Fashionable Minds
I immigrated to the US in 1991. I speak English well enough for most of my psychotherapy clients to not bother asking me where I am from. I've been here for exactly half of my life (I was 21 when I left Russia) and yet I consider myself largely "culturally illiterate" when it comes down to the nuances of the American Way. I know some but there is also a lot I don't know. Many of the pop culture references of the past twenty to thirty years are lost on me.
Minds of Significance
Cultural literacy is not civic literacy. Civic literacy is, for example, being familiar with the Constitution of the country you live in or with its government structure or its election process. I am not talking about that kind of literacy. Nor am I talking about political correctness and knowing the contemporary norms and standards of a given culture. I am talking about knowing who culturally matters.
So, who culturally matters? Actors and athletes? In my opinion, not so much. The political puppets of the day? Maybe. The barons of industry? Perhaps.
Who else?
How about scientists? How about dissidents? How about philosophers?
Here are my current favorites in the above three categories: Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), Noam Chomsky, Ken Wilber.
When I say "my favorite," I don't mean to say that I am in complete agreement with them. What I mean to say is that I consider these three to be "minds of significance." I consider them to be culturally awake. I consider them to be paradigm-breakers. I consider them to be "rascal sages" of the cultural moment.
My three don't have to be your three. Nor do you have to limit yourself to these three categories (scientists, dissidents, philosophers). Nor do you have to limit yourself to just three. There are tons of awake and sober and conscious people to choose from, there are tons of enlightened minds to follow.
But we - culturally - usually don't.
Instead we watch politicians read speeches that they themselves didn't write. Instead of following the minds of significance that can change our minds we culture-track body-changes (who gained weight, who lost weight, etc.).
Broadening the Scope of Cultural Literacy
Any writing of this sort can be seen as moralizing or as a sweeping generalization or as a criticism of the culture. I don't really mean it as such. What I am going for is an attempt to broaden your definition of cultural literacy. This is a call to know your scientists, a call to know your dissidents, a call to know your philosophers. This post is but a feeble attempt to make a simple point: minds-of-significance matter.
Know who is awake in your culture. When you culture-track someone like Lindsay Lohan running into trouble again and again and again, you know you are not watching a mind but mindlessness, you are not watching an awakening but a body-on-autopilot. When, however, you read about the turbulent and amazing scientific career of, say, Lynn Margulis, or about the powerfully unifying, paradigm-shifting ideas of Ken Wilber, or the politically gutsy analyses of someone like Noam Chomsky you know you are dealing with people who are existentially awake.
Don't get me wrong: you don't need to agree with any of these minds. That's not the point. The point is to keep exposing yourself to the minds that have the capacity to change your own mind. That's what I mean by cultural literacy. Cultural literacy is both the courage to open your mind and the curiosity towards those in the culture whose minds are already open. Cultural literacy - in my arguably subjective definition - is knowing who culturally matters, not just who matters to you; knowing who is awake, who is free, who is a pattern-breaker, who speaks the inconvenient truths, who is a trend-setter of consciousness.
Fashionable Minds
When it comes to our mind-ware, we all tend to wear flip-flops. We want to keep our opinions, we want to remain right or, better yet, righteous, we crave status quo, we don’t want the turbulence of in-depth analysis with its usual dialectics of ambiguity, we want fluff, simplicity and ease-of-wear. And that’s why we can spend inordinate amounts of time shopping for our bodies while leaving our minds naked and un-inoculated to the nuances of human consciousness. I challenge you to develop an appetite for fashionable minds. Not for minds that think like you and the rest of us but for minds that think like no one else. Not for the minds that program but for the minds that de-program. Not for the minds that disseminate cultural dogma (of whatever society you are in) but for luddites of dogma. Look for the inconvenience of mind-ware, for the toe-curling, arch-cramping high heels of unorthodoxy. Keep updating your mind-ware rather than running paranoid virus scans against the difference in opinion.
Mind-Ware
What do I mean by mind-ware? When I say “mind-ware” I mean a kind of software of the mind. Immanuel Kant, the great Baltic philosopher, long ago proposed that human mind comes pre-equipped with the so-called pre-givens of perception, with a kind of perceptual software. For example, according to Kant human mind naturally organizes sensory input about reality through the time frame of space and time. Doing so allows the human brain to form causal hypotheses and investigate reality through an organizing reference frame. If Kant was right, and I think he was, all of us, humans, have the same basic software that runs on the hardware of our brain. Mind-ware is another level of that. Mind-ware is a kind of acquired (learned) specific informational filter that runs your perceptions. For example, you might have learned to sort people into Democrats and Republicans and this kind of political filter creates a bias of perception that tends to confirm your treasured beliefs and opinions. Fashionable minds that I am talking about are paradigm-breakers. They challenge our habitual filters, they help to de-program our minds so that we can re-program ourselves by choice (as opposed to continuing to think the way we have been culturally conditioned). That’s the fashion of consciousness that I am talking about: you swap the jeans of your conformity for the parachute pants of the new wave of thinking. You try out a new way of looking at reality and maybe you keep it or maybe you keep shopping until you find a worldview that really fits. But – as part of your continued cultural literacy, as part of this life-long cultural re-education – you still keep tabs on the fashions of the mind. To keep progressing, so as to not become another throw-back of the mind. The cup of the mind – just like your coffee cup – needs to be emptied now and then and then to be washed clean of its ideological dregs. Call it cultural literacy or mental hygiene. The term doesn’t matter. What matters is the periodic renewal of the mind, a change of thinking fashion.
Stay open and updated, Fellow Mind.
