Reviews by Hubie Goode: Secret Societies, Freemasons, Occult Knowledge, Who Rules the World? Part 5

Secret Societies

Part 5

Grand Lodges have now spread into other nations all over the world and influenced the societies of these nations to such a degree that the history of the world cannot be written without the inclusion of their influence. However, even the Masons themselves have come to admit that the forms of Masonry have over time become divided. There are those who have called for the “ancient chain” to be once again soldered together in order for the politics of the current age to be influenced according to Mason edicts once again.

In 1921 the first meeting of the International Masonic Association was held in Geneva. The next year, the leader of the IMA meeting stated in front of a world gathering: “My brother Masons, my hope is that Freemasonry, which has done so much for the emancipation of men, and to which history owes the national revolutions of 1789 and 1871, will also know how to make the greatest revolution, which will be the international revolution.”

By 1930, this powerful order included the Grand Lodges of Vienna, Belgium, France, Spain, Greece, Poland, America and many more. They have even had an obvious intent to infiltrate the governments in Latin America and undermine the Catholic power base in those countries. Why? For the same reason that the Grand Lodge of France encouraged its brothers, namely, in order for there to be a network of Freemasons encircling the globe.

Even Islam has not been spared of the encroachment of Masonic intrigue. Revolution in Turkey was sparked there also by the Masons who had become friendly with the Turkish military, and by 1908 they had deposed the government.

One enemy of the Freemasons has stated: “Freemasons have contended for the empire of the world, as few Kings have attempted. And to what end? To be the point of issue for all follies and all monstrosities, the Kabbalah, magic, Hermetic philosophy, communications with spirits, magnetism, Theosophy, Deism, Atheism, physical and moral regeneration, vengeance, destruction of empires, the Universal Republic. If we take away these ideas, what would remain is but a few honest citizens.”

Today there are millions of innocent people playing a part in the Masonic game, completely dumb to the truth of the organization they are ignorantly a part of. Freemasonry’s call to members and the subsequent subjugation of their freedoms and independence is really no different than that of Mohammed telling the slaves that he will set them free, or Adolf Hitler telling his people that they are the chosen ones. It is a divisive and destructive practice. It sets men against one another.

Freemasons argue that they are indeed not religious and yet they hold dear to the grand architect of the universe and have more rules, dogma and doctrine more complex and draconian than any on earth. They are indeed a religion and thus believe in divinity, their own transformation from man into divinity.

Since the beginnings the initiation into the order has not changed. It is still a system of control. A wolf in sheep’s clothing that states it is for the good of the people, by the people and for the people. They are not the conquerors who come with tanks and bombs, but the infiltrators who take the place of the man who works beside you at the office everyday.

Great works of charity are performed by all religions, including Freemasonry. But great works of destruction also come from many of the same groups, who then claim the role of hero when they rebuild the cities and towns afterwards. In the meantime, the first victims of war, the innocent, cannot be consoled or reconstituted.

One hundred years ago a reporter wrote in a publication that the Masonic chief of a lodge or order has little free choice as to his direction over the people under him, or the society in which he finds himself the inevitable influencer. His directions come straight from an unseen power above him, a massive “underground” government to which he answers. Since the beginnings, nothing of this relationship has changed. The laws of nations may try to prevent such “under the table” intrigue, but the Masonry has few worries as to their being impended in their prime directive. Those who hold positions of power have a knack for seducing the uninitiated into the fold with their contacts and abilities which mimic something of an old style Sicilian organization and they can in fact be called, in reality, “the Untouchables.”

Today there are many high ranking persons with great influence and power who are Freemasons, most are unknown to the every day masses. But they are also involved in altering the mind set and beliefs of the ordinary person and the whole society. Books such as “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” is one of these types of planned influences. Its author is indeed a Freemason. The precepts of the book take direct aim at the Catholic church and all Christian beliefs and then replace them with the ideas and directives of Freemasonry. Its child, “The DaVinci Code” is merely another shot heard round the world in this ideological battle.

There are also hundreds of United States senators and governors who are indeed members. Others such as Buzz Aldren, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ex President Gerald Ford, Henry Ford, and even Daniel Boone. There is a great web of influence, including many of the names well known to society from today and yesterday; and that may or may not be a coincidence, which if looked at from a distance can be seen in a rather shocking light in terms of the persons who have indeed influenced society from all factions. These factions include politics, entertainment and business, and many other areas where curiously, the leadership and successful organization beneath the leadership have the look of conquering success.

From the earliest times the orders have been involved in the worship of nature, the stars and planets. They created icons in rock and stone “Houses of the Holy” and claimed these houses to be the place where god was. One of these places made famous by The DaVinci Code is Rosslyn Chapel in Edinburgh, Scotland. It is in fact a structure devoted to nature itself covered in Masonic symbolism.

These works in stone are all known by the name “Masons”. It is the Masons who are responsible for building the stone houses of worship and rock deities which we know of down through antiquity. They have also placed sacred geometry upon the ground in places such as London and Washington. They seek to create a New Jerusalem which will result in their New World Order. Ultimately, Freemasonry seeks to also rebuild the temple of Solomon.

They also continue to worship the “divine light” which in coded Masonic language is indeed Lucifer himself, the morning star. The representation of the inner light is shown in the wearing of all white, which today is not at all that practical. Therefore, in replacement, but not in lesser importance is the wearing of the apron. This apron, it is stated, must be of the purest lambskin. There is widespread understanding that the KKK or Klu Kulx Klan may have indeed been started by Freemasons and was populated by a majority of Freemasons.

As for the beards, the very first Mason wore one as representative of a kind of “Aaron’s beard”, which when burned represented the inner light. Only the Master Mason was allowed to have the full beard, marking him as the “wise one”.

All the things I have covered here come to the world via a long historic chain of secret orders that have encircled the globe. They now influence politics, business, media and religion. They have caused revolutions, set up international organizations, and created numerous other sects and orders in the directive to achieve their purpose to influence humanity and create a New Jerusalem. A new Holy city.

This long invisible hand has left its powerful effects all over the world and its history, and is still alive today. The leaders of these secret societies have little use for your religion or political beliefs. They answer to a supreme father who runs the whole world wide network. It is a unifying creed and utopian ideal that is detested by fundamentalists across the world.

The choice is as old as time, as old as the first questions from the Garden of Eden. Whom do we believe? Like Eve, we can ask ourselves if what God says is the ultimate truth of our reality, or is anything anyone else tells us the truth instead. But unlike Eve, in our day and time, we may find ourselves pitted against the whole of the masses who have been manipulated once again to go off on a “Holy Crusade” to ultimately serve the nefarious machinations of the unseen powers of our society.


More on the story of these secret groups next time.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Secret Societies, Freemasons, Occult Knowledge, Who Rules the World? Part 2

Secret Societies Part 2

We saw earlier how many signs and symbols used in the secret societies evolved over time from star worship. The ancient word “Tzaba” may actually derive from an old use of the word which no longer exists, and may mean “many baptisms”. The pole star was worshiped as the creative principle which they named IAO, which also means “Isis” or “nature”.

From those earlier times the nature and star worship were intermingled. Stones and rocks were worshiped and considered a part of the greater universe, they were used to erect “houses of god”, each one contained a major place within for the heavenly presence. Nations from all around the world, Asia, Africa, Egypt and even those you might find surprising such as the Aztec nation and other similars were all used as a part of a world wide construct, or world wide “map” if you will of these “houses of god”.

Eventually the worship of the stones would fall into alchemy and there would arise such things as the “philosopher’s stone”, and also adding many spiritual and psychological meanings. All these representations, from the works in Egypt to the Mayans, seemingly on the other side of the world, were all different manifestations of the “god of light”. And when I say “god of light” I most certainly mean Lucifer and the Devil. Surprisingly, the number seven, used for perfection in the Bible, is here used to represent the number of colors in the spectrum that make up the color white, as well as the number of planets known at the time. In fact, there is a “holy meteorite” that is held in great esteem in the Muslim world even to this day.

The spread of Satanism was so successful that traces of it can still be found within modern secret orders. The Rosicrucians have some sacred grains known as “Elohim Tzaboath”, the dead are invoked and adored. One of their inner circle sayings goes, “I am the light of fire.” Secret societies often practice the invocation of spirits by using these types of divine secret names.

The bottom line of all this is that members are taught that man is connected to nature by a divine light that resides within himself. This divine light is the key to connecting to nature itself and must be awakened. Over time, the mind-bending level of energy needed to produce this state of connection was kept ultra secret by these societies, believing they had some inroad into ultimately manipulating this connection into serving their own ways and means.

This universal agent as they call it, can be controlled, say the ancients, and reality itself as a result. Don’t be surprised if one day you see the AntiChrist himself following this line of thinking as he proves to the world what is believed to be hidden since ancient times. He will be able to send thoughts around the world, give out words that will guarantee success, and heal at a great distance.

This unknown language, which can reverberate around the world, is completely unknown to most ordinary men and women. It has been used for millennia to proselytize people all around the world into their societies, and is usually revealed in deep drug hallucinogenic states. Not scientifically provable, this ability more so belongs to the types that are “Tibetan masters” who practice a kind of mind control that escapes the grasp of the common man.

Overt drug use, sexual depravity and types of BDSM, transcendental meditation and other similar practices, are all used to bring the mind into an altered state of consciousness in order to grasp this connection to nature, and the “light within”. This is a device that spread across the world in much the same way as the stone “houses of the holy” but was kept less obvious by use of secret rituals and hidden practices. From the drunken parties of Bacchius, to the orgies of Caligula, to the shedding of blood in the Aztec nation, and the self mutilation of the Gauls; all were expecting to gain a secret wisdom and thus advantage.

It would appear that all through history, there is a consistent attempt to become one with a “higher power”. If the self flagellation that is required in order to receive this special connection is still practiced, and in these societies it indeed is, then it is no wonder they are kept as secretive as they are.

Amazing symbols can be found in the esoteric writings of the Greeks, the Elysius as they are called. These secretive symbols actually come from ancient Egypt in its antiquity. There was a sacred phallus, not unlike the Washington monument, which was erected in honor of the virile part of Osirus (the sun god), and to which Isis ordered sacrifices and offerings. This is, in fact, the IAO, or creative principle worshiped from the very beginning by those who worshiped the stars. The phallus was a stone pointing upright to the northern star, giving homage. In India it is known as the “shiva linda” or “philosopher’s stone”. Whether Shiva or Osirus, the idea is the same, we are talking about the worship of nature, the creation, as though it were the creator.

Down through the ages the central idea has splintered and been effected by those whom have handled it, but the basics of the secret ideas are all pointing in the same direction. They can be broken down into simpler parts. The stars and planets directed man, and therefore they were worshiped. They offered navigation and measurement and solidified man’s place in the time of day. This heavenly process gave rise to tales of Osiris and Isis and much more, the sun and the moon and the cycle of life measured out by the gods. This powerful knowledge was ruthlessly guarded.

To communicate with what man thought were deities, he had to alter his state of mind. The process was related to the heavenly host which would guide his way. The priesthood, learning and developing the means to do this became quite powerful, and therefore had to be protected by an elite guard. The royalty of that day was given its power by the work of the priests and therefore, there was a tribunal gathering of king, priest and military. (Not unlike the predicted state of the coming AntiChirst with his religious leader by his side and the massive control of the military.) Civil servants were the sinews by which the body of the tribunal could interact and they had all the knowledge of the Kings and Priest and could also manipulate the military.

More on the story of these sacred groups next time.

Are We Really in the Dawn
of a New Age?
Part 3

Let’s continue our study by looking at the issues and subjects that are relevant to us today. John Dewey was indeed hard to understand on these points at times, but all too often he did indeed present these ideas candidly and in great detail. For one thing he had no faith in eternal truth. He believed that the closest you could come to eternal truth was in philosophy, that philosophers were often the creators of the future but most assuredly the creatures of the past. As we all are.

True to his own form, Dewey uses other terms to espouse his own inherent atheism. Cloaked in terms of philosophy and murky logic, he again and again denies the existence of God or an eternal truth of God’s word. Meaning is more important than truth, was his mantra and he felt that philosophy was more concerned with meaning than truth. Placing some type of separation between meaning and truth can be risky, as eventually you’ll have to prove that such a thing can be done, for how can falsehood have any meaning or function if you are a person who is concentrating on results rather than mechanics. This is just one more example of the grey area of logic that Dewey, a man who influenced the world of education, convinced the world of his “genius” with.

For this sort of thing, Dewey was known as an “instrumentalist”. Education and all other activities for him were to be evaluated by the consequences experienced by the person educated and not by their truth content. For Dewey, there was no content in truth. Dewey believed that the ultimate problem in production was the production of human beings. In my opinion, this is an obvious point put forth as though it were some kind of new rational, for without the humans to build the machines and run the machines, in all their faulty, mistake riddle ways, we would have no production at all.

Dewey felt that any final formulations of truth often lead to disaster for mankind, and he stated past historical activities related to what he called “dogma” as evidence of this fact. He once said:

“A great tragedy of the present situation may turn out to be that those most conscious of present evils and the need of a thorough-going change in the socioeconomic system will trust to some short cut-way out, like the method of civil war or violence. Instead of relying on the constant application of all socially available resources of knowledge and continuous inquiry, that may rely upon the frozen intelligence of some past thinker, sect or party cult, frozen because arrested into dogma.

That intelligence, when frozen into dogmatic social philosophies , themselves the fruit of arrested philosophies of history, generates a vicious cycle of blind oscillation, as strategically exemplified by the present state of the world.”

So, pray tell, what is the answer Mr. Dewey?

“But an immense difference divides the planned society from the continuously planning society. The former requires fixed blueprints imposed from above and therefore involving reliance upon physical and psychological force to secure conformity to them. The latter means the release of intelligence through the widest form of cooperative give and take. The attempt to plan social organization and association without the freest possible play of intelligence contradicts the very idea of social planning. For the latter is an operative method of activity, not a predetermined set of truths.”

Thus the trail of ambiguity left by Dewey infects all aspects of education today. How the world could have greeted a man who only raised questions but abstained from providing concrete answers as some sort of new age genius is a deep mystery. Eventually the world got wise though, and came away with the impression that Dewey was indeed a thinker, but only a thinker.

Dewey continued to speak all over the world, however, especially on the education system. He felt that education must move one way or another, either backwards toward the intellectual and moral standards of the pre-scientific age or forward to ever increasing utilization of scientific method in the development of the possibilities of growing, expanding and experience. Dewey loved that word experience and when he would speak of the “forward” method he would use it consistently along with “growing”, “expanding”, ....”change”. (Sound familiar?)

He believed firmly in the “experimental method” when applied to education. The current educational system, for him in the late 1800’s, was a failure. He believed a total revamp of the system was desperately needed. He also felt that there were inherent problems with education being solely focused on the promotion of literacy, i.e. the acquiring of skill in reading, writing and figuring. Educators of the past, he said, lacked uncanny insight and imagination in not seeing any other way for education to be performed, and this included higher education.

Historically, higher education was focused on foreign languages and mathematics as the core of education. These were the springboards toward all other education and would equip the student to find greater success in anything else they studied. Schools presented facts to students and then returned respect for conclusions drawn by students in relation to those facts. Dewey was against this sort of thing, as he believed that it was too parochial of an exchange to quickly give information and then derive new information from a set of facts absorbed by the student. Instead, he favored drawing conclusions apart from the facts as a gateway to higher thought. Education became a democratic process instead of developing concrete tools for dealing with the physical world around the student.

Little could he have imagined the influence of the democratic process on that of education as it has produced a society of lower achieving students who think they know everything. He believed that schools should be about producing social change, much in the same way that the ancient Greek philosophers sat around all day postulating man’s existence while other people did the hammer and nails work that put together the city they could sit around and debate in. For Dewey, since change was constant, education had to be constantly changing. He felt that this was a “modern” and “progressive” way of seeing the educational process and anyone who disagreed was operating from an ignorant fear.

His thoughts on the subject of Religion:

“Science has the same spiritual import as supernaturalism; that democracy translates into the same religious attitude as did feudalism; that it is all a slight change in the phraseology, a development of old symbolisms into new shades of meaning - such beliefs testify to that torpor of the imagination which is the uniform effect of dogmatic belief. The reconstruction of the church is a matter which concerns, indeed, the whole community so far as its outcome is concerned; while the responsibility for its initiation belongs primarily to those within the churches. The burden of conducting the development, the reconstruction, of other educational agencies belongs, however, to the community as a whole. With respect to its intellectual aspect, its philosophy, it belongs especially to those who, having become conscious to some degree of the modern ideas of nature, of man and society, are able best to forecast the direction which social changes are taking. It is lucidity, sincerity, and the sense of reality which demand that, until the non-supernatural view is more completely elaborated in all its implications and is more completely in the possession of the machinery of education, the schools shall keep hands off and shall do as little as possible.

We need, however, to accept the responsibilities of living in an age marked by the greatest intellectual readjustment history records.”

Dewey rejoices in the idea of society and education moving from a focus on the supernatural to the non supernatural. In other statements Dewey comes very close to calling religion a social faction, and in that way categorized a major strain in society that had been around for several centuries to a lower tier of social importance below that of science and societal development.

Dewey continues:

“But of one thing I am quite sure, our ordinary opinions about the rise and falling off of religion are highly conventional, based mostly on the acceptance of a standard of religion which is a product of just those things in historic religions which are ceasing to be credible. So far as education is concerned, those who believe in religion as a natural expression of human experience must devote themselves to the development of the ideas of life which lie implicit and are still new science and are still new democracy. They must interest themselves in the transformation of those institutions which still bear the dogmatic and the feudal stamp (and which do not?) till they are in accord with these ideas. In performing this service, it is their business to do what they can to prevent all public educational agencies from being employed in ways which inevitably impede the recognition of the spiritual import of science and democracy, and hence of the type of religion which will be the fine flower of the modern spirit’s achievement.”

How familiar is this? The religion that must now be put forward is the spiritual import of science and democracy. Sound like America to you?

Dewey shows his near utopian attitude about the progress of history, and as anyone reading the newspapers will tell you, we certainly have a problem with ideology in high political offices. The best way for progress to be achieved, he thought, was by influencing the content of education.

Before we get into the long term results of Dewey’s influence upon our world today, let’s just summarize his main ideas.

1) Final truth is illusory.

We live in a world that is ever changing and the only thing you can count on is change. With this idea Dewey stood in contrast to epistemologists who held any concept of eternal truth. And like wise, he stood against “the doctrine of objective value”, postulated by C.S. Lewis in his tome, The Abolition of Man. In this book he stated, “When we deny the doctrine of objective value, we must as an inevitable result finally produce the destruction of humanity.”

For Dewey, all of reality is merely in the mind of the observer. Nothing is valuable or true unless it means something to somebody... somebody human. However, the mind of man is teleologically oriented, and must have purpose and reason. To live on the edge day to day with no grounding is madness to the human soul, and has resulted in some of the most baffling bewilderments and confusions of all time. If reality begins with people and ends with people then you have nothing but circular thinking, which has no anchor in final truth.

2) We must not consider truth but meaning instead.

Truth is restrictive and inconvenient. Meaning is better because it is the facts interacting with the dynamic of the moment.

Dewey’s insistence on meaning brings about a shifting sand of logic to stand on. When a word means something to you and another thing to me, and yet they are both acceptable, chaos is born. Truth on the other hand has a universality that anyone anywhere can stand on, when you remove it, you can eventually give let to any and all impulses as having merit. This can lead to passing laws for legalized murder, with those of the society who are the least defensible paying the ultimate price. The word meaning may sound sublime in light of using the word truth, but it only fosters the fog of misunderstanding and incomprehension.

3) Truth is resident in experience.

The truth of simple syllogisms that are contemplated by the mind, but not experienced in reality is to be denied. Experience, sparked by interest creating teachers, and rewarded by realization is what education is all about. Information can only go so far in its relating to the student the truth of a situation, thus the lecture method was devalued by Dewey in favor of education as experience and visa versa.

Thus due to this ontological view of the nature of experience, Dewey subverted nearly every faction of everyday life, including religion, with existentialism. In the years since, the spirit of the age, influenced by the doctrine that truth is experience, has brought forth ideas that would have been thought the height of madness in the past. It wasn’t too long before society decided that happiness, fulfillment, the thrill of the moment, and even anticipation (it’s making me way-yay-yate) where more desirable than black and white propositional dogma.

If truth is equivalent to experience than answer me this: What kind of experience? Since my experience can be different than yours in any different circumstance, how can we define experience at all? This is the practice of imaginary thinking that has polluted out educational system. When we ascribe that truth equals experience we being an emotional questing that has lead to a world which is more unsettled than at anytime in history.

4) Teaching fundamentally depends on experiment.

There is no final methodology, anything can be done in anyway as long as you find results. The ends justify the means, in both educational revelation and also in progressive life acquisition. “Give it a try and see what happens”, is the motto of the day. You only break the law... if you get caught. (Go ahead and take a bite of the forbidden fruit, who knows what will REALLY happen?)

School has ceased to be the place where your kids go everyday to learn objective truths about reality so that they may act wisely and responsibly tomorrow. Instead, it has become a testing ground for any and all new ideas to come from the powers that be “just to see what happens”, and our kids are the ginny pigs. School today is all about finding the truth that we get today and seeing what comes from the experiment of tomorrow.

Busing is a prime example of this thinking. Some sociologist put forth the idea of changing society by equally distributing kids all around the city so as to fill quotas and influence experience and open up social contact; this is not, however, an incentive to better education.

5) The idea of “God” has meaning to those who believe. Religion however, must be reformed to serve mankind.

Everything has to be redirected to facilitate democracy and freedom. God must remain a serviceable concept that serves the moment and not something written in stone. Dogma was anathema to Dewey. He did believe in teaching Christianity in schools, but was as usual, he was fuzzy as to what Christianity was, citing the multiple fractions of Christianity that had, by their own default, made the teaching unsuitable and unprofitable in public schools.

In Dewey’s opinion, God was a unifying force between the ideal and the actual. Results were everything, and if a group succeeded due to a set of religious ideas, then the process could be accelerated by removing those ideas which connect to the supernatural. In a sense, if some activity while serving God results in visible success, then you’ll have even more success and be quicker about it if you just lose the original God element.

The New Age Movement loves this sort of thing, for it makes God a “spacey gobble-de-goo” of the universe that is there to serve man in whatever fashion man sees fit.

Dewey was indeed a positive, forward thinker, who did outright reject fundamentalist religion. He did however, find a place for almost every strain of new thought that dared to come along and enter into his view of the universe. One might say he was the father of “the vast emergence” of ideas that broke upon the 20th century like a flood of locusts and soon entrenched themselves within the machinery of the American educational system.

So what have we gotten as a result of all this new age education and thought in our world today? What is the afterbirth of the dawn of the new age?

More on this next time.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Are We Really in the Dawn of a New Age? Pt. 2

Are We Really in
the Dawn of a New Age? Pt. 2

As I said in our last installment, the “new ideas” of the new century found their way into the educational system of America. How did this happen? Well, there are many in causes, of course, but the single most prominent one came on the scene in a then current day educator named John Dewey. He, more than anyone, was responsible for major transformations in the way education was done and the attitudes toward it.

Known as “America’s foremost philosopher and educator”, he was responsible for refashioning the educational system here in America and moving it past the static perceptions of the past (his past anyway) and he redefined everything. The nature of truth, the responsibilities of a teacher and also the capacities of the human personality, were all changed forever. His pervasive influence changed the future of America and then also effected the way students were taught in most other countries as well.

A “genius” of his day, his ideas lasted through a fifty year period where he performed his capacities as a seminal thinker, voluminous writer and OCD type organizer. He became a leader in the world of “new thought”. The idea “the way the world thinks” can be ascribed solely to this man, John Dewey, for he more than anyone made education what it is today.

In the overall scope of things, his life was relatively unexciting, for he wasn’t a war hero or a great leader of a nation, nor was he the inventor of some life changing item or miracle drug. No, he was just one of the many who lived an ordinary life in his day, but he did do one thing. He won a war that happened behind the scenes, one of ideas and thoughts, and introduced these ideas to the youngest of the up and coming generations for the majority of his fifty year span of influence. He won a battle for the mind of mankind.

Indeed, for Joseph Stalin said it best: “Get them when they are young.” In this respect, Dewey did exactly what is needed when waging a war for the world itself, he won over the way mankind thinks. The struggle for tomorrow is not going to be one of tanks and submarines and legions of armies, for those battles are merely the result of earlier battles waged within the minds of the men who ordered them in an attack or in defense of some closely ascribed to thought that had existed previously. Millions throughout history have found their final resting place far out at sea, or on some desert dune, or in a deep Asian jungle simply because someone else, someone in a far more powerful position than they, failed at intellectual or moral persuasion.

Remember this when the coming Antichrist hits the world scene in the not too distant future, the opening salvos of any war are the public announcement that the earlier spiritual, intellectual and mental battles have all been lost. John Dewey was a chief contender in history in the battle for the mind. But unfortunately, he too, was on the wrong side of the battle.

Born in 1859 in Burlington, Vermont, he was a shy and bookish young man. In 1875 he attended the University of Vermont and soon became enamoured with philosophy and social thought. He didn’t see philosophy though, from a classical point of view. As a rule, philosophy addresses certain questions and points of view on life and then directs answers to those questions according to specific schools of thought. Dewey didn’t see things as being so parochial in their application, instead he saw philosophy as a sort of swirling maelstrom of ideas, issues and concerns that was ever changing. For him there was no thought or idea that could be foundational, nothing could ever be settled. There was NO one truth.

While in University, Dewey was greatly influenced by Hegel. Initially influencing Dewey in the area of idealism, Hegel was also a major influence on other well known historical figures such as, Karl Marx, and Kierkegaard and others who would become influential in a later age. Therefore, Hegel can indeed be counted as one of the major influences of today’s western thought.

Dewey received from Hegel a sense of the ideal and the concept that reality was not a fixed and hard rule. For him reality was an emergence, a development and not a fixed thing that is unalterable. As a result, reading anything by Dewey can be an exhausting exercise as his many ideas are often fluid and hard to pin down. He would often deny a given proposition and then also refuse to admit the opposite of the same proposition. For Dewey, reality and answers were something in between the two extremes, but also something NOT between the two extremes. As a result, truth for him was not a static proposition, but a result of measured social fulfillment.

As Aristotle spun in his grave over this sort of thing, his then contemporary followers found Dewey somewhat hard to categorize. Although a philosopher, he was not the father of any school of thought, although one might argue for the school of confusion. He was an educator, but not one who taught any kind of static truth. He was an administrator who was more concerned with outcomes rather than mechanics. Therefore, terms such as provisional, experiment and unpredictable were linchpins of his thinking and methods. Most of his written material could be quoted for both sides of any argument, for he found the grey areas to be what the whole was really about and all things were adaptable to whatever reinterpretation was appropriate for the day or the hour.

Surprisingly, Dewey made his education by being involved with specifics, as he taught science and algebra on the high school level before attending John Hopkins University. Graduating in 1884, with a doctorate, he presented his thesis and dissertation on Immanuel Kant. Kant, a proponent of moral relativism, as you may recall, was famously quoted on his view of life as: “Eventually, we all die.”

Dewey became increasingly dissatisfied with philosophy and its inherent unpractical use for the every day man. He attempted to make it relevant to every day life and as a result, his views on economics, politics, and social views became more and more radical.

Ten years later in 1894, he became chairman of the Department of Education, Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Chicago. There he took great part in social welfare activities, becoming a benefactor for Jane Addams’ Hull Hose. There he involved himself in the economic and social problems of a major urban area, and cemented his conviction that philosophy must be practical. He then founded the Dewey School, and wrote important books on education, the likes of The School and Society and also, The Child and Curriculum.

Graduating, as it were, from his work in Chicago, he was offered a chair at Columbia University in New York. Once in this influential position, he gained prominent influence for his positions in education and philosophy until he retired in 1930. The Columbia Teacher’s College soon became a training center for teachers from around the world. This resulted in Dewey’s ideas being spread all around the earth.

New York was then as it is now, the journalistic and media center of the nation. This gave Dewey the opportunity to write volumes of columns that put forth his political and social views in magazines and newspapers that came from an important media nerve center. He also traveled the world, lecturing in places such as Tokyo, Peking, Turkey, Russia and Mexico, where he would find education centers to spread his radical ideas which were considered at the time a radical ethos.

Dewey accomplished so much, that a published bibliography was over 150 pages long. So diverse were his writings, that his influence made an impact in every field of intellectual inquiry. Dewey’s writings were not so much indefatigable as literary pieces as they were, much like the speeches of Adolph Hitler, a call to the deep inner aspirations of his fellow man.

Therefore, as a cheerleader presenter and speaker that could capture the zeitgeist of his audience, Dewey became thought of as a man of all knowledge. He was considered a supreme intellect who could provide all the answers relevant to the modern world. For many years Dewey was considered the prime educator of the world, a concept he kept in motion through his many writings that flooded the world of the intellectual reader.

So, having outlined all this, what shall we say are the ideas that we today hold to be infallible truths and ways of education and thought which can be followed directly back to the influence of John Dewey, influences we take today for granted that actually had their birth in the mind of one lone man?

More on this in our next installment.

Reviews by Hubie Goode: Are We Really in the Dawn of a New Age?

Are We Really in
the Dawn of a New Age?

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a prevailing question kicking around the western world, namely, had our existence entered a new age? There was this palpable sense of wonder and potential that all of mankind had entered into a new and abundant breadth of vision. All of nature seemed to be flowering into something it wasn’t before, leaving behind the dark ages and entering into a euphoric optimism about the new “fabulous century”.

This new attitude of mankind grew from many streams of influence, these streams were believed to be genuine and world changing by the great thinkers and every day man on the street alike. The influence that those of that time observed appeared significant and world changing and in truth, there was some accuracy in that idea. But few of those influences in the course of history have provided those changes as they were believed to provide, or would provide.

The influences were many, and in the nineteenth century the west was moving from a feudalistic attitude and practice to the great change in culture called the Industrial Revolution. Knights and catapults were replaced by steam engines and the classes that streamed to work on rail roads across America. The horseless carriage, the machinery and the primary machinery to make secondary machines, all seemed to make enough of a bright promise that centuries of old ways of doing things were tossed aside like so much chum. Modern machinery turned the back breaking work of thousands into a simple one man operation on a machine. Naturally, of course, to see this was to anticipate that a time of unprecedented leisure was coming upon the world. Contemplation would now be the work of mankind as now machines were here to do the work of many.

This hope of an easier future for mankind was one of the perspectives that made ignoring the sweatshops and other exploitations of labor which became common place in those days all the more comfortable. Idealism was now the linchpin of popular thought (what was cool) and the false parachute of the poor was an assumption that all their troubles would soon be over anyhow as mechanisms became the “servant android” of society. Hope found in the “well to do”, feasted upon the patience of those who were downtrodden and exploited.

These times were also generally peaceful days, and it was a “knee jerk” response, if you will, to glorify the growth of industry as the prime provider of those good times. The Civil War had brought about some of the worst carnage and in-fighting ever seen in America, and in many places of the world at that time, and it was all quickly forgotten as it was sublimated to the collective consciousness of the society at large. It was, instead, relegated to the realm of the heroic and seen as a precursor that brought about the new industrial age, and therefore, it was not so much a tragedy in retrospect as much as it was a necessary evil.

Let’s be honest, every election year we are reminded of the forgetfulness of the populace at large, as we vote for one party and then the next as we are disappointed again and again with promises of change while we still talk about the war and the economy and jobs and such, only to vote for whomever once again promises change. This is also a historical fact as each generation often forgets the horrors that came before it from failed policy and the inherent flawed traits of mankind which consistently fail to live up to the ideals set forth. This makes it possible to repeat the mistakes of former societies and nations as people insist that ideas and policy are progress and not the death trap that past societies experienced with the exact same proponents. Homosexuality and abortion being prime examples.

The world of the twentieth century was one filled with anticipation due to the philosophies that had become popular at that time. The early 1900’s saw Darwin’s ideas become popular, and evolution was well on its way to capturing the imagination of academia and the thoughts of the common man. There was a grand social belief that all of society had begun to rise up from the gross and animalistic life of the last several hundred years and mankind was now flowering into the sublime and even perhaps, the angelic. Anyone could deceive themselves into believing that natural selection could, and indeed had, selected them. Natural man could see himself as the new custodian of history as each person looked around himself and said in his own heart, look at what great things man has done.

Social Darwinism was gaining fast ground as it convinced the populace that no problem was beyond their reach to solve. Humanity had a potential within it that could do anything if given enough time. Naysayers and pessimists were left behind as it was stipulated that nature itself had made it possible for progress and fulfillment to be accomplished beyond all of mankind’s wildest dreams.

At about this same time, the Christian religion was being discarded as a litmus for corrective theology and found itself to be inadequate to stem the rising red tide of humanism. The strong preaching of cardinal Christian doctrine relating to original sin would have indeed proffered much, but unfortunately, Christianity at large had abdicated its role and began to cooperate with the golden apple promises of the humanists. Teaching on cleansing through the Blood of Christ was now seen as more and more anachronistic in favor of salvation through restructuring of the society as a whole. Some of this change was seen by the common populace as a natural changing of the guards in much the same way we traded steam engines for the old horse and wooden trailer. Education and inspiration were now all that was needed to bring mankind into a new world, man was no longer a shamed sinner in need of a savior, all he needed was the improved works of his own hands and the potential of his mind. The parallel between machines of the day and clay images of yesterday suffered a grand cognitive dissonance.

This is not to say that the attitude of the religious establishment at that time was not all that understandable, for there had been significant revivals of religion in the past. Those revivals however, were never characterized by intellectual or theological content. Many people were brought to the knowledge of Christ, but they were delivered there by simple preachers with a simple Gospel for the common people. The era just before the turn of the twentieth century brought about an earnest faith within those saved, but it did not provide a broad view of God and the World and the relationship they shared. The common people of the time had great revivals but the ranks of academia of those days were negligibly involved.

As a result, the great missing link in Western thought is the Christian viewpoint. Today’s populace considers economics, government, education and thousands of other things with hardly a glance at what God himself would say on the matter. Unfortunately, the lack of a focus upon that question, “What does God say about this?”, has lead to some frightful disasters or “weeds” as it were in the garden of promise that was foreseen for the twentieth century. It has brought into existence the greatest intellectual confusion, moral myopia, and flat out carnage that has ever been seen by man. We hardly need to be reminded that science without God had produced a world where one country with the right weapons of mass destruction can bring about a war that could decimate the Earth many, many times over.

Also at this time, the ideas of Karl Marx, and his promise of a new philosophy, new thinking and a new future were taking root. These new thoughts also promised a new society to contain this increase in knowledge, an increase that would have boggled the minds of western Europe only a few hundred years before.

How was it that these new ideas were so readily and speedily ushered into our social agendas in such a short amount of time? Emergent ideas usually took a very long time to make their ascendancy in years past. But suddenly, comparatively over night, liberalism, humanism, and a new fluid way of thinking took foothold.

Simply put, these ideas found their way into the forefront of the American Educational system. These complex set of new ideas, thoughts, notions, philosophies and ways of thinking moved into what was at that time the world’s greatest instrument for the dissemination of ideas, the American public school system.

I’ll talk more about how this all happened in the next installment.