Reelin' in the Years, Stowing Away the Time
The wisdom of Edmund Burke, Plato and Steely Dan, all in one post!
My word for the day is "intemperate" - meaning immoderate in indulgence of appetite or passion; not temperate; unrestrained; unbridled.
Edmund Burke wrote:
"Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites, — in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity, — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption, — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."
I focused on these words:
"...men of intemperate minds cannot be free."
Wow. That sentence is prima facie evidence that there are some simple truths that transcend time and space.
An argument can be made we are living in a time when intemperate minds rule.
As the glorious caffeine began to disperse throughout my body this morning, tempering my thoughts, my mind turned to the intemperate among us, considering how it came to be that we are ruled by such irrational madness.
I remembered Plato's Allegory of the Cave.
In Plato's allegory, prisoners are made to spend their entire lives in an underground cave with its mouth open towards the sun. They are shackled by their legs. Their necks are restrained so they only see in front of them, looking toward the the back of the cave. Behind the prisoners, a fire is blazing, and between them and the fire there is a low wall behind which men carry diverse statues above their heads, such that the fire casts the shadows of the statues onto the back of the cave. These shadows are the only thing the prisoners have ever seen, so they suppose the shadows are the objects themselves.
Then assume a prisoner escapes and turns towards the light, his eyes will seem blinded, he will suffer sharp pains, but in time they grow accustomed to the light and he begins see the statues in detail, rather than just the shadows. Dragged out of the cave in to the sunlight, it is so bright he is only able to look at the shadows, and then at the reflections of the actual objects. At last, he is able to gaze directly upon the objects themselves, of which the statues were but pale imitations. In time, he looks up at the sun, and understands that the sun is the cause of everything that he sees around him, of light, and sight, and the objects of sight.
Plato's allegory posits the true purpose of education and knowledge is to drag the mind (the prisoner) as far out of the cave as possible; not merely to instill knowledge into his soul, but to turn his whole soul towards the sun, which is the Form of the Good.
Plato states: “Previously, he had been looking only at phantoms; now, he is nearer to the true nature of being.”
Once freed and exposed to reality, the prisoner is, of course, reluctant to go back down into the cave and involve himself in the menial matters of men. When eventually he does, his vision is no longer accustomed to the dark, and he seems blind. His thoughts and tales of another world unknown to the prisoners still in chains, seem ridiculous and outlandish to other men. Even though he aims to free them, they violently resist, fearing they will become as insane as he seems. They even tell their prospective liberator that they will kill him if he tries to free them.
I would take Plato's allegory a step further as it applies to our contemporary times. For all its advancements, Plato's world was much closer to nature than ours. It was a simple matter to exit the cave and find the truth of the natural world (water is wet, fire burns, etc.) than it is today.
Today, people must work harder to find reality. In Plato's example, there is only one cave but it seems today, there is a chain of caverns, each of a degree brighter than the other, and escape from one cave leads to imprisonment in another, and then another, until we finally reach the sunlight and reality of the surface.
We must also accept the reality that not all caverns are of natural origin, that there are those continually digging the next cave and a kindling a slightly brighter fire, simply seeking to create even more and different shadows, the singular purpose of which is the continuance of confusion and chaos.
The most important questions for us are these: "How do we know what is shadow and what is statue? How do we know when we reach the sun?"
For me, I simply go outside into the sunlight - not the intellectual sunlight, the light from that yellow heat dot in the sky. I take a walk or a hike because in that time, I witness the reality of the world, the eternal cycle of the seasons, death and rebirth, the roles of predator and prey, the harshness and the beauty, and the constancy of nature.
We like to think humans have evolved, that the power of our minds allow us to create reality for ourselves, but the truth is that we cannot escape the roles created by "Nature and Nature's God". We may have access to more sophisticated and deadly tools and weapons, but the same processes of life experienced by the hawk and the rabbit exist for humans.
When temper our intemperate minds to the level of "water is wet and fire burns" awareness, the shadows of the cave begin to recede and our perception sharpens. It is then we begin to see the things we are told are elements of reality cannot possibly be real, that they are merely shadows.
Again, to quote Steely Dan: "The things that pass for knowledge, I can't understand."