Knowledge is a Privileged Enterprise
Neurobiology, philosophy, sociology, science, psychology and every other established field of knowledge is the result of social privilege. This is quite hard to deny when the material requirements (and this includes psychological/neurobiological requirements) that give one access to these domains must be in place in order to obtain the information. For example, it is unlikely that a child growing up in the tragedy and violence of Syria, is going to have advanced knowledge in philosophy or science, let alone even much awareness of itself or the world. Those who have this knowledge, especially in advanced forms, have it only because they had favorable social conditions that allowed them to access and obtain such knowledge. (They have been the beneficiaries of society). What explains the procurement of knowledge is not an effort on the part of the will, but the conditions of the culture and class into which one is born. There is no way around this because the argument is based on the concrete facts of material existence, the very objects and conditions required for high level function to even exist.
But this tells us something. What does it mean that knowledge is really a product of cultural access and privilege? One thing it means is that humans are not consciously promoting an advanced species because they do not understand that individual quality is the result of social quality, most specifically universal access and opportunity to a comprehensive education.
We as philosophers must all move in this direction if we are really serious about thinking, serious about intelligence, because this is precisely where the conclusion of intelligence leads us. If one is a good thinker they assume it to be a trait that is worth emulating, so how do we impart quality of thought to the species? How do we self-consciously create a society of thinkers? The answer is by intelligently creating and directing social conditions that favor the developmental quality of individuals.
The quality of humans is undeniably bound up in their psychological process of development. Thanks to recent work in the field of psychology, specifically Attachment Theory, we now understand how to produce healthy humans, how to avoid individual pathology, which gives us the power (at least in degree) to negate social pathology. Religion has been on earth for thousands and thousands of years and it never figured out, and does not know how to produce healthy humans. Thanks to methods in science coupled with the genius of thought, humans have now figured out how to intelligently proceed toward themselves.
Knowing that knowledge is a privileged enterprise empowers us to create a more intelligent species.
But this tells us something. What does it mean that knowledge is really a product of cultural access and privilege? One thing it means is that humans are not consciously promoting an advanced species because they do not understand that individual quality is the result of social quality, most specifically universal access and opportunity to a comprehensive education.
We as philosophers must all move in this direction if we are really serious about thinking, serious about intelligence, because this is precisely where the conclusion of intelligence leads us. If one is a good thinker they assume it to be a trait that is worth emulating, so how do we impart quality of thought to the species? How do we self-consciously create a society of thinkers? The answer is by intelligently creating and directing social conditions that favor the developmental quality of individuals.
The quality of humans is undeniably bound up in their psychological process of development. Thanks to recent work in the field of psychology, specifically Attachment Theory, we now understand how to produce healthy humans, how to avoid individual pathology, which gives us the power (at least in degree) to negate social pathology. Religion has been on earth for thousands and thousands of years and it never figured out, and does not know how to produce healthy humans. Thanks to methods in science coupled with the genius of thought, humans have now figured out how to intelligently proceed toward themselves.
Knowing that knowledge is a privileged enterprise empowers us to create a more intelligent species.
Comments (45)
I've seen some quite healthy and happy Mormons.Even Jehova's Witnesses, in between statements of "there is only one true God," seemed happy. I guess it's all an illusion. Of course there is always collateral damage of some sort... those who can never belong to the group and suffer for it.
Happiness is not the sole marker of psychological health. One can learn to be happy being oppressed. Talking about what comprises a healthy human doesn't merely equate to feelings of happiness, the spectrum is much broader.
This is all very idealistic. Knowledge is not something disembodied and abstract. At least not in the form that modern society is privileging it.
Modern society is pragmatic. It wants scientists so it can build machines, harness resources, run a growth-predicated economy. Once it has got that going, then it needs to generate consumption to match. It needs a creative community who invent new ways to waste energy and keep the whole deal going.
So history has been advanced by this general entropic imperative. It is "good" to establish a culture where people think rationally, and better yet, mathematically. That gets the basic structure of economic expansion on a "free world" going. Then because this mode of growth is so successful, society has to also build its creativity to provide a sink for all the production.
With tongue in cheek, I describe this pragmatic view of knowledge a little negatively. But I just want to underline the unthinking positivity with which you characterise human knowledge and intelligence.
Is it good, is it bad, is it is what it is?
I think we at least have to start closer to the pragmatic truth of knowledge. It must be serving a purpose. The question becomes whose?
Is it in fact ours? It may well be. Or you may be talking about some Romanticised image of the actuality.
It is indeed a significant fact of history that humans have shifted up a level from being "emotional" animals to being "rational" beings due to the semiotic power of developing language.
But have we overshot the mark in trying to construct a purely rational society? Or even a purely mechanistic one, now that we have added the semiotics of numerical syntax to that of linguistic syntax?
It could also be that this is just Hegelian inevitability. We are following Nature's course somewhere "good".
It is a live question. And the deeper one to be addressed.
No this is not all "very idealistic" but very materialistic, just the opposite, it is the result of thinking about reality from the basis of its most primitive point of concretion. As to what I said about producing healthy humans, see Allan Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. What happens to a human in the process of development, and how it happens, is not idealism but has empirical verification.
Quoting apokrisis
This is too vague for me, we can pinpoint it far more specifically than this. You didn't obtain the knowledge you have because you grew up in a war-torn country that was lacking in social resources. The actual case is that it's just the opposite. Right now you are manifesting, not that you have superior will power, but that you have been a beneficiary of society to a higher degree than others. I deal in concrete facts not abstractions.
Now, I'm not trying to put you on the defensive, but I am trying to make sure this conversation is not derailed by idealism. This is no easy task.
Quoting apokrisis
I do not find this to be a very intelligent question for the simple fact that it pretends like humans are not allowed to answer with their own interest. Last time I checked food and water were the basic building blocks of intellectual life. Do you deny this? You can try to say it fails to make contact with your position, but it is in fact the most primitive point of your being and every other intellectual being. Hard to see how one could negate it with idealism? You can of course, try to minimize it, and pretend like food, clean water, shelter, are just given, but you are intelligent enough to know that would merely display ignorance or arrogance.
Quoting apokrisis
While I fully embrace the importance of these questions and ask them with you, they overshoot and presume too much about my post. It is not an abstract problem when we talk about poverty and lack of education throughout the world. One should admit this. The questions you are raising, are in fact, secondary questions, they are questions of privilege, once the basic needs of humanity have been met, then we can ask the finer questions you have raised. Seriously, imagine putting these questions to a million war torn refugees. What we need is a society that can get to the secondary questions and questions beyond, how come you can get here? Examine the concrete facts and you will see that your will had nothing to do with it. Come now, isn't it smarter to act at the level of conditioning as opposed to try to pretend there is no conditioning? If we know we are determined by social process and resources, isn't it intelligent to try to intelligently determine this process? Why leave it to chance when we have the tool of thought?
Quoting apokrisis
Event if this is the deeper question, it is not the question of highest value and it is not the question of highest relevance, that belongs to the basic structure of society, specifically, the intelligence of man's production process, because this determines everything else.
This simply suggests you haven't read what I said.
I said you are being idealist because you are not understanding that Nature is also about the imperative of entropy production - the dissipation of material gradients.
That is where pragmatism is a corrective. It makes us go looking for the reasons why we would even hold rationality, science and a good education in such high regard. Society is training us for something!
As it happens, I indeed had every privilege. I attribute nothing to any will power or natural diligence. In fact I was as lazy as it comes at school or university.
But being detached is just another level of privilege as it means you can walk through any door, take any path that excites your curiosity.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Again, you just fundamentally misread my position. A mistake you seem to repeat with many posters here.
I frequently cite Maslow's hierarchy of needs. My whole post is emphasising the concrete rootedness of knowledge - the pragmatism of being an organism. So it is quite amazing you attack me with the very points that I've just laboured.
Quoting JerseyFlight
But I am asking why you would consider that "a problem".
Aren't folk in Africa or India quite happy - if they have sustainable traditional lifestyles? Isn't that what Western anthropological "happiness" researchers find to their amazement? What kind of psychic oppression are you wanting to liberate them from? Are their lives going to be improved by Latin lessons and trigonometry?
So you start off with the presumption that a lack of education is a problem, and that poverty exists because of it.
I reply, dial back the presumptions. First ask why we might think education so vital. Why do you make it sound an inherent good?
Quoting JerseyFlight
Jesus. Whose war tore them up? Why are they having to flee? Those are the relevant questions.
If the answer was that it was because of "modern rational civilisation doing the things it does", then you can see where you are going so wrong. Your words are shallow rhetoric meant to tug on the heart strings. (Ironically.)
Quoting JerseyFlight
Again, what else am I arguing except to actually think about the social constructionism at work here?
You are only telling me to do what I have done.
The puzzle is why you can't see this. Why are you so defensive about your post being critiqued - to the degree that you need to say that what I should have said, and indeed did say, is what I didn't say, but its opposite?
That's a ninja level of dissembling, you would have to agree. :grin:
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by this?
The first time this idea appeared you said:
Quoting apokrisis
I do not see how these two relate, though I expect one is an expansion of the other?
I agree that knowledge is not something disembodied and abstract. I am talking about the concrete possession of it, which is a thing that does exist, and most specifically, in a positive form that you would validate (even if that form was only your own). My charge is that this always presupposes favorable social conditions (which I think you agree with) and that we must reverse engineer the process (replicate it or reproduce it, pick your word).
In contrast you are trying to derail the conversation in the direction of privileged questions (please note, I don't much like this word, and I don't like using it here). What you are getting at is indeed quite abstract:
Quoting apokrisis
This is an abstract program. We don't need millions of people asking the privileged question of why we would hold rationality, science or good education in such high regard, you are ignoring the concrete fact that the positive fruit of these categories already exists, and that is what I am referring to. I comprehend what you are asking, it was asked, far more profoundly than you are asking it here, by the Frankfurt School.
Back to the concrete. I referenced an exceedingly important text by Allan Schore, in this text he has traced the biological and psychological development of human beings from the early stages of life. This is a major game changer and it has broad significance to philosophy-- philosophers just don't know it yet. If you and I can actually begin to understand each other, and be honest and open, willing to have our beliefs changed, much progress can be made between us. The consciously combined power of minds is the medium of excellence that is seldom achieved in society.
I can put it in simpler terms, is it even a matter of asking questions, or is it a matter of action at this point? We have completed so much theory, there is no point in reinventing the wheel. This is one reason I would never write a text on Critical Thinking, it would be useless, I know of several masterpieces in this area. What this allows us to do is use this material to better society. By proceeding thus we can make more progress. We must overcome the psychological desire to prove something about ourselves, we must reach the point of maturity where we are trying to change something in society, not merely prove ourselves in society.
I think he’s not saying “idealistic” in a sense opposed to “materialistic”, but a sense meaning “naively optimistic”, or “not skeptical enough”. He’s saying you seem to value intelligent, reason, etc, as virtues or ideals in themselves, and he’s trying to call attention to the practical reasons to value them instrumentally instead.
Seems simple enough. Society invests in knowledge creation for pragmatic reasons. We need to know how to harness the material resources of the natural world to our advantage.
So there is a purpose behind our concept of what constitutes knowledge.
That raises the question of in whose interests would you be wanting to impose some universal system of education? The objective sounds grand and impressive. But you are so far just presuming it has legitimacy. And that “our education” is the privileging one.
Quoting JerseyFlight
You call the fruits positive. That is the presumption I have challenged you to justify.
The fruits at least seem mixed to me.
And the equation with poverty is suspect. Education doesn’t have to cost much. Wealth is as much likely to result in intellectual indolence. Poor countries can churn out well educated people.
Your OP is full of florid statements about the need to produce healthy people and avoid individual pathology. And yet how much attachment is impossible in the modern nuclear family where parents are chasing careers and children are being pushed from birth to be genius achievers?
If you have an argument, it doesn’t feel well constructed so far.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Perhaps. Or maybe the Frankfurt School gets a lot of stuff wrong. Does it have some concrete successes in terms of high functioning states?
Quoting JerseyFlight
Seems like commonsense parenting. But modern life goes against that. One of my points was the concrete observation that an over-emphasis on “getting an education” is a major thing against actually getting a good one.
Quoting JerseyFlight
This is very abstract. I have no idea what you mean in actionable terms.
So maybe you would bring up your kids exactly as I brought up mine. Maybe you have the same notions of what a well rounded person would be.
If so, all the theory talk is happily redundant.
They have to be the two aspects of the functioning whole.
A problem with Marxism is that it was Romantically unbalanced. It presumed everyone would play nice if everything was communally owned.
But that isn’t a natural dynamic as Nature shows. Systems are built on the productive mix of competitive and cooperative behaviours.
So when it comes to education, it has to be complementary to the means of production. That. Is the general rule.
But then we can step back to critique the kind of society that results. Or also, the possibility that a society has an education pulling in one direction while its material economy is driving in another.
Its purpose is to bind groups with common values/purpose in a system of meaning, not to produce healthy humans, and certainly not to promote “the developmental quality of individuals”, because that would lead to independence, which is in opposition to the point of religion.
I don’t follow this reasoning and skimming through the responses to date doesn’t help. Also, it’s unclear if the point is to create a more intelligent species or a healthier one.
This exchange has to be narrowed to get anywhere. Is there no such thing as a quality educated person? Is your criticism then an example of something that should be negated as opposed to replicated?
A healthy human is not just one who is physically healthy but one that is psychologically mature, to simplify it, not driven by defense mechanism or insecure rigidity.
I've already said I have my ideas about an ideal education. My parents applied them to me. I applied them to my kids. No one has any complaints.
But my point remains that what is "ideal" has to be plugged into what is "pragmatic", at least if we are talking about everyone on this crowded planet of ours.
Does everyone benefit from an "education"? If we are talking about reaching a post-doc level of comprehension, doesn't that just leave 99% of the population feeling "dumb".
If we are talking about having the most possible people fit to have happy lives, that feels like a very different social investment.
Reading your posts, one can only speculate where you sit on such concrete details.
And yet you are the one complaining my approach is too broad? :chin:
So we need to be stable but plastic, clever but wise, young but old, etc.
If you believe in dialectics, then a balance of oppositions is implied. And yet we don't want to be too balanced either!
You did not answer my questions. You accused me and challenged me to justify my claim. As I already said, 'I am talking about the concrete possession of it, which is a thing that does exist, and most specifically, in a positive form that you would validate (even if that form was only your own).'
Please answer my questions.
Friend, I'm super disappointed. You are a total obscurantist and sophist. This is proven by the fact that in your last reply you 1) evaded my questions and 2) tried to introduce multiple red herrings into the exchange. This is dishonest. You are smart enough to know that when you answer my questions you will end up validating the very category you tried to deny, which then provides the premise from which to deduce my position.
All I'm seeing on your end is either a trail of evasion or a constant failure to comprehend. So it is rich that you demand "answers" to questions you don't even seem clear about yourself.
Maybe someone else thinks you are making some kind of sense and will chip in with the replies you feel you need.
But in the end, what are we to make of "arguments" that go like this?....
Quoting JerseyFlight
Sure, bombs don't advance civilisation. At least for those bombed.
And yet bombs also drive civilisation's scientific advances.
Go figure.
Or instead, just steer a wide berth around anything that might actually challenge this kind of false equivalency.
You are now engaged in Ad Hominems. Please answer my questions.
You are now continuing with your evasions. Please start answering my questions.
Your position, in order to qualify as a refutation of my position, must in no way validate the existence of quality educated persons. If these people exist, it means society is already producing quality, and that is exactly my position. You denied the existence of this quality, that is why, properly and legitimately shifting the burden of proof, I asked you, 'Is there no such thing as a quality educated person?' This is not a hard question and the answer is obvious. Which then of course, makes my plea to expand what already exists valid! So I would like to make clear to all readers, there is a real elitism attached to your position. You are indirectly claiming that what you possess as an educated person 1) does not exist and 2) cannot be replicated and 3) (and this is where the elitism comes in) that we can't even talk about its integration. The whole time you are speaking from a privileged platform, denying the legitimacy of discourse on the very thing you have. This is not just elitism, it is a form of intellectual tyranny! Intellectuals like you are the problem with society. You are trying to de-legitimize the conversation by making use of a false and generalized negative. Why do you have to answer my questions? Because the burden of proof is in your court.
We’ve established that you have no particular position. There is nothing substantial as yet to be refuted. Only multiple question marks you haven’t addressed.
I have no interest in evading my burden of proof. I am not trying to play a posture game. I just want to seek out truth, my motivation is not to be right. You raised many points and some of them may indeed stand to correct my position. I would only be grateful for it.
Quoting apokrisis
This is just an empty assertion, with no particular content.
What I said above was quite clear and quite correct. I will try to put in clearer terms.
Suppose I was talking about freedom in a time of slave plantations, and you went off on an abstract rant about "whose interests [would this freedom serve] would you be wanting to impose some universal system of freedom?"
This helps to expose your elitism. Because lots of people had freedom in America at the time of slave plantations. My position is exactly the same, lots of people have education throughout the world, and every occurrence of it is the result of social privilege. Just like you would be telling me I was wrong to speak of freedom back then, you are telling me that I am wrong to speak of education now. I hold my tongue, but you are seriously a despicable intellectual.
Do you consider it a crime not to be always thinking of other people's problems? If everyone did that communication would break down.
This is just an empty assertion, with no particular content. :cool:
Quoting JerseyFlight
The question would be what interest was being served? That purpose would explain why some interest group might take one view rather than another.
And my general position would be to ask whether some universal system of freedom could even be the case. What would it look like if it was to meet all possible purposes of a variety of interest groups?
I would expect some universal story could be extracted. But I wouldn’t already presume it aligned with what suits me personally.
Quoting JerseyFlight
I’ve said nothing of the sort of course.
Quoting JerseyFlight
That’s not holding your tongue. :rofl:
And all the while you were busy asking would there have been free people at this time in the world?
I will try this one more time.
The question above was a reference to my slave analogy. The point is that you would be abstracting about freedom, as you are abstracting about education now. So the logical question to ask is, since your position is in the negative, did freedom exist in the world at the time of slavery? Likewise, the question to ask now, since your unsupported claim is in the negative, do quality educated people exist anywhere in the world?
I asked what would be your criteria? That’s pretty vague. And the context provided by your OP suggested you hadn’t thought about the matter with sufficient depth to give a useful answer.
Generally all your replies in this thread have been irrational and emotional. So you can try one last time to remedy this fault.
Don't you think we first need to establish as to whether or not such a thing even exists? My argument, again, is based on the fact that educated people do exist. There are real people that have knowledge and they can be distinguished from those who don't. The simple point is that this quality needs to be extended. This is neither a sophistical argument or a false one. I am happy to discuss criteria, but I would never do it without looking at people who already possessed high ability in this area (that is why I spoke of reverse engineering the process). That is also why I referenced psychological development. However, what we know is that this does exist and that it is possible, we just have to figure out how to expand it.
Quoting you: "And the context provided by your OP suggested you hadn’t thought about the matter with sufficient depth to give a useful answer. Generally all your replies in this thread have been irrational and emotional."
These are actually poisoning of the well fallacies. Your replies are littered with them. "Poisoning the well (or attempting to poison the well) is a type of informal fallacy where adverse information about a target is preemptively presented to an audience, with the intention of discrediting or ridiculing something that the target person is about to say." You are attempting to characterize my position in a negative light so that you don't actually have to engage it. And I must say, you are exceedingly good at doing this, which is not a compliment, I don't think I've ever encountered a person more skilled at administering this fallacy.
The second point is that a claim has been resolved. I said, 'you are ignoring the concrete fact that the positive fruit of these categories already exists...'
You said:
"You call the fruits positive. That is the presumption I have challenged you to justify."
My point was exactly that you must confess to the existence of quality educated people in the world. This validates the category.
This claim has been justified. But it is not worth it to discourse with you. One hardly gets anywhere. I had to reason much just to get to the point that quality educated people exist. And maybe we are not even there, maybe your ego still wants to deny it? I am content to leave you to it. This is not, and cannot be, a sign of high intelligence. An exchange with you isn't worth the effort or time. Maybe others can get more from your discourse, but I find it to be dishonest, dodgy and riddled with fallacies.
Hi. I am very interested in education and developmental psychology, but I am struggling to understand your thesis in this thread. The above seems to be a historical claim that I cannot reconcile with my general understanding of history. Education has always been a privilege, and always, the privileged have invested heavily in the education of their children. Up until very recent times, there has always been a heavy burden of physical labour involved in mere survival as well as in the processes and materials of education. So the universality of education is necessarily a recent affair. One cannot educate children properly if one needs them to work in the coal mines or herding the sheep. Nevertheless, a reverence for books and writing has been widespread for a long time.
Perhaps what we might more agree on is that we are now at a stage of social transition, where we have the economic capacity to invest in universal education, but we have yet to adjust our societies from a graduated privilege based one to a fully universal one.
Quoting JerseyFlight
I'm not familiar with your reference, but a very quick glance suggests to me that it relates quite closely to other material connected to the ACE questionnaire and work on childhood trauma. But I wonder if it wouldn't be better to explore this separately from the question of education? I can see the connection of course, as someone who found his own childhood education rather traumatic. But I think two threads are better than one in this case.
How does a person come to possess knowledge? Is it a matter of will power?
Quoting unenlightened
I agree with this, and it is implied by my post.
I don't like to talk about knowledge as a possession. I give freely what knowledge I have and in that relationship I learn.
Will has no power, but is the expression of conflict.
Exemplum: I used to habitually smoke tobacco, and had the idea that i wanted to stop. But I could not manage it and said I didn't have enough will power to overcome the addiction. Then one day I had an insight, that it is the easiest thing in the world to not do something one does not want to do. The difficulty was that I didn't want not to smoke because it made me uncomfortable. Seeing the simplicity of it, I decided that actually I did want to stop smoking and suffer the discomfort, so I stopped. No will required, just an end to the conflict between what I want and what I don't want.
As if one goes to the shop to buy something, and finds it costs more than one wants to pay. And by an act of will power one hands over the money and buys the thing. No, knowledge is not accumulated by frowning deeply and thrusting out one's jaw. Hear a song, sing along, and before you know it, you know it. Not a possession so much as something one ia absorbed by and that one absorbs in turn.
Yes, these are precisely the sentiments of John Dewey. He believes that the true role and function of education is the perpetuation and gradual perfection of culture. That all genuine social life is educative. And that formal education should create a simplified, idealized and balanced environment to that end.
"As a society becomes more enlightened, it realizes that it is responsible not to transmit and conserve the whole of its existing achievements, but only such as make for a better future society."
~Dewey, Democracy and Education
But some people have it and others don't. We cannot be indifferent to this.
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, my friend, this is the point. To figure out a way to expand knowledge freely.
We don't think of knowledge as something privileged, we think of it as something either given through genetics or something that is the result of will power, but we do not think of it as it is in reality, that it is the result of social beneficence. Knowing this is important because it allows us to stop focusing on the error of individual will power, and instead focus on the cultivation of the social conditions that produce knowledge. It means we are no longer shooting in the dark, but can begin to direct our course. As I said, this knowledge empowers us to create a more intelligent species. Exactly how we do this has to be worked out through intelligence, but knowing that this is the direction we must go is the important thing, and that is my point.
Indeed.
Quoting JerseyFlight
Well I have been involved with the Free school movement and the home education movement and in my dotage I involve myself here and elsewhere online. There is wiki, there are free online courses, I'm not sure that figuring is going to do much without some action.
We should indeed champion universal free thought and speech for everyone, but I do not think it is a privilege that another is denied access to such information, because it robs us all of the chance to get his opinion of it. This is true of all injustice and ill-treatment. We are all worse off, not privileged, because of another’s lack of access to information and education.
If I'm following correctly you're saying that we can't blame people for not being intelligent because intelligence is a privilege. I get that but I don't get how this realization empowers the promotion of not making it a privilege. Call me a cynic but typically when people realize that they have an advantage or privilege, they fight tooth and nail to keep it.
I raised this issue in the course of this thread: 'I can put it in simpler terms, is it even a matter of asking questions, or is it a matter of action at this point? We have completed so much theory, there is no point in reinventing the wheel. This is one reason I would never write a text on Critical Thinking, it would be useless, I know of several masterpieces in this area. What this allows us to do is use this material to better society.'
The real point from all of this is that intelligence takes us in the direction of trying to figure out how to increase knowledge in society. Philosophy takes us in the direction of society! My exposition is both a rebuke and plea. Philosophers are lost in a world of theory, and many intellectuals posture away from their responsibility by fallaciously deferring to abstraction. This is because they feel safe in the realm of theory. But we do not get to pick and choose where thought drives us.
If you read my exchanges with apokrisis in this thread you will see that I was exposing and combating this elitism. Where praxis is logically concluded there the elitist intellectual tries to subvert it, he tries to force praxis back into the domain of theory. This makes him feel that he is engaged in a hierarchy of relevance and that his responsibility is nothing other than theory.
Because we don't think of intelligence in terms of social process, because we think of it in terms of individual effort, therefore as a society we focus on the individual as though his intelligence were a product of chance or predestined genetics. This is materially false. If we don't possess the correct ontology of knowledge's formation, then we will not be able to focus on its replication. Knowing that intelligence is the material result of a social process provides us with the accurate information to begin its replication. The world is still living in the dark ages here.