|
INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION xliii |
||
|
Such an example is of course extreme and over-simplified, although it illustrates the principles. However, officially teaching such methods which are inadequate to handle evaluation, and so human values, has a definite sinister effect, among others, on the 'sex' life of the students. Many of them are taught to orient themselves generally by referents and operations only; and so mere physiological performance is often identified with mature love life, etc., and is a causative factor in the wide-spread marital unhappiness, promiscuity and other lowerings of human cultural and ethical standards.
Thus, theories of 'meaning' or still worse, 'meaning of meaning', based on 'referents' and 'operational' methods are thoroughly inadequate to account for human values, yet they do affect the nervous systems of humans. We must, therefore, work out a theory of evaluation which is based on the optimum electro-colloidal action and reaction of the nervous system.
There is no doubt that a civilized society needs some mature 'morals', 'ethics', etc. In a general theory of evaluation and sanity we must consider seriously such problems, if we are to be sane humans at all. Theory and practice show that healthy, well-balanced people are naturally 'moral' and 'ethical', unless their educations have twisted their types of evaluations. In general semantics we do not 'preach' 'morality' or 'ethics' as such, but we train students in consciousness of abstracting, consciousness of the multiordinal mechanisms of evaluation, relational orientations, etc., which bring about cortico-thalamic integration, and then as a result 'morality', 'ethics', awareness of social responsibilities, etc., follow automatically. Unfortunately our educational systems are unaware of, or even negativistic toward, such neuro-semantic and neuro-linguistic issues. These are sad observations to be made about our present educational systems.
May I suggest that readers consult Apes, Men and Morons and Why Men Behave Like Apes by Earnest A. Hooton; The Mentality of Apes by W. Kohler, The Social Life of Apes and Monkeys by S. Zuckerman, and many other studies of this kind. They might then more clearly understand how the aristotelian type of education leads to the humanly harmful, gross, macroscopic, brutalizing, biological, animalistic types of orientations which are shown today to be humanly inadequate. These breed such 'fiihrers' as different Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins, etc., whether in political, financial, industrial, scientific, medical,* educational, or even publishing, etc., fields, fancying that they represent 'all' of the human
* See Carrel's Man The Unknown. |
||