At a recent humanitarian training on hygiene promotion in emergencies, I had the opportunity to reflect on the extent to which modern thinking can impair learning.
The training involved one Power Point presentation after another, most of which entailed some stultifying combination of semantics, theory and complicated visual depictions of behavior models. The training materials looked like they'd been held hostage in some business management consulting firm that demanded ransom in the form of adherence to its enthusiasm for inane diagrams supposedly representing conceptual analysis of real world phenomenon.
Earnestly attempting to stave off sleep by focusing on the slides, I recalled Walter Ong's explanation in his masterful book, Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, that abstraction is a characteristic of thinking in literate (that is, modern) societies. Pre-modern, oral societies think more situationally:
Illiterate subjects [in one experiment] consistently though of the group [of drawings of a hammer, saw, log and hatchet] not in categorical terms (three tools, the log not a tool) but in terms of practical situations - "situational thinking" - without adverting at all to the classification "tool" as applying to all but the log. . . . A 25-year-old illiterate peasant: "They're all alike. The saw will saw the log and the hatchet will chop it into small pieces. If one of these has to go, I'd throw out the hatchet. It doesn't do as good a job as a saw." . . . Asked why another person had rejected one item in another series of four that he felt all belonged together, he replied, "probably that kind of thinking runs in his blood."
(p. 51 (citations omitted).)
Of course, situational thinking isn't bad or less intelligent than abstract, categorical thinking. It's a different way of organizing information that, in certain contexts, is appropriate or even superior to abstract, categorical thinking.
One such situation, I have discovered, is during a training for hygiene promotion in emergencies.
Hygiene promotion involves persuading and cajoling people into washing their hands after using the toilet. Safe water and food handling, safe disposal of excreta and solid waste, and safe management of "vectors" (rats, flies, mosquitoes, etc.) is also part of the job.
The job can be difficult and anxiety-provoking because the subject matter can be embarrassing, and people are often unwilling to discuss or change intimate habits, especially with or at the behest of strangers or foreigners. In learning how to do the job, case studies, simulations and opportunities to work directly with relevant populations are helpful. But as any parent who has toilet trained a child can affirm, diagrams of models of behavior change don't offer much assistance in getting a kid to use a toilet.
This retreat into business-consulting-speak may be a simple result of hiring too many engineers to do water and sanitation-related work in emergencies. Engineers are notoriously poor communicators.
But this silly and ineffective abstraction about hygiene promotion may also have another cause: anxiety about discussing embarrassing and, potentially, demeaning issues. Making a behavior model about hand washing may seem, to some, more important work than actually communicating with others about hand washing; certainly, there's less risk of personal exposure and humiliation.
Sadly, such a perspective simply leads to wasted efforts. No matter how advanced the society in which we live, we are all practitioners of primitive functions, like defecating. Modern thinking is powerless to change ancient facts.
My most abiding response to Sophie's World is surprise at how narrow the history of philosophy is (in Jostein Gaarder's telling). The most basic assertion of philosophy is that the "big" questions -- who are you? where does the world come from? -- are universal to humans. As Gaarder writes in Sophie's Word, "[T]here is something else . . . which everyone needs, and that is to figure out who we are and why we are here." (p. 14.) And yet the history that Gaarder writes of the answers to those two questions focuses on the responses of a small group of white men hailing from a sliver of the world's geography.
I say this not to raise an issue of political correctness, but to question the fundaments of philosophy. If these questions are universal to humans, why does our history record answers from only so few? The most obvious possibilities are either that (1) the questions are not universal, (2) that there's a recording problem with the answers, or (3) philosophy has failed to recognize answers to these questions that are offered in another format or under the rubric of another discipline (e.g., myths, political theory, theology).
Is it possible that people don't ask who they are and where the world comes from? One way of rephrasing this question is to ask if we can we find a society without a creation myth? Such a society apparently exists: the Pirahã in the Amazon have no identifiable creation myth (as documented in this New Yorker article and this Guardian piece). The Pirahã also seem not to have a sense of time, which is a likely explanation for why no one in their society asked what existence was like before the Pirahã.
But most societies have a sense of time, along with creation myths. Are there nonetheless people in those societies that don't ask who they are and where the world comes from? Without having conducted any empirical research on the question, I'd venture to say "yes." Asking these questions requires a degree of self-awareness; and self-awareness isn't as common to the human condition as, say, phlegm.
Gaarder might disagree with me. In Sophie's World, Gaarder argues that the capacity for wonder is innate in children, and society drums it out of them: "Although philosophical questions concern us all . . . . [f]or various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background." (p. 19.)
My own perspective is that the process often works in the reverse: absent awareness raising at the outset, people won't necessarily ask "who am I?" and "where does the world come from?" In my own view, the capacity for wonder, like compassion, is innate only in varying degrees in different individuals, and it must be cultivated. Sophie's World is itself an account of such calculated cultivation.
Moving on to the second question, is it possible that there are some recording problems with the answers? I feel confident in saying that oral cultures got the shaft when the history of philosophy was compiled. Without a written record, oral cultures faced problems preserving their thougths and communicating them across geography, time and language. Whether anything can be done to restore the knowlegdge banks of oral cultures is doubtful -- these repositories largely exist only in the memories of the long-dead -- but the issue of this "lost" contribution to human thinking shades into the third question as well:
Is it possible that the history of philosophy hasn't recognized answers to its questions that were offered in different formats, or under the rubric of different disciplines? In Sophie's World, Gaarder includes coverage of Darwin, Marx and Freud, people who are not primarily associated with the discipline of philosophy, so perhaps Gaarder would reject my third question. But I believe the challenge remains. Aside from Gaarder's exclusion of obvious candidates, like Confucius and Buddha (there are passing references to him, but nothing in depth), Gaarder doesn't confront the fact that modes of thinking in societies vary depending on whether the society is an oral or literate one.
"Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it
does. . . . More than any other single invention, writing has
transformed human consciousness," writes Walter Ong, a Jesuit priest and English professor, in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy. People in literate cultures think differently; they organize information and construct the world in patterns that diverge from those that predominate in oral cultures. Thus, they may ask different questions; and even if the questions are the same, the answers will certainly be different. A thousand years ago, the Kyrgz tribe answered the question "who are we?" with the epic poem, Manas. Is it philosophy? Probably not. Does it belong in the history of human thought about philosophical questions? Probably yes.
From this brief examination of these three questions, the shape of an answer to my original question -- why does the history of philosophy include answers from such a narrow range of humanity? -- begins to emerge. Specifically, before an individual will offer answers to philosophical questions that qualify for inclusion in the history of philosophy, he or she must live in a culture that:
has a sense of time;
creates conditions for the cultivation of wonder (or, alternatively, creates conditions that don't squash a sense of wonder innately present in an individual);
is literate.
Undoubtedly there are more factors, but this is (an already too long) blog post, not a treatise, so let's leave it at those three. The important point, however, is that philosophy's claims for universality seem rather frail. If we can't even say that every human society experiences time, or has a creation myth, how can we agree with Kant's theory (as phrased by Gaarder) that "moral law has the same absolute validity as the physical laws. . . . It applies to all people in all societies at all times." (p. 330.) It's an intriguing idea -- and one that might even be to some extent right, if an innate sense of fairness can be equated with morality -- but Kant based his assertion on only the slenderest sampling of human culture and society, which either makes his claims for the power of reason either absurdly arrogant or pitiably silly.
And here, perhaps, is the practical answer to the question of why the history of philosophy includes answers from such a limited range of people: philosophy's insistence on the supremacy of human reason and the universality of its application to humanity, regardless of evidence (or its absence), appeals to a particular kind of ego that often goes by another name: asshole.
At a recent humanitarian training on hygiene promotion in emergencies, I had the opportunity to reflect on the extent to which modern thinking can impair learning. 
