Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Five >>>>> Illiteracy and Semi-Literacy

Happiness is grounded in concern for one’s fellows and a genuine desire to make life better for all people on the planet at the time one lives and as one anticipates the future.

 

Before the advent of writing systems, oral communication was the only means of recording thoughts, including those pertaining to ethics and spirituality in poetry, stories, and epics that combined those two forms.  In the aftermath of the creation of systems of writing in certain parts of the globe, many societies continued to transmit intellectual, creative, ethical, and spiritual thoughts orally, operating without the written word.  Such societies often continued to operate very close to nature, so that the sun, moon, rivers, lakes, land, all manner of features of the sky and what could be observed of the cosmos pervaded the lives of humans, giving them ideas of creation, deity, and meaning. 

 

Given that God is to be found in and in contemplation of Nature and Cosmos, people living in preliterate and non-literate societies had a deeper understanding of life than would be the case with the advent of civilization.  Writing systems came with the urbanization and hierarchical mechanisms of control identified with civilization.  City life and concerns associated with urban people presented distractions that people in less complex forms of social and civic organization did not have.  Although people warred on each other, the capacity for enormous destruction was limited and the impetus for survival necessitated a focus on what was good for the community as a whole in the present and in contemplation of the future.

 

Civilizations have been dominated by elites who sought to control all aspects of existence as much as possible.  Expressed concern for the greater good was mostly a rationalization for the exercise of power.  Life in the palace and territorial expansion became chief goals for the governing elite and associated militarists, and by extension those scribes who served their needs.  Concern was not to make life better for all but for an elite few, who pretended that the greater number of inhabitants in realm and empire would also benefit from their political, territorial, and hedonistic gratifications.

 

Scribes used writing systems first created approximately 3500-3000 BCE by the Vinca culture of Serbia and then very proximately by elites in Sumer, the first of numerous influential civilizations in Mesopotamia, the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (today’s Iraq).  The writing system of Sumer, cuneiform, was in the beginning highly functional in application, used to advance the purposes of mercantile, trader, and government elites.  This was true, too, in Egypt, in which the pharaohs and others in the bureaucracy used hieroglyphics, the first writing system to incorporate phonetic values, to further their personal aggrandizements and to control the populace.  Hieroglyphics, while a very distinct system, was at a high degree of likelihood inspired by the Serbian and Sumerian initiatives.

 

Over the expanse of Eurasia, other people created writing systems that may have had some sense of those initiatives but were largely independent.  Some time after 2000 BCE, elites in the urban center of Harappa in the Indus River Valley created an as yet undeciphered script, used for the familiar mercantile and governing purposes.  By 1200 BCE, the ruling classes of the Shang Dynasty recorded details of their religious sacrifices, military fates, and matters of law and governance on oracle bones.

 

More definitely independently generated in the Serbian and Sumerian manner were scripts developed by the elites of the Americas from today’s Mexico southward.  During 900-400 BCE, the Olmecs and Zapotecs created royal iconography and calendars via writing systems that furthered the aims of elites in today’s Mexico.  And in today’s Yucatan peninsula of Mexico and southward to Guatemala, the Mayans created the most sophisticated writing system of the American pre-Columbian era, used for administration and for the propagation of the religion and governing dictates of the ruling class.

 

Inspired by a succession of scripts induced by the achievements of the Serbians and Sumerians, the Greeks developed an alphabetic system during 1100-700 BCE that feature consonants and vowels.  But this alphabetic system in all likelihood was part of a historical concatenation dating to the consonantal alphabetic system of the Canaanites from 1500 BCE.  This script became influential upon those elites who developed the Phoenician writing system featuring the first linear alphabet, a script which in turn inspired Hebrew and Aramaic systems.  The Hebrew system was used by those who migrated to Canaan during 1200-1000 BCE;  the system evolved into the new “Square Hebrew” system after the 6^th century BCE Babylonian exile.

 

Aramaic, developed during the same 1200-1000 BCE period as in the Canaanite case, became a hugely influential system, adopted by the Achaemenid rulers of Persia and inspiring systems ranging to Turkish and Mongol populations in today’s Siberia, Mongolia, and Turkestan.  With the expansion of trade and associated advantages of reading and writing for mercantile classes, literacy in West Asia (Middle East) may have increased to 15-20% of the population.  Literacy may have been in that range also in the Roman Republic and Empire, where from 1200 BCE Latin evolved from systems used by the Etruscan and Latin peoples and from the various systems of the Mediterranean and West Asia.   And during the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), Latin was used by Christians at the papal court and by clergy and monks throughout Europe for purposes of maintaining the papacy;  and by governing aristocrats, who often employed these clerics and monks do their administrative bidding.

 

The Renaissance featured a revival of interest in the humanistic works of the Greeks and Romans and created a spirit of critical analysis that impelled a concern for reform of received institutions, including conspicuously the Roman Catholic Church.  Protestants created their own orthodoxies and manifested their particular institutional deficiencies, but their approach to religion proved a boon to literacy.  With Protestant emphasis on actually reading the Bible, with new printing presses churning out works far more cheaply, and with the quest for data and facts engendered by the Enlightenment (1600-1800, Age of Reason, Scientific Revolution), some nations of northern Europe surged toward full literacy;  in Sweden, literacy became a prerequisite for marriage.

 

But in the British Isles and then in the United States literacy remained below 50% through the 19^th and into the 20^th century.  Worldwide, the masses remained mostly illiterate until the latter half of the 20^th century:  Literacy increased from 55.7% in 1950 to 86.2%  in 2015.   In the year 2019, literacy remains wildly variable:  almost full literacy in North America, Europe, West Asia, and Central Asia;  above 90 percent in East Asia, the Pacific, Latin America;  67.55 percent in South Asia and North Africa;  and 59.76 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Literacy among youth (younger than 15 years of age) augurs more promisingly for the future, but still is at only 84.03 percent for South Asia and North Africa and 70.06 percent for Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

And although female literacy increased fifty percent from the year 1970 through 2000, reducing the gender gap, there has been stagnation in the literacy rates for women, who constitute 63 percent of the world’s 745,000 illiterate people.  In North Africa, the gap is sixteen percentage points, with 70 percent of women and 86% of men literate;  the comparable figures for South Asia are 58 percent and 77 percent;  and for Sub-Saharan Africa 52 percent and 68 percent.  Thus, although illiteracy worldwide is now low, gender and regional disparities exist.  In the contemporary world, these disparities predict others:  Incarcerated people across the globe tend heavily toward illiteracy;  children of literate mothers are 50 percent more likely to live past the age of five years.

 

Literacy rates are all the more disturbing, since reportage of such rates indicates only very minimal literacy.  Scholars classify literacy in three or four categories that rise from the very basic literacy recorded in reported rates to a classification typically labeled “full prose proficiency.”  Those who possess full prose proficiency are readers who can comprehend complex texts, defined as those assigned at the undergraduate level in college.  To make this reference concrete, perpend the following :

 

Such ability would be required, for example, to understand the much-discussed Mueller Report from an investigation into actions that might rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and thus involve impeachable offenses.  Scholars estimate that only 15 percent of the American adult population have full prose proficiency.

 

Only fifteen (15%) of adults in the United States could read this chapter and the other chapters of Understanding Human Ignorance, fully comprehend the articles entered on my blog, or read my books that appear on the blog or those that have been commercially published. 

 

And dauntingly, such scholars fix the literacy rate for the average American adult at grade seven or eight.  They convey that a truly acceptable literacy rate abides only in the 65-85 percent range;  that 19 percent of the American adult population cannot comprehend a newspaper or comparable website, or fill out a job application;  that 50 percent cannot read at an eighth grade level (understanding that many grade 8 students also cannot read at grade level);  and that 21-23 percent of adults have trouble locating information even in rudimentary texts or making low-level inferences.

 

Thus, people who lived in societies before the advent of writing systems proceeded on their earthly sojourn more fully in control of their lives than have those who lived in those literate societies called civilizations.  Once civilizations developed and society became socially stratified and occupationally specialized, male governing, military, and scribal elites used literacy as a device of control.  Failure in contemporary society to educate most people (who attend wretched public schools) at a high level of literacy suggests strongly that elites continue to maneuver to send their children to private schools (the case, for example with almost all Senators and Representatives in the United States Congress) or the best suburban schools they can find.

 

The United States and other putatively advanced nations who claim democracy as a descriptor of governance do so in name only:  They have yet to become the democracies that they imagine themselves to be.

 

This means more work for women, who shall lead the world into the future.              

Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Four >>>>> Economic Exploitation

Human ignorance, then, is grounded in the temporal, intellectual, and spiritual infancy of humankind. 

 

Once civilizations became a reality of human existence, society featured social stratification in which elite groups of governors, militarists, and scribes used their high positions in the hierarchy to wield authoritarian power.

 

They also used this power to subject those lower in the hierarchy to economic exploitation.

 

During the years 4,000 BCE through the early centuries of the Common Era leading to approximately 500 CE, economic exploitation was frequently of the governmentally direct sort, through heavy taxation and other extractive devices.  Pharoahs, emperors, and monarchs heavily taxed the majority agrarian population and also levied taxes on urbanities of the craft and mercantile classes, and on traders operating across land and sea.  Forms of feudalism did exist during the millennia preceding the Common Era and the first centuries of the latter, whereby favored elites were given land that bore tax obligations that were passed on to peasants who labored on the land;  sometimes these remained taxes in the formal sense, while in other cases they took the form of rents, shares of the crop perceived to be due to the aristocratic lord as owner of the fields.  Either way, the peasant paid heavily and the aristocratic classes, including the top aristocrat, the emperor or monarch, extracted heavily.

 

During the medieval era of Europe of 500-1500 CE, the feudal type of economic exploitation became more dominant.  Monarchs of this era were typically just the top aristocrats to whom other aristocrats pledged military service and economic sustenance.  Peasants in what we today know as France and Germany were serfs, generally secure on the land but bound to it, without the option of moving to another place or serving another lord;  this sort of economic arrangement was also witnessed in other realms throughout continental Europe and the British Isles.  As Russia became a more developed political entity under Ivan III and Ivan IV during the 14^th century and 15^th centuries, serfdom became common;  under the Romanovs, from the 16^th century forward, serfdom became a fixture of Russian society and persisted longer than anywhere else in Europe (remembering that the political fulcrum in Russia has been west of the Ural Mountains and thus in European Russia, whereas the much greater portion of Russian territory lies in Asia).

 

The peculiar economic arrangement of serfdom was not the common form of peasant exploitation across the globe from 500 CE forward, but the broader defining elements of aristocracy had many parallels.  The Chinese empires of Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing commanded great centralized resources but frequently depended on local landowning gentry to take their cut via high rents and then pass a suitable amount on to the central government.  An interesting variant of the feudal style prevailed in Japan during the blend of imperial and shogunate governments of the Ashikaga (14^th through 16^th century) and Tokugawa (early 17^th century through mid-19^th century) periods.  The Toltecs, Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas in Mesoamerica and South America featured systems of hierarchical elites who controlled great expanses of land worked my peasant masses and forwarded generous portions of wealth extracted from the agrarian laborers to those living in imperial style in Tenochtitlan, Cuzco, and the like.  And this feudal mode of ascending economic obligation existed, too, in the great Ghana, Mali, and Songhai empires of West Africa.

 

Not until the 19^th century, in the nation-states of Europe, did the aristocratic pattern with many of the general features of feudalism undergo significant change.  Technological innovation and machine invention of the Industrial Revolution, the growth of the mercantile and trading classes, and the factory system induced and produced those economic arrangements that define capitalism.  Aristocrats hung on stubbornly but the owners and managers of the bourgeoisie accumulated the greatest fortures;  and even as agriculture and peasant labor continued to dominate most economies, the greatest fortunes were made in the cities by exploiting the working, proletarian masses who toiled in urban factories.

 

This arrangement continues to dominate in many nations across the globe in the 21^st century, but in especially the United States, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Canada, and the nations of western Europe, plutocrats are the new aristocrats, building their fortunes by exploiting the labor of free contractors and specialists as well as the conventional working classes, escaping taxation on much of the wealth that they amass, and leaving the greater share of taxes to the various gradations of the middle class.  The economic measure known as the gini coefficient places the economic distance of the wealthiest and the poorest as shorter in Taiwan and Japan by comparison especially with the distance that abides in the United States.  But the highly technological capitalist economy as a new form evidences ever more ingenious forms of economic exploitation and dominance by economic elites.

 

Spiritual and ethical matters count little in the schemes of existence that dominate life in the most advanced economies of the early 21^st century.  Older forms of economic exploitation prevail in the many other quarters of the globe.

 

At this juncture in human infancy, humanity has been ingenious in developing ever more powerful forms of military, governmental, and economic exploitation but woefully ignorant as to the psychological underpinnings of human behavior and unimaginative in contemplating more satisfying ethical and spiritual lives.

 

Again, the hope is that women and the formerly dispossessed who surged forward during the 1964-1973 period and are in the year 2019 asserting power vigorously will be less psychological ignorant and more ethically and spiritually advanced than the white male who formerly dominated military, political, economic, and institutional life during the earlier phases of human infancy.

 

An Even Harder Rain Will Now Fall >>>>> 13 August 2019 MPS Board of Education Meeting Demonstrates Severe Moral and Intellectual Corruption of Board Members and a Shortage of Logic from Those Making Public Comments

Proceedings at the 13 August 2019 Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) Board of Education meeting demonstrated the moral and intellectual corruption of board members and featured comments from members of the public that were wildly errant in their aims.

As to public comments, the time allotted for these ensues at 5:30, with the silliness that passes for the main meeting for consideration of agenda items by this inept membership following at 6:00 PM.

The meeting of 13 August was not typical.

I did lead first with public comments as usual, delivering the essence of the message conveyed in the “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” article that appears next as you scroll on down this blog.  I never know whether my comments will be received with deafening silence (the case when the room is dominated by flunkies of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers [MFT] or others employed by the district)  or fair-to-thundering applause (the case when others are present to register complaints).  On this evening the affirmative “uh-huhs” and applause were in the moderate to upper range:  Others were present who were poised to make their own stringently negative comments.

……………………………………………………………………………….

 

Public comments on 13 August, other than my own, ensued after a nearly hour delay to wait for language interpreters to arrive and were of three main types.

 

First, there was a bevy of Latina and Somali women who stepped forward to complain about the quality of education that their children are getting.  Adeptly organized by Adriana Cerrillo in response to a campaign for “priority enrollment,” the remedy sought is to transfer children from low performing to high performing schools.

 

My response to the comments made by the women and the remedy sought is two-fold:

1)  The successive and numerous accounts of the racism and insensitivity experienced by their children resonated deeply with me, underscoring my own observations over many years that teaching and administrative staff in preK-12 education generally and at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) specifically is not up the task academically, pedagogically, or attitudinally.

2)   The remedy sought is understandable but wrong:

Parents understandably seek enrollment for their poorly served students in schools that seem to offer better learning environments.

But the premise that there are high-performing schools to be found within MPS is errant:

There are schools with affluent student populations who score acceptably on ACT exams of college readiness and on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) when in the latter case they are not irresponsibly opting out.  But any graduate of the Minneapolis Public Schools walks across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only, so ill-educated are they in literature, history, political science, economics, world languages and, by the standards of the best education systems in the world (Taiwan, Singapore, Finland), mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics.  Furthermore, the putatively “high-performing” schools of Southwest Minneapolis and the suburban schools of Twin Cities Metro do little better than “low-performing” schools in educating historically abused students and those on free and reduced price lunch.

Hence, the approach that should logically and morally be followed by all activists is to exert maximum pressure on staff at all MPS schools to provide knowledge-intensive education to students of all demographic descriptors.  There is much psychologically, socially, and culturally to recommend neighborhood and proximate schools;  we should first define and comprehend excellent education and then insist on implementation of knowledge-intensive curriculum in every school.

The second category of public commentators was comprised of those seeking the reinstatement of a beloved lacrosse coach.  This coach does seem to have been first-rate in his athletic instruction and in his mentorship of young men.  But these commentators share much in common with those who come to school board meetings only when some particularistic interest arises (cops in the schools, racist elements to reading curriculum), only to fade away and never to be heard from again.  By definition, this means that such commentators care little about the pressing needs of all students in the Minneapolis Public Schools, with grave inattention to the academic program that constitutes the reason that public schools exist.

The final category was comprised of commentators seeking to install a trades program at North High School or somewhere on the Northside.  The problem with the comments of these speakers was the way in which their pleas were couched:

“Not all students want to or are capable of going to college [by implication, meaning a four-year college].”  

“My child has always been a hands-on learner;  she does not do well sitting at a desk for hours.”

“I went into the trades and I earn more than many people now heavily in debt after attendance at a [four-year] college.”

My response to this line of reasoning is to refer to the preK-12 curriculum design that I first published in my Journal of the K-12 Revolution:  Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota.  This curriculum overhauls current curricula, beginning with the preK-5 elementary level then progressing from that level logically through middle school (grades 6-8) and high school (grades 9-12).  This curriculum is included in my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.  My observation is that in the course of thirteen (K-12) or fourteen (preK-12) years of schooling, students should possess mastery of the liberal and technological arts across a multiplicity of subject areas, with abundant opportunity especially in high school to take electives that suit their driving interests, whether in the conventional academic liberal arts, high technology, or the trades.  But all students should receive the broad education needed to live lives as culturally enriched, civically engaged, professionally satisfied citizens.  People who become employed in business and the professions should have manual skills.  Those earning their living in the trades should have abundant knowledge of history, economics, government, mathematics, and the natural sciences.

……………………………………………………………………..

 

Public comments at the 12 August meeting were delayed for nearly an hour as attendees waited for language interpreters to enter the chamber.

Then those comments were met with typical cluelessness by a reduced board composition (Bob Walser, Siad Ali, Ira Jourdain never appeared;  Josh Pauly came very late;  absences were due to familial matters, attendance at funerals, and travel).  Rather than address the concerns expressed by commentators, after regular agenda items were handled, board members acted in usual sycophantic fashion in commending the splendid teachers and administrators who have so ill-served MPS students;  and then, particularly in the cases of Kim Caprini and Kerryjo Felder, gave treacly testimonies to how much down time and reflective moments they needed and took over the summer, given the pressures that had mounted in their personal lives.

I kid you not.

I almost departed at this point.

But I typically endure all of these sad affairs so as to be privy to all occurrences.

The occurrences at the meeting of 13 August 2019 are going to cause even greater disturbances in the skies threatening the irresponsible actors at the Minneapolis Public Schools:

An even harder rain’s gonna fall.  

Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall >>>>> Observations from >Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools: Current Condition, Future Prospect< (with 500 pages of factual and analytical content)

A hard rain’s gonna fall on the education establishment of Minnesota, particularly on the administration and all key actors in the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), but also on those many culpable parties who set the context for the wretched quality of education delivered by that school district.  The rain will fall amidst the thunder and lightning of data pouring forth from my book, Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

All problems in PreK-12 education in the United States, an institution within which the Minneapolis Public Schools serves as salient example, begin at colleges and universities with teacher and administrator training programs.  Departments, colleges, and schools of education located on postsecondary campuses operate with a degraded philosophy of education that devalues knowledge, sends forth teachers who are low on knowledge, and connives to direct teachers toward lightweight masters and doctoral programs that add very little to the academic knowledge base of teachers and administrators. Such programs are cash cows for the coffers of colleges and universities, so that administrators at these institutions are deeply complicit in sending forth teachers who lack subject area knowledge, have slim pedagogic skill, and have little idea as to how to communicate personally and academically with students facing challenges of historical abuse, economic poverty, and familial dysfunction.

The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) is bountifully staffed by people who have graduated from these academically insubstantial programs.  They receive ever-changing directives from the United States Department of Education, which pretends in legislative initiatives such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to be moving forth with yet another new approach for the betterment of public education.  Officials at MDE cynically receive these directives, do whatever is necessary to appear to be fulfilling legal mandates, and then create programs such as World’s Best Workforce and North Star Accountability System that have no chance of improving the quality of preK-12 education in Minnesota but establish the norms to which locally centralized school districts such as the Minneapolis Public Schools must mount their own cynical response.

Academic administrators at the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) and at school sites have no scholarly credibility.  When charged with creating curricula and programming, they spew forth the mantras of education professors who ruined their already challenged intellectual capacities with the nonsense offered as educational philosophy.  A notable fact pertaining to the administration at the Minneapolis Public Schools is that huge talent fills the finance and technology divisions but that the efforts made by the highly educated people in these divisions are largely wasted because of the low intellectual level and corrupt philosophy of those making decisions pertinent to academic programming, which is the only reason for having public schools.  Hence, the purpose of these schools is not realized and cannot be until teachers and administrators are trained outside of conventional college and university programs.

Teachers at the PreK-5 level have been through the weakest course of study at any college or university.  They have no hope, even if they deemed the impartation of subject area knowledge important, of providing academically substantively education in natural science, history, geography, economics, or high quality literature to their students.  Art and music teachers are also frequently second-rate talents or people who are biding time and making a buck while trying to figure out how to break into the realms of the professional artist or musician.

Secondary teachers generally do have to pursue a degree in a major academic discipline (e. g., mathematics, biology, English literature) but they typically are not at the head of their classes and when they seek a bump up the step and lane system they demonstrate their lack of academic seriousness by entering those lightweight masters programs in departments, colleges, and schools of education.

Teachers unions (Education Minnesota;  Minneapolis Federation of Teachers) protect the sinecures of their constituencies and thus sustain academically insubstantial teachers who lack any understanding of and dedication to the most challenged student populations.

Identifying those at locally centralized school districts such as MPS who are ultimately responsible for the abominable quality of education delivered is a quixotic quest.  Responsibility lies in some netherworld between the superintendent and the board of education.  Current members of the MPS Board of Education constitute as incompetent and philosophically adrift group as one is like to find, even among many other similarly incompetent assemblages;  given the shallow academic training of Superintendent Ed Graff, there is no hope that with this school board and this superintendent any progress can be made in the thorough redesign necessary for the delivery of knowledge-intensive education.

The school district functions in behalf of a public that is also generally clueless as to the elements of an excellent education.  Attendance at school board meetings is greatest when some hot issue (cops in the schools, signs of racism in the reading program, programmatic and administrative changes that affect a given parent’s child) but typically slim when apparently mundane but highly significant decisions are under consideration.

Reporting on preK-12 education at the Star Tribune is abhorrent;  beat writers such as Faiza Mahamud just pursue topics determined by the school district with little analysis and upon a knowledge base not likely to produce incisive analysis even if the inclination abided.  Editorial pages editor Scott Gillespie and opinion pages editor Doug Tice have little understanding of preK-12 education and have in their decisions demonstrated moral and intellectual corruption.

Thus is our system of preK-12 education rife with culpable parties, radiating from those teacher and administrator training programs at colleges and universities and reaching to the voting public and conventional journalists.

In my Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect, I provide 500 pages of details concerning the matters discussed above, and all manner of information on central office departments and divisions;  school by school profiles and academic performance;  Minneapolis Federation of Teachers;  MPS Board of Education;  college and university teacher and administrator training programs and the officials and teachers produced by them;  policy making and policy makers at the national and state levels, including a bevy of detail on those at the Minnesota Department of Education;  the current MPS Comprehensive District Design, by comparison with the previous Acceleration 2020 Strategic Plan;  salary and duties for those who occupy positions in the Davis Center, including evaluation of quality of performance;  and many other areas for research and exploration suggested by my nearly 50 years of experience as a teacher, scholar, and keen observer of locally centralized school districts.

A hard rain’s a gonna fall.

It’s gonna fall on many culpable parties, including those who are expecting the storm and many who will be caught unaware.

Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Three >>>>> Authoritarian Governance

Human ignorance, then, is grounded in the reality of human infancy. 

 

Humankind is a temporal, intellectual, and spiritual infant. 

 

Violence has been the defining characteristic of human existence. 

 

Following and extending Hobbes, not only has the individual life been nasty, brutish, and short, but in like manner has the existence of homo sapiens on earth been despicable, caddish, and brief.  Inasmuch as the term homo sapiens means “knowledgeable human,” the appellation is a misnomer.

 

The male leaders who have dominated life on earth, especially since the advent of those more complex configurations known ironically as civilizations, have tended to seize power and restrict participatory governance to the very few.  The river valley civilizations of Sumeria, Egypt, and China all were headed by one of monarchical or imperial aspirations;  governance in Mohenjodaro and Harappa in the Indus Valley is less clear, but social stratification abided.  The Greek city-state of Athens gets favorable reviews for asserting the democratic principle, but civitas was limited to males who owned substantial property.  Romans during the republican phase did provide for a Tribune representing commoners in addition to the Senate of the patricians, but in almost all cases the leaders known as consuls were of patrician rank;  and as the years of the Common Era approached, republican governance gave way to the more exclusivist imperial style.

 

In China, the quest for the life of the scholar-bureaucrat became by the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) theoretically open to the meritorious of all classes, but the level of education needed to gain the academic degrees leading to high government position was beyond the reach of most humble folk, and in any case the emperorship operated on the principle of heredity.  Japan was dominated by imperial, aristocratic, and samurai elites.  Monarchies and empires abided in Southeast Asia, Mesoamerica, South America, and Africa.  Muslim empires---  Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal---  were autocratic and patriarchal, with power held by the very few.  Hindu monarchies and empires that preceded or competed with the Mughals in India were typically short-lived, with territorial boundaries that fell short of aspirations, but whatever level of power manifested was the province of elite males.  Considerable social stratification is indicated by archeological sites of North America.  Village societies across the globe, including those of oceanic areas, featured shorter distance between ruler and ruled, but the propensity of male leaders to exercise authoritarian, imperial, monarchical, and aristocratic governance is clear.

 

Even as the Glorious Revolution (1688-1689) in Great Britain countered the authoritarian monarchical and aristocratic system with an increasingly powerful representative parliament, the franchise opened only very slowly to those other than aristocratic and mercantile elite males.  Similarly were the opportunities to vote and participate in governance limited to the very few even in putatively democratic societies in the 19^th and 20^th centuries;  in western Europe, Canada, and the United States, governance was the sphere of white males until women gained the franchise at the early-middle stages of the 20^th century.  Even then, women had limited inheritance rights and, if married, by law had to defer to their husbands in decisions involving money and property.  Nonwhites in all of these western societies faced severe discrimination;  in the United States, African Americans lived under conditions of the police state in the Jim Crow South and found urban life at the termini of the Northern Migration to be a severe disappointment in the context of hopes for full citizenship.

 

Not until the years spanning 1964-1973 did women and nonwhite ethnicities in the United States gain enforceable legal affirmation of citizenship status.  This legal advancement has met with considerable opposition from white males whose centuries of dominance have been challenged: 

 

Recent vigor in white male nationalism is but an extreme form of a general phenomenon. 

 

And across the globe, authoritarian patriarchy remains the rule to which there are few exceptions.  In an increasingly interactive globe of humanity, the social movements witnessed since 1968 in the United States and the West have had an impact and will have enduring influence;  however, given the level of white male resistance even in those societies deemed most progressive, the path to multiethnic, gender equitable governance will be long, difficult, and violent.

 

The pattern of governance in prehistory and, especially, history has been patriarchal and authoritarian.

 

In full realization of the promise of legal advances since 1968, women must take the lead in developing egalitarian political systems and in so doing alter the course heretofore observed in the human past.

Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter Two >>>>> The Failure of Patriarchy

For most of the 200,000 years of human existence, human beings were hunter-gatherers, apparently living in rather egalitarian arrangements that featured a considerable amount of gender equity.  Conventionally, scholars of and speculators about prehistory have maintained that men did the hunting and women the gathering, but there very well have been much hunting and gathering performed by members of both genders.  Competition for sources of food and water logically would have induced violent encounters, although calm consideration may have led some clear thinkers to work out mutually agreeable sharing of resources.  In any case, the capacity for destruction was less than would be the case at historical stages of more advanced technology, given rudimentary weapons and the lack of empires or nations for which to exalt and assert prerogatives.

 

Matters changed considerably with the appearance of civilizations, with all of their incivility.  First militarists and governmental leaders in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China;  then those from among the Hittites, Chaldeans, and Assyrians established armies and coveted territorial expanses.

 

Then, too, did the Greek city-states fight with each other and with the Persians;  and the Roman legions aggressively seek and largely obtain land rimming and ranging far inland from the Mediterranean and as far northward as the British Isles.  Thereafter came all manner of violent competition for territorial control engendered by the ambitions of Goths, Franks, Lombards, and Huns;  Pepin and Charlemagne;  allies of and agitators for the papacy, including those who claimed to rule a Holy Roman Empire;  and aristocratic holders of fiefs, including those with ambitions to be monarchs and those who would in France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, Scandinavia, and Russia realize that ambition.  As the impulse toward nationhood proceeded in Europe, governmental leaders of the Chinese dynasties;  the Umayyad, Abbasid, and Ottoman caliphs and sultans;  the leaders of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai in Africa;  the rulers of Mesoamerica and of Peru;  and Mauryan, Gupta, Mughal leaders in India asserted right to territory obtained through violence.  And through the passes of Central Asia stormed some of history’s most fearsome practitioners of violence:  Scythians, Mongols, Turks.

 

Violent territorial conquest and authoritarian rule were largely the endeavors of males.  Those queens and empresses who gained power managed to find a place in the patriarchal systems apparent throughout the globe.  When male physical prowess, by no means superior in many an individual circumstance but on average greater among the male of the species, was put to work in behalf of bureaucratic states, empires, and kingdoms, violence became a norm of life for humankind.  With a premium on physical strength and aggressive behavior, males asserted themselves and patriarchy became a defining feature of human existence.  The primacy of male military and political leadership abided throughout the short lifetime of humankind on the globe (remembering the billions of years that passed after the Big Bang and earth’s formation before the appearance of homo sapiens, civilization, empire, and nation) until women finally asserted their right to prerogatives formerly claimed by men in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

 

The crudeness of humanity throughout 60 centuries of putative civilization was the work of males:

 

Patriarchy pervaded life among the Sumerians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans, and throughout the continents of Africa, North America, South America, Asia, and Europe.  Males in the main promulgated the tenets, told the tales, and conceived the ideas undergirding Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxies, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Confucianism;  among the major belief and ideational systems, only Daoism gave evidence of sensitivity toward women and conveyed antipathy toward qualities of violence and domination that had come to define patriarchy.  And in the Protestant Reformation, much went unreformed, including the patriarchal propensity toward violence and domination.

 

Not until 1968, to assert a date of focus for a remarkable transition, did the undermining of patriarchy begin.  Not until the juncture of history represented by this very year of 2019 going on 2020 are women gaining momentum as a social, cultural, and political force.

 

Understanding human ignorance saliently includes grasp of the harmful nature of patriarchal systems, so that even the promising cultural developments and religious quests that began in the context of patriarchy must be reinterpreted from a feminist perspective.

 

Men have led humankind poorly during the period of human infancy.

 

As humanity matures, women will lead the way.

Understanding Human Ignorance >>>>> Chapter One >>>>> Introductory Comments

Given that the Big Bang propelled the primordial soup into a nascent cosmos 13.8 billion years ago, humankind is a temporal newborn.  As the universe expanded and the cosmos gained greater definition, earth took shape 4.5 billion years ago.  Single cell life forms evolved approximately one billion years into the earth’s existence, but not until 500 million years ago did evolutionary processes gain momentum that produced botanical organisms and marine, amphibian, and terrestrial creatures.  And not until the extremely recent juncture at 200,000 years ago did homo sapiens follow hominid predecessors into existence.  

Humanity has only existed for 0.0014 percent of the time that has ensued since the Big Bang and 0.0044 percent of the time since the earth’s formation.  The ratio comparing the temporal existence of homo sapiens to the temporal existence of the universe when applied to a human life span of 75 years would find a human newborn just 1.5 minutes into her or his earthly sojourn;  if the applied ratio were that of the formation of earth compared to the temporal appearance of homo sapiens, that newborn would still be just 4.7 minutes old.

                     

Understanding the infancy of humanity is vital in comprehending the extraordinary ignorance of humankind.

 

After two hundred thousand years of hunting and gathering, people first began to farm intentionally just 10,000 years ago.  Civilizations featuring writing systems, social stratification, occupational specialization, and urban centers appeared between 4,000 and 1,500 BCE in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China.  The great civilization of Greek city-states evolved from 1200 BCE, reaching apogee during the 5th century BCE.  Roman expansion, Republic, and Empire spanned the years 500 BCE to 500 CE;  and as largely independent developments were taking place in North Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and the insular regions of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, just four major time periods in Europe succeeded the collapse of the Roman Empire:  the Middle Ages (500-1500 CE), Renaissance (1300-1600 CE), Enlightenment (1600-1800 CE) and the late modern and contemporary world of 1800-2019.

 

With the Renaissance, Graeco-Roman humanism animated European intellectual life. When that humanistic spirit was applied to great experiments and produced the scientific epiphanies of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, modernity was born.  The Age of Reason and the Age of Science became appropriate alternative appellations describing the intellectual character of the Enlightenment.

 

Note how recently in the temporal expanses of prehistory and history the Enlightenment occurred.  With the Enlightenment came great faith in the capacity of objective data and human reason to solve the problems of and improve the life humankind.  But science produced insights at a high level of objective truth that opposed long-held positions of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches;   and while creating the intellectual questioning that impelled the Protestant Reformation of the 15^th and 16^th centuries, those same applications of science and reason produced objective results that were also at odds with the myriad of Protestant creeds that formed in the context of Reformation.

 

At late 18^th century, revolutions in the British colonies of North America and in France seemed to augur societies built on the political reasoning of Montesquieu, John Locke, and their acolytes, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.  Science and reason were in ascent, but three successive periods of conservative religious reassertion provided antithesis to the scientific thesis.  The tension between scientific humanists and religious conservatives intensified as Charles Darwin published his works on natural selection and evolution; Freud conducted his interviews in Vienna that suggested unconscious and subconscious determinants of human behavior;  Einstein mathematically challenged assumptions about the reality and relationship of matter, time, and space in the cosmos;  and B. F. Skinner powerfully asserted on the basis of scientific experimentation that human behavior is shaped exclusively by biological and experiential determinants, so that human beings only perceive that they have free will.    

 

In the aftermath of these great insights of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the forces of religious conservatism countered with views engendered by dogma and belief, rather than science and reason.  Failure to resolve the tension between science and reason, and thus to realize the promise of the Enlightenment, has stalled the already sluggish trajectory of humankind:

 

Temporally an infant, humanity remains intellectually and spiritually infant, as well.

 

Only when astute thinkers from each of the world’s great religious traditions congregate to agree on ethical principles consistent with scientifically observed conditions of nature and humanity will the ascendant trajectory of humankind ensue.

 

The thesis and antithesis of science and religion must gain synthesis, so that people live lives on this one earthly sojourn that are both rigorously rational and spiritually nourishing.

 

Failure to gain this synthesis undergirds all of humankind’s current dilemmas;  attainment of the synthesis for unity of science and religion would impel humanity toward conditions of life described by abundance, equity, and spiritual satisfaction.  

 

In the succeeding pages I detail the foundations and consequences of human ignorance and the better life to come via the astute conciliation of science and religion.