Beyond Alienation

[coberst]

Beyond Alienation

 

When I speak of alienation I am speaking about wo/man’s alienation from his or her nature. I am speaking of the fragmentation of the individual. I am speaking of the fact that part of what we are is being defiled and rejected by the manner in which we live in our society.

 

A general theory of alienation would be a body of knowledge about how human freedom and responsible choice is constricted. Evil is that which makes it impossible for sapiens to realizing their potential; this knowledge would be an expression of what are responsible human powers and how society limits the expression of those powers.

 

Emerson, considered by many as the top moralist in American history, understood these facts when he stated the important challenge to all wo/men to be self-reliance. He felt that self-reliance was the “keynote of American democracy”. Whatever should limit human self-reliance works against the nature of wo/man. The great challenge to education was to develop a comprehensive theory of the limitations of self-reliance and to teach this to all Americans.

 

To achieve such a goal demanded that science comprehend what all humans strive for. Emerson was convinced that sapiens strived after meaning and the creation of meaning. The crux of self-reliance then was how to advance the self-creation of human meaning.

 

Our habit of seeking accustomed satisfactions prevents us from finding new sources of energy with which to see or create new meanings. Blind habit controls our every turn. Familiar modes of thought and accustomed perceptions lock our imagination and will into a strait jacket of passivity.

 

What tool is available to break this passive mold of inaction and apathy? It is playful imagination that can lead us from the jailhouse we have trapped our self within. We need to remind our self of Plato’s wise expression that the gods are happiest when man plays. This playful attitude applies both to our sciences as well as our arts. It applies to all of wo/man’s symbolic activities.

 

Physicists found the world inside the atom to be non-intuitive. The world inside the atom seemed to be totally different from our world. Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy was about an alien world. If, however, we were able to climb into the atomic world it is quite possible that the principle of indeterminacy would be ‘just doing what comes naturally’.

 

Some of history’s great thinkers have penetrated into the human mind long before Freud. Rousseau, for example, comprehended an aspect of “unconscious motivation”. “The moral of this anecdote is that the honest man can see through himself even quicker than the honest scientist can see through nature.”

 

We could have comprehended the science of the human condition much sooner than we did and the reason we did not is because of the “intolerance of method, the claims to exclusivity, the doctrine of a single valid approach to the study of man…The place where this took its greatest toll was in the fragmentation of the disciplines, the isolation of the various approaches to man. But undoubtedly the most harmful intolerance of all was the intolerance of philosophy in the science of man.”

 

In the reaction to various philosophical speculations, the scientific community in the mid-nineteenth century shouted ‘no more speculations were needed about the nature of man’. The scientific community followed by the population in general decided that it was only important to discover what was going on within the organism. Psychiatry became uncompromisingly organismic. Science failed to see that its methods were narrowing significantly humanities real striving.

 

Pragmatism at the end of the nineteenth century was a response to this narrow scientific approach toward the “science of man”. It became obvious that we must understand what wo/man is striving for, “as a part of nature, as a dimension of life”.

 

Rousseau taught us that humans wanted meaning and maximum conviction but a major question that the scientific method could not resolve “What was behind all of man’s peculiar urges, what he was trying to do as a vehicle of the life force? For only if we could understand this abstract problem could we answer the greatest practical puzzle of all: What were the possibilities of life on the level of human existence; and, conversely, what was there about the human condition that was hopeless?”

 

What are the limitations and possibilities for human life? Is it possible for humans to live in harmony or is war a necessary component of human activity?

 

Ideas and quotes from “Beyond Alienation” by Ernest Becker

[nutronjon]

Ouch, your last questions took me in a completely different direction from your beginning explanations. May I say, literacy in the Greek and Roman classics, could be very helpful here? That would be a liberal education. Ancient mythology is awesome insight into the nature of man. The Greeks decided it is our nature to be political. They tell us an unexamed life isn't worth living. They also explain our character differences very well. The Gods and Goddesses are arche types, and we can learn a lot about ourselves by studying them.

 

Hades is both the ruler of the under world and the name of the place. We must all go to Hades for a sense of meaning. However, it is very easy to get lost in Hades, and we should never enter without the help of the Gods. To be lost in Hades is to be depressed, or worse, psychotic. I think it is a mistake to give Fraud so much credit for what we call psychology, and to ignore mythology.

 

Everywhere in the world, story telling / mythology, told people what it is that makes a person a good person. We learn what it is to be a hero, and to achieve the acceptence or even admiration of those we live with. Mythology transitions youth to adulthood and unites people. Public education used mythology for transmitting a culture, uniting us into a strong nation, and preparing individuals for citizenship. It is the most cost effective way to maintain social cost at there lowest level, and the only way to protect our liberty. It also prevents the human suffering that has greatly increased in the US.

 

Education for technology, stopped transmitting a culture. It stopped preparing the young for good moral judgement and left moral training to the church. This lead to the rapid advancement of technology, social chaos, and a society that does not have the wisdom to use this technology. Interestingly, it is exactly as Zeus feared, with the technology of fire, we have discovered all other technologies and now rival the Gods.

 

There are only two ways of having social order, culture or authority over the people. Since we stopped transmitting a culture, that leaves only authority over the people. We are being united by fear and war, not culture, and this is about to get very ugly, if our economy falls. Since we left moral training to the church, we wrongly believe only the church can know God and morals, returning us to external authority over our lives, instead of internalized authority. Only highly moral people can have liberty, and we now only have authority over us, as opposed to internalized morality, and wrongly believing only Christians can teach morality, which is dependent on belief in an external authority that rewards or punishes people. If we do not realize what we have done to our society and take immediate corrective steps, I am afraid we all take a walk through Hades, without the Gods.

 

Human nature? we have learned from primitive cultures, that when a culture is destroyed, and especially when life becomes insecure and unpredictable, our human nature isn't like the Gods at all, but falls to the lowest animal level. Families break up, and the children are neglected, alcoholism and suicide skyrocket. What makes us human is what we learn. Underneath are animals that can not function in large collectives. Our brains are too biologically limited for us to function in large collectives without a learned culture to tell us how to function.

[coberst]

Nutronjon

 

The following is my response to LaurieAG and is my response to you here.

 

Nutronjon has a phrase “educating for democracy” that captures the domain of action that is very important here. We no longer educate our young people for democracy.

 

It seems to me that until we have a bottom-up demand to do so there is little hope for changing our public policy of educating for technology. Public policy is in the hands of Corporate America and while that is the case there is little likelihood of change.

 

How is it possible to develop a bottom-up demand for change in our educational policy?

 

Only when a sizable group of citizens recognize the problem will change be possible. Our educational system will not produce individuals with the sophistication to recognize the problem until it changes its policy. Thus adults must manage to pull them selves up by there own boot straps. Adults must become more intellectually sophisticated through self-learning to recognize the problem and thereby to force the change.

 

Adults must take up the responsibility to educate them selves for democracy so that they can provide the bottom-up demand for change that is required.

 

We adults must make a conscious effort to understand our present culture and the human sciences, which will allow us to create a better culture than we now have.

[nutronjon]

Wow, do I appreciate your concern. I wish everyone knew, our shared concern, and Bush's military action are one and the same thing. The US could throw every weapon in the ocean, and it would still be living under military order instead of family order. This is a very serious problem that will effect how we get through economic collapse. Our materialistic, consumer values, and weak family values, could throw our nation into the chaos of the fall of Rome if the predicted recession, becomes a depression, as some think it may, because instead of coming together, we are now more apt to rip apart, and be at each others throats. We face a problem equal to dependency on the pharaoh when a long and harsh draught brings an empire to its knees. We are no longer self reliant and feeling empowered to resolve problems together. We no longer think of our democracy as one for all and all for one. We think such thinking is the evil of "communism" a godless, false belief. Our expectations of our leaders are very unrealistic.

 

What does education for democracy mean? I means reading the Greek and Roman Classics. The best book to buy is titled "Great Political Thinkers" and it is published so often, you should be able to get it in a used book store or on-line. If you read this book, you will instantly appreciate that democracy was found in these classics, not the bible which is a book about kings and slaves. Liberal education included classical education, especially at the college level. This would be the education of Thomas Jefferson and the literate people of his time. This is the literacy that defends democracy. Especially Cicero is important reading.

 

When we mobilized for the first world war, a naval recruiter spoke at the National Education Association, and called our liberal education a mistake. He spoke of the technological development in Germany and its rapid military victories. We have to admire Germany's accomplishments. Honestly, it was just a little nation that dared to take on the world, and had the US not joined the allies, the Germans would rule. Folks, get over your false national pride, and realize, when it came to military technology, Germany was superior, and the naval officer who spoke at the 1917 National Education Association Conference, argued we must immitate Germany. Basically his plee was ignored, until 1958, when the cold war, following on the heels of the second world war, and Sputnik, resulted in the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which replaced our liberal education with education for technology for military and industrial purpose.

 

Understand this, until the military technology of WWII, our national defense depended on patriotism, therefore, we retained education for democracy. It took over a year to mobilize for war, and the world wars involved every man, woman and child. Today, we can do more damage in 4 hours, than several troops could have done in many months. Especially the ability to fly across oceans and drop atom bombs, made the rapid advancement of military technology essential to national defense. Please, chew on this for a moment. Grasp the importance of the change in education, then let your mind ponder the ramificactions, such as, we no longer have the social organization that got us through wars and the Great Depression, and therefore, we are set to fall as past civilizations fell.