I'm starting to read through the 1800’s novel Heidi Johanna Spyri in the original German - a little bit each day - making it a vehicle for learning vocabulary.

One impression that strikes me immediately is that genders given to nouns may have been an academic flourish added to the language at some point in time... however, what the upshot is, is that it gives an allowance to writers and speakers to produce rather disjointed sentences. German sentences in literature seem to be a mess of many appended clauses. These would be considered "run-on sentences" in English. My idea, is that out in the rural areas, people got very excited about proving their intellect by knowing all the genders to the nouns... and then this rough rural language developed a very disjointed quality to it. Reading through these paragraphs makes me very happy that I speak English, where if you say "he" or "she," you know damn well it's a person which is being referred to.

I wonder further, if these genders of nouns act something like pegs or nails in a piece of wooden equipment... you can't take them out or the whole thing falls apart. I'm sure that certain progressively (and regressively) minded people sometimes want to change the gender of a noun. And I'm sure it happens from time to time... but it's a hard thing to do, because it would lead to lack of clarity. So, were genders a gambit by academics to keep an intentionally designed academic order within the language?

The broader musing would be: I wonder whether an organically evolving language like English evolves more sensibly than an academically designed language like German. Does it become quantitatively more useful and more elegant (more embellished with connotation, and synonym?)

Disclaimer (sigh... this has actually become longer than the paragraphs it refers to):

I know that my style of written personal musing can really rub a lot of people (especially folks in the USA) the wrong way. This distresses me - because I don't mean to sound arrogant. Believe it or not, humility is actually a very important value to me.

Like many of my personal meditations... this one charts out my models in a way that is obviously quite opinionated, and some would say is arrogant. I can honestly tell you that it's not meant to be. This little essay is an example of a fifteen-minute foray into the exploration of a set of models about how languages might evolve. When I'm doing that kind of mental excursion, I don't qualify my ideas on paper right away. To qualify your models, means that you've already developed your ideas to the point of maturity - and can now assent to some of the counterarguments, and possible weaknesses in your assessment. To be clear-thinking about an evolving model means that you have to be very earnest in respect to the current puzzle pieces you are putting together. Qualifying your ideas too soon can undermine that earnestness.

You may build your ideas about the world around you, differently. Maybe you synthesize pieces from what many different groups around you believe. However, I have found the method I describe to be the most effective way forward for me. It is a way of building my models separately from the mainstream preconceptions of the society in which I live.

This manner of model-building I describe, is part and parcel with why philosophical debate typically starts with "a proposition' - a novel assertion which reflects a strong conviction in the person who wants to bandy about this idea with the other folks. That starting point allows an idea to be easily weighed in the balances and tested. All the cards are on the table from the outset, for everyone to see.

In regards to the above blurb about the German language - the qualifications that brushed on my mind, but which I didn't commit to paper when I originally wrote it, are:

1. that naturally, it would not have been only academics who decided that the language ought to have genders - but it would have been a long historic tradition in the culture, which would have itself evolved organically out of perhaps a playful way of looking at the world.

2. that the "rough language" of groups of people who bear some stigma in a society is always the most innovative branch of the language. This is true with the northern parts of England. It's also true with rural people (who probably are also the ones who have more time to write novels and poetry and essays).

3. that each language has its own beauty. Genders, of course, add a lot of poetic nuance to people's discussions and meditations.

This is a wonderful series of podcasts that was broadcast last autumn on the BBC. You can see the BBC's description page for more info. There is some lead-in and lead-out audio which you may have to fast forward through.

An abridged audio book read by the author, herself, Bettany Hughes (in mp3s):

• episode 1
• episode 2
• episode 3
• episode 4
• episode 5

The above downloads are unavailable temporarily, as I transfer my files to a new webhost.

If you like it, you can support the author by buying the full book on Amazon.

It's really intriguing for me to watch or listen to BBC programs on European history. Our sense of history in the USA is so short and partial. We Anglos here don't have any sense of our cultural roots in Europe. It seems to me that there was a huge cultural shift under Constantine when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity after being a pantheistic society where everyone had their own household gods. This book gives us a glimpse through this window in time into this inspiring other world - the Athens of Socrates' day.

Progressives of the Usa, listen up. This is a film talking about one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's important policies. Roosevelt created the economic juggernaut which we have seen so much wealth from over the course of the 1900s. We, the progressives, did that. We were the ones who wanted high stock prices, who wanted to get the nation off of the gold standard, who were savvy about business. The republicans try to be seen as the people who support the free market, and who are best for business interests. In fact, the reason they are able to claim that, is only because we on the left, have forgotten that we were the parents of this wonderful process of wealth creation. It was our plan and our doing.

Do you know why the nation faltered under the Bush policies - why the financial market crashed? Because those in the right wing do not understand business. After all, they were the ones who favoured staying on the gold standard. They were the ones who have been against many other policies throughout the decades which have produced so much good fruit for our nation.

This film is fascinating for me, in other ways. It seems to me that intellectualism tends to thrive in times where people feel they're struggling. The phrasings this narrator uses show a lot of insight, and a lot of caring, and a lot of zeal which you don't see in discourse in the Usa, today. The people in these pictures look happy and as if they have direction and feel that they have a purpose in life, in a way that people in our cities today often don't.

I think that we nurturing thinkers are kind of still geared up for that mode of working. We tend to know what to do for our society when times are rough. There were some wonderful films and other intellectual material which came out of postwar Britian, and now British discourse seems to be degenerating, in the same way ours did across the pond when we became wealthy.

I remember growing up in the 1970s, how everybody who was a nurturing thinker in my life - english teachers, sociologists, progressives etcetera - identified as democrats, and were excited about things like the civil rights movement, they like the poet Ezra Pound, and the writer Susan Sontag. Today, the same thing seems to be true. Caring thinkers are associating themselves with the netroots movement to get Barack Obama elected, with peace rallies, etcetera. And I myself find that I spend a lot of time at sites with rollicking raucous debate like reddit.com - where very smart people are trying to get some traction with their ideas using the passions of struggling, hurting people to facilitate social change.

I was very disgruntled about this practice as a teenager. I would have pointed to two other areas that nurturing thinkers should focus on, instead:

• Children - because children are the future.

• Media organisations - if we are so smart, why can't we use that intelligence to make money, and start to build a media empire?

I think that we nurturing thinkers need to shift gears. For thousands of years, we have lived in a society which was very poor and struggling. And we have taken a certain role in that society. We have been successful.

It seems to me, however, that when a society develops a middle class, the old strategies we have been accustomed to using, in order to spearhead social trends and to inspire people, and to impart wisdom to people don't work anymore. People who are doing well for themselves, with their children, and their job, and their house in the suburbs don't see a need to learn new things, or to make their world a better place by implementing new ideas.

Therefore, I think that focusing on kids is a really good way forward for us. Kids are very appreciative of those who care about them and who wish to impart wisdom to them. Kids are like little beacons of light in a community when they have good teachers and mentors and adults in their lives who have taught them how to be ethical and how to be smart. The incubation time for ideas which are imparted to groups of children might be longer. But the overall effect on society over the decades is much larger as well.

For many years, I've been applying myself to learn many different kinds of things. I've picked up a lot of skills - writing, graphic design, computer programming, photography, and so forth. And I've also learned a lot about the world, by spending a lot of time on the internet reading the latest scientific and technological news, and things like that. And I always have had in mind the idea that the more skills one has, the more ways you have to make money. I don't think it's true.

Today, I was talking with a gentleman who works for a local natural gas company, repairing compressors. I realised what the word "capitalism" meant today. It means that people with money can create cash cows. And that's how our economies work. This guy estimates that the company he works for pulls in a billion dollars a day, gross, from the natural gas which is sold from their wells. All they have to do is drill a hole in the ground, and pipe out this substance, compress it, and then sell it to others through those same pipes. All around us are examples of other cash cows - from the telephone service, to internet service, to health insurance, to cable television. Basically, any service where everyone pays a certain amount of money each month for a fungible commodity is a cash cow. Factories and mineral mines and forestry are also examples of cash cows. And it seems to me that there is an inverse correlation - the more intellect you throw at a project, the less profitable it will be. This is because simplicity cuts down on the work put into a project.

So, intellect is really a thing which is good for increasing one's own enjoyment of life. And it can be used to make your world a better place, or it can be used when you are teaching other people who need a leg up in life. But intellect leads to poverty, not wealth.

And all of us who engage in creating art, or literature, or teaching children - or any of the "finer" things in life, kind of are living at the whim of those who create cash cows. That's where the locus of control is. Who funds the schools? Those who pay the taxes for them. It's interesting how people who are poor always want to "stick it to the man" - but in fact, our system of government and its social services were created by people who had the resources, and decided they wanted to use them to help people.

There's an interesting movement which has been afoot since the 1930s or so, called "Humanism" - and it's an affiliation of different community groups who are made up of very deep thinking people. The vision of the founders seems to have been to try to supplant the christian churches of the West through providing the same kind of social services and celebrations which churches provide. Today, it dawned on me that this might not work... and that in fact, both buddhism and christianity might have evolved, centuries ago, out of the failure of this very kind of group to ever really accomplish what it set out to do.

Religious people always try to trace their own history in a way that I believe is somewhat disingenuous. Religion serves a purpose in a community and that purpose and that niche has changed and evolved over time. Some people would say that Christianity started with the life of Christ, or that Buddhism started with the life of the Buddha. But honestly, I think it might be more accurate to say that there are people who wanted to form a tradition and a social group at certain junctures in history, and they drew on old stories and folklore which seemed to work for them as they pursued their goals of creating a civic group of a certain nature.

Somewhere back in 2000 or 2001, there was a fascinating article in National Geographic Magazine about Tibet. My impression from that article was that in that year, Tibet was one of the last very quaint and ancient civilisations still around. I think it has changed over the course of this first decade. China has made a lot of effort to integrate Tibet into the greater Chinese society. But one thing that struck me was that their religion would have been similar to what Christianity was a thousand years ago. Religion institutions were both the schools and the charity organisations of every town.

So this shows how religion's niche has evolved and changed over time in societies.

Anyway, my realisation this morning, to put it bluntly, was that perhaps the nurturing thinkers could not get the posturers interested in being part of a do gooder community where the nice successful man or woman was up there teaching about life's lessons. My thought is that perhaps these thinker/nurturers would have been encouraged by their experiences with children; they found a very excellent social dynamic that could be established as an adult leader of a group of kids. And then they tried to impose on adults this same formula of working with kids. And it didn't work. And so someone had the wild idea of taking a different tack: "Let's tell a story about a good smart caring person who suffered rather than succeeded." And that story piqued the interest of the townspeople.

It's an interesting commonality that both Buddhism and Christianity have as their central figure a very smart and charismatic figure who suffers. In the one case, the guy is put to death wrongfully - and in the other he voluntarily gives up all of the pleasures of this world, in a gesture of altruism.

So, all this leads me to a certain conclusion. I think that humanism is good as a group where people can gather who have common interests and passions, and a love for reasoning and acting in caring ways towards others. And it's also good to have groups like the TED conference where these kinds of thinkers show off their ideas to eachother. But in all of these things, I think it's best that we support eachother, rather than try to press our ideas into the minds and hearts of others.

Those people who themselves so value the power of independent and critical thought, should not be trying to think on behalf of other people, or they might end up with bad results.

I was reading a short children's novel today because this winter I am helping to direct a play which is based on the book. I haven't read a fiction novel for many years. Instead, I read a lot of articles on the internet about the latest scientific discoveries, and news from various parts of the world. The last novel I read a few years ago, to reminisce about my childhood, was EB White's trumpeter of the Swan... before that, the last one would have been Peter Pan in 1992. I was a voracious reader as a child, and my mother was very curious about why I didn't want to read when I became an adult and left the nest. I told her I wanted to just live life, and not read about it. In recent years, my reason would have been slightly different, but similar - I wanted to look at the world, and learn about it - not look through the funhouse mirror/lens of someone else's perspective on the world.

I was pleasantly surprised though, with how much I learned from reading this very simple story. It's called "the best christmas pageant ever" by Barbara Robinson. It's a very trite and simplistic story based around a traditional event which happens in churches all across the country on christmas night. The author is clearly a very face-value kind of person, and she writes from within that sort of perspective about the world. The fact that she used such a stock narrative, and a stock set of characters (some children who interact with eachother both at school and at church) gave me a lot of insight into this mindset that is so foreign to me - that of the person who just sees the world as being a self evident place.

Particularly fascinating, was a character where the author was able to show her own feelings towards the smarty pants kid in class. This rift I have written about between reasoners, and face-value people happens early - even in elementary school. In this story, there is a character named Alice who is misconstrued as being arrogant. And she becomes the one character in the book who the whole school makes fun of. No one else suffers that level of unanimous reaction from the kids on the playground.

I was volunteering at a school a couple of years ago... and it was so interesting to encounter this very effect the moment I walked into that fourth grade classroom. The first thing that one of the boys said to me was that his peer who was right next to us was "gay." The boy who was the brunt of this social attack was very good natured about it. He smiled when he heard his classmate say that. But what do you think it does to a person to have that constant battering from your classmates throughout your twelve years of school? Different smart kids would exhibit different effects from this kind of constant abuse during their young years. But unless they're really agile, socially, and know how to pick their friends wisely, they will suffer these kinds of social problems. It's bad for their social development.

A young male teenager I was working with this last spring on a different community theatre play also had the same kind of senseless teasing and indignation which had developed around him from the other teens. He was ready to quit the play at one point, because of it. I had to address the older teenage girls pointedly and tell them they were being sexist in how they talked about boys.

That's only one of several thoughts that came to me as I had the pleasure of diving into this woman's mindset for the morning. That mindset of the face-value kind of person who sees the world as being self evident, is one of these last pieces of the puzzle, and I found two or three big models about the social dynamics in the world around me, crystallise in my mind today as I read this book.

I also had some big epiphanies about the field of political science, the beginnings of both the christian religion and the buddhist religion, how women's perspective on men has shifted between the original publication date of the book (1972), and today, and I also had a thought about the nature of love.

Here's to reading, I suppose.

I've made a series of posts of my musings about a very important rift we ought to see in our society. That rift is one which lies between those people who see the world as being something which is self-evident, who are just going to do the best they can for themselves pursuing their own endeavors within that world on the one hand - and on the other hand, those who see the world as being something which is like a puzzle which needs to be figured out using reason.

With different blog posts, I have put different labels on these two groups, and I have looked at this thing from several different angles.

This film is one thing that one of my college-age friends gave me to look at a while back, after kind of a long series of conversations where I was being a bit overbearing in how I was trying to give him advice:

He told me that this was how he felt about humanism... more specifically, this is what he felt happened to people who tried to follow the teachings and advice of those who call themselves humanists. And this is a very important thing to see, I think. I have come to the conclusion that people who care a lot about their society, and want to help it, by sharing their insights and acting in a caring fashion might actually be causing disruptions to the social dynamic around them. I wrote a little about that here.

And this film would show how that might occur - even the kindest, gentlest, least didactic and least overbearing way of giving advice, might not work when someone tries to put it into practice.

There's a really odd social effect which I've studied privately for a few years. It seems to me that people who go out eloquently preaching the gospel of critical thinking, and sharing their unique new ideas can end up unintentionally furthering a sour social dynamic in places where they have influence.

It has to do with this rift that I've noted elsewhere on this blog between people who see reality as being self evident, and people who believe that issues need to be reasoned through.

I have spent years writing longwinded comments at a website called "reddit" - and I've found it to be a very effective place to toss out the seeds of new perspectives on issues. And I've seen trends of these new ideas grow around these topics... and eventually spreading to people who write within the mass media. But I've also seen that those of us who have tried to use reddit for this purpose seem to have created a sour kind of social interaction among those people who aren't that deep in how they muse about life.

I've also begun to recognise that this effect which disturbs me is something I'm seeing in New Zealand as well. I have followed events there for the past several months through the lens of the journalism which is available over the internet. I was initially very entranced with New Zealand. From the way that organisations like the New Zealand Herald, and 3news report on their country it seems to be a liberal paradise in some sense. But then, I encountered a discussion board which is a place where disillusioned expatriates go to chat about their experiences in New Zealand.

And I began seeing what they are seeing, as I looked closely at video which I watch out of New Zealand over the internet. I believe it's the same effect I see at reddit. There's a complex social effect where groups can tend to become mean and petulant when they feel the rug has been pulled out from under them in respect to how they see the world. They lose their earnestness and their conscientiousness in how they participate socially with others. And I think there is resentment that they get no support from the powers that be, when it comes to the reality that they and their peers see as being around them - they see "bad people" that they want to have put in their place by the authorities. And the idea of bad and good people just isn't the paradigm that is fixed upon by the caring and nurturing intellectual. On the other hand, this type of liberal thinker is sometimes inclined to a laissez-faire attitude towards things.

Canada is kind of the opposite of New Zealand. It seems to me to be a very conservative society. People there have designed lots of government infrastructure and policies which are intended to keep a very strong handle on the social dynamics of the society. News anchors for the CBC television programs seem to be honestly very scared and nervous about crimes and wrongs which they are reporting on. And I wouldn't say that they are judgemental, but their emotions are very obvious... and their earnestness when it comes to believing in the need for more government involvement to solve the problems they're reporting on, is very evident. This very detailed set of firm government policies I think makes conservatives feel that they have a society that makes sense. Liberal thinkers, on the other hand tend to believe in the innate inner goodness of human beings.. so they sometimes err on the side of laissez-faire policies.

So, this makes me think about the kind of effect I want to have as a person who has a passion for writing about deep philosophical topics. There are two kinds of journalism which I think are very healthy for a community. One, I see in the Boise Idaho newspaper. That newspaper seeks to skip over controversial areas of discussion altogether as they write their articles. And instead they focus on talking about the vision their community has for itself. The other example is the Oregonian newspaper (aka Oregonlive) in Portland Oregon. Their tack is that they are passionate in presenting both sides of any controversial issue. I think both papers are guided by this nurturer/thinker ideology... however the way they write doesn't leave other people with different worldviews bemused. It seems to me that in both cases, there are good outcomes in the way people act and think in those cities. I need to qualify my remarks by saying I haven't spent any time in Boise. One very brief experience there really impressed me. I was traveling through on a greyhound bus... and downtown as the bus came to a turn - two kids on bicycles (maybe ten years old or so) cheerily rode across the street from corner to corner. I think it was a brother and a sister. And those children's attitudes, coupled with where they were riding - downtown in a major city - really struck me as something of a litmus test as to the social health of that city. So you can say I don't have enough information to work with... and you'd be right. However, I have developed a practice of keeping an eye out for these kinds of indicators as I look at the world around me.

I have always had a strong distaste for the idea that the ability to figure out riddles and to do puzzles is an indicator of greater or lesser intelligence. And it dawned on me today, that this custom which is today carried on by people like those in Mensa, and even by psychologists who design IQ tests is rooted in the ideology of people who believe that reality is self-evident. the reasoning goes something like this:

"Reality is self evident, therefore, the answer to these puzzles ought to be self-evident, because these puzzles are a part of reality. But they are hard for most people to figure out. Those who can see through the twists and turns of the puzzles must be smarter than most, because they have a keener sense of reality."

From my perspective, being of the camp that believes that we have to reason things through, and that reality is certainly not self evident - that in fact, many core truisms about the world can be counter-intuitive... I would think that's a laughable way to test intelligence. These are puzzles which are designed as a game of outwit. And so matching your wits against the puzzle maker is not an accurate test of how well you will succeed in life, where you match your wits against the situations you come into contact with.

Recently, I have realised something very centrally important in life in the West. Not having recognised this divide between two kinds of people has been really detrimental to my life. Most people believe that reality is self-evident. Other people believe that you have to reason things through, in order to learn about them. The former set of folks just like to chat about what's there around them. A certain subsection of them will be silly sometimes because in their estimation, it doesn't matter what they say or do, it doesn't change the fundamental environment other people live in, daily. The second set of people will reason together, rather than just chat together. And they like talking and thinking in philosophical ways about life. And there's a big rift between these types of people. The differences extend from lifestyle choices, to taste in music, to expectations of what makes a good friend, to any number of different things. Those who believe that we must understand things in the world by reasoning stuff through are what are known as "critical thinkers." People often have a mistrust for those kind of people. One day I felt steamed when hearing a parent who was a child psychologist say in a tongue-in-cheek manner that there wasn't a "problem" with her own children being too smart. But that was a telling little point of humor on her part.

A person who is an avid thinker - who loves getting in there and sucking the marrow out of life by learning about new things and seeking to influence social trends is going to have to really watch for this rift between people like him, and people who just believe that the world is the way it is, and that we just need to get on with going about our own actions within that world.

Plato had a very cynical story which he presented to folks which reflected his very bad experience with this social divide. This is called the "allegory of the cave."

A reader of my blog may or may not begin to take note over time, that the progress of my reasoning kind of comes in levels of realisations - it's kind of like a staircase with landings at various interim points that you can rest on if you wish. I wrote another piece about this difference I'm describing today, when I talked about "nurturer/thinkers" as compared to "posturers." That was my earlier assessment of the same social divide.