Istiqlal Roundup
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Abdu'l-Baha advised somebody or other in a book I read long, long ago to take a tablespoon full of honey every day. Through the years I have sporadically taken that advice; at worst it reduces the guilt and remorse when I raid the kitchen and dip my spoon into the honey pot, rather than, say, the cookie jar. Then this morning I came across evidence that this advice may not come from as far out in left field as I had thought. In an article called "Honey is the bee's knees for staying young" New Scientist reports that a study found that supplementing the diets of rats with honey found positive benefits, including increased curiosity, more lively behavior and longer lives. The reason?
"`Diets sweetened with honey may be beneficial in decreasing anxiety and improving memory during ageing,' says Starkey, whose work was funded by Fonterra, a dairy company interested in sweetening yoghurt with honey. She suggests the findings may be due to the antioxidant properties of honey, which have previously been demonstrated in humans." (New Scientist,
Here is an interesting site devoted to Baha'i humor. Some of it is clumsily adapted from other humor, but some of it, especially the comics, look very professional and hit the nail on the head.
<bahaijokes.blogspot.com/>
Last Wednesday the family attended the September "meet the creature" encounter at the kids' school. I had looked forward to this parent teacher meeting more than any before because I wanted to share with the teachers John Mighton's books, as well as the JUMP (Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigy) lesson plans that I had bought. I talked to four teachers and not one had heard of either JUMP or Mighton, but they seemed pleased and interested to hear about this guy's idea that we can save the environment by increasing the efficiency of education and enabling children to make more rational decisions than the older generation has made. If you want to hear Mighton's story from his own mouth, go to:
http://www.booklounge.ca/multimedia/mightonjohn/index.html
This site, "Booklounge.ca for people who love books," features interviews with several other authors. Their blurb for this video is: "Don't miss John Mighton's revolutionary call for a new understanding of how people learn as he talks about his important book, The End of Ignorance."
Last night I attended our first Philosopher's Cafe meeting for this season. Now that I have both kids with me I was worried that I would be interrupted often, but they had a great time on their own in the Wainfleet library while our adult conversation went on in the back room.
We discussed the tragedy of the commons, the idea that the earth, oceans and air are possessions of all, and therefore become the possessions of nobody. Without supervision, they are exploited by the first person who can exploit them, destroying the resource for latecomers, not to mention the rest of us who have to breath the air, drink the water and walk on the land. I was surprised at how committed to the environment some of these people are; one refused a gift of a twenty thousand dollar car because its engine was too big. At the end of the meeting there was a feeling that we had not plumbed the depths, so we agreed to repeat the topic next month.
It was annoying much of the time to have to listen to long speeches about what -- it seemed to me -- missed the point completely, but it was also good to have my say about things that I normally do not have the chance to talk about. Having read so much lately about how the media mavens flatter "the people" while at the same time muzzling us, it is good to participate in a movement designed to give the average joe a chance to mix and match thoughts actively, if not skillfully. In spite of my overpowering sense of frustration most of the time, I felt at the end an emergent feeling of commonality forged from all the fervent jawboning.
Tomaso and I watched together John Huston and Dino De Laurentiis's epic 1967 film, "The Bible" over the past two days. It includes the creation story, Cain and Abel, the story of Noah and the
Thomas's favorite story was the ark. He was full of questions about the animals, both trivial and too hard to begin to answer. An eight year old is the perfect companion for such a story, because he jogs perspectives that you would never think on your own.
But for me most edifying was the story of Adam, Eve, and the serpent. I had just viewed a documentary, "Dangerous Knowledge," by David Malone, describing how the greatest discoveries of mathematics, logic and physics in the 19th and 20th Centuries were all basically repetitions of the lesson of this myth: do not try to take a bite out of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Such knowledge is forbidden. Once you think you know what is good and evil, you fall, and fall fast, into fanaticism and hypocrisy. The promo for Malone's film says that he,
"looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Godel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide. The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin, mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and Roger Penrose. Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to answer today."
If you want to see the BBC documentary for yourself, go to:
<http://bestdocumentaries.blogspot.com/2007/09/dangerous-knowledge-full-documentary.html>
The comments about the film on this blog are pretty skeptical about the thesis of the film that these geniuses were driven insane by their discovery that knowledge is self-limiting. But for me that is not the point, the point is that hubris, arrogance, the belief that we have certain knowledge, is the mark of corrupted science, as it is the mark of corrupted religion, as the story of Adam and Eve's eating of the apple proves. The filmmaker Malone also wrote an article in New Scientist which starts off:
"You might think that no one could argue with the value of certainty. It has the air of one of those indisputably good things, like world peace or motherhood. But I would argue that the pursuit of certainty has become a dangerous addiction. Like alcohol, it makes us feel safe, but it is also making us stupid and belligerent. Few notions have become as deeply embedded in our culture as the belief that there is a perfect certainty to be had -and the desire to have it. It has survived virtually intact the transition from religion to rationalism as the touchstone of our society. Even as science squeezed out belief in God and scriptural certainties, a perfect law-governed creation remained; it was just under new management. Science has become, in the minds of many, the new guarantor that there is certainty and that we can attain it." ("Are we still addicted to certainty?" New Scientist,
Let me repeat: the certainty that we know what is good and bad for us is false faith; like booze, it lowers our intelligence and makes us aggressive. We can maintain our sobriety and our innocence and live in the garden of Eden if only we refuse to accept the forbidden fruit, the false belief that we know what is good or bad for us while God does not. This belief is insidious, it is a temptation almost impossible to resist. But we have a few examples of minds who succeeded. This, I think, is what Baha'u'llah was talking about when He spoke of the "power of the Great Ether." The ether is the vacuum that enters in when the soul is humble enough to recognize that it does not know. Socrates, Jesus, Abdu'l-Baha, Einstein, they all had it, and demonstrated how to get it. We had better take that ether in too, and not go mad, if we hope to survive as a race.
Maybe I should have included Mo Tzu as an initiate of the great ether. In the following exchange he demonstrates an essential quality of a great teacher, the ability to recognize a proper test, the right criterion, and the humility to know when an indicator does not suffice.
"The Lord of Lu consulted Mo Tzu, saying: "Now I have two sons. One likes learning and the other likes dividing property for people. Which one should be crowned Prince?"
"Mo Tzu said: We cannot tell. It may be that they behave so just for the praise and reward of it. The fisherman's bait is not intended to feed the fish. Trapping a mouse with worms is not for the love of the mouse. I wish your Lordship would observe both their intention and their consequences." (The Ethical and Political Works of Mo Tzu, tr: Yi-Pao Mei, Arthur Probsthain, London, 1929, #14, at: http://www.humanistictexts.org/motzu.htm)
All this explains why I think John Mighton's teaching method hits on something revolutionary, an essential part of what comes from the great ether. As it is, teachers make up tests for frivolous motives and only encourage failure. Tests must test the right things, what leads to expertise and discovery. But they do not. They weed out those who happen to be primed at that time for an irrelevant skill. Tests must be part of the learning process, and their aim to build confidence, especially at first. Otherwise the myth of ability, the belief that only a few can learn what has to be learned, will obscure what is needed in order to progress. A learner must not take the forbidden fruit, she must think of what is not known, and summon up courage to find that out. As Mighton says,
"... the debate about intelligence misses the point. The results of JUMP suggest that we can raise the level of even the weakest students sufficiently to enable them to appreciate and master genuine mathematics. At this level, sheer intelligence is almost secondary. In the sciences, factors such as passion, confidence, creativity, diligence, luck, and artistic flair are as important as the speed and sharpness of one's mind. Einstein was not a great mathematician technically, but he had a deep sense of beauty and a willingness to question conventional wisdom." (John Mighton, The Myth of Ability, p. 22)
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