TrueLife - Spotlight on Alfred North Whitehead #2: Process, Reality & the Flow of Consciousness

Starting point is 00:00:01 Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scar's my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Fearist through ruins maze lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

Starting point is 00:00:39 The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. To my friends, welcome back to the big show. Back here with Alfred North Whitehead. We are. You know what we're doing? What we're doing is we are looking at the future through the eyes of a philosopher in the past.

Starting point is 00:01:38 And it is so intriguing and beautiful, an amazing journey all through the eyes of the past. I gotta tell you, there's really something to reading these older books that are not fiction, and they're not science fiction and they're really not literature. They are the dialogues, the papers, the written correspondences of people of the past. There's something so visceral about it, and I hope all of you are getting a chance to get out of this what I get out of it. Let's dive right back in here and you can actually, hopefully you can get a sense of what I have been getting a sense of. Again, these are just the dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, and they were taken or written down over the course of about 20 years or 30 years. So let's jump right back into it here.

Starting point is 00:02:43 Again, I'm going to just kind of go through some excerpts that I've highlighted, stopping every now and then to give you a sense of what I think about it, and hopefully allowing you a few moments to do a little mental exercise with me and see what you think about it. Okay, so that being said, let's jump right back in here. From the book, I raised the question why the creation of an artwork exhausts the experience for its creator, but is infinitely potent of repeated stimulations in the enjoyer. Perhaps he said it is because all human effort is directed towards the achievers. of an end, whether it is satisfied or not, and the artist's end, although never quite the result he hoped for, is largely attained and therefore finished for him. The point at which he ends is

Starting point is 00:03:46 where the enjoyer begins. That's an interesting way to look at it, don't you think? The generation, now at the age of 50 or thereabouts, he said, seems to mean to have had its uproarer bringing, terribly bungled. When I address an assemblage of youths under the age of 30, I am aware of feeling a hearty respect for them. I think, he continued, it came from their parents, having lost their own belief, but going on insisting on the dead formulae of conduct in order to keep their children, quote unquote, good. When they no longer believed in these formulae themselves, the children eventually found it out, deceived their parents in turn, and it resulted in deceit all around. They knew their old religion was empty, but were not honest with themselves, nor with their children about it.

Starting point is 00:04:52 Their children in those years, between 18 and 24, when one is experiencing, for the first time, vital necessities, emotional and physical, were, left in total ignorance of the social consequences of certain types of conduct. I think that's really relevant today. I know that when I was growing up, there were certain ideas and certain conceptions of how life should be done that weren't necessarily true, and those do in fact lead to social consequences. But why such an advance in the past two centuries when mathematics had been highly developed by the Greeks at least 26 centuries ago? This is an interesting part.

Starting point is 00:05:53 Man's earlier discoveries in mathematics were made by observation of his physical surroundings, as contradistinguished from abstract reasons. said he. On the plains of Caldea, he noticed the stars swinging round and round, deduced the conception of the circle, and finally arrived at the wheel. Interesting to think about

Starting point is 00:06:21 how mathematics may have been discovered and how the evolution of our science resulted from it. I think you can go, much like the wheel, full circle, in understanding the relationship between mathematics and abstract thought

Starting point is 00:06:45 and how today being away from nature and submerged in this world of technological abundance, you know, it makes sense. It makes sense that our idea and our worldview has become so narrow. The further we go away from nature, the more narrow the pathway of advancement becomes. Does that kind of make sense? If you just take that little particular bite there of man using an abstract thought

Starting point is 00:07:26 by staring at the stars and realizing that we are rotating in that the way you can see the moon move around the earth and you can see the procession of the equinox, how one could get from there to the wheel. Those are big ideas. Those are big thoughts and abstract where today we are narrowly focused on this tiny little part of technology. It's just fascinating. The deeper you get into something, the more the illusion of abundance. I told you. I told you this was going to be interesting.

Starting point is 00:08:09 Beautiful, right? How is experience to be brought to the level of consciousness and transmitted into an art? form out of the subconscious. That is a big question. You are speaking to mentally. It is first an aesthetic experience, powerfully felt, emotional experience with mental perceptions. Then it demands a definite artistic form.

Starting point is 00:08:40 The trouble with creators of today is that they try to substitute a mental idea for the aesthetic experience. They think, look here, wouldn't it be exciting to try it this way, a way no one else has ever tried it before? But the novelty is of no significance. All that has any significance is the depth and vitality of an experience out of which the art comes. And if it comes out of mere consciously clever radiosination, it is foredoomed. You are dealing in secondary perceptions and relatively shallow experience. It does not bear the stamp of deepest truth.

Starting point is 00:09:32 Wow, that is pretty deep. Let's kind of break that down a little bit. So if you and I want to, how is experience to be brought to the level of consciousness and transmitted into an art form out of the subconscious? I think that is a question that all artists are striving to, do, right? You're trying to bring something back from the unconscious mind. It's a lot like going balls deep into like a 10 gram psychedelic trip or day two of an ayahuasca bench and trying to formulate a new linguistic pathway to share the experience with others with. Right? You want, if you really want to

Starting point is 00:10:25 transcend. If you want your idea to live forever, if you want to put your stamp of authenticity onto the minds of those who are viewing your idea, you have to have this new way of showing things. So what is that? What is that? Well, you don't want to be too mentally about it. You want to, you want to invoke a feeling in someone else. You want to have both the power and the soothing effects of your idea transmitted not only via words but by felt experience. According to Whitehead, he says that the trouble with creators of today

Starting point is 00:11:23 is that they try to substitute a mental idea for the aesthetic experience. It's something to think about. If you are an artist, if you are someone who wants to change the world, then you're going to need to grapple with that in your... You're going to need to understand that the idea you want to transmit must transmit feeling. It must evoke an emotion.

Starting point is 00:11:55 Man's best thinking is done either by persons living in the country or in a small community, or else by those. having had such environment in early life, enrich their experience by life in cities for what is wanted is contact with the elemental process of nature during those years of youth when the mind is being formed.

Starting point is 00:12:20 I think we can agree that the majority of people, well, it seems to me, in my own experience, that my best thinking is usually done alone in nature. For me, it's been out in the ocean or hiking or somewhere where you're not disturbed by, I don't know, the unnatural noise of mankind. Urbanization is a weakness in much of our modern thinking, especially about social problems. Thought is taken primarily for the cities when perhaps it isn't the cities that so much matter. Smart plays are written for Blase audience in a metropolis.

Starting point is 00:13:17 eccentric poetry and clever novels are concocted about dwellers in crowded streets who poor souls are cut off through most of the year from contact with the soil, the woods, and the sea, and who perhaps never did a day's hard manual labor in their lives, and to whom the very changes of the weather are but feebly perceptible. They are deprived of that discipline which is imposed by daily contact with their leisurely growth of crops, by the anxiety that those crops

Starting point is 00:13:55 should be so at the mercy of nature's caprice. And yet also the reasoning, I'm sorry, and yet also the reassuring experience of nature's bounty in the long term. It's interesting that it just seems the technological advances in today's society favor us being quarantined

Starting point is 00:14:21 into small dwellings in a tightly packed city where everything can be monitored where again what goes back to it seems our best thinking is done outside those city centers the most we can ask of civilization

Starting point is 00:14:45 I think he said smiling wickedly is that it shall not crush every type of talent. Scholarship, said he, can ask itself three questions. First, what exactly did an ancient author mean when he wrote certain words? And what exactly do those words mean to his contemporaries? That is what scholarship was doing

Starting point is 00:15:14 pretty much throughout the 19th century. Next, it can ask, what and where are these flashes of insight in the work of genius, whereby he rises out of his own time into all time. Such flashes are always anachronistic, in the sense that they are timeless. And this is a realm in which scholars do not much move, and where scholarship rarely finds itself at home. And finally, how can we perpetuate and propagate these rare flashes of genius in which he humanity as nowhere else has risen above itself.

Starting point is 00:15:59 That's pretty deep there. What do you guys think? How can we perpetuate and propagate flashes of genius? Dr. Cannon talked to Russia, Germany, and China, where he had been on tour and in medical conventions last summer. Ivan Pavlov, the Russian scientists, was one of his old friends. During the early days of the revolution, he said, Pavlov, as was his want, before beginning his regular series of academic lectures, commented on world events.

Starting point is 00:16:41 He was called before the Cheka. After they had questioned him a while, he drew out his watch and said, Gentlemen, you must excuse me, I have a lecture to deliver and walked out. You can do that if you're Pavlov, said Whitehead. Otherwise, you go to Siberia. Foreign diplomats and consuls in Russia, said Dr. Cannon, have no Russian friends. The Russians dare not be seen talking with foreign officials. A British consul in Leningrad who cultivates gypsy lore was rejoiced at the prospect of going there

Starting point is 00:17:18 because the Russian authority on gypsies lives and teaches in that city. But in two years he has not been able to meet him. Friends of the Pavlovs, a young scientist and his wife, were arrested by the Checa, while their little boy, a seven-year-old, was asleep, and they were jailed separately in communicato. The Consignor saw them being taken away and notified the Pavlovs who took the child. By acting through Moscow, they obtained the release of the parents a week later, but the woman was shattered and probably will never recover. The boy is of necessity being brought up in the utterly abnormal atmosphere. Goes guarded to school and can have no playmates. The hounding of scholars, said Whitehead, is one of the symptoms of social decay.

Starting point is 00:18:12 It keeps cropping out in Western Europe as well. The dread must be always upon them. It is, said Dr. Cannon. And they bring it with them. When Pavlov visited me here in Cambridge, It was a sultry day in July. My family was in New Hampshire, and I took him down to Harvard Square. But where is your watchman, he asked?

Starting point is 00:18:31 I have no. Your house will be robbed. Oh, I don't think so. Then seeing my old Ford car in the backyard, he said, but your beautiful car will surely be stolen. Oh, no. No? Then how superior is the morality of Boston to New York?

Starting point is 00:18:50 I think that's relevant today. as of today November 18th 2020 you could make the argument that the censorship that we see in social media is a lot like the censorship

Starting point is 00:19:08 the beginning of communism in times before nowhere near is it as violent or as brutal as taking away kids from families. But I think it's a start.

Starting point is 00:19:34 I mean, if you look at the way YouTube or Facebook or Google, if you look at the China model with a social credit score, not being able to say things about certain types of government officials, or talk about the coronavirus being a fake or a fraud, and just an attempt to condition people, all that gets taken off of the Internet. it. You know, it is in fact a great social experiment being pushed on the people right now. And it's working. It's working. I have people in my family that won't even go outside because they believe this invisible virus is going to kill them in all of humanity.

Starting point is 00:20:21 And I would argue that the coronavirus is mainly spread through television, which can be a drug. It can be. a brutal form of social control. Here's an interesting part about a novel written, or what was Dr. Whitehead was reading. Here's an interesting book review by Dr. Whitehead from April 19, 1937. Three novels about Boston have appeared within a year, the latest of them, Ward 8 by Joseph Danine, is a study of municipal politics,

Starting point is 00:21:17 with a lifelike portrait of Martin Lomensi, who was something between Guardian and Tsar of the West End. It deals with the other three quarters of the city not coped with, although noticed in John Marquan's the late George Appley. Santayana's The Last Puritan of a wider range ends as a period two decades earlier than the other two. The Whiteheads had been reading Ward 8 and asked. Do you know the author? Certainly he is a reporter and friend of mine. Could you bring him to see us? Would he care to come? One can't undertake to produce him, but I can try. It proved easier than anticipated. We went both. We went. Both whiteheads were in top form. Perfection of handling. Genial, considerate, interested, but uncompromising. It was amusing to see Joe. shaken out of his attitude of indifference. He began with a general defense of the system.

Starting point is 00:22:29 They demolished it by Socratic questioning. What service does the boss perform? Employment agency? Yes. Humanizer of the ward? Yes. But isn't the tribute he exacts excessive? And how about selling their votes after they have paid him for jobs

Starting point is 00:22:50 and the employers have paid him for paid him for getting the laborers. Is it finally defensible? Danine took it gamely. Besides, he knew that Mrs. Whitehead was emotionally in sympathy and that both of them admired the novel. He explained the graft all through society in the labor unions, the unions expecting to be sold out by their elected agents who openly justify their having done.

Starting point is 00:23:22 done so on the score of policy. Then in business, finance, journalism, it is an enveloping climate. The discussion moved to a comparative view of the two social systems, American and English. We in England, said Whitehead, have a bad system inherited from medieval feudalism which oughtn't to work, but which as a matter of fact does work rather well. Whereas here in America, you have an excellent system which ought to work very well but does, as a matter of fact, work rather badly. Your system, said I, keeps the individual of the class in the class, but by so doing provides it with able leaders, which gradually elevates the class as a whole. Ours allows the individual to

Starting point is 00:24:24 arise, but by so doing deprives the class of its natural leaders and so tends to leave the class as a whole down. That's a fascinating point. I think we covered that one a little bit in the first edition of Alfred North Whitehead. There is no tolerance unless there is something to tolerate, and that in practice is likely to mean something which most people would consider intolerable. Religion carries two sorts of people in two entirely opposite directions, said Whitehead. The mild and gentle people, it carries towards mercy and justice.

Starting point is 00:25:17 The persecuting people, it carries into fiendish, sadistic cruelty. Classes identify the interests of their nation with those of themselves. It begins to look as though the one thing democracy has. that is worth saving is the freedom of the individual. I would say, remarked Whitehead, the freedom of the individual is one, but your knowledge of history will remind you that there has always been misery at the bottom of society,

Starting point is 00:26:05 in the ancient world slavery, in the medieval world serfdom, since the development of machine technique industrial proletariat, Our own age is the first time when, if this machine production is sensibly organized, there need be no material want. Russia has relieved the suffering of the masses at the price of the individual's liberty. The fascists have destroyed personal liberties without really much alleviating the condition of the masses. The task of democracy is to relieve mass misery and yet preserve the freedom. of the individual. How would you say we are doing that today?

Starting point is 00:26:50 I would say very poorly. I don't think we are relieving mass misery and preserving freedom of the individual. Maybe it can't be done. Maybe it is a utopian vision to do both of those things. I would say that we are slipping faster and faster into, a more fascistic regime.

Starting point is 00:27:21 If you look at what's going on, at least in the United States, you can see that the Great Reset or the COVID-19 is a fancy way of getting rid of small businesses. There will be no room for small business in the future. And we will be moving rapidly towards a... I'm a... of the opinion it's more of a eugenics mindset. Now we're going to kill off tons of really poor and mentally disabled people. I'm not saying I agree with that. I'm just saying that's what it appears to me. This fake pandemic or planemic is just a way to transfer wealth from the

Starting point is 00:28:11 bottom people in society to the very top people. In the United States, we, we have a way to, we have had what is deemed stimulus for people, but it's really just bailouts of banks and corporations and the new aristocracy that will be that will be moving forward in the future. It's kind of a dark vision. I hope I'm wrong. I hope that there is some sort of AI behind this, you know, or some sort of some sort of, you know, or some sort of sort of, I don't know, I don't know how realistic believing in a AI to solve problems is. It seems like a technocratic nightmare is being thrust upon us. Struggle, ambition, heroic energy, these are noble, as potentially noble as anything in man.

Starting point is 00:29:10 But when they decline into a mere love of domination, they are evil. You know, it seems that throughout our evolution, these were incredibly noble aspects of man's struggle, ambition, heroic energy. These are the stories of our youth. Stories told to young men and women to help them survive. stories of young men and women that overcame overwhelming odds. And in today's environment, those particular ideologies or those particular traits are used not to overcome adversity, but to enrich, underscore, material gain regardless of the outcome. You know, we're not fighting dragons. We are fighting weaker people to steal all their resources. In the name of profit. Later, we got

Starting point is 00:30:48 onto what Whitehead called asking ourselves historical riddles. Let's see what you think about some of these. Whether the Spaniards had maimed their intellect by expelling the Jews and Protestants, he added. The gold they brought from the Americas demoralized them. The gold they brought from the Americas demoralized them, and the armies they sent over Europe drained off more of their best blood. No doubt the soldiers produced their proper number of babies, but not in Spain.

Starting point is 00:31:27 The blight, however, did not extend to the arts. Did the expulsion of the French Huguenots postpone the French Revolution? Perhaps caused it, said he. That suggests the German 48ers. After the failure of their revolutions, multitudes of Germans got up and came over here. Later in the evening, he said, I have been meditating on the relation of technique to art

Starting point is 00:31:59 and have a theory. Whether it can be sustained, I am not. not sure. It is that in the early stages of an art technique comes in as a means of expression for the burning conviction that is in the artists. It is often raged. Take the cathedrals. You get something profoundly moving and at elbows with it and at elbows with it something clumsy but which does not detract from it. Then as the art matures and the technique gets established and transmissible by teaching, the bright boys are picked out who can learn the technique readily. To the neglect

Starting point is 00:32:47 of the boys who have magnificent dreams. The work is clever and finished but lacks depth. See, that to me speaks to the, I don't know, I guess that that can be something seen throughout history or throughout the centuries, in the beginning you have these beautiful artistic ideas, people that have the ability to dream and create new things. And as the century moves on about halfway through, maybe 50 years, those people are no longer needed. What is needed is good students of those people to finish the dream. It's almost like in the beginning of every century or maybe in the beginning of every age, the dreamers are given the right to begin dreaming. And then the dreamers that are born 20 or 30 years from them are to be cast aside as workers

Starting point is 00:33:55 or cast aside as lower class because their dreams, their skills are no longer needed. What is needed is the A student, the person. that can follow directions that can carry out the dream of the long-gone dreamer. I think it kind of harkens back to system versus experience. We started rummaging among the arts to test it. He thought Raphael was one of the clever technicians who appear at the moment when the profundity begins to be lost, and Milton another, and the flamboyant style and Gothic, a further example.

Starting point is 00:34:37 English Gothic said he runs through about four centuries, 1,500 to 1,500, and through the successive styles, Romanesque, early English. Decorated and perpendicular, each style lasting roughly about a century, up to the 16th when it begins to peter out. What was happening in those four centuries was that new aspects of the idea of Gothic architecture were being discovered and developed. Its possibilities of novelty looked endless, but by the 1500s they began to look used up. I don't say that they were used up. Then you get a complete break. Builders go back to the architectural style of Greece and Rome, Renaissance. They adapt that style for every usage in the modern world and from church to railroad station,

Starting point is 00:35:32 so that in London you get instead of a god. Abbey, St. Paul's Cathedral, and a New York and Pennsylvania railroad station, which is modeled after the baths, Paracalla, and Rome. We tried this theory on the art of Greek tragedy, and sure enough, here was the same life cycle. Sicillis has a burning moral conviction. His technique in the Persians is little more than that of a cantata. or an oratorio, but in the Agamemnon, it is highly advanced. In the extent plays of Sophocles, you have the balance of a middle period. There is still strong conviction. The ideas are expressed with tremendous force, and at the same time with a technical mastery which releases their power to the full. In this group are the Antigone and the two Oedipus plays.

Starting point is 00:36:44 By the time Euripides arrives, technique is so well understood that it can be juggled. But while there is still strong conviction and the ideas are powerful, the spirit is one of skeptical criticism. We found that what we were discussing in terms of techniques were the life cycles of art forms. Such cycles can be traced in Greek sculpture, Greek sculpture and Renaissance painting and in modern music, beginning three centuries ago, and coming on down to the 20th, when the technique of symphonic orchestration is so well understood that it can now be taught to the bright boy. Some of these bright boys, Whitehead's theory, had let in a flood of light, put on dazzling shows of technical fireworks, brilliant

Starting point is 00:37:37 flashes and bangs. They can astonish the natives with previously unheard of combinations of sounds, can shock the daylights out of the old folks by using the naughty four-letter words of harmonic dissonance and a tonality. But believing in nothing they have nothing to say, and the once powerful idea is stone dead. Yet it may have a resurrection, caution the white head. There are ideas which have lain in the tombs for centuries, then rising again have a revolutionized human society. Some boy who is more than merely bright gets hold of an idea which has long been supposed to be dead, and it comes to life in his hands. But when a young man is all in a glow over the discovery of a great idea, it is not so much the particular

Starting point is 00:38:35 idea he has discovered that is important, as it is. glow over it. There you have the sense of adventure of newness. The old idea has been seen freshly in some new aspect. For the vitality of thought is an adventure. Ideas won't keep. Something must be done about them. When the idea is new, its custodians have fervor, live for it, and if need be, die for it. Their inheritors receive the idea, perhaps now strong, and successful but without inheriting the fervor so the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age turns senile and dies but the institutions organized around it do not stop they go on by sheer force of acquired momentum or like the

Starting point is 00:39:26 dead night born along on his horse interesting right to think about the life cycle of art forms to think about the life cycle of art forms to think about the life cycle of ideas and how similar the life cycle of artwork and ideas is to our own life. You could think of yourself as an idea, the idea of George Monti, the idea of enter your name here. It can give you an interesting aspect of your life. You know, and it just, it's fascinating to think of an idea as a idea as a person. person, an idea is something that's real. An idea is something that lives a life alongside of you.

Starting point is 00:40:26 Whatever you believe in, whatever idea you have, if you pour your heart into it, it becomes real. How would your life change if you look at yourself like an idea? Ideas are something that you can, they're malleable. You can change an idea as fast as you can change the way you think. The idea of yourself. Maybe if you're not living the life you want to live right now, you can just change the way you think about who you are and your life will change. It's true with an idea, right?

Starting point is 00:41:12 If you think of the idea of living in a purpose. perpetual state of happiness. You can begin to live it. If you think of the idea of living in a depressed, saddened state of depression, then you can live that one as well. What you focus on is what you feel, and the life cycle of art is the life cycle of life,

Starting point is 00:41:40 is the life cycle of ideas, is the life cycle of our planet. Just like watching a flower grow on a tree from bud to fragrant flower, fragrant flower to browning of the edges and falling on the ground. It's the same way you can look at the United States, or at least the cycle of this part of the United States. When you're green, you grow, when you're ripe, you're ripe. When I first lectured in American colleges, said Whitehead, roughly from 1924 to 1929,

Starting point is 00:42:27 In those five years, I soon saw if I used a quotation from the Bible that not one of my students had ever read it, ever intended to, or had the idea what I was talking about. And if they sensed that I was speaking of religion, they leaned back until I should have got on to something else. But in the years from 1929 to my retirement, the last seven years of my active teaching, this attitude changed. changed. And when I spoke of religion, there was an attentive leaning forward. Okay, I want you to think about the years he's talking about right now from 1929 until his retirement. That was almost a hundred years ago. In the beginning of that, from 1924 to 1920, and I no one even cared about religion, according to Whitehead. And where are we now? We are in, just, you know, we are in, 2020. And you could argue that there has been a growing detest for religion in the United States

Starting point is 00:43:42 in the last, I don't know, 15 years, all these atheists and just different. It seems to me that as a whole, our country was getting away from religion. But in times of crisis, where we're at now, it seems that it's growing back faster. And we're right back to the last chapter where we talked about the life cycle of ideas. You know, what if every hundred years there's a resurgence of religious fervor? What if every hundred years there is a small cycle and a big cycle? And every thousand years might be the big cycle. And every hundred years, there may be an opportunity for a great war,

Starting point is 00:44:36 rebalance. You know, we're rapidly approaching the 100-year mark of World War, of the world, both world wars, really. And you could argue that that's where our countries are headed to now. From here, the discussion detoured to a discussion of crusading zeal, and Whitehead remarked of professional crusaders that their old age is likely to be a crusading zeal. And whitehead remarked of professional crusaders, that their old age is likely to be a melancholy affair. They go from cause to cause. Where precisely should a man's crusading zeal abate, I ask, when his blood cools?

Starting point is 00:45:23 With the professionals, said he, it never does. Your spirited vindication of the Jews in the Atlantic prompts me to ask why they are, as you have remarked, so often unpopular. They are acute, and their acuteness often takes a form which excites envy, namely, the form of doing well in trade. It is not always depth, and picking men you must guard against the brilliancy of the young Jew. They mature at 19 or 20 and can seem dazzling, but they do not always fulfill the expectations of them based on their superiority to others at that age. Furthermore, added Mrs. Whitehead, they have not had the experience of ruling other people or even a state of their own.

Starting point is 00:46:12 That gives them, said he, a certain helpful preoccupation with the ideal. They are singularly deficient in humor or were till they lived among the Europeans. The Bible is quite humorless. After their tragedies, they never seem to have a, a farce by Aristophanes. Situated as they were between military empires, perhaps there was nothing to laugh about. The Jew is naturally melancholy, said Whitehead,

Starting point is 00:46:44 and they don't get credit for their enormous achievement, the influence they have had on the development of Europe, allowing for three centuries to get going. The Bible has been a best seller for 1,500 years and is still. But the Jews, get no credit for having produced the most influential book on earth because they insisted that every word of it had been dictated by God. That's kind of funny. I told him, Bruning, sometime Chancellor of Germany, had said during a conversation at Dr. Hans Zinners

Starting point is 00:47:33 that education should be reserved for the elite. Until 50 years ago in England, said Whitehead, It was confined to a small upper layer, and no one thought it amiss that the mass of the people should be illiterate. Now, we take literacy for granted. My father had the running of the village school when schooling was first made compulsory. He encountered the stiffest opposition. The villagers had not been educated, and they did not want their children to be educated. There was a sudden and immense trek to education in this country after the world war, which has continued ever since.

Starting point is 00:48:16 I remarked, by 1926 it was unmistakable, and it kept right on through the depression. With it has come a higher regard for the teacher. In every 19th century in America, I'm sorry, in the early 19th century in America, as I understand it, said Whitehead, the teacher and scholar and professor were looked up to. They were Unitarians and had a nimbus of religious awe, but as the century wore on, that wore off. Unitarianism was a religion, not of one God, but of one God at most, if not of one God. And also, said I, as the continent was open, the feeling was at the turn of the century that if man was what he ought to be, he would make a fortune. this was what made William James call success the bitch goddess that worship is not as prevalent now

Starting point is 00:49:20 interesting to think about our history with education and how you know is it education or is it indoctrination and if it's indoctrination is it really that different than what the Germans did to their people Has it always been a level of propaganda? Is science something that is determined by a group of experts? You know, it's interesting to think about how malleable a country can be if they have a system of education. And to the point about only a few people being literate, you know, I think it's still there.

Starting point is 00:50:17 You know, I think that, I think that, I think the point of elite schools in the past was that really intelligent people have the opportunity to go away to institutions where they could continue their learning with other incredibly intelligent people. And out of this idea of beautiful fairness and out of this idea of raising the consciousness of the entire country, we should make it more available to all. all people. However, in doing so, in our attempt for eternal fairness, we have turned education into a higher form of indoctrination. You know, there are, if you go to an Ivy League school, you are probably going to be surrounded by the smartest people in the world, whereas if you go to a state school, you are going to be surrounded with the people you would normally be surrounded with wherever you live, just from a different part of the world.

Starting point is 00:51:30 It doesn't mean that people that don't go to an Ivy League school can't be brilliant in other areas because they surely can. And in fact, may have a better all-around education than a, like a highly educated weirdo that just can only play guitar and talk about robotics. You know, I, in a way, people that are, that are, that are at, like, some of the greatest schools in the world are, are borderline retarded in that they can't have relationships. They can't, they're almost like the monks from an old school monastery where, you know, they're blessed with this unbelievable idea of how to cultivate abstract ideas. but it's that same fascination with the abstract that makes it impossible for them to live a regular life. So I'm not sure you should want to be Elon Musk or other individuals that seem to be glorified

Starting point is 00:52:35 when in fact they may not have the life you think they have. You should be happy with your own life because you're a beautiful person. A paragraph in Whitehead's appeal to San Francisco. prompted me to ask again if any state had ever permitted adequate expression to the creative impulses of man. Time and again, we see the heads of states themselves, humane men, acting on behalf not of society's creative impulse, but its possessive instincts. Herbert Hoover, a Quaker, fed milk to Belgian babies. Herbert Hoover, as president of the United States, had the war for veterans of the bonus army bombed out of Washington by tear gas.

Starting point is 00:53:29 What is this profound dichotomy? The milk for Belgian babies didn't necessarily imply humanitarian sentiments on his part, said Whitehead. It was merely an organization job, which the sentiment of his time had a judged, had a judged, had to be done, and he was engaged to do it. Quaker, yes, but unimaginative.

Starting point is 00:53:56 In his original function as an engineer, his job was to get minerals from mines somewhere in the interior down to tidewater. Such men don't think in terms of human values or human well-being. Those items, if they enter at all, come in incidentally to the main object, namely, that of taking up the metal from one place and laying it down in another. They keep their minds fixed on that. When it came to getting the bonus army out of Washington, there you had a situation that wanted to be handled very delicately, and he showed how heavy-handed he really was. Then let me cite another instance. In 1914, we had an incident with Mexico.

Starting point is 00:54:48 Something provocative happened in the harbor of Tampico. First a squabble, then a dispute, over an insult and a demand that the Mexicans apologize and salute our flag. The affair kept worsening. The North Atlantic fleet was ordered the coast of Mexico. Public feeling was inflamed, or at least the press, vociferated. And President Wilson ordered a Navy to attack and capture Veracruz. They did. And 17 boys were killed. 16 Marines and one sailor. Two more died of wounds a few days later. Only half a dozen years before that, Mr. Wilson, instead of being pressed, President of the United States had been a college president at Princeton, a humane gentleman,

Starting point is 00:55:35 like any of your colleagues here, who would have been distressed if 17 boys in his freshman class had died of an epidemic. The bodies were brought to the Brooklyn Navy Yard on an armored cruiser, and the coffins each covered with a flag were rolled out on a parade ground. The president came from Washington to deliver the funeral speech. He said he envied those dead young men. It was Wilson, the official, who had given the order for them to attack. It was Wilson, the man, who had to look at the 17 coffins. Remember, this was in May, 1914, and next to no one foresaw the world war. Our world hadn't then been Caliphany.

Starting point is 00:56:27 by years of mass slaughter, such events were still felt normally. And Mr. Wilson was heartbroken. My point is that as president, he was required to act on behalf of collective property interests in a manner which, as a man, he never would have entertained. Only a part of the man was acting as president, because only a part of man is organized in the state. Whitehead replied that, Inside the state, men pursue numerous corporate enterprises which do express other aspects of their natures,

Starting point is 00:57:04 educational, charitable, creative, artistic, social, and that perhaps the function of the state thus far is to provide conditions of sufficient tranquility within which those more varied forms of activity can proceed. Already many of them, such as science and education, are international and supervene the state boundaries. What he had said in his appeal to sanity was, each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs. Any particular community life touches only part of the nature of each civilized man. If the man is wholly subordinated to the common life, he is dwarfed. Communities lack the intricacies of human nature.

Starting point is 00:57:58 War can protect. It cannot create. Man, that's almost like a mic drop right there. Let me just read that again so you can truly kind of take some time to think about it. Appeal to sanity. Each human being is more... is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

Starting point is 00:58:25 Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs. Just take a minute to mow it over. I know. It's deep. Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs. Any particular community life touches only part

Starting point is 00:58:50 of the nature of each single, civilized man if the man is wholly subordinated to the common life is dwarfed communities lack the intricacies of human nature war can protect it cannot create the task of government is not to satisfy everybody but at least to satisfy somebody if it satisfies one reasonably influential class or perhaps two they will try to keep it in power. And the more classes it can satisfy, the solider it will become. Civilization doesn't break up when only one major activity or two go awry,

Starting point is 00:59:34 but in our age economics have swollen into these huge corporate enterprises, which bring a new form of oppression that wants coping with. And nationalism has got out of hand, and religious faith has gone to pieces. And between a lot of them, our civilization does seem to be in a bad way. Pretty fascinating, right? I just, it blows my mind to think about how much of this is still relevant today. Just that last paragraph that talks about our government,

Starting point is 01:00:12 not being able to satisfy, and doesn't need to satisfy large groups. It needs to satisfy two groups, and that's enough. But I think the most relevant part of this last paragraph is how our age of economics has swollen these huge corporate megolids like Amazon, Walmart, or Google, and how there's no religion. It's like the absence of the religion plus the pure power and greed and just uncaring hatred. for people not making profit, for not caring about how productive you can be. Like, it seems like production has taken the place of religion. People in boardrooms no longer see working people or no longer see people below them as people,

Starting point is 01:01:09 but in fact, cogs and numbers. You know, if the people in boardrooms could see the people that work at their companies as human beings, instead of a number, instead of being so far removed from the people that accomplished their dreams of profit, then that they could see those people as people, the world will be better. And I think that there is a visceral hatred for people in boardrooms trying to squeeze productivity out of people they don't know. And that when you do that, when you see people as numbers, and you treat them like cogs in a wheel, that the level of anger and the level of just pure, unadulter hatred,

Starting point is 01:02:14 and that hatred is culminated and aimed at the very people at the top, those people at the top, they're in for a huge problem. And they should be scared. I think that's why you see a lot of billionaires hiding and running and people in boardrooms running and that they should be afraid. I mean, if you look at the French Revolution, that's nothing compared to what the world of underclass people could do to people in positions of authority and power. like the level of barbarism, the level of just pure anger and hatred, like that, you know, I fear that that's going to be pointed not only at the people in the boardrooms, but at their families and the generations of their families to come.

Starting point is 01:03:06 Like there is a real, there is a real undercurrent of animosity coming for the people who can't see other people as human. humans. I hope somebody in power listens to this because you should be going out of your way to change the ways in which you look at the world. Well my friends, I think that's good for

Starting point is 01:03:31 this episode of Alfred North Whitehead. It's got some good stuff in there, right? I hope you take a few minutes to go over it and I hope you maybe take a few moments to see how relevant some of this is today and to understand if you

Starting point is 01:03:49 want to know the future, we should look to the past. That's all we got, my friends. Aloha.

TrueLife - Spotlight on Alfred North Whitehead #2: Process, Reality & the Flow of Consciousness

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