I first became aware of Allan Bloom in the late 1980s. As a fellow educator and believer in democracy, I was interested in reading his then-recent publication, The Closing of the American Mind. Having read his book, I realized that he was writing about the failure of American Universities to live up to their role of educating the elite. Bloom was a self-described elitist. For Bloom, then, the university, specifically the classics, was the most essential institution of American democracy. He wrote about and taught classes on Plato’s Republic. Taking Plato at his word, he believed that the character of a society is best expressed by the people who rule it. Thus, colleges and universities, the training ground for America’s elites, had the task of ensuring that the country’s leaders embodied the basic principles of its political regime.
I’m a proponent of the classics and believe in their inherent worth. But if we are to build a more convivial society where people become educated persons, thereby gaining knowledge through experience. An educated person can and should love others. Before she can love others, she must respect herself. She must feel confident and competent in herself and her role in dealing with others. She is also rational, skilled in reasoning, intuitive, and analytical in thinking. She is compassionate and warm in interpersonal relationships. She is sensitive, empathetic, and non-ethnocentric. She is an independently motivated lifelong learner. She is a problem-seeker and solver. She is fluent and flexible in her perceptions, ideas, and feelings. She is curious and an inquirer, an avid gatherer and an organizer of information and ideas. She is a copper rather than a defender, an active seeker rather than a passive acceptor. She is a clarifier of her own belief systems and values, working to remove dissonance between the ideals she professes and the actions of her daily life. She is a person who continues to grow in wisdom, competence, compassion, and reason throughout her lifetime.
This type of educated person is ideally suited to life in a rapidly changing society. However, in a highly controlled and stable society, which some scholars propose, such a person would pose a threat. She would be viewed as a deviant and undoubtedly would be “treated” to correct her abnormal tendencies. George Orwell describes this type of society in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. In such a society, the educated person tends to have an authoritarian personality, having been taught and learned to accept their lot, show great respect for authority, think stereotypically about themselves and others, and believe in the absolute nature and truth of knowledge in academic disciplines. These persons are offended and threatened by the ever-increasing divergence in publicly expressed values and lifestyles.
I once wrote a paper titled “A Theory of the Functional Self.” Most theorists, however, would agree that the self is inseparable from the social contexts in which we exist. This is why, as an educator, I have tried to practice John Dewey’s philosophy, which holds that all learning occurs within a social environment. In this sense, knowledge is socially constructed based on our experiences. As Dewey puts it, the ‘educational process has two sides — one is psychological and the other is sociological.’ As John Donne states in his poetic passage:
No man is an island, Entire of itself; Every man is a piece of the continent, A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, As well as if a promontory were: As well as if a manor of thy friend’s Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
“Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.”
Sunlight Through The Aspens on Mt. Lemmon– Computer Painting by kenne
When the mind’s eye rests on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and comprehends them, and functions intelligently; but when it turns to the twilight world of change and decay, it can only form opinions, its vision is confused and its beliefs shifting, and it seems to lack intelligence.
I wrote this in the 1990s. Since then, retirement and moved 1,000 miles from where we had spent 25 years, putting distance between bonds. In the three years since moving, we have watched the bonds drift away, causing me to question the desire to evoke life, even when distance can’t separate a lifelong bond.
We had moved to the Sonoran desert with the illusion that friends and family would be beating a path to our new home in the desert southwest — not such luck. So we try staying in touch through social media, often questioning whether the bonds were ever real — confirming that we remain tourists in other people’s reality.
Old Jules is a 70-year-old hermit, living with three cats somewhere in the Texas Hill Country and writing a blog I enjoy reading from time to time. Old Jules has concluded that he has spent over a third of his life “being insignificant in the lives of others.”
In 1992, after 25 years of marriage and a career of 20 years, he began a new job and life in Santa Fe.
“All secure in the knowledge the extended family and friends remaining behind were part of my life in which I’d been and remained important.”
Over time he concluded it was all an illusion.
“Kids, young adult nephews, and nieces I’d coddled and bounced on my knee pealed out of my life-like layers of an onion. Most I never heard from again.”
He began to realize that he was merely tolerated, “. . . a piece of furniture in their lives.”
Over time he rebuilt his life with a more potent dose of skepticism concerning his worth and place in the lives of others, which resulted in his becoming a hermit.
“I no longer assume I’m important in the lives of other human beings and get my satisfaction in knowing I’m at least relevant to the cats.
Because cats, though sometimes dishonest, aren’t capable of the depth and duration of dishonesty humans indulge regularly.”
Old Jules has come to believe “. . . that life is entirely too important and too short to be wasted in insignificance.”
His new awareness of life is now in teaspoon measurements, “. . . measured in contracts with cats not equipped to lie. A determination in the direction of significance measured in teaspoons of reality,
as opposed to 55-gallon drums of dishonesty and self-delusion.”
“Teaspoons, I find, don’t spill away as much life in the discovery
when they’re found to be just another ego-wart of pride and self-importance.”
Bonds, illusion or not, have difficulty being when the moments are separated by time and distance, becoming gleams of light, for an instant, in the long night.
I understand where Old Jules is coming from and feel his disillusionment. There is, however, a binding force that comes from a homesick longing to be whole, to have completion, as Plato described in the myth of the human halves passionately striving towards one. Like all mythical totalities, humans are subject to the triple dramaturgical rhythm of primal completeness, separation catastrophe, and restoration. The most significant attraction effect occurs between the second and third acts of life’s drama, which is where I find myself today — maybe this is also where Old Jules is. I am learning to understand myself from a new divide, one half experienced, the other inexperienced — in such a way that I’m learning to understand myself in new ways.
— kenne
“Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?
They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”
Agua Caliente Trail (View from Agua Caliente Trail of the Rincon Mountains.) — Image by kenne
Sunlight Through The Aspens on Mt. Lemmon– Computer Painting by kenne
AJ Murphy — Image by kenne
Self-portrait 
Images by kenne
