© Charles D. Hayes
I’ve always thought
that America’s Founding Fathers made a mistake by focusing on the pursuit of
happiness. If, instead, they had prized the pursuit of wisdom, we would likely have
many more reasons to be happy.
Just about everything
we create comes with an owner’s manual. Everything, that is, except us humans. For
nearly four decades, I have been in pursuit of self-education with a goal of
learning, to the best of my ability, the value of having been afforded the life
of a human being. The older I get, the more I think I understand what is wrong
with our educational system.
The core of the problem
lies in our belief that it’s okay to leave the study of human behavior to
professionals. The specialization of knowledge has resulted in what cultural
anthropologist Ernest Becker called “a general imbecility.”
Deep down in the
primeval recesses of our brains is a condition analogous to a software program
containing malware. This innate disorder exists because we human beings are
unique in the animal world. We alone become aware early on in our lives that we
are going to die, and this sets us up for a subconscious emotional roller
coaster ride. The reality of our mortality stalks us throughout our lives,
making shadowy appearances in all manner of disguises like change, uncertainty,
and especially otherness—metaphorical cousins of death that are subtle
reminders of our inevitable nonexistence.
The essence of what I
characterize as an existential education is achieving a level of knowledge
equilibrium that offers us maximum coping capability with the emotional angst that
comes with the human condition, an intellectual ability for anxiety dissipation
that enables us to live without the need for distractions from our mortality by
scapegoating those whose very existence reminds us that we are going to die.
One has only to examine
the condition of planetary human relations to understand that the core
educational components missing in our species worldwide are Human Behavior 101,
a course of humanities representing the acquired wisdom of our global culture,
and enough knowledge of anthropology to put one’s tribe in meaningful
perspective with the rest of the planet’s occupants.
Addressing this
civilizational short circuit was supposed to be the goal of a liberal
education, but its advocates never seemed able to get enough people to agree on
the value of liberal arts or how incredibly important it is to be able to cope
with uncertainty and not feel threated by the existence of people whose beliefs
and customs appear strange or foreign.
To accept the premise
that the known fundamentals about our species form a body of specialized
knowledge suitable only for experts undermines the long-term sustainability of civilization.
We have achieved the technological capability of wizards, while the nature of our social and political relations
ranges from narcissistic adolescence to Stone Age tribalism.
The history of human
conflict is steeped in ignorant assumptions and misunderstandings based on
superficial observations, uninformed gossip, and conspiratorial paranoia about
other people, whose differences are perceived as threatening because they serve
as reminders of our mortality.
Pointing out
differences and making fun of unfamiliar customs is a bonding ritual in which
in-groups alienate out-groups. The process of bonding through the alienation of
others offers a false curtain of security in which genuine knowledge of the
other becomes verboten in order to keep the curtain closed and to maintain
one’s sense of patriotism.
Our educational deficit
is readily observable by focusing on those whose lives are sheltered by a
narrow sense of identity, a regional, local, or tribal view simplified by
relating to all of those outside their group in terms of us and them. All that
should be required of a thinking person who views a tribe or clannish group
with a restricted worldview is to ask if one’s own outlook is thus similarly
constructed and constrained.
Moral psychologist
Jonathan Haidt uses the metaphor of rider and elephant to describe our
reasoning ability, with reason being the former and our emotional subconscious
the latter. I am not suggesting that an existential education will enable our
rider to boss its elephant around. But if we are to have any chance of taming
the elephant, we have to be able to dispel the fears born of ignorance that
naturally occurs at the borders and dividing lines where the differences of our
respective national and tribal associations are celebrated, exaggerated, and
reviled. A better understanding of human behavior doesn’t trump our fears about
mortality, but it can help dissipate the angst associated with otherness which so
often serves as a preferable distraction to reality.
The essence of an existential
education is a learned predisposition for getting beyond ignorant assumptions
and for refusing to go along with the vitriol of tribalistic small-mindedness. When
we are young, we are totally dependent upon family and local culture in
developing our sense of reality. As we grow older and mature, our exposure to
other cultures is bound to grow as well, unless our respective cultures
restrict our access or discourages our pursuit of knowledge outside our
borders, real or imaginary.
There is a fork in the
road on the path to adulthood: One path leads to one’s local culture and the
shelter of identifying oneself as a member of the association that offers a
form of protection that will trump all threats. In other words, the truths or
arguments of enemies do not really count in closed associations because one’s
culture is assumed to be ideologically correct by nature of its identity.
Moreover, clinging to group identification reduces the need for critical
analysis and self-reflection about the problems one’s society faces. All one
has to do is choose sides, go about one’s business, and substitute loyalty for thinking.
The other path is respective
of group identity but it’s also a posture of being open to experience, the
pursuit of knowledge, affection for ideas and for achieving a critical mass of education
in which learning becomes its own reward with the knowledge that the world is
not made worse by getter closer to truths previously perceived as being
inconvenient. To the contrary, life gets better as we get closer to an
objective reality because our existential fears are diminished and we can make room
for those who view the world differently without feeling threatened.
If we do not pursue a
vigorous existential education for the pleasure of learning that follows and for
an increased ability to deal with one’s own inevitable creature anxiety, we
wind up as a species identifiable by the alarming fact that if the neural
patterns in our heads don’t match, we will turn on one another. So far, this
kind of learning has not been our priority. To see how well the alternative has
worked for us, observe the news of the day.
My Books and Essays on Amazon
New Fiction: The Call of Mortality
My Other Blog
