conesus...

"Nothing is ever about just one thing." —Lynn Nugent

This essay will compare and contrast kindergarten-level and adult-level conceptual abstraction skills, and then will go on to examine some of the political implications of a thinker’s reliance on each mode of reasoning.

These topics are worthy of discussion because, alas, as will be seen, rather more political thinking is done using kindergarten abstraction skills, than is appropriate in a society supposedly intended for free, responsible adults.

To examine these matters, we’ll start on Sesame Street (the children’s TV show), wander through Epistemology (the philosophical science studying what knowledge & abstraction are, exactly), and end discussing Freedom.

If you are under 40, grew up in North America, and aren’t suffering from total cultural alienation and withdrawal, then you simply have to know by heart the words and music of the Sesame Street TV show’s "One of these things is not like the others" game. But, for those of you with amnesia, or over 40, or living overseas, or just now ending a four-decades-long stint as a hermit recluse, here are the lyrics, anyway:

The "game" that goes with the song, involves looking at a 4 x 4 table of pictures, shapes, colours, shadings, or what-not, like the following one ...

... and choosing which of the pictures, shapes, colours, words or whatever "doesn’t belong" with the other three in the table.

The game and its lesson in introductory abstract thinking conclude with the game leader (after some humming of the music, to give the young audience a bit of time to think) pointing out the discordant picture, while singing the concluding lyrics:

The purpose, obviously, is to help pre-schoolers recognise, develop & hone their abstract reasoning skills. To that limited yet mentally critical end, this game is a truly excellent teaching tool. Up to about grade 2 or 3, that is.

By about that age (or a little earlier or later, depending on the child), it will be time to move to the next level of abstract thinking. Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge (and I work mostly as a teacher), nothing remotely comparable to this game’s simplicity and its express focus on the tasks of abstraction as such, will ever again be seen by any child in any school, any place on the planet, unless the teacher makes the entire lesson up, entirely on his or her own. It is not part of any K-12 curriculum that I know of.

It is simply assumed, pedagogically, in both public and private schools, that after about the grade 5 level, the student’s abilities to abstract, and then to think about the abstractions, will take care of themselves, as some collateral result of all the other teaching and learning that goes on in math, language, social studies, science, and so on. Attention is never paid to abstraction as such, even though it wouldn’t have been put on a toddler’s educational TV show (as in this game), if it were not understood to be a foundation skill.

In other words, "philosophy" (i.e., "thinking about thinking"), which is to say, the most abstract, complex and comprehensive task any human being has to learn, is not expressly taught at all in the, let us say, rather significant educational interval between Grover on Sesame Street, and Graduate Study Seminar. From my point of view as an educational professional, I find this, to put it mildly, to be mind-boggling, in several senses of that expression.

The most immediate social consequence of this institutionalised omission (viz. negligence), is this: a disordinately large fraction of our populations, and that means of our electorates, have abstract reasoning skills that are to all extents and purposes arrested at the Sesame Street level of development.

We’ll discuss some specific political consequences of this further on in the essay. First, though, we have to look at what skills get left out, if teaching of abstract thinking stops at the Sesame Street level embodied by this game.

To illustrate why this is really important stuff (indeed, of vaster importance than a literary starting point of great green Grouches in gunky garbage cans would seem to suggest), I’d like now to show you how this teaching game would develop, if it were to be used as a deliberate philosophical teaching tool at the senior elementary, junior secondary and senior secondary levels.

At the pre-school level, 4 x 4 tables such as the above, or like this one...

... teach pre-schoolers that there is such a thing as an abstract category at all. This is exactly like learning that "there are 26 letters, that can be used to communicate". Knowledge of this latter fact hardly prepares one to read even a comic-book, forget critiquing a formal government paper outlining a policy proposal. Analogously, mere knowledge that abstract categories do exist, isn’t even sufficient for intellectual work at the cartoon-book-level.

For example, what is a person who has mastered endless repetitions of the stop-at-the-first-step Sesame Street game, to make of the following second-step instance of the "one of these things is not like the others" game?

Oh me, oh my! Is the "Book" the odd-man-out? It must be — after all, the other three belong to the obvious conceptual category, "fruit", and a book, if it is anything, is not a botanical fruit. Or, is "Apple" the odd-man-out? For, the three other entries in the game-table all begin with the letter "B" — and who, especially among the spelling-bee-focused residents of Sesame Street, would minimise the importance of an initial letter of any word!?

What’s a five-year old to do? Well, firstly, anyone actually inflicting the above 4 x 4 table on a five-year old (unless she is an exceptionally bright, educationally advanced five-year) is sowing confusion instead of helping the child to learn. It matters little whether this is done negligently, or on the grounds of some far-out if fashionable educational theory, or just out of plain sadism. Doing this to a five-year old is messing with their minds.

However, not doing this by the time the kid is, say, 8 or 9, is equally cruel, or negligent. At some point, early in the elementary years, children need to learn that abstract categories overlap. That is, that objects in the real world can and do "belong to" more than one abstract category.

Subsequent and corollary lessons to the above include helping the child to make the following inferences (among others): abstraction is the result of choice of emphasis — you are the one abstracting — this is what your mind does — the abstractions don’t "exist" in the real world of things (though the properties of the concrete objects on which you base them, do), rather, you create them, in your mind — the abstraction comes from the object, not the other way around — objects don’t "belong to" categories, categories "come from" objects — you can create higher-level abstractions out of groups of abstractions ... and so on, across the field of epistemological enquiry.

In illustration of the teaching point about creating further abstractions from abstractions, consider that one could construct a 4 x 4 game-table such as this next one, as a follow on from the ones we’ve seen already in this essay, and others which I hope you can imagine for yourself:

One would hope that a child of, say, 11 or 12 would be able (perhaps with assistance) to articulate the fact that the table entry "Categories of animals" is a higher-order abstraction than the other three: they are kinds of concrete objects, it is an abstraction of an abstraction.

Before they leave their hypothetical grade 12 philosophy course, I’d want the senior high school students to be given the opportunity to learn two more specific things, beyond those mentioned in the preceding paragraphs.

First, I would want them to learn about teaching abstraction. One way this might be taught, would be to have them review the game, then work on a short project like building simple tables for it, such as a five-year-old could learn from, and ‘confusing’ ones, that would risk interfering with the five-year-old’s ability to understand abstract categories. Of course, it would be part of the project to explain the basis of the risk of the confusion. That is, the senior student would be asked to think about how to help others to think clearly, by thinking about how people get confused. This would help them to think yet still more clearly, for themselves.

A second final learning task I would want them to grapple with is, to make a table where every entry is different from each of the other three in some respect, yet joins up with them otherwise. That is, they would be given the opportunity to see how abstract categories intermesh, and how they don’t.

This latter task can be harder than it first seems, especially if you want to put anything more concrete than shapes and colours in the boxes. If you want a bit of a challenge, try it.

If philosophy were expressly taught in the K-12 school system using tools such as the above, by the time students reached grade 12, they might have a better understanding — ironically, a more concrete understanding— of the absolutely central importance that abstract thinking has for individual (and therefore for collective) human survival.

They would not be at risk of mistakenly thinking, as is typically the case in society today, that philosophy, which is an indispensable and regular daily activity of all people, is totally remote, difficult, irrelevant, and useless.

Instead they would be aware that "epistemology" is happening inside their crania every second, from cradle to grave. And they would all immediately "get it," that the most pervasive and damaging sort of political fraud is not fiscal or electoral fraud, but political philosophical fraud. Alas, they don’t.

Thus, we live in a society in which, philosophically, people have no locks on their doors, even though the place is teeming with cognitive burglars.

Part of the reason I would want this done before the end of Grade 12, is so that the students would be prepared to eventually teach their own children how to think about thinking in this way. Why leave it to the schools?

Another reason is, some of these kids, on graduating, will go on to colleges and universities, where philosophical thugs hold tenure positions, and every footpath of the intellect swarms with epistemological highwaymen.

I would want them to have at least a philosophical pointed stick with which to defend themselves. Consciously defend themselves, I mean, as in, while being aware that they are being attacked. It’s hard to take action against being beat up by thugs, if you aren’t even aware when an assault happens.

Forearmed in this way, these children-turning-adults would be at least be somewhat prepared to play in the vicious, brutal games of ...

Hey, kids! Welcome to another fun episode of Abstract Avenue, the TV show for the pre-Ph.D. crowd! Time to play our game! Are you ready!?

Good Golly Miss Molly! How the Aitch-ee-double-hockey-sticks are ya supposed ta figgerthat one out!?

Answers:

Let’s try another round:

Gee, I dunno — hard to say ... Hey! I’ve got it! Dan Rather only "knows" about the Monica Lewinsky scandal (erm ... and which Monica Lewinsky scandal would that be?), therefore the other three never happened!

(Which just goes to show, dropping your shorts is more of an offence against public morality than killing people — erm, how’s that again!? ...)

Let’s try one final round before bringing this essay to a close:

Answers (imagine you are trying to found a political party along with 300 other semi-sorta-like-minded people, and you all have to cobble together a policy platform which addresses each of the above areas, while also being defensible to a critical public and punditry, as one that is "consistent"):

Frankly, this heading requires a whole essay in its own right. Indeed, at the first, it was a tentative title for this one, before I decided I had better clearly explain to you, the readers, what I exactly I meant by using the expression, "kindergarten-level abstract thinking skills". But as making the meaning of it (hopefully) clearer has taken so long, I’ll be brief about the implications.

The expression means: having but a mere awareness that there are abstract categories, but without having any conscious awareness of one’s own acts of abstraction, nor any understanding of where abstractions come from, nor how they relate to the concrete objects that they intellectually subsume, nor having any understanding of how they exactly it is that they interrelate with other abstractions (and so on, in a long, sad litany of cognitive limitations).

The basic political consequence is as follows. Say a widely-noticed event occurs, or some ‘controversial’ issue arises in the public forum, with the result that the self-appointed ‘opinion leaders’ are all over it like a dirty shirt. The politicians quickly, and with an odd intuitive grace, assess which resolution of the issue, or explanation of the event, will do the least damage to the on-going aggregation of their power over the citizenry. Then, they’ll be up in front of the microphones saying "This event is about X," and their characterisation of the issue or event will be one permitting them to add to that a statement of the kind, "And therefore, ladies and gentlemen, we as a [insert their favourite adjective] society ought to do Y". And Y, of course, is a proposed course of action (or inaction) which minimises the citizens’ interference in that on-going aggregation of politicians’ ill-gotten power.

Actually, I am somewhat misleading you. The situation described in the foregoing paragraph isn’t, of itself, the main consequence of kindergarten-level abstract reasoning skills on the part of the electorate.

Rather, the consequence is that the politicians get away with this cr@p.

The politicians get away with this sort of con-job, because the citizenry are, having being retarded in their conscious cognitive development, unable to grasp that even if "This event is about X", it can also be about other things at the same time, and in particular, when it comes to politics, all issues are issues that involve the question of politicians’ aggregation of power over their citizens: therefore, all political issues, whatever else they might be "about", are also always about the Liberty of the citizens.

But no, instead of this, political debates in our culture, particularly as they are presented in Evening News Soundbites and on Talking-Head TV, are always framed in terms of ONE abstract category: this is about a stronger military; that is about polluting the environment; the other is about a ‘fair system of taxation’ (whatever that might be) — & whoever wins the debate about what the story/event/issue is "about", wins the whole debate.

And so, political debates degenerate into a battle of characterisation, with just about zero inquiry into collateral consequences. That is, our political debates pretend that all that matters is "which is the real abstraction here," when in fact, as I hope I have demonstrated, it is never the case that only one abstraction can be exhaustively relevant, to any public event or political issue that involves, say, at least four things. Four voters or more, say. Or, say: monetary cost, social consequences, citizens and politicians (just say).

The main political implication of having even a significant "swing 10%" of our electorates in a conscious state of philosophical awareness, is that we’d not be having to put up with vacuous, puerile political debates. If enough of the electorate reasoned like adults, politicians (pretty well all of whom it seems have as their main, unstated goal, keeping us in infantile dependence upon them) would have to treat the whole of the electorate like adults.

If the electorate were better able to think, their liberty (and yours) would be less at risk, indeed, probably would not be at risk at all. Therefore, among other things, don’t expect our politician-&-bureaucrat-run public education systems to make any serious, strenuous and prolonged efforts to implement programs or curricula to assist children in learning to think abstractly like adults are supposed to, along the lines sketched out earlier in this essay.

No, the politicians and bureaucrats will find lots of other priorities, first: national subsidised day-care; or saving the forests; or saving the sawmills; or saving public Medicare; or saving the heritage buildings; or saving the lobsters; or some other thing. The sort of education that will create an astute, thinking electorate, and so will enhance Liberty in society, will be so far down this list of "Things To Do Today", that it won’t really be on the list at all. And there’s a reason for that ...

Politicians and bureaucrats, after all, are well aware that Liberty is one of those things that is not like the others.

Tim S. Macneil is not like the others. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and his email address is: tsmacneil@coastnet.com