The Little Friar

I've spent a good deal of my life dealing with the notion of "mental illness".  It's not a secret that I'm on the Autism Spectrum.  That diagnosis alone comes with a host of attendant diagnoses of various additional disorders.  So I'm not one to downplay any particular diagnosis.  I know the suffering involved. That said, I'm struck by how often a diagnosis becomes a socially controlling thing in our lives. Enter Thomas Szasz . For those of you unfamiliar with Szasz's work, Thomas Szasz was the radical and iconoclastic psychiatrist who spent most of his life attacking the profession of psychiatry by arguing that "mental illness" didn't exist.  Rather, Szasz argued, "mental illness" was a social construct created so that society could use it as a form of social control via the medical and legal professions.  According to Szasz, mental illness was a myth as he wrote in his famous book The Myth of Mental Illness , pub...

Someone asked this morning:  How do the best teachers get to be good?   If you reject outright the platitude that good teachers are just born good (as I do), then you have a good stake in how you answer this question.  So, let me lay out a response. Inspirational teacher training is a long-term route to making schools and universities more inspiring places.  On the Renaissance philosopher Plutarch's view , after all, the mind's education isn't a vessel that needs filling, but it's a wood that needs igniting.  Fire spreads, so to speak.  So how to set teachers' minds on fire? The answer to this question all depends on who you're asking.  Oftentimes, teachers-in-training will respond with very specific and technical issues:  Teachers need (1) a clear sense of purpose with (2) engaging processes in their chosen curriculum.  What's more, teachers need (3) influence over the politics that make those curricula.  Along with (4) the abili...

We are, as Aristotle put it , defined by words.  Speech is uniquely human.  Thing is, we find it hard to talk, even with closest friends.  Even more so, with our lover. Take Mr & Mrs Hendy, from Monty Python's Meaning of Life .  We find the retired American couple at a restaurant.  Like many friends and couples, their conversation has all those awkward silences and half-spoken words.  I guess they didn't heed Nietzsche's words, in Human, All-Too-Human :  "When marrying, one should ask oneself this question:  Do you believe that you will be able to converse well with this woman into your old age?" To remedy the silence, the couple orders a conversation from the menu:  Philosophy.  "Have you ever wondered ... just why you're here?" asks the waiter to the couple, trying to help them begin.  "Well, we went to Miami last year," replies Mr. Hendy ingenuously, "and California the year before that, and we've" … "No, no, no...

Aristotle once rightly observed that ethical character is a matter of habits :  We are what we do.  Or, to quote him: We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Lots of us, in fact, want to believe we're someone else.  We usually say we're not really the miserable, grumpy, cynical, obstructive or unreasonable person we appear to be -- it's just that, right now , there are some extenuating circumstances.   The boss is being a Nazi.  Our childhood sucked.  Money's tight.  We just don't have the time.  It's not my problem.  We like to imagine we could change the world -- or at least our little corner -- if circumstances were different.  Inside our heads we're convinced that we're kind, forward-thinking, engaged members of society who, given half the chance, would be working to make the world a better place. Thing is, Aristotle was right.  We are what we do.  That miserable...