Ep2: The Fault is in Our Stars... Or is It?

human "design" is far from intelligent -- but the failure to overcome it is on us

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” — Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights — imagine a woman being all that back in the 18th century! She died at the age of 38 after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelly — the future author of Frankenstein. The plot of that novel can be seen as an illustration to her mother’s understanding of the nature of evil.

But then again, the whole human history, wars and all, can be seen as one elaborate illustration. And this is why many others came to the same realization. Socrates suggested that knowledge is the only true virtue. Jesus asked the Father to “forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” Or here is Otto Rank, an Austrian psychoanalyst and one of Sigmund Freud’s disciples:

All that complicated and elaborate explanation of human behavior is nothing but an attempt to give a meaning to one of the most powerful motives of behavior, namely stupidity! I began to think that it is even more powerful than badness, meanness — because many actions or reactions that appear mean are simply stupid and even calling them bad is a justification.

A careful reader might notice how the last quote stands out. Sounding a bit flippant, it blames evil not just on our ignorance, but on our stupidity. Perhaps Otto Rank had a bad day? And he did have a few of those, but so did Jesus. It was on one of his bad days (you might want to read the whole chapter to understand why) that Jesus snapped at people in the Temple:

Why do you not understand what I am saying? It is because you are unable to accept my message. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out his desires.

The similar kind of frustration sips through the words of Socrates, of the Buddha, of Mohammed, of the prophets in the Bible. It wasn’t about people’s ignorance — rather, it was about their inability, often perceived as unwillingness, to absorb the knowledge that was made readily available to them. Carl Jung, another student of Freud’s, spoke of the “futility of words.” Or here’s Otto Rank again:

For the time being I gave up writing. There is already too much truth in the world — an overproduction which apparently cannot be consumed!

Note that this lack of understanding did not imply disagreement. Socrates, Jesus, the Buddha were no less frustrated with their own followers, those who were more than willing to agree yet, clearly, struggled to understand their teachers. Lev Shestov, a Jewish-Russian existentialist and religious philosopher, summed it up as a general tendency:

Men listen, nod in approval, and finally act as if they had heard nothing. Sometimes they even repeat what has been said to them. They repeat it continually, but they live and act as they please… Is it not strange?

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Well, here is what I think is strange: our longstanding determination to take the very capacity to understand knowledge for granted — despite all the evidence to the contrary. We casually regard this skill as something that everyone can and should master on their own, just like we master walking or talking — through trial and error and by observing others’ doing it. So whenever a person fails to understand, we assume it’s because they are lazy or otherwise unwilling. Or stupid?

Whatever our reasons, we fail to teach understanding explicitly. Our schools skip this step altogether and move straight to teaching the knowledge itself, from day one. Sure, we keep looking for more innovative ways of doing that, the ways that would supposedly make it easier for students to understand what we teach. But it’s not working well precisely because all these new ways still focus on teaching students specific material — rather than on showing them how to use their brains, how to understand knowledge in general. Effectively, we leave the development of that capacity to chance. And by chance a few kids would pick it up, and we would call those few “bright” or “gifted”. But most kids wouldn’t — by chance — and those we would call stupid “less gifted”… at least we used to.

These days we don’t, of course, having convinced ourselves to accept, even celebrate this kind of diversity (don’t teach a fish to climb a tree, etc.), rather than seeing it for what it is — for our failure as educators, as parents, as human beings to consistently teach our children a critically important life skill. To develop the very ability that, one could argue, makes us human, the ability that our ancestors spent millions of years to evolve. We throw it away — and we keep paying the price, the price of yet another generation of humans left to stumble through existential fog, mistaking evils for the good they seek.

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Ultimately, the root of our troubles lies in our not-so-intelligent design. Humans don’t come “preinstalled” with their “software”, with the knowledge of the world and of themselves, of their own nature. Instead, we have evolved to spend several extra years in our childhood, discovering and piecing it all together — and not on our own, of course, but under the guidance of caring and knowledgeable adults, as well as older children.

This makes our wellbeing, if not our survival, dependent on an intricate system of intergenerational knowledge transfer. And it is that system that became disrupted with the advent of “civilization” — disrupted through famines, wars, and by the general trend of moving away from the tribal, communal lifestyle (‘cause “it takes a village to raise a child”). Our public education system was meant to address that issue. Indeed, since ancient times and through the Age of Enlightenment we have hoped (against hope?) that education is the answer. Mary Wollstonecraft believed so. However, when the system of mandatory education was finally established in the 20th century, it made little difference. We are still fighting wars and we appear, otherwise, no less confused about how to live our lives. And the reason why the school system keeps falling short is that, again, it keeps trying to teach knowledge before ensuring that students have developed the capacity to understand it.

And that’s why it is on us. All other societal ills — and sure there are many — could be traced back to our failure to teach this critical skill intentionally, systematically, and consistently.

“We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds — a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.” ~Alain de Botton

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Can we do better though? After thousands of years of trying and failing — can we? I am positive that the answer is “yes” — but we cannot teach what we can’t explain. Therefore, we need to gain some introspection first — we need to understand how we understand.

Stay tuned.