Francis Berger
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With a Sober Peasant Mind

3/6/2019

6 Comments

 
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Angelus - Jean Francois Millet - 1857-59
Józan paraszti ésszel, which means "with a sober peasant mind” is one of my favorite Hungarian expressions. The expression sometimes omits the peasant in favor of the simpler "with sober mind." In either case, the saying is the Hungarian equivalent of the English common sense or mother wit. Though I understand why many Hungarians omit the word peasant from the phrase today, I much prefer the variation that includes this word; the addition of peasant not only deepens the phrase’s meaning, but also serves as a kind of gentle reminder of the danger of substituting common sense and wisdom with abstract or factual information and data.  
 
Our information-saturated world is suffering through a harsh drought of common sense and wisdom at the moment. This is rather ironic because never in the history of the planet has so much data been available to so many people. The West has never had so many schools, databases, and libraries. Literacy rates are virtually one hundred percent in every Western country. Never have so many people held so many university degrees. The vast bulk of the Western Canon, the very foundation of our civilization is accessible online without charge. On top of that, the internet drips with more information than a city of ten million could collectively sift through in a century. So much data and information. So many enlightened, sophisticated individuals. Nonetheless, the readily available facts, crisp university degrees, and gleaming techno gadgets have created a paradoxical world of abundant information and scarce wisdom and common sense, which in turn has made our contemporary world a veritable breeding ground for stupidity.  
 
What is the source of our current wisdom/common sense famine? Put bluntly, the substitution of Reality with unreality. Factual information can be absorbed from books, schools, and the internet, but wisdom and common sense can only be gained through learning from lived experience. Unfortunately, the lived experiences of many today are nothing more than virtual experiences lacking a solid grounding in Reality. This lack of contact with the Real signifies a lack of true experience, which in turn creates callowness. A world without wisdom becomes a world ruled by theories, ideologies, systems, and political correctness credos.
 
This is exactly why I love the expression józan paraszti ésszel (with a simple peasant mind) so much. As it is everywhere else, peasant is a pejorative here in Hungary, so I can understand why it is often left out of the saying. The disparaging connotations of peasant include simplemindedness, boorishness, and uncouthness. Peasants were also uneducated, unrefined, and unsophisticated. All of this is technically true. Nevertheless, I maintain the word peasant must be included in the phrase for it to have full effect.  Pre-industrial agricultural workers were simple people and certainly did not need a degree in agricultural engineering to raise crops and tend livestock. Yet I would posit the world of the peasant is the inverse of the world we inhabit now – that is, the peasant’s world was one of scarce information but abundant wisdom.
 
What made peasants wise? I imagine peasants had an abundance of life experience; they lived their lives immersed in Reality. They understood nature, the Earth, the weather, and the elements. The seasons and the movements of the sun and the constellations in the sky measured their days. They possessed a keen awareness of their place in the world and lived in close contact with their families, friends, and foes alike. Peasants also had an intimate relationship with the life cycle – they witnessed the births and deaths within their communities firsthand. They probably possessed a simple but surprisingly thorough degree of self-knowledge. Most importantly, peasants knew God. Peasants were certainly ignorant of many things, but I surmise most were not stupid.
 
It is not my intention to romanticize or idealize peasant life, nor advocate for a return to some primitive form of agricultural living, for I am certain a great deal of this life was rather harsh, monotonous, and mundane. Nevertheless, whatever peasants lacked in material wealth or scholarly information they more than made up for in wisdom and common sense, which was essential to their very survival. Peasants knew imposing unreality on Reality was not only foolish, but also foolhardy. We in the contemporary world, on the other hand, do not recognize this simple truth. Residing firmly in the Real, peasants wasted little time on theories or abstractions. I imagine their wisdom and common sense also made them quite obstinate. In other words, if a peasant knew something to be true, there would be no way of convincing him otherwise, especially if all you offered him as proof were theories and abstractions. He would equate a denial of Reality with stupidity, regardless of how persuasively it was presented or through what authority it was commandeered.
 
This brings me back to my fondness for the expression, with a sober peasant mind. The need to evolve our consciousness and aim at higher things is a vital one, but our efforts to reconnect with Reality should not ignore or discard the sober peasant mind. The source of many society's ills emanate from our willingness to entertain and make compromises with obviously false abstractions that not only challenge Reality, but force us to accept the lie that Reality does not exist at all.

​For example, when a grown man with a full beard dons a tutu and declares himself to be a woman, the faculties of thousands of universities across the West rise up to defend the man's claim and demand we recognize something we know to be false. To back up their defense of tutu man, these university faculties will present studies, research reports, and clinical tests all designed to persuade us of the unreality of Reality.
 
Sadly, in our world of information without wisdom, the forces of unreality have been quite successful. Yet, if the faculties of the West exerted this kind of pressure on our peasant friend, he would merely smirk and then turn back to tending his crops. He might not have enough data to understand the arguments supporting tutu man’s claim, but he is wise enough to understand that they are all false, regardless of the authority supporting them.
 
We should all work toward developing consciousness as we strive to reconnect with Reality, but perhaps part of this development involves approaching challenges and problems with nothing more than a sober peasant mind.
6 Comments
Bruce Charlton
3/6/2019 12:23:49

What a wonderful, and pregnant, phrase!

You are certainly correct in your central argument - although I would prefer some word like 'data' or 'information' rather than 'knowledge' to describe what we currently have a lot of. In general I am Even More pessimistic about our situation than you are!

Real knowledge requires thinking, and thinking needs time, effort, honesty... otherwise we just get parroting; or recording and replaying. The amount of knowledge is constrained by the capacity of a single human mind - data dispersed around the internet, or teams, does not expand it by a molecule!

And - nearly always - the main constraint on knowledge is capacity for thinking, rather than lack of access to data.

People *Know* a lot less now than they did before the internet, and most of what they think they know is false and/or trivial.

When a student/ academic/ journalist assembles an piece of writing by cutting, pasting, arranging and editing the words of other people; they don't know anything more than they did beforehand - these are just secretarial skills.

We must indeed recover the sober peasant mind, and eschew the culture of deference and obedience to fake experts; and that seems to mean basing things on our personal experience and what we can each think through for our-selves.

Reply
Francis Berger
3/6/2019 12:35:16

Thank you for the great comment. You are quite right about the word knowledge. I have changed this to information/data in the post, which is what I was truly aiming for.

Information, rather than knowledge, is the mot juste here.

Thanks for the helpful feedback. It helped improve the post.

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Epimetheus link
3/7/2019 22:16:25

Exceptional post. It takes something special to deny all the modern authorities, all their studies, funding, power, peer pressure and propaganda techniques.

I could use some of that righteous peasant stubbornness. I guess the best sort of confidence originates in the Divine. Bruce wrote a while back that Christians should have a fearless Sublime Confidence. That's stuck with me.

One thing I notice is that the psychological need to be persuasive, compelling, logical, supported by the facts - this is a major weakness. It's as if focusing on Communication per se is the wrong way to think.

Maybe it's better to speak from the utter certainty of one's heart and soul, and discard all concern for how it looks and sounds to others

Reply
Francis Berger
3/8/2019 10:11:23

Thanks for the insights, E. I was attempting to show that "divine thinking" does not always need to be equated with complex "high" thoughts. Sometimes, a simple approach and a simple mentality toward certain issues is divine enough.

I don't recall reading BC's post on Sublime Confidence. I'll go look for it now.

Reply
Epimetheus link
3/8/2019 16:09:20

Here it is:
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2017/03/fear-is-sin-i-mean-existential-fear.html

Reply
Frank Berger
3/8/2019 17:18:37

Thank you, Epimetheus. Much appreciated!

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