Windows on Humanity

I am a believer in liberty. That is my religion — to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right — because it is his right — but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge — in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech."'

- Robert G. Ingersoll, at the trial of C.B. Reynolds for blasphemy (May 1887.

Some of my own current thoughts on the issue of freedom of thought:

A really free person should be able to value ideas and actions on their own real merits. A free person will not do it based only on how new ideas do fit into an ideology one already has. This kind of state is naturally immensely difficult or even impossible to achieve fully.
However, at least understanding the dilemma and setting freedom of one's own thought as a real goal can give immense rewards, I think.

Every person does have a basic view of how the world should be. However, this view will inevitably change when life goes on. Thankfully, very often a person will see more and more shades of grey also when time passes.
A real-world problem is that if you don't fully subscribe to any ideology, you will very easily left out in the cold by followers of all ideologies. So, a real search for a freedom of thought will be a lonely journey.

On the other hand, morality is always based on human opinions and needs of the current society and sometimes on even very ancient human opinions. However, this is not the point here. The point is the ability to break free from any ideology that has stored ready-made, pre-programmed standard answers to your own brain.
This is extremely difficult task, and a very basic level of response comes always from the gut (or level 1 reasoning according to Daniel Kahneman). However, even noticing how ideologies can affect one's own thinking is a major step forward, given that one wants to evaluate the world as it really is.

Naturally, even the grand majority of people do not want to do it. The ready-made ideologies do offer safe-heavens, where one is spared from the heavy task of taking a stand and analyzing things by oneself. This is not a bad thing as such. Life just is too short to find out everything and people do have different kinds of goals in life. Short-cuts do just make ones life so much easier.
People who gather around ideologies do also very often initiate real changes in society. Ideologies have immense value as initiators and tools for political and social activity. However, people who are seriously interested in how human societies and the universe do really work need to be aware of the danger of ending up as a mouth-piece for a ready-made ideology.

(This piece was refurbished on 24th of December, 2012)

Robert G. Ingersoll is in Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/ingersollorator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Ingersoll
"Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899) was a Civil War veteran, American political leader, and orator during the Golden Age of Freethought, noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism."

For love of domination we must substitute equality; for love of victory we must substitute justice; for brutality we must substitute intelligence; for competition we must substitute co-operation. We must learn to think of the human race as one family."

- Bertrand Russell in the "New Internationalist Magazine"

My own ideas on the quote:

One can only add to this wonderful quote that competition is not the only or even major force that has driven humanity and progress forward especially in the field of science. With whom did Newton or Einstein compete when they did their findings? The answer is: nobody. They were driven by intellectual curiosity and most of all by an inner need to understand and know more.
Newton or Einstein were not competing with other people, but with just their former selves. The need to improve one's thinking and mind is not dependent on competition with others. The need and will to improve oneself is, in fact, one of the greatest forces that have driven mankind forward.

Pure intellectual curiosity and the need to understand more have been the biggest motivators of all great minds, I think. The possible rewards in the form of money or fame have been secondary in all really big innovations.
Of course, small-scale and industry-level innovation can be motivated with monetary rewards also, but it hardly the case that Newton or Einstein would have produced anything bigger or better if they  would have received more money because of their world-changing innovations.

Bertrand Russell is in Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/russellbertie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_russell
"Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic."

"It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it."

- Will Durant as quoted in "The Gentle Philosopher" (2006) by John Little at the Will Durant Foundation

My own ideas on the quote:

One of my biggest sorrows has always been how so many people disregard and disrespect history. All too many people seem to live in on the environment where there is no real past and no future; just the present. The biggest danger here is how this kind of thinking can lead into missing the idea of change.
However, if a person is unable to understand change, he easily becomes unable to judge so very many things that do happen around him or her. The most important thing is that if one does not understand that people really do change, a major portion of human resources can be wasted. People can end judging other people on grounds of what they once were, and not on what they really are now.

Other thing that really irritates me is how some people dismiss even some first class thinkers and writers because of trivial matters. People do this because some thinkers have at some point of their life thought and written something that later turns out to be foolish or silly.
However, a person’s whole lifework does not turn into nothing simply because he or she does something that is at a later time point is deemed as silly or wrong. Often the idea that makes a person susceptible at our eyes has been socially fully acceptable at that time.

However, the main point Will Durant does make here is that we are living on a top of an iceberg. We normally just can see the part that is over the water. The real mass of an iceberg is always under water. It can take time and effort to see what is hidden there.
We cannot project how the iceberg will behave in the future without knowing the sunken part of it. Similarly, trying to foretell the future without knowing the past is a doomed adventure.

Our knowledge has expanded incredibly especially during the last hundred years. The massive influx of new information has had also had negative effects. There are people for whom all this is just too much. One way to avoid being buried under the mass of new information is simply to reject it and its worth.
The rise of radical conservatism and radical religiousness can also be seen as reactions to the immense rise of our knowledge. Some people simply tend to see new information also as a threat to traditional values.
The requirement to understand immensely complex new ideas and scientific theories can lead really to a backlash, where people just reject new information out of hand. Sticking to the bronze-age religious ideas does make life so much easier for many people. It just does give them a respectable reason to reject the influx of new information.

(This piece was refurbished on 22th of December, 2012)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Durant
"William James Durant (November 5, 1885 – November 7, 1981) was a prolific American writer, historian, and philosopher. He is best known for The Story of Civilization, 11 volumes written in collaboration with his wife Ariel Durant and published between 1935 and 1975. He was earlier noted for The Story of Philosophy, written in 1926, which one observer described as "a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy."

If you think that your belief is based upon reason, you will support it by argument, rather then by persecution, and will abandon it if the argument goes against you. But if your belief is based on faith, you will realize that argument is useless, and will therefore resort to force either in the form of persecution or by stunting and distorting the minds of the young in what is called "education". This last is particularly dastardly, since it takes advantage of the defencelessness of immature minds. Unfortunately it is practiced in greater or less degree in the schools of every civilised country.”

- Bertrand Russell in Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954)

Some of my own ideas on the quote:

One could add to this fantastic quote that to be really able to speak out freely a writer should be able to forget for the brief moment that one has friends or relatives. As soon as one starts to think how somebody else would react to the ideas, a writer is not able to speak fully freely.
This kind of self-induced censorship can be  one of the main reasons why people like Bertrand Russell are so rare. It is not because his level of intellect would be impossible to achieve, even if also it is undoubtedly a major challenge.

Of course, the fear of what others will think is one of the most important sources for self-censorship for all of us who are not self-employed. The later career as a free writer gave new mental  freedom also to Bertrand Russell.
However, even there is always the wishes of the publisher and buyers of books to be considered. If one takes this idea to the utmost, one sees that a really free thinker and writer must be a person who does not write for money or even fame, but who just writes about what he or she really thinks.
A fine example of this is Marcus Aurelius, who’s book ‘Meditations' was found among his belongings only after his death.

In our own age, getting ones thoughts to many others to read is easier than it has ever been in human history. This is naturally thanks to blogs and all the other channels for self-publishing that are offered by the Internet.
Of course, there are masses of rubbish published in the net. However, there is also a lot of great and fresh thinking that we would perhaps never know of, if these new methods for free self-publishing would not be available.

It is true, that the subconscious part of our mind will never be completely free. We will undoubtedly take into consideration what others think of us on the subconscious level, even if we try to be as free as possible on a conscious level. However, even trying to be more free will undoubtedly result in freer way of thinking than not even trying.

(This piece was refurbished on 21th of December, 2012)

Bertrand Russell is in Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/russellbertie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_russell
"Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS[1] (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his protégé Ludwig Wittgenstein. He is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. He co-authored, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy." His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics."