Learning: A very long story on many different sideroads
I have written that the large part of our brain is kind of an empty cavern and that most of our brain is not concerned too much with what goes on there. Well, of course, you don’t believe me.
That’s fine, because I don’t believe myself.
After all, is the portion of our brain that we are cognizant of and that we all presume is where we develop our thoughts.
But in actuality it has no memories and is not very “plastic”. Brain plasticity is what we call the ability of the brain to mold itself; or to acquire new information. Some portions of the brain however,actually become “closed” Our audio facilities always seem to remain plastic to be able to continue to hear input; however this is not necessarily true of the visual facilities. They become fixed to the types of input that our brains have learned is more necessary to process; or make available to us. It’s not that the visual cortex does not observe a lot, but our brains filter what we “see.”
One might have noted I am not overly fond of psychiatric definitions that develop not out of any observed testing and yet declare certain diseases of the mind can be diagnosed and “treated”.
It is not that there are no observed diseases of the mind…I’m sure everyone has observed the depressed person; and at least observed someone who appears to be disconnected from reality in a way that seems to be “schizophrenic.” Of course “minds” can become unhinged; but this unhingement is completely the result of the manner in which we attempt to modify behavior.
And so behavioral studies that have attempted to explain this through rigorous scientific testing that verifies the observations of behaviorists.
Burrhus Skinner stands out; but today contemporary neuroscientists, at least those who do not go into the field with preconceived notions have added tremendously to behaviorists’ comprehension by actually observing the brain.
Human beings, on an individual level, generally try to deny that their ideologies and actions have in anyway been modified; or at least they like to think they, as individuals, can resist these attempted modifications.
Yes we can train dogs to go outside and yet humans somehow don’t need to be “potty trained.” Well no that’s absurd…but they haven’t learned better yet…adults, however, should be able to resist modification, because we are rational and once we have learned (rationally) we will either behave properly or we will not behave properly.
As rational beings we have agency to be good or be bad and we are quite capable of learning; only some are more capable than others. What baffles me is that the excellent learner gets a Doctorate instead of a Platorate in their specialty because they now believe they know they are the only ones who no longer see the shadows on the wall.
So I am going to rewrite this next portion and shift it to a personal account of becoming “educated”--not mine, but I’m going to outright steal someone else’s words of becoming educated.
I attended very elite schools and I am neither bragging nor complaining, because I was from a blue-collar family that lived in the ghetto; a notorious Crip-Set known in Los Angeles as “the Rollin’ 60’s.” My parents, for whatever reasons (and they were many) decided that they would sacrifice for me to have a good academic foundation. I was often the only Black Person in the United States in many of my academic environments and even attended classes with four of The Brady Bunch kids, as well as other celebrity children.
I can not help but muse about how I would have felt differently about myself if it had been taught to me that the Statue of Liberty is actually about slavery, in large part. The antithesis of those hallowed and lofty words from The New Colossus. All the greater, I wonder how my European-Amerikan counterparts would have felt not only about me, but themselves. The information is readily available, would such a disclosure, especially in the formative years, been Critical Race Theory, the truth, or both?
Academic Subterfuge
Black Children in the United States are often stereotyped and equated with substandard academic performance. Not only European-Amerikans, but Asian-Amerikans, Latino-Amerikans, Arab-Amerikans and, yes, other Black People in the United States, are stunned when they encounter a well-performing black student. If I ask the average person in the United States to name a famous Black Person in the United States, I am willing to bet diamonds to doughnuts that they name an athlete or entertainer; no one in an academic or intellectual realm. The only exceptions to this might be Martin Luther King or Barack Obama.
The world’s first university is located in Africa; I was never taught that, hoity-toity education notwithstanding. I was a grown man before I became aware of that fact. Most people, including so-called African-Amerikans, cannot name ten countries in Alkebulan (aka “Africa”) though there are, now, 54. The 54 resultant of European exploitation and violence. Because, you see, initially there were just ten.
The Negro Act of 1740 legally codified the crime of teaching Black People in the United States to read and/or write, it also made it legal to murder them; something never assigned to any other people in the United States, ever. I can not help but muse about how I would have felt differently about myself if these facts had been taught to me, especially in my formative, most impressionable years. All the greater, I wonder how my European-Amerikan counterparts would have felt not only about me, but themselves. The information is readily available, would such a disclosure, especially in the formative years, been Critical Race Theory, the truth, or both?
Rapist Reverence
I often have mentioned the “founding father” Thomas Jefferson’s repeated rape of a 14-year-old black child when he was a 47-year-old man. Am I to think he was in love with this child who had no rights whatsoever? This is something that even my most ardent European-Amerikan acquaintances get very angry about, never stopping to think that if it makes them angry, how must I feel (especially being a man with all female children).
I was taught about Thomas Jefferson signing the Declaration of Independence, but none of my stellar instructors ever told me that the preamble “all men are created equal” specifically excluded those that look like me, my parents and my children. I can not help but muse about how I would have felt differently about myself if these facts had been taught to me, especially in my formative, most impressionable years. All the greater, I wonder how my European-Amerikan counterparts would have felt not only about me, but themselves. The information is readily available, would such a disclosure, especially in the formative years, been Critical Race Theory, the truth, or both?
Black People in the United States were officially equated with animals; something no other ethnic group has experienced in the history of the United States. Black Women in the United States were referenced as a “Nigress” on the auction-block (think Tigress or Lioness). Black Men in the United States were referenced as a “Buck.” A Buck is a zoological term meaning the male of a horned animal.
This was never taught to me as a child and, akin to the previous examples, I was a grown man before I learned these stark facts and can not help but muse about how I would have felt differently about myself if these facts had been taught to me, especially in my formative, most impressionable years. All the greater, I wonder how my European-Amerikan counterparts would have felt not only about me, but themselves. The information is readily available, would such a disclosure, especially in the formative years, been Critical Race Theory, the truth, or both?
The above was taken from a substack column entitled, “Lady Liberty Speaks The “Truth” About Critical Race Theory" by Rohn Kenyata.
Of course we are experiencing multiple behavioral modifications here. Mr. Kenyatta is learning how to learn as a white man by his family and yet his family is teaching him his value as a human to them which is why they are enduring some material pain in order to enable them to be educationally accepted by white people as their equal.
And yet, had Mr. Kenyatta not had the support of a black man he would have perhaps become Thomas Sowell who has learned through his education that black people are inferior and Mr. Sowell spent his life proclaiming blacks are inferior primarily because they don’t understand how superior the white man is.
Now I have to leave it with this idea of education because when we begin talking about individuals on a personal perspective I can’t really determine why my parents behaved as they behaved; but my point is to illustrate that our education system is designed to modify thought to conform with certain ideas of who is superior, and that achieving such a level grants one permission to continue to modify the behavior of others.
I might suggest that the way I interpret this result might not be the way either of these gentlemen might interpret the result of their experience within the “system of modifying a child’s learning through our system we call education.
But of course the modification begins earlier as the brain is making its earliest observations about its external environment and how the brain perceives the value given to it by the humans within that social environment and those humans relationships with others as well as their relationship to its external environment.
The brain needs to learn this value system, or what I am calling a value system, in order to begin to interact within this social environment. The brain’s primary function is the survival of the entity. The ideas you develop, the memories you design for yourself, your ability to relate to others and your future “educational acumen” are all being developed by the brain not to make you dumb or smart but to protect the existence of the beings under its care. What I’m framing as values, perhaps, are not what one typically refers to as values, but my meaning here is that your brain is developing your personality nearly in toto from the perspective of developing what fears and what aspirations it thinks will best serve the entity.
Now from both a behaviorists and from a neuroscientists’ perspective the vast plasticity needed for a human child to learn is not even in dispute except for a very minor minority whose work is rejected by ninety percent of the rest in the field.
This does not mean they have all the answers; what it means is that it’s not a conflict between environment or inheritance… personality begins developing almost exclusively by observation and these self-designing values. Thereafter genetics kicks in and the brain begins to mold itself into certain patterns of comprehension that include what one “sees” , what one becomes more “reactive to”, etc. Inheritance kicks in and shapes a personality.
I’m not suggesting the molding has stopped the learning process, no, what has happened is that it has developed the mode that henceforth leads to what learning it will pursue.
But it is not just differing environmental upbringings that create differing personalities. There are very intangible things that go into the making of a personality and the way it will mold itself to the information it allows itself to accept, or the manner in which it will interpret that information.
On the face of it, Mr. Kenyatta seems to have grown up in a ‘ghetto” in Los Angeles; but Mr. Sowell, in a ghetto in New York. Then it begins to diverge, Mr. Kenyatta is sent to a private school to learn, Mr. Sowell fails to finish high school and joins the Marines.
But how does that in itself explain the difference between their very opposite ideologies, not their behavioral actions, I know nothing of that in either gentleman; what we are referring to here is the behavioral development that whatever their experiences that led to the behavioral actions that might have happenstance; if I were to lay out to you just these two minimal biographies and where they diverged from their initial circumstances, it is likely if it were speaking not of individuals, but generalities of what might be expected, then we might suppose that Mr. Sowell and Mr. Kenyatta might have each have had the other’s behavioral ideology.
But this becomes the problem with comprehending individual human beings. Mr. Sowell was something just shy of remarkable in the 1950’s to proudly proclaim himself a conservative black man; his terminology, so don't jump on me for the label.
Of course that conservatism was welcomed by whites and he advanced very rapidly upon the editorial pages in American media. His ideology was basically poor people, primarily poor black people, were willfully poor and they retarded their own success by laziness In essence it appears Mr. Sowell accepted the stereotypical Stepin Fetchit (not the real Lincoln Perry who utilized the stereotype to insure others had to step in and fetch it for him). But every white person absolutely loved the character and it didn’t dawn on them that that very low perspective of the laziness of the stereotype is what enabled Perry to be able to fetch them into the movies so he didn’t have to fetch for anyone. (And apparently, sometimes as Lincoln Perry he had to battle the “bosses” of Hollywood, but so did others, and because no imitators could carry the role as well he became a millionaire).
But as civil rights began to demand pridefulness for the black man Lincoln Perry’s character came under attack. A documentary narrated by Bill Cosby really tore into the character Stepin Fetchit as an insulting characterization.
Of course if you actually observed his performances, the character he portrayed insulted the white observer because every time they ordered him to step in and fetch something for them he would make such a to-do and act such a fool he never quite accomplished the task and his improvisations of unwillingness usually ended up with the lazy buffoon getting the last laugh at his master.
And of course, that was why I thought it was funny, long before Octavia Spencer served up her shit pie to Hilly Holbrook, Lincoln Perry was serving shit pies and the white audiences, so ensconced in the conception of the reality of the character didn’t realize Stepin Fetchit had made the orderer end up doing, or completing the task.
But the white audiences were dense because they knew the only real Stepin and Fetchit’s were the fears that the black man could be utilized to take away their own industry because they were not at all lazy.
No black man was ever lynched for laziness, he was lynched for his industry. Schools were kept segregated so the black student could not become “smarter”; not because they thought he was dumber.
The principals that underlined Jim Crow and the the mass incarceration of black men was never because they thought they were inferior, incapable of stepping in and fetching it; but because they thought he might be more capable of stepping in and fetching it and the boss men that were needed white men to be dumb enough to believe they were smarter, stronger, and more industrious than the black man so and that these white men could come to think that any black man who would not step in and fetch it was an uppity bastard who needed to be beaten out of his willfulness; imprisoned or lynched. And if a boy from Chicago came south and whistled at a white woman, god almighty, the white man’s brain, that had been modified to fit inside his dick, panicked.
To survive as humans we must learn to modify our behavior. Contrary to the concept that humans can’t be easily modified in their behavior very easily, our entire infancy is utilized by the brain figuring how any particular human needs to have his brain modified in order to maximize his lifespan …but it’s job is not to maximize our intelligence except as a mechanism to enhance the prime task of the brain which is to keep the being alive.
Human learning is, therefore, a process of behavioral modification.
But as I’ve tried to illustrate with the quote from Mr. Kenyatta, he wants to know why he was not taught about Alkebulan culture. On the other hand Mr. Sowell suggests everything anyone learns about Alkebulan culture is sometimes a leftist plot to insidiously keep black-americans believing they are black. So although Mr. Sowell proclaims he is a conservative, he cries foul at the term black conservative. He cries foul at being black. Telling people they are black mires them in poverty and makes them unwilling to step in and fetch it to their benefit as if stepping in and fetching it is to their benefit.
({Not to become overly sidetracked, the ideal would indeed be a color-blind Cultural Amerika where no one was ever modified to be inferior to another. Even Sowell doesn’t suggest such a thing. Instead he suggests blacks are responsible for their continued persecution and that if they weren’t being led down the road overgrown with weeds they would become industrious enough to no longer be black.}.
What I am trying to get to here is that in the earliest initial stages of self and societal evaluation that these disparate evaluations were initiated. And so of course we speak in generalities that do not always directly correlate.
Mr. Sowell says he realized later in life the value of conservatism. But I disagree. What he learned in conservatism later in life was that, for whatever reason, his self that saw itself as a tiger could be unleashed itself thorough a “high-tech lynching” of his own making of his own self that preferred his ghostly remains of that self to project a self that castigates in generalities projections upon his own tigers of inferiority and creates a manifest reason that inferior is walked down the road into inferiority.
And there I applaud. The one thing Sowell actually understands is no one is inferior by creation but they become inferior by design. Or by a design that attempts to maintain the ‘superiority conception’ that can only be if there is an inferior.
Sowell, Thomas, Race & Economics, David McKay Co., 1975
Sowell, Thomas,"Weber and Bakke, and the Presuppositions of 'Affirmative Action'." pp. 37–63 in Discrimination, Affirmative Action, and Equal Opportunity: An Economic and Social Perspective, edited by W. E. Block and M. A. Walker. Fraser Institute. ISBN 978-0-88975-039-5, 1982