Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Archives for June 2016

Wisdom Wednesday: Proverbs 22:13

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The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets.
(Proverbs 22:13)

Passages of scripture like this pose one of the greatest challenges for risk averse people. Many of us think we are wise for avoiding risk. And indeed, Proverbs itself says that the wise hides himself when there is obvious danger (22:3)*. This piece of good advice, as with all wise practices, can become a shield from personal responsibility (see Matthew 6 for Jesus’ discussion of this fact with regards to prayer, fasting, and even alms).

Often in life, we who are risk averse take the slothful route and claim that the time isn’t right for action because things aren’t perfect. My karate instructor said that the most common excuse he received from people skipping karate after a vacation was “I need to get back into shape first.” Some people won’t go to church because “I need to get right with the Lord first.” If you’re super risk averse then you’re probably waiting for circumstances to be exactly right, but you’ll actually be in the process of waiting when good circumstance pass you by. Check this actual sloth out:

I suppose he could have died crossing the road, but there is simply no such thing as a “perfect time” for a sloth to cross a road because it’s just gonna take him an hour to do it and during that time a car is gonna get him. No, I don’t know why he’s crossing the road; maybe he’s got a lady friend. Maybe he’s rescuing other sloths from a sloth villian. But the fact remains that the circumstances for good action would have passed him by if he’d waited too long to cross the road.

*The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.
(Proverbs 22:3) This verse is important for people who’ve ever said YOLO.

On Pedagogy: Transmission and Revision

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I’ve written a few posts that overlap with themes concerning education. But I think that, over all, good education has this main goal: it supports human happiness.

Of course, everything humans do is “for happiness,” just like every arrow is aimed at a target. But like arrows, decisions and processes can miss their mark. Education is no different. And just like how we do everything for happiness, we should make sure we define it happiness in terms of our specific nature as human beings. Happiness requires virtue (goods of the mind and soul), wealth (goods of the body and mind), and friends.

So, what makes education different from other activities of human happiness such as eating, sex, or meditation?

Education is Transmission

Education, perhaps more than any other domain of human activity relies upon the transmission of knowledge. This, is where people get confused. Knowledge is typically perceived as merely that which is accepted as true or mere cognitive content. But knowledge is actually more than this. The skills of civilization (virtues, customs, etc) constitute knowledge, attitudes and habits are learned, and one’s vision of the goal of humanity (hardly what many consider knowledge) is also a form of knowledge. Knowledge is certainly cognitive content, but it also includes “know-how,” bodily, emotional, social, and habitual information which can be difficult to put into precise words (because it is non-verbal in nature).

In this sense then, if the purpose of education is human happiness/flourishing and the nature of education is the transmission of knowledge and information it must be said that education is the transmission of knowledge that tends toward happiness in a way that tends toward happiness. Observe that while “getting a job” or “making money” are not the chief end of education, happiness includes have the goods of the body and therefore having money/food are part of the purpose of education. In other words, education is the transmission of tradition for happiness.

Education is Revision

But education cannot merely be the transmission of a settled body of information for several reasons: human beings find new knowledge, the world changes in ways that old knowledge cannot always anticipate, and human beings have different callings, personalities, and skills. Education must be attuned to the individuality of each person and to giving human beings the capacity for finding the limits of older knowledge in order to add to it, reapply it, and reformulate it for whatever present situation exists. In this sense, education must be personal.

But if education is in its nature personal and for the purpose of happiness, then it must be personal for the purpose of happiness. Education cannot be personal with respect to allowing tradition to die (for traditions survived a process of natural selection that makes them robust and even antifragile). On the other hand, traditions must be questioned for their veracity, effectiveness, and applicability. An example of this might be the tradition claiming that everybody in the medieval era believed that the earth was flat. I learned some version of that claim every year I took history. Then I found out that it was absolutely false using the research skills I had gained in high school English. Another tradition is going to college right out of high school. This tradition, while at one point, made tremendous sense for some people is treated as a gold standard of life advice (knowledge). It really should be questioned by students because schools won’t question it for them…the survival of many universities often depends upon this tradition remaining intact.

In this sense then, for education to be truly helpful for human happiness, educators (and students themselves) must aim to create a sense in students that while they should be grateful and try to benefit from the past, they must be willing to be independent of it in order to seek truth and virtue.

Conclusion

True education it seems has three elements:

  1. The transmission of knowledge and habits.

  2. The building up and equipping of individual persons for their unique circumstances in light of their personalities and potentials.

  3. The intended goal of human happiness.

Mental Models

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There are many models we can use to understanding the world. When I took college history my professor told us that there were several paradigms for interpreting the events of history: economic, philosophical, national, geographical, and religious. He would say that some of these paradigms are more appropriate to a situation than others, but that none of them were right or wrong because every major human event involves all of these paradigms. Outside of academics there is still significant need for good mental models. Most of us just use one.

It’s important to have more than one model because if we try to simple view things as they appear to us we’ll inevitably reduce our experiences to the model most convenient to us or believe whatever our brains make up to bring sensibility to a world too big to interpret.

What I mean by a mental model is a sort of simplified way of interpreting things that, alone would be a distortion of reality, but is necessary to think of exclusively in order to see the insights it offers. An example would be seeing the world as a machine. The world is manifestly not a machine. But to see it as a machine helps physicists find efficient and material causes of things.

Other models include:

  1. Everything is sales.
  2. Everything is tribal.
  3. Everything is sex.
  4. Everything is true or false.
  5. Everything is economics.
  6. Success is having energy.
  7. Everything is moral.
  8. Everything is spiritual.

None of these are complete and life is more than each of them. But your brain cannot interpret the whole universe at once. But it can interpret more of the universe at once through an incomplete filter.

What mental models have I left out?

Beginning Christian Spirituality

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The central reality of Christian spirituality is this:

John 8:31-32  So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, (32)  and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

There is a startling array of things that a new Christian can do or that people will recommend to them.

There are (and this is good) like 50 spiritual disciplines to choose from.

There are a million Bible reading plans.

There are 25 million prayer books.

But I want to simplfy things.

When you first become a Christian or want to be more serious about your faith in Christ, here is a three step plan to help you for the first few months.

  1. Say the Lord’s prayer daily. Jesus said to pray this way. God answers prayers according to his will and what prayer is more in line with God’s will than one Jesus said to pray?
  2. Read a chapter of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). These are the books about Jesus. If you want to “abide in” Jesus’ words, you’ve got to know them.
  3. Read a chapter of Proverbs a day and read the chapter that corresponds with the date (31 chapters in the book).

I recommend writing in a journal when you read. This will help you to do three things:

  1. Write questions.
  2. Write down what you’ve learned about Jesus, his greatness, his teachings, and about daily nuts and bolts wisdom.
  3. Write down what you could do better in life.

I suspect that a plan like this would be very helpful for busy parents, people who hate reading, long time Christians who do not know Jesus very well, or Christian academics who study the Bible for work but who do not store it in their hearts.

Politics is Pro-Wrestling

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How is politics pro-wresting?

  1. It’s fake, most of the people are lying and often the enemies are friends in the locker room (though in the history of pro-wrestling real fights break out amongst the giant, steroid infused alpha-males because they’re all vying for attention from the promoter and the fans for more money).
  2. It’s fun. Most of the people are doing it for fun/because they like it.
  3. It’s based on spectacle.
  4. It’s tribal. People get so emotionally attached to personae that principle, results, and data have very little to do with their allegiance to this or that person/party.
  5. People think it’s real.
  6. People get hurt in real life because of it.
This explains Trump’s rise (what happens below is a description of Trump in terms of pro-wrestling, not in terms of political support, policy, or morality):
  1. He admited it’s all fake and then started claiming to hate the people he pretended to befriend in the locker room (Clinton’s, etc). This way he can lie with a twinkle in his eye and his fans love him for it.
  2. He’s clearly having fun. And he’s been sued for having American flags too big for city ordinances on his properties…so he may (whether he’s right or wrong) really be a patriot. And because his character (him in real life?) loves high stakes games, he’s playing really hard.
  3. Trump creates spectacle on purpose…he even released a tape of himself pretending to be his own public relations manager to create controversy a few weeks ago.
  4. Trump, like Hillary with women, has decided to act as a tribal leader. But his act attempts to make him the leader for every caste of Americans who feel cheated by politics and Wall Street. In fact, I’ve checked his twitter mentions and people tweet him regularly thanking him for how his books have changed their lives. These tweets are remarkably similar to the ones sent to Hulk Hogan.
  5. Trump, by pulling back the curtain, has alerted the American public to just how awful all these people who run for office typically are. Think of all the people who claim to be too principle-based to make petty attacks, while they pettily attack Trump (this really has been for the best).
  6. Trump has criticized the war in Iraq, let people whose family members have been murdered by illegal immigrants speak at his rallies, and named specific companies who are moving their factories overseas to save on manufacturing costs as a result of cheap labor provided by bad trade deals made by congress. These people have really been hurt. In wrestling real injuries addsto the belief that it’s real. In politics, it makes people mad because politicians and their concern for the citizenry is clearly fake but the results hurt people who aren’t even playing.
Previously, I wrote about how reality is a simulation, like pro-wrestling.

The World is a Simulation

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The world probably isn’t a simulation.

Your senses give you access to the real world, but that access is still mediated.

Your perceptions can be inaccurate, your inferences can be wrong, and there can be data you missed out on.

A great deal of your worldview is false.

Another significant amount of it is not quite false, but simply fictional. It could turn out to be true, but we don’t know.

I’m not a global skeptic, I think that you and I can know things about the world through a sort of give and take between our minds, the minds of others, and the rest of the cosmos.

But just as viewing the world as a machine helps physicists ignore data to the contrary to find material and efficient causes in the world. But the world isn’t a machine.

Similarly, viewing the world as a simulation can help you control your life.

How so?

If so much of your worldview is false or simply made up, then you can choose which parts are significant, which parts to rewrite, and which parts simply do not exist (insofar as you give them no thought).

Eventually, as Dallas Willard reminds us, reality is the merciless “what” that we crash into when we’re wrong.

But the model (not complete or necessarily true in itself) of the universe, it being a simulation (rather your worldview being the simulation of the real world outside your mind), can be helpful.

If your down or feel like you can’t get out of a rut, decide to play the version of the simulation where you make good choices all day.

These are some thoughts.