As the initial progeny of poor Ashenazi-Russian immigrants, we absorbed the cultural criterion of the primacy of learning and education. Respectful social acceptance was ethnically dependent upon accumulated wisdom. This criterion for a life of value has beneficially persisted on an enduring lifetime rewarding basis.
We eternally saw education as a precursor to such a cultural determination and systemically revered education and its instructors, from High School through College and Professional School. In our mature years, we with retroactive understanding, look back at our practice of respectfully wearing our one sports jacket wit tie to lecture sessions, and sheepishly confess to inwardly restraining ourselves from the impulse to respectfully stand when the Professor entered. We entertain the presumption that other first-generation Jewish progeny felt similarly.
Contextually, the youthfully significant existence of friendships, sports, and social dating, in principle, were felt secondary to our inculcated appetite for elective reading and an adequate education. Contemporarily, such inspired motivation, disappointingly, is contemporaneously seen as archaic, compared to the ubiquitous modern desire to pursue a formal education, in pursuit of a profession or specific employment. Nevertheless, our lifelong aspiration for knowledge and understanding, as such, has continued to provide a sense of wholeness and personal fulfillment, the latter of cogent necessity and solace in our elder years.
The acquisition of a mature perception ( balanced objective knowledge) and its aspirational and ultimate prize, viz., wisdom, appears to be the successful product of a valid and useful understanding of ourselves as well as other human beings. It must be acknowledged that Man’s eternal quest for knowledge is empirically proscribed by the natural limitations of Man’s mental proficiency as empirically evolved and that temporally accepted explanations in the form of superstitious belief are retrogressive and demonstrably harmful to the progress and intellectual achievement of humankind.
Tangentially, as we view Man’s beneficial search for knowledge, ancient and present, we have, with the years, become dismayed at the widespread human inclination to conflate rationally attained empirical knowledge with atavistic adherence to superstitious belief. The ubiquitous pre-historic belief in a “Sun God” as an explanation for diurnal changes and the phenomenon of the disparate seasons. is illustrative and rational useful. A plethora of superstitious or non-factual”beliefs” have been conceived to explain phenomena, subsequently illuminated after rational and empirical inquiry. Empirical inquiry has inarguably proven to be far more developmentally useful than beating drums or chanting pleas to an unseen but presumed power. As a related but cogent matter, we might reference the ample historical record of injustice and human tragedy brought about by the militant human punishment and the plentiful existence of wars concerning the existence of “non-believers” of the temporal dominant religion. This blemish on the course of Man’s history shamelessly and reductively continues to date.
However, returning to the thematic direction of the present writing, we have observed a notable difference between those individuals who, by the dedicated application of their capacity forexperiential learning, as well as that derived from the written experience of others, ultimately enjoy the satisfying feeling of “awakeness,” and personal participation in the extant dynamics of human existence; having thereby acquired an individuated catalogue of their own lifetime of human existence. We have noted, over the several decades of our life, that one’s rationally enlightened knowledge of oneself, in tandem with an appreciation of the state of humanity, is the most productive human state of fulfillment.
It would seem that the appropriate awe and respect for educational enlightenment, evinced by our younger days, albeit, admittedly somewhat ethnic and unsophisticated, ultimately proved to be beneficial and satisfying. We can confidently assert that empirically acquired enlightenment is a product of Man’s knowledge of himself and empirical history and is the sole effective portal to Man’s personal acquisition of a fulfilling life and, ultimately, an improved world.
-p.
plinyblogdotcom 