Am I A Fool?
On this site’s homepage, I state the following:
“We can learn a LOT from children. Is this because they’re smarter than we are? Perhaps they’re more knowledgeable? Of course not!
So then, why IS it that a child of age 3 can teach a person of 50 so many things?
Quite simply, it’s because children are HONEST A child looks at the world and asks honest questions about it. “Adults” are often embarrassed by a child’s questions because much of the “adult world” is built upon pretension.
Most people, it seems, “outgrow” their child-like ways and become hardened, opinionated, or even cynical. Once this happens, they stop questioning the world around them and begin to try to make everything fit into their own narrow view.
Then a child comes along and says something like “The Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes!” and suddenly, we’re embarrassed. And we’ve learned something.”
In response to this, an individual wrote me the following:
“You mentioned the honest answer of a child. I disagree with you that honesty is the issue. The adult will give you his honest answer and it is just what you would expect and you learn nothing from it. I think the point is that the child has only imperfectly integrated the common knowledge of the culture and therefore sees the situation more for what it is rather than how he has been told it should be, or at least may have a fresh perspective on it. The adult foreigner, an outsider to your culture's common knowledge, can do the same thing.
We are all instinctively tribal to varying degrees and the heart of tribal identity is agreements about a shared reality. These agreements are always smaller than what is actually out there. Of the various roles available in the group, you are giving the child the role of the Fool, the person only lightly bound to the group's reality agreement. These agreements act as filters on our perceptions and our thoughts and keep us safely within the bounds of the group's reality. And why do we accept these limitations? Our instinctive fear of abandonment”
This response was rather distressing for me. On one hand, the author acknowledged the very point I make on the home page. By stating that a child “sees the situation more for what it is rather than how he has been told it should be,” and his admission of tribal agreements on “shared realities” that “act as filters on our perceptions,” is the author not admitting that many (if not most) adults live in only a partial reality; one that has self-imposed and mutually acknowledged boundaries?
Although I’ve often suspected this to be the case, this person now seems to confirm it. Worse (for me), he also seems to be DEFENDING such behavior!
Can anyone help me with this?
I’ve often chafed at people’s unwillingness to learn beyond a certain point. In fact, it’s the primary reason that I live pretty much as a hermit. I have brought too many lively discussions to a complete halt simply by voicing, in a friendly, contributive manner, my view on the subject at hand. Sometimes I’d simply ask a probing question of a speaker, seeking to better understand his point, only to be met with complete (and seemingly embarrassed) silence.
It has been my practice to assign the cause of such reticence to each individual (in hopes of one day finding someone who behaves differently); but now this response to my web site seems to be confirming my fearful suspicion that it is a general practice of the human race to willfully limit people’s knowledge of reality.
So, is this my fate? Am I fulfilling the role, as the author says we assign to the child, of a Fool?
If that’s the case, I suppose I’ll just have to become comfortable with it, since to me, willfully limiting knowledge of reality, whether individually or as a group, sets the stage for failure; sometimes on a catastrophic level.
Could this be why human history continually repeats the same mistakes?
Throughout my life I’ve often believed that I needed the companionship of educated, intelligent people. Yet, it has been from this segment of humanity that I have met with the frustrations I mentioned above. People love to engage in “discussions” about their favorite topic until someone tries to push beyond their limit. Then they seem to clam up.
Consequently, I now live in a poor rural area and am establishing friendships with the local people. I suspect I get along better with these people because, being without many comforts, one of which might be faith in a secure future, these people can’t afford to do anything BUT accept reality for what it is.
Although the above reply to my home page comments was a bit distressing, in a way it is now comforting to actually know why I never seem to fit in.
There’s no way I could willfully deny a portion of reality that reveals itself to me, no matter how uncomfortable it makes me. To do so would be to willfully limit my own life, and I just refuse to do that simply to “fit in.”
I wonder if this is why so many people belong to churches.
While I do not presume to equate myself with “An American Scholar,” I can readily identify with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s description of a scholar’s duties in his speech of that title:
“I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and the results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has thought of as such – watching days and months sometimes for a few facts; correcting still his old records; must relinquish display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept – how often! – poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society.”
In his essay titled “Self-Reliance,” Emerson has this to say about society:
“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”
If anyone can find any error in my assessment, I’d sure appreciate it.
Otherwise, I suppose I’ll have to be content to play the role of the Fool.
Some years ago someone said that I was “Too smart for my own good.”
Now I think I understand what they meant.
And what a sad commentary THAT is on the human race.