The Gift of Fire - Richard Mitchell (free e novels txt) 📗

say it is comes not from a process that might be called “discovery,” but from invention. We make it. Accordingly, you do not have to listen to anybody else. You can say for yourself what education is, and what you say is not subject to the judgment of those who say something else, but only to the judgment of Reason. If they say something else by the power of demonstrable Reason, then you should pay attention, but otherwise, they are talking rubbish, and deserve no attention at all. The first and most obvious understanding of education comes from the fact that anyone who can not tell Reason from rubbish is not yet in a condition to know that he can not tell Reason from rubbish, a disability which, you would suppose, can hardly be one of those put forth as education. But it is.

For your own purposes, and for the sake of Petronilla, which is really the same thing, consider the consequences of adopting, as an understanding of education, the ability to tell rubbish from Reason. Nothing more. Nothing but the power, and the propensity, to discover that a statement is worthless, or a term without meaning, or a proposition absurd. That would also be the power to make statements that are not worthless, and propositions that make demonstrable sense. That seems little enough to ask, although a moment’s reflection will suggest that it is far more than it looks, and perhaps far more than we can imagine. But consider also the alternative of your adoption of such an understanding of education. Would you be willing to hold, as it seems to me that our general understanding of education does in fact hold, that the condition called “education” does not require the ability to tell rubbish from Reason, but only some powers by which to get along in the world?

From Epictetus, we can take another possible understanding of education. It is power over the inner world, the ability to know and judge the self and to do something about it. It is not, therefore, the same as whatever it is that gives us power over the outer world, the stubborn public world of Nature and Necessity. The two powers neither preclude each other nor include each other. In any mind, either may exist alone, both may exist, and, of course, in any mind, both may be absent.

The two powers are not exactly equal counterparts, however, for the power over the inner world can make judgment of the power over the outer world. By the latter, we can do something; by the former, we can decide whether we should do what we can do. Should we, in fact, destroy most of the world and its people, future generations might say of us:

They did what they could. They did anything and everything they could. They seem to have had no way of knowing, and were not especially interested in asking, whether they should do whatever they could.

The ability to know and judge the self may seem a rather minimal, and, to some, even a selfish and antisocial definition of education, but imagine instead some understanding of education from which it is excluded. Such an understanding is what is stuck in our heads by popular beliefs about schooling. Out of it, we suppose that a brain surgeon - why is it always brain surgeons? - is educated. And we suppose the same, but without expecting to pay as much for it, of our teachers and professors, especially of those who have stuck us with the idea that education is the power to work change in the outer world of Nature and Necessity. And then we say that it is all those overeducated theorists and physicists who are going to blow us all up.

And then there is the understanding of education with which I began, education as that which makes us able to be good. Able. A disarming proposition. Who can be against the ability to be good? Granted, the ability is only that, and easily permits us to imagine someone who is perfectly capable of being good but would rather not. Nevertheless, there is nothing “mere” about the ability, for without it there is no hope of goodness at all.

Those three views of education all hang together. Indeed, they are only slightly different views of the same quality or power. Not one of them could exist without the others. He who has no reliable way of telling rubbish from Reason can have no knowledge of the self that he is to judge and control, by which judgment, and only by which judgment, he is able to choose the better over the worse. It will not only be the voice of the world that deceives him; his own voice will deceive him. As to his own beliefs and propositions, which may not even be his own, but only his recitations of what the world says, he will not be able to tell rubbish from Reason. That condition, however, need not hinder his effectiveness in bringing about changes in the outer world. He may be perfectly capable of what is nowadays called “excellence,” which is the new name for a particularly visible combination of efficiency and success, a high and measurable degree of effectiveness in problem-solving. It has to do with such things as the marketing of blow dryers, in which sort of enterprise the words “better” and “worse” have not the same meanings as they had for the men who didn’t throw stones.

To most people, those understandings of education seem at once lofty and insipid, idealistic and impractical, however “noble.” And that is precisely because they do not include problem-solving. If Western culture had had such understandings of education for the last two thousand years, would we now be flying through the air at twice the speed of sound? Would we be sending men to pick up rocks on the moon? Would we have conquered polio and diphtheria? Would we have air conditioners and blenders? Or even matches? Would we have, as the author of Missile Envy asserts, “the secret of atomic energy locked in our heads forever”?

I don’t know the answers to such questions. Nobody knows them. Some questions are interesting and important because of the answers to which they lead, and others are interesting and important because of what they say about those who ask them. The questions above are of the second kind. To ask them at all, we have to make some astonishing assumptions.

They are all asked in the Land of We All. Only out of a great delusion would I say, We have learned how to send men to pick up rocks on the moon. No such thing is true. We have not. Somebody has, to be sure, but not “we.” We have not wiped out polio, nor have we learned the secret of atomic energy. A few of us, and a very few of us, have done all such things. Unless I remember that, I am continually subject to the delusion that tells me that I am somehow “better” and more “advanced” than my very distant ancestors who painted pictures on the walls of caves, and just because I happen to be a member of we.

Ah, I say, those poor, ignorant savages. They could paint, all right, no one denies that, even Picasso said so, but what is painting? It’s some sort of gift, I guess, and they were lucky to have it. But could they even do so simple a thing as make fire? No. They had to find it, and then preserve it carefully. I, on the other hand, to name only the very least of my accomplishments, can make fire just like that! Whenever I please. I can, with a tiny movement of a finger, bring light into a dark place, and the very images and voices of distant sportscasters right into the room where I sit. Even these trifling powers, to say nothing at all of internal combustion and refrigeration, bear witness to the progress that comes of problem-solving, and to the betterment of all humanity.

But I am deluded. I can not make fire any better than the cave painter of twenty thousand years ago. Indeed, I can not make fire at all, having failed that requirement of Cub Scouting along with the tying of the sheepshank. What I can do is strike a match, but I can not even claim to strike a match any better than he would have struck a match, had he had one. I can not make a match any more than he could have made a match. I can flip a light switch no better than he could have, but I can not make the enormous system that makes the light switch work, or even any small part of it, although I may sometimes be able to rewire the switch without stabbing myself with a screwdriver. I can buy my ticket and board a plane, and I can pay my taxes toward the work of those few who can send men to the moon to pick up rocks, and who do have the secret of atomic energy in their heads, but that’s it. I am, in every one of the “great advancements of mankind,” as we understand them, a sort of passenger, a freeloader at that. I have not been a party to any one of them. I am along for the ride. And, while I gladly take whatever “profit” comes from the work of a very few, I must also take whatever “loss” may just as often come from that work. And the same is true of almost everybody else, including those very few who do all such things. The one who has the secret of atomic energy locked in his head does not have all of the secret. He needs some other very few. Nor can he wipe out diphtheria, nor make fire.

What is there that he can do any more than I, or any more than our common ancestor who painted the walls of the caves? What is there that all three of us can do equally well, or ill? Leaving aside the particulars - the secret of atomic energy on the one hand, and the secret of yellow ochre on the other, neither of which I happen to share - what is the difference by virtue of which I suppose myself somehow “advanced” beyond some “worse” condition in the cave painter?

The details, I admit, seem important. I would prefer not to trade lives with the cave painter, although I’m not sure how much that means, for I would prefer not to trade lives with anybody. I am likely to live longer. I like that. But I have not understood any principle, except for my liking of it, by which to know that a long life is better than a short one, or even by which to decide what long and short might mean in that context. I am vexed by wanting a life that is at least “long enough,” but by not being able to say what it ought to be long enough for. The cave painter may have had the same vexation.

I have certain comforts that the cave painter did not have. I will - perhaps - suffer less pain, unless it is one of the disadvantages of a longer life that it provides more time for the possibility of pain. And it does occur to me that, as I sit here in no pain at all, some not inconsiderable number of my contemporaries are suffering every bit as much pain as any ancient cave painter ever suffered, and asking themselves exactly what principle it is by which a long life is thought better than a short life. And of fear, the same is true. Indeed, if there really are people who live in active and continual fear