diversity and tolerance

[Fist and Faith]

I'm not going to tell you that you can't know what you know or feel what you feel, even if I say that such knowledge or feelings are wrong.

You do not say my thoughts and feelings are wrong, you say I can't think and feel them. You say it's impossible for a person whose mental processes are working correctly to think and feel them. They do not agree with your beliefs, so it cannot be. Therefore, the truth of the matter is that I haven't thought about them sufficiently.

And it all comes down to this: "If universally meaningless, then no reason to do." You do not feel there is any reason to do anything if there is no eternal meaning to anything. And you base your pronouncements about my thoughts and feelings on it.

The problem is, "If universally meaningless, then no reason to do" is not an objectively logical thought. It's your judgement. Our disagreement on this topic is certainly a more complex disagreement than "I prefer chocolate." "I prefer vanilla." But it's much closer to that than to an idea like "Survival is a universal goal." Meaning is different for different people. Different people don't even agree on which types of meaning are important. And I'm not talking about "exceptions." There are many individuals in both our societies that feel as I do. There's even the entire Zen tradition.


And you try to place a similar universality onto the legal world. My goal is to let each person live their private lives however they want; yours is to require all people to live their lives according to your beliefs. It's not possible for everyone to agree on everything. Not even every Orthodox will agree on everything. Better to let everyone act on their own beliefs, provided those actions do not make it impossible for individuals to survive, or for people to live among each other. Those two things are what laws are supposed to be for.

[Avatar]

In the very act of saying that, you are applying an absolute truth of yours to me, the very thing you say I shouldn't be doing.

But it's alright for you to do so?

Anyway, I disagree. I'm saying that what you believe to be true is true. For you. In the sense that you act (and think) as though it was, so it might as well be.

People who act and think as if other things are true, are just as convinced of the truth of those things as you are.

--A

[rusmeister]

I'm not going to tell you that you can't know what you know or feel what you feel, even if I say that such knowledge or feelings are wrong.

You do not say my thoughts and feelings are wrong, you say I can't think and feel them. You say it's impossible for a person whose mental processes are working correctly to think and feel them. They do not agree with your beliefs, so it cannot be. Therefore, the truth of the matter is that I haven't thought about them sufficiently.

You keep saying that I say this and I keep denying that I say this. What I think is that you have taken some statements of mine where I have said that your thinking is wrong and taken it to mean that you can't possibly think that. Of course you can think things. Everybody does - and therefore, I do NOT say that people can't think (or feel) things. If you've read that into something I've said, then you misinterpreted. Maybe I worded it badly at some point.

Now, as soon as you say "correctly", though, we have a different bone of contention. Who IS correct? If I am right, then logically, your conclusions CANNOT be correct and your thinking therefore goes wrong at some point in the process - and you can equally point out the reverse. And yes, I do think you miss things - as you think I do. What's the use of belaboring that, though, if the other consistently denies it?

And it all comes down to this: "If universally meaningless, then no reason to do." You do not feel there is any reason to do anything if there is no eternal meaning to anything. And you base your pronouncements about my thoughts and feelings on it.

Well, yes. So what? That's what we do on these forums. We discuss these ideas. You base your pronouncements about my thoughts on your conclusions. This is only to say that we react to each other's ideas.

The problem is, "If universally meaningless, then no reason to do" is not an objectively logical thought. It's your judgement. Our disagreement on this topic is certainly a more complex disagreement than "I prefer chocolate." "I prefer vanilla." But it's much closer to that than to an idea like "Survival is a universal goal." Meaning is different for different people. Different people don't even agree on which types of meaning are important. And I'm not talking about "exceptions." There are many individuals in both our societies that feel as I do. There's even the entire Zen tradition.

You say, "objectively logical". That can be debatable, although I no longer care to. What I could try to communicate is that I can see my own body rotting and crawling with worms (or like Scrooge, simply staring down at his own grave) and then contemplating what it all meant, and to whom. If I can only use the past tense, if I can ONLY say it meant something at one time to all of these people in the graveyard, then it no longer - in the present tense - means anything.* And I am standing there in the graveyard looking at meaninglessness. What is the good, what is the meaning of that?
*the same fate befalls meaning deferred to one's family or children - the 'they will go on' idea. But they won't go on. They, too, will all return to the earth. It is merely an attempt to postpone the inevitable conclusion.

But I don't think I can even communicate that. As long as death remains a theory, something far off, something that can be set aside and ignored, and a pretence that there is only life, that we can 'eat, drink and be merry', though tomorrow we die, then the illusion of temporal meaning can convince us that it is enough. And my words about it will themselves seem meaningless.

And you try to place a similar universality onto the legal world. My goal is to let each person live their private lives however they want; yours is to require all people to live their lives according to your beliefs. It's not possible for everyone to agree on everything. Not even every Orthodox will agree on everything. Better to let everyone act on their own beliefs, provided those actions do not make it impossible for individuals to survive, or for people to live among each other. Those two things are what laws are supposed to be for.

This seems like a fine libertarian position. If I hadn't taught in public school, I might have bought it. Having seen a definite worldview imposed on children - one which pretends to accommodate all but in fact does so by treating them as irrelevant - has made me see that you cannot have such a world where people merely 'live private lives'. In public life, one ideology or another will dominate. If your school is teaching my kids to "tolerate" "alternate" sexual morality, for example, then we are already at war. You are making war on my kids, even if you don't realize it. I do.

[rusmeister]

In the very act of saying that, you are applying an absolute truth of yours to me, the very thing you say I shouldn't be doing.

But it's alright for you to do so?

Anyway, I disagree. I'm saying that what you believe to be true is true. For you. In the sense that you act (and think) as though it was, so it might as well be.

People who act and think as if other things are true, are just as convinced of the truth of those things as you are.

--A

I quite agree with the last. People can be, and are convinced of the truth of ideas that are mutually exclusive.
But the idea that the individual creates his own truth is simply wrong. It's contradicted, if nothing else, by the natural universe, where it is evident that the nature of what we see is objective - a person falls whether they believe in gravity or not. Etc. Why should the truth about the creation of the world and human beings or our destiny be any different? The world/universe was NOT created in a million different ways. It did NOT both appear magically on its own AND be created by an external force/God.

Like I said, Av, I think any conversation between us is cut off at the very beginning.

The best response I see to your ideas is in Lewis's "Poison of Subjectivism". It cuts down your ideas faster than you can grow them.

[aliantha]

God *is* magic, and so's the Goddess (said the Pagan).

[Orlion]

God *is* magic, and so's the Goddess (said the Pagan).

God is neither male nor female, rather the combination of King Sol and Queen Luna in Chymical Wedding (said the alchemist)

[SerScot]

If God (or Goddess) is intrinsic to existence how can their existence be "magical"? Just because we can't comprehend something doesn't make that something "magic".

[Vraith]

If God (or Goddess) is intrinsic to existence how can their existence be "magical"? Just because we can't comprehend something doesn't make that something "magic".

Well....if we don't understand something, you're correct, it isn't necessarily magical.
But if it's impossible for any non-god[dess] to understand, then it pretty much is.

[Fist and Faith]

You keep saying that I say this and I keep denying that I say this. What I think is that you have taken some statements of mine where I have said that your thinking is wrong and taken it to mean that you can't possibly think that. Of course you can think things. Everybody does - and therefore, I do NOT say that people can't think (or feel) things. If you've read that into something I've said, then you misinterpreted. Maybe I worded it badly at some point.

Now, as soon as you say "correctly", though, we have a different bone of contention. Who IS correct? If I am right, then logically, your conclusions CANNOT be correct and your thinking therefore goes wrong at some point in the process - and you can equally point out the reverse. And yes, I do think you miss things - as you think I do. What's the use of belaboring that, though, if the other consistently denies it?

You are saying the only logical conclusion to a belief that there is no eternal meaning to life is hopelessness, and no possibility of feeling that a life has any meaning to the person living it while it is being lived.

The problem is, that's not a logical conclusion to the belief that there is no eternal meaning to life. That is your feeling about the logical conclusions of believing there is no eternal meaning to life. My feeling about those same logical conclusions is different. Neither of us is more or less "correct" than the other. We simply feel differently about the scenario. It makes as much sense as looking at the various reactions our bodies and brains have to chocolate and vanilla being placed on the tongue, then claiming that preferring one is more logical than preferring the other. Or even looking at our various reactions to tasting chocolate and listening to music, and declaring preferring one more logical than preferring the other.

But you take it even farther. You say nobody can prefer vanilla to chocolate (or chocolate to music). You say if I truly thought the issue through, the logical outcome would be a preference for chocolate (or music). The reason you disagree with these analogies is that you think hopelessness and the impossibility of finding any sort of meaning are the last link in a chain of logical thoughts. They are not. They are stepping back from, and deciding whether or not we feel good about, the chain.

You believe otherwise, because you think your worldview allows you to understand my worldview better than I do.

And you try to place a similar universality onto the legal world. My goal is to let each person live their private lives however they want; yours is to require all people to live their lives according to your beliefs. It's not possible for everyone to agree on everything. Not even every Orthodox will agree on everything. Better to let everyone act on their own beliefs, provided those actions do not make it impossible for individuals to survive, or for people to live among each other. Those two things are what laws are supposed to be for.

This seems like a fine libertarian position. If I hadn't taught in public school, I might have bought it. Having seen a definite worldview imposed on children - one which pretends to accommodate all but in fact does so by treating them as irrelevant - has made me see that you cannot have such a world where people merely 'live private lives'. In public life, one ideology or another will dominate. If your school is teaching my kids to "tolerate" "alternate" sexual morality, for example, then we are already at war. You are making war on my kids, even if you don't realize it. I do.

I'm not suggesting schools teach kids to tolerate, or not tolerate, any kind of sexual morality. I don't think public schools have any business telling kids what's "right." It is you who wants that. You want public schools to teach that only the sexual morality you (the OC) believe is correct is correct. (Actually, I guess you don't want public schools to exist at all. But since they do exist, you want that taught in them.)

And you want the law to forbid the practice of any sexual morality other than the OC's.

[rusmeister]

You keep saying that I say this and I keep denying that I say this. What I think is that you have taken some statements of mine where I have said that your thinking is wrong and taken it to mean that you can't possibly think that. Of course you can think things. Everybody does - and therefore, I do NOT say that people can't think (or feel) things. If you've read that into something I've said, then you misinterpreted. Maybe I worded it badly at some point.

Now, as soon as you say "correctly", though, we have a different bone of contention. Who IS correct? If I am right, then logically, your conclusions CANNOT be correct and your thinking therefore goes wrong at some point in the process - and you can equally point out the reverse. And yes, I do think you miss things - as you think I do. What's the use of belaboring that, though, if the other consistently denies it?

You are saying the only logical conclusion to a belief that there is no eternal meaning to life is hopelessness, and no possibility of feeling that a life has any meaning to the person living it while it is being lived.

The problem is, that's not a logical conclusion to the belief that there is no eternal meaning to life. That is your feeling about the logical conclusions of believing there is no eternal meaning to life. My feeling about those same logical conclusions is different. Neither of us is more or less "correct" than the other. We simply feel differently about the scenario. It makes as much sense as looking at the various reactions our bodies and brains have to chocolate and vanilla being placed on the tongue, then claiming that preferring one is more logical than preferring the other. Or even looking at our various reactions to tasting chocolate and listening to music, and declaring preferring one more logical than preferring the other.

But you take it even farther. You say nobody can prefer vanilla to chocolate (or chocolate to music). You say if I truly thought the issue through, the logical outcome would be a preference for chocolate (or music). The reason you disagree with these analogies is that you think hopelessness and the impossibility of finding any sort of meaning are the last link in a chain of logical thoughts. They are not. They are stepping back from, and deciding whether or not we feel good about, the chain.

You believe otherwise, because you think your worldview allows you to understand my worldview better than I do.

And you try to place a similar universality onto the legal world. My goal is to let each person live their private lives however they want; yours is to require all people to live their lives according to your beliefs. It's not possible for everyone to agree on everything. Not even every Orthodox will agree on everything. Better to let everyone act on their own beliefs, provided those actions do not make it impossible for individuals to survive, or for people to live among each other. Those two things are what laws are supposed to be for.

This seems like a fine libertarian position. If I hadn't taught in public school, I might have bought it. Having seen a definite worldview imposed on children - one which pretends to accommodate all but in fact does so by treating them as irrelevant - has made me see that you cannot have such a world where people merely 'live private lives'. In public life, one ideology or another will dominate. If your school is teaching my kids to "tolerate" "alternate" sexual morality, for example, then we are already at war. You are making war on my kids, even if you don't realize it. I do.

I'm not suggesting schools teach kids to tolerate, or not tolerate, any kind of sexual morality. I don't think public schools have any business telling kids what's "right." It is you who wants that. You want public schools to teach that only the sexual morality you (the OC) believe is correct is correct. (Actually, I guess you don't want public schools to exist at all. But since they do exist, you want that taught in them.)

And you want the law to forbid the practice of any sexual morality other than the OC's.

Hi Fist,
As I said, I feel it is fruitless to respond to endless repetitions of the same arguments. The one thing I DO feel worth responding to is your ideas about "what I would teach" - something that, to me, is immaterial as there is a definite sexual morality definitely being taught in public schools that is hostile to what I acknowledge.

It surprises me that you think an institution can pretend to teach, and yet not communicate ideas of what is good (right) and what is not. They inevitably must. Everything that I have been saying is that they DO teach something and MUST favor one view or another, and that therefore, your idea of an impartial universe, where people live and let live, and no one's ideas have any impact on anyone else, is impossible. Ideas must inevitably have an impact on others, if they are actually practical and not self-contradictory imagination.

[Fist and Faith]

If teachers in public education are told that they MUST impose one worldview or the other, I'll try to get them to impose mine. And you can try to make them impose yours.

But we can also try to make them not impose any. It seems to me you've given up on too many things. No point trying to make people take traditional marriage more seriously, and stop divorcing so much. The damage is too far gone. It's irreversible. No point in trying to change anything about the public education system. It's too strongly established. Come on! Is there no way to make people see the ultimate Truth of all existence?? Oh sure, I'll fight you. But who am I in the face of the Light?

[rusmeister]

If teachers in public education are told that they MUST impose one worldview or the other, I'll try to get them to impose mine. And you can try to make them impose yours.

But we can also try to make them not impose any. It seems to me you've given up on too many things. No point trying to make people take traditional marriage more seriously, and stop divorcing so much. The damage is too far gone. It's irreversible. No point in trying to change anything about the public education system. It's too strongly established. Come on! Is there no way to make people see the ultimate Truth of all existence?? Oh sure, I'll fight you. But who am I in the face of the Light?

Fist, you can talk about doing/changing things in public schools from the theorist's armchair. For a teacher on the ground, such things are a death sentence to their career. No teacher can oppose the currently imposed ideology without direct risk to their job. No teacher candidate can challenge that ideology in class without direct risk of being failed or dropped from the programs - and some have, and "paid the ultimate price". It's not "giving up". It's having a thorough understanding of just how entrenched the ideology is, and how far it is from the American ideals of freedom of speech and even belief. The hints of that entrenchment are based in how thoroughly everyone has been indoctrinated into unquestioning tolerance and diversity, and into the rhetorical use of the terms to prevent any real thinking about what is behind those undefined "ideals".

Anyway, it's no use talking about a laissez-faire ideal in public schools because it is impossible in practice.

And yes, it IS difficult to make people see truth, especially when that truth says that they need to make some changes in their own lives. Everybody wants world peace - few are willing to change themselves to attain it.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

[Fist and Faith]

Puh-lease! Entire governments have been overthrown. Slavery has been abolished in some countries. Women in the US have gone from being their fathers' or husbands' property to getting the right to vote, work, and darned near anything else. All of these things at costs far more severe than losing a job. Get to work! You're not the only teacher in the public education system who believes what you believe and went through what you went through. All of you write down what happened. Dates, cause of reprimand or termination, etc. Collect it all. There must be people high in the publishing industries who share your beliefs. Have them publish it all. Books, newspaper articles, magazine features, whatever. If most people in the USA believe in ID, they're gonna be upset that any teacher in the pub ed system who mentions ID gets fired.

If you all throw your hands up and say, "I got fired! Nothing can be done!", and go underground, then don't complain that the system is wrong and unfair.

[rusmeister]

Puh-lease! Entire governments have been overthrown. Slavery has been abolished in some countries. Women in the US have gone from being their fathers' or husbands' property to getting the right to vote, work, and darned near anything else. All of these things at costs far more severe than losing a job. Get to work! You're not the only teacher in the public education system who believes what you believe and went through what you went through. All of you write down what happened. Dates, cause of reprimand or termination, etc. Collect it all. There must be people high in the publishing industries who share your beliefs. Have them publish it all. Books, newspaper articles, magazine features, whatever. If most people in the USA believe in ID, they're gonna be upset that any teacher in the pub ed system who mentions ID gets fired.

If you all throw your hands up and say, "I got fired! Nothing can be done!", and go underground, then don't complain that the system is wrong and unfair.

Has it occurred to you, Fist, that if the entire public education system has been bought, and that trillions of dollars are flowing through it, that simply gathering facts and statistics and getting people to publish them won't change anything? It HAS been done. John Stormer did a good a job as can be done on information and statistics (setting aside his Republican and evangelical leanings). Outrageous facts - and yet its effect was only a ripple in the pond. One of the prime purposes of the existing education system is to ENSURE that revolutions won't happen again; that the product of this system will be too bored and indifferent, and happy merely to consume, to be a consumer.

To do anything effective, one must know exactly what the situation is and how it came to be that way. If the trouble is, for example, that people are actually living in a computer-generated dream world, a la "the Matrix", how would you propose getting them to realize it? Realizing it would mean that some of their most fundamental propositions in the world were wrong - and they will fight that tooth and nail rather than admit it.

While the truth on public schooling is not quite so bad, it is bad enough that a realization of it would cause most people to choose to disbelieve the facts rather than accept them. At the very least, accepting them would mean not only millions of teachers having to adjust where and how they do their jobs, millions of administrators and other useless people in "education" to actually go out and get a productive life, and finally, the millions and millions of parents who would have to radically re-arrange their own lives so as to ACTUALLY educate their children.

I posted a thread in Doriendor Corishev on this, and with going on fifty views, no responses at all. Rather supports my thesis, I think. Nobody knows much of anything about the history of our public schools, and I believe that it is because, in part, that they would prefer not to know, although the surface thought might be that it is not an important topic (although how the history of one of the most formative influences on our thinking and behavior could be unimportant beats me).

FWIW, with the testimony of my own life, I have done what can be done. I left that system right after earning my certificate, left the programs to help teachers into houses and a path to moderate low-level success in the US, as it is measured there, and converted and moved my family to Russia. Even there, for the first year after leaving I was bewildered as to why the system should have turned out the way it is, blocking actual education at every turn. It was only after reading Gatto that it made sense - and I realized that people who remain in the system and/or financially dependent on it (in one way or another) would have difficulty seeing any fundamental criticism of the system as a rotten thing that needs to be brought down.

[Vraith]

In some ways, Gatto [and to a much much lesser extent] have identified problems.
Then they either misunderstand, or manipulate the causes.
Worse, the solutions they propose are to treat a bleeding head wound with a tourniquet around the neck.
Of course, according to them, that's not me speaking or my thoughts, it's my humanist indoctrination...or [from Lewis] I've been poisoned with subjectivism.
The whole premise seems to be that anyone who really understands the concepts "objective" and "absolute truth" and denies them either has other motives or actually doesn't understand them.
I understand them. I think they're false, and deadly.

[rusmeister]

In some ways, Gatto [and to a much much lesser extent] have identified problems.
Then they either misunderstand, or manipulate the causes.
Worse, the solutions they propose are to treat a bleeding head wound with a tourniquet around the neck.
Of course, according to them, that's not me speaking or my thoughts, it's my humanist indoctrination...or [from Lewis] I've been poisoned with subjectivism.
The whole premise seems to be that anyone who really understands the concepts "objective" and "absolute truth" and denies them either has other motives or actually doesn't understand them.
I understand them. I think they're false, and deadly.

Then I don't think you understand them.


Not sure who else you are referring to besides Gatto.

I actually agree with you a good deal on the matter of solutions. I think Gatto, at least, is weak there. But as to causes? C'mon, it's Occam's Razor. There's not a whole lot to misinterpret there. Chesterton was saying the same things about it a hundred years ago. The purpose of compulsory education is to deprive the common people of their common sense. And it has worked with a vengeance. This actually benefits people - the heads of industry and their production of needless things which themselves need only consuming. (Edit) It benefits many others, too. The ideologues who wanted to push this particular vision of utopia (Shaw, Wells, Dewey, Russell, etc), everyone in the massive bureaucracy/jobs program that has developed in the institution, etc. All beneficiaries of this monstrosity that doesn't teach critical thinking or truly educate in a meaningful sense of the word. I have seen more success in the Russian system when they were getting 1/10,000 of the US education budget, where the toilets don't have seats or toilet paper, if only because boys who don't get into institutions of higher learning are eligible for the draft.

Money simply doesn't translate into success for children. It translates into a still bigger bureaucracy. The people it does not particularly benefit are the children and their parents.