first built by some ancient sophists while Plato was growing up! Protagoras, for example, was what today would be called a liberal secular humanist. As he traveled around he encouraged his students to focus on actively making themselves more intelligent and skillful with practice, rather than merely keep reasoning about otherworldly objects; after all they may not even exist! To him and Dewey too any kind of excellence is the result of active and intelligent practice, and the more such habits are practiced the stronger they grow. What mattered most to such liberal thinkers was how intelligent peoples' practice was; was it merely routine or did it creatively keep testing the ideas people wanted to test? Sadly, however, such a liberal model of psychology just wasn't what most people wanted to hear; most everyone had a need for salvation and a better life. Even many rulers wanted to become a god or god-like themselves, so how could they deny such objects couldn’t be known?
With such information about ancient forms of psychology we can continue sinking Dewey's liberal roots deeper. In fact, the roots of such practical habits go back over 2 million years, to the first stone tool makers. They only reached a more conscious level of awareness in the ancient world. Liberals there too celebrated such ideas like discovering naturalistic truth, experimental science, business, and theatre arts, logical reasoning, gathering evidence for their ideas, architecture, and medical science. All of those useful and practical arts, and many more, reached new levels of accomplishment with the help of talkative, inventive, and studious Greeks. A much more detailed model of this new model of nature and human nature can be seen in Books 2-5 in this series. Here, however, we can begin feeling some of their meanings. In any case, however, because they continue living to this day, liberal, moderate, and conservative models of psychology and excellence are anything but merely dead ancient history. The quest for excellence is as alive today as it was in ancient Greece.
No doubt, not many people today feel how alive and growing such ancient models of psychology are, and how they continue forming our modern era. Students of philosophy and ancient history are about as common as uranium238. Such people are usually found only in small groups in colleges and universities, and when they graduate they begin forgetting much of what they redd. But such habits continue being practiced by more and more people on a daily basis, thanks also to many liberal thinking religious folks too, and perhaps from such books as these.
Western civilization's 3 main Greek philosophic models of excellence are still practiced today around the world, and the more conservative ones still are used to justify much of the violence we see. Thus, there's still a need to keep testing people to see what their feelings are; how liberal, tolerant, peaceful, and respectful are they? And how disrespectful, intolerant, and domineering are they. In fact today liberal, moderate, and conservative models of life and nature may even be more alive than they were in Greece, especially liberal democratic habit-arts. There they were just a small movement, but in today’s world whole countries now practice their ideas, thus keeping the liberal tradition growing. After all, who wants to spend their entire life slaving away to keep paying off bank debts they neither made nor benefit from? And yet that’s what’s happening in many countries today. Many conservative bankers still feel small concentrations of economic and political power, like Plato celebrated, are the best forms of power for eliminating all competing liberal forms of power, like democracy and publicly owned banks benefitting the people, rather than bankers.
In fact, the more people can begin feeling such ideas in the ancient world, the easier it becomes to see examples of it in today’s world. Are our schools still justifying enslaving students to learn essentially useless knowledge and facts about life with a now discredited faculty psychology? Why not ask your local school principals? And if so, then how can education become more practical to better help individual students start building their own work skills? Without such skills young folks simply become more vulnerable to modern stresses like drug addiction, unemployment, intolerant and disrespectful actions. Such questions are as alive today as they were in Plato’s day.
Finally, in the eternal quest to make life more tolerant, or at least as clear as mud, and also to have a little fun too, here's yet another in a series of lame little limericks.
A native shaman once saw a church’s dome,
And decided to it he should immediately roam.
Though at first afraid,
He eventually stayed,
And soon felt right at home.