Good Morning Friends,

We're going to wrap up here, our topic having been Pragmatism (the philosophy) and class stratification. We asked the question why class stratification happens despite people's best efforts to create egalitarian institutions. We looked at the Soviet Union in the fifties, which had already "evolved" a ten-class social system.

We looked at Israeli farm collectives at the turn of the twentieth century. There is a perspective that would have liked to have seen the manual workers and farmers, of these communities, remain on top socially as they had been at the beginning; they would have liked to have seen this community remain a "worker state."

But, sociologically, its like a see saw, with the "brain" or "clean" work class eventually remaining on top, or the bottom holding workers aloft, depending on your perspective. There seems to be a transition period when new societies are being created - when things are a bit rough and the rugged sort of John Wayne character is needed, and glorified, to tame things.

The adventurer, doing his job so well, actually expedites his own extinction. After "civilization" is established the managerial sort is needed to sustain it. Hopefully, the civilized state lasts far, far longer than the transitional stage. Hopefully, the civilized state continues in perpetuity, indefinitely. And so, the adventurer becomes "obsolete." This is almost mathematically obvious when one thinks about it.

It is the "knowledge worker" who is seen as vital in "holding society together," and so forth. One of the criticisms made of, the first post-conquest viceroy of Iraq, Paul Bremer's "de-Baathification" policies, was that they created a "brain drain" effect. They drove away, and sometimes underground with the "insurgency," a lot of the educated professionals who already knew how to run the society like teachers, engineers, and the like.

Brain-drain is not a term I like, because it implies that those people who are left behind do not have intelligence. When you confront commentators on this, they will undoubtedly say that they didn't mean it that way.

I could be wrong, but I think that, deep down, they did mean it that way. Not only is the term an insult, but it reflects an incorrect view of the nature of knowledge. It does not acknowledge the relationship between the perceived-abstract and the perceived-practical.

Now, the adventurer, in the form of the national security state, tries to avoid riding off into the sunset of obsolescence, by: A) insistently assuring us how "wild" the situation still is; B) creating adventures for itself, being provocative, talking belligerently about (with respect to one nation or another) "keeping all options on the table," and so forth; and C) deploying the "Buffalo Bill" solution and telling us how many threats they delivered us from, popularizing, and, sometimes, we think, even fictionalizing their exploits.

Again, I would refer you to the Adam Curtis BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares," which is online. For example: A) We need only recall George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech, and before that Ronald Reagan told us the Soviet Union was "The Evil Empire"; B) I would just cite, here, the constant rhetorical harassment of the nation of Iran by U.S. officials, and also we might cite what many think of as the "spreading" war on terror, into Pakistan, Yemen, etc; C) We are constantly being told that "we" are fighting the terrorists "there" so we don't have to fight them "here," and so forth, and, as you know, there are many people who believe the U.S. went to war in Iraq on the basis of "cherry-picked" intelligence.

But returning economic class stratification, none of us would suggest that society be convulsed deliberately in order to bring about, once more, a "wild" situation in which the worker can once again reign. The goal of making a classless society is total freedom, not to exchange one rulership for another. What is needed, in my opinion, is a proper understanding of the nature of knowledge, which I talked a little about before.

If I had my druthers I would restructure education in general. For example, I think more dialectical materialism is needed in the study of history. I know this term 'dialectical materialism,' may have unpleasant Marxist associations for some of you, and you may think that this approach is horribly "reductionist," meaning that it reduces the passions of history-makers to crude material motives. But, as we have discussed in detail, materialism is not just materialism and money is not just money.

Money and material possession are symbols - unwholesome ones when accumulated in excess - of man's desire to become God.

Dialectical materialism offers a way in which we might teach an "integrated" curriculum. What is the study of history, as we largely have it today? It is white, heterosexual, male, bourgeoisie/aristocracy, political triumphalism, little more than kings and popes lists. I think I mentioned this before, but some observers are concerned about what they think of as de facto or "voluntary" school segregation.

This is hardly surprising since the curriculum itself is segregated. Because of this we don't really know how to be together across class, ethnic, "racial," and sexual orientation lines. Some of your "best friends" might come from x group, but if you examine your interactions I think you will find that you keep it light, you keep it relatively superficial. You stick to sports, travel (if you're of the traveling class), shopping, sex, and the like. There are certain places you don't go, certain things you don't and can't talk about. You don't want to make each other uncomfortable. This is the fault of bad education. Deep down, we really don't know what to say to each other.

Moving on, I think math could be taught differently, to make it more accessible to more people. We have the discipline as a fixed set of rules, equations and formulas, what have you. We tend to think mathematics as something handed down from Heaven whole cloth. But before we had math it had to be created or discovered, piece by piece, part by part.

I would say that the initial exploration of mathematics, thousands and thousands of years ago, started as a joint abstract-practical investigation. It was practical in that an "immediate" problem, of how to express a relationship, needed to be solved. It was abstract, in that it was an engagement with language.

Math is a kind of language or sub-language. Math is a response to a desire to bring more precision to communication, in one sense; and as such this is the province of intuition or the abstract. When we "reach" to find the "right word" to express ourselves in a given situation, this is a very intuitive, abstract activity. But as math is taught the intuitive element is entirely cut out.

And yet the fact of the existence of something called theoretical mathematics, indicates the intuitive, abstract aspect of math. If this level of math is speculative, it must mean that there is room for disagreement among mathematicians concerning their field, even though we may not be used to thinking about it this way.

Does all this mean that I think everyone could be train to the exact same level of proficiency in math? No.

It's like this: most of us over 18 have a driver's license. But only a tiny fraction of us have the skill of a professional race car driver. And yet we can all handle a car. I believe math, as well as the sciences can be taught in such a way that gives us all driver's licenses, at least. The distance between the "professional" scientists and mathematicians need not be so very vast; and because of this we, the public, are so susceptible to misconception, gross error, and "old wives" tales.

Let me end by saying, that I'm beginning to suspect that one reason there were so many "polyglots" (multitalented) thinkers in the ancient world, as we're told there were, is - in addition to the relative scarcity of data - the fact that they understood the relationship between the perceived-abstract and the perceived-practical much better than we do today.

wingedcentaur