A Brave Experiment

“It seems, then, that nature has pointed out a mixed kind of life as most suitable to the human race, and secretly admonished them to allow none of these biases to draw too much, so as to incapacitate them for other occupations and entertainments. Indulge your passion for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have a direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.” Hume, “An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding”

A lot has been written about the World Wide Web. The Information Super-Highway was supposed to usher in a new age in which knowledge would be so widely available that it would revolutionize society. Society is waiting to see if the potential of this new development will ever be realized or if the Web will just be a means of providing an unlimited source of cheap pornography to lonely people isolated by an artificial society.

This book would have been impossible without the World Wide Web. The inspiration to do the reading which made it possible to write this book originated in E-Communities dedicated to discussing important issues, communities that could not exist without the Web. The quotes in this book are taken almost entirely from public domain E-Texts generated by organizations like Project Gutenberg http://www.promo.net/pg/ .

The book itself has been written by a High School Dropout with no formal, traditional academic credentials. The question is, is it possible for someone like that, provided with the resources of the Web to do or say or write anything which should command the respect of readers and thinkers inside Academe as well as regular people?

If you were doing an experiment like this, you might want to choose an exceptional person to write such a book. The author of this book has a long well documented history of very exceptional intelligence. He scores consistently in the top few tenths of 1 percent in intelligence. Without any college he took the GRE aptitude test. This test is specifically designed to be given to College Graduates to measure their ability to do advanced academic work. It is used as one criteria for selecting candidates for Masters and Doctoral programs. He scored in the top 1% of College Graduates in language skills and in the top 15% of College graduates in math skills though he had no formal College education. He used the scores from this test to join Intertel http://www.intertel-iq.org/ a club limited to people scoring in the top 1% of IQ, twice as difficult to join as Mensa.

He also took 9 GRE Subject examinations (they were offered free of cost through DANTES in the Navy). These subject examinations are designed by GRE to test the ability of College Graduates to do advanced academic work in specific areas. The USNY Regents http://pages.prodigy.com/TXKV53A/regov.html program accepts scores above the 33% on these tests as proof of knowledge in the fields tested sufficient to award a Concentration or Major in that subject. The author of this book studied for 12 hours for the test in Sociology and scored in the 92% of College Graduates in that field. Without studying for the other tests he satisfied the requirements for degrees in History, Political Science, Philosophy, Geography, Literature and Psychology. USNY Regents awarded him a degree with concentrations in all of the above but Psychology. The results from the Psychology test reached USNY Regents after his enrollment expired and were not included in his transcript or degree. He also qualified for a concentration in Education but USNY Regents would not take his experience as an instructor at GMS Dam neck as classroom time for a degree in Education so it is listed as additional credits in his transcript. He missed qualifying for a degree in Economics by a few points but has since read Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” learned economic history and spent many hours arguing economic issues on the Web. If these tests are valid, if they do show anything about the potential of a person to do advanced work in these fields, he should be exceptionally capable of doing such work. This book on Political Philosophy is definitely within the area examined by these tests.

The specific E-Community which inspired the reading leading to this book is the Great Books Café http://cafes.mirror.org/gbcafe2.cgi . This community stimulated him to begin a course of heavy reading which took him 3 years to complete reading 20 or 30 hours a week. He read “The Story of Civilization” by the Durant’s several time during this period. He would read one volume of the work and then read various volumes in the Great Books of the Western World that were written in the period described by that current volume. Since “The Story of Civilization” covers more than the Western Tradition he also read various major works outside the GBWW while rereading Volume one of the set. The works he read from the 1952 edition are; Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Lucretius, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Virgil, Plutarch, Tacitus, Plotinus, Dante, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Gilbert, Galileo, Harvey, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Milton, Pascal, Locke, Berkely, Hume, Swift, Sterne, Fielding, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Adam Smith, Gibbon, The American State Papers, Mill, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky. Outside the GBWW he read Confucius, Mencius, Chu Hsi and Tsu Lu “The Neo-Confucian Anthology“, the 13 Principal Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita, Sun Tsu, Seneca "Moral Essays" volumes 1-3, Cicero "De Officius" “De Re Publica“, Caesars "De Bello Gallica" and various anthropological works including “Patterns of Culture“ by Ruth Benedict. As he read these books he was able, because of the Web, to post comments on the various volumes read both to the Great Books Café and to an email forum maintained by Intertel and to argue and debate the material covered. This time spent amounted to one or two hours a day or an additional five or ten hours a week. This in terms of time required, material covered and stimulating discussion is roughly equivalent to a Doctoral program.

The reading was done in the old fashioned way using real books. The author purchased his copy of “The Story of Civilization” from a local second hand book store and the Web. Virtually all of the works in the GBWW are available online via Project Gutenberg or similar sources. The author bought a second hand copy of the 1952 edition for 99 dollars at a book store, and various second hand copies of the other works bought in local bookstores or found them by doing searches for specific volumes and authors on the Web. E-Texts are still not a substitute for real books if you are going to actually sit down and read them. They are tremendously useful for finding quotes remembered after the real reading has been done. The value of E-Texts in actually composing this book, providing the necessary quotes, and enabling the author to cite specific ideas is inestimable. The inspiration to do the reading, the ability to discuss the ideas involved and the ability to cite specific quotations all originate with the Web. This book would have been impossible without the Web. The availability of these works on the Web also made the question of legal use relatively simple as it was possible to verify that the material quoted fell in the public domain. Some modern authors are very briefly cited without specific quotes. A form of such and such an author in such and such a book said such and such is followed. This should fall easily under fair use laws of copyright.

In addition to these qualifications, the author of this book has a gritty practical life history which allows him to bring a real world experience to understanding his reading. He is a retired Staff Sergeant from the US Army. He spent 12 years in the Naval Submarine Service where he held a Top Secret SIOP ESI clearance. He completed the Auxiliary Police Academy in Virginia Beach and served as an officer for a few months. This background may make his style, approach, and some of his ideas seem a bit rough to more polished professionals. Indeed this book is not an attempt to create a doctoral thesis, but a collection of observations or essays on Political and Ethical issues facing America. The unusual qualifications of the author and the origin of the work may accidentally make it of some academic interest. In this context it may be considered as roughly equivalent to a doctoral thesis in political philosophy presented as a third party platform for an hypothetical third political party.

For those interested in such matters, his family has produced some relatively distinguished Academics. The authors Uncle Gerald Huff graduated with the highest scores in Math in the history of the college he attended. He became the Dean and later Dean Emeritus of the Math department in the State University in Athens, Georgia and made significant contributions to Chaos Mathematics. The authors Uncle Stephen Huff taught Literature at TCU. The authors Uncle John Davis was a Professor of History at the University of Houston. Though the author may be said to have come from a Black Sheep branch of the family, he grew up in a home with more books in it than were in the libraries of the schools he attended in Houston. Readers may therefore assume either nature or nurture or both as they prefer for contributing to any qualifications the author may possess to write a book. It is worth noting that his Great Grandfather Huff was a Texas Ranger.

During the period that he did this reading he worked as a Security Officer in various posts. The fact that the author could do these things on the salary of a Security Guard is a demonstration of the tremendous opportunity for personal improvement and education that the Web represents. If the author of this book cannot write anything deserving the respect of Academics using the resources of the Web, it is unlikely that the promise of the Web as a resource for people outside formal college and research institutions is false. If the author did manage to put together a book worthy of the consideration of Academics, it proves that at least for people with talent, the Web does provide an alternative to traditional advanced education.

Academics have a professional interest in not accepting non-traditional education. Their jobs depend on the existence of traditional Colleges and Universities. Any accreditation of non-traditional education is a threat to their careers. This book presents them with a difficult dilemma. If they dismiss the authors demonstrated intelligence and ability shown by the various GREs he has taken, they suggest that any average person could do as well as a College Graduate and answer questions in these fields off the top of their heads as well as any College Graduate. This would mean that College education in these fields is pretty useless. (Something that many people suspect is true of the so-called ’soft’ subjects.) On the other hand if they do not just reject him because of his non-traditional credits, they have to give those non-traditional credits some respect. This dilemma is unavoidable and individual members of the Academic Community must face it each in their own way.

No traditional academic body was in any way involved in the creation of this book. It is not a formal experiment but a sort of spontaneous product of the opportunity provided by the Web. The exceptional qualifications of the author suggest that even if he did manage to write something which deserves the respect of Academics, it is probable or at least possible that most other people still need traditional institutions of learning.

For many this book will be of interest, because of its origins and because it would have been impossible without the Web. It may be a sign of things to come, or it may not. The book and its significance in this context is something each individual reader must make up his own mind about.