I have been in academia for more than a decade. Before that, I spent two decades working in nongovernment organizations, government projects, and short stints in multilateral agencies. I have the privilege of a different experience outside of academia, and this column is about the differences in learning, acquiring knowledge and political beliefs, and the political divide.
The first hindrance in learning is facility in the language because most of science and knowledge are written in English. Like most Filipinos, we went to public schools, finishing elementary and high school just enough to learn the basics. With poverty and average abilities, we are lucky enough to finish our degrees in state universities or in local colleges. Many can barely write a sentence or a paragraph without mistakes in grammar and sentence construction, much more in articulating and expressing what is in our minds. Along with this is the inability to comprehend deeper meanings in reading materials from literature to social science writings.
Finishing mostly technical undergraduate degrees, our minds are accustomed only to a few and narrow logical structures of reasoning. Without exposure and benefit of the methods and logic of liberal education, plus the inability to understand readings in English, we are trapped in our narrow world and built realities. Ripe for dogmatism to thrive, engaging in fallacies, shallow social sensitivity, very little room in accepting diversity, and yes, prone to believing conspiracy theories. This is much worse for a large proportion of the population having less education. This is one political divide: the liberally educated thinkers who mostly acquired their education in top schools and universities vis-à-vis the rest of the majority. There is the tendency of freedom-loving liberals to become elitist in all manners of living and ideas compared to the rest of the majority.
With the political divides now in the US and UK, and in Europe, where the US is the most polarized, it appears that language facility is not a hindrance to learning. There is the drift towards an open and critical mind in understanding humanity and the world and be able to manage our affairs with less conflict. There is also the drift towards constraining the world between us and them, even eschewing science, coupled with the drive to use force and harm others. This is not anymore about differing language facility in learning. It is about our differences in social upbringing and values, how our family loved us, and how our communities treated us. In the language of brain science, how neural networks in the brain, brought out by social upbringing, are connected, and intertwined forming the persons we are. The motivation to learn and acquire deeper understanding of humanity and the world is acquired in our upbringing. Language facility is a hurdle but can easily be surmounted by the desire to learn more. Poverty can also be constraining. Religion plays a key role in shaping this motivation at a young age.
Neuroscience had unlocked the physical basis in the development of the human brain to our ability to adapt to new environments. At birth, a human baby’s neurons are unconnected. We are helpless unless nurtured by our loving parents, and by extension our communities and societies at large. We formed over a hundred trillion connections or synapses that will be continually pared back during much of childhood, shaping the brain itself to the environment. Our brains form fewer but stronger connections as we grow older, but it always opens for newer connections that correspond as we develop as a person.
We all grew up with different degrees of competitiveness and individualism, but we also spend much time cooperating for the greater good of our families, communities, or society at large. Competition may bring out the best in us, but it is cooperation in general that builds societies, brings progress, and civilizations. Cooperation is a function of how limited or expanded our definition and understanding of humanity and the world is, and how we defined and separated the like-minded us, and the others. It is founded on how we loved and are loved in return, how we are ostracized and excluded and how we reacted in return, or how we accepted and are accepted back in return. The algorithm in social media can exacerbate this divide. Our brains can be manipulated and programmed by political agenda of dehumanizing or making caricatures of the others to cement togetherness of like-minded us. Sadly, this is the world we are now. The call for “Unity or Pagkakaisa” by our political candidates appeals very hollow by the way that their army of trolls is fracturing our society by neural manipulation.
Mr. Joselito T. Sescon is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of Ateneo de Manila University.