I'm a terrible snob who was convinced at about age 3 of being smart -- and even superior -- by all the wrong evidence:
1. Our house was full of books.
2. I was one of only a couple of people in my big high school who were finalists for National Merit Scholarships, though I didn't actually get one.
3. I had a different full scholarship to Northwestern.
4. People told me I was really smart.
BUT . . .
1. The books were trivial pop stuff, which I didn't know enough to realize.
2. At college everyone had been a National Merit Scholarship finalist and a lot of people actually got it.
3. The scholarship I did get was more because I was poor but not embarrassing and was politically justifying to the university. I mean, they wanted to look generous.
4. Most people didn't know any REALLY smart people. In fact, I'm not sure I did until U of Chicago. But now I redefine "smart." I'm not.
Nevertheless, two people listened to my undergrad rambling about religion and life and all that stuff. One was my biology partner, Bill Shaw, whom I loved very much but who was a bit alarmed by me. He was nicknamed "Hume" because that was his focus. The second came through Browning in the early 60's and I don't remember his name, but he looked a bit like Bill. He invited me to come out to his camp on Cut Bank Creek for supper, which he cooked over a campfire. I did and loved it and he liked me, too. He said I sounded like Spinoza and invited me to run away with him to Berkeley. I was tempted, but loved where I was already. It would have been a very different life choice.
In the Fifties "smart" was for boys and consisted of math and physics so they could go to the moon. In high school there were two "enriched" streams for smart kids. One was for boys (math and physics) and one was for girls (lit and writing). I took the female route and discovered that the teachers were neither competent nor respected. I might as well have been taking embroidery and piano. (Actually, I was -- through 4-H and individual piano teachers. They were taught in the most naive and concrete way, no reference to history or theory, just imitation and repetition of old women in the nabe.)
Going to Northwestern while Alvina Krause was teaching Method acting was an immense stroke of luck, or maybe I was seeking it. Also, I took courses on religion about the nature of being human, ways of relating, tragic errors and so on -- the big emotional stuff. I also took all the psych I could, but it was about white rats, S/R. (Stimulus/Response, not to be confused with S/M.) When marriage collapsed and I discovered the Third Wave psych thinkers -- Rogers, Maslow, Erikson, Fromm, and so on -- it was no longer about white rats and nut cases, but began to consider what was not just "smart" but "wise."
The U of Chicago was "smart" in the old lab rat and big technology ways, but there were little signs of a more wholistic way of looking at humans. I make this statement so it will explain in a minute how I came to respond to Alison Gopnik at "The Edge," a think tank growing out of the Whole Earth Catalogue that started out to be sort of alternative hippie enterprise and than sank back into bossy white men with a bug in their shorts. Gopnik was one of two women in a conference trying to understand AI, or Artificial Intelligence which is more often focused on prioritizing the male objective/math/science way of being smart, which I mock as being about "a brain in a bucket." (Somewhere poor Einstein's brain is "pickled", still floating around in hopes it will show how to be "smart.") Gopnik was pursuing the new neurobiology of what a human is.
I knew nothing about either Hume or Spinoza and have kicked away precedent-based philosophies as far too dominated by both old white men with power or smart-ass male sophomores of any color. But when I watched this vid linked below, Gopnik was electrifying, tying together things I think about a lot like evolutionary biology and human life trajectories. I've been eager to hear about embodiment theories and the cell-level proof that guts also "think". So I started looking for Gobnik online. She talked about Hume and Spinoza. Hmmm.
It turns out that there's a lot more to developing the whole-body, emotion-as-information approach than we thought. Some have been using it all along, particularly those who have escaped the domination of Western culture, whose most salient characteristic IS domination. Gopnik's position is from human development and contrasts the "plasticity" (openness to new ideas) of a child up to a certain "tipping point" when they have developed enough brain circuits to make a jump to a vastly different picture of the world. It's arrogant to say so, but I feel that I've gone past that point, but many people have not.
In fact, Copnik dares to contrast the effect of some psychedelic drugs (LDS, psilocybin, MDMA and Ketamine) as "mind-opening," restoring the plasticity of childhood. (This is in contrast to the mind-altering "power" drugs like amphetamines or even alcohol.) I've never tried drugs or even much alcohol, but people tell me I'm childish. (Bit of a joke to restore humility.)
People who are "still doing ag" are often considered to be stuck in Medieval times, because the Western theory emphasizes modernizing and finds progressivism always "smarter." But a circle or system of Twitter connections I've only recently found is that of farmers of a certain kind. Some are in England and some are in Canada north of Calgary. They are people who have passed what Gopnick calls "The Tipping Point", meaning they are curious, they ask questions and plan experiments all the time, and they reach out to others -- even if it makes them see the world differently. They are capable of cultural abstract language even as they attach to a beloved sensory world of animals and land. I feel returned to Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson.
Gopnik suggests in her book "The Gardener and The Carpenter" that our modern pattern for care is control-based like cabinetry -- she's too polite to point out that wood is dead.) But caregiving for living things (Gardening) is interacting with the living and sharing with the environment. These caregiving relations cannot be contractual, demanding that certain results be achieved. Rather, dealing with the living is a "transparent attachment", open-ended. Gopnik is full of phrases. She says, "Children are a source of unpredictable variability" which sounds to me like unconditional love. But it's also the basis of evolution through mutation.
She introduces us to a real historical character named "Desideri" which means (loosely) "what we desire." (Some of us used to have a poster of the Desiderata on our walls. His importance is linking the West to Buddhism through the Jesuits, most rigorous of religious orders, to the "best" of thinking that is about participation rather than control.
"In his 20s, Desideri conceived his own grand project—to convert the Indies to Catholicism—and in 1716 he became one of the first Europeans to go to Lhasa, and the first to stay. He was passionate, emotional, and easily exasperated. He was also curious, brave, and unbelievably tenacious. In an early letter written on his way to Tibet, he says he feels as if he is being torn apart on the rack. “It pleases his divine majesty to draw my whole heart away with sweet and amorous violence to where the perdition of souls is great,” he wrote, “and at the same time with fastest bonds are my feet bound and drawn elsewhere.” He kept up that intense pitch in everything he did."
He looks quite modern!
In the jargon of the people talking at "The Edge," about AI, Desideri was a "high temperature" thinker. These expert folks are old enough to have been taught that "passion" is a bad thing, so temperature is their euphemism. The idea used to be that cold was better. Now it turns out that all that frigid calculating has precipitated us into planetary warming.
More about Gopnik in the future. Possibly also Hume and Spinoza.
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