Dear Percy,



                  I don't think you should let me being a university professor trouble you - especially as I am not one, merely a retired reader (officially, I got to the stage of being allowed to read, but not to profess).  And I failed my eleven plus exam twice!



                  A word may legitimately be used to mean somewhat different things in different contexts.  Precisely what we mean - what we ought to mean - by a word, can well depend on context and purpose.  So, there may be contexts in which it is valid to interpret "civilization" and "culture" in such a way that there is no ethical or value element.  But if "civilization" is taken to stand for something that we should strive to achieve and maintain, then it would be utterly ludicrous to omit ethics and values from our idea of civilization.  And an analogous remark applies to culture.



                  We need also to appreciate that values are inherent in the aims of science, and in those of rational inquiry more generally, of one kind or another.  A basic point behind AOE and AOR is that science and rational inquiry are both more rigorous, more rational, more objective, and likely to be of greater intellectual and social value, if this is explicitly recognized, so that problematic values can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved as we proceed.



                 So far no disagreement, I trust.  As to what you go on to talk about - institutions and social arrangements subverted by manipulation - well, one has to ask, why have people of good will not discovered how to transform these institutions and social arrangements so that they come rather better to serve our best interests?  Knowledge-inquiry - what we have inherited from the past - not only fails disastrously to help us learn how to this; it does not even construe this as a task of academic inquiry.  Knowledge-inquiry holds that the proper basic intellectual aim of inquiry is knowledge; it holds that, in order to acquire reliable, factual knowledge, values, ethics, human feelings and desires, must all be excluded from the intellectual domain of inquiry.  It demands of people educated in the context of knowledge-inquiry that the mind attends to fact and logic and splits itself off from feelings and desires, ethics and values.  It produces a kind split person, a sort of educated schizophrenia.  People are educated in such a way as to discount the ethical and value dimension of decision-making and action, and to ignore the emotional and motivational aspects.  Instead of encouraging us to put "the mind in touch with the heart, and the heart in touch with the mind, so that we may acquire heartfelt minds, and mindful hearts" (as I put it in my first book), which is what we need, it does the opposite: it demands that we drive a wedge between mind and heart, in the (misconstrued) interests of reason and objectivity. 



                We live in a symbiotic relationship with the people, the institutions, society, culture and technology around us; it is a great mistake to think that change for the better must decide between (a) people individually transforming some aspects of their lives, or (b) society, institutions, culture and technology being changed for the better.



                 But we, above all, are the species that learns.  That is why it is so profoundly important that our institutions of learning are well designed, rationally designed and devoted to help us learn what we need to learn: how to discover and achieve what is of genuine value in life, for ourselves and others.  Judged from this standpoint, knowledge-inquiry is an intellectual and humanitarian - or moral - disaster.  It is far, far, far worse than a mere inadequate definition civilization and culture.  Academia (implementing knowledge-inquiry) not only gives priority to the pursuit of knowledge and fails to take as fundamental the tasks of getting clearer about what our problems of living are and what we need to do about them; furthermore, it fails to help people learn what we need to do to create a better world, locally and globally. 



                           Best wishes,

 

                                    Nick

Website: www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom

Publications online: http://philpapers.org/profile/17092

http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html



-----Original Message-----

From: Group concerned that academia should seek and promote wisdom [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Percy Mark

Sent: 28 July 2015 13:29

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: My Wakeup



Dear Nick,



Thank you for your thorough and detailed response to my intervention in this discussion, and for so clearly explaining what the letters AOR and AOE stand for. I have seen these letters used and have had no idea what they mean. So I am very grateful for that.



I have agonised over whether and how to reply, seeing that you are a university professor and have published a number of books and I am just an ordinary guy - a nobody really - with nothing academic to my name, except that I have studied the philosophy of Dr Albert Schweitzer in some detail.



As far as I can see, it was he who realised - or at least it was through him that I realised - that the ‘profound mistake’ was to omit ethics from the definition of the concepts of ‘civilisation’ and ‘culture’. 

For quite a while, reading Schweitzer's writings, I took it for granted, that ethics were part of the idea of a ‘civilised society’. But then for some reason I had occasion to look up the definitions of these two words in the Oxford dictionary and found to my complete surprise, that ethics did not appear to play any part. I found the same in all the dictionaries I could lay my hand on.



And it appears that you and I have a fundamentally different view of this issue, though I think it is probably only a difference in emphasis.



I will try and explain my ‘emphasis’:

The life of society is shaped by systems - ‘institutions and social arrangements’ as you say - and by people who attempt to implement these in varying ways. 

Thus, any good system can be subverted by clever manipulation - see: democracy in the Western World at present; and most bad systems can be made to work reasonably well for the common good, by well intentioned people - even capitalism could be made to work reasonably for the common good, if implemented with empathy and kindness - as indeed it does in many instances.



During the last few centuries the Western World has been obsessed with ‘ways of tinkering with systems’ to the near total neglect of personal responsibility for their implementation, particularly when it comes to choosing its leaders and tolerating their behaviour.



Because of this neglect, the vast majority of its citizens have laid themselves open to manipulation by a media, and a system of ‘advertising' controlled by a few individuals, and have fallen into the trap of ‘blaming the system’ for all the difficulties.



So here we have our difference of emphasis: for you the first priority is changing the ‘system’ by which universities operate, in order to make everything better; for me, because of the centuries of neglect, the first priority is to encourage people to work on themselves and raise their on behaviour to its highest potential. And I have to admit, that for me that 'highest potential’ includes ethical criteria.



I know that your defences are good and strong and impenetrable by someone like me, so I am content to ‘agree to differ’ on a friendly basis, because I still admire what you are trying to do.



With all good wishes



Percy





Percy Mark

[log in to unmask]