6. PLATONIC MODELS OF EXCELLENCE
Much has already been said about Western civilization’s most famous conservative, Plato of Athens. This section, then, talks a little more about the social conditions and the people he was closest to, like the Pythagoreans, the religious Orphics, and of course Socrates; Plato developed a very close bond with the famous conservative Athenian critic. Many of their ideas helped build his dialogue writing style, as well as his philosophic models of life and nature. For those who’re interested in a more detailed description of this very important period in Western history, Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence will be helpful.
Socrates was born about 470 BCE, during what many consider the height and depth of Athens’s so-called Golden Age, the period from about 600 BCE to 300 BCE. During his life Greek theatre arts, sculpture, architecture, and liberal philosophy blossomed as never before. Much of their stunningly graceful sculpture and temple-art remains inspirational to this day. Their artistic naturalness was also captured in many of Plato's earlier dialogues, as well as in much of Democritus’s writings. And this was the period of the humanistic Sophist movement too, led by Protagoras. With their help criticism increased about popular religious ideas; even respected poets often portrayed the gods acting less than excellently, and often as powerful spoiled children. In fact, the criticism became so popular in the 300s BCE, Plato would eventually condemn most arts as being politically dangerous to a conservative status quo, much like the Spartan system.
In spite of such social and philosophic turmoil, however, even today many of their plays, sculptures, temples, paintings, and philosophy continue echoing the vibrant independent energy built into them centuries earlier, even though much of it was callously based on slave labor. So many people adore the Parthenon's ruins even today and yet never feel how it was built from the ground up with slave labor! Still, much of their artistic reasoning was creative; Carlos Castaneda's phrase 'controlled abandon' often describes many of their artistic accomplishments, even in Democritus', Plato's, and Aristotle's work. And, incidentally, today a recently elected liberal government in Athens is trying to reform the economic system which has made them slaves to wealthy bankers, much like Solon reformed Athens’s economic system in the early 500c BCE. It seems there are always wealthy people looking to take more wealth from people.
Such artistic accomplishments in the 400s were bound to affect conservative and moderate philosophers too. Dewey noticed how much such art work encouraged Plato’s and Aristotle’s thinking. In what way? Well sculpture, painting, and architecture helped create a feeling both Plato and Aristotle celebrated, namely nature itself also has eternally unchanging objects. Such works of art feel entirely closed and complete in themselves, just as they felt some objects in nature were. In fact, for them nature itself was a closed and essentially unchanging system, not evolving in any way; Aristotle went so far as to say natural movements were eternally the same. Many statues, for example, were of eternally finished gods and goddesses, constant as the heavenly constellations. In short, such art work helped inspire both Plato’s and Aristotle’s closed, complete, finished, and unchanging models of nature. Just like nature’s heavenly artwork, buildings and statues too were something to be contemplated, admired, beheld, and used as models for the eternal objects causing such regular movements. Where Democritus and other liberals had pictured nature as we picture it today, as open and infinite, Plato and Aristotle would picture it as basically closed and eternally the same, like any building or statue. For Plato a supreme male god “looked after the universe and arranged everything for the safety and goodness of the whole”. What’s more, in such a model of nature based on Greek art, every object from the moon and beyond was felt to be a god, or have some divine power within them, just like all animals had psyches, and thus their movements were all controlled and excellence. For Plato, the sun was a visible result of nature’s supreme Spirit-Idea of the Good. Only on the earth, at the center of the universe, far away from the most perfect Beings, could an evil spirit work at corrupting people to ignore the gods and act independently. Similar ideas had probably been a part of the conservative tradition for thousands of years, as were the religious ideas of Pythagoras – one of Plato’s main inspirations. In fact, one Pythagorean leader, a man named Archytas, was probably one inspiration for Plato’s famous idea of the Philosopher King in Republic, 6.
Plato and His Times
In the first phase of Greece’s Golden Age, the 500s BCE, Ionians like Thales started building Western civilization’s first scientific movement. Even at that early date nature to them had become a kind of new and unknown object needing new models without spirit-ideas. And in the 400s BCE Atomists like Democritus and Sophists like Protagoras had also gladly embraced such a model of nature. However, for pious conservatives like Socrates and Plato, suddenly many people were questioning their entire worldview; no doubt Plato deeply felt that situation. Suddenly more liberal democrats were beginning to see life without spirit-ideas, building an empire of city-states dominated by Athens, and even going to war to protect its empire. Even their respected leader Pericles endorsed a devastating civil war between Sparta and Athens which had lasted for about 30 years.
Even after the war, Democrats felt they had acted responsibly by condemned the man who many conservatives felt was the wisest Greek, Socrates himself! In all probability Plato may have felt agnostic democrats like Protagoras was also to blame; he had angered the gods, who then choose Sparta to be the winner. In fact, much of his famous Republic celebrates many Spartan political habits and ideas. For conservatives like him, the more people ignored the gods, the more dangerous life would become. As a result, almost certainly many conservatives felt what today might be called 'existential anxiety' -- real anxiety and fear. After all, not only were liberals challenging conservative models of life and nature, but their war had effectively destroyed Athens’s economic base, its empire. Many Germans probably felt much the same way World War 1. France and England were demanding huge amounts of money the defeated Germans simply didn’t have, much like today’s bankers continue demanding money from countries who can’t pay it without becoming economic slaves. In short, much of the Greek psychic world had been shattered and conservatives like Plato felt justified in blaming liberal democrats like Protagoras and Democritus; the first admitted he knew nothing about such spirit-objects, and the second defined god as a collection of atoms.
For sensitive conservatives like Plato the challenge seemed obvious: the entire conservative model of life and nature needed to be reconstructed from the ground up, so to speak, and put on a more solid philosophic foundation. For that he would need to focus on describing the eternal spirit-objects existing beyond our natural world, and yet somehow also helping mold our world into what it is. Several questions thus became important. For example, how can other-worldly objects be known, and what kinds of political and educational power would leaders need to build a city-state based on those ideas, and maintain its status quo? For him liberal Atomists and Sophists had all but destroyed Athenian piety and the feelings of sacredness he felt were so essential to a well-run city-state, much like many religious conservatives today feel about liberal sexual and democratic ideas. For Plato, the popular ideas about the gods had to be re-built; people believed they regularly acted like spoiled children, lying, cheating, and even murdering. Such popular religious models made it easier for people to cause social chaos, and for liberals to ignore them as mere uneducated myth and superstition. He too agreed with Xenophanes; it was totally wrong to picture the gods as lying, thieving, adulterous creatures. Only if they were pictured as perfectly good and acting for the good of everyone could any kind of conservative ethical and political excellence be restored. And of course once restored it would have to be maintained against all outside corrupting forces with a vast system of social censorship. In effect, then, he wanted to build a closed and unchanging city-state much like the Spartans had built theirs. Incidentally, recently much the same kind of reaction to radical economic and democratic reforms happened in Russia during the 1990s, when their empire collapsed.
Slowly, then, Plato began feeling his philosophic mission take shape. The only way to end such corruptive, selfish, and evil personal and political habits was to build a model of life and nature as governed by new and different kinds of Spirit-Objects, as perfect, pleasing, and eternal as fine statues and temples. Like any beautiful Greek temple, play, statue, or painting, he felt nature too was guided by such Spirit-Objects, existing in a completely non-physical realm of their own. He would spend about 50 years working on this mission, even while realizing much of what he thought was beyond proof, rested on mere assumptions, and might be impossible to put into practice. As we’ve seen earlier, he tried 3 different times to make it happen, and failed each time.
In the Republic he makes Socrates say in order to build such a city-state all people older than 10 must be expelled. If nothing else, it shows the importance even ancient conservatives put on education and habit formation, in addition to all their lofty philosophic description. No one really gets away from pragmatic solutions to practical problems. And towards the end of his life he wasn’t afraid to say force should be used to maintain a conservative status quo. His famous, or infamous, Nocturnal Council had the power to kill any unrepentant agnostic or atheist. It was also their job to censor all offensive art, and see to it everyone practiced all the state religious laws; only such laws could best return peace and stability to any city-state. In Plato's conservative psyche there was simply no room for tolerating independent thinking atheists or agnostics, much like many conservatives today feel they should never sexually liberated people any equal rights.
If nothing else, perhaps now the reader can begin feeling the source for many of Christianity's intolerant models of social excellence: educate as many children as possible with only Christian ideas, and even publicly murder those who disagree. Until only recently have such actions been challenged, as nature’s great variety of religious habits became more socially interactive. Among other changes, however, what Christians added to Platonic thinking was the idea of a saving Messiah, instead of reincarnation ideas.
Of course, in Athens slave labor continued liberating many aristocratic families like Plato’s and Aristotle’s from having to work for a living, and so more people had time to travel and see how the nature’s own cultural diversity was indeed helping build more liberal models of life and nature. Young Greek men began feeling all habits, even religious ones, were simply man-made, created by those with economic and political power to keep and increase their power! In fact, today many corporations are doing much the same kinds of things with international trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement, (NAFTA) and the latest attempt called the Trans Pacific Partnership, (TPP). With such actions it becomes obvious power itself, especially wealth power, becomes the best thing to have!! But for the young optimistic and conservative Plato such ideas were the result of a misguided education, one that lacked eternal Truths reflected by eternal and unchanging Spirit-Objects. At that point in his development, he felt certain such objects were both within nature, and yet somehow beyond nature too. People could see their material presence in heavenly objects like our sun, and yet they existed in a completely non-physical realm of nature.
Such philosophic optimism to make people more intelligent and life more just is reflected in, perhaps, philosophy's greatest book called Republic! It and Plato's Timaeus have inspired conservatives from that day to this. They reflect much of Plato’s youthful optimism about the Pythagorean and Orphic ideas he was learning about. In those models he saw how to fulfill his philosophic mission. He would assume spirit-objects really existed, their absolute Truth could be known to some degree merely with contemplative reasoning, could be taught to political leaders, and could thus help guide them to bring order, proportion, harmony, peace, and real excellence back into their city-Like in Sparta, political leaders would be relieved of all economic pressures, and thus be free to keep learning more about nature’s spirit-objects.
Indeed, even though many Athenians had lost much of their confidence and vitality after the war with Sparta ended in 404 BCE, many conservatives in the 300s BCE believed Spartan ideas were solidly grounded in nature itself. Spirit-Objects were somehow guiding nature rather than atoms merely moving around in endless combinations and having no end or purpose at all. Even his last book Laws reflects his faith that such excellent laws enforced excellently are the best way to build and maintain a just city-state. If nothing else, then, his work greatly increased educational philosophy’s importance in the ancient world. He helped people ask, who should be educated, what should they be taught, how should children be taught, and many more. Incidentally, another idea Plato celebrated remains forgotten for both conservative and moderates today: children should not be forced to learn anything they don’t want to learn. Just imagine, for a moment, how much more democratic our public schools would be if children had just that one freedom!
And so the young and optimistic Plato began describing his new models of a dualistic nature; it has both natural and supernatural objects in it. He was, no doubt, brought up in a pious household, and then in early adulthood psychically seduced by the charming and opinionated conservative Socrates. His mission was to get people to search for the knowledge reflected in what he too assumed were nature’s constant and unchanging objects. Simply by a logically rigorous and controlled form of talking, called dialectic, he felt such knowledge could be discovered. Plato would then add the logical thinking demanded by mathematical studies. Both he and the Pythagoreans felt mathematics trained the mind to grasp nature’s highest Spirit-Ideas. After Socrates died Plato probably traveled a good bit, and probably met Pythagorean mathematicians like Archytus in southern Italy; they remained in contact all through life.
For them mathematics encouraged the feeling nature really did have some inbuilt unchanging Truth in it. Like the Pythagoreans Plato too would become captivated with the language and study of math. For many people studies like geometry and arithmetic encouraged the feeling nature really does have some kinds of eternal and unchanging truth! After all 2 + 2 is eternally and always 4, isn’t it? Thus math encouraged many ancient conservatives to use it for training one’s mind to mentally grasp and behold what they assumed were eternal and unchanging Spirit-Ideas! Until only recently such feelings have been attractive to conservatives. For example, in the 1600s philosophic moderate Baruch Spinoza wrote an entire ethics book in the form of a mathematical treatise, and thus continued severing philosophy from any kind of popular thinking.
In general, however, the Greek language of mathematics was at just that time in its evolution when it seemed to actually reveal eternal and unchanging truths. Both its Greek and Roman number systems were just too awkward to be much use in daily life or early science, and so conservatives continued experimenting with that kind of reasoning, from assumptions to complex ideas. Only much later in its evolution, after a number zero had been invented, algebra, logarithms, analytic geometry, and calculus did it become a really effective language for calculating both the size and movement of objects. In Plato day mathematics was still a baby, so to speak. Thales himself was a great mathematician, as was Democritus, but, again, a very awkward number system had to be replaced with our current system to make its development much easier.
Thus, for Plato the always-changing material world somehow moved to supernatural rhythms; in some mysterious way spirit-objects participated with natural objects, even though they were completely different objects. Christians would later say it’s a mystery no one can understand. However, such ideas didn’t stop creating problems for Plato. For example, there was the old problem of evil; if a perfect and eternally good god had created all of nature to be beautiful and good, then why was there so much misery and evil in the world? Such questions have remained a conservative mystery for thousands of years. Plato eventually solved the problem by saying Evil itself had its own spirit-form. After all, Persian Zoroastrians had readily admitted that more than a century before Plato was even born. But the problem remained unsolvable for Christians who said god is perfectly good; how can something perfectly evil be created by something perfectly good?
Eventually, Plato would build a model of nature as a closed and fixed feudal-like structure. The lowly chaotic earth stood motionless at the center of the universe, and the well-ordered, constant, all-powerful, and unchanging spirit-objects existed at the top in a completely non-physical realm, beyond physical nature altogether. It was far from the mechanical Atomist models. For Plato nature was in fact alive and controlled for the most part by super-intelligences. Thus, everyone had their place and should only act when told to by those with more knowledge and authority. No doubt, such ideas also reveal Plato’s deepest motives and desires. He didn’t want to liberate people with secular kinds of intelligent habits like experimental thinking, but rather keep them focused on spirit-ideas and habits. Needless to say, all during the medieval period such ideas were practiced on a regular basis, and in fact are still practiced in many places today.
As mentioned earlier, sometime in midlife something terrible happened with his entire philosophic model; its entire foundation was shattered with the discovery of many seemingly unsolvable problems. Plato began learning about some very troubling results of his spirit-assumptions. He would eventually write about them in his dialogue called Parmenides. It would become a truly assumption-shattering event. From then on Plato’s beloved Spirit-Ideas would all but fade into non-existence, believed in but still largely ignored. Knowledge about them may have come in a letter from Archytus.
Even though his youthful optimism about building a new conservative model of life and nature soon faded with the Parmenides, his 50 years of contemplative reasoning and writing over 30 dialogues helped rebuild Western civilization's conservative foundations from the ground up, and paved the way for Aristotle’s and Christian improvements to his model. Before his death in 399 BCE pious Socrates continued helping young Greek men focus on learning about such eternal and unchanging ideas. After the Parmenides, however, Socrates’s motto -- the unexamined life is not worth living – became more deeply felt. No doubt, it encouraged Plato to admit his spirit-assumptions caused some serious results, but he was honest enough to admit it, which is more than what many modern conservatives refuse to do today. Many feel their ideas are really eternal and unchanging truth, even when objective evidence shows they’re not! It’s yet another example of habits being stronger than logical thinking. In any case, however, after Plato his work would help grow an even more mystical Neo-Platonic model of life and nature in the 200s CE. It’s founder Plotinus (204?-270 CE) even felt ashamed for having a body at all, and then after him came Augustine’s dark and foreboding Christian pictures of human sinfulness and need for church salvation. Impulsive childhood actions were seen as evidence for such a sinful nature.
Such is a very brief sketch of Plato's mission and thinking, but together with everything already said about him it gives a fairly accurate picture of the man and his times. Obviously no one can really do justice to all of Plato's feelings, especially not me; I certainly haven't redd all of his works. But that he felt the need to offer his supernatural models as conservative models of excellence is certainly obvious, even after he realized such models of a supremely logical and rational world were shattered by logical reasoning itself. Such reasoning created the feeling Protagoras voiced decades earlier; the very subject itself and the shortness of life makes knowing anything about spirit-objects practically impossible! Still, to the end he remains intolerant of all such thinking. He just couldn't see much good in being tolerant about free-thinkers like Sophists, Skeptics, and Atomists, and their celebration of moderate pleasures as ethically important. Almost certainly, to him such ideas were the main cause of Athens’s social chaos and downfall caused by the war. They simply had no real and lasting way to make men behave with Greek excellence --moderately! Also, he saw how people easily became drunk not on wine, but on power, like his own relative Critias. Aristotle tells us some 1500 democrats were executed on his orders. In and of itself there's obviously nothing wrong with power, but what're important are the results of how it's used! In that sense Plato felt a little of what the liberals were saying -- the motives and results of our actions are what make them good or bad, not how much they might imitate objects we only assume exist.
In any case, however, his models of life and nature were a conservative reaction against the newly emerging liberal, democratic, humanistic, and atomistic ideas of Sophist educators like Protagoras and atomists like Democritus. As we’ve seen, such secular-minded and practical men traveled from city to city lecturing about practical and useful democratic habit-arts, like how to debate and think logically, and thus make one's political and personal life more intelligent and excellent by thinking more about the results of our actions. No doubt, dew to the war Plato's teacher Socrates quickly became convinced democracy itself was the problem. How could anyone guide their government excellently when they had no real and eternal knowledge about political excellence, like what is the eternal meaning of justice? That became the central question of Plato’s Republic.
To liberal sophists such ideas were mere assumptions; there was no objective evidence such spirit-objects even existed, much less could be known by anyone. To them Socrates was chasing mere ideas, not knowledge. Still, at the time conservatives criticized the system. They said most people had never even been educated to sit and listen intelligently and thoughtfully to debate, and so just weren't ready to intelligently guide their own lives, much less their government's actions. And so, why should greatly undereducated people be allowed to make important political decisions? For such conservatives what's needed most is the habit of examining ideas to see their results, rather than merely acting impulsively and unconcerned about any dangerous results. In short, people were still too easily persuaded to make unintelligent decisions by powerful speakers. During the war Athenian leaders continued trying to dominate and enslave as many other city-states as possible. Incidentally, such ideas have been discarded for about a century now. In the early 1900s many state reforms were passed allowing voters to directly decide what laws they should live under; many US states now have what’re called initiative and referendum powers.
What’s more, these ideas aren’t just ancient history! Don’t such criticisms also apply to Nazi Germany, or communist Russia, or dozens of other modern countries? After all, wealthy conservatives in the US aren’t interested in debate about laws benefiting them; they’re just interested in persuading enough politicians with money and well-paying jobs to vote for laws making them wealthier and even more powerful! In that respect, weren’t ancient sophists right? Isn’t justice really what those in power judge it to be? And don’t we still have many educational challenges in front of us even today? How strong can our democracy be when young folks still aren't formally educated to think about the results of their actions, learn how to experimentally test their choices by being treated as they treat others, and when teachers act mostly to keep control of children’s thinking and choosing habits with their own assignments? If so, then such political results as plagued ancient Athenians continue plaguing us today. Don’t the wealthy still have too much economic, political, and educational power? Doesn’t even the world’s oldest democracy -- the US -- still suffer from such weaknesses? We'll see much more about modern models of excellence in Books 4 and 5.
The Republic's model of life and politics celebrated Athens's 'good-ol days', when aristocratic people had the best knowledge, and used it to keep and expand their political power. Plato wanted a return to those days, only based on education rather than wealth. He felt only after many years of education could the brightest people be educated to become philosopher kings and queens, keep society closed to outside changes, and keep the status quo in place, like the Egyptians had been doing for thousands of years. In fact, in many ways Plato’s political ideas resembled Sparta's and Egypt's feudal and authoritarian society. In them power was often used in keep a social status quo in place.
What's more, Plato helped justify slavery; nature itself is arranged to put people into a certain class. Thus, by nature some people were slaves and some were natural philosopher kings and queens; by nature only a few could know Plato's eternal, unchanging, and inbuilt Spirit-Ideas, and only they could know best what laws would keep society stable and everyone at their cosmically rightful social levels. Everyone would thus be happy because they would do what their immortal psyches destined them to do. In short, excellent life wasn’t a process of intelligent growth, evolution, progress, education, and individual betterment, but rather merely a system where change and progress are practically non-existent!
Sensing the importance of schooling for a healthy and intelligently run democracy, and where constant improvement is a reality, Dewey too focused on education as the key to its continued growth and excellence. Only with excellent education could people be taught to respect fair and just laws, other peaceful people, and work to see everyone has the same equal rights and privileges. Had Plato foreseen the tremendous growth of our electronic world, and its increased communication possibilities, he might not have emphasized the status quo as much as he did.
No doubt, to many liberals like myself such conservative models of life and nature are frightening, not merely because they rest on un-testable ideas, but because of their intolerant, hard-hearted and intolerant social results! Such a similar economic and political system has already evolved in the US, make it easier not teaching children important democratic habits, like how their lives are being shaped by wealthy conservatives, as well as how to use their voting power to improve such feudalistic systems. By what right does anyone have to enslave anyone else with their economic power, either physically, mentally, or merely because they haven’t taught themselves excellent habit-arts?
In short, Plato's philosophic models helped negate and weaken human excellence itself; almost anyone can learn to become very creative and helpful, but only if properly trained and educated. Thus, we Deweyan liberals question how wise Plato was for focusing only on how to build a social and political system maintaining a fixed and unchanging status quo? We would say today he had a strong phobia or fear of change. What's more, how can such ideas of eternal knowledge and justice ever be verified if they can’t be tested and their productive and constructive results actually seen? Why should only a small minority who are liberated from earning a living be allowed to have such social and political power all out of proportion from their numbers? In essence that’s a feudalistic system, not a democratic one. It denies average lower-class artisans and businesspeople the right to choose how they want to be governed, and leaves a small wealthy class of people free to keep feeding their addiction to power.
Although any mere limerick, however languid and lyrical is might be, could never really summarize one of Western civilization’s greatest philosophers. Dewey himself recommended all students of philosophy read his work. Still, one is challenged to write such a limerick, if nothing else than to keep making philosophy a human art easily known and used by many people.
Plato’s conservative mind was always on the go,
About a spirit world he too wanted to know.
But after much doubt and fear,
The result was clear.
He built a new way to justify the status quo!
7. ARISTOTLE’S MODELS OF EXCELLENCE
As with Plato, so too with Aristotle; only a little more need be said about the founder of Western civilization’s moderate models of life and nature. No doubt, to liberal Sophists and Atomists, moderate Aristotle’s work was a welcomed breath of warm philosophic air over cold Platonic tundra. As far as experimental science was concerned, and building habits useful in the natural world, Plato was indifferent; he all but ignored science and the natural world. However, soon after Plato died Aristotle began criticizing Plato’s radical dualistic matter-spirit models of life and nature. The age-old problem of change, and explaining how nature changes according to set and repetitious patterns was made all but impossible to understand with Plato’s dualistic model. How can2 completely different objects like matter and spirit ever interact in any way?
Almost certainly, at the Academy Aristotle listened to the critical discussions eventually resulting in the Parmenides, and no doubt they encouraged him to find a more moderate model of nature, as well as a better way of knowing the eternal and unchanging objects he felt existed and caused the regular patterns of natural change; plants, animals, and people always produced similar objects. In that way he too shared Plato’s desire to show the Sophists were wrong about mankind’s inability to know anything about such objects, even that they existed. Also, Democritus’s work in Atomism may have convinced him such objects should be seen as material, not spiritual, but he didn’t like Democritus’s assumption about an infinite number of material atoms being nature’s eternal and unchanging objects, and the cause of all natural change,
Also, he believed Socrates too believed such eternal objects were material. Thus, that assumption about the problem of explaining how nature can change according to set patterns felt best, rather than Plato’s radical matter-spirit dualism. After all, most of the serious philosophic problems Plato faced were caused by that assumption, and neatly avoided with a more materialistic model of life and nature. However, he would also experimentally try a different solution from Democritus’. Instead of an infinite number of atoms he would suggest a finite number of eternal and unchanging Forms embedded within most all natural objects. With that assumption he set about to build his philosophic model of life and nature, and offer his solution to the problem of change that had baffled both Greeks and their native ancestors for thousands of years. As we saw earlier, most native peoples solved the problem of change with animistic spirit ideas, spirits they felt were material.
As we saw earlier, however, some of the problems Plato faced Aristotle needed to face too, especially about how always changing people can ever know with certainty such eternal Forms exist and can be known. What should a model of human nature, or psychology, need to look like in order to produce those 2 results. Again, his reading of Democritus and his model of psychology which, sadly, has not been preserved for us, encouraged Aristotle to also focus on reasoning as the best way for knowing anything about such Forms. After all, Democritus too said there were 2 kinds of knowledge, one based on reason, and one based on the senses, and of the 2 reason was the stronger. Eventually he wrote down some of his own thoughts about human psychology, called De Anima, or on the psyche. He admits it’s a very difficult subject, and wasn’t convinced his model was the most accurate; some contradictory ideas show his some problems. For example, at one place he agrees with Plato, and says the reasoning psyche is eternal, and in another place says nothing in the psyche lives on.
No doubt, Aristotle felt it was one of the weakest parts of his work, but his 2 basic assumptions about material Forms and our knowledge of them also helped create many other weaknesses in his moderate models of life and nature. For example, it seems he merely projected a pyramid model of human society into nature itself, made easier with his own aristocrat habits and feelings. In today’s language he was born into the wealthy 1% class, surrounded by slaves all his life, and so naturally came to feel they too were an eternal part of nature. Unlike democratic Democritus he never lost those feelings. After all, most all of human society was at that time arranged in a pyramid of power and authority, increasing from lowly slaves at the bottom, to skilled workers above them, to the warrior and priestly classes, and finally a ruler king or queen. Aristotle thus simply projected into nature such a social pyramid model, from the chaotic earth at the bottom to the more constant moon, planets, stars, and god at the top. Everything in nature thus moves to imitate the highest Form, god itself. Thus, most everything has a natural final Form to which it moves. Eventually, that idea especially would become a major obstacle to early scientists like Galileo who found no evidence for any kind of final form for any material object, or any kind of pyramid form of power and meaning. He, and many of the scientists after him, saw nature more like Democritus had described it, as merely different kinds of atoms moving in definite patterns and rhythms. Even the rhythms of falling objects could be described with mathematical precision. About the same time liberal philosophers like Francis Bacon were also saying such knowledge could be learned with experimental testing, and what’s more, should be used to keep improving life for everyone! Bacon was one of Dewey’s heroes.
In any case, Aristotle had a much greater respect for nature than Plato. Aristotle’s father Nichomachus was a famous doctor to the Macedonian king Amyntas 3, so much of his youth was directed to knowing more about natural objects, rather than spirit-objects. As a result, as Aristotle grew older any kind of spirit-idea grew less important for him. Like Democritus before him, he felt god had nothing to do with life on earth; it existed beyond the stars harmlessly contemplating nature’s eternal Forms for all eternity. For him it felt as if god was more of a logical conclusion than a felt reality one learns only with practice. More than anything else god served to cap the top of Aristotle’s pyramid-shaped model of nature, much as a roof caps a temple or house.
Being more naturalistic Aristotle also liked looking at nature with artistic feelings, and picturing nature much like a finished and closed work of human art. Thus science became the art of merely classifying its different species which, to him, their Forms had set and finished for all eternity. For him there was no hint of progress or biological evolution. Human artists created finished and closed works of art composed of material, ideas, constructive work, and they all had a purpose. Those became his 4 causes of most everything. The purpose of shoe art was to create something for the feet; of carpentry art to create beds and tables; and of theatre art to help people let go of pity and fearful feelings. The more people realized most tragic events were necessary, the easier it was to accept them as part of life; even mine-working slaves shouldn't be pitied; they too had a purpose, namely to act like human tools.
However, when those 4 human-based causes of manmade objects were projected into nature itself, it created a rather odd model of it. For example, rain’s material cause was water, its formal cause was rain drops, heat caused the growth of water in the air, and its final Form purpose was to nourish vegetation and animal life. Thus, like any human work of art, nature too became closed and finished, and having purpose to its movements too. In that respect he was closer to Plato than Democritus. Such natural purposes and ends were simply built into nature! Some modern fans of Aristotle might say if he had lived another 10 or 15 years he too might have seen the wisdom in Anaximander's and Empedocles' evolutionary models of nature, but there’s really no way to verify such ideas. Sadly Aristotle died while still in his early 60s, and before he could examine more fossil evidence.
At any rate, his mature thoughts about nature saw it as being as set and finished for all time as any statue or building. It had always been this way and it will always be this way. So again, science for him became a process of merely classifying nature’s many different forms into their eternal species built by eternal Forms; all apples belonged to the same eternal species. As mentioned above, however, modern scientists like Galileo began by first rejecting all such ideas about nature having any inbuilt purposes and ends; there was simply no evidence for that assumption. Almost certainly, Aristotle used such ideas to build a model of nature different from the atomists who said nature really has no purposes of its own. However, after Isaac Newton built his model of gravity as a universal force, then Aristotle's model of a natural hierarchy having internal forms guiding objects became all but useless in scientific work. Rocks didn’t fall because an internal final Form purpose caused them to fall; they fell because the earth’s gravity field pulled objects to its center, and is pulled by the much larger sun’s gravity field. Only as more people began seeing nature as something to keep experimenting with, and learning about, could useful objects be built, like non-fat yogurt, i-phones, and pet rocks.
In effect, then, Aristotle too painted nature much like his teacher Plato, as basically closed and have inbuilt purposes of its own. Buddhists too believe nature’s purpose is to eventually reach perfect. For Aristotle, however, nature's constant and eternal Form-Species embedded within most all objects keep it eternally closed and the same for all time, and of course that includes animal and plant species too. Thus, he too assumed nature has an inbuilt value-system and ‘ends’ to which it always moves. Within objects their final Forms guide them to their purpose, in most everything from lowly rocks and fire, to earth’s eternal species of animals, plants, and humans, and of course to the totally self-enclosed Highest End -- god, living beyond the stars. All things seek to imitate god’s perfection, even planets and stars, and thus stay in the rhythmic patterns we see. A divine substance called 'ether' enclosed all of nature around an unmoving earth. The ‘end’ or natural purpose of all rocks, for example, was to seek the center of the earth, and so they always move towards it when they’re dropped. That was their inbuilt purpose and 'end', just like mankind’s highest purpose and happiness was to contemplate all those inbuilt Form-Spices, and imitate god itself.
No doubt, were he alive today he would accept modern science’s ideas of DNA; back then, however, such an option wasn’t available. Like Plato, he too wanted to believe nature has some eternal causes and purposes built into it, thus making it possible to have some absolutely certain knowledge. And he guaranteed that quest for certainty by saying an intuitive reasoning faculty was infallible. When used properly such intuitions couldn’t be wrong.
From what’s been said so far it should be fairly easy to see why, like Plato, Aristotle too wasn’t a big fan of democracy and its feelings for equal rights. Being a Greek aristocrat he too felt democracy was not the best political system. So, instead of accepting Democritus’s arguments for democracy based on the fact of all people belonging to the same human species, Aristotle based his political models of excellence on the idea of authority. Many models of social life based on authority already existed, and so Aristotle used them. Fathers have authority over wives, children, and slaves, political leaders having authority over citizens, and rulers and kings have authority over most everyone. Thus, for Aristotle authority, not equality, was the best basis for a political system. For both him and Plato an enlightened leader could produce the best political system, but Aristotle also says it’s very difficult to find such people, and so other forms of government might work just as well in different situations. One can hardly blame him for such ideas; after all, not only his own life, but most of the world acted as if only one or a few with power and authority created the best political system. Without a more democratic system of education, such political forms remain alive to this day.
To this day many conservatives and nationalists believe the same thing. Even communist peoples’ republics like Russia and China are run by a small group of men for whom the democratic legislature is merely a rubber stamp for their ideas. And no doubt, many US conservatives would love to have such a system too. After all, both economic and political competition merely slows the process of making as much money as possible, and thus becoming more powerful. With such thoughts one can easily get the feeling Aristotle would feel very comfortable in the US Republican Party today, liking the idea of small government and as having as little control over the wealthy and middle class as possible; it sounds like a subject for a doctoral thesis in political science.
Logical Models of Excellence
As mentioned earlier, Aristotle felt his logical studies and its deductive reasoning rules, were his most important contribution to philosophy and the biggest help in the quest for absolutely certain knowledge. Once someone had intuitively beheld an absolutely certain truth, say, all men are mortal, then reasoning properly could reveal an absolutely certain conclusion: Socrates was a man, therefore Socrates was mortal! He felt all such universal statements were the result of an absolutely certain intuitive mental faculty; its results were beyond question, or were they? For example, how can anyone possibly verify all men are mortal? No one can ever experience all cases of mortality, and so aren’t such statements merely useful general assumptions in any reasoning process? If they are, then how can we ever be absolutely sure any conclusions are absolutely certain? As we’ve seen before, when Plato’s intuitive thinking told him it’s absolutely certain man is a featherless biped, Diogenes simply plucked the feathers from a chicken and called it Plato’s Man. Without some kind of verification, such intuitive thinking can even become deadly, like with the Nazi intuition about all Jews being inferior people.
For modern liberals like Dewey, Aristotle’s deductive logical rules for discovering absolutely certain truth were merely the result of playing with assumptions and ideas. What’s more, any individual example of mortality, like Socrates, was already implied in the first statement: all men are mortal. Thus, such deductive kinds of reasoning really tell us nothing new or very useful about how nature really works. What we liberals want to know is how healthy people are, and how might they become healthier, so as to enjoy more of life here and now? For those results only experimental testing and learning can help.
In short, Aristotle’s logical certainties don’t help open up nature to new discoveries, ideas, experiments, and improvements; they merely state what already is included in its first general statement! Thus, his deductive model of logic too helped close down the will to keep experimenting with nature! It merely produced the feeling some ideas were absolutely certain. Only as mankind became liberated from those kinds of closed deductive logical thinking, and more people saw how restrictive Aristotle's deductive logic was, did it become easier to build experimental kinds of inductive logic. And the more that happened, the easier it became to see any idea as merely a mental tool to possibly test and experiment with! Sadly, because the liberal Greek movement was just sprouting in Aristotle’s day, most people just weren't taught how to experimentally test their ideas for their constructive results. And after Aristotle, first the conservative mystical Christian religion, and eventually Islam, continued celebrating a feudalistic philosophic model of life and nature. Even hundreds of years before it became Rome’s official religion, Emperor Augustus reacted against atomistic Epicureans. He ordered all such books not only banned, but burned. This liberal, for one, shudders to think how a conservative US king or queen would treat many of our liberal traditions and works of art.
Again, for Aristotle nature was seen as a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of power and being, like many religious people today still picture it -- god at the top and sinful mankind and animals much lower in nature. Then, after Thomas Aquinas’s work in the 1200s many of Aristotle’s ideas became official Catholic doctrine, and in the 1500s Protestant doctrine too. In fact, they were so strong they helped create a most unusual trial in the US, called the Scopes Monkey Trial.
In March, 1925 the Tennessee state government passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in all state universities, normal, and public schools; by that summer the famous Scopes Trial began, assisted by an organization Dewey helped found a few years earlier to protect everyone’s right to free speech, the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU. If nothing else, such events keep telling us, many of these ancient ideas are as alive today as they were in Aristotle’s day! No doubt today Aristotle would be amazed to learn even the weather has become what he said it could never be, namely a science! Weather predictions are made based on atmospheric conditions, and then tested against actual events!
Aristotle’s ethical models of excellence also reflect his aristocratic naturalism. For him ethical values are divided into 2 kinds. There are reasonable practical habits of excellence even lowly shoemakers and carpenters can feel when they build excellent shoes and houses. And then there are intrinsically higher forms of intellectual excellence only philosophers like himself can feel, namely the contemplation of nature’s eternal certainties. In his The Quest for Certainty, Dewey describes how only after people began seeing how limited and prejudiced Aristotle’s ethical model was, did it become easier for people to actually start experimenting with their own ethical ideas, and see what the results were. How much helpfulness to others and pleasure and enjoyable fun to ourselves should I build into my ethical system? Those ethical questions became more important as Aristotle’s ethical models became more the subject for university students than anyone else.
Life After Aristotle
For us living today, there are, once again, many educational lessons to be learned from western history. For example without more liberal kinds of schools to teach young folks, old conservative and moderate ideas and habits have remained strong and propulsive! Plato’s conservative models of life and nature continuing feeling best for most everyone until the late Middle Ages, then Aristotle’s naturalistic ideas became more important as the Renaissance movement began growing in Italy in the 1400s. Without more liberal schools, however, most people continued feeling intolerant toward those who practiced different philosophic or religious habit-arts. Eventually such feelings became dominant in Western civilization. No doubt, for a few centuries after Aristotle, philosophic variety continued growing with the help of different schools, especially with Atomistic and Stoic models of life and nature. However, such an educational variety greatly withered with the growth of Catholicism.
We saw earlier how a few years after Aristotle died liberal Epicurus opened his famous garden-school in Athens, surrounded himself with like-minded students, and wrote some 300 little books and letters. No doubt, intolerant feelings helped destroy almost all of them. But after Alexander’s armies swept over Greece, it somehow sapped much of the Greek vitality and energy fueling so many great accomplishments during its Golden Age. Epicurus’ work was one example. He was content to live out his life not as a social activist or education reformer, like Plato and Dewey, but rather he preferred to teach quietly while Alexander’s armies occupied much of Greece, Egypt, and southern Asia. Soon after, Roman legions replaced Greek ones and continued dominating much of life and sapping creative educational and scientific energies.
Again, Epicurus taught the practical character arts of letting go of life’s stressful and tense feelings. He taught his students how to feel more of life’s healthful and pleasurable energies, and thus feel more relaxed, happy, and confident about life here and now. Yoga, aerobics classes, and of course safe sexual pleasures today help produce the same kinds of relaxed results. Like Socrates, Epicurus said only wise and intelligent pleasure is excellent; how else is the best happiness felt? If you don’t enjoy your work, then how happy can you be? Even though Epicurus’s ethical passivity wouldn’t feel very good to many social and political activists today, his school and movement did help keep liberal ideas and habits alive and growing, at least for a while. Much of social and political life at the time was often more controlled than most nations today. Loot-hungry, bloodthirsty gangsters -- usually called armies by many historians -- kept marching back and forth in mindless obedience to some emperor or general, first Persian, then Greek and Roman. Conquered people were often economically enslaved with taxes, which then helped support lavish and opulent aristocratic lifestyles thousands of miles away; into such a world Jesus was born. Today, without more liberal schools and universities, much the same kind of economic systems have evolved, where constant debt payments to private bankers keep increasing the wealthy for a few and decreasing the political power for many. The less money people have, the less they’re able to support candidates they like. How often in our public schools and universities is the idea of a people-owned public banking system even mentioned, much less experimented with; North Dakota is the only state in the union where such a banking system exists, and the people have been benefitting from it for about 100 years now!
Often timidly withdrawing from public life altogether slowly became the Hellenistic idea of ethical and social excellence. So said the Epicureans and Skeptics, and even well-educated Stoic emperors like Marcus Aurelius (d.180 CE) Everyone has their duty to perform, be you slave or emperor, and excellence is merely accepting one’s fate and during one’s duty. With such thoughts much of Aristotle’s status quo models continued on. The old robust, vibrant, and constructive individual Greek energies began weakening as early as the late 300s BCE. Bold and brass social critics like Diogenes the Cynic showed the futility of rebelling against the status quo, even though he often challenged any philosophic model which arrogantly claimed to know eternal and unchanging kinds of knowledge and truth.
Alas, such social critics were a vanishing breed of individual. For the most part merely a peaceful and tranquil inner retreat from life's immense and uncontrollable forces and stresses became ethical excellence, broken up now and then by a few Cynics fornicating in public. As a result, more and more thoughtful people ‘dropped out’, as it were, like many US ‘hippies’ did in the 1960s. The only way to really improve life was to start a new movement, away from everyone else. It was the best way to stop gangster-armies drafting thousands of young folks to die needlessly in some little country thousands of miles away. Turn in, turn on, and drop out were ethically accepted by both ancient and modern young folks; it was better than being made to keep killing innocent people and perhaps being killed yourself. After Aristotle the modern liberal ideal of using armies wisely to help liberate oppressed and suffering people was just out of step with the times, and even today. After all, the conservative class of US generals and wealthy corporate CEOs want as much social and political power as Alexander and Roman Emperors wanted in ancient times. The US military wanted to make a social statement in Vietnam, namely they would in no way tolerate any competitive economic or political system to their own. Where’s the profit in just liberating people and teaching them how to govern themselves; it would mostly create more desires to keep making life more satisfying and enjoyable for everyone. And yet today US corporations regularly have business contracts in Vietnam.
After Aristotle more and more people began losing their desire to believe philosophic ideas could really make any improvement in peoples’ day to day living, or that reasoning alone was the best way to learn about such ideas. And so slowly the idea of making this world a better place became replaced with the faith to achieve perfection only after death. What many began craving was an instant release from their worries about salvation with religious rituals, rather than spending years trying to reason their way to the absolute truth about life and nature. They wanted peace, contentment, happiness, and salvation. In short, the whole liberal, moderate, and conservative Greek models of a reasonable life and nature slowly lost their charms, if they ever had any for all but a few philosophers and students. As barbarian tribesmen continued attacking Rome, more and more people saw others as very far from reasonable and rational. Doing one’s Stoical duty thus became the new ethical model of excellence, be you emperor or slave. Most people continued feeling nature was full of evil spirits. And so, gradually faith in higher spirit-powers once again began replacing confidence in reasoning and experimental science alone, putting them far below simple faith and obedience to those with religious authority. As those kinds of ideas and feelings continued spreading, the curtain slowly came down on the ancient western world. Only obedience to those with religious authority and their truth could make worthless sinners worthy of forgiveness and eternal happiness in heaven.
In time such habit-arts of faith and obedience grew stronger than Greek reasoning and scientific habits. Such habits depended on years of education, training, and careful experimentation, and the schools weren’t prepared to teach them. At the beginning of our current era Christianity’s founder Paul of Tarsus discovered even many Greeks were ready to accept his mystical messiah ideas, even in Sodom-like Corinth. And so from his day to Augustine's in the early 400s CE, Christians continued working to reconstruct liberal Greek models of life and nature based on democracy, equality, and reasonable kinds of pleasure. In the 200s CE mystic Plotinus all but erased the natural world from his consciousness, personally confessing to have spiritually experienced nature’s highest spirit-object more than once or twice.
Even a century earlier the dramatic opening to the so-called John's Gospel -- In the beginning was The Word -- is a mere echo of the important Greek idea of ‘logos, or reasoning. It would eventually become the second person of the Christian trinity. Such ideas continued molding Hebrew religious ideas into Christian ones, and picturing god as creating the entire universe just by speaking … god said let there be light, and there was light. In fact many of our ancient mothers and fathers normally believed even evil spirits could be controlled merely by talking to them. The New Testament records how Jesus sometimes expelled demons merely by telling them to leave a person; sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Even many people in his hometown of Nazareth simply didn't believe he had such powers; they had watched him grow up and practice his carpentry skills. In any case, however, such new religious ideas began giving much more hope to people than philosophic ideas ever could. And, the more children were told they’re often controlled by evil spirits, the easier it was to believe it.
In short, liberal Greek arts of experimental reasoning and verification were eventually used to build more detailed religious models of life and nature, as we saw earlier with Augustine’s work. It was simply easier for most people to merely accept religious ideas than discover how they often made no logical sense at all! Such spirit-models were made to sound reasonable and logical, especially ideas about eternal salvation. The almost complete lack of liberal schools made it easy to feel nature like Plato felt it, as controlled from a heavenly top -- god the father -- to a sinful and earthly bottom where people living with pain, frustration, and sickness often celebrated pleasure in their daily lives.
What’s more, most people already believed in natural mysteries and miracles as a normal fact of daily life; even Greek mythology talked about how the gods could perform miraculous events. It made stories about miraculous kinds of healing easier to accept; most everyone already believed animistic spirits controlled everything, so why not health too? When Adam and Eve sinned all of nature and all human nature afterwards somehow became infected with their guilt, even though a perfectly powerful, merciful, and good god should have easily made life less painful. Ideas of collective guilt were common in the ancient world. When a plague struck Athens during the Peloponnesian War many felt the gods were punishing all of them for allowing agnostics and atheists to live and teach among them. There’s a story about Protagoras being expelled from Athens just before he died. Already fearful, powerless, diseased, and uneducated people, most everyone really, already thought of themselves as worthless sinners, and so it was easy for them to believe they needed salvation more than anything, and it could only be achieved with the Church’s help. Its highly negative and pessimistic feelings about nature and mankind need only be accepted to earn an eternity of heavenly perfection; many poor, sick, and frustrated people were eager to make that model of life and nature their own, rather than learning to make this life better for themselves and others.
Once again echoing Plato, Augustine said only a strong centralized, religiously-oriented government – a City of God he called it -- could possibly save anyone from damnation, even by force if necessary! Such ideas quickly became absolute Christian Truth, and for much of the Middle Ages most all Europeans were educated to see only that conservative model of feudalistic excellence. In fact, eventually many thousands were tortured and heartlessly killed merely for not believing such ideas were the absolute Truth. No doubt, the Church also performed many useful and helpful acts to many people, but it never seemed to really liberate people and encourage the kinds of habits that helped build Greece’s Golden Age. The Church’s sensually dazzling cathedrals helped people feel they really knew nature’s eternal Truth.
Thus even Plato's models of ethical excellence as a focusing on spirit-objects and practicing moderation slowly evolved into merely believing in a messiah risen from the dead would bring them eternal life in a perfectly enjoyable heaven. Religious monopoly became as desirable then as corporate monopoly is today. Neither schools nor society were teaching the love of debate, healthy competition, experimental reasoning, and critical thinking Athenians practiced almost daily, and that were necessary for inventing such useful arts as experimental science, new useful objects, and democratic politics. Centuries earlier ancient Egyptians also believed they too could be rewarded after death.
Slowly, more and more people wanted to hear about an all-powerful loving god knowing what they were going through, who had suffered as many were suffering, who patiently listened to their prayers, and perhaps even miraculously helped them too with their problems! What other idea-habit-tools could paint more hopeful pictures than those? Without liberal schools it became practically impossible. Thus, people wanted their priests to keep telling them about such a god on Sundays, and with practice such ideas soon felt like absolute Truth. What could possibly be more important than eternal bliss, even if it was after death?
I don’t mean to belittle Aristotle’s work; like any philosopher he accepted certain ideas as practically sacred, and built one of Western civilization’s first philosophic systems with basically 2 ideas, Forms and matter. But in the end it too rested on feelings he accepted as true.
Aristotle wanted to prove with great insight,
Eternal objects existed, with all his might.
Could he prove this conclusion,
Beyond all illusion?
Damn the evidence, he said, it just feels right.
8. DEWEY’S MODELS OF EXCELLENCE, 101
In this and the following 2 sections we’ll describe more of the liberal naturalistic ideas Dewey used to separate himself from conservatives like Plato and moderates like Aristotle. Later in life he felt such a separating was necessary. In childhood he was exposed to a Christian model of life and nature; his mother was a devote Christian. However, Dewey gradually became one of Western civilization’s best examples of a modern atomistic sophist, or as he described it, a Naturalistic Humanist. With phrases like that it’s easy to see why even his modern liberal philosophy has become more difficult to understand by the general reading public. Like many other professions, philosophers too have developed their own language. No doubt, that’s exactly what many modern conservatives have been working to achieve for many thousands of years now, while carefully preserving Plato’s and Aristotle’s writings! The more difficult it is to understand liberal philosophers, the better they like it. Just the few surviving bits and scraps of ancient liberal thinking is yet more objective evidence for that conclusion.
If so, then there’s been a propaganda war going on in Western philosophy and culture for thousands of years. Why? At this point it should be obvious. Conservatives have been in power for thousands of years, so naturally they want to keep the power they have over others, and continue being supported by workers who grow the food and build their building. In our more liberal modern period that cultural war continues on, especially since many conservative and moderate values and ideas are more easily challenged now more than ever before! Liberal values and ideas have become much more acceptable for millions of people around the world; why keep supporting a feudalistic system when a more democratic one will produce more enjoyable results?! Why should a small group of obscenely wealthy greedy folks be allowed to pass on their wealth-power to their children and thus keep making life more difficult for millions? Also, many of our information sources like television, newspapers, talk shows, and even books are either controlled by conservatives, or aimed at not offending them; many are more interested in keeping peoples’ attention diverted from both knowing more about economic reality and doing anything about it. In spite of it, however, more and more people are realizing ideas about nature having any kind of eternal objects, and some people knowing about them, be they spirit or natural objects, are merely assumptions, not provable facts. That thought alone is a liberating idea; it undermines the entire conservative and moderate feudalistic economic and political models of life and nature.
For thousands of years conservatives have been working to minimize liberal ideas, like democracy, equal rights, economic fairness, and educational excellence. Liberal ethical models too are challenging both conservatives and moderates like Aristotle and Kant. The new models are based on respect for all law-abiding people, healthful and loving pleasure, helpful the disadvantaged, and equal rights. Also, we liberals say using the government to also help with services like health, safety, housing, help for the disabled, and building practical and useful public school systems are equally important. We continue asking why should only a small class of wealthy students have the best educational opportunities, while the rest are made to learn facts and ideas largely useless outside of school? More and more people are realizing the best education model isn’t forcing most every student to learn the same kinds of cold and useless academic book-facts which have little use in real life! Young folks need to learn useful skills so they can start contributing to life after high school, or go on to college if they want. This and the following 2 sections, then, will briefly describe some of Dewey’s naturalistic assumptions about life and nature, and their results. A more detailed description of such a liberal educational model will be seen in a later section.
Nature's Continuum
This is perhaps Dewey’s most basic assumption: Both life and nature are a natural continuum of events. Why is it a more reliable assumption about nature than Plato’s dualistic assumption about matter and spirit, or Aristotle’s assumption about nature having eternal and unchanging Forms embedded in objects? It’s simply because experimental science has provided a wealth of objective evidence for believing nature is a continuum of natural events, while at the same time failing to verify both Plato’s and Aristotle’s basic assumption! Let it be said again, our strongest and most reliable experimental knowledge simply finds no objective evidence for a spirit realm or eternal Forms, so why believe in them?!
As a result, we Deweyan liberals believe natural movements cannot be discontinued or interrupted by other objects besides changing forms of energy; in short, we don’t believe in spirit-caused miracles. For us, most all the religious stories about spirit-caused miracles were built and written when most people already believed such events often occurred. As we’ve seen, such ideas began in the pre-scientific tribes of our native ancestors, and have continued on into ancient and medieval periods. Today, such ideas can more easily be seen by us Deweyan liberals as yet another result of living in a science-poor world, where nature’s movements were almost completely unknown and many people wanted more out of life, like their diseases healed and better kinds of happiness.
No doubt, where young folks continue being told such events can happen, such feelings continue on, but we Deweyans have been liberated from such ideas with a naturalistic model of nature as an on-going natural continuum. If certain results want to be produced, then natural causes and energies must be studied and tested. What’s more, we feel confident such conservative and moderate models of nature like Plato’s and Aristotle’s will keep evolving into what many ancient religions are now, namely mythical stories. Who worships the Roman god Jupiter today, or the Norse god Thor, for whom our Thursday is named? Almost certainly that will continue happening as modern science continues unlocking the secrets of how nature works, especially at its molecular and atomic levels; such knowledge will help build more tools to work at that level, and thus gets the power to help improve any disability or disease, as well as grow more healthful food. Such a process is already underway with some food sources.
With such a modern liberal assumption about nature, energetic change composes our continuum. As science continues learning how to control and direct those changes, it will continue verifying Dewey’s basic assumption of nature as a continuum. So far, it’s been one of the most liberating assumptions ever made. Just think about it for a minute. For many thousands of years our native, ancient, and medieval ancestors assumed they could get some spirit-help for their problems; prayer, sacrifice, and good actions were the accepted forms of request. As a result, however, peoples’ all important creative attention was deflected and diverted from actually studying natural movements and people to see how they might be useful for better helping improve life!
In short, believing in disconnected miraculous events encouraged people to stay generally isolated from nature itself, and uneducated about how natural facts might be useful! Again, Dewey’s assumption of nature as an on-going continuum, supported by much scientific evidence, liberates us from all such weak and counterproductive ideas. The new continuum assumption frees us up mentally to learn better experimental facts, like how to improve our health, diet, exercise, and sex habits too, one step at a time. Thus, for millions of people today both conservative and moderate models of nature are rapidly becoming less useful for helping build peaceful and respectful habits and skills. If there is another spirit-dimension to nature, and we admit there might be, then we’ll need to have some objective evidence it exists and can be known! The common phrase is, I might believe it when I see it. The philosophic problem has always been such a realm is completely beyond all our senses!
No doubt, the growth of our strongest knowledge -- experimental science -- has played a key role in helping build Dewey’s liberal assumption about nature as a natural continuum. The more tools and useful technology science helps create to reveal nature’s secrets and better harness its energies, the less need there will be to rely on habits like praying and hoping for miracles. Today if you want to have another nice mammoth pizza, just pick up the phone and order out! And if you want some protection again this season’s current flu viruses, just forget about the local witch doctor and get a flu shot; it might not always work, but 75% or 80% reliability is much more useful than relying on praying for protection.
No doubt, praying might help people relax more and let go of the useless muscular tensions called stress. Many Muslims who pray 5 times a day find the habit relaxing. However, as the world has become more interactive, many other methods of relaxing are now available too. There’s yoga, the Chinese relaxing art called Tai Chi, sauna baths, and messaging, not to mention most peoples’ favorites, food and sex! They too help people relax their overly tense muscles, at least for a while. And for us Deweyan Behaviorists there’s also practicing the habit-art of moving with as little useless tension and as much joy as possible. All such habit-arts simply assume nature is merely an always moving continuum of matter-energy, and with practice anyone can learn to relax naturally; as a Zen Buddhist might say, relaxing means relaxing. Their tea ceremony produces such relaxing results too, as can any habit-art.
In any case, however, there’s no need for us Deweyan liberals to believe only a perfect life after death will finally relieve all stress and tension. In fact, as the ancient Weeping Philosopher Heraclitus pointed out, some tension is a natural and normal part of life; an arrow could not be useful unless a bow had some tension in it. Even the healthful uses of atomic energy wouldn’t exist if every atom wasn’t a center of energetically vibrating forces, tensions, and stresses. As a result, we also suggest our own public schools should help teach young folks to spend a few minutes each day just relaxing and letting go of their muscle tensions, instead of always enslaving children to tensely keep learning more and more useless book facts! Such public schools would help more young folks overcome one of today’s important challenges, namely learning how to slowly and intelligently manage annoying kinds of tensions, either psychic or physical occurring within our natural continuum.
Dewey’s assumption about nature being an eternally moving continuum of natural events also helps anchor our thoughts and actions to nature here and now, thus making it easier to feel how its energies can be managed more intelligently! Essentially it means the best objects to experiment with are natural objects; only they help produce our most intelligent and constructive results. I realize such ideas will sound obvious to many people already, but then again philosophy’s art is to consciously describe subconscious feeling, so everyone can keep acting more intelligently about life and nature. So again, for us Deweyan liberals only natural objects can produce our most reliable and useful knowledge.
Our assumption of nature’s continuum means it's excellent to keep one’s all-important attention focused on improving our natural world with our own experimental actions here and now. That kind of psychic attention can help build healthy motives, like wanting to act as cautiously and helpfully as possible! With such liberal motives it becomes easy to agree with Democritus: All people deserve the same respect and equal rights, simply because we are all people. It doesn’t mean we simply give away all our money to the poor, but rather help those who want to help themselves become more skilled and useful; even those who don’t want to help themselves deserve respect. At the same time, however, we still are careful to believe such an assumption certainly isn’t the absolute Truth; it's just another working assumption, or idea-tool; it most often helps produce the best results; it best helps guide our actions in such an energetically changing world as ours.
Over the past 4 centuries experimental science has proved that assumption is most reliable than any other, and it’s finally begun helping liberate mankind for our own mythical superstitions about life and nature. It's proven its reliability! The overwhelming amount of new scientific facts and evidence about natural evolution helps confirm even more the assumption’s reliability: nature is best pictured as a continuing and uninterrupted series of natural events. In short, the idea’s become almost certain. To us Deweyan liberals, assuming nature is a continuum is merely true beyond a reasonable doubt, and helps liberate us from the search for so-called miraculous events; there are natural explanations for them too. Two examples can be cited. The gospels tell us how Jesus walked on water, but religious scholars have learned the Aramaic word for ‘on’ can also mean ‘by.’ So, obviously those conservative Greek writers who wrote the gospels wanted to describe Jesus as having supernatural powers used the word to mean ‘on,’ rather than the ordinary word ‘by.’ Such actions are useful when building a new religion; Mormon myths about their founder Joseph Smith work the same way.
A second Bible example is more dramatic. In it is described how a prophet named Joshua, with god's help, miraculously stopped the sun from moving for many hours. However, nowhere else on earth is it recorded such an event ever happened. Almost certainly even at such an early date many other cultures already had keen astronomical observers, like in both Baghdad and China; they would've certainly noticed if the earth stopped rotating for a number of hours. Thus, simply assuming nature is an always moving continuum helps us become less superstitious and less vulnerable to those who like to have power over others’ actions. Dewey’s assumption of nature’s continuum simply liberates people from merely accepting all such miraculous events. Incidentally, for me the closest thing to a miracle was President Nixon’s resigning the presidency in 1974, or perhaps Bobby Thompson’s winning the pennant for the Giants in 1951 with a homerun in the bottom of the 9th inning at New York’s Polo Grounds!
No doubt, many millions of conservative people around the world still routinely believe in miracles, and say natural movements can be interrupted and changed by spirit-objects like god or angels. For them it’s part of their religious system, like believing spirits care for us and want to help us. As we’ve seen earlier, for thousands of years our native ancestors used such animistic ideas to help explain how nature changes like it does; events happen because animistic spirits make them happen. As a result, many millions still believe nature’s movements can be miraculously disconnected and interrupted from time to time; they believe nature really does have two realms to it -- natural AND supernatural, and spirits can really miraculously interrupt the flow of events. They certainly have that right, and should have that right, but today it's no longer the only, most reliable, or the one most based on objective evidence.
Today, because experimental testing of ideas has become our most excellent learning art, and has done more to improve life than any so-called miracle, we’ve been able to get much more power over nature than ever before. We no longer need rely on religious rituals to make us healthier, smarter, or wealthier. The liberal continuum assumption simply makes more logical and philosophic sense. After all, we still don't have ANY objective evidence spirit-objects exist, much less how they can cause events in a completely different natural realm. As we’ve seen, Plato himself eventually admitted as much. He never really understood how it was possible for completely non-physical spirit-objects to cause any physical object to move? Aristotle’s poetic solution was to say natural objects are lovingly attracted to nature’s most perfect Being, namely god. To people like we Deweyan liberals, however, Newton’s idea of gravity have become much more reliable for predicting celestial events. And even though President Nixon’s resignation may feel like a miracle, in reality we know he simply no longer had congress's trust and respect.
As we saw earlier, all theistic religions which assume an all-good, all-powerful, and all-merciful god exists, create a number of serious questions and logical absurdities. For example, if such a god exists, then how can it possibly allow the great variety of religions to exist around the world, and thus endanger people’s eternal futures by practicing different religious rituals? How can an all-merciful and knowing spirit purposely condemn people to eternal punishment and suffering even before they’re born? For many people today such questions certainly don't sound like what an all-good and merciful spirit-god should do. What’s more, if there is only an individual spirit in each of us, re-born again and again, then how can such an idea be tested, to see if it's really true, rather than being just another religious assumption about people, and helping keep them in their social classes all their lives? And finally, if there really were only one spirit-truth and people could really know it, then wouldn’t all our religions reflect that one truth? Clearly they don’t. Buddhists, in fact, picture nature as having no god while others say god exists while others still say many gods exist. Such objective results thus lead us Deweyan liberals to reach the same obvious conclusion ancient Xenophanes, many Sophists, and Atomists reached centuries before Jesus was born: No one really knows the truth about spirit-objects!
With Dewey’s liberal assumption about nature’s continuum, however, it becomes easier to see all our great religious varieties around the world as more evidence for this conclusion: spirit-ideas are another human creation for helping people feel as if they can have more control over very dangerous and often brutal natural events. Again, sometimes animal hunts were successful after spirit-rituals, and so such habits continued being practiced, probably over the last 40,000 years at least. After all, if philosophies are a purely invented human art, then why shouldn’t religions be too? In any case, however, experimental testing’s focus on results gives us a more objective way to judge any of today’s religions. Do they respect our strongest scientific knowledge; and do they help make the world a more peaceful, loving, and satisfying place to live for everyone? If not, then why should they be allowed to continue endangering innocent people? For us Deweyan liberals, the more their ideas and assumptions keep helping people grow and become what they want, the better they are, and the closer they become to Dewey's liberal models of natural democratic excellence.
Also, learning more about religious history, and the actual results their assumptions produced, has also given us more evidence for assuming nature is a continuum, rather than a spirit-matter dualism, or an Aristotelian Formalism. Again, those kinds of assumptions about nature simply have no objective evidence, and so little reason to believe them.
Human Creativity and Religious Variety
Dewey’s liberal assumption about nature says it’s best seen as a natural continuum, and that of course applies to human religious evolution as well. Regularly anthropologists around the world continue supplying information about different religious habits. Obviously, with our assumption of nature as a natural continuum, it becomes important to us liberals to offer some reasons why there are so many different religious varieties around the world, hundreds in fact. No doubt, it’s a very complex question, and will be more fully answered in Book 2’s Native Models of Excellence. What’s more, much has already been said about such an evolution. Here, then, are just a few more thoughts about it.
Almost certainly, for tens of thousands of years our native ancestors have been puzzled about how nature changes. Not only was it one of the main questions ancient Greek thinkers thought about from the very beginning, but the animistic spirit-ideas and habits of our native ancestors show they too wanted to know how nature changes. As we’ve seen, the first Ionian philosophers wanted to use natural objects like water and air to explain how nature changes; that natural quest soon led to the world’s first atomic model of nature. In short, the quest to know the world around us has been a part of human life for many, many thousands of years. Into such a science-poor world animistic spirit-ideas evolved. Our first African Han ancestors may have begun talking about them even before leaving Africa about 60,000 years ago; after all, even Neandertal peoples probably did too.
Book 3’s Ancient Models of Excellence will describe more fully religious evolution and varieties in and around Greece, but for now we can mention a few general facts about it. For example, Christian thinkers of course wanted to explain how nature’s great religious variety evolved. For that they often said evil devil-spirits had corrupting mankind and led them away from the one and only religious Truth, namely Christianity. And it worked too; even today many still believe only Christian ideas are absolute Truth, and devils have been corrupting non-believers for thousands of years.
Obviously, for us Deweyan liberals, however, the more nature is seen as an uninterrupted natural continuum, the easier it becomes to see why there are so many different religious habit-arts. Over the centuries each individual native tribe kept experimenting to build their own spirit-rituals, and so a great variety of different spirit-systems naturally evolved to explain how nature changes and why human life is arranged as it is. Besides animistic religious systems there also evolved what are called totemic religious systems, dividing people into different totem groups and thus controlling events like who can marry whom. In China, too, even before Confucius lived in the 500s BCE, there was already growing a liberal non-spirit humanist movement, whereas in the relatively isolated Americas many different totem religious ideas and habits evolved to express many different local feelings, as we’ll see more fully in Book 2’s Native Models of Excellence. Totem poles are one artistic expression of such ideas like eagle and bear totem groups. Naturally, the more children are encouraged to believe and practice only their own local religious habits, the easier it becomes to feel they’re eternal truth. Even within, say, Judaism there has evolved orthodox, conservative, and reform models of it. In short, religious variety is a natural result of creative human experimentation, as is philosophic variety!
With Dewey’s naturalistic assumption of nature as an on-going energetic continuum, explaining our great variety of religious models is not only easy, but it’s also easy to trace their evolutions as well. Every once in a while someone may feel like expressing their own different religious thoughts, and thus begin building a new religious model. It’s a much more natural way of explaining why there are hundreds of different religions even today. They’re all the result of natural human creative impulses to express one’s thoughts and feelings. The same ideas help explain philosophic variety as well, or any kind of variety. What’s more, based on the assumption of nature’s continuum, it’s easy to also see all ideas are organic and growing natural events, rather than being a reflection of eternal and unchanging objects. Such an idea is mainly useful to religious leaders who like to have and keep control over what other people do and even think. Instead, we Deweyan liberals feel it’s much better to teach people how to think and act intelligently for themselves.
In any case, however, we Deweyan liberals aren’t attacking a person's right to believe whatever they want, as long as their actions are respectful to others. Such democratic kinds of respect are another liberal idea growing around the world. What we do challenge, however, is the idea of believing only one religious system is the only one true and eternal Truth. For that conclusion we see no objective evidence. For us, religious variety has been religious reality for many tens of thousands of years now, so why shouldn’t people know more about it? In fact, in their quest to keep their power over others, comparative religious studies were regularly forbidden by the Roman Church. As a result, however, life became more dangerous for those outside the religion, as, again, religious history teaches us.
Am I being overly critical in our modern day and age, or just realistic? Neither, I’m being naturalistic! If some intolerant religious radicals weren’t in fact still making life dangerous and less than what it could be, then that question might be justified. The fact is, however, such radical feelings about only one religious Truth are still endangering people in many parts of the world for everyone who doesn’t accept their ideas. In many parts of the US today, intolerant people will even deny law-abiding people their equal political and civil rights based on their religious ideas. The current example of gay and lesbian couples being denied their equal marriage rights is merely one current example of excessive social intolerance and injustice. Such undemocratic and unkind results are what we Deweyan liberals continue challenging wherever we find them.
There’s also another more modern system of intolerance of which some economic institutions are examples of using their ideas to keep increasing their power over others. Today many banking institutions act as intolerantly as some medieval religions. With the rise of a profit-based capitalist money economy, and their quest for ever more money-power, they’ve become modern versions of some medieval religious systems. With the growth of such economic systems, wealth itself has become the way to control people and their actions to keep making a small class of already wealthy people even wealthier than any medieval religious leader ever dreamed of. We’ll see more about the modern shift from religious dogma to economic power in a later section, but they are both examples of how the quest for evermore power can be socially dangerous and counterproductive for millions of people. Ancient Greeks saw and felt those dangers centuries before Jesus was born.
For us Deweyan liberals, both intolerant religious and economic systems not only help distort one’s inner character of ideas and feelings, as both Plato and Aristotle saw, but they also make life less satisfying and enjoyable to millions of people. Many capitalists now feel only their profit-hungry system should be allowed to grow, and many socialist systems eliminated forever! In the US the military has often played the role Inquisitors played in the Middle Ages; they both acted as if no other systems should be tolerated or allowed. As we’ll see a little later, Marine General Smedley Butler felt he acted like merely a henchman for Wall Street bankers and financiers.
Also, in Iraq Sunni and Shiite religious factions often produce the same dangerous social results, as do some Arab and Jewish actions in Palestine. Until young folks are taught to see they have a right to choose any religious or economic system, or none, such violent results will almost certainly keep endangering peoples' lives and making life much more stressful than need be. No doubt, many parental ideas may be felt strongly by their children, and even idolized as part of a long religious or economic tradition, but how does that alone necessarily make any of them absolute Truth? For us Deweyan Behaviorists, when people feel that way they're merely feeling how strong and propulsive their own habits are, nothing more and nothing less.
Thanks to many brave anthropologists around the world who kept learning more about religious variety, such ideas are becoming more widely known. In fact, after studying many such native religious forms, sociologist Emile Durkheim (d.1917) in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, concluded all the rituals and ideas of ancient religions were already present in the native world, rituals like cleansing oneself from sin, a creator god, and initiation rites like baptism were practiced by native peoples!
Thus, another great educational challenge we liberals face today is teaching young folks to first learn about such ideas, and then keep testing them for their social usefulness! Why not educate young folks to feel more tolerant of other religions and economic systems, as well as more realistic about their own ideas and beliefs? Why not teach more young folks to see their own religious dogma as merely one set of religious rules. Unlike many conservatives and even moderates, we Deweyan liberals say everyone has a right to believe and act the way they see best, as long as the results are law-abiding, helpful, and respectful of others. After all, in a democratic republic like the US, shouldn’t anyone have the freedom to criticize any religious or economic system claiming to be the best expression of god and truth? Where is the harm in teaching everyone to become an intelligent individual rather than an obedient conformist? In fact liberal democracy celebrates it.
Such talk is important before choosing a philosophic model of life. As we'll see in Book 3, those are ideas even ancient Persian Zoroastrians celebrated; their priests were active social workers, helping those in need. One difficulty today involves people taking such literary criticism as a personal attack on them; it’s not. It’s merely pointing to another way of thinking about their beliefs and ideas, like any good philosophy should. In fact, intolerant kinds of actions were often practiced in the Middle Ages, and resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, many of them women and children. However, with our modern re-birth of more tolerant democratic forms of living, freedom of information has become a necessity, rather than a luxury. After all, it hurts no one to say any religious truth is merely an idea-rule, and thus is capable of being examined and criticized for its usefulness. Doesn’t everyone have the right to say what rules we should live with? For ancient liberals that was a very important question, and to which both Plato and Aristotle answer no! In fact, Socrates too encouraged such critical actions – the un-criticized life is not worth living. For us Deweyan liberals, the more we help nurture such constructive freedom and intelligent question-asking in our public schools, the more tolerant and peaceful life will become. Who’s ready to test that idea?
We Deweyan liberals celebrate religious variety; it shows how creative people can be for expressing different feelings about life and nature. Everyone has a right to believe what they want, but not to always act as they want. And if that's true, then why shouldn’t we not only celebrate all such natural creativity, but also teach such habit-arts to young folks as well? Every new invention is the result of a creative thought. After all, how boring would foreign travel be if people didn't have different habits and cultural arts to see? Who would travel, say, to China or Thailand to see another TV soap opera, have another hamburger at yet another US fast-food restaurant, or keep watching an endless stream of TV auto commercials?
Simply because nature is now best seen as a natural continuum, we can keep strengthening our own creative growth in a world where intelligent growth has become for us Deweyan liberals what life’s best goal. Though they defined it very differently, ancient Greeks like Plato and Aristotle called it wisdom. We need never stop growing until life’s over; it’s the best idea for keeping life alive, vibrant, healthful, and interesting. It helps focus and center our all-important attention on what’s happening here and now – the ultimate scene of all creative growth. It’s also the only place for testing any creatively helpful idea, as well as for teaching even 1st graders to start learning such useful habits and skills? In short, we Deweyan liberals help turn not only religious dogma, but economic dogma as well into merely different kind of constructive HUMAN habit-arts, not absolute truth. Such ideas help us feel how very important liberal kinds of education are to the continuing improvement of life for everyone! Without knowing how to intelligently control their own creative growth, life soon becomes routine and monotonous. We Deweyan liberals thus encourage more people to start making their own neighborhood public schools more useful, creative, productive, and experimentally exciting to the kids themselves. Those kinds of enjoyable results are what help make liberal democratic schools more desirable and enjoyable for the kids. However, a sad reality even today is most parents don’t know such school can be built, much less how to build them. Book 5’s Educational Models of Excellence offers some thoughts on the subject.
The Quest for Certainty is Ending
That result too is becoming more obvious to many people today. It’s another logically obvious result of assuming nature is a natural continuum. The spread of business arts around the world also helps encourage that feeling. Two of Dewey’s books, Reconstruction in Philosophy and The Quest for Certainty openly and boldly challenged intelligent readers to begin improving their old conservative and moderate models of life and nature based on what other people merely say is certain Truth. Not only ancient philosophers of change like Heraclitus, but even new models of physics, like those built by Albert Einstein in the early 1900s, showed how mere rates of natural change are what should be studied in order to keep making life more satisfying and enjoyable. How soon will my smoking and over-eating habits wreck my health and life, and how often do I need sexual relief? In such an ever-changing nature Einstein discovered the faster an object goes the less it ages and the larger it grows! Heraclitus, Sophists, and Atomists too celebrated rates of change as nature's best things to know; how quickly can I learn some new skill or art? It was yet another direct challenge to Plato and Aristotle who wanted to believe some eternal objects could be known with absolute certainty. As we’ve seen, to achieve that feeling Aristotle went so far as to say an intuitive mental faculty can grasp absolutely certain ideas. With the growth of modern quantum physics, however, such assumptions have been rapidly fading. At the atomic quantum level of nature even ‘laws’ like cause-and-effect simply don’t apply; rates of change are so rapid only probabilities can be known.
No doubt, such modern discoveries while Dewey was alive encouraged him to say the entire quest for absolute certainty has been the major philosophic weakness for all conservative and moderate models of nature! Even life at the human level is dominated by different rates of change and thus amounts of probability, not certainty. Why mention it? Well, when the quest for certainty was defined conservatively, as knowing only those objects which don’t change, then the results for experimental science and political democracy proved disastrous! The belief some ideas could grasp objects which never changed helped keep people obedient and psychically enslaved to a conservative model of nature, and thus dulled not only the democratic instinct, but the experimental instinct to keeping studying how rapidly some objects change, and also how they can be changed. Such a period of meek obedience is often called the Middle Ages. And if recent reports are accurate, the same is still being done in conservative Christian and Muslim schools today; some children are taught to even sacrifice their young lives for radical models of truth, as if only their models know the truth about unchanging objects. We Deweyan liberals frankly ask, which sect of Islam is absolutely certain, Sufi, Shiite, or Sunni, or Christian sect for that matter.
As we’ve been seeing, it doesn’t matter whether such unchanging objects are natural or spirit-objects; there’s still no evidence such objects exist! So, in either case the mere idea of knowing unchanging objects with absolute certainty must remain just an assumption, resting on mere faith and trust rather than objective evidence. In short, all such assumptions rest more on a person’s feelings than anything else. Modern physics shows us once again there’s no objective evidence for any such objects; even atoms have their own rates of change and movement; they can also be broken apart and built up naturally. Celestial events called Super Nova are so powerful they can fuse hydrogen atoms together and form heavier elements, like uranium atoms with 92 protons, as well as the lighter elements on which all humans are composed.
Such thoughts make it easier to see even Plato's quest for knowing unchanging objects with certainty is merely based on HIS assumption-feelings; with him the poetic religious models of Homer and Hesiod were substituted for his own poetic philosophy. At the time they helped justify his rigid and authoritarian political models, as well as status quo social classes! Thus his philosophic model merely expressed his feelings about wanting to know absolutely unchanging spirit-objects. He felt such eternal spirit-objects really existed and could be known with absolute certainty, at least in his so-called middle period of growth. Given such feelings it was entirely natural for him to wholeheartedly believe mere contemplative reasoning could grasp and behold with certainty such objects! As we’ve seen, however, that desire was never fulfilled, and was in fact practically given up, as his later writings show us. After that spirit-objects become practical objects; he felt they helped keep social order by convincing people different rewards would be given after death. Thus the religious political lie was born; he couldn’t prove any such ideas, but he said they were practically useful. No doubt, Plato continued piously praying to discover such undeniably certain kinds of truth, but never did. Even war was sometimes explained with the mythical idea the gods are fighting amongst themselves, or they’re letting go of their natural control of events.
Even ancient democratic liberals like Protagoras and Skeptics gave up the quest for certainty as not worth the effort. No doubt, they too realized it liberated them for learning more about our always changing natural world, and how we might take advantage of new trends and build better institutions. How long would it take to teach young folks new debate habits, or how to make new jewelry or clothes? Dewey simply agreed with them; natural rates of change are what’re important to know. How can we make it easier for, say, children to learn a new skill or habit? In fact his generation probably saw more useful inventions and social improvements with such knowledge than any other in history! Much of his world was reconstructed with inventions based on reliable kinds of scientific knowledge about how fast or slow objects change. For example, if you wanted to build a flying machine, then it was easier if its wings were curved like bird’s wings, but it’s not absolute truth. Space craft don’t need wings, only small rockets to change their direction of flight.
To the ancient liberal democratic Greek Sophists and Skeptics go the credit for encouraging the quest for useful and reliable knowledge, rather than for absolute certainty. In reality, however, the quest for such practical and creative thinking went back to the first stone tool maker, over 2 million years earlier! Greek liberals simply encouraged such practical kinds of knowledge, like learning how fast metals can become liquids and then used to make better tools. Without such practical kinds of knowledge, Western mankind's learning cocoon would have remained closed much longer. Who knows how long it would have taken us to convert Democritus' atomic ideas into useful atomic facts; how healthful are the food atoms you’re eating and how quickly are they harming or helping us? No doubt, the following lemonly lame limerick will clear up all confusions once and for all, or not.
Disrespectful Ralph often lost equilibrium,
Often acting like a jerk and unbalanced bum.
As his last ring was pawned,
The thought finally dawned,
It seems life is an on-going continuum.
9. DEWEY’S MODELS OF EXCELLENCE, 102
In this section we’ll talk some more about ideas, and their use as the psychic engines of growth. As we’ve seen, closely related to the conservative and moderate Greek quest for certainty was the excessive use of contemplative reasoning, based on the assumption some ideas can truly grasp and behold eternally unchanging objects! For Dewey, all such assumptions about reasoning and ideas only helped delay the growth of experimental science for thousands of years after Plato! For much of that time education was controlled and dominated by religious conservatives. Even atomists like Democritus celebrated reasoning with ideas as a way to discover nature’s eternal truth, that is, atoms and space. One can well imagine him thinking everything can be divided into smaller pieces, and then intuitively thinking there must be some objects which can't be cut up, or else nothing could exist. Atom is the Greek word for uncut. As we’ve seen, the same assumptions about reasoning and ideas were used by both Plato and Aristotle. Only Sophists and Skeptics saw ideas as merely something to be verified.
Medical doctors like Hippocrates too saw ideas differently. For them they were merely something to test and experiment with, to see if their results were useful and reliable. After all, how was one to know which ideas are reliable, useful, and productive, other than by testing them? Plato realized it too, at least on a subconscious level; he began offered some new solutions to the problems described in the Parmenides. And of course since then many others have assumed their ideas could somehow participate, grasp, and imitate nature’s eternal objects, and thus help satisfy the quest for certainty both Plato and Aristotle accepted. But, the more people began seeing such ideas as merely personal assumptions about life and nature, then the way was cleared for building different models about ideas, like seeing them as merely mental tools for directing one’s actions.
For liberal democratic sophists like Protagoras, people like Plato and Aristotle were merely using their ideas to create philosophic art, not philosophic truth, at least not until their ideas could be verified. Simply because atoms have been verified, Democritus’ ideas have become much more reliable for building useful medicines and more sources of energy, as well as tremendously destructive weapons. Such uses for ideas were celebrated in ancient Greece. The famous playwright Sophocles, for example, assumed the idea of harmony best reflected Greek excellence, and so he built the feeling into many of his plays. Others like Euripides assumed passion was the dominant human feeling, and so built plays around that idea. So, how was that any different from what Plato and Aristotle did with their ideas about eternal objects? Didn’t they too use them to express their idea-feelings with their philosophic models? And if they did, then why not think of them too as merely philosophic artists, at least until their ideas are verified. In short, until the art of testing ideas for their actual results began in the 1600s, all philosophy until then can be seen as merely philosophic art, just as religions too can now be seen as religious art. They too are merely ways for people to express themselves with their ideas. However, when testing ideas became more widespread, then liberal philosophic ideas could become both an art AND a science! They could be used to artfully build more objectively scientific models of life and nature!
Liberal Democritus assumed only atoms and space exist, but with those ideas he became freer to practice more liberal kinds of actions, like religious liberation, ethical kindness, democratic equality, and international justice. All such ideas were rejected by both Plato and Aristotle; they felt such ideas would be too disruptive to life. For them ideas should help justify the social and political status quo as much as possible; they should be used for building models of life and nature based on authority and concentrated power. Aristotle too painted much the same kind of social models with his ideas, even though his general outlook was much more naturalistic than Plato's. In both cases, however, liberal democratic Dewey recommends seeing how their ideas were used to artfully build their philosophic models, rather than seeing their ideas as a reflection of eternal truth. For many philosophers it’s been practically impossible to believe they too are merely human, all too human, and so are their ideas.
As we’ve seen in Part 1, Dewey’s liberal model of ideas as mental tools is another result of assuming life and nature are always an evolving continuum. No doubt, if you’ve been raised to feel some ideas really do participate, reflect, and grasp nature’s eternal and unchanging objects, like spirit-objects, or any form of unchanging object, Dewey’s liberal model of ideas will feel strange at first. I know it did for me. The all-important psychic background of feelings will be weak, and so will their meanings.
No doubt, for millions around the world today it's still easy to accept the more traditional model of ideas. Even 350 years ago, as our modern scientific world began growing, highly intelligent people like Isaac Newton (d.1727) could still easily assume his ideas of time, space, and matter did really grasp eternally constant natural events! Even in 1800 moderate philosophers like Immanuel Kant assumed Newton’s ideas did in fact produce scientifically certain ideas, like Newton’s laws of nature. Like Aristotle, Kant too thought they were certain because our inbuilt mental mechanisms can grasp and behold some ideas with certainty. Much like Aristotle before him, Kant built a model of human psychology to guarantee Newton’s ‘laws’ were scientific certainties. One can well imagine what liberals like Dewey eventually felt about those ideas.
Is all this talk about ideas what helped kill philosophy for most everyone? Well, the way philosophers often talked about them it probably did. Most of modern philosophy has been spent talking about ideas, and what we can really know with them! Philosophers call it epistemology, or the study of knowledge. In fact, however, the nature of ideas is anything but a new philosophic subject. Strangely enough, even the Gospel of John reflects an important philosophic question about ideas. In it Pilate asks what is truth? Naturally from such questions comes this one: what are ideas; can they reflect the existence of eternal objects, or are they merely mental tools best used for improving daily life here and now? How useful will our ideas be about a new recipe for chili, or how to better train our young dog? Using ideas that way helps us feel Dewey’s new model of ideas. Even new religious ideas are necessary for building new religions.
It seems even Jesus used his ideas that way. For example, what’s the best idea about divorce? The gospels tell us he sided with the conservative Rabbi Shammai; only adultery could justify it. And he also chose to feel more liberal ideas about Jewish law -- they were made for mankind, not to enslave mankind to a religious status quo, at the time centralized in Jerusalem by a priestly caste of Sadducees. Being a more independent northern Jew his religious ideas about prayer, for example, allowed him to feel a more direct communion with god; he didn’t need any Sadducee or Pharisee to intervene for him. Such events show us how ideas are actually used in life, to help express one’s feelings, rather than grasp and behold unchanging objects. No doubt, such uses were important to Dewey too. To build his naturalistic models of excellence his ideas too were used as mental tools; he simply looked at how people use their ideas in daily life, mainly to justify their actions, and also get safely through another day. Even crossing a busy street uses ideas as tools; is it safe to cross now, or shall I wait some more? Again, however, the big difference between his model of ideas and conservative and moderate models like Plato and Aristotle’s, was his model could be tested and verified, whereas the other ones could not.
With such a naturalistic model of ideas it becomes easy to see why conservatives like Plato, and even moderates like Aristotle, built different models of ideas. They wanted to feel their quest for certainty was justified and possible; they wanted their ideas to really grasp and know nature’s eternal and unchanging objects, and know them with certainty. Thus, for them some ideas must be as eternal and unchanging as those objects! For Plato some ideas were in fact pictured as being divine objects, like Truth, Beauty, and Goodness; he felt they really existed in a spirit-realm. And of course Aristotle said god reasons eternally with his ideas! In either case, however, such a model of ideas helps us see the pious aristocratic Greek feelings they each had, feelings that were then absorbed in religious models of excellence.
Again, however, the results of such thinking eventually produced not liberating and productive results, but rather confining, limited, and unhelpful ones, especially for modern liberal scientists and philosophers like Dewey. For example, the more people pictured some ideas and logical thinking as grasping nature’s eternal truth, the easier it became to feel all of nature is one huge logical system known with reason alone! It was essentially the same feeling Plato and Aristotle had about nature, namely its inbuilt logical structure could be known with reasoning alone! Thus, for them nature itself was seen as a rational and logical system. It remains an eternally feudal pyramid model of increasing value and importance! For Aristotle heavenly bodies were thought to be more real and perfect than earthly bodies merely because they were closer to god, and so ideas about them would be much more certain. As philosophy’s modern history teaches us, however, picturing nature and ideas like that was just assuming too much; it was more excessive thinking. Eventually experimental science helped liberals like Dewey feel such conservative and moderate rational models of nature were mainly used by them for defending a feudalistic social status quo, based more mere social authority, habit, and religious ideas. Such a model of ideas helped people feel they should obey what those with social power told them to obey and believe, and thus continue keeping the social status quo in place. As we’ve seen, for liberal Dewey such a model of ideas was then used to build a ‘spectator model of learning’, rather than an experimental model. They weren’t interested in improving life for everyone, and their model of ideas and learning show it. Only when ideas became seen as something to test and verify, did nature begin opening up to exploration, rather than merely accepting it as it is.
No doubt, to many people today who experiment almost daily in their work and homes, either consciously or subconsciously, such conservative and moderate models of ideas now feel strange. Most people are interested in closing a business deal or making a more nutritious meal, and not with thinking about eternal truth. Most people today want to grasp the next meal or sexual event, rather than think about eternal truth. Experimental science and business arts have encouraged such practical ways of using ideas. For example, how much advertising is needed to convince someone to buy a new product, or accept a new idea? Such questions are answered daily for parents, teachers, advertisers, politicians, and anyone selling anything, from deodorant to the next war! Also, how quickly will sexy salespeople, colorful photography, and music increase the rate at which people will change their thinking and buy a new product, or donate to a worthy cause? As a result, more and more people today are feeling, at least subconsciously, their ideas too are merely mental tools for accomplishing some goal and overcoming some challenge. If one idea doesn’t work to solve a problem or sell a product, then another one can be tried and tested.
Strangely enough, Dewey’s liberal model of ideas as merely mental tools has a long history too. In ancient Greece, for example, liberal humanists like Protagoras said man is the measure of all things, and so, almost certainly, ideas for him too were best seen as tools for answering life’s challenges here and now. How long would it take for people to learn how to defend themselves in court, and what kinds of lessons would help produce that result? Even in spirit-drenched ancient India some liberals called ‘annihilators’ said ideas don’t reflect divine objects; at death our ideas are annihilated too! Thus, books became an important way to preserve one’s ideas, and possibly learn from them. Even Einstein experimented for years with different ideas for building what’s called a Unified Field Theory, one uniting all 4 natural forces with one idea. Today that model’s called 'String Theory'. In short, a liberal pragmatic model of ideas has been consciously encouraging people for thousands of years to keep intelligently experimenting with their ideas and feelings. In fact, for Dewey, science itself is merely the art of testing ideas! Anyone who tests any idea becomes a kind of experimental scientist, whether it’s eating better food or exercising better.
Yet another interesting result from picturing ideas as mental tools can be described like this: it helps increase the feeling of respect for our constantly changing nature, and our own knowledge limits. What do I mean? Well, like a carpenter’s tools, naturalistic ideas are 'true' only as they help overcome the challenge we're faced with here and now; if an idea does that, then it becomes true! If not, then it becomes a false idea, but only for that time and situation! At another time and in a different situation the same idea may work beautifully. Thus, Dewey’s liberal model of ideas helps increase our respect not only for our always changing natural continuum, and also for our knowledge as well. Only as ideas are used here and now to make life more satisfying are they verified and confirmed for that situation only!
No doubt, those who already feel some ideas are always true will feel uneasy about conclusions like that; they want to believe ideas like the sun will rise tomorrow are absolutely certain, or that god and heaven exists. Science’s own history, however, teaches us even its own ideas are best seen as highly probably, somewhat probable, or highly unlikely. For example, with Einstein’s help even Newton’s 3 unchanging objects of matter, time, and space were all shown to vary and change in different situations! Even one of Einstein’s assumptions was eventually corrected. He assumed the sun is a perfect sphere, but actual measurements have shown it isn’t. Thus, today, whether we aim to solve some health problem, or test some new kind of medical treatment, ideas about those solutions are best seen as merely experimental and highly probable, not certain. After all, even doctors don’t know for sure how a person will react to some medicine; some people are even allergic to the very useful drug penicillin.
Increased Creative Thinking
In his greatest and toughest-to-read book, Experience and Nature, Dewey often mentions another dangerous result of feeling any of our ideas reflect absolute Truth. He says feeling such ideas helps slow the growth of more creative experimental habit-arts. Thinking, for example, our diet is really the best keeps us from learning more about it, and perhaps improving it in some way. In short, the more we believe some of our ideas reflect unchanging kinds of truth, the more difficult it becomes to think creatively about other ways for overcoming our challenges to keep making life more satisfying for everyone. For that idea thousands of examples can be seen in human history. For example, for native, ancient, and medieval peoples often thought healing diseases could be produced with spirit-rituals, even in Hindu and Chinese cultures too. Ideas about spirit-causes for diseases regularly said such diseases were the result of violating some sacred and divine law, like Yin and Yang, or of offending some god-spirit. Even routinely using Plato’s secular ideas about disease always being the result of unbalanced bodily fluids helped continue routine ‘bleeding’ cures into the 1800s, George Washington included!
In short, any routine idea about absolute truth helps depress the experimental instinct for feeling all habits and results can be improved with creative experimentation! Such ideas also help us feel arrogant about our own knowledge. In reality, however, experimental testing is the best engine for intelligent growth. For us Deweyan liberals, then, letting go of all such ideas about absolute truth is, therefore, mentally liberating; it allows us to keep creatively growing and building our knowledge, and thus feel more deeply how fluid and changing life often is. Such liberal ideas thus allow us to more intelligently and humbly direct our own growth with the experimental actions we choose to make. Such ideas can also more easily help build our confidence to become the master of our fate, rather than remain the slave to our own selfish and greedy habits. The more deeply we feel such liberal ideas, the easier it becomes to keep alert and focused on living in an always changing and dangerously stable nature. Just recently, for example, I heard a woman admit she’s afraid to start writing down some important ideas because she doesn’t feel she’s capable of writing well. Even after accepting that challenge such ideas about her confidence were telling her she can’t succeed. However, with the feeling all our habits can keep growing stronger the more they’re practiced, even confidence about having weak writing habits can start growing. If life is a natural continuum, then why not think of it as one long learning experience?
More and more, then, this much seems obvious. Only recently have liberals like Dewey begun painting a more helpful and encouraging model of ideas with his Behavioral model of psychology. As we’ve seen, such an active and experimental model of ideas was essentially the same liberal sophists like Protagoras practiced in ancient Greece. For him too, the more people practiced learning to, say, defend themselves in court or anywhere else, the more skillful and confident they became. Dewey agreed. For him all our ideas are best pictured as the result of our own actions; either they help us become what we want, or not. Ideas about, say, drug use either help us become what we want, or don’t. Either they help us keep improving our weak, excessive, and unhealthful habit-arts, or not. Well into the 1900s in the US, mean and vicious racial ideas were practiced on a wide social level. By actively challenging such ideas, however, it’s become much easier for us Deweyan liberals to feel more confident about improving any socially weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits with intelligent experimental ideas. All such actions help liberate us from old feelings of worthlessness, inequality, and weakness, often expressed with the words ‘I can’t’, or ‘It’s just god’s will.’
As we’ve been seeing, for many tens of thousands of years our native and ancient ancestors assumed their spirit-ideas were the truth. Naturally, the more those ideas were practiced, the more certain they felt, and also the more difficult it became to creatively test different ideas for more reliable results. Many native peoples, for example, thought merely digging in the earth to plant useful food crops might anger some earth spirits, and so their creative experiments with more intelligent farming arts remained weak and undeveloped, as did their food sources.
Even in medieval Europe ideas about intelligent experimentation was kept weak while many intelligent nuns and priests regularly practiced routine spirit-ideas like praying and psalm singing as much as 8-9 hours each day! As a result, creatively intelligent experimentation to learn more about how nature really works, as well as creative inventiveness, became all but ignored. Both personal and social growth itself became almost non-existent. No doubt, even early Christian ideas encouraged kind and generous actions towards others; the Acts of the Apostles records the growth of many helpful socialistic church-communities. But when other religious ideas routinely restricted such kind and helpful actions, then actually building a more satisfying world with creative experimentation became practically impossible. Again, such routine religious ideas restricted natural curiosity, inventiveness, and experimentally learning how we ourselves can keep making life better for ourselves. They restricted both personal and social growth itself. Life became socially divided between leaders and followers, when in reality most everyone had about the same kinds of mental ability.
Building a more liberal model of our ideas as experimental mental tools became much easier once Dewey realized all learning and growth is, in fact, an experimental process of trial-and-error! How can it be otherwise in an always changing world? In such a world how can anyone be sure an idea today will work the same tomorrow? Seeing nature as an always changing natural continuum was a great psychic breakthrough which began growing after 1600, with, of course, the help of experimental science! Why exactly were scientists producing many reliable ideas about life and nature, and many useful tools as well, like microscopes and telescopes? In part, people like Galileo were using their new ideas about lenses and light as mental tools to help direct their experimental growth, just as our habilis ancestors used their feelings to start building stone tools over 2 million years ago! In both cases creating such useful tools began opening up a whole new world of growth possibilities beyond the normal range of our senses, and thus created new fields to explore and experiment with.
However, until only very recently has it become much easier to feel all our ideas like that, and thus keep using them creatively to keep intelligently guiding our growth and learning. Recently, it’s become much easier to, say, learn how to grow more food, learn a new skill or habit, cure more diseases, and have the confidence to build more healthful diet and exercise habit-arts, especially when the practice is enjoyable and begins with short times only. Building such ideas made life more enjoyable and satisfying. No doubt, to learn how to enjoy those new kinds of experimental habits takes some time, patience, and some creative thinking and practice, but for many millions of people these days they’ve consciously become a stronger part of their daily lives and body-minds. Business people around the world use such skills to keep guiding business growth. The more they’re talked about, the more conscious such ideas become. The social challenge these days is to learn new ideas about increasing one’s helpfulness, rather than acting selfishly and greedily. No doubt, another lamely limp limerick will be another piece of eternal truth; or so I hope.
Unskilled Herbert thought of ways he should,
Get a gun for some money, like he knew he could.
But the more he blundered,
The more he wondered,
Was that idea really intelligent and good?
10. DEWEY’S MODELS OF EXCELLENCE, 103
Scientific Laws of Nature
Today, many people still feel so-called scientific laws are just as eternally true as Plato’s spirit-ideas or Aristotle’s Forms. They don’t realize such ‘laws’ merely point to stable rates of change, not eternal and unchanging objects. For example, Galileo discovered objects fall at such a rate they can be described with mathematical ideas, called equations. For every 32 feet of distance their rate of speed doubles. Thus, science discovers and experiments with different rates of change, not eternal objects.
What does it mean for us Deweyans? Well, if one needs to believe there exists unchanging truths about nature, then we suggest this one -- everything is a form of ever-changing energy! But at the same time we also say, all such statements are merely highly probable intuitions or general assumptions. The above example has been tested and found reliable, but it’s certainly not anything like the unchanging objects both Plato and Aristotle liked to think existed, and could be known with absolute certainty! Such scientific assumptions merely help encourage us to believe each of us can keep learning to intelligently manage our own and safe social, political, and economic energies, to make them more satisfy-able and enjoyable for everyone, rather than just the small wealthy greedy class of people who already have too much social and political power. Such managing often takes the form of voting for more liberal candidates. The democratic ideal of equal rights works in much the same way; it offers a goal to be achieved with such managing power. It’s certainly not the only power, but it’s a useful one.
In fact, Dewey saw a great weakness for all such universal generalizations and assumptions, like energy and equal rights. It’s just this: All such abstract assumptions aren’t any help for discovering how energies should be managed to reach such goals! In short, for him all universal ideas of unchanging truth are competely empty of useful knowledge! For example, if your mate says ‘You act like a bum, so I don’t want you anymore’ will you say ‘Forget about it, we’re all just different forms of energy’? No. You'd probably get thrown out even faster! And if you have an illness would it help to get well sooner by knowing 'we're all just different forms of energy', or health is a universal goal? Obviously not.
Again, what's most important for intelligently managing our energies is learning what results they produce here and now! And only such intelligent experimenting can teach us such knowledge! Only it can teach us how to build useful drug-medicines or more healthful eating and exercise habits. For intelligently growing those kinds of useful skills we need to experiment within specific conditions here and now, not just abstract generalized assumptions like everything is a form of energy.
Such liberal ideas about scientific laws helps us ask this question too: What good is it to believe with Plato there really exists a universal Spirit-Idea of justice as giving to each person what they deserve without knowing exactly what individual people do deserve here and now? Plato and many other conservative philosophers simply assumed reasoning about such generalizations would help them become a better person; knowing the eternal nature of Justice would help make all our actions just. Aristotle, however, went to the other extreme; he spent much of his time collecting and cataloguing individual facts about nature without suggesting ways of using them to make life better for everyone! He had very little feelings about improving life with natural knowledge; in fact for both of them life was basically set and finished for all eternity. In India a social caste system helped create the same kinds of feudalistic feelings.
Again I’d like to say, there’s a huge practical difference between universal assumptions like energy, and knowing how to intelligently manage one’s energies here and now! Should we stand and fight, or run away to fight another day? What’s the best way to combat racial and sexual hatreds here and now? Is it to pass better laws or just punch a bigot in the brain? Thus, energy is just an assumption, while knowing how to intelligently manage and guide our energies with intelligent actions here and now is what both ancient and modern liberals call practical knowledge! Only experimental testing can best teach such knowledge. Only experience can teach the all-important feelings making any idea a useful living reality, or not. For example, we can use such abstract ideas to think about our universe. Starry solar furnaces continually and constantly reconstruct matter into energy before they die out. So will our universe eventually die out? It seems doubtful. If energy is eternal and if a 'Big Bang' happened once, it can happen an infinite number of times! But practical liberals like Dewey asked, what’s the use of such reasoning? How can it make our lives better here and now? And equally important, can our precious public monies be better spent here on earth, or in sending 2 or 3 people on missions to other planets?
All such reasoning thus again helps us see how even science’s universal ‘laws,’ and Dewey's experimental testing, are merely useful idea-tools, rather than eternal and unchanging Truth. As history teaches us, their truth can change instantly if new evidence proves they’re wrong or useless. As we’ve seen with some of Newton’s assumptions, it’s happened many times already. For us Deweyan liberals, scientific laws aren’t used to make us feel we know nature’s eternal truth, but rather they keep encouraging us to keep experimenting and make our present life better and more satisfying to everyone. Assumptions like nature’s continuum and equal political rights are 2 examples. Liberal philosophy’s universal ideas are most useful if they encourage us to keep intelligently overcoming our challenges here and now, like, for example, curbing over-population, not practicing mean and inhumane social intolerance, making our environment safer and more human-friendly, and even making enough non-fat yogurt for everyone! What else does respect often mean besides not saying or doing anything mean and hateful to all peace-loving people?
Such assumptions are also logically useful. The assumption of energy, for example, is as useful logically in science as geometry’s axioms are in mathematics. They both help build scientific and geometric systems of ideas; change the assumptions and a different system can be built. In the 1800s the geometry of curved space was built by simply changing Euclid’s parallel assumption. Thus, assuming all foods too have energies can helps us keep experimenting with our diet habits to produce more healthful results. Such thinking is, to me, one of the beautiful things about Dewey’s philosophic models; they help make everyone a scientist in their daily life, so as to keep life growing and interesting, rather than dull and boring.
Obviously even before the ancient era began around 500 BCE, mankind learned to intelligently manage some of nature’s energies. For example, fire’s energies have helped make life more enjoyable for probably 500,000 years now! Such energies were used for warmth, for roasting more tasty mammoth kabobs, and also scaring away dangerous animals. However, during only the last 4 centuries has mankind been learning to intelligently use many other natural energies, for both useful and greedy purposes. As a result, then, more and more people have begun ignoring spirit-ideas to help cure diseases and build a better world. With more useful scientific skills we’ve learned to grow more food and build better hospitals. In neither case, however, have challenges been eliminated; on the contrary. As Dewey points, every new invention create new challenges. One current example is drone technology. The challenge is to use them safely and constructively, rather than just destructively. And we’re still challenged to make our new modified foods safer and more healthful, as well as making new medical services more available to everyone. In the ancient world people were just learning new ways of controlling fire, like for melting metals in rocks, and thus build better tools and weapons. Incidentally, both Plato and Aristotle were so opposed to experimental learning they said all such work makes slaves of everyone who did it, and thus incapable of intelligently governing any political system. In practice such aristocratic assumptions were merely useful mental tools for justifying their undemocratic political and social feelings.
Today, with our modern engine-tools for converting chemical and electrical energies into energetic mechanical movement, like in cars, much of life has become much easier. One person and a monster truck can now move many tons of earth every day. And who could ever exist without their electric can openers and toothbrushes? However, the challenge still remains to keep studying the results of such work! Overuse of petroleum energies, for example, appears to be endangering much of life as we know it, and the more ignorant people become of such results, the more danger they create for themselves.
Also, new inventive ways of managing and controlling electrical energies have helped create an electronic revolution reconstructing life almost daily; who hasn’t learned how to waste time playing i-phone games? Electrical engineering has become a new science of its own. Electron microscopes too now regularly see objects at the atomic level, thus helping create many of the electronic gadgets we use today. Who knows? One day soon we may even be able to better control genetic energies, and thus help create another biological revolution unlike any other in history! It’s already begun with bio-engineered foods. Will all disabilities be cured one day soon?
In any case, however, the challenge remains to make such improvements more available to everyone, rather than just a few greedy wealthy folks who can afford to pay high fees for them! In fact, for us Deweyan liberals today, managing our new global economic system for the benefit of everyone, and not just a few greedy bankers, is perhaps the most important challenge we have today. If we don’t, if we keep allowing banking and economic systems to keep increasing their social and political control, the feudalistic results will become stronger than ever. Powerful international banking systems like the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank keep working to dismantle all public systems benefiting the people, and replace them with private systems taking more of the public’s money from them. All so-called austerity economic systems are designed to do just that – make more publicly owned buildings and systems privately owned and operated. Thus, the ancient war between the wealthy and the poor continues to this day, as well as experimentally learning how to better manage such economic energies.
Unlike spirit-objects, natural forms of energy like electricity, wind, water, nuclear, and heat can be physically harnessed and much better controlled, and that makes them more useful and important to us Deweyan liberals. Recently new green-energy plants are being built in China, and solar heating systems are growing in usefulness, taking advantage of renewable energies rather than potentially harmful petroleum energies. Such new inventions thus help reduce harmful carbon in the air and global warming. In any case, however, energy’s useful reliability is the main reason it’s become our strongest scientific 'absolute'. It’s certainly possible immortal souls may exist in a completely different supernatural realm, but working happily and playfully to keep improving our own character habits here and now, and also helping others once in a while, is much more important to we Deweyan liberals than, saying, trying to escape from a so-called wheel of rebirth, or working to sit around some kind of perfect ‘heaven’ for the rest of time. As the old saying goes, if there's an afterlife we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it! And if we cross that bridge we can fondly feel grateful for our own little slice of life lived best by helping ourselves and others learn how to make their own lives more excellent!
Again, experimental science is not the doorway to knowing absolute truth; it's just the human art of testing ideas, and seeing their results. The on-going challenge is to test ideas for their peaceful, productive, and enjoyable results! Science’s experimental testing and learning arts are what’s most important, not feeling some ideas are absolutely certain for all time. For us Deweyan liberals such feelings are signs of a weakness for living in an always changing nature. Our always changing natural continuum demands an energetic always growing model of life, rather than an always static model. In a constantly moving nature the most useful skill is knowing how to keep using our energies intelligently, rather than routinely.
Also, remember too, experimental testing encourages creative reasoning to think of ideas to test! For that result we can also feel some gratitude and thankfulness to our creatively reasoning liberal Greek ancestors like Democritus and Protagoras. They too realized how important it was to actually create new ideas to test and see the results they produce; otherwise any idea is just an expression of inner feelings, including many of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas of eternal and unchanging objects! The idea of atoms was just one result of such creative thinking.
In fact, as we’ll see more clearly in Book 2’s Native Models of Excellence, modern experimental testing skills are basically the same trial-and-error skills our native, ancient, and medieval ancestors often practiced, but yet weren't physically or psychically ready to feel they were our only learning art. Not only religions, but both Plato and Aristotle, helped people feel some things in nature are eternal and unchanging. Even native life has become so organized, as we saw earlier. As a result, most people just weren’t ready to admit such experimentation was our only learning art. Both Plato and Aristotle wanted to prove the democratic and experimental Sophists and Atomists must be wrong. In any case, however, Dewey saw how bringing such useful experimental ideas from a subconscious to a conscious level of awareness remains another major modern educational challenge for us liberals today. That can best be done with more experimentally constructive work in our public schools.
No doubt, the ancient history we’ve been seeing helps people see why our modern experimental age is so different from any other, but more importantly, why it’s so important to keep it growing! The more people consciously practice intelligent kinds of experimental learning, the easier it is to feel how both Plato's ancient conservative, and even Aristotle's moderate, philosophic models as merely different forms of ever-changing energy, not absolute Truth! The irony is they themselves felt how experimental their work was long before conservative Christians like Augustine and Aquinas elevated many of their ideas to absolute Truth.
As a result of such conservative actions, the democratic struggle for equal rights also continues in many places around the world; only recently have some women in Saudi Arabia been allowed to even drive cars, much less have equal political, social, and personal equality. Such is the kind of conservative feudalistic world many still live in. No doubt, many conservatives may see such actions as the clash between good and evil, and between god’s law and human law, but for Dewey the more conscious experimental learning becomes, the more liberated people will become from their old routine ideas, their habits of intolerance, and arrogantly assuming only their ideas reflect eternal truth. Such feelings will also make it easier for more people to become more curious about how life is actually working, and how money energies can more intelligently be controlled and managed. Without more liberal schools teaching such habit-art, the process will become that much more difficult. Still, the more than 2 million year old history of stone tool making shows us even our first human ancestors wanted to keep making life more satisfying for everyone.
For us Deweyan liberals such energetic clashes and tensions are a sign of growth and change; ancient Heraclitus said such tensions are a natural part of nature. However, another challenge faces us today, namely how to keep making such tensions produce less violent and more intelligent results. It’s the difference between intelligent evolution and violent revolution. As we’ve been seeing in the past few years, merely killing those who lead such conservative reactions is useless; merely another person with similar ideas takes over. Again, money is playing its part. There’s more money to be made in warfare than there is in more peaceful evolutionary actions, like building more liberal schools, and more just business systems; until that situation changes and war becomes unprofitable, almost certain it will continue being practiced. Who wants to experiment with this idea: Merely reduce the economic and religious benefits of warfare and it may become as extinct as Mesozoic dinosaurs?
In any case, a new scientific world continues emerging. The shock of science’s recently constructed new model of life and nature described briefly in these pages is still echoing throughout the modern world. Within the past 150 years alone, experimental energies and testing have helped create genuine and revolutionary new models not only in biology, but in physics, psychology, astronomy, geology, economics, and education. In short, an almost completely new and more powerfully liberal experimental age focusing on expanding individual freedoms and rights continues growing in a largely conservative feudalistic world! Obviously those conservatives who still resist such ideas often insist young folks can stop such ideas from spreading by throwing their lives away and becoming self-destructive human bombs! Some radically religious models of life and nature still say their leaders should have such educational power. To us Deweyan liberals, however, such actions are seen as another educational challenge. No one is born a religious martyr; all such ideas are taught and learned by vulnerable children. Can such mean results ever be completely stopped? Probably not, but the more intelligent and helpful our schools and business arts grow around the world, the more peaceful, creative, and helpful such habits will grow.
No doubt, day by day our world seemingly grows more liberal with more democratic, more experimental, and more business oriented habits. Naturally, with such new habits come new tensions and challenges. They’ve been felt in human societies for millions of years. Homer’s Odyssey is merely one ancient example. On his 10-year journey back from Troy Odysseus kept meeting life-threatening challenges and kept overcoming them with his own creative thinking and actions. So, a natural question thus forms: Why shouldn't our own public schools be teaching young folks what it consciously feels like to practice such constructively experimental habits? In fact, the challenge for all us liberals today is to keep building schools like that. If we don’t then precious tax monies will continue being wasted on correcting and improving the weak, excessive, and unhealthful habits often taught in more conservative book-oriented schools. How can our schools continue telling us their book-obsessed model of education helps build a well-rounded student, and yet at the same time keep ignoring the importance of teaching intelligent character habits like tolerance, helpfulness, and respect for laws based on equal rights? Our over-populated prisons alone teach us such character habits are just as useful now as they’ve ever been! Such ideas helped Dewey build a much more liberal educational model to better help young folks intelligently build character habits useful in a modern democratic and industrial world.
A Little Personal History
A little personal history may help humanize these ideas. Like Dewey, in my youth I too was exposed to a Christian dualist model of life and nature. Nuns and priests merely taught Church dogma, rather than how to question any of it, and of course church rituals built the feelings for such ideas. At university, however, I began learning how to think more rationally about such ideas, rather than merely keep accepting them. Slowly, over many years, a whole new world of naturalistic ideas and thinking opened up for me, in which I still live today. Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct was a major turning point in my life. Naturally, the more I redd, the more comfortable they felt; they helped me better understand and manage not only my own life, but our collective and continuing history and evolution. With useful character ideas like focusing on our own needs first, learning how to love and respect myself, respect just laws and law-abiding people, help those less well than myself, and intelligently help make life as safe and peaceful as possible, I began feeling more liberal kinds of excellence. The main problem I saw, however, was in making his ideas easier to learn about; much of Dewey’s writing is difficult, to say the least. Some of his works were meant for philosophers, and not the general public. That’s when I decided to popularize his ideas. The easier it was to know what he was talking about, the easier it would be for anyone to keep making themselves a more intelligent master of their fate, rather than a slave to what others say is the truth. Isn’t the ‘ultimate’ liberation really freeing our self from all of our own arrogant, narrow, destructive, unhealthful, excessive, weak, and unintelligent habit-arts, so we can more joyfully help our self and others build a safer and more satisfying world for everyone? Isn’t that what being ‘normal’ means?
No doubt, too many young people of all ages now feel philosophy, history, economics, and psychology are all just too complicated to understand, much less practice. Thus, their attention is still easily diverted with the latest electronic phone or game. Most everyone went to public schools where learning more abstract book-facts was demanded. Practical workshops were almost non-existent, like the Behavioral psychology workshops where young folks learned more about themselves and how to become better learners, happier, and more joyful by actively practicing such habits, and of course helpful activities? No doubt, many teachers and parents may feel such habits really aren’t what our schools should be teaching, but even conservative Plato recommended children should basically play educational games until they’re ten or so, and never be forced to learn anything they didn’t want to learn! Dewey agreed, but added his own thoughts. What better way to make children’s future years more productive and rewarding than by teaching such character habits and skills to all students, and not just to wealthy ones? No doubt, there are many challenging obstacles to overcome in order to build such liberal schools, but the longer we ignore such challenges, the more difficult it becomes to actually build them. Is there a more excellent goal in life than building schools where everyone can enjoy learning both practical skills and also how an intelligent ‘normal’ person acts, namely joyfully, happily, and intelligently?
For me, the results of Dewey’s liberal models of excellence just helped me feel better about myself and life. And the more that happened, the less I felt like worshiping anything I couldn’t see and know about. All conservative religious models of life and nature began feeling like just more social organizations, nothing more and nothing less. And conservative philosophers weren’t much better. For example, one of Dewey’s contemporaries, the founder of Phenomenological philosophy Edmund Husserl (d. 1938), was still on a quest for certainty, but only about our own mental thinking, much like Immanuel Kant was in the 1700s. They seemed to neglect the entire social world around me, as if it would keep improving all by itself. The Vietnam War, however, taught me that was certainly not the case; never before had I seen my country act as viciously and brutally as it did to millions of people. No doubt, all those companies making millions in the process were happy. I voted for Nixon in ’68, believing he would end it, only to learn he and his war-mongering advisors like Henry Kissinger believed North Vietnam could be broken; it was the only time I voted for a Republican.
I felt there was much more to life than merely convincing myself I could really know nature’s absolute truth if only I reasoned properly. And, much like Plato, another modern conservative thinker, Francis Bradley (d. 1924), boldly proclaimed time, space, and matter cannot possibly be real and philosophy's almost completely useless for guiding our actions! Such radical conservative conclusions felt all but useless for someone who was just entering adult life and needed all the guidance and constructive advice he could get. With conservative philosophic ideas like those, is it any wonder supernatural religions are still popular? They at least hold open the hope for a better life after death. While reading Dewey’s Experience and Nature I began feeling my life’s mission – to popularized his ideas and make them as easily understandable as possible. I wanted to lose all the technical philosophic jargon and express such ideas with words anyone could easily understand, so more people could learn to intelligently get more satisfaction FROM life by playfully and kindly giving more TO it!
Dewey’s models of excellence, and the ancient liberal models they were based on, continued opening up nature and life to more learning and growth, and even to enjoy it with the help of intelligent and joyful pleasure and humor. No doubt, it took some time to turn such ideas into real working feelings and habits, but then again what new habit doesn’t take time to feel comfortable? My own speaking and writing skills too were weak and greatly underdeveloped. Still, Dewey’s talking about life as a learning process was encouraging and helpful; it helped me feel life is where one is being ‘born again’ every day! I shouldn’t fear such results, but rather embrace them and look forward to becoming a little stronger every day! If something hurts, then learn to enjoy figuring out ways to act without feeling such pain.
Like so many other college graduates I too left school without really knowing how to enjoy much of life. It’s one thing to merely read Dewey’s ideas about life as a playfully kind, enjoyable, and useful experimental adventure, but to actually feel what that meant took time. Actually feeling all of life as a dangerously safe creative and helpful experimental growth process remained a challenge for many years, and which only practice and experience could deepen. It remains to be seen how deeply the reader, and myself, will continue deepening such feelings.
Dewey’s ideas felt best to me, and as I learned, I have ancient liberal Greeks to thank also. They were the first to openly say what life can look like when one assumed only the natural world as the best place to focus our energies and thinking. They began elevating speaking, logic, and reasoning to a plateau without spirit-ideas, and building the Western world’s first liberal models of life and nature. Learning more about Democritus and Protagoras was another delight for me. In fact it’s still amazing; all through my college studies I remained almost totally ignorant about 2 of the ancient world’s best liberal thinkers.
No doubt, many people feel philosophic books can be very difficult to read, and many are. Conservative writers have been working for centuries to make their own often illogical models of life and nature seem best, and thus make liberal models of life less attractive. Over the centuries such writers have even been scaring people away from learning more about liberal models of life and nature with vicious life-threatening ideas like hell and vicious actions like public burnings and hangings. I began seeing such actions as weapons of social control, rather than battling evil and celebrating goodness. Such actions kept frightening people from learning more about our natural world, and thus keeping life as feudalistic as possible. In fact, I came to see much of modern life is, in many ways, as feudalistic as it was in the Middle Ages. As I learned more about economic events, I saw a small class of obscenely wealthy people around the world working daily to keep increasing their economic power, no matter who might suffer. Liberal models of life and nature like Dewey’s, however, said the people whose work and taxes support those classes have the power and right to say how they should be regulated, controlled, and even ended if they so choose. Why should merely being born into a certain family automatically give some children more privileges of safety, housing, medical care, and education than anyone else? At the same time, however, I saw how their twisted logic would say the government shouldn’t try making anyone’s life more satisfying and enjoyable, as if only they deserved such benefits.
I know how frustrating philosophic reading can be; it's definitely not much fun to use a dictionary while reading a book. In fact, not only philosophers but many writers too are notoriously difficult, or boring, or both. What’s more, they often violate some of the basic writing ideas I heard in 7th grade, like not separating subjects from verbs with all kinds of qualifying phrases, and not stringing too many prepositional phrases together, like most people do. As a result, many philosophic books can feel as if a cold and frigid logic has frozen all warm feelings about life and its democratic possibilities. What has become known as Aristotle’s work is perhaps the best example of that idea, but many other philosophic writers are equally guilty, Hegel and Kant to name just 2. Even though Aristotle’s feelings for nature were much warmer than Plato’s, even the best examples of his work, like the Politics, still feels like a vampire’s victim, drained of all human warm and tender human feelings.
As we’ll see a little later, his Politics is, perhaps, the best example of aristocratic Greek political feelings; all those not in his aristocratic class were felt as mere slaves. Incidentally, many modern-day Aristotelians like Ayn Rand continued celebrating such ideas, as do many congressional Republican conservatives too. In fact, one of her converts, economist Alan Greenspan, helped destroy a useful federal economic regulating system which eventually caused the worldwide recession in 2008-9, sending millions of people into bankruptcy and funneling billions of federal dollars into Wall Street banks and financial corporations to avoid another Great Depression. Such a lack of feelings for helping common people with their challenges by using more money from the wealthy goes back to Aristotle himself.
Modern Forms of Slavery
For us liberal Deweyans today, our main social challenge remains educational; how can we keep teaching young folks about the new scientific, democratic, and money-dominated world they will soon enter? More specifically, how can we help more students learn how to free themselves from all the modern forms of slavery now at work? Social systems are now so arranged as to make perpetual debt slaves of anyone but the very wealthy; they often use cash to buy homes and cars. Such educational models encourage people not only to keep learning more about what's happening out there, and what wealthy folks are doing with their money, but also how to intelligently avoid becoming economically enslaved to them. Too many people today believe slavery is finally over, but there are in fact many forms of slavery; debt and economic slavery have become much more common in today’s world. In fact, it’s become such a serious problem, many states and nations are now looking at building more publicly owned banks to better serve people, rather than allowing private banks to keep increasing the wealth of a few financial titans and moguls, many of whom just happened to inherit huge fortunes. In that way Aristotle may have been right; he believed human nature is basically corrupt and too greedy. No doubt, for many in his day it was, but for us Deweyan liberals the problem is educational, not genetic. After all, no one is born greedy, and so educating people about using their political voting power intelligently remains another challenge.
Such book-obsessed schools as we still have in the US also helps young folks become slaves to military organizations after they graduate. They need obedient people to fight wars and keep the US economic empire in place. Marine General Smedley Butler said as much after he retired. Even politicians are now enslaved to wealthy donors more than ever before, and the problem isn’t going away soon. In the 1920s political satirists like Will Rogers told audiences we’ve got the best congress and president money can buy! And more recently, Supreme Court rulings have only made the political enslavement situation worse. They’ve finally taken all limits off political donations, justifying it by saying money, even corporate money, is merely another form of free speech. In effect they’ve made politicians even bigger slaves to wealthy donors than ever before, thus making democratic improvements like a fairer tax system even more difficult!
No doubt, Rogers’ humor was useful for educating people about political reality, as are perhaps some limericks here, but for us liberals it’s only one educational step. Without actually voting more liberal and progressive Democrats and Socialists into office, even the oldest democracy on earth will continue becoming the world’s most feudalistic democracy! Thus, we Deweyan liberals say it’s about time both economic and political philosophy should become more popular, easier to understand, more widespread and energetic, and even enjoyable in our public schools, rather than ignoring such habits almost completely. The alternative is to keep allowing a small class of greedy people to keep getting more and more control over people and nations.
No doubt, such liberal habit-arts still aren’t taught to many young folks around the world today; they’re still largely suppressed by those in power, even in communist-run countries. With such actions both Plato's and Aristotle's feudalistic models of excellence continue living to this day. As a result, liberal philosophic writers like myself merely want to make people more aware of how they can better meet such current challenges here and now, and thus become less slavish and better masters of their own lives. After all, shouldn’t young folks have more options in life than going into college-debt, home-debt, car-debt, and medical-debt? Shouldn’t they have more choices other than putting the lives in danger in the military, or going into the business world without knowing what habits are useful there? For us, the more people get a more liberal education, and learn some creatively useful experimental skills, the stronger our present democratic Age of Experimental Learning will keep growing.
Ancient Greek philosophers gave Western civilization its first taste of logical reasoning's power. Start with an obvious assumption and conclusions from it feel absolutely certain. Such feelings helped fill a psychic need for certainty in an always changing and often violent world, as well as help justify many institutions like priestly royal classes supported by much larger classes of peasant farmers and slaves. With reasoning's help, for a few centuries our first Age of Reason blossomed in Greece. That alone was a giant step away from native life's spirit-dominated models of excellence. However, with the growth of experimental science, such reasoning skills became merely one step in the new experimental testing process! All ideas were to be tested for their actual results; that was perhaps the most important skill helping divide our ancient-medieval world from our modern one.
Sadly, most ancient Greeks just weren’t ready to consciously admit how widespread experimental learning was. As a result, both Plato’s and Aristotle’s models of life and nature eventually became merely a self-portrait of their feelings, nothing more and nothing less. They became philosophic autobiography. Basically Plato's was a more detailed type of spirit-cocoon, and even though Aristotle's was a much larger one, it was, nevertheless, just as enclosed and finished. He even closed off the highest kind of happiness only to those who, like himself, practiced contemplative reasoning. For centuries conservatives and moderates continued practicing such reasoning arts, but since the growth of experimental learning began in the 1600s, they have continued losing the great philosophic respectability they once had. Today, it may be much more accurate to describe our modern period as an Age of Experimental Science and Learning. Why haven’t we heard more about such ideas in school? Well, haven’t mainly conservatives and moderates been writing history and philosophy for most of history!?
One liberal Greek feeling has, however, proved durable through the ages. Today robust Greek feelings of democratic confidence have been growing much stronger since the 1600s. Obviously they existed before that; a small class of religious Churchmen kept them alive during the Middle Ages, but more people now feel confident about the democratic possibilities our new scientific world is creating. In the 1500s the great sea explorations around the world began building peoples' confidence to master nature, as did Greek colony builders centuries earlier; both stimulated democratic confidence. Also, democratic confidence increased in the early 1900s Progressive Era as the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution became monopolized by a small class while many people often went hungry. Such confidence-building democratic events have continued growing and helping make life less stressful, more enjoyable, and more equal for many, but as the saying goes, the price of democratic freedom is eternal vigilance! For many conservatives such freedom has been, is now, and will forever be the enemy!
Almost certainly there will always be some for whom wealth-power is the goal in life, rather than using it to help those less well off. If so, then people need to stay focused on what’s happening here and now. Religious radicals too will continue posing a danger, at least for the foreseeable future. Recently results produced by a wealthy conservative class are evidence of those ideas; their work has created a feudalistic system where wealth now plays a more dominant role than ever before. To ignore such results and efforts to improve them only makes more people vulnerable to more forms of slavery. All those who can live without a car have liberated themselves from auto financing slavery. Even with the explosion of human population numbers, more and more people today feel they can teach themselves the skills needed to make a decent living, raise a child or 2, and feel the intelligent kinds of pleasures making life more enjoyable.
Even though life has recently become more liberal and democratic than ever before, at the same time we Deweyan liberals realize there is no guarantee such liberal ideas and habits will continue growing. Institutions like the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund continue mulching as much money from taxpayers around the world as they possibly can; both were created by wealthy bankers after World War 2 had made them even wealthier. Recently an entire country, Argentina, told their economic slave masters they weren’t going to remain economic slaves any longer, and the same seems to be happening in Greece today as well; Greeks got together and elected a socialist government. Unless there’s some economic competition, capitalist systems will continue strengthening their monopoly power. We Deweyan liberals celebrate such confident democratic actions; perhaps best of all, they help increase similar kinds of confidence around the world. Unless people organize their democratic power, almost certainly such kinds of slavery will continue ad infinitum! With such focused democratic power, however, all feudalistic models of life based on money-power can now be more easily improved and regulated more than ever before.
Conservative models of life and nature are no longer as monopolistic as they once were. In a world practically devoid of science, Augustine, for example, could claim the Bible is all mankind needs to know and read, and will ever need to know and read. Given the level of knowledge and education at the time most everyone accepted those ideas. But in today’s more diverse and scientific world, such ideas are no longer acceptable to millions of people. With scientific inventions we've simply liberated ourselves from obedience to such feelings. Many millions today realize such spirit-models of excellence have kept people enslaved to religious ideas and habits for centuries, and also from learning more about life’s natural pleasures and satisfactions.
As our electronic media reminds us daily, in many places around the world a healthy mix of conservative, moderate, and liberal habit-arts continues evolving and co-existing. Such a social situation began growing in ancient Greece. In ancient China, too, conservative Taoists pictured Yin and Yang (female and male) spirits normally controlling natural events, while moderate humanistic Confucians ignored such ideas and focused on building a better educational system so the government could have more educated advisors to make life better for everyone. They had that sense of a common humanity Democritus talked about in Greece. And eventually humanistic Buddhists too added their models of life and nature to Chinese life, making it even more diverse and colorful. Emperors had astrologers consulting heavenly omens to bless or change their plans as slaves worked and died building the Great Wall.
Chinese emperors also experimented with actively controlling their economy rather than controlling peoples' religious beliefs. In fact, such economic control has become another fundamental liberal modern ideal. As we’ve seen yet again in the economic meltdown of 2,008-9, ending the useful controls on wealthy bankers proved disastrous for millions of homeowners around the US alone, not to mention the world. Often Chinese emperors were more interested in nationalizing and socializing their iron, salt, and bronze industries for everyone’s benefit, rather than letting a small class of wealthy people run them for their own profit. In the West, however, many religious conservatives felt tolerance for such religious and social diversity was wrong; its temptations endangered peoples’ souls. It's certainly not always easy to be tolerant, as many people today in the US are learning to live with African, women, and non-heterosexual equal rights. But intolerance too is merely a feeling resting on certain groups of muscular tensions; relax those tensions and the feeling vanishes.
As we’ve seen, Dewey’s liberal ideas of tolerance have a long history too. Many centuries before Jesus moderate Confucius taught the arts of harmonizing with people, rather than with spirits. To help produce that result he too created another version of the 'Golden Rule': Treat people as you would have them treat you! Like Aristotle in Greece he too emphasized what today are called excellent character habits, however, sadly Aristotle didn’t build the same kind of tolerant feelings Confucius did for all peaceful peoples. And in the West Voltaire eventually saw tolerance as essential to democratic growth. Such excellent habit-arts encourage us to use our own precious energies peacefully rather than meanly and destructively, except of course when you're appointed district Chief of Police, like Confucius. When that happened he wasn't afraid to teach people respect for the law by throwing them in jail.
We Deweyan liberals continue celebrating these kinds of habit-arts, especially in our public schools. They may be growing, but they’re certainly not everywhere. Even in supposedly 'liberated and enlightened' communist Russia many people are still fearful about sharing their rights equally with gays and lesbians, and also demanding more democratic forms of government. In Russia, China, Cuba, and many other countries life is still run from the top down, so to speak, just like ancient conservative and moderate Greeks pictured nature itself. To us Deweyan liberals, however, it’s just another sign our educational systems still aren’t as democratic and liberal as they could be. After all, if 4 Billion years of natural evolution teach us anything, it's that nature is a natural diversity-producing system, and with that in mind here’s yet another in a series of loquaciously lame limericks.
There once was a youngster named Smithy,
Whose thinking was rather pithy.
But an educated voice,
Soon offered a choice.
What do you want to experiment withy?