Written by: Monica Pelaez, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Rene Descartes was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. He lived in the 17th century, one of my favorite centuries because the truculence of Europe’s politics is the best content source for reality TV ever. Think of Loui IX, the Sun King. Oliver Cromwell believing in the British Republic. Peter the Great modernizing Russia. And why think only of European figures? Well, do you believe in capitalism and believe communism had it coming as a socio-economical-political ideology? The roots of our constitutional and economic principles are found there in the 17th century, especially in France.
The founding fathers were men of their time, and men of their time looked to France for the “world-class” education any smart person aspired to at the time. French and Latin were the languages of knowledge, not English. The founding fathers believed in the separation of powers, for example. This concept comes from Baron de Montesquieu, who studied Rene Descartes. The importance of Descartes is that he believes man can understand the world by thinking. Now you understand why Rene Descartes is so important to me.
We have had many, many “influencers” in how our operating system of thinking works. If you believe your way of making decisions is “free,” sorry, but you are wrong. Your education determines the way you think. You can believe you can understand the world by observation, or you can believe you cannot understand the world on your own, and you need to believe what others tell you; Rationalism or Theologism. A free thinker does not exist. To be a free thinker, you have to decide not to think. And at some point, you have to think, and you have to come to some conclusions. People think as much as they breathe. Not possible not to think. All of you anarchists, grow up!
This brings me to families. Every family has a narrative of its own, a belief system of its own. Some families follow credos through numerous generations. Some change radically as Monica Pelaez Life & Education Coaching an offspring diverts from the family norm, either influenced by politics or religion or economics. Yet families, as any human collective, create so many unique and interesting phenomena: customs, beliefs, rituals, vocabulary, style. As an education coach, I visit at least 10 different homes on any given week. Oh, so different they are!
As human beings, we desperately need to “organize” the world we live in. We need norms, morals, boundaries, processes, procedures, manners, right, and wrong. What can be done and what cannot be done. (My father was a surgeon. He had a very precise way of living, which included dinner at seven o’clock on the dot. I could go anywhere I wanted, stay up as late as I wanted. But I had to be home for a formal, 4-course meal every night at seven o’clock. After dinner, I was free again. Needless to say, I had many “guests” when I was a teenager. Wink!)
I am a “student.” I will give de the odd lady in her 80’s attending college pursuing some sort of degree. I have been a student since I can remember. I have pursued degrees in Law, Economics, Accounting, Art, Political Science, Management. As part of my Economics studies, I read “Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith. He rocks! Which took me to the Mercantilism dawn in the 1600s. Mercantile means trade, and trade back then required a lot of faith!
Imagine investing in a vessel, a galleon made of timber, in the shape of a half watermelon, with huge sails and cannons popping through crevices to defend itself from pirates! (Oh! Pirates of the Caribbean, here we are. In 2008, during a dig in London, the HMS “Duke of Wellington” remnants were found; the most powerful ship in the world when launched in 1852. One of the interesting discoveries was the system used to identify the ship's different logs and timber pieces to make sure they went in the place they were meant to go once recycled. Mind you; good timber is an expensive commodity. Amazing information technology!) That galleon of commerce, that vessel would leave the port of Naples and travel to Constantinople (today’s Istanbul in Turkey) for months without news.
The Mediterranean is and was a busy, dangerous sea. Anything could happen. You could win really, really big or lose big. Mercantile endeavors were a risky system of wealth development but very, very profitable. The main players were Jewish bankers. Why? Well, Jewish bankers learned a lot from anyone. They did not have prejudice when it came to knowledge. And the Persians (modern Iranians) were as smart, wise, Monica Pelaez Life & Education Coaching knowledgeable and methodical as the Greeks and Romans. In the West, we are infused by Greek and Roman thought, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hesiod, Heraclitus, Thucydides, Cicero, Seneca. But the Jews, in addition to the Greeks and Romans, knew the Persians and Arabs were as advanced if not more than the Greeks and the Romans and absorbed everything they could from their thinking. Thinking creates knowledge, technology.
The Mercantilists believed there had to be quantitative methods to measure these sea adventures. And accounting was invented—the systematic representation of commercial exchange using numbers. Numbers had always been important. When Rene Descartes, my rational hero, attended a Jesuit Catholic school, the curriculum comprised Mathematics, Philosophy, Astronomy, Theology, Rhetoric. In education, previous to the 20th century, quantitative knowledge from qualitative knowledge was not separate; the two areas of knowledge went hand in hand. For Descartes, philosophical, political discourse was up, close, and personally connected to mathematics. Mathematics was not just the quantitative analysis of the concrete phenomenon. Mathematics was a way of thinking. An organized, procedural, step-by-step process that had been deliberately prescribed and followed towards the desired outcome. The Mercantilists were not philosophers. They did not deem it necessary to consider if exploitation was moral or immoral. Their concern was the ROI, Return on Investment.
ROI first appeared in 1914 at the United States Treasury. This term was coined by an electrical engineer called F. Donaldson Brown, who had worked at the Du Pont Corporation. This man was a sales representative of the corporation in the explosives department. He participated in a committee charged with analyzing whether the corporation should diversify into lacquers, Pryalin, plastics, and dies. His work was so admired, he was recommended as Assistant United States Treasurer. In that capacity, he developed a formula to monitor businesses’ performance. Return on Investment is born. Mind you, F. Donaldson Brown did not have Descartes’ education. He had a very different one.
By then, the distance between philosophy and mathematics was broad and wide. In the 1800s, as a result of the Reformation of the Church, the emergence of Calvinism and Rationalism, Mathematics was stripped of any philosophical digression, concentrating on the science itself. Only the scientific method prevailed, and any discourse, departure, or analysis of implications was stripped from mathematical thought application. (Currently, there is a Monica Pelaez Life & Education Coaching resurgence, and physicists are also philosophers. Nick Bostrom at the “Future of Humanity Institute” is a good example.
ROI is a method of measuring businesses. A family has “assets” that cannot be “valued” in currency. Families have “results,” which cannot be measured by any quantitative method. Allow me an example. A parent of a three-year-old whom I am “home-schooling” to some extent asked to have a more “formal, structured means of measuring his daughter’s progress. I was offered more information. The parent sidestepped to his work to illustrate his point. He mentioned how in his business which was “measured” weekly, they knew if they had met target points. I interjected to say in education we no longer measure, we asses and there is a very good reason for it. Then a friend was mentioned “who went to Northwestern and is very smart” who had recommended, “Playing Preschool.” And as a final point, he said his wife asked for money to do yoga, with which he was perfectly fine as long as the results of those yoga classes could be seen.
I smiled profusely.
We need to understand that our rationality will not be the magic wand we so much desire. I agree with Descartes in that our mind can understand the world, but the mind, as wonderful as it is, has limits. Life requires soul, requires spiritual strength. Spirituality is not religiousness. It is the belief that we are part of something, and we must respect our place in that something where many other beings exist. We are not the best thing that ever happened. (Yes, this is a very personal, simplified version of what spirituality is. I do not wish to be an “expert” on the subject). We also need to understand the family has nothing to do with success. Family is about love, loyalty, respect, nurture, kindness. It’s about supporting each other. It is about “something” we cannot put into words but that we can recognize when we see it. Do you feel at this point this is all fluff? Good. Because it is fluff and fluff cannot be measured, it is fluff after all. And I have made my point then.
So, all of you very smart, successful, accomplished, articulate parents; beware! Everything you worked so hard to learn in college and business school will not serve you to be a good spouse, father, son, sibling. Family is about the heart. No amount of head can understand the pain of a sick loved one. No amount of numbers can explain why a child just cannot read. No amount of evaluations can explain why an autistic child hates the sound of a Monica Pelaez Life & Education Coaching elevator but loves the wishing buzz of a washer. No amount of theory will convince your teenager to speak!
At the bottom of all this, we find the need for control. What the parent in my example craves is control. Control of his daughter’s growth, intellectual ability, doing capacity. His assumption is that if he makes the right decisions, his daughter will be smart and successful. His education has taught him evidence is king. Paper, numbers, black and white, will assure safety, health, survival. But oh! The wicked witch of the west has a surprise. Life is gray! Life is uncertain. Life is non-measurable. Life is volatile. Life is like water sipping, dripping through your fingers.
What frustration! Flow my dear flow.
Quantified outcomes cannot measure family success. Family success is a mystery. In my opinion, it should remain as such. How after many, many years of distance, a hug heals all rifts. How a little white puppy creates such joy and laughter in a family suffering from a serious illness. Yes, the first “mama.” The first step. A baby discovering her foot! A teenager spontaneously asking us for a meal together. Family is not a business, and anything in the realm of Return on Investment has absolutely no place there. Wake up, my dear 21st-century professionals. There is so very much more to life beyond your wildest calculations!
Monica Pelaez, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Monica Pelaez is a thinker, writer, coach, and instructor. With a background in international law and business, involved in educational projects across continents, she has built a coaching/tutoring private practice to help the ones who are like her, "outliers." Those who do not fit the mold have a hard time with the system but are smart, curious, and intrepid. She combines the spheres of emotions, behavior, and academics in her practice. She views the individual as a complex being with unique talents, challenges, and needs and works to have them succeed in academics. She writes about any and all topics that interest her, without any claim to expertise, under the liberal principles of freedom of thought.
