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"The danger of knowledge - not its impermanence but to cling to what we know as if it were absolute" [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-01

This is a quote from George Kinder's Seven Stages of Money Maternity , in his chapter "Knowledge II: Planning, Props and Practicalities." Written almost 25 years ago, Kinder acknowledges that what he writes in that book, specifically as "financial knowledge" is likely to become outdated. As a Financial Professional, I write here sometimes cross-contextually. What Kinder wrote in 1999 is applicable to us today, if we pay attention.

"The danger of Knowledge is not its impermanence but our inclination to cling to what we know as if it were absolute."

I write this on New Year’s Day, as a series of thoughts on creating for ourselves what may well be a very challenging, 2025, or an empowering 2025, depending on how we go about it. The full quote, which did not fit in the title above, is:

"Knowledge is not wisdom, which remains deeply truthful despite the passage of time. Knowledge is impermanent; it changes, drifts away, fades, like fog or smoke."

I share this as a thought for moving forward into the New Year:

In philosophy there is a word, "reification." In the simplest definition, it is to take an abstract idea and consider it material or concrete. I use the verb "to reify" as to take impermanent ideas of philosophers and set them in stone, as if they would come to the same conclusion if they lived today. In other words, loosely -- not exactly, but close enough -- "to cling to what we know as it it were absolute."

To give a trivial, frivolous example in order to make this point, the Board of Disney Studios would ask, in the years after Walt died, in their decision-making process: "What would Walt Disney do?" This worked for a few years until the company started to stagnate, and they (almost) too late began to realize that

the world had changed beyond what Walt could have imagined at the time, and they could not imagine how and if Disney would have adapted his creativity to the new realities developing around them.

In short, ideas set in stone that are fixed in time are usually applicable in the time in which that concrete set, and often not in the future.

One of my mentors, Murray Bookchin, wrote an unpublished (yet) manuscript titled The Politics of Cosmology. I had the good fortune of being part of a study group in which he shared his ideas and chapters as he wrote them, as well as having a copy of the unedited, unpublished manuscript. Bookchin understood that philosophers did not write in a vacuum. Every philosopher and philosophy-- from Plato (Socrates) through Hobbes, Hume, Descartes, Spinoza, Hegel, Nietzche, etc; through the negative dialectics of the 19th century, to the positivist reaction to the negative dialectics in the 20th century; through Marcuse, Horkheimer, Adorno and the Frankfurt School for Social Research; through today -- every philosopher wrote their philosophy in the context of, and in reaction/response/acceptance/rejection of the political realities in which they resided.

And so, to be crass, we can look askance at America's "Founding Fathers" as "white male slave holders" which is entirely accurate. We can also see that "Originalism," a concept that has gained traction on the current US Supreme Court, is based on reified ideas, fixed in the late 18th century. Many are woefully outdated. At the same time, we can also see that, for that time, in that time, many of those ideas were, in fact, revolutionary.

As Buck O'Neil, the late Negro League player and historian notes of the controversy of whether or not Ty Cobb -- the early 20th century baseball player from Georgia at the turn of the 20th century -- was racist, his reply was, "Of course he was," because everyone from his time was racist to some degree, including Cobb's Abolitionist grandparents, and including his father, an attorney who actually did once stand in front of a jailhouse as an attorney and prevent a lynching, a real-life Atticus Finch. Racism was in the water and the air around them. It could not be escaped from, even by those who saw it for what it was. It was part of the medium in which they existed.

Every racist, sexist, homophonic, or transphobic thought held by an otherwise intelligent, often creative, possibly forward-thinking or even revolutionary thought-leader in the past was reacting/responding/accepting or rejecting the political realities in which they lived, within the medium in which they existed. Civil Rights leaders and anti-war activists in the 1960s, for example, only included women who made the coffee, and the secretaries who took notes. That does not negate all of the ideas, of course, of these revolutionary thought-leaders, though only by reification would we insist on accepting their "inherent" sexism along with whatever wisdom may have developed from them. Or, despite the dismissal of thoughts at the time of over half of humanity, who many of whom had profound and worthwhile ideas to contribute, and soon found ways to do so. Some of those ideas threatened the patriarchy, and some from that time (even those that have themselves reified) and many from today, still do.

Steve Hardison is a brilliant coach who once recommended a book to a client. The client told him that it was a bit too "Christiany", in the client’s words, for their taste. Steve's response was, "Think of it as a pizza; if you don't like pepperoni, take off the pepperoni, and eat the rest."

The flip side of that is when Fundamentalists of any particular religion reify their particular understanding of religious works, the tend to pick off the toppings they want to ignore while demanding that the rest of the world follow the dictates of what they decide remains on the pizza. As I heard Murray Bookchin, born a Jew from the Bronx, once say in conversation decades ago, "If 'The Sermon from the Mount' was actually what is Christianity, then I would be a Christian."

I also heard Bookchin say back in 1976, in response to a question about working within the system to create change:

"We don't work within the system. The system works within us."

And so it does. It is the medium within which we exist.

So, where does this all leave us for 2025? It leaves us where we started.

"The danger of Knowledge is not its impermanence but our inclination to cling to what we know as if it were absolute."

It leaves us recognizing that "Knowledge is not wisdom, which remains deeply truthful despite the passage of time. Knowledge is impermanent; it changes, drifts away, fades, like fog or smoke." And,

"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it."

For us, here, today, it means that, for 2025, we get to create our world and the people around us, recognizing that we change over time around them, and they change over time around us. We participate in their change, and our change, by creating ourselves, and them, in relation to us.

We get to attempt to figure out, as the Frankfurt School philosophers attempted to do as fascism envoloped Europe and, as Rachel Maddow in her “Ultra” podcasts and her book Prequel documents, many in America as well, just how the heck did that happen? How did this happen?

To understand this will require us to see the world differently, to recognize, as the saying goes, that what got us “here” will not get us where we want to go. Clearly, we did not want to get here.

Reification sets in stone some ideas and perceptions that no longer apply in our lives. To step back in order to attempt to discern what still applies and what does not is itself a journey, a process, that might take a significant amount of distilling. It is not enough to point fingers at those we may perceive as short-sighted, illiterate, bigoted neanderthals. It is not enough to repeat the joke going around Germany the day after our election:

“Question: What borders on stupidity?” Answer: “Mexico and Canada.”

As Greg Palast wrote in an email yesterday:

This is a dangerous moment, when progressives who gave literally billions for their candidates, cry into their beer and crawl into their burrows.

Yes, many of us have crawled into our burrows, licking our wounds. And today, New Year’s Day, this week, this month, it might be the time to examine, within ourselves, within our burrows, what ideas we hold dear have calcified into stone and clearly no longer work in today’s world? And how can we do so without pointing fingers, creating “straw men” or otherwise de-humanizing people who hold both power, and the ability to use that power to hurt us or those we love?

This process might be easy, or very difficult. It could possible involve forgiveness. It might involve self-forgiveness. It might require re-humanizing the other. It might require examining what has reified within the medium in which we exist, yet would be helpful to "drift away, or fade, like fog or smoke." It might involve social distancing from ideas, people or relationships that no longer serve us.

Or not.

It is no longer enough to “cling to what we know as if it were absolute.”

We get to create our world and all who are in it (recognizing, as Bookchin frequently noted, that "The lamb has no business lying down next to the lion." We can create our realities without winning "Darwin Awards" 😉). We get to choose the toppings, removing the metaphorical pepperoni if if does not or no longer serves us, and to add other toppings -- or even to insist that it be vegan, or gluten free -- for ourselves.

Or not.

I wish for you all to create a magnificent, compelling, enriching, prosperous, powerful 2025, full of freedom and opportunity for you, your loved ones, and for those you care about.

[END]
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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/1/2294669/-The-danger-of-knowledge-not-its-impermanence-but-to-cling-to-what-we-know-as-if-it-were-absolute?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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