Personal and Social Knowledge

by Gary Berg-Cross

The topic of personal versus social knowledge came up the other day in a group conversation that I was more or less part of.  The particular spark was a Pew poll that suggested the American public is becoming less religious.  As one can see from the lead paragraph the actual results are a bit nuanced:

..the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. ....

The share of U.S. adults who say they believe in God, while still remarkably high by comparison with other advanced industrial countries, has declined modestly, from approximately 92% to 89%, since Pew Research Center conducted its first Landscape Study in 2007 “

But the way the group conversation went was a bit skeptical of the trend and wondered if Pew survey methods (as compared to Gallup for example), say just using landline phones as some claimed might be a reason to doubt the results. 

I did a quick search during the discussion to find that Pew uses a variety of methods but just point out that in general only 1 in 10 people contacted responds to their surveys.  

The group’s skepticism is not isolated.  RELIGION DISPATCHES, for example, argued that there are serious differences the way questions are argued that the religion-science conflict question (“Generally, do you think science and religion are often in conflict?”) locked respondents into:

“ a specific formulation of concepts. “Religion” and “science,” as we mentioned earlier, can point to a very wide range of traditions, activities, and groups of people. ‘Conflict’ here could refer to a fundamental epistemological incompatibility between religion and science, or to secondary social tensions between dogmatists on one or both sides. Or it could refer to some combination of both. Asked whether science and religion are, “often in conflict” or, “mostly compatible,” the poll participant has to collapse any such nuances and pigeonhole their beliefs into one side of a binary.”

It is true that surveys are based on respondent’s individual interpretations and the phrasing in different surveys is important to understand, but for many important topics group or social surveys provide important insights into topics that individual may not have due to a lack of one’s own knowledge, experience or existing biases.

There’s something to be said and maybe much to be said for personal knowledge via experience of something the witness actually saw or heard.  There is something attractive in the strong individual sense that appeals to conservative thinking of self sufficiency. It may be especially valuable if it is reflected experience and tested over time.  

Personal knowledge looked upon this way can be distinguished from what we learn from some other person or source.  In a way this was part of the experience of the Renaissance and more so the Enlightenment.  But only part, because the social aspect of knowledge is extreme important. Science is a social activity carried out by the community of scientists using methods agreed upon by that community’s cumulative experience over time. In Science the acceptance or rejection of the evidence submitted to must be carefully weighed.

Knowledge in the personal sense has to do with being familiar with something.  You can argue that  in order to know the color blue, one must have experienced blue; in order to know fear, one must have experienced it. And gather knowledge by acquaintance.

But much of the world reality is beyond my ability to directly experience it.  What do people believe about the existence of God, or the wealth needed to make one in the top 1% of people in the US?  These are social facts that I don’t experience directly but rely on faithful methods to produce a sharable “fact.” To the extent that I believe in the method by which such facts are gathered I may accept the sharing of them.  It’s an example of social knowledge and when you think of it, much of what we think of as our personal knowledge was been acquired in this social, shared way.

The distinction between personal knowledge and shared knowledge can be summarized by the difference between talking about what ‘I know’ and what ‘we know’. What we as a group know builds a sense of community and makes our relationships last.

In a democracy what we know together is important as are conversations about what we know and believe. And real conversations in political times can be challenging. The prejudices that surround them are so inveterate, that it is impossible to do them justice without entering into considerable detail and nuance, as was touched on in the Pew Survey results. And hearing 2 or more sides of an issue is hard enough in normal circumstances but becomes more difficult has emotional investment rises along with competing facts and interpretations.  You can get on fact checker sites to help but that doesn’t work with all issues and one thing I’ve heard from time to time is argument from “personal experience” that backhands away supposed facts such as from survey and statistical analysis.  I think that it is a mistake and would rob us of a variety of shared knowledge such as historical facts together with historical interpretations that comprise community knowledge over time.

It is also true of economic facts, such as unemployment rates.  Sure I and my neighbors may be employed but what is happening in Baltimore.  I rely on others to understand and report this. Economic topics are varied and vast so the evidence concerning them is varied, but just relying on direct, personal experience doesn’t get us through the problems of knowing.

Some Observation on Truth from Robert G. Ingersoll in time for the 2014 election

By Gary Berg-Cross

As you can probably tell, the flood of insincerity abroad in our politics. It’s a stunning mix of strange, false & brazenly cheesy with intrusive fear paralyzing ads to boot (note - Overall ad spending has broken $1 billion in federal elections and state governors’ races,according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP)). Of course there is plenty to fear with war, pestilence and poverty abroad in the land also along with "shady,deep-pocket dark money from the establishment that undermines what we call "Democracy." Indeed all these fears can get rolled into campaigns like Scott Brown who warns that ISIS might cross the border, and bring Ebola with them. All this conservative talk about things like "restoring the values of the Christian family" moves us away from reality.
 
Over 100 years ago Robert Ingersoll warned about message like this that use religious beliefs in hard times to impose faith-based values about morality and the like.  He recognized the methods of silencing people with alternate opinions and even denying the vote to those not favored by class or ethnicity.  His antidote, summarized in a booklet called “The Truth” (sometimes package with another pamphlet call Ghosts) was a dose of rationality and truth with ideas forged in the Enlightenment  after the “countless years” we had “groped and crawled and struggled and climbed and stumbled toward the light after being “hindered and delayed and deceived “  In Ingersoll’s time the foundation was given a boost by Darwin’s evidence-based theory of evolutions. So armed humanity seemed hungry for the facts and ready to accept Science as a benefactor.  Ingersoll’s apt observation was that:

 “Nothing is greater, nothing is of more importance, than to find amid the errors and darkness of this life, a shining truth. Truth is the intellectual wealth of the world. Truth is the mother of joy. Truth civilizes, ennobles, and purifies. The grandest ambition that can enter the soul is to know the truth.

Truth gives man the greatest power for good. Truth is sword and shield. It is the sacred light of the soul.

The man who finds a truth lights a torch.”

Like many Ingersoll would be disappointed to find so few of us with the right sword, shield or torch to spark our inner light of understanding and to speak honestly from deep conviction. Instead we are still under the say of politically correct belief buttressed by invisible ghosts of prejudiced conclusions that steals the truth from us like a mix of a tyrant and a beggar. There are just still too many factors, as Ingersoll observed, lingering from our primitive past  that hinder us from examining issues.

“Prejudice, egotism, hatred, contempt, disdain, are the enemies of truth and progress. .... all questions presented to his mind, without prejudice, -- unbiased by hatred or love -- by desire or fear.” 

Our political process and its allies tries to prevent open inquiry by “force or fear” which  is doing all it can to “degrade and enslave” us still.
In part we have not taken up with full enthusiasm the path to the truth - by investigation, experiment and reason.  We are still prey to a truth short-circuit of that self-controlled exploratory path. Open investigation of issues is still difficult and ill-supported with some topics too sensitive to discuss.  Instead we are swallowed by the dishonest propaganda of conventional and mainstream, politically correct thinking and truthiness. It comes mixed in with talking points and slogan that hide reality like a Wall Street insider.

A final thought is that those who can cut through the fog of politics to a better understanding have the obligation to reach out as Ingersoll did and communicate and to be a concerned citizen:

“If it be good for man to find the truth -- good for him to be intellectually honest and hospitable, then it is good for others to know the truths thus found.

Every man should have the courage to give his honest thought. This makes the finder and publisher of truth a public benefactor.

Those who prevent, or try to prevent, the expression of honest thought, are the foes of civilization -- the enemies of truth. Nothing can exceed the egotism and impudence of the man who claims the right to express his thought and denies the same right to others.

It will not do to say that certain ideas are sacred, and that man has not the right to investigate and test these ideas for himself."

”

And oh yes, vote your wisdom.

Wrestling with Spiritual Concepts

By Gary Berg-Cross

Spirituality and religion are often conflated. In conversation there are terms like “soul” that gets used in each, but some freethinkers are bit more comfortable believing in some spiritual concepts than religious ones like god. This was recently discussed as part of a movement from religion to a non-god spirtual realm by the Nones.  Spirituality lacks a definitive definition, but the general idea is that it is a realm of existence set apart from the ordinary (think - the natural world as shown by science) and worthy of special attention. That is, more attention should be given to these special, transcendent ideas than the mundane, material world that science gives us. In a word spirituality leads us into a supernatural realm.

As the Wikipedia entry suggests, religion and spirituality were largely synonymous for a long time. But in about the 11th century this identity began to break. Spirituality began to denote the mental aspect of life, in between the material and sensual aspects of life and pure spirit. In other words a socio-psychological distinction began to be part of "spirituality" and indeed it might be considered the more foundational piece to explain religion. William Irwin Thompson puts it in a way that makes sense to me:

 "Religion is not identical with spirituality; rather religion is the form spirituality takes in civilization."

Sure, if we can agree on what those elements of spirituality are and that religion is a construct. 

One may follow this growing distinction through the Enlightenment and into 20^th century thinking as Psychology grew as a science and discussed spirituality in more scientific ways.

After World War II spirituality & religion were further distanced as more ideas on the nature of spirituality arose.  New humanistic discourse developed, which including things like existentialism, humanist psychology, but also the import of mystical and esoteric traditions and eastern religions such as Buddhism. Quite a blend of efforts to talk about topics like the true self, true life, free expression, mindfulness and meditation.

I find this a bit of a strange stew and while some of the common language of spirituality is now a distance from religious dogma, it can seem arbitrary and unscientific in the hands of layman but also the spiritually inclined. It provides perhaps too much of an easy frame to experiences and thus may hinder deeper understanding. Take the idea of soul.  We can use it as shorthand for some inner complexity. We might agree that Morgan Freeman has great "soul."  But I might think of that not as some indwelling spirit, but as great presence, a calm confidence etc.  It might be OK to use the soul-shorthand, for some open discussions. Sloppy use may mislead at times. An example is a new (killer) phone App called GPS for the Soul.  What is that about - some higher level of being?  No it uses the phone to monitor "stress" levels.  How?  It measures your pulse. Here we have the physical pulse standing in as a proxy for a mental concept of stress/good living, but labeled for the soul.  Discuss children.

And all too often we start to jump from a simple word sense to a huge image via a false analogy. Consider this one about soul that uses an image of life as if we’re all at a swimming pool, with the water in the pool standing in for a Pool of Spiritual Understanding. Some are fully in the pool and exhibit a large, spiritual soul, while others are along the sides of the pool, are just dangling their feet in, and still others are sitting out of the pool on the lounge chairs, just watching and listening. Horror! Explaining complex phenomena with untestable hunches is the slippery slope of spiritual concepts that frightens me.

Giving spirit the central role is to imply that we are NOT human beings on a spiritual journey, but instead, we are spiritual beings who just happen to be on a human journey. This idea of primary spiritual beings pulls us back to this early idea of a spiritual source of life, the breath of god, for example.  We started to break away from this idea centuries ago, but keep getting tripped up in sloppy thinking and trapped in vague terms that remain in the culture like "soul".

Sure there is great mystery in the mind, and some oceanic experience of some unexplained connection to a larger reality greater than oneself, but we should not allow loose talk to cloud our understanding or explain away phenomena that we still don’t understand by labeling them too readily and believing that we are really having a meaningful conversations using them. Here I’m thinking of phrases like spirituality as a way of life, an inner path, inner peace or the overuse of the terms love, wisdom, virtue & tolerance. We see language examples from people like Deepak Chopra:

"...we understand spirituality not as some kind of religious dogma or ideology but as the domain of awareness where we experience values like truth, goodness, beauty, love and compassion, and also intuition, creativity, insight and focused attention."   Deepak Chopra 

 We may all agree on the importance and great value of concepts like love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, responsibility, harmony, and a concern for others, but are these spiritual concepts or better framed of as part of our humanity and psychology?  Give me good scientific studies of selfishness and altruism and I see the Enlightenment still progressively at work.  

Biology is the science that studies life, but nobody has a precise, general definition of life. We are still learning about the subject but I don't speak in terms of life vitality or design rather than evolution.  We do make progress by making careful and empirical distinctions even in everyday life with our common sense vocabulary to describe our experience. To paraphrase Elbert Hubbard - the spiritual (aka supernatural) is the natural not yet understood.

Talk about it in vague Buddhist terms (harmony & order etc.) and I see a good conversation but little progress. Worse yet, perhaps, is to collapse too easily into a mysterious belief that there are things unknowable or that can’t be expressed in some form of language.  There may be some, since we are cognitively limited, but I think we are not close to practical limits and do not yet want to cede a large territory to something vaguely reifiied and called spirituality.

 Some see spirituality in everything, and want to "walk in the spirit." As a reaction against naive materialism, I may have sympathy for this. But I prefer to try the path via sciences like Psychology. It's a surer path to where we'd like to go and makes for interesting conversation along the empirical way.

 Images

Mindfulness: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/22/how-to-meditate-mark-vernon

Bridging The Gap Between Psychology And Meditation: http://dailyheal.com/meditation-news/bridging-the-gap-between-psychology-and-meditation/

Mind control: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/cultivare/2013/07/relax-neuroscience-is-not-going-to-destroy-your-faith/

Looking for another Johann Friedrich Struensee

by Gary Berg-Cross

As the House Republican argue for prosecute journalists for reporting on leaks Freedom of the press is in the news again.  It is not widely known that Denmark was the first country officially to declare freedom of the press. This small step for freedom came about through the influence of an interesting Enlightenment and atheist figure, called Johann Friedrich Struensee. Along with Hume and Voltaire, Struensee is given credit for an early role in the freedom of the press battle in the late 18^th century when banning books was in high season.  His Shakespearean-flavored, but true story of early Enlightenment battles against ignorance and entrenched power remains one for our times because it shows how a person of vision, skill and fortitude can marshal progressive forces.

The full story of enlightened ups and downs (he was executed by reactionaries) is told in books like Per Olov Enquist ‘s THE ROYAL PHYSICIAN'S VISIT (Translated by Tiina Nunnally  & Reviewed in the NYT) and by  the book and movie A Royal Affair (En kongelig affære) nominated for the Best Foreign film Oscar, based on the novel by Bodil Steensen-Leth. The film allows one to feel the changing times of 18th century Europe filled with possibilities and obstacles.
 

In the late 1760s Denmark was nominally ruled by Christian VII, but a strange childhood and apparent mental illness made for erratic rule as factions of advisers struggled for influence. All this changed when he came under the care of doctor Johann Friedrich Struensee, his personal physician.

 

Struensee's life arc in the early struggles of the Englightment is interesting. He rebelled against his father’s strict religiosity and discipline & went off to study medicine at University. While there he came into contact with enlightenment ideals. He quickly started on a life of controversial opinions and ambitious ideas which included a lifelong exploration of atheism. In 1758, Struensee moved to Altona, a small town near Hamburg. Altona was a town of Evangelicals and naturally disliked by Struensee, who had become an avowed atheist. Struensee collected a library of literature and Enlightenment philosophy and eventually published Enlightenment treatises.

The ambassador was however, alarmed by Struensee’s disdain for religion and established authority. - ‘It cannot easily be determined whether his talents are more formidable, his principles more relaxed or his address more seducing’.

Altona was the right place for reform. It had attracted some influential freethinkers who had fallen out of power with the King’s court in Copenhagen. Through them Struensee was introduced to the King becoming his personal doctor, and through this executive he was able to provide wise advice. Medical advances that worked, like vaccinating the elite's children gained him an audience and following. (NB while also ministering to the poor in times of Smallbox). Radical medicine was part of Enlightenment and what you could do with the human body (such as dissection for autopsies.)

Brilliant and brave he steadily rose in power & influence. In 1768 Struensee was described by then British ambassador as having: ‘carried freedom of thinking as far as any man’

Struensee eventually gabbed enormous power, becoming "de facto" regent which allowed him to  introduce widespread progressive reforms such as the abolition of torture. Of course the irony is that he seemed to act as a benign dictator, a role that his enemies could use against him. The paradoxes are well captured in the film A Royal Affair viewable on instantly Netflicks.

Still many reforms were enacted and set a tone that was to prevail after some decades of reversal later on and the torturing of Struensee as one of many ironies. 

A notable achievement was King Christian VII's declaration of freedom of the press in his territories  Norway and Denmark and the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein) on 4 September 1770. It was in the form of a Cabinet Order to his Danish Chancellery, in the following words:

We are fully convinced that it is as harmful to the impartial search for truth as it is to the discovery of obsolete errors and prejudices, if upright patriots, zealous for the common good and what is genuinely best for their fellow citizens, because they are frightened by reputation, orders, and preconceived opinions, are hindered from being free to write according to their insight, conscience, and conviction, attacking abuses and uncovering prejudices.

And thus in this regard, after ripe consideration, we have decided to permit in our kingdoms and lands in general an unlimited freedom of the press of such a form, that from now on no one shall be required and obliged to submit books and writings that he wants to bring to the press to the previously required censorship and approval, and thus to submit them to the control of those who have undertaken the business until now of inspecting them; so have we graciously revealed and made known this our will concerning our kingdoms to our Danish Chancellery.

Given at Friedrichsberg, the 4 September 1770. Christian.

These are principles and values worth conserving. The Enlightenment atmosphere gave Europe a chance to overcome the chill of entrenched authorities including sacred spaces and intrusions into private lives.  We may face a new treat based on a security state mentality. We can only hope for some small chance that we will also have champions like Johann Friedrich Struensee.

 

Images

Johann Friedrich Struensee: http://greeninteger.blogspot.com/2009/09/black-flame-lies-in-world-of-truth-on.html

Paranois: http://hanlonsrzr.blogspot.com/2013/06/whos-afraid-of-commenting-on-security.html

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2011/05/protecting-us-from-our-freedoms.html

Condorcet and Dreams of Reason

By Gary Berg-Cross
 

I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment, its products (Encyclopedia), values (the notion of progress), traditions and influence. I agree with Jürgen Habermas that its ideas along with democratic ideas has the potential for transforming the world and arriving at a more humane, just, and egalitarian society through the realization of the human potential for reason. I agree with Kant, that the Enlightenment marked:

"Mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of the human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error."

But I also agree with Habermas (and others like E.O. Wilson in Consilience ) that the Enlightenment is an "unfinished project." It was a start on emancipated thinking but has not been able to universalize this or remove large islands of ignorance, intolerance and error. It’s successes and shortcomings are something we can learn from. Like Habermas I think that one of its passionate, strategic thrusts, the idea that certainty in moral, social and politics issues will emerge from the application of the scientific method to society, should be corrected and complemented by modern understanding, but not discarded. 

What type of corrections? Well considerations of rationality for one and how it is applied successfully to reform society, understand morals and politics. With the idea of progress comes the idea that morals and politics will become more the products of rationality and greater factual knowledge generated by Science. That’s not exactly what happened in the 19^th and 20^th century. 

One inspirational starting point and humbling lesson comes from that the great French mathematician, philosopher Revolutionist, and Enlightenment figure Condorcet (1743-1794- full name Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet). In NNDB, an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people they have determined to be noteworthy, H B Acton described Condorcet as:

Wholly a man of the Enlightenment, an advocate of economic freedom, religious toleration, legal and educational reform, and the abolition of slavery, Condorcet sought to extend the empire of reason to social affairs. Rather than elucidate human behaviour, as had been done thus far, by recourse to either the moral or physical sciences, he sought to explain it by a merger of the two sciences that eventually became transmuted into the discipline of sociology.

He was indeed one of the pioneers in the invention of an analytic, Social Science. He provided the Enlightenment movement some social theory and these remain an important contribution, but his approach did not provide a simple path to Enlightenment goals. Among other things Condorcet struggled to find logical-scientific ways to understand individual and group choice.  One issue was how best (most rationally) conduct voting to advance Democracy. The idea was to apply mathematical principles to social/group decision making and human choice? (Condorcet was a mathematician and well versed in probability which he was eager to apply to social issues. )
So he expected that rational/mathematical analysis could (and would) establish an authoritative system of ethics, aesthetics, and knowledge -something we are still debating and working on. Early on Condorcet argued that through voting, people were more likely to make correct group decisions. But when he modeled voting analytically to check this out he found mathematical paradoxes in it, as did Noble prize winner Ken Arrow many decades later. (In 1972 American economist Kenneth Arrow, together with Sir John Hicks, was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for work in this area - “pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.”) As explained in Wikipedia the voting paradox (also known as Condorcet's paradox) is a situation noted by the Condorcet, in which collective preferences can be cyclic (i.e. not transitive meaning that if A beats B and B beats C then A also beats C - but this isn't what happens in a cycle). Cycles are paradoxical, because they mean that majority wishes can be in conflict with each other. When this occurs, it is because the conflicting majorities are each made up of different groups of individuals. Thus the usual collective democratic decision-making principles don’t generate correct, consistent and stable results. 
Discouraging as was Condorcet personal  participation in the French Revolution.  Part of that story based on brief biographies is culled below:

When the French Revolution broke out Condorcet championed the liberal cause. He was elected as the Paris representative in the Legislative Assembly and he became the secretary of the Assembly. He drew up plans for a state education system which were adopted. By 1792 Condorcet had become one of the leaders of the Republican cause. He joined the moderate Girondists and argued strongly that the King's life should be spared.
When the Girondists fell from favour and the Jacobins, a more radical political group led by Robespierre, took over, Condorcet argued strongly against the new, hurriedly written, constitution which was drawn up to replace the one which he himself had been chiefly responsible for drawing up. This showed a lack of sense and he paid for it when a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Condorcet went into hiding and wrote his very interesting, seminal philosophical work Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795). Sketch of a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind . Sketch pretty much descibes all he had time for. It was a sketch outlining what was supposed to be a much larger,full picture work. In March 1794 he thought that the house in which he was hiding in Paris was being watched by his enemies and he no longer felt safe. So he fled from Paris but after 3 days he was arrested and imprisoned. Two days later he was tragicaly found dead in his prison cell of unknown causes. Was he murdered or did he take his own life? His death robbed of much including his plan Historical Picture, which was to be the grand defense of his philosophical system.

As J Herival notes of Condorcet:

... Condorcet was no politician. His uncompromising directness of manner and inability to suffer illogical windbags in silence made him many enemies and few friends. His weak voice, lack of oratorical powers, and tendency to bore the Convention by the excessive height of his arguments was one of the tragedies of the Revolution.

 

Condorcet left us with a martyr to the dream that mankind might directly be freed from error with a simple progressive idea that improves on past belief.  The dream is if only we had processes to get factual information and cogent arguments widely disseminated. Sounds good, but it didn’t work in the emotions of a revolution and now we now understand the problem a bit better. I don't blame a devil , nor do I deem the dreams of reason.  But emotions can override reason, and it happens with some people more than others. Progress can be blocked and the dream of reason deferred. Furthermore, there are probably evolutionary reasons that establish this variability of emotion/reason balance. People who are not as open to the facts are not necessarily stupid or stubborn. Some may be, but others are wired (and acculturated further) to process and react to information differently. As the cognitive linguist George Lakoff put it:

So to attack (that) “belief” through logical or reasoned argument, and thereby expect it to vanish and cease to exist in a brain, is really a rather naive idea. Certainly, it is not the wisest or most effective way of trying to “change brains,”

And changing brains is something needed to advance the Enlightenment vision. One modern interpretation of our dilemma is that rationality and the advancement of knowledge are great values, but they need strategic allies in the Enlightenment effort against institutionalized ignorance that prevent progress.  

For more  on this see my blogs on Confirmatory Bias and for more on Condorcet see Mooney’s "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality."

Great Thoughts at the Library of Congress

by Gary Berg-Cross

Washington DC is a great city to visit for scientific and humanities treasures. One repository of humanist and intellectual expression is the Jefferson building of the Library of Congress. This Beaux-Arts palace was constructed from the wealth of the Gilded Age which yielded its prosperity to the more hopeful reform of a Progressive era. It was an age of science and technology celebrating in World Fairs and Edison seeming to invent just what we needed.

In this atmosphere the Library of Congress building was constructed,. The building as a whole reflects a Jeffersonian spirit, child of the Enlightenment idea that intelligence and an informed public is necessary for democracy and society. One can enjoy the joyful expression of this principle and many supporting ideas on the walls of the Jefferson building of the Library.

Above the windows of the great hall’s East corridor on the 2^nd floor there are, for example, some very humanistic quotations:

SCIENCE IS ORGANIZED KNOWLEDGE
Herbert Spencer, Essays, "The Genesis of Science," Vol. ii, 1.

Around the corner, facing the staircase, a poet speaks:

BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

On the other side of the staircase a 17th mediation on life and death:

TOO LOW THEY BUILD WHO BUILD BENEATH THE STARS
Edward Young, Night Thoughts, "Night," viii, 215

And around the corner, facing the Great Hall is something naturalistic philosophy:

THERE IS BUT ONE TEMPLE IN THE UNIVERSE
AND THAT IS THE BODY OF MAN
Novalis, Philosophy and Physics

The feeling of historical wisdom washes over me in the presence of these thoughts. Lucky visitors can enjoy these and more that show some of humanistic cultural wisdom inherited from Greco-Roman times up to the great writers, thinkers and artists of the 19^th century. They have much to say that is worth reflecting about in our times.

THE NOBLEST MOTIVE IS THE PUBLIC GOOD Virgil

King James and Citizen Grayling

A few days ago I was surprised to hear an NPR story about the 400th anniversary of the completion of the King James Bible (KJB) in 1611. The story by Barbara Bradley Hagerty was entitled "Hallelujah! At Age 400, King James Bible Still Reigns"

One of the themes of the celebration is to honor its general status as one of the great masterpieces of world literature. The early 17th century was indeed a great era for literature since it comes roundly in Shakespeare's time. Perhaps for this reason one of the celebrating events in a marathon recital of the King James Bible at London's Globe theater with 20 actors working in rotation to present all 69 hours of this historic book.

The NPR story was interesting to me because it not only covered the language of the KJB, but some of the background history about how it came to be written. Interestingly there were several poltical-religious ingredients starting around 1603. That's when King James I, whose name leads in KJB, ascended to the English throne after ruling Scotland. According to Gordon Campbell, a historian at the University of Leicester the English were suspicious of this seemingly foreign king, He may not have been born in Kenya or a Hawaii-like distance but he:
"spoke with a heavy Scottish accent, and one of the things he needed to legitimize himself as head of the Church of England was a Bible dedicated to him."

This was timely because England was warring over 2 earlier English translations of the Bible. There was the Bishops' Bible which was read in churches, but was clunky & inelegant. Then there was the Puritan choice, called the Geneva Bible which was more accessible and "bolder" because it included "marginal notes" according to David Lyle Jeffrey (Baylor University historian). From the point of view of the royalists, and the new King there was a executive problem:

"these marginal comments often did not pay sufficient respect to the idea of the divine right of kings."

Shades of Social Justice Christianity! The notes referred to kings as tyrants and challenged regal authority. Good King James needed another, more favorable version. Perhaps they had PR and Presidential Commission folks back, because they got the bishops and the Puritans together like 2 opposing groups to compromise and work out the differences. The hidden agenda was to eliminate the Social Justice flavored notes while losing the clunky language that hindered the kingly message.

What astonishes many is the quality of language that could emerge from something started with such devious motives. It's not every committee compromise that produces poetry of extraordinarily high quality. The KJB's pleasant phrasing has allowed it to find a home in our language, thoughts, customs and laws. As one commenter summarized it:
"It's memorable. It's beautiful. And in the KJB, it's distinctively the voice of God."

Of course as we've seen how it was engineered to be that kingly voice. It's been reworked to have an impact.

Examples offered of its powerful language include:

Isaiah 40 , where God speaks out of the whirlwind saying:
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the LORD's hand double for all her sins.
Hagerty's article summarizes many English Phrases which seem to have been coinage in the KJB. These are mostly non-religious and include:

• A drop in the bucket (Isaiah 40:15)
• A house divided against itself cannot stand (Matthew 12:25)
• A man after his own heart (Samuel 13:14 or Acts 13:22)
• A wolf in sheep's clothing (Matthew 7:15)

These are all fine and good, but I think that admirers of Mark Twain can find equally good ones that were inspired more recently and didn't take a committee of bishops. For example:

• You can't reach old age by another man's road.
• Honor is a harder master than the law.
• Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

Going back a little farther in US history an Enlightenment Age Benjamin Franklin coined some pretty good ones too:

• Honesty is the best policy.
• A penny saved is a penny earned.
• A place for everything, everything in its place.
• Lost time is never found again.

But there's more. I happened to have attended a talk by the noted philosopher A. C. Grayling a few days ago. He happen to also talk about the history of the Bible and had a few additional things insights(from what we might say is a Secular Perspective) about how the the language came about and its influence.

For one thing Grayling pointed out that the 6 committees of 50 translators did not achieve remarkable quality, clarity and consistency by themselves. They all drew heavily on an earlier 16th century translation by William Tyndale (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tyndale) As noted in Wikipedia "Although the authorised King James Version is ostensibly the production of a learned committee of churchmen, it is mostly cribbed from Tyndale with some reworking of his translation."

The Catholic Church in particular did not like much of Tyndale's translations which in their opion did not provide a proper view- using words like "overseer" where they preferred "bishop," "elder" for "priest" etc. So “In 1535, Tyndale was arrested by church authorities and jailed in the castle of Vilvoorde outside Brussels for over a year. He was tried for heresy, strangled and burnt at the stake in 1536."

However, the KJB committees liked the tone of Tyndal's archaic language. They could use this is set a proper kingly tone for god. As Grayling notes, groups tweaked Tyndale translation to suit their purposes. This is part of a long history or reworking it to suit particular messages. Folks redact what they don't want and enhance what message they are selling. The translated Bible, like Shakespeare's works, draws heavily on prior work, making an older story into a bolder more digestible one. Old testament tribal leaders are made to seem like 17th century Kings and societies from 2500 years earlier are made to seem more like nation states than tribes. Great Scott! Mark Twain would have had fun with this if he gotten a chance as he did with the Romantic era's view of a King Arthur!

We don't have Twain to deconstruct the KJB, but A. C. Grayling has gone one better. He has constructed a new version, "The Good Book: A secular Bible." Like the KJB this is intended to make bold but is easy to digest since it can be taken in small bites such as "Be gentle since life is short."

This Good, or I would say Wise Book, mirrors the Bible in both form and language, but is a manifesto for rational thought. Grayling calls the work "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". To do this he draws on some classical secular texts from both east and west. So he has sources like Hume, Socrates, & Cicero. But he has reworked them into a "great treasury of insight and consolation and inspiration and uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world".

While the book begins with a scientific view of our genesis it ends with a secular humanist version of the 10 Commandments. The Bible's has God giving Moses a small list include laws forbidding idol worship along with prohibition of killing and stealing. In Grayling's secular alternative, he mines and refines past secular humanists to give the reader these 10 commandments:

1. "Love well,
2. seek the good in all things,
3. harm no others,
4. think for yourself,
5. take responsibility,
6. respect nature,
7. do your utmost,
8. be informed,
9. be kind,
10. be courageous: at least, sincerely try."

Thank you Dr. Graylin. I was so charmed by the effort and his talk I bought a copy for my son. Something to grow on.