Spotlight - Alfred North Whitehead # 2
“Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs”
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Transcription:
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/56549397
Speaker 0 (0s): Part to me, Whoo my friends. Welcome back to the beginning. We're back here with Alfred North Whitehead we are in what we're doing, what we're doing is we are looking at the future through the eyes of a philosopher in the past. Yeah. And it is so intriguing and beautiful and amazing journey all through the eyes of the past.
I got to tell you, this is really something to reading these older books that are not fiction and they're not science fiction. And there are really not literature. They are the dialogs, the paper's the written correspondences of, of people in the past. There is something so visceral about it. And I hope all of you, we're 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.
And 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, let's jump right back into it here. 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.
So that being said, I just jumped right back in here from the book. I raised the question why the creation of an artwork exhausts the experience for his creator, but is infinitely potent have repeated stimulations in the enjoyer. Perhaps you said it is because of all human effort is directed towards the achievement of an end, whether it is satisfied or not.
And the artists in, although never quite the result he hoped for is largely attained. And therefor finished for him to a point in which he ends is where the enjoyer begins. That's an interesting way to look at it. What do you think the generation now at the age of 50 or thereabouts, he said seems to, to have had its upbringing 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 formula of conduct in order to keep their children quote unquote good. When they no longer believed in these formula themselves to children eventually found that 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 no more with their children about it, their children in those years, between 18 and 24, when one is experiencing for the first time, the 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
Speaker 1 (4m 21s): Conceptions of how life should be done.
Speaker 0 (4m 25s): We 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,
Speaker 1 (4m 51s): That was an interesting point. Mans earlier discoveries in mathematics were made by observation,
Speaker 0 (4m 58s): All of his physical surroundings as
Speaker 1 (5m 2s): The Contra distinguished from abstract reason, set he on the Plains of Cal DIA, he noticed the stars swinging round and round. Do you do just the conception of the circle and finally arrived at the wheel? Interesting to think about how mathematics may have been discovered
Speaker 0 (5m 27s): In the past and how the evolution of our science resulted from it. I think you can go much like the wheel for me,
Speaker 1 (5m 38s): I'll circle in understanding the relationship.
Speaker 0 (5m 42s): So between mathematics and abstract thought and how today being away from nature
Speaker 1 (5m 50s): And submersed in this world of tech,
Speaker 0 (5m 54s): The logical abundance. No, that makes sense. That 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 makes sense if you just take that little, that little particular bite there of man, you are using an abstract thought 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.
I like those are big ideas. Those are big thoughts and abstract. Where today we are narrowly focused on this tiny little part of technology. And it's just fascinating. The, the deeper you get into something, the more of the illusion of abundance. I told you, I told you this is going to be interesting. 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 and aesthetic experience powerfully felt emotional experience with mental perceptions. Then it demands a definite artistic form. The trouble with creators have 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 away?
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 in. And if it kind of
Speaker 1 (8m 11s): Comes out of mirror consciously clever radio, Sunation it is for doomed. You are dealing in secondary perceptions and relatively shallow experience. It does not
Speaker 0 (8m 27s): Behr the stamp of deepest truth. Wow. That has some pretty, that was pretty deep. Yeah. That's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (8m 38s): Break that down a little bit. So if you, and I want to,
Speaker 0 (8m 44s): How was experienced to be brought to the level of consciousness and transmitted into an art form out of the subconscious? I think that as a question that all the artists are striving to do, right?
Speaker 1 (8m 56s): You're trying to bring something back from the unconscious mind. It's a lot like that.
Speaker 0 (9m 4s): Going balls deep into like a 10
Speaker 1 (9m 9s): Graham's psychedelic trip. What a day, two of an Iowasca Benjen trying to formulate a new linguistic pathway to share the experience
Speaker 0 (9m 20s): And with others with right.
Speaker 1 (9m 23s): If you really want to transcend, if you want your idea to live forever, if you want to put your stamp of authenticity on to the minds of those who are viewing your right now,
Speaker 0 (9m 36s): Do you think you have to have this, this is
Speaker 1 (9m 42s): New way of, of showings. And so what is that? What is that?
Speaker 0 (9m 47s): Well,
Speaker 1 (9m 48s): You don't want to be too mentally about it. If you want to know,
Speaker 0 (9m 51s): Do you want to
Speaker 1 (9m 57s): Invoke field in someone
Speaker 0 (9m 60s): Else? You want to have both the power and the soothing effects of your idea transmitted not only via
Speaker 1 (10m 13s): Words, but by felt experience according to Whitehead. He says that the trouble with creators have today is that they try to substitute a mentor
Speaker 0 (10m 25s): Idea for the aesthetic experience. Hmm it's it's something to think about if you all right.
Speaker 1 (10m 37s): And artist, if you are someone who wants to change the world, then you're going to need to grapple with that in your own way. You're going to need to understand that the idea you want to transmit must transmit feels right.
Speaker 0 (10m 52s): It must evoke any emotion.
Speaker 1 (10m 57s): The man's best thinking is done either by persons, living in the country are in a small community or else by those having had such environment in an early life, enrich their experience by life and cities for what is wanted, is contact with the elemental process of nature. During those years of youth, when the mind is being formed, I think we can agree that
Speaker 0 (11m 22s): The majority of people Well, it seems to me right
Speaker 1 (11m 26s): In my own experience, that my best thinking is usually done alone in nature. For me, its been out in the U S
Speaker 0 (11m 33s): Or hiking or somewhere
Speaker 1 (11m 38s): Where you're not disturbed by
Speaker 0 (11m 43s): The, 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 city's that so much matter smart plays are written for blahzay audience in a metropolis, eccentric poetry and clever novels are concocted about dwellers in crowded streets, poor souls, our cut off through most of the year from contact with the soil, the woods and the scene 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 leisure, the growth of crops buy the anxiety that those crops should be. So at the mercy of nature's Caprice and yet also the reasoning ops and yet also the reassuring experience of nature's bounty in the longterm.
It's interesting that it just seems the technological advances in today's society favor as being quarantined into small dwellings in a tightly packed city where everything can be monitored. Where again, when it goes back to, it seems our best thinking is done outside the city centers.
The most we can ask of civil civilization, I think he said smiling wickedly is that it shall not crush every type of talent scholarship set. 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 pretty much throughout the 19th century.
Next it can ask what and where are these flashes of insight in the work of genius, where by he rises out of his own time in to all the time, such flashes are all ways and acronystic 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 in propagate these rare flashes of genius in which humanity
Speaker 1 (14m 52s): As nowhere else has arisen
Speaker 0 (14m 55s): Above itself is a pretty deep, there are at least what do you guys think?
Speaker 1 (15m 3s): So how can we perpetuate and propagate flashes of genius,
Speaker 0 (15m 15s): Right?
Speaker 1 (15m 16s): Dr. Cannon talked to Russia, Germany and China, where he had been on tour and in medical conventions last summer, Ivan Pavlov, the Russian scientist 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. He was called before the checkup, 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 in, walked out. You can do that. If you're a Pavlov, he said Whitehead otherwise you would go to Siberia, foreign diplomats and consoles in Russia said, dr. Canon have no Russian friends' the Russians dare not to be seen talking with foreign officials, a British console in Leningrad who cultivates gypsy lore was rejoiced at the prospect of going there because the Russian authority on Gypsy's lives and teaches in that city.
But in two years, he has not been able to meet him. Friends of the Pavlov's, a young scientist and his wife were arrested by the checkout while there are a little boy, a seven-year-old was asleep and they were jailed separately in communicative. The constant year, saw them being taken away and notified the Pavlov's 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 a necessity being brought up and the utterly abnormal atmosphere goes guarded to school and you can have no playmates.
Speaker 0 (17m 7s): Right?
Speaker 1 (17m 7s): The founding of scholars said Whitehead is one of the symptoms of social decay. 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 soldier day in July in my family was in New Hampshire. And I took him down to Harvard square.
Speaker 0 (17m 29s): And where is your watch? And then he asked, I have in your house, we'll be robbed.
Speaker 1 (17m 35s): So why don't think so then seeing my old Ford car in the backyard, he said, what your beautiful car will surely be stolen? Oh no, no. Then how superior
Speaker 0 (17m 47s): He was the morality of Boston to New York. I think that's relevant today. As of today, November 18th, 2020, you could make the argument that
Speaker 1 (18m 2s): Censorship that we see in social media is a lot of them.
Speaker 0 (18m 7s): The censorship, the beginning of communism in, in times before
Speaker 1 (18m 18s): Nowhere near, is it as violent or as well
Speaker 0 (18m 22s): Is brutal is taking away kids from families. But I think it's a lot.
Speaker 1 (18m 33s): So I mean, if you look at the way YouTube or Facebook or Google, if you look at the China model
Speaker 0 (18m 43s): With a social
Speaker 1 (18m 43s): Credit score, not being, you know,
Speaker 0 (18m 45s): Able to see you
Speaker 1 (18m 49s): And the things about certain types of government officials or talk about the coronavirus being a fake or a fraud, and just in an attempt to condition people, all of that gets taken off of the internet.
Speaker 0 (19m 3s): You
Speaker 1 (19m 3s): Know, it is in fact, a great social experiment being pushed on the people right now and it's working, it's working. I, I have people in my family that we won't even go outside because they believe this invisible virus is going to kill them. And all the time
Speaker 0 (19m 20s): Humanity
Speaker 1 (19m 23s): And argue that the Corona virus is mainly spread through television
Speaker 0 (19m 27s): And which can be a drug that can be a brutal form of social control. Here's a interesting part about a novel Britain or what was it?
Speaker 1 (19m 58s): Dr. Whitehead was reading. Here's an interesting book review by dr. Whitehead from April 19th, Yeah
Speaker 0 (20m 6s): 1837, three novels about Boston have appeared within a year. The latest of them ward eight by Joseph Deneen is a study of municipal politics with a life like that.
Speaker 1 (20m 18s): Portrait of Martin Loman. See who was something between guardian and czar of the West end. It deals with the other three quarters of this year.
Speaker 0 (20m 29s): Did he not cope with although noticed and John Mark Quan's the late George Apley
Speaker 1 (20m 36s): Santa yanas. The last Puritan have a wider range, ENS as a period of two decades earlier than the other two,
Speaker 0 (20m 48s): The white heads had been reading ward eight and asked, do you know, the author certainly is a reporter and friend of mine. Could you bring them to see us? Would he care to come one can't undertake to produce him, but I can try you approved easier than anticipated. We went both. We went both white heads were in top form, perfection of handling genius, considerate, interested, but uncompromising, it was amusing to see Joe shaken out of his attitude of indifferentism.
He began with a general defensive the system. They demolished it by. So questioning what service does the boss perform? Employment agency? Yes. Schuman ISER of the ward. Yes, but it isn't the tribute. He exacts excessive. And how about selling their votes after they have paid him for jobs and the employer's have paid him four, getting the laborers is It finally defensible.
Dineen took it gamely. Besides he knew that Mrs. Whitehead was emotionally in sympathy and that both of them admire admired the novel. He explained the graft all through society in the labor unions, the unions expecting to be sold out by the reluctant agents who openly justify there having done so on the score of policy that in business finance journalism It is an enveloping climate.
The discussion moving 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 is odd, 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 set 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 rise, but by so doing deprived, 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 set of Whitehead the mild and gentle people.
It carries towards mercy and justice. The persecuting people, it carries into fiendish, sadistic cruelty,
Speaker 2 (24m 24s): Right
Speaker 0 (24m 29s): 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 a misery at the bottom of society in the ancient world, slavery in the medieval world, served them since the development of machine technique, industrial proletariats 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 mass is that 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?
I would say very poor. Don't think we are relieving mass misery and preserving freedom of the individual. Maybe they can't be done. Maybe it is a utopian vision to do both of those things. I would say that we were slipping faster and faster into a more fascistic regime.
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 I'm of the opinion. It's more of a eugenics mindset now were 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 that's what it appears to me. If this fake pandemic or a plan DEMEC is, is just a way to transfer wealth from the bottom people in society to the very top people in the United States, we've we have had what is deemed a stimulus for people, but it is really just bailouts of banks and corporations and the new aristocracy that will be that we'll be moving forward in the future.
And it's, it's kind of a dark vision. And I, I hope I'm wrong. I hope that there is some sort of AI behind this, you know, or some 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 as being thrust upon us, struggle, ambition, aerobic energy.
These are noble as potentially noble as anything in man, but when they decline into a mere love of domination, they are evil. You know, it seems that throughout our revolution, these were all incredibly noble aspects of man's struggle, ambition, heroic energy. You know, these are the stories of our youth story is 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, those particular ideologies or those particular traits are used not to overcome adversity, but to enrich, to, to underscore material gain, regardless of the outcome, you know, we're not fighting dragons.
We are fighting weaker people to steal other resources in the name of profit. Later, we got on to what Whitehead calls, asking ourselves historical riddles. Lets 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 in the gold. They brought from the Americas, demoralized them in 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. 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 48 hours 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 and have a theory, whether it can be sustained. I am 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 wracked take the cathedrals, you get something profoundly moving and At elbows with It and At elbows with It something clumsy butt, which does not detract from it. Then as the art matures and the technique gets established and transmissible by teaching, the bright boys are pick out who can learn the technique readily to the neglect of the boys who have magnificent dreams.
The work is clever and finished, but lacks depth. So that to me speaks to the, 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. These people that have the ability to dream and create new things. And then 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
Speaker 1 (32m 41s): Right to begin dreaming. And then
Speaker 0 (32m 46s): The dreamers that are born 20 or 30 years from them, or to be killed
Speaker 1 (32m 52s): Cast aside as workers or cast aside as a lower class because their dreams, their skills,
Speaker 0 (33m 1s): There is no longer needed. What is needed is the a student, the person that can follow the directions that can carry out the dream of the long gone dreamer. I think it kind of harkens back to system versus the experience we started rummaging among the art's to test it. He thought Rafael 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 in Gothic, a further example, English Gothics that he runs through about for centuries 1100 to 1500 end through the success of 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 for centuries was that new aspects of the idea of Gothic architecture were being discovered and developed its possibilities of novelty look endless But by the 15 hundreds, 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 and the modern world and from church to railroad station. So that in London you get instead of a Gothic Abby st Paul's cathedral and the New York and Pennsylvania railroad station, which is modeled after the baths of Caracalla in Rome.
We tried this theory on the art of Greek tragedy and sure enough, here was the same life cycle Chili's has a burning moral convictions. His technique in the Persians is a little more than that of a <inaudible> or an or a tutorial, but in the Agamemnon is highly advanced.
Speaker 1 (35m 19s): In the extent plays of Sophocles, you have the best
Speaker 0 (35m 26s): 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 Antigony. And the two Oedipus plays by the time you rip it, he is arrives. Technique is so well understood that it can be juggled, but while there is still strong conviction, and the idea is
Speaker 1 (35m 54s): We are powerful. The spirit is one of skeptical critics.
Speaker 0 (35m 58s): We found that what we were discussing in terms of techniques, where the life cycles of art forms, such cycles can be traced in Greek sculpture and Renaissance painting and in modern music beginning three centuries ago, and coming on down to the 20th, when the technique of a symphonic orchestration is so well understood that it can now be taught to the bright boys. Some of these bright boys, white heads theory had let him in a flood of light, put on dazzling shows, have technical fireworks, brilliant flashes and bangs.
They can't 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 an <inaudible> a tonality, but believing in nothing, they have nothing to say. And the ones powerful idea is stone dead. Yet it may have a resurrection caution.
The Whitehead there are ideas. What do you,
Speaker 1 (37m 12s): We have lane in the tunes for centuries, then rising again, have a revolutionized human
Speaker 0 (37m 18s): Society. Some boy
Speaker 1 (37m 20s): Who is more than merely bright, gets a hold of him, right?
Speaker 0 (37m 22s): The idea which has long been supposed to be dead. And it comes to life in his hands. But when a young man,
Speaker 1 (37m 30s): He was all in a glow over the discovery, have a great idea.
Speaker 0 (37m 33s): It is not so much that particular idea he has discovered that is important as it is glow over it
Speaker 1 (37m 42s): They're you have the sense of adventure of newness. The old idea has been seen freshly in some new aspects
Speaker 0 (37m 49s): And for the vitality of thought is an adventure ideas. Won't keep something must be done about them. When the idea is new it's custodians have fervor live for it and if need be die for it, they are inheritors. Receive the idea perhaps now is strong and successful But without inheriting the fervor. So the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age turns senile in dies, but the, you know,
Speaker 1 (38m 20s): Institutions organized around and do not stop, or they go on by sheer force of acquired momentum
Speaker 0 (38m 26s): Or like the dead of night borne along on his force. Interesting, right? To think about the life cycle of art forms,
Speaker 1 (38m 38s): Think about the life cycle of ideas and how similar the life
Speaker 0 (38m 42s): Cycle of artwork and ideas is to our own life. You can think of yourself as an idea, the idea of George Monty the idea of enter your name here. It can give you an interesting aspect of, of your life. You know, it just, it's fascinating
Speaker 1 (39m 11s): To think of as more of an idea
Speaker 0 (39m 15s): As a person,
Speaker 1 (39m 16s): An idea is something that's real and idea is something right
Speaker 0 (39m 20s): That lived
Speaker 1 (39m 23s): A life alongside of you,
Speaker 0 (39m 25s): Whatever you believe in, whatever idea you have, if you pour your heart into it, it becomes real. How would you
Speaker 1 (39m 36s): In your life change if you look at yourself like, and I know,
Speaker 0 (39m 39s): Yeah. I mean, 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?
If you think of the idea of living in a perpetual state of happiness, you can begin to live it. If you think of the idea of living in a depressed, sad, and yeah.
Speaker 1 (40m 31s): State of depression, then you can live that one as well. What do you focus on as what you feel? And in the life cycle of art is the life cycle of life is the life cycle of ideas is the life cycle of our planet. Just like watching a flower, grow on a tree
Speaker 0 (40m 51s): From bud to fragrant flower, to the Browning of the edges and falling on the ground.
Speaker 1 (40m 60s): It's the same way you can look at the United States or at least the cycle of this part of the day,
Speaker 0 (41m 7s): The United States, when you are green, you grow when you're right here. Right. When I was
Speaker 1 (41m 21s): The first lecture, it in American colleges said, Whitehead right
Speaker 0 (41m 24s): Flee from 1924 to 1929. In those five years, I soon saw if I use a quotation from the that's
Speaker 1 (41m 34s): Not one of my students had ever read it ever intended to, or had the idea what I was talking about. And if they sense that I was speaking of religion, they leaned back until I should of got on to something else. But on the years from 1929 to my retirement, the last seven years of my active teaching, this attitude changed. And when I spoke of religion, there was an attentive leaning
Speaker 0 (42m 2s): Forward. Okay. I want you to think about the years he is talking about right now
Speaker 1 (42m 8s): From 1929 until
Speaker 0 (42m 10s): His retirement. That was almost a hundred years ago in the beginning of that
Speaker 1 (42m 22s): From 1924 to 1920. And I, no one even cares for them
Speaker 0 (42m 25s): Religion, according to Whitehead and where are we now? We are in 2020. And you could argue that there is,
Speaker 1 (42m 38s): It has been a growing to TA dis tastes for religion in the United States in the last,
Speaker 0 (42m 44s): I don't know, 15
Speaker 1 (42m 45s): Years, all of these atheist in, in just different. It seems to me that
Speaker 0 (42m 51s): As a whole, all of
Speaker 1 (42m 53s): Our country was getting away from religion. But in times of crisis where we're at now, It seems that it's growing back fast.
Speaker 0 (43m 5s): That's true. And, and, and we're right back to the last chapter
Speaker 1 (43m 12s): Or what we talked about, the lifecycle of ideas, you know, if every a hundred years this, there is a resurgence of religious fervor, or what if every a hundred years there is a small cycle and a big cycle, you know, every thousand years might be the big cycle. And every a hundred years
Speaker 0 (43m 32s): There may be
Speaker 1 (43m 34s): An opportunity for a great wor a rebound.
Speaker 0 (43m 36s): And that's, you know, we're, we're rapidly approaching the a hundred 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.
Speaker 1 (43m 57s): So from here, the discussion detour to a discussion of crusading zeal, and Whitehead remarked of professional crusaders that their old age, as likely to be a melancholy affair, they go from Cause
Speaker 0 (44m 13s): To Cause where precisely
Speaker 1 (44m 16s): Should a man's crusading zeal, a bait. I asked when his blood cools 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
Speaker 0 (44m 34s): Unpopular, they are a cutie.
Speaker 1 (44m 37s): And there were a cuteness often takes a form which excites envy, namely the form of doing well in trade.
Speaker 0 (44m 45s): It is not always depth in picking men. You must dart against the brilliancy of the young Jew.
Speaker 1 (44m 52s): You were 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 New York
Speaker 0 (45m 12s): That gives them, said he is
Speaker 1 (45m 14s): In a certain helpful preoccupation with the ideal. They are singularly deficient in humor, or were there till they lived among the Europeans. The Bible is quite humorless after their tragedies. They never seem to have a farce by Aristophanes's situated as they were between military empires. Perhaps there was nothing to laugh about. The Jew was naturally melancholy. He said Whitehead 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 1500 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
Speaker 0 (46m 9s): By God. So that's kind of a funny, I told him
Speaker 1 (46m 26s): Bruning sometime chancellor of Germany had said during a conversation at dr. Han's Zinner is that education should be reserved for the elite until 50 years ago in England
Speaker 0 (46m 38s): Said, Whitehead, it was confined
Speaker 1 (46m 41s): To a small upper layer. And no one thought it was a MIS that the mass of the people,
Speaker 0 (46m 48s): It should be illiterate. Now we take literacy for granted. My father had the running of the village school when schooling was first made, compulsory
Speaker 1 (46m 60s): Countered, 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 a degree
Speaker 0 (47m 9s): Education in this country after the world war, which has continued ever since I remarked by 1920.
Speaker 1 (47m 18s): Yeah, it was unmistakable. And it kept right on through the depression with it has coming 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. So the Whitehead the teacher and scholar and professor were looked up too. They were Unitarians and have a Nimbus of religious all, but as the century wore on that wore off Unitarianism was a religion not have won God, but have won God at most, if not, I have one God and also said I as the continent was opened, the feeling was at the turn of the century, that man was What.
He ought to be, she would make a fool.
Speaker 2 (48m 10s): This was what,
Speaker 1 (48m 12s): What made William James call success? The bitch goddess that worship is not as prevalent
Speaker 2 (48m 20s): Now.
Speaker 1 (48m 22s): Interesting to think about our history with education
Speaker 2 (48m 28s): And
Speaker 1 (48m 28s): 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
Speaker 2 (48m 52s): Experts? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48m 54s): You know, it's, it's interesting to think about how malleable the country can B if they have a system of education and to the point about only a few people being literate,
Speaker 2 (49m 12s): You know, I think,
Speaker 1 (49m 15s): And I think it's still there. You know, I think that The point of elite schools in the past was that really intelligent
Speaker 2 (49m 27s): People.
Speaker 1 (49m 29s): We have the opportunity to go away to institutions where they could continue their learning with other incredibly intelligent people,
Speaker 2 (49m 40s): Right?
Speaker 1 (49m 40s): And out of this idea of beautiful fairness out of this idea of raising the consciousness of the entire country, we should make it more available to all people, however, in doing so in our attempt for eternal fairness, we have turned education and to 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,
Speaker 2 (50m 16s): Right.
Speaker 1 (50m 23s): The people you would normally be surrounded with wherever you live, just from a different part of the world. Does it 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, like a highly educated, a weirdo that just, I can only play a guitar and, and talk about robotics. You know, like in a way of people that are, that are, that are at like some of the greatest schools in the world, or are borderline retarded in That, they can't have relationships.
They can't throw almost like the monks from an old-school monastery ware. You know, they were 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 that you should want to be Elon Musk or
Speaker 2 (51m 29s): Right.
Speaker 1 (51m 33s): Other individuals that seem to be glorified. When in fact
Speaker 2 (51m 39s): They may
Speaker 1 (51m 39s): Not have the life you think they have, you'd be happy with your own life because you're a beautiful
Speaker 2 (51m 46s): In person,
Speaker 1 (51m 51s): A paragraph and Whitehead's appeal to sanity 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 all of society's creative impulse, but it's possessive instincts. Herbert Hoover, a Quaker fed milk to Belgium babies. Herbert Hoover, as president of the United States had the war veterans of the bonus army bombed out of Washington by tear gas.
What is this profound dichotomy? The milk for Belgian babies didn't necessarily imply humanitarian sentiments on his part said Whitehead. It was merely in an organization job in which the sentiment of his time, it had a judge, he had had a judged, had to be done, and he was engaged to do it Quaker. Yes, but unimaginative 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 inter at all, come in incidentally to the main object, namely that of taking up the metal from one place in laying it down in another, they keep their minds fixed on that. When 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 site another instance. In 1914, we had an incident with Mexico. Something provocative happened in the Harbor of Tampico first, a squabble than a dispute over an insult in a demand that the Mexicans apologize and salute our flag. The affair kept worsening. The North Atlantic fleet was ordered to the coast of Mexico. Public feeling was inflamed, or at least the press was separated.
And president Wilson ordered a Navy to attack and capture Vera Cruz. They did, and 17 boys were killed 16 Marines and one sailor to more died of wounds. A few days later, only half a dozen years before that mr. Wilson, instead of being president of the United States had been a college president at Princeton, a humane gentlemen, like any of your colleagues here who would've 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 cover with a flag were rolled out on a parade ground.
Speaker 0 (54m 55s): The president
Speaker 1 (54m 57s): That came from Washington deliver the funeral speech. He said he is
Speaker 0 (55m 2s): Envied those dead young men.
Speaker 1 (55m 5s): 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 Cause
Speaker 0 (55m 13s): That's remember this was in May, 1914, and next to know one for some of the world war, our world hadn't then been calloused 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, educational, charitable, creative, artistic social, and that perhaps the function of the state thus far as to provide conditions of sufficient tranquility within which those more varied forms of activity, we 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 is that
Speaker 1 (56m 48s): The man is wholly subordinated to the common life. He is dwarfed communities, Lac, the intricacies of human nature war can protect. It cannot create, man. It's almost like a mic drop right there.
Speaker 0 (57m 5s): Let me just read that again. So you can truly kind of takes some time to think about it. Appeal to sanity. Each
Speaker 1 (57m 17s): Human being is more common, is a more complex
Speaker 0 (57m 20s): The structure than any social system, to which he belongs. 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 a deep Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs any particular community. Lifetouch is only part of the nature of Each civilized.
Man. If the man is wholly subordinated to the common life, he is dwarfed communities. Lack of 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 too, 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. But in our age, economics have swollen into these huge corporate enterprises, which bringing 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 are 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, not being able to satisfy and does it need to satisfy large groups. It needs to satisfy to 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 managers. The light's like Amazon, Walmart or Google and how there is no religion. It's like the absence of the religion. Plus the, the pure power and greed. And just on caring, the 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 in the people in boardrooms, no longer see working people or no longer see people below them as people, but in fact, cogs and numbers.
And you know, if, 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 accomplish their dreams of profit, then you know, if they could see those people as people, the world we'll be better. And I think that there is a, like a visceral hatred for people in boardrooms, trying to squeeze productivity, productivity out of people they don't know.
And that when you do that, when you see people as numbers, if you treat them like cogs in a wheel, that the level of anger and the level of just pure on a dime Dalton hatred, if that hatred is, is culminated and aimed at the very people at the top, those people at the top of their, in for a huge problem. And they should be scared. I, I think that's why you see a lot of billionaires hiding and running in people in board rooms, running in 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, right? Not only at the people in the boardrooms, but at their families and the generations of their families to come, like there is a real, she was a real undercurrent of animosity coming for the people who can't see other people as humans.
I hope they are hope somebody empowered us to this. 'cause you should be going out of your way to change the ways in which you look at the world. All my friends, I think that's good for this episode of Alfred North Whitehead we 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 want to know the future, we should talk to the past.
It's all we got my friends Aloha.
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/56549397
Speaker 0 (0s): Part to me, Whoo my friends. Welcome back to the beginning. We're back here with Alfred North Whitehead we are in what we're doing, what we're doing is we are looking at the future through the eyes of a philosopher in the past. Yeah. And it is so intriguing and beautiful and amazing journey all through the eyes of the past.
I got to tell you, this is really something to reading these older books that are not fiction and they're not science fiction. And there are really not literature. They are the dialogs, the paper's the written correspondences of, of people in the past. There is something so visceral about it. And I hope all of you, we're 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.
And 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, let's jump right back into it here. 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.
So that being said, I just jumped right back in here from the book. I raised the question why the creation of an artwork exhausts the experience for his creator, but is infinitely potent have repeated stimulations in the enjoyer. Perhaps you said it is because of all human effort is directed towards the achievement of an end, whether it is satisfied or not.
And the artists in, although never quite the result he hoped for is largely attained. And therefor finished for him to a point in which he ends is where the enjoyer begins. That's an interesting way to look at it. What do you think the generation now at the age of 50 or thereabouts, he said seems to, to have had its upbringing 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 formula of conduct in order to keep their children quote unquote good. When they no longer believed in these formula themselves to children eventually found that 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 no more with their children about it, their children in those years, between 18 and 24, when one is experiencing for the first time, the 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
Speaker 1 (4m 21s): Conceptions of how life should be done.
Speaker 0 (4m 25s): We 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,
Speaker 1 (4m 51s): That was an interesting point. Mans earlier discoveries in mathematics were made by observation,
Speaker 0 (4m 58s): All of his physical surroundings as
Speaker 1 (5m 2s): The Contra distinguished from abstract reason, set he on the Plains of Cal DIA, he noticed the stars swinging round and round. Do you do just the conception of the circle and finally arrived at the wheel? Interesting to think about how mathematics may have been discovered
Speaker 0 (5m 27s): In the past and how the evolution of our science resulted from it. I think you can go much like the wheel for me,
Speaker 1 (5m 38s): I'll circle in understanding the relationship.
Speaker 0 (5m 42s): So between mathematics and abstract thought and how today being away from nature
Speaker 1 (5m 50s): And submersed in this world of tech,
Speaker 0 (5m 54s): The logical abundance. No, that makes sense. That 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 makes sense if you just take that little, that little particular bite there of man, you are using an abstract thought 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.
I like those are big ideas. Those are big thoughts and abstract. Where today we are narrowly focused on this tiny little part of technology. And it's just fascinating. The, the deeper you get into something, the more of the illusion of abundance. I told you, I told you this is going to be interesting. 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 and aesthetic experience powerfully felt emotional experience with mental perceptions. Then it demands a definite artistic form. The trouble with creators have 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 away?
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 in. And if it kind of
Speaker 1 (8m 11s): Comes out of mirror consciously clever radio, Sunation it is for doomed. You are dealing in secondary perceptions and relatively shallow experience. It does not
Speaker 0 (8m 27s): Behr the stamp of deepest truth. Wow. That has some pretty, that was pretty deep. Yeah. That's kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (8m 38s): Break that down a little bit. So if you, and I want to,
Speaker 0 (8m 44s): How was experienced to be brought to the level of consciousness and transmitted into an art form out of the subconscious? I think that as a question that all the artists are striving to do, right?
Speaker 1 (8m 56s): You're trying to bring something back from the unconscious mind. It's a lot like that.
Speaker 0 (9m 4s): Going balls deep into like a 10
Speaker 1 (9m 9s): Graham's psychedelic trip. What a day, two of an Iowasca Benjen trying to formulate a new linguistic pathway to share the experience
Speaker 0 (9m 20s): And with others with right.
Speaker 1 (9m 23s): If you really want to transcend, if you want your idea to live forever, if you want to put your stamp of authenticity on to the minds of those who are viewing your right now,
Speaker 0 (9m 36s): Do you think you have to have this, this is
Speaker 1 (9m 42s): New way of, of showings. And so what is that? What is that?
Speaker 0 (9m 47s): Well,
Speaker 1 (9m 48s): You don't want to be too mentally about it. If you want to know,
Speaker 0 (9m 51s): Do you want to
Speaker 1 (9m 57s): Invoke field in someone
Speaker 0 (9m 60s): Else? You want to have both the power and the soothing effects of your idea transmitted not only via
Speaker 1 (10m 13s): Words, but by felt experience according to Whitehead. He says that the trouble with creators have today is that they try to substitute a mentor
Speaker 0 (10m 25s): Idea for the aesthetic experience. Hmm it's it's something to think about if you all right.
Speaker 1 (10m 37s): And artist, if you are someone who wants to change the world, then you're going to need to grapple with that in your own way. You're going to need to understand that the idea you want to transmit must transmit feels right.
Speaker 0 (10m 52s): It must evoke any emotion.
Speaker 1 (10m 57s): The man's best thinking is done either by persons, living in the country are in a small community or else by those having had such environment in an early life, enrich their experience by life and cities for what is wanted, is contact with the elemental process of nature. During those years of youth, when the mind is being formed, I think we can agree that
Speaker 0 (11m 22s): The majority of people Well, it seems to me right
Speaker 1 (11m 26s): In my own experience, that my best thinking is usually done alone in nature. For me, its been out in the U S
Speaker 0 (11m 33s): Or hiking or somewhere
Speaker 1 (11m 38s): Where you're not disturbed by
Speaker 0 (11m 43s): The, 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 city's that so much matter smart plays are written for blahzay audience in a metropolis, eccentric poetry and clever novels are concocted about dwellers in crowded streets, poor souls, our cut off through most of the year from contact with the soil, the woods and the scene 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 leisure, the growth of crops buy the anxiety that those crops should be. So at the mercy of nature's Caprice and yet also the reasoning ops and yet also the reassuring experience of nature's bounty in the longterm.
It's interesting that it just seems the technological advances in today's society favor as being quarantined into small dwellings in a tightly packed city where everything can be monitored. Where again, when it goes back to, it seems our best thinking is done outside the city centers.
The most we can ask of civil civilization, I think he said smiling wickedly is that it shall not crush every type of talent scholarship set. 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 pretty much throughout the 19th century.
Next it can ask what and where are these flashes of insight in the work of genius, where by he rises out of his own time in to all the time, such flashes are all ways and acronystic 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 in propagate these rare flashes of genius in which humanity
Speaker 1 (14m 52s): As nowhere else has arisen
Speaker 0 (14m 55s): Above itself is a pretty deep, there are at least what do you guys think?
Speaker 1 (15m 3s): So how can we perpetuate and propagate flashes of genius,
Speaker 0 (15m 15s): Right?
Speaker 1 (15m 16s): Dr. Cannon talked to Russia, Germany and China, where he had been on tour and in medical conventions last summer, Ivan Pavlov, the Russian scientist 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. He was called before the checkup, 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 in, walked out. You can do that. If you're a Pavlov, he said Whitehead otherwise you would go to Siberia, foreign diplomats and consoles in Russia said, dr. Canon have no Russian friends' the Russians dare not to be seen talking with foreign officials, a British console in Leningrad who cultivates gypsy lore was rejoiced at the prospect of going there because the Russian authority on Gypsy's lives and teaches in that city.
But in two years, he has not been able to meet him. Friends of the Pavlov's, a young scientist and his wife were arrested by the checkout while there are a little boy, a seven-year-old was asleep and they were jailed separately in communicative. The constant year, saw them being taken away and notified the Pavlov's 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 a necessity being brought up and the utterly abnormal atmosphere goes guarded to school and you can have no playmates.
Speaker 0 (17m 7s): Right?
Speaker 1 (17m 7s): The founding of scholars said Whitehead is one of the symptoms of social decay. 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 soldier day in July in my family was in New Hampshire. And I took him down to Harvard square.
Speaker 0 (17m 29s): And where is your watch? And then he asked, I have in your house, we'll be robbed.
Speaker 1 (17m 35s): So why don't think so then seeing my old Ford car in the backyard, he said, what your beautiful car will surely be stolen? Oh no, no. Then how superior
Speaker 0 (17m 47s): He was the morality of Boston to New York. I think that's relevant today. As of today, November 18th, 2020, you could make the argument that
Speaker 1 (18m 2s): Censorship that we see in social media is a lot of them.
Speaker 0 (18m 7s): The censorship, the beginning of communism in, in times before
Speaker 1 (18m 18s): Nowhere near, is it as violent or as well
Speaker 0 (18m 22s): Is brutal is taking away kids from families. But I think it's a lot.
Speaker 1 (18m 33s): So I mean, if you look at the way YouTube or Facebook or Google, if you look at the China model
Speaker 0 (18m 43s): With a social
Speaker 1 (18m 43s): Credit score, not being, you know,
Speaker 0 (18m 45s): Able to see you
Speaker 1 (18m 49s): And the things about certain types of government officials or talk about the coronavirus being a fake or a fraud, and just in an attempt to condition people, all of that gets taken off of the internet.
Speaker 0 (19m 3s): You
Speaker 1 (19m 3s): Know, it is in fact, a great social experiment being pushed on the people right now and it's working, it's working. I, I have people in my family that we won't even go outside because they believe this invisible virus is going to kill them. And all the time
Speaker 0 (19m 20s): Humanity
Speaker 1 (19m 23s): And argue that the Corona virus is mainly spread through television
Speaker 0 (19m 27s): And which can be a drug that can be a brutal form of social control. Here's a interesting part about a novel Britain or what was it?
Speaker 1 (19m 58s): Dr. Whitehead was reading. Here's an interesting book review by dr. Whitehead from April 19th, Yeah
Speaker 0 (20m 6s): 1837, three novels about Boston have appeared within a year. The latest of them ward eight by Joseph Deneen is a study of municipal politics with a life like that.
Speaker 1 (20m 18s): Portrait of Martin Loman. See who was something between guardian and czar of the West end. It deals with the other three quarters of this year.
Speaker 0 (20m 29s): Did he not cope with although noticed and John Mark Quan's the late George Apley
Speaker 1 (20m 36s): Santa yanas. The last Puritan have a wider range, ENS as a period of two decades earlier than the other two,
Speaker 0 (20m 48s): The white heads had been reading ward eight and asked, do you know, the author certainly is a reporter and friend of mine. Could you bring them to see us? Would he care to come one can't undertake to produce him, but I can try you approved easier than anticipated. We went both. We went both white heads were in top form, perfection of handling genius, considerate, interested, but uncompromising, it was amusing to see Joe shaken out of his attitude of indifferentism.
He began with a general defensive the system. They demolished it by. So questioning what service does the boss perform? Employment agency? Yes. Schuman ISER of the ward. Yes, but it isn't the tribute. He exacts excessive. And how about selling their votes after they have paid him for jobs and the employer's have paid him four, getting the laborers is It finally defensible.
Dineen took it gamely. Besides he knew that Mrs. Whitehead was emotionally in sympathy and that both of them admire admired the novel. He explained the graft all through society in the labor unions, the unions expecting to be sold out by the reluctant agents who openly justify there having done so on the score of policy that in business finance journalism It is an enveloping climate.
The discussion moving 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 is odd, 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 set 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 rise, but by so doing deprived, 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 set of Whitehead the mild and gentle people.
It carries towards mercy and justice. The persecuting people, it carries into fiendish, sadistic cruelty,
Speaker 2 (24m 24s): Right
Speaker 0 (24m 29s): 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 a misery at the bottom of society in the ancient world, slavery in the medieval world, served them since the development of machine technique, industrial proletariats 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 mass is that 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?
I would say very poor. Don't think we are relieving mass misery and preserving freedom of the individual. Maybe they can't be done. Maybe it is a utopian vision to do both of those things. I would say that we were slipping faster and faster into a more fascistic regime.
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 I'm of the opinion. It's more of a eugenics mindset now were 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 that's what it appears to me. If this fake pandemic or a plan DEMEC is, is just a way to transfer wealth from the bottom people in society to the very top people in the United States, we've we have had what is deemed a stimulus for people, but it is really just bailouts of banks and corporations and the new aristocracy that will be that we'll be moving forward in the future.
And it's, it's kind of a dark vision. And I, I hope I'm wrong. I hope that there is some sort of AI behind this, you know, or some 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 as being thrust upon us, struggle, ambition, aerobic energy.
These are noble as potentially noble as anything in man, but when they decline into a mere love of domination, they are evil. You know, it seems that throughout our revolution, these were all incredibly noble aspects of man's struggle, ambition, heroic energy. You know, these are the stories of our youth story is 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, those particular ideologies or those particular traits are used not to overcome adversity, but to enrich, to, to underscore material gain, regardless of the outcome, you know, we're not fighting dragons.
We are fighting weaker people to steal other resources in the name of profit. Later, we got on to what Whitehead calls, asking ourselves historical riddles. Lets 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 in the gold. They brought from the Americas, demoralized them in 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. 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 48 hours 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 and have a theory, whether it can be sustained. I am 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 wracked take the cathedrals, you get something profoundly moving and At elbows with It and At elbows with It something clumsy butt, which does not detract from it. Then as the art matures and the technique gets established and transmissible by teaching, the bright boys are pick out who can learn the technique readily to the neglect of the boys who have magnificent dreams.
The work is clever and finished, but lacks depth. So that to me speaks to the, 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. These people that have the ability to dream and create new things. And then 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
Speaker 1 (32m 41s): Right to begin dreaming. And then
Speaker 0 (32m 46s): The dreamers that are born 20 or 30 years from them, or to be killed
Speaker 1 (32m 52s): Cast aside as workers or cast aside as a lower class because their dreams, their skills,
Speaker 0 (33m 1s): There is no longer needed. What is needed is the a student, the person that can follow the directions that can carry out the dream of the long gone dreamer. I think it kind of harkens back to system versus the experience we started rummaging among the art's to test it. He thought Rafael 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 in Gothic, a further example, English Gothics that he runs through about for centuries 1100 to 1500 end through the success of 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 for centuries was that new aspects of the idea of Gothic architecture were being discovered and developed its possibilities of novelty look endless But by the 15 hundreds, 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 and the modern world and from church to railroad station. So that in London you get instead of a Gothic Abby st Paul's cathedral and the New York and Pennsylvania railroad station, which is modeled after the baths of Caracalla in Rome.
We tried this theory on the art of Greek tragedy and sure enough, here was the same life cycle Chili's has a burning moral convictions. His technique in the Persians is a little more than that of a <inaudible> or an or a tutorial, but in the Agamemnon is highly advanced.
Speaker 1 (35m 19s): In the extent plays of Sophocles, you have the best
Speaker 0 (35m 26s): 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 Antigony. And the two Oedipus plays by the time you rip it, he is arrives. Technique is so well understood that it can be juggled, but while there is still strong conviction, and the idea is
Speaker 1 (35m 54s): We are powerful. The spirit is one of skeptical critics.
Speaker 0 (35m 58s): We found that what we were discussing in terms of techniques, where the life cycles of art forms, such cycles can be traced in Greek sculpture and Renaissance painting and in modern music beginning three centuries ago, and coming on down to the 20th, when the technique of a symphonic orchestration is so well understood that it can now be taught to the bright boys. Some of these bright boys, white heads theory had let him in a flood of light, put on dazzling shows, have technical fireworks, brilliant flashes and bangs.
They can't 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 an <inaudible> a tonality, but believing in nothing, they have nothing to say. And the ones powerful idea is stone dead. Yet it may have a resurrection caution.
The Whitehead there are ideas. What do you,
Speaker 1 (37m 12s): We have lane in the tunes for centuries, then rising again, have a revolutionized human
Speaker 0 (37m 18s): Society. Some boy
Speaker 1 (37m 20s): Who is more than merely bright, gets a hold of him, right?
Speaker 0 (37m 22s): The idea which has long been supposed to be dead. And it comes to life in his hands. But when a young man,
Speaker 1 (37m 30s): He was all in a glow over the discovery, have a great idea.
Speaker 0 (37m 33s): It is not so much that particular idea he has discovered that is important as it is glow over it
Speaker 1 (37m 42s): They're you have the sense of adventure of newness. The old idea has been seen freshly in some new aspects
Speaker 0 (37m 49s): And for the vitality of thought is an adventure ideas. Won't keep something must be done about them. When the idea is new it's custodians have fervor live for it and if need be die for it, they are inheritors. Receive the idea perhaps now is strong and successful But without inheriting the fervor. So the idea settles down to a comfortable middle age turns senile in dies, but the, you know,
Speaker 1 (38m 20s): Institutions organized around and do not stop, or they go on by sheer force of acquired momentum
Speaker 0 (38m 26s): Or like the dead of night borne along on his force. Interesting, right? To think about the life cycle of art forms,
Speaker 1 (38m 38s): Think about the life cycle of ideas and how similar the life
Speaker 0 (38m 42s): Cycle of artwork and ideas is to our own life. You can think of yourself as an idea, the idea of George Monty the idea of enter your name here. It can give you an interesting aspect of, of your life. You know, it just, it's fascinating
Speaker 1 (39m 11s): To think of as more of an idea
Speaker 0 (39m 15s): As a person,
Speaker 1 (39m 16s): An idea is something that's real and idea is something right
Speaker 0 (39m 20s): That lived
Speaker 1 (39m 23s): A life alongside of you,
Speaker 0 (39m 25s): Whatever you believe in, whatever idea you have, if you pour your heart into it, it becomes real. How would you
Speaker 1 (39m 36s): In your life change if you look at yourself like, and I know,
Speaker 0 (39m 39s): Yeah. I mean, 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?
If you think of the idea of living in a perpetual state of happiness, you can begin to live it. If you think of the idea of living in a depressed, sad, and yeah.
Speaker 1 (40m 31s): State of depression, then you can live that one as well. What do you focus on as what you feel? And in the life cycle of art is the life cycle of life is the life cycle of ideas is the life cycle of our planet. Just like watching a flower, grow on a tree
Speaker 0 (40m 51s): From bud to fragrant flower, to the Browning of the edges and falling on the ground.
Speaker 1 (40m 60s): It's the same way you can look at the United States or at least the cycle of this part of the day,
Speaker 0 (41m 7s): The United States, when you are green, you grow when you're right here. Right. When I was
Speaker 1 (41m 21s): The first lecture, it in American colleges said, Whitehead right
Speaker 0 (41m 24s): Flee from 1924 to 1929. In those five years, I soon saw if I use a quotation from the that's
Speaker 1 (41m 34s): Not one of my students had ever read it ever intended to, or had the idea what I was talking about. And if they sense that I was speaking of religion, they leaned back until I should of got on to something else. But on the years from 1929 to my retirement, the last seven years of my active teaching, this attitude changed. And when I spoke of religion, there was an attentive leaning
Speaker 0 (42m 2s): Forward. Okay. I want you to think about the years he is talking about right now
Speaker 1 (42m 8s): From 1929 until
Speaker 0 (42m 10s): His retirement. That was almost a hundred years ago in the beginning of that
Speaker 1 (42m 22s): From 1924 to 1920. And I, no one even cares for them
Speaker 0 (42m 25s): Religion, according to Whitehead and where are we now? We are in 2020. And you could argue that there is,
Speaker 1 (42m 38s): It has been a growing to TA dis tastes for religion in the United States in the last,
Speaker 0 (42m 44s): I don't know, 15
Speaker 1 (42m 45s): Years, all of these atheist in, in just different. It seems to me that
Speaker 0 (42m 51s): As a whole, all of
Speaker 1 (42m 53s): Our country was getting away from religion. But in times of crisis where we're at now, It seems that it's growing back fast.
Speaker 0 (43m 5s): That's true. And, and, and we're right back to the last chapter
Speaker 1 (43m 12s): Or what we talked about, the lifecycle of ideas, you know, if every a hundred years this, there is a resurgence of religious fervor, or what if every a hundred years there is a small cycle and a big cycle, you know, every thousand years might be the big cycle. And every a hundred years
Speaker 0 (43m 32s): There may be
Speaker 1 (43m 34s): An opportunity for a great wor a rebound.
Speaker 0 (43m 36s): And that's, you know, we're, we're rapidly approaching the a hundred 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.
Speaker 1 (43m 57s): So from here, the discussion detour to a discussion of crusading zeal, and Whitehead remarked of professional crusaders that their old age, as likely to be a melancholy affair, they go from Cause
Speaker 0 (44m 13s): To Cause where precisely
Speaker 1 (44m 16s): Should a man's crusading zeal, a bait. I asked when his blood cools 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
Speaker 0 (44m 34s): Unpopular, they are a cutie.
Speaker 1 (44m 37s): And there were a cuteness often takes a form which excites envy, namely the form of doing well in trade.
Speaker 0 (44m 45s): It is not always depth in picking men. You must dart against the brilliancy of the young Jew.
Speaker 1 (44m 52s): You were 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 New York
Speaker 0 (45m 12s): That gives them, said he is
Speaker 1 (45m 14s): In a certain helpful preoccupation with the ideal. They are singularly deficient in humor, or were there till they lived among the Europeans. The Bible is quite humorless after their tragedies. They never seem to have a farce by Aristophanes's situated as they were between military empires. Perhaps there was nothing to laugh about. The Jew was naturally melancholy. He said Whitehead 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 1500 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
Speaker 0 (46m 9s): By God. So that's kind of a funny, I told him
Speaker 1 (46m 26s): Bruning sometime chancellor of Germany had said during a conversation at dr. Han's Zinner is that education should be reserved for the elite until 50 years ago in England
Speaker 0 (46m 38s): Said, Whitehead, it was confined
Speaker 1 (46m 41s): To a small upper layer. And no one thought it was a MIS that the mass of the people,
Speaker 0 (46m 48s): It should be illiterate. Now we take literacy for granted. My father had the running of the village school when schooling was first made, compulsory
Speaker 1 (46m 60s): Countered, 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 a degree
Speaker 0 (47m 9s): Education in this country after the world war, which has continued ever since I remarked by 1920.
Speaker 1 (47m 18s): Yeah, it was unmistakable. And it kept right on through the depression with it has coming 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. So the Whitehead the teacher and scholar and professor were looked up too. They were Unitarians and have a Nimbus of religious all, but as the century wore on that wore off Unitarianism was a religion not have won God, but have won God at most, if not, I have one God and also said I as the continent was opened, the feeling was at the turn of the century, that man was What.
He ought to be, she would make a fool.
Speaker 2 (48m 10s): This was what,
Speaker 1 (48m 12s): What made William James call success? The bitch goddess that worship is not as prevalent
Speaker 2 (48m 20s): Now.
Speaker 1 (48m 22s): Interesting to think about our history with education
Speaker 2 (48m 28s): And
Speaker 1 (48m 28s): 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
Speaker 2 (48m 52s): Experts? Yeah.
Speaker 1 (48m 54s): You know, it's, it's interesting to think about how malleable the country can B if they have a system of education and to the point about only a few people being literate,
Speaker 2 (49m 12s): You know, I think,
Speaker 1 (49m 15s): And I think it's still there. You know, I think that The point of elite schools in the past was that really intelligent
Speaker 2 (49m 27s): People.
Speaker 1 (49m 29s): We have the opportunity to go away to institutions where they could continue their learning with other incredibly intelligent people,
Speaker 2 (49m 40s): Right?
Speaker 1 (49m 40s): And out of this idea of beautiful fairness out of this idea of raising the consciousness of the entire country, we should make it more available to all people, however, in doing so in our attempt for eternal fairness, we have turned education and to 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,
Speaker 2 (50m 16s): Right.
Speaker 1 (50m 23s): The people you would normally be surrounded with wherever you live, just from a different part of the world. Does it 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, like a highly educated, a weirdo that just, I can only play a guitar and, and talk about robotics. You know, like in a way of people that are, that are, that are at like some of the greatest schools in the world, or are borderline retarded in That, they can't have relationships.
They can't throw almost like the monks from an old-school monastery ware. You know, they were 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 that you should want to be Elon Musk or
Speaker 2 (51m 29s): Right.
Speaker 1 (51m 33s): Other individuals that seem to be glorified. When in fact
Speaker 2 (51m 39s): They may
Speaker 1 (51m 39s): Not have the life you think they have, you'd be happy with your own life because you're a beautiful
Speaker 2 (51m 46s): In person,
Speaker 1 (51m 51s): A paragraph and Whitehead's appeal to sanity 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 all of society's creative impulse, but it's possessive instincts. Herbert Hoover, a Quaker fed milk to Belgium babies. Herbert Hoover, as president of the United States had the war veterans of the bonus army bombed out of Washington by tear gas.
What is this profound dichotomy? The milk for Belgian babies didn't necessarily imply humanitarian sentiments on his part said Whitehead. It was merely in an organization job in which the sentiment of his time, it had a judge, he had had a judged, had to be done, and he was engaged to do it Quaker. Yes, but unimaginative 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 inter at all, come in incidentally to the main object, namely that of taking up the metal from one place in laying it down in another, they keep their minds fixed on that. When 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 site another instance. In 1914, we had an incident with Mexico. Something provocative happened in the Harbor of Tampico first, a squabble than a dispute over an insult in a demand that the Mexicans apologize and salute our flag. The affair kept worsening. The North Atlantic fleet was ordered to the coast of Mexico. Public feeling was inflamed, or at least the press was separated.
And president Wilson ordered a Navy to attack and capture Vera Cruz. They did, and 17 boys were killed 16 Marines and one sailor to more died of wounds. A few days later, only half a dozen years before that mr. Wilson, instead of being president of the United States had been a college president at Princeton, a humane gentlemen, like any of your colleagues here who would've 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 cover with a flag were rolled out on a parade ground.
Speaker 0 (54m 55s): The president
Speaker 1 (54m 57s): That came from Washington deliver the funeral speech. He said he is
Speaker 0 (55m 2s): Envied those dead young men.
Speaker 1 (55m 5s): 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 Cause
Speaker 0 (55m 13s): That's remember this was in May, 1914, and next to know one for some of the world war, our world hadn't then been calloused 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, educational, charitable, creative, artistic social, and that perhaps the function of the state thus far as to provide conditions of sufficient tranquility within which those more varied forms of activity, we 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 is that
Speaker 1 (56m 48s): The man is wholly subordinated to the common life. He is dwarfed communities, Lac, the intricacies of human nature war can protect. It cannot create, man. It's almost like a mic drop right there.
Speaker 0 (57m 5s): Let me just read that again. So you can truly kind of takes some time to think about it. Appeal to sanity. Each
Speaker 1 (57m 17s): Human being is more common, is a more complex
Speaker 0 (57m 20s): The structure than any social system, to which he belongs. 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 a deep Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs any particular community. Lifetouch is only part of the nature of Each civilized.
Man. If the man is wholly subordinated to the common life, he is dwarfed communities. Lack of 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 too, 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. But in our age, economics have swollen into these huge corporate enterprises, which bringing 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 are 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, not being able to satisfy and does it need to satisfy large groups. It needs to satisfy to 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 managers. The light's like Amazon, Walmart or Google and how there is no religion. It's like the absence of the religion. Plus the, the pure power and greed. And just on caring, the 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 in the people in boardrooms, no longer see working people or no longer see people below them as people, but in fact, cogs and numbers.
And you know, if, 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 accomplish their dreams of profit, then you know, if they could see those people as people, the world we'll be better. And I think that there is a, like a visceral hatred for people in boardrooms, trying to squeeze productivity, productivity out of people they don't know.
And that when you do that, when you see people as numbers, if you treat them like cogs in a wheel, that the level of anger and the level of just pure on a dime Dalton hatred, if that hatred is, is culminated and aimed at the very people at the top, those people at the top of their, in for a huge problem. And they should be scared. I, I think that's why you see a lot of billionaires hiding and running in people in board rooms, running in 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, right? Not only at the people in the boardrooms, but at their families and the generations of their families to come, like there is a real, she was a real undercurrent of animosity coming for the people who can't see other people as humans.
I hope they are hope somebody empowered us to this. 'cause you should be going out of your way to change the ways in which you look at the world. All my friends, I think that's good for this episode of Alfred North Whitehead we 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 want to know the future, we should talk to the past.
It's all we got my friends Aloha.
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