It is true that we have the secret of atomic energy locked in our brains forever. But this does not mean that we can’t alter our behavior. Once we practiced slavery, cannibalism, and dueling; as we became more civilized, we learned that these forms of behavior were antithetical to society, so we stopped. Similarly, we can easily stop making nuclear weapons, and we can also stop fighting and killing each other.



In trying to keep your mind clear, it is always a good idea to be on the lookout for the pronoun "we." If "fat men" make up a category too big and shapeless for us to say anything accurate about, we is clearly much larger, and, unfortunately, not at all shapeless. Except where some defined context limits it to exactly these or those of us, we has to be all of us. Every one. And people who make moral propositions have a way of talking about we, and making thus the same kind of worthless statement that I can make by talking about fat men. 

And, because we is everybody, it is nobody. It is simply not a person, not a center of consciousness that can think and feel and do, and is therefore capable of no one of those acts named by the verbs that go with the statement "Only a person can..." 

I am a bona fide member of we. So are you. About you I can not speak, but for myself I can say, and not at all to my shame, that I have never given up slavery. I have never even dreamed of it. If you are depending, for the sake of the survival of our species, on the fact that I have learned to alter my behavior and have thus forsworn slavery, then you are leaning on a weak reed, and the future of our species is not bright. Nor do I suspect for a minute that I am just one of the die-hards, still holding fast to the practice of slavery when almost everyone else has learned better. I rather suspect that, among we, there are actually billions like me, who have never given up slavery, having had, like me, no reason to do so, having never, just like me, practiced it in the first place. I suspect, furthermore, and the history of an especially bloody war leads me to that suspicion, that many who did give up slavery, did it not out of some moral reawakening, but under duress—that is to say, not as a result of what a person can do, but as a result of what humanity can do. Their giving up was an outer event, and not an inner act. And I have to wonder about the author of that passage. Did she have some inner reason to give up slavery? And did she proceed, by a conscious and supremely important act of the will, to give it up? 

If we now look around at all of our species, and flatter ourselves as persons who have learned at least enough goodness to grant our slaves their freedom, we say what is not so. Somewhere in North Africa or the deep jungles of Borneo, it may be possible to find a chieftain or two who has in fact done exactly that, but I think it unlikely that we can depend on them to save us from war. 

I will have to say the same about dueling and cannibalism. I have never given them up. In those respects, I am not the better person implied in that we. And there is very probably hardly anyone who is. Where will we find all of those people who, having learned better how to order society and become better persons, will now be the better persons who stop fighting and killing each other? 

Any proposition has two sides. It always says, in its simplest form, that A is B. The A of those propositions simply doesn’t exist. There surely have been people who did once give up those wicked practices, but they are gone from us. Could they hear us boasting that we made those decisions, they might be a bit put out. Perlman might do little more than raise an eyebrow if I were to claim that we had learned to play the violin, but the heroes of Marathon might actually turn nasty if I were to boast that we found on that little beach the strength and determination to turn back the stronger force of tyranny. The B’s of those propositions, however, do indeed exist. And, if we can understand them not just by their titles but by their principles, it may become clear that practically no one has ever given them up. 

Here is another way in which our language can trick us into imagining that we are thinking. The names of things are not the things, and we have many names that point to no things at all, but to ideas. What is slavery? In one sense, it is easily identified. Where one person is allowed to have, by law, possession of another person, ownership, with all the rights that traditionally go with ownership, that is slavery. In our own nation, that law was changed, but not by those who owned the slaves. As to whether those who made the change sought the moral betterment of those who resisted it, or something else, there is at least room for speculation. 

But what is the root of slavery? What is it in principle, rather than in detail? How did such a practice come to be established by humanity, and, apparently, universally established at that? Here, there is room for both speculation and introspection. Which of us can say that he has never used another person as though that person were an object? Which of us has resisted every impulse to control or govern another? Which of us has never deemed himself better and more valuable than another? Which of us has never sought to put some fence around the mind of another? Is there one of us who has not thought what even Plato thought, that there are certain people who are—well, just inferior, by nature, just not capable of living under their own direction, and that we are actually doing them a favor by directing their lives for them, in some way or another? 

I will plead guilty to all of those charges, and I would be very eager to meet a person who is innocent of them all, for then I might best study Goodness. But, thinking not in terms of laws and social conventions, which are always changing, and for reasons that have nothing to do with Goodness, but only with Necessity, I will have to admit again, but for a very different reason, that I have not given up slavery, for indeed, I still practice it. 

I can be very specific about that. I can, and do, so overpower the minds of my students, those, at least, who want to pay attention, and who have little defense, that they come to believe what I seem to believe, to judge as I judge. When that happens, I have to start contradicting myself, and pointing to the uncertainties of my own reasoning, until they too come around to the new course, and the process begins again. Is the root of slavery not in them as well as in me? Who of us has not sought to be led? Which of us has not, from time to time, abandoned the difficult task of understanding for ourselves, of governing ourselves, even of supporting ourselves? Which of us has not wanted a master, so that we might be as well taken care of as a puppy, fed and watered and cleaned up after? Why is it that my students, when they come to be entirely of my mind, think that that is what they are supposed to do? What taught them that, if not some cultivation and even some encouragement in them of whatever it is in us all that fears the perils of freedom? And the cultivators and encouragers, or even the permitters—have they given up slavery? 

Nor have I given up dueling. I still duel. I still seek to avenge my "honor." I still incline to answer fire with fire, and injustice, whatever I mean by that, with justice, whatever I mean by that. That I do not go out at dawn with pistols is not enough to save me from the name of duelist. 

On cannibalism, I will make a small concession. While I never did give it up, I have also never knowingly practiced it. It is, in any case, not at all the same sort of "crime" or "depravity" as slavery or dueling, or even as fighting and killing, not rooted in what may well be some permanent and universal facts about human beings. We do know that it was usually practiced only as a religious ritual, and we also know that our supposed innate abhorrence of cannibalism disappears quite readily under the clear and imminent threat of starvation, as survivors of airplane crashes in the high mountains will testify. But cannibalism, too, might well have been "given up" by some person or persons who did indeed come into some new moral understanding. Where are they now? What role will they have to play in the moral reawakening by which we will all escape the coming storm? 

If you were to ask the next three persons you meet in the street to give a few reasons for the fact that so many people seem unable to think coherently, consistently, and logically, you would hear some obvious answers. Some of those answers would refer to what is called "intelligence." Well, some people are just smarter than others, and thus naturally capable of more and better thought. You would hear answers about something called "judgment," and very likely accompanied by the complaint that the schools just don’t teach judgment anymore, as though they always had, of course, in the good old days when everyone was consistently able to think coherently. Your most sophisticated informant might well point to the notorious difficulty of strict and formal logic, which the schools also don’t teach anymore. After all, are there not dozens and dozens of those syllogisms, each with a name of its own, and each indispensable to clear and correct thought? Just think of all those famous fallacies, and how easily the untrained mind will stumble into them. And then, of course, there is ignorance, in this context to be strictly construed not as dullness of mind, but as the simple absence of information, and thus a widespread impediment to clear thinking even in the smartest. And just think how much information there is! Who could have it all, or even any considerable share of it? 

There is some usefulness in all of those understandings, but they seem to me quite unable to explain the thinking we have been considering here. The author of those thoughts on slavery remains, whether she practices or not, a skillful physician. She must indeed be what we call "smart," and diligent as well. Her profession requires logical thought, and lots of it, and the drawing of correct inferences from the evidence of knowable facts, a process which must be granted the rank of judgment. I would put the care of my body under her supervision with no misgivings at all, knowing that where she had knowledge she would act effectively, and that where she had not enough knowledge, she would know that she had not enough knowledge, and send me to someone who did. 

Nor would I say, of the thoughts we have been thinking about, that she has wandered "out of her field." There are some people who do put themselves forth as experts in the mysteries of the human heart and soul—all sorts, from psychiatrists and economists to preachers and politicians—but those mysteries are, and in fact should be, everybody’s field. Who are you, who am I, who is anybody, to be disqualified as to that inquiry? If there is any special expertise to be had in contemplating human mysteries and speaking what truth can be had about them, it might be in our poets and dramatists and novelists, or even in our myths and music, but who surely knows which? No, we are not dealing here with someone who is just out of her depth in a highly technical subject. The impediments to her clear thinking are not to be found in any of the answers given above. They come from pains in her belly. 

The Greeks supposed that the belly was the nursery and dwelling place of the appetites and desires, just as they supposed that the head was the home of thought, and the chest the place of right feelings, a reasonable mediation between the two. Their knowledge of anatomy would not have gotten them through our medical schools, but their metaphor provides powers of the mind that are not instilled in our medical schools, or any other. That metaphor has this great virtue, that it gives us the beginning of a way to distinguish internal and invisible events from one another by family, as it were. We can be almost as clear in our minds about the different denizens of the belly, the chest, and the head, as we can about animals, vegetables, and minerals. 

(I am thinking just now, as many readers may know, about a long essay by C. S. Lewis, "Men Without Chests." It is about what seems to Lewis a general and growing inability either to dethrone or harmonize technical information or prowess and gut feelings. It is good to read. Once a year.) 

Consider again that, even in the company of those we call "intellectuals," I would suffer rebuke or disapproval in saying that Jews are stingy, and escape both in saying that Jews are diligent and productive. As thinking, both statements are equal. Both worthless. If I can get away with the second, even in lofty mental company, it is because what I say probably makes every belly in the room purr with satisfaction, while the first makes them all growl with unease. 

Of course, it may be a bit more complicated than that. Some belly may be in spasm, truly pleased to hear Jews called stingy, but fearful lest its owner be revealed as bigoted. That owner will very likely permit his belly its secret pleasure and send his head forth to do a little socially acceptable lying. I will still get the rebuke and disapproval. To escape it, and thus get away with an utterly worthless proposition, all I have to do is make the bellies purr. Lots of people know that secret, and live very well by it indeed. 

The passage cited earlier will make many bellies purr. There are probably very few people who are looking forward to nuclear war, and thus anxious about all the rest of us who are hoping to find some way to prevent it. Who but a maniac out of an old-fashioned science-fiction novel would contemplate with glee the destruction of all life, or even of lots of it? Who would not lament the destruction of the butterflies, which is actually, and just a little bit unfortunately, one of the hideous possibilities used by the author in her "argument"? 

But if it is by reasoning together that we may escape nuclear war, then her thinking may kill us all. In that marvelously pliable land of we all, anybody can get away with anything. Her opponents, and there must be some, for otherwise there could be no threat, can write books claiming that we have learned, through bitter lessons, that force succumbs only to force, and that we have thus given up, or certainly should give up, our childish dreams of perpetual peace. Just as cogently as she, which is to say, not at all, but with just as much hope of making bellies purr, others can say that we have learned that the price of freedom is supreme sacrifice, and thus given up the belief, which might also be called "antithetical to civilization," that we can enjoy its fruits without paying its costs. 

There is lots of talk these days about "teaching children to think," a presumed function of the schools, which they are either executing well or ill, depending on which expert speaks. Of what can that teaching of thinking consist, I wonder. What exercises can be done? Are the answers in the back of the book, or only in the teachers’ manual? What would I do, if I had to teach children to think? 

The first thing I would do, I hope, would be to get out of the land of we all, and recognize that "children" do not constitute an entity capable of thought. So I would set out to discover how to teach a person to think. And, since the task seems formidable, I would prefer, for my first try at such work, to pick the person myself, one who shows some promise. And I would pick, of course, a person who says that we have given up slavery and dueling and cannibalism. 

And where would I begin, with a person who is already, as we understand the term, not only "educated," but "highly educated"? With the belly, of course, which in this case has overpowered the head. The greatest failures of thinking do not come from any incapacities of the mind, nor are they prevented by great skills of the mind. They come from the interference emitted by the feelings, which can be both detected and disarmed by the one great power of thought that is the mother of all others, and that is self-knowledge, the beginning of all thoughtfulness.

Chapter Four
The Right Little Thing
 
THERE IS A STORY ABOUT THE importance of self-knowledge in the Fourth Gospel, but I think it is traditionally misunderstood because of certain disorders of the belly, some feelings that are little examined because they are generally thought to be simply "right." One of the those feelings, of course, is that Jesus ought not to be included in the company of those who were merely Great Teachers, such as Socrates and Confucius. They were all proponents of self-knowledge, of course, but Jesus.... Well, he may have thought self-knowledge a good thing, but he really set his sights far higher, we say, and had some greater sort of knowledge in mind. And, since many will assert that that knowledge is not truly a work of the mind, but of something else, you could probably get yourself in a great deal of trouble in some company by saying that Jesus was a supremely educated man who undertook to lead others in the paths of education. But I will have to take that risk, and say further that he urged an education that begins, and ends, in self-knowledge. 

He was surely a stern teacher, who knew when to rebuke the ignorance of self. What’s wrong with you people? he said. When the wind blows from the South, you know that the day will be hot; and when it blows from the East, you know enough to prepare for the coming storm. So how come you can’t read the signs in yourselves? And in the famous story of the woman caught in adultery, known even to unbelievers, he can be seen setting the model for that enterprise that we now find so necessary and so difficult: Teaching the Children to Think. 

What a strange and wonderful story that is. Behold their dire approach, the righteous men who have caught a naughty girl in the very act, a posse of vigilantes, we usually think. And up to cunning tricks as well, for we see them setting a trap for Jesus. All right, Mister Master, what about this? You know the Law, and you know what has to be done in this case just as well as we do. So how are you going to wriggle out of this one, with all your sweet talk of forgiveness and mercy? What a poser. And isn’t it just like them, those unregenerate, stiff-necked Pharisees? 

But wait. Is it the mind or the belly that paints that portrait? Are they not citizens doing what they do believe, and what all their society presumably believes, their civic duty as well as their religious duty? Are they not charged with the deed they intend, just as we are charged, both by law and whatever we mean by morality, to report our knowledge of crime? And do they not respect that charge, as we do, finding it both worthy and necessary for the orderly life of us all? Therefore, whether adultery can be accounted a crime or not according to our law, is not the point; it is the obedience to law that matters. 

Do we see those men as cruel vigilantes because we are good democrats, on the side of the woman, weak and alone against the forces of repression? Because they are old-fashioned traditionalists, dogmatic and benighted, and sex-ist as well, having obviously neglected to bring a certain other culprit with them? Because we don’t choose to observe our own laws against such things as adultery, having come to consider them vestiges of a primitive moral system that we have given up, just as we have given up slavery? Do we think them devious, because we are on the side of Jesus, and we presume that they are not? And, most important of all, do we try to answer such questions by listening to our feelings, or by considering the evidence? 

The only evidence we have is in the story, and there is no hint in it that Jesus makes any such judgment of the men who ask him what they ought to do. Nonchalantly, almost as though shrugging, he seems to say, Fine, go ahead. I do know the Law as well as you do. But since you are men who say that you want to know what is right, just be sure that he who throws that first stone is one who knows that he is in the right, and that there is no wrongness in him. I, being pedantic, and thus cagey, by profession, talk about wrongness, but he said it right out—without sin. 

The religionists of our time would produce so many candidates who would fight for the privilege of throwing that first stone that they would have to raffle it off, thus, as a happy side-effect of righteousness, raising a substantial amount of money for the doing of God’s work. But those supposed vigilantes, those rigid dogmatists, those vindictive and self-righteous taunters of a good man, did no such thing. They thought about it, and they dropped their stones, and they went away. 

But that isn’t exactly true. It is only a "manner of speaking," and manners of speaking, of which there are more than we can count, have a way of deluding the mind. I said that "they" thought about it, but, of course, they didn’t. He did. That one right there. And he did too. The man to the left. And that one. And that one. They did not form a committee. They did not hold a meeting. They did not discuss it, considering options and calling for testimony as to opposing points of view, hoping to discover some compromise more or less satisfactory to all parties concerned. 

Each one, all alone, considered himself, and nothing but himself. In an act that has come to be thought of as selfish, each one looked into his own goodness without any consideration for the goodness of others, or for their badness either. Each one "minded" his own business, which is to say that each one put his mind to work on himself, seeking his own betterment. And each one found it, and became better. 

In this vexatious life, it is not at all uncommon to meet people who call themselves "educators." They swarm. There seem to be millions and millions of them, so many, in fact, that it is nothing short of astonishing that there is anyone left uneducated on the face of Earth. If there were that many orthodontists, you would have to make your way deep into the jungles of Mindanao to find buck teeth. The next time you meet a person who calls himself an educator, ask him this: So, whom have you educated lately? Make sure he gives you their names and addresses. 

If you had asked that question of Jesus, as the stone-carriers went their ways, he could have answered, although he probably wouldn’t have. He would rather have seen you as the smart-alec taunter, and would have found the "right little thing" to say that would cause in you what he had caused in the departing men. If I knew what right little thing he would have said, I would tell you, but I don’t. I am not an educator. 

But I do know that those men went away educated, "led out" of some captivity, and thinking. And I do know that what Jesus did that day is True Teaching, not asserting, not arguing, not convincing, not demonstrating, not cajoling or threatening, not role-modeling or relating. Just plain teaching. He provided those men with what I have come to think of as an "occasion of education," an irresistible impulse to thoughtfulness, and probably the very sort of thing suggested by the poet who said that "the words of the wise are as goads." They get you moving. And that suggests another question that you might want to put to an educator: When do you educate? 

You may have recognized the book that I quoted earlier, the one in which we are given credit for having forsworn cannibalism. About that argument, I can find nothing good to say, but the title of that book is a splendid example of the occasion of education. It is called Missile Envy. In that, the author has found one of those right little things to say. It enforces a thought-provoking image—ostensibly grown men, beribboned and bedecked, panting after the bigger and better, fearful lest others have bigger and better. It applies equally as well to missiles as to spears, or even stones, for that title, quite unlike the silly arguments of the passage quoted, points through and beyond particulars to a universal principle by which we see some dark connection between war and lubriciousness, some prurient quality in violence, and by which we are also led to examination of ourselves and our own aggressions and desires for revenge, suddenly and newly revealed as nasty, childish, and shameful. If we could all be impelled to drop our stones, it would be not by the force of the book’s argument, but by its title. But that would also require, of course, that we think about it, and about ourselves. 

If it is education that is brought about in the would-be stone-throwers, and that might be brought about in us even by just the right little thing, education must have some attributes that we don’t ordinarily grant it. For one thing, it is not a "rank," like citizenship or captaincy. It is an inward event, like joy or surprise. It would seem more correct to say, education has sometimes happened to me, than, I am educated. That would also reflect the fact that education is usually temporary, and who is brought to it just now, and in this context, may fall out of it tomorrow, or forget all about it when his belly growls. Thus it can be, for instance, that a highly trained and skillful expert can also be foolish, and utterly uneducated. 

And, by token of those same attributes, it seems reasonable to understand education as a possible habit, or propensity, at least, maybe a leaning, an inclination of the mind to notice what the world surely provides—unintended occasions of education. To such a habit, there would have to be added, of course, the habit of looking, of paying attention, and that in itself might well be included in an understanding of education. 

Of all the attributes of such a condition, however, there is one that easily escapes our notice, and that will not easily win approval. The condition of the men who chose not to throw their stones was entirely inward, personal and private. What each had come to know, however briefly and incompletely, was himself. And the act by which he had come to that knowledge was done by himself, and could not have been done by another for him. The place where that deed was done is a place where only the self can go—the private contemplative life of the solitary mind. The fact that it is perfectly possible for human beings to live out life without ever going to that inner place, and not the fact that human beings have different mental endowments, is the single greatest impediment to a true education. To that impediment we add another when we disapprove, as socially irresponsible, those who turn inward rather than outward. 

Education is neither a social virtue nor a particularly sociable one. In the case of the men in the story, in fact, it brought them to an act that has to be called, changing whatever particulars might need changing, antisocial. They have rejected what their society recognizes not only as a social obligation but as an absolute requirement of religious belief, thus making themselves heretics as well as criminals. They have walked away not only from the criminal, of whose guilt there is no question, but from the Law. They have taken it unto themselves to decide what is right and what is wrong, completely disregarding the opinion of others and the supposed needs of a civilized order. So what are they? Are they heroes or rogues, autonomous men, however briefly, or anarchists? 

The question can be put another way: As they disappear from our sight, are they better men or worse? Have they reached some power that they lacked, and given themselves to its use, thus making themselves better men? And is that power not a power of the mind, rather than the power of some other imaginable faculty? 

I think those questions might be a bit misleading. They do imply that men who were formerly "bad" became "good" through the use of their minds, but if education and rationality really have the force that I think to find in them, the case is not quite that simple. If education is what makes us "able to be good," as I have said earlier, the change in the stone carriers must be seen not as a passage from bad to good, but as a growth into the ability to be good. They do not come on the scene as bad men, but only as men who don’t know, not as wicked, but as ignorant. Jesus doesn’t make them good; they have to do that for themselves. He makes them able. 

What was it, then, that had made them unable? The power that they discover in the story is surely wonderful, but it is neither miraculous nor unusual. It is a power that we all nod at, when we hear of it, for we all have it, and even use it once in a while, although often under duress. Self-knowledge may be good to have, but whenever I get a flash of it, I find myself hoping that no one else knows what I have just come to know. But we do recognize it for what it is, and recognize it as essentially human, one of the things that make us different. Surely, those men could have found self-knowledge all by themselves? Why hadn’t they? Why did they have to come to Jesus at all? 

There is an annoying answer to that question. It has to be something like what we call "faith," a belief, or a collection of beliefs, simply accepted as true and either left unexamined, or of such a nature as to permit no examination, which is to say, made up of worthless statements. Faith is not only religious, it is also social and traditional. The men who came with stones were what we would call "adjusted" to the world of ideas and understandings in which they lived. They were normal. While it turned out that they lacked some very important knowledge, they were not short of information. Far from it, they knew the very letter of the law. Nor were they in any doubt as to the spirit of the law. I can not help thinking of some character in a novel of William Dean Howells who says that it is, of course, possible to be a Christian and still be a good man, but that it is much harder that way. It does seem that it is because of their sincere religiousness, which purrs in the belly, that the would-be stone-throwers have not been able to be good. That seems a bit shocking but not really any more shocking than a secular equivalent—that it is because of another purr, their public-spirited and dutiful citizenship, that they can not be good.