Simple-Dino Observations on Human Personality and Learning for Make Benefit Glorious Epoch of Tertiary Time

When I was a wee but precocious dino, I recall observing my fellow students closely. I noticed a few things, which I here put in terms drawn from an adult sensibility and intellect, that have stuck with me all these years:

1. People’s character takes a set very early in life: the kids to whose speech, actions, and attitudes I attended seemed like little adults already. Some were cynical and jaded even at eight, ten or twelve years old, some were mostly innocent and cheerful, some were dishonest, some curious, some shy, some assertive, etc. It wasn’t too hard to imagine what sorts of adults they might become. Whatever innate factors and external influences make us who we are had already endowed them with recognizable personality traits. As Wordsworth and then Freud said, “The child is father of the man.” It’s certainly true of me: by the time I was around eight, I was pretty much who I am now. – bookish, eccentric, moody, a bit shy but also honest and charitable towards others; unambitious; interested in philosophy, literature and languages; always on the outside of things and events looking in, and preferring it that way. (And, of course, a khaki-hued predatory dinosaur.)

2. For the average bloke and blokette, “Truth” seems to be what Nietzsche says it is in his 1873 essay “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn): a species of error – or perhaps today we would prefer the Foucauldian term “discourse” – that has become useful in terms of comfort and power relations. When a teacher puts kids in small groups and gives them some question to work on or a problem to solve, the cleverest one can blurt out the answer right away and it probably won’t make a significant impression on the others: to them, what matters isn’t the answer but rather the social process of arriving at the answer. In Nietzsche’s terms, they aren’t interested in Truth; they are instead trying to make friends, to belong, to demonstrate their power to the group, and so forth. Truth is only the means to such ends, not their goal.

You are welcome to make of these observations what you will, or nothing at all, with regard to the wider political concerns that we so often take up at the ZONE.

I should mention that by the first point, I don’t mean to negate the observation made by Baudelaire and others that most of what humanity has accomplished has been done not because of our nature but rather in spite of it. We have the capacity to change our ways and our thinking (we are not, to use the modern metaphor, hard-wired), to go against nature – it’s just that it’s usually difficult to do that, and much easier not to bother trying. By the second point, I infer only the difficulty of changing people’s minds, of disabusing them of error, and so forth -- not the absolute impossibility of the task. We want to return to the safety of the cave, as in the Platonic parable that in part underwrites Nietzsche’s Über Wahrheit und Lüge – to return to our perceptual, intellectual, and moral comfort zones along with our fellows instead of really thinking things through and doing what honors our own potential and does right by others.

But what do I know? I have a brain about the size of a walnut in a three-foot-long noggin (including the toothsome snout), so perhaps others will have much smarter things to say….