Since the subject of Karl Marx has come up in the last couple of posts, I thought I would share a personal story of how I first came to learn his theories. Unsurprisingly, it happened when I went to university. Since I decided to do first year sociology, hearing about Marx was not surprising. What was surprising was a certain revelation that came from our tutor, who was a self-declared Marxist.
While introducing himself in the very first class of the semester, the tutor told the class he only worked part-time at the university. His second job involved stacking shelves at one of Australia’s largest supermarket chains. He wasn’t doing it for the money, he told us. Rather, he was bringing down the system from within by stealing from the supermarket at every opportunity. This declaration of criminal activity earned a snigger from several students in the class, even though it wasn’t meant as a joke. It did sound kind of lame coming from a middle-aged man who was supposed to be in a position of authority.
Later in the semester, we finally got round to learning some Marxist theory, which our tutor delivered with great passion. By then, I’d realised that I was the odd one out in the class because I had actually done several working-class jobs before entering university. Although I couldn’t be sure, because I never asked him, I would wager that our shoplifting tutor had never worked a factory job. Meanwhile, the other students that I got to know seemed to largely be from wealthier demographics.
I’d had five years’ experience as a member of the “proletariat” by the time I started uni. Mostly, that was through my father’s small manufacturing business where I’d been working during school holidays ever since I was 13. As part of that work, I’d also seen the inside of several large manufacturing sites including with the giant Australian mining company BHP, and I’d taken a couple of other summer jobs to earn some cash.
The result of all this was that I had an unusually large amount of empirical knowledge to draw on when trying to understand Marx. I realised quickly that Marxist theory seemed to have very little to do with my lived experience of being a worker. This is not surprising when you consider that Marx himself never worked in a factory. He was an intellectual. The same was true of most of the big-name socialists: Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Lenin, Stalin etc. One notable exception, who we’ll return to later, is Robert Owen.
Of course, it has to be said that the conditions I faced as a worker were far superior to those which obtained when Marx was writing in the 19th century. Especially in Australia, the modern working class enjoys decent wages and conditions, generous overtime provisions, and all the other benefits that have been fought for over the last two centuries. Nevertheless, the core of Marxist theory is not about these details, and the ongoing attraction of Marx is largely theoretical and ideological in nature. Marx did get some things right, but it was the things he got wrong that stood out to me even as an 18 year old.
One of those is the concept of the alienation of labour. Marx believed that the ability to produce was what separated man from the animals. Therefore, production should be an expression of individuality. We can contrast this position with the ancient Greek philosophers for whom it was the ability to think that separated man from the beasts. Nevertheless, according to Marx, workers were alienated from their work because they didn’t get to choose what to produce. Their individuality was stifled, and their lives lacked meaning as a result.
Although I think there is a kernel of truth in this idea, what stood out to me at the time was how little alienation there had been in my lived experience of work. Marxist theory predicted that I should have been alienated, yet that wasn’t true, and I didn’t believe it to be true of most of the people I had worked with. Now that I have a lot more experience in the matter, I can confidently state that the most alienating and meaningless jobs tend to be those in the professional realm and not traditional working class employment.
Work can be physically exhausting, dirty, and dangerous, but if it’s meaningful, you don’t feel alienation. On the other hand, a high-paying, high-status job is alienating if it is meaningless. The work I had been doing in the factory was dirty, difficult, and dangerous. But it was meaningful because it produced things that were actually of value. We could see the results of the work and we knew to what purpose they would be put. That’s why nobody there was alienated.
Another reason why the factory job was not alienating was because of the camaraderie among the workers. It was this aspect that was arguably the most valuable to me at the time. The factory was an all-male affair and it gave me what amounted to an initiation into the world of manhood. I was now part of a team and I was expected to contribute. If I screwed up my part of the job, I would let everybody else down and create extra work. I had been given a small measure of responsibility and I was directly accountable to others.
That dynamic creates a tight-knit group that’s very similar to a sports team. Unlike (amateur) sports, however, if you screw up in a work setting, you become a burden to others, a fact that they will remind you about ad nauseum. Keep screwing up and you’ll lose your job. Because there are real consequences on the line, this raises the tension, but it also raises the feeling of achievement you get from successfully carrying out your part of the work. That satisfaction increases as you improve your skills and win the respect of your workmates.
Although it’s politically incorrect to speak about it these days, there’s an aspect of masculinity that is revealed in such settings. Throw a group of men together to carry out a task, and they effortlessly, unconsciously, and automatically arrange themselves into a meritocratic hierarchy. Something like this has been happening ever since the first group of men decided to get together and hunt animals, i.e., for pretty much all of human history.
I’ve never been part of a hunting party, but I’m pretty sure a small-scale factory setting bears a lot of resemblance. When you work together as a team, you learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, everybody knows who is the strongest guy in the factory, who can fix motors or electrical devices, and who can perform this or that skill to the highest level. None of this ever gets said explicitly. To the extent that it ever gets discussed, it is always via jokes and jibes which allow room for the development of the less practical but no less important skill of taking-the-piss.
For these reasons, my initiation into the working class was not alienating at all. It was about teamwork leading to friendship, the satisfaction of building skills and knowledge which I still use to this day, and also of earning reasonable money, which was certainly a welcome bonus for a teenage boy. Although I certainly had no idea about it at the time, I now realise it was a kind of male initiation ritual, very similar to that which young men have been going through since time immemorial.
This way of viewing it also brings into doubt Marx’s theoretical opposition between capitalist and worker. If we assume that men automatically form hierarchies, then the fact that there is a manger is not surprising. In fact, there are very good practical reasons why there has to be a “boss”. There’s a reason why hunting parties, military platoons, sports teams, or manufacturing businesses all have leaders. A hierarchy is adhered to because everybody intuits that it is required to get the job done.
The problems come when somebody challenges the hierarchy, usually implying a disagreement with the implied or overt leader. It’s always astounded me how groups can form themselves so easily and work together with no explicit coordination for long periods of time and then instantly fall apart over the most trivial disagreement. We seem to have an instinct that lets us get along in groups but no instinct about how to handle conflict.
The British liberal tradition solved this problem by making work into a contract which either party could terminate. Thus, if you disagree with your boss, you can just quit. When we look back at 19th-century capitalism, however, the clear problem was that workers had no real option to quit because they had no wealth or unemployment benefits. But the more important problem was that the power dynamic between capitalists and workers massively favoured the former. Many capitalists abused that power, as most humans do when they find themselves in such a situation. That’s not a problem of capitalism, it’s a problem of human nature.
One way to address that would be to enact policies that tilt the scales in favour of the workers. If you make labour scarce, you create conditions where capitalists have to compete by offering better pay and conditions. That’s what ended up happening through unionisation and the democratic process.
However, the incremental progress of democracy did not appeal to Marx and the other socialists. They wanted to rearrange the entire political structure through a dictatorship of the proletariat, which invariably ended up becoming a dictatorship of a dictator, as the 20th century showed in great detail. In this respect, it’s worth comparing Marx and his intellectual colleagues against another prominent 19th-century socialist, Robert Owen.
Whereas Marx, Engels, and most other socialists were intellectuals, Robert Owen was born into a working-class family and received very little formal education. At the tender age of 10, he started an apprenticeship as a draper. By his late teens, he had become an entrepreneur, investing in new enterprises. By his late 20s, he owned and ran a large-scale fabric-manufacturing business.
Several things differentiate Owen from the average socialist intellectual. Firstly, he worked his way up from the bottom, doing the hard work of learning a trade and then rising through the ranks to positions of management. Owen started as a worker and then became a capitalist. His empathy for workers came from direct experience, not theoretical considerations.
Secondly, Owen’s intellectual activity was an outgrowth of this real-world experience. It was not divorced from practical concerns. Thirdly, and most importantly, Owen put his ideas into practice by changing the way he ran his company. This enabled him to try things and judge the results. Later, he would take what he had learned and launch various experiments, such as the establishment of co-operatives and intentional communities.
Because Owen was empirically testing his ideas, and because he was implementing them on a relatively small scale, he was able to judge the results with more precision and clarity. Most of his projects failed, often in very quick order. One of his associates on one project quipped that all they had done was to reproduce the French Revolution on a smaller scale. Just like the French Revolution, the projects started with grand ideals but quickly got punched in the face by reality. Meanwhile, the one area where Owen had long-term success was in the management of the business that he himself owned and was directly involved in.
Here is where the link back to Marx and Engels becomes important. One of the main overarching differences between the continental and Anglo societies of this period was that the Anglo societies, including and especially the USA, were empirical and entrepreneurial in nature. They were full of men like Owen who put theory into action and learned the pain of failure first hand. By contrast, the continental tradition was full of academics like Marx and Engels who had no practical experience in trade or organisational management but who had a lot of wonderful ideas about changing the world through political action.
Marx and Engels were the precursors to the middle-class intellectuals that have come to dominate in our time. They were born into relative wealth and were educated prior to having any real-world experience. Even though they claimed to speak on behalf of the working class, their most devoted followers were other middle and upper class people. While the working class had genuine reason to want to change the system, the middle and upper classes were actually the beneficiaries of it. Why, then, were they interested in the theories of Marx and Engels?
That is a question that probably requires a book to answer. The deeply weird kind of self-loathing that exists in our time among educated Westerners is not a new thing. It goes back at least to the start of the 19th century. One of the outcomes is that this class of people convinced themselves that it was permissible to break the established rules in the name of ideology, for example by stealing stuff from supermarkets. This was seen to be necessary in order to bring about the leap into the socialist utopia. It was in opposition to the incremental and iterative approach of capitalism and democracy.
Thus, Marx and Engels actually criticised Owen for the fact that he was a “capitalist”. It’s not hard to see that his pragmatic approach was kind of a bummer because it seemed to show that the grand theories were not all they were cracked up to be. In terms of broader social dynamics, it’s still true in our time that the leisured classes prefer to be swept up in grand ideologies rather than deal with the difficult work of organisation.
We shouldn’t neglect the romantic appeal of it all. Engels was a handsome young man who swanned about Europe speaking passionately about revolution. In the process, he enchanted more than his fair share of young ladies. He was very similar to Byron, Wagner, and the other romantic poets, philosophers, and artists of the era.
The bourgeoisie were dedicated, disciplined, and hard-working, but also mostly invisible. They had a full-time job keeping their organisations running and had little time left over for political activity. By contrast, the intellectuals were dramatic, exciting, and inspiring, and they had nothing better to do than organise political rebellion.
The contrast between these two archetypes of the romantic intellectual and the hard-nosed capitalist still sits at the heart of many current issues, although the reality is that the intellectuals have been dominant ever since WW2. One of the obvious ways in which that is true is that about a third of the public now attends university. In the post-war years, we have set about creating a society not of the bourgeoisie but of intellectuals in the vein of Marx and Engels.
The result has been predictable: ideology over pragmatism. Communist utopias are no longer fashionable, but it’s not hard to see that climate change, renewable energy, saving the world from pandemics and many other issues fit the bill. The yawning chasm between the practicalities involved and the promises of the ideology is of no concern to the intellectuals who push such schemes. Vague utopian visions with no definable criteria for success are a feature, not a bug. Political activity is the end in itself. It is the way in which dominance is exercised.
By contrast, when we look at the Robert Owenses, Thomas Edisons, or Henry Fords of the world, we find men who received almost no formal education. They were autodidacts who started life very poor, got a trade or other working-class job, and then worked their way upwards. Their skills at organisation came from practical experience, not intellectual reasoning.
Even though it was this latter demographic which built the modern world in which we live, it should be obvious that it is the ideologues who have taken over. How that happened probably also needs a whole book to answer. But there’s one unappreciated point to make.
The weird self-loathing of the intellectual class has been matched by an equally strange inferiority complex on the part of the bourgeoisie. They genuinely thought that the philosophers and intellectuals had access to a kind of knowledge that they themselves lacked. Possibly this was the result of their lack of formal schooling. As Chesterton once quipped, the point of education is to learn not to take educated people seriously. Many of the most successful bourgeoisie never had the chance to learn that lesson, and still to this day the working class happily send their children off to university to learn how to shoplift.
Makes me think of “Things That Aren’t Doing the Thing” (https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-thing).
Intellectuals spend inordinate amounts of time and energy not doing the thing. It is a perverse form of laziness.
In the real world people simply do the thing, and engender disrespect to those who do not.
Daniel – exactly. There’s also an interesting social dynamic there. In a setting where physical work is being done, it is obvious to anybody who is and is not doing the work. That’s why there’s a meme about the people standing around watching. In a professional setting, however, there’s no obvious way to know who is really working and who is wasting time. That insight only comes with experience. Hence, you get hugely expensive projects where almost nothing gets delivered even though people looked like they were working the whole time.
Simon – We need to differentiate between healthy and toxic types of capitalism and democracy.
Healthy capitalism: based on hard work, honest investment, personal risk, wise reflection, humility to admit mistakes and cut losses, networking and trading with others of the same wise and virtuous ilk, creation of goods and services that are actually needed for long term health and happiness.
Toxic Capitalism: based on pretending to do the above.
Healthy Democracy: based on giving voting power to those who are capable of recognising and putting forth wise, perceptive, humble, compassionate, greedless, courageous, forgiving, honest, trustworthy, knowledgable well-expressed and inspiring leaders.
Toxic Democracy: based on pretending to do the above.
Jinasiri – I know what you mean, although technically your definition of capitalism could apply to feudal guilds or most other economic systems. Marx would certainly disagree with you 😉
I think what makes capitalism and democracy so problematic is that the normal state of affairs is for them to be in a seeming state of corruption. If they have a saving grace, it’s that they allow course correction eventually.
“One of the main overarching differences between the continental and Anglo societies of this period was that the Anglo societies, including and especially the USA, were empirical and entrepreneurial in nature.”
As a German I would completely disagree with this. I come from a heavy industry area. The German capitalists of the 19th century are everywhere. Lakes are named after them, monuments have been errected in their name. Museums (and Ruins of their factories) celebrate their achievements. Germany was on the verge of taking over the British Empire in the 19th century as the second largest economy of the world. They would not have achieved that without the work of guys like August Thyssen. In comparison, Karl Marx basically had to flee every country where he set his foot into…
Well, if Mr Marx is disagreeing with me, I must be onto something.
What you say about medieval guilds is the crux. In the presence of virtue pretty much any system that has pedigree will work. Feudalism seems to have the longest pedigree though. It probably came to an end not because it’s a historical dinosaur that was bound to go extinct and be superceded by capitalism, but because the virtue of it’s leaders got lost. I’m willing to bet every cent I have – a game rigged in my favour, of course – that if a modern democratic and capitalist country could produce a virtuous religious, political and business leadership class, it would naturally by way of voluntary and wisdom based feedback loops end up looking a lot feudalism in its hey day in iron age India.
… which btw was actually highly democratic in some places. Democracy can work in the long run, but universal sufferage isn’t a keeper. It can give good returns via things like successful labour movements, but it’s too hard to maintain high levels of virtue and wisdom in the population at large. Unelected and unaccountable idiots in charge is one problem. Idiots elected by idiots is another. Limited sufferage plus culture, rites of passage and rituals that maintain high levels of virtue and wisdom in the leadership class are probably the minimum ingredients to a sustainably successful and peaceful society.
Secretface – that’s a fair point. It’s not well-remembered how quickly Germany caught up to Britain once it adopted the capitalist model. Still, millions of Germans moved to the USA for a reason. Even Richard Wagner was considering moving to the US later in his life because of what he saw as the restricted possibilities at home. It was a relative difference, not an absolute one.
Jinasiri – agreed. The Catholic Church brought on the Reformation by being almost cartoonishly corrupt. The medieval guilds started as a way to ensure prices and wages stayed high, a good thing to ensure high quality production, and ended up abusing their power. We’re seeing similar levels of corruption now in the globalist paradigm. That is one reason to suspect that it is going away.
Simon – ah yes. But even if the approaching reset manages to create something better,
can we understand human nature enough to prevent a long term repeat of human nature?
Jinasiri – as I alluded to in last week’s post, if human nature is the Journey into the Sacred, then what we are living through IS human nature. The possibility of transcending out of human nature is an issue that many religions have dealt with and they all seem to assume that it won’t happen here on earth.
Hi Simon. Historically only a few thoughtful folk (who were generally wealthy) could become the great intellectuals as they had the time to pursue their particular topic, whereas the more thoughful poor folk had to use their time to work to live. However with the rise of the internet anyone can put their great intellectual theories out into the world. I think of those folk as the ‘arm chair theorists’ – interestingly solar power attracts alot of those types. Full of great ideas, with no application in the real world. One of my own crappy theories is that the traditional working class is being replaced by the university educated professional class who have large amounts of mortgage debt. Instead of traditional working class working to survive, these modern day professional working class folk are essentially working for the bank so that they aren’t homeless.
Sandra
Sandra – good point. But now imagine that the armchair theorist says, “Hey, I’ve come up with a great idea to re-organise the whole of society. We just have to follow my theory.” That’s the mentality that’s become dominant and it’s only gotten worse since we sent everybody off to school for 16 years to study theories instead of actually doing things in the real world. Hence, the avalanche of stupid ideas we have to put up with these days.
Simon – all but, perhaps, one. Early Buddhism. Whether its social visions are anything more than a pipe dream though is for the experimental monks of today to find out by wagering their lives😉. We’ll give you the results in 50 years.
It’s also the only one where faith (or, better, conviction) is 100% rational, which makes yay-saying in the face of the fact of suffering a real possibility.
… btw what’s your read on Unit? Being semi-backed by gold, will it be a force for de-abtractification?
What is the social vision for Early Buddhism?
As for Unit, we’ve been hearing about a BRICS currency for more than a decade now. When they actually have a trading desk open that survives the few runs on the gold, then I’ll pay attention.
Hmmm. There’s a toughie. Let’s see if I can wrap it into a sentence or two.
“Scalable, nested and interconnected small to medium sized voluntary communities built upon, at every level, both mediated (ie. reliance on bhikkhu Saṅgha) and direct connection to the Divine and what lies behind it (Nibbāna), all to be systematically and artfully achieved and scrutinised by way of both individual and communal practice of the Noble Eightfold Path in its oldest formulations, in part or in whole, in this very life. The starting point being the radical transformation of all cost-benefit evaluations, something that naturally flows from bridging of the gap between self interest and altruism; which is, in turn, made possible by commitment to the working hypothesis that karma and rebirth are real, and that their existence is being or was reported by people who have attained the abilities to directly gather the relevant empirical evidence on that score.”
Interesting. I assume was tried in the early days but gave rise to something else (hence, the difference between “early” and “late” Buddhism)? Do we know why it was changed?
My hypothesis, substantially backed by textual records and personal experience. The monks became sedentary, then negligent, then corrupt.
> Do we know why it was changed?
There are tales in various Buddhist texts of entire kingdoms wholeheartedly embracing the Buddha Dharma and promptly departing this human realm en mass – ie they died out. Thus I don’t consider things have changed, rather what we have now is filtered by the descendants of those who “didn’t make it” to put things rather pointedly.
Jinasiri – that’s why I like the holy-sacred dichotomy (bit like yin-yang). Too much holiness leads to its own kind of corruption. We need the confrontation with the sacred every now and then to revitalise. (By contrast, in our time, we have too much sacredness and can never seem to regain wholeness).
Daniel – where do they go after the human realm?
> Where do they go after the human realm?
Short answer is to what is described as the heavenly realms. Now exactly what that means is a whole ‘nother question to which many a doctorate has been written by various scholars of the last two millennia.
In Buddhist cosmology there are uncountable worlds which are typically divided in to six realms through Hell, Hungry Ghost, Animal, Human, Jealous God, Godly. Many texts subdivide and categorise further in excruciating detail – scholars are a tad addicted to categorisation, and then arguing about it forevermore. But aside from that, the labels are being applied over a vast spectrum of experience, and in a fractal (or micro/macro) manner to boot. In a simplistic sense, the realms somewhat correspond to how rarefied the mind state is.
As I understand it, a mind close to enlightenment tends to naturally inhabit realms that are superficially similar to those of the Gods, hence the ‘heavenly realms’ but the state of being is fundamentally different to the gods themselves. An enlightened being has passed beyond any conceivable metaphor so the terminology is loose at best. The Buddha himself used the term Tathāgata, ‘thus gone’, ‘thus come’. A state not of ordinary conception.
A very deep rabbit hole is the Buddha Dharma.
Simon – me too. When monks are cloistered inside their ivory towers and strict hierarchies, they become blind to their own faults. That’s why the early monks never stayed in the one place for too long. Their lives were similar to those of tribal nomads. Hunting and gathering without the hunting. By regularly having to deal with the hardships of the road and meeting new people, sometimes in places where support was difficult to obtain and respect was thin or non-existent, they got plenty of feedback on how they really are on the inside compared to who they think they are. The problem with blind spots is they can’t be seen. We need exposure to regular initiation crises to rub them in our faces.
Daniel – No stories of that sort are found in the earliest strata of Buddhist literature. Nonetheless, the danger of running out of good men is acknowledged. The solution the historical Buddha expounded was that it was the responsibility of all advanced practitioners to pass their knowledge to others well before they died. The early Sangha was a democratic, anti-guru culture specifically ruled by the rule of law and and informal meritocracy, not by any individual nor oligarchs. By decentralising knowledge and power while also promoting individual cultivation inside a context of extremely modest material consumption, it was able to be both communally resilient and individually free.
I reckon the old model can be revived and it’s historical success repeated. Past revival failures don’t count because none of them have attempted to bring back the old nomadiscism properly, nor the ancient democratic legal code.
We working on it right now. We won’t be able to make calls on how it went for another few decades though.
Daniel – interesting. I once dipped my toe in some of the Hindu cosmology which I assume is of similar complexity. There did seem to be an awful lot of categories for things that supposedly transcend the subject-object dichotomy.
Jinasiri – a bit like the original journey of the monk Xuanzang from China to India to collect the Buddhist scriptures. It’s a cliche, but still true: the journey is the important part, not the destination.
Simon – Actually, both the journey and the destination are important. If only the journey is important then everything is meaningful which makes nothing meaningful. The problem with later Buddhist literature is it reifies non-dualism too early. The non-dual is the final goal. The Path however is to be performed in this world which can only be understood and made meaningful by way of dualism. Not everything is good. The Buddha of the early texts definitely taught there is good and evil, what should be done and what should not be done, and was happy to explain in fully rational terms why.
The Empire loves the modern Mindfulness movement because it brainwashes people into thinking it’s profound to think there is no good and evil – making them perfect donkeys for the carriage of evil.
Fa Xien was earlier the Xuan Zang, btw.
Yes, I agree. Although, I think that it’s a core part of the Sacred Cycle that you can’t know the destination until you get there. This touches on the differences in how we “know” things. It’s a statement of the obvious, but we can’t know-by-experience until we have actually experienced. The problem is a lot of people are not paying attention to the experience because they are too busy imagining the goal, for example, getting married because it’s the “right thing to do”.
Indeedy. The key is straddling both goal and path at the same time. Fashions in philosophy and spirituality seem to swing dialectically between the two, but people who get real results don’t get onto polemics on the side of one or the other. Loyalty deserves to go to both.
As you say, it really is applicable to the learning of any skill whatsoever, whether it be math, meditation, coding or prayer. Their is a sacred cycle wherein we move from the known to the unknown through a breaking of complacency, a taking up of faith, an overcoming of a challenge and arrival at a new state of knowledge and skillfulness. The reason why I think faith is 100% rational is because it is 100% irrational to not want to learn anything. But faith requires elders who prove themselves trustworthy. That’s why we have so many learned fools today. Secular education doesn’t ask anyone to make serious leaps of faith. So most just swim the same old waters while sprouting fancier terms for recurrences of ignorance and prejudice.
… as for marriage, etc: nothing is good or bad in and of itself. Things are made good if they are fit for and devoted to good purposes. I sigh internally every time I hear a bright young bud talking about the profundity of art for art’s sake or education for education’s sake or doing whatever for whatever’s sake. It’s for sure a poetical path nihilism and narcissism.
Marriage is one of those old institutions that has a good pedigree for doing good things for individual and societal maturation through the taming of passions required to make it work. So it’s potentially fit for good purposes. The problem is that people get married now without the slightest clue of what good purpose they might turn it towards ‘coz apparently values are just social illusions.
Although I’m a monk, I usually recommend young people get married so they can create a microcosm of Goodness called a “family”.
Well, this brings us back to the theme of this post. Modern education doesn’t work because it doesn’t present a challenge to be overcome, unless we define “challenge” as the regurgitation of facts and theories. It is quite extraordinary how far you can get with that kind of education. I see this in my profession. There are people who know what words to say and can use the tools properly, but they can’t actually solve a problem. They don’t know how to think about problems at all. It’s all just mimicry. And mimicry is everywhere around us. Politicians, media, experts, they all just mimic each other. That’s why they all use literally the same words and phrases. A Potemkin world.
… “phonies” like Catcher in the Rye. But it’s a superhuman task that most will fail to overcome the emotional trauma behind the phoniness without an elder who has already succeeded to guide and encourage. Real traditions are chains of eldership teaching humans to live dangerously in the journey of the Sacred. Phony traditions, are always offering insurance schemes and how real risk can be effective replaced with virtual risk.
If one lives in an age where the chain has died, and we have been for a while (not just in the West)- Nietzsche called it – it takes extraordinary individuals to restore the lineage. His mistake though was that he thought the challenge was in the Superhuman Will to just make up values, believe in them and recreate the world based on bootstrapped belief. Actually, it’s about risking one’s life and ego to discover them. I think that’s what Parsifal is about.
That’s my reading, but you’d know better …
Simon,
“Modern education doesn’t work because it doesn’t present a challenge to be overcome, unless we define “challenge” as the regurgitation of facts and theories.”
– I once had an idea to change requierments for a Bs.c on chrmistry to – put the student in a lab with all of the chemicals and equipment required to carry out a nontrivial preperation, say distillation.
There will be people standing by to make sure you are not doing anything dangorous but otherwise you have yo carry out the process by yourself. I still think that while impractical, this could be effective in training chemists, knowing you have to pay attention for three years because this stuff will matter when you have to actually do something.
Jinasiri – hah! Don’t get me started on Nietzsche and Parsifal. Actually, Parsifal is the story of the Orphan who is sent away by the Elder without initiation. Nietzsche understood the meaning and lived it through his philosophy.
Bakbook – a challenge can only be a challenge if there’s a real risk that something will go wrong. The teacher’s job is not to just throw the student in the deep end (although sometimes that can work) but to steadily ratchet up the level of the challenge so the student keeps developing. Anything else is just kabuki theatre.
Simon – After three years of studying chemistry, shouldn’t a student be prepared to conduct simple lab work? I simply suggest making the final test practical, rather than just solving exam questions.
I think there is actually a difference between lab work and theory. In any case, why wait three years? Why not just teach the student using a combination of the practical and theoretical?