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Discussion Membership
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Concentric Circles
Premise: Individuals, journalists, and society operate by the same methods. Reponding to a PressThink essay "Not up to it", I wrote "Journalism is up to it", which concludes: Journalists fight uncivil behavior wherever they find it -- at home or abroad. Individuals, journalists, and society operate by the same methods, towards the same end. Lay one on top of the other like concentric circles and they would share the same curiosity, thirst for understanding, and sense of the future. We're all in this together, trying to understand the full picture, using the same processes, planning for our better future. In "Hard Times", serially published beginning in 1841, Charles Dickens hammered an underlying problem of contemporary schooling. 'NOW, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!'By the end of the book, the speaker, Thomas Gradgrind, is brought to his knees by an inability -- unwillingness -- to process those facts and compare them to experience for usefulness. Gradgrind's universe is static and Newtonian -- Step by step, marching forward to its inevitable conclusion because, built on "facts", it must be correct. Dickens didn't ignore facts. Facts, in and of themselves, were insufficient without a self-correcting process to use and evaluate them. Gradgrind overlooked feedback. Decision making is a dynamic process that learns from experience. Given metaphors like motion picture film and M. C. Escher's art that available in the 160 years since Dickens, one would think schools would have integrated dynamics into curricula. Nope. Number 2 pencil-filled bubble tests lend themselves to grading facts, not necessarily encouraging the process used to think. No wonder we are scrambling to recognize our own useful tools.
Shared CharacteristicsWhat characteristics do individuals, journalists and society share?
They plan for the futureJacob Bronowski reminds us, "There are a great many species-specific gifts -- the one I want to center on here is the fact that human beings guide their conduct by making plans." He later writes, "Human beings have these special characteristics of memory, imagination, symbolic representation, and language which make it possible for them to project themselves into futures which have not yet happened (and, indeed, some of which will not happen) to set up artificial futures and make plans toward one rather than another."Or, as Ludwig von Mises wrote in "Theory and History", "acting man aims only at one ultimate end, at the attainment of a state of affairs that suits him better than the alternatives."
They work to understand their worldIndividuals, journalists and society work to understand the world around them, for their own safety's sake. They plan their future based on their interpretations of their sensations of the world around them. They have nothing else to work with but the the most accurate map of reality in their head that they can fabricate from experience.
They know they have made mistakesEveryone has experience -- different experience, but experience nonetheless. History has value. From one's own experiences similar useful lessons can be extracted. Foremost is the humbling realization that even using their best available undertanding of the world one knows, one nevertheless has made mistakes.The same lesson applies to society. Looking not at history, but at the way that people have written it, the same events have been interpreted differently depending upon the conventional wisdom of the day. Popular and respected American historians have written with a point of view only obvious later:
Oliver Cromwell said, "I beseech you, ... think it possible you may be mistaken." (Of course, Cromwell, himself, more than once turned out to have been mistaken.) If one believes oneself to be correct, how can one know when one is not? This is the spark of wisdom that powers education. The core value of democracy is that it codifies humility. It permanently recognizes that the least among us may suggest a better way of doing things and demands society preserve free speech to try to convince others of that advantage.
They work to understand those mistakesEnglish, the subject taught in school, might be better called "Tools for Thought". That thinking is what education is about seems to have been lost over time -- thought is hardly mentioned in dozens of pages of New York State's English Language Arts requirements. In classical education, those tools not only were explicitly taught, they were the Trivium -- the first three of the Seven Liberal Arts -- Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric.
They value community as an aid to do thatAn educated mind knew that while it constantly had to check itself, it also was useful to engage other minds as a further check, and, beyond that, put thoughts on paper as a further check to see if they stood up to the cold harsh light of day.
They continuously work to do betterThe mistake of the totalitarian societies that ostensibly implemented Marxian ideas was that they didn't implement the most significant Marxian process -- the dialectic -- continuous checking and rechecking to see if their conclusions matched the reality that they saw. It was as if they went thorugh the dialectical process, determined that a screwdriver was the answer, and henceforth, even when conditions changed, treated everything as a screw.
They work to bring others alongDeciding how to act is no theoretical abstract. It is integrally tied up with the immediate practical protection of one's own life. My proper concern is my own life. Your proper concern is yours. Our individual future safeties are integrally tied up with convincing as many other people in the world as we can the value of creating The Protective Umbrella of civilization that is both equitable and valuable for their own safety and well-being as it is for our own.Under that system people across the world decide, by their own actions, how they will be treated by others who embrace the manufactured umbrella of civilization. The first responsibility of individuals, journalists, and society is to help the whole world understand clearly their actions have consequences for how they will be treated just as our actions have consequences, too. Our own best interest encourages promoting thoughtful attention of those unaware of the benefits community can bring.
They defend themselves against those who prefer the law of the jungleAmong the things that distinguish between ourselves and the remainder of the plant and animal kingdom, two characteristics spring immediately to mind:
Individuals, Journalists, and Society operate similarlySo whether we speak of one individual, two or more individuals interacting, the journalist that serves as a surrogate, or a society interacting with other societies, rest assured that process counts, place in time counts, reflection on experience counts, sound thought counts, interaction with others counts -- because all we are about manufacturing civilization, for our own safety's sake.So we are all in this together, trying to understand the full picture, using the same processes, planning for our better future. The core interests and the core processes coincide -- which is not to say we won't disagree on other things. [Macro error: Can't find a sub-table named "commentIt".]
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