Episode #036 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

When most people think back to the most revolutionary moments in history, when they think about the moments that changed things the most, they’re usually thinking of pictures of war and destruction—images of soldiers goose-stepping down the streets of a town that they just conquered. When most people think about conquering entire populations of people or they think about overthrowing a kingdom, they see images of Genghis Khan sieging Bagdad, or they think of the great Califates from the Middle East from over the centuries. But just think about the power of ideas. How many kingdoms have been brought to their knees over the years simply because of ideas—these ideas that were planted in the heads of their population and then made into a reality by them?

It's very easy to think of the most critical shifts in history as being connected to one of these bloody conflicts. But make no mistake, Genghis Khan could never dream of overthrowing as many kingdoms as the ideas of John Locke. But look, this is far from a secret. I mean, even the monarchies at the time of John Locke knew this. And just like any organism that’s built for survival that’s backed into a corner, these monarchies were fighting for their lives.

John Locke was born in 1632, and he went to the Westminster School at London before he went onto Oxford. And one of the most interesting things about John Locke is just how much his thoughts transformed over the course of his life. I mean, you read some of his writing from when he was at Oxford, and it’s practically indistinguishable from later on in his life when he had these radical political views. Like I said last time, when John Locke was in his early 20s, he’s actually a huge proponent of a monarchy at that time. And it’s not until after his formal education—it’s not until when he continues trying to learn about these subjects, talking to influential people, listening to new viewpoints—it’s not until then that he arrives at these radical government positions that would eventually change the world. And what’s impressive to me—what’s most impressive to me, I should say—is that he didn’t really need to do any of this.

I feel like something happens with most people right around when they graduate high school. There’s this feeling like they’ve already gone through their education, and now they got the world pretty much figured out. And it’s such a contrast from what it’s like before. I mean, as babies, we come into the world with nothing. I mean, you just look into the eyes of a baby and watch it look around the room just starry eyed. It’s soaking up everything. There’s a reason why the common expression is that a baby’s brain is like a sponge. They’re constantly learning about the world around them. And then they have their first day of school, and then they go to first grade and second grade; and they learn a little bit more about what it’s like to be a human. And then they go on to high school. They graduate. If they’re lucky, they go to college, and they learn some more.

But then something happens with most people right around here. Learning about new things, for whatever reason, just is not as much of a priority anymore. And it makes sense. They spent the last decade and a half of their life going to school, learning. They’ve gleaned this lens that they view the world through that works for them. And their life is going really good. So now, life becomes more about using what they’ve already learned as opposed to remaining a perpetual student of the game. And it’s funny, because if you asked 99% of these people if they think that they know everything in the world or if they think they got it all figured out, all of them would say, no, of course I don’t. They realize it should be a priority to learn. But I think there’s a difference between common knowledge and common practice.

And John Locke was somebody that never stopped learning and adapting throughout his life. But let’s just imagine if he did. Let’s imagine that John Locke grew complacent about his political beliefs. Let’s picture, what if John Locke was 70 years old and he felt the exact same way politically that he did when he was in college? Where would the world be today? And it’s kind of inspiring. I mean, this audience is filled with people that understand the value of learning day by day, of continuing that process of education all throughout your life. What if one of you guys come up with an idea like John Locke? What if you change the world, you know? Just something to think about.

Maybe another really interesting thing about John Locke is that this decision that he made to continue his education wasn’t all good for him. I mean, it actually complicated his life quite a bit. See, these monarchies were like a giant octopus. And they got all these slimy tentacles just going around everywhere feeling for anything that was trying to threaten it or question its existence. And then they find one, and they’re just like, shew! They slurp it up, and they wrap around it. And they don’t let it go, and it won’t move. And then it dies, and they let it go. To understand the fear John Locke must have felt during his lifetime, we kind of got to put ourselves in his shoes. So, let’s talk about what he would have expected to happen to him if he got caught plotting against the king during his time.

In the 1680s, there was a conspiracy and an attempt by a couple different groups to overthrow King James II who was the monarch of England at the time. This whole situation comes to a climax at what we now know as the Battle of Sedgemoor when the rebellion against the king got absolutely demolished. And afterwards King James imprisoned over a thousand of these rebels to stand trial for questioning the crown. And this is how serious it was: just the retaliation from the monarchy has a name in the annuls of history. The methods that they used to show people what would happen to you if you dare cross the monarchy are remembered by their own title. The trials and subsequent punishment of these rebels is what’s now known as the Bloody Assizes.

And it wasn’t all at once. There’s all sorts of examples of what they did to these people. They sentenced an elderly woman to be burned at the stake. But you should take solace in the fact knowing that, at the very last second, they downgraded her sentence from being burned at the stake to just a mere public beheading. She got off easy. Several hundred of these men were taken to the West Indies and forcefully enslaved for the rest of their life. But to be fair to the monarchy, most of them died along the way of typhus, so it was actually a death sentence, just a prolonged death sentence. But the most powerful message that was sent during this particular fiasco was when they took around 150 of these lucky rebels, and they were hung. And then after they were hung, they were drawn and quartered. And then pieces of their bodies were hung around the entire kingdom to serve as a constant, bloody reminder to anybody thinking of causing trouble of just what happens to you if you act out against the king.

I mean, just put yourself in the shoes of the average person at the time. How terrifying would it have been to see these bodies hanging around everywhere? I mean, no matter how unjust things got, would you ever question the status quo? Would you ever question the people in charge if that’s what could happen to you? There are accounts of the great-great-grandchildren of these people; 150 years after these bodies were hung around, people still weren’t going around the area where they hung the bodies. That’s how traumatizing all this was to them. It must have been terrifying. And what’s important about this when understanding John Locke is that there’s something to be said for the sort of hardship he had to endure throughout his life just to hold these radical opinions.

In today’s world, you can hold radical opinions, and it doesn’t really need to affect your life that much. There are all sorts of radical opinions around. There are people that actually think that there are reptilian shapeshifters that are the puppet masters of our planet and that they’ve infiltrated all the top governments of the world, and that now they’re directing the species the way that they want it to be. Now, that’s some pretty radical stuff. But all they got to do is start a YouTube channel. John Locke had to put everything on the line.

It's so hard to find a frame of reference for this. Imagine yourself being forced into exile for an opinion that you hold. Imagine being forced to move away from your home right now. John Locke not only had to move to Amsterdam to have his opinions, but he had to live and work under a false name there so that nobody could find him once he got there. Once the English government knew about his thoughts and they knew how destructive they could be to what they got going, they kept him under constant surveillance, spies following him around asking people about him all the time. You can read the first-hand accounts of the spies that were assigned to watch John Locke. It’s pretty crazy.

And on the other hand, you got John Locke plotting against the king in secret. There are letters you can read of him talking about something seemingly benign like childcare. It looks like he’s just writing a letter to somebody about how to properly treat a child when, in reality, it’s one giant, extended metaphor. It’s code for what’s going to happen in the revolution. Like, the child represents the actual revolution. The bad nanny that’s making all the bad parenting decisions—she represents the King of England. It’s crazy. You should read those letters if you have a chance, by the way.

Now, if I caught you on the street and if I asked you the question of who were the three great continental rationalists, how many of you guys would know the answer to that? I hope most of you by now because I’ve mentioned it several times: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. Well, the thinkers that they were competing against were called the British empiricists, and they were known as Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. The first one of those being who we’re talking about today and last week, John Locke. John Locke was known as a British empiricist. That’s the point of this last paragraph that I’ve rambled on.

So, if we have these two groups of people that are in competition with each other and the differences in their views are what separates them from each other, then that kind of implies that at least some of the time there’s going to be issues that the two groups hold opposite opinions on. And that’s true. Though it should be said that the true relationship between the two groups isn’t as cut and dry as just rationalists versus empiricists. But historians of philosophy really like it because it separates them into a nice, clean, organized three-versus-three. And for our purposes today, it works pretty well too.

That said, if we’re looking for one of these issues where the two groups fundamentally disagreed on, one pretty good place to start would be the question of, what is the contents of our brain the moment that we’re born? Are we born with a personality? Are we born with certain curiosities or interests based on what our genes held? The overarching question there is, are we born with certain pieces of innate knowledge? And when you think about this question long enough, it starts to resemble the modern-day question that a lot of us have already thought about of nature versus nurture. How much of your personality can be attributed to nature, and how much is nurture?

So, it might help if before we begin talking about this if we pause the podcast and think about what we feel in that regard. How much of your personality is nature, and how much is nurture? Now, the two ways people typically think about this question in modern times are—well, on one end, we have this person that thinks our brains are empty at birth. Our cells communicate with each other, and they make biological things happen; but our brains are essentially computers that are sitting on that DOS screen—you know, the all-black screen with the blinking white line, just waiting for us to put something in. There’s nothing on the hard drive to these people. The brain is the hardware, and we have drivers in place, poised, ready to help the brain process the information coming in into something that’s useful to it.

And you can see where they’re coming from. I mean, it’s honestly pretty pragmatic. The thinking behind this is that we are evolutionary beings that, throughout different points in history, we’ve needed to be able to survive in drastically different climates. I mean, just think about it. There are tribes of humans that have survived in the Amazon jungle that face very unique threats to their existence. They have snakes; they have jaguars; they have famine—all the problems that they face. And at the very same time that they’re existing, there were humans in Siberia that face a completely different set of threats to their survival, not the least of which are temperatures that can reach as low as -40 at times.

Now, consider the fact that while both those things are going on, humans are also having to survive to a unique set of threats to their survival in a place like New York City. The underlying point is this, the software that was programmed into our heads has one goal: survival. That software hasn’t the faintest idea what sort of world we’re going to be born into—what sort of climate or living conditions or culture that we’re going to be born into. So, this group of people today think that we’re born with very little in the nature department and that, from the very moment we’re born, we start soaking up all of this information around us and learning how to survive in this particular environment.

This idea goes long before you’re actually born, by the way. There are studies of people who were babies in their mother’s belly during World War II during the siege of Leningrad. Leningrad was this Russian city that was surrounded for a long period of time, and people essentially just sat there and starved for months. Some of these people that were in their mother’s womb during that long period of starvation—they adapted some ability to metabolize calories super efficiently. Even when they were inside of their mother’s womb, they were still pulling information from the outside world that they don’t even exist in yet and adapting to it.

So, this represents one side of the modern-day argument. And the other side has a little more variance to it. On one hand we have people like Descartes who say that humans are born with little pieces of innate knowledge. For example, he said that we are all born with the innate knowledge of an understanding of God as being an infinite being. But then there are people that go even further than that. And if there’s somebody that went the furthest of all the philosophers, it has to be somebody that we’ve already talked about—Plato. And if you remember back to the Plato episode, then you’re a genius, by the way. It was a long time ago. If you honestly remember Plato’s theory of innate knowledge, treat yourself to something. Go out and buy yourself some froyo on me. But for everybody else, I got to recount his theory of innate knowledge just so that we can understand Locke’s views.

Plato believed in the idea of innate knowledge, more specifically, that total knowledge of everything in the universe is actually inside of us. But because we die and then our souls are put into new bodies, that whole messy process makes us forget it all at birth. And Plato reasons that the process of learning is not building connections in someone’s mind; it’s not connecting one schema of information to another. Learning was the process of remembering this total knowledge of the universe one bit at a time. And if you remember, he tells that great story of Socrates teaching the slave boy how to do geometry. Slavery, reincarnation—everybody was having a great time back then.

But the important part to take from this is that the rationalist view throughout the years since Plato and during the time of John Locke—they held that we are born with certain innate ideas. And through those innate ideas and our ability to reason, we can arrive at further knowledge. The example that they use is, just as an artist paints a painting and when he paints that painting he leaves a little signature at the bottom of the painting—he makes his mark on his work—rationalists believe that we—as being created as pieces of art by something that they called God—had a little mark on each one of us. And that mark came in the form of certain innate knowledge at birth. They conclude that these innate ideas, coupled with our ability to reason about things, can at least in theory lead us to certain knowledge about the world around us.

Now, Locke and the British empiricists didn’t exactly agree with that. See, when Locke was at Oxford, he met a guy named Robert Boyle. Robert Boyle we would know in today’s world as one of the godfathers of modern chemistry. But to John Locke, he was just this really interesting dude at Oxford. What Boyle told Locke about the makeup of the world around us—it would shape the way that Locke viewed how we gather knowledge for the rest of his life. Boyle told Locke about a theory pretty popular at the time that the world is made up of tiny little subatomic things known as corpuscles.

And it’s from this worldview that Boyle lays out that Locke has a couple questions for this rationalist position. Most notably, he doesn’t know why there’s any intelligible reason to even entertain the idea that we’re born with any sort of innate knowledge. After all, where’s the evidence for it? Rationalists can’t really show anything. But that’s not all. Locke attacks the notion entirely. And he asks, how can anybody actually believe this? Locke argues that, look, these people say that we have innate ideas at birth. But in order for something to be considered an idea, it has to be present in someone’s mind. I mean, that’s kind of the definition of an idea, right? But if that’s true, and these ideas are actually innate and not just something that seems innate, how is it possible that these ideas are present before the infants are even born?

Locke says that there’s a big difference between something feeling intuitive and us just not knowing or remembering where we received that intuition. And even further than that, it’s a bigger logical leap to say that something magically is present in something before it even exists. Locke says, “It seems to me a near contradiction to say, that there were truths imprinted on the soul which it perceives and understands not; imprinting, if it signify anything, being nothing else but the making of certain truths to be perceived. For to imprint anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it, seems to me hardly intelligible. If therefore children and idiots have souls, have minds, with those impressions upon them, they must unavoidably perceive them and necessarily known and assent to these truths: Which, since they do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions.”

John Locke goes on to use critical thinking here. He wonders, if human beings truly have these innate ideas that you guys are talking about—you know, concepts already loaded into their hard drive at birth—what sort of effects would that have on the world? He makes the argument, look, if we really had this collection of ideas that was innate at birth regardless of where those humans were born or when they were born or who their parents were, then it stands to reason that we would see at least some similarities across all the cultures of the world throughout history, because they would be based on those innate ideas. John Locke points out that we don’t see those similarities, especially when it comes to the notion of God who, if the rationalist position was true, he would be the guy leaving his signature at the bottom of the painting. We should see it there at least.

So, in the argument of nature versus nurture, it’s safe to say that John Locke falls strongly on the side of nurture. He writes here in one of his most famous passages, “Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas: —How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from Experience. In that all our knowledge is founded, and from that it will ultimately derive itself.”

John Locke believes that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa, or blank tablet, or blank slate, whatever you want to call it. We’re born with no knowledge of the outside world or of the self or of God or anything, for that matter. The processes of reason and abstraction are innate—the method the mind uses to process input is innate—but that input, the ideas that the mind is processing, that comes from the outside world for Locke. Back to our computer analogy—the hardware and drivers are innate, but those hardware and drivers are completely useless without a hard drive full of information for them to process, right? John Locke says that that information on the hard drive, that comes from experience, sense perceptions from the outside world.

You know, I was thinking earlier today about whether I should leave this part in the podcast. And I was also thinking about the fact—if somebody asked me to come up with a way to make thousands of people instantly tune out and turn off the podcast and never listen again, I think I’d probably start explaining a 17th-century version of how the brain processes information. Because as interesting as it is to me, who really cares? Aw, that’s cute. John Locke thought that the brain did something that it didn’t actually do. He thought it was made out of cheese. But just real quick, I want to describe a small piece of this process because it has huge implications. And I promise I won’t ramble for too long.

So, Locke thinks that there are multiple different types of ideas and multiple different steps to get to each of those ideas respectively. The critical first step to arriving at any sort of idea is stimulation of your sense organs either through seeing something or hearing something, etc. We take this very raw perception, and then the mind processes it and produces what Locke calls simple ideas. An example of a simple idea would be, that lawnmower outside is making a lot of noise; it’s ruining the podcast right now. And those simple ideas become the ingredients that we have to make complex ideas, because the brain processes them and reasons and makes connections between them. And that creates complex ideas. Now, the awesome part about all this—Locke concedes to the point that reason is a very important part of arriving at ideas. But his overall point is that all of it would be impossible—the mind would have nothing to use its reason to process—if it wasn’t for that first crucial step, the senses perceiving something in the first place.

So, John Locke thinks that the mind is a blank slate at birth and that who we are and the ideas that we possess come from the sum total of all the experiences we’ve had since birth. Now, if you believe something like that, then you also kind of have to believe that that really annoying person at work that’s always bothering you—they too are just the sum total of their set of experiences, and that set of experiences might not be as reasonable as yours. His view kind of breeds compassion in a way.

And then if you believe that, then how about for a second we consider this giant institution that we’ve created as a society that we all pay lots of tax dollars into, and the sole purpose of it is to cultivate experiences for people? What am I talking about? I’m talking about the public school system. Because that’s what it does, it cultivates experiences for our young people trying to turn them into productive, tax-paying citizens. That’s the function of it, right?

Well, John Locke being somebody that believes that we are shaped by our experiences, it’s no surprise that he had a lot of ideas about education and how to improve it. I mean, he said, “I think I may say that of all the men we meet with, nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education.” He thinks that nine parts out of ten of what makes somebody who they are, useful or not, good or evil, is derived from the nature of their education. Now, he has all sorts of interesting ideas that were incredibly revolutionary for his time period. And for the record, they’re still revolutionary for our time period. So, let’s talk about these ideas that he had to improve the education system.

So, if John Locke were the superintendent of your school when you were a kid, he has all sorts of seemingly bizarre things that he’s going to add to your everyday curriculum. But bear with him. He has a good reason for every single one of them. One of the first things that he thinks we should teach people as soon as they can walk, as soon as they’re able to learn it, is dancing. Now, this isn’t about finding your inner spirit. John Locke was not a 17th-century free spirit. He actually has a pretty good reason. He says that when you dance, you’re forced to do certain things. You’re forced to stand up straight. You got to keep good posture. You’re supposed to move in a directed manner, accurately and with purpose. John Locke thought that if you teach kids to move and stand and act in this manner, that they would naturally be able to bring those skills into other aspects of their personal life. They would stand up straight in their personal life. They would move with purpose and do things accurately in their normal life.

Now, maybe you disagree with him on this point, but one great point that he’s referencing here is that he’s endorsing activities that build skills that aren’t necessarily on the surface of the lesson. I mean, we’ve all heard this before. I’ve heard tons of people talk about how the biggest lessons that they learned from high school they learned from organized sports—it wasn’t even in the classroom—the teamwork, the discipline, the camaraderie, the long-term gratification, the feeling of doing something small that sets the stage for somebody else to step in and do something big. These are all lessons that kids take from these sports programs when on the surface they just appear to be playing a game of basketball.

Locke gives a few examples of this. He talks about teaching kids French. French was a very useful language in the time of John Locke. He said that they should learn French because it’s going to open up a lot of business opportunities that wouldn’t be available to them in their adult life otherwise. He says that it’ll make them more informed voters because they’re going to understand French politics—all sorts of benefits from learning French. The modern-day equivalent to this would be like learning Mandarin or Spanish.

But by far my favorite insight that John Locke gives into his vision of proper education is this, “Great care is to be taken, that it never be made as a business to him, nor he look on it as a task. We naturally, as I said, even from our cradles, love liberty, and have therefore an aversion to many things for no other reason but because they are enjoined us. I have always had a fancy that learning might be made a play and recreation to children: that they might be brought to desire to be taught, maybe if it were proposed to them as a thing of honour, credit, delight, and recreation, maybe as a reward for doing something else; and if they were never chid or corrected for the neglect of it.”

What he’s saying is something that I believe in a lot. He’s saying that the task of education is incredibly important when it comes to creating the type of people we want to. Yet, more often than not, education is crammed down these kids’ throats. They are forced to learn about stuff that they don’t even care about. Locke says, look, it’s not that they don’t want to learn. We have a natural predisposition to learn stuff from birth, but we also have a natural predisposition to liberty. We don’t want to be forced to do stuff. Let’s allow these kids to learn about stuff that they’re interested in. Let’s not make education boring. Let’s find a more effective way where it’s entertaining to them or honorable to do it.

What he’s saying is, when we force-feed people stuff that they aren’t interested in, they don’t seem to learn very well. It’s funny how that works.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you guys soon.