More thoughts on integrity, plus a few thoughts on The Grapes of Wrath

One of the reasons I find the Taking Children Seriously philosophy so compelling is this fundamental idea that no person should be obliged to disintegrate themselves.

They are literally teaching justice, in the sense that a just person acts with integrity and an injust person behaves one way while believing another – and when you tell a child that they must do X or Y will happen, even though everyone in the room knows that Y does not necessarily follow X, the child understands they are being treated unjustly and learns to become injust. To lie, to themselves and to others; later, to have trouble distinguishing between what is false and what is true.

The Taking Children Seriously people are also teaching the idea that problems can be solved when two or more people work together to discover a possibility that allows all of them to remain integrated, which absolutely must be taught to children so that they may use that skill to become adults.

It may, in fact, be the most important thing a person can learn.

It will be interesting to see whether this comes up in the Republic at any point; the idea of integration-focused problem-solving should be part of any conversation about consent, for example, when two adults set boundaries around a particular relationship and then learn new information that might make them want to expand or contract those boundaries, and you'd think that Socrates would have been smart enough to have figured that one out.

But, you know, enough about that, let me tell you what I've learned in the past twenty-four hours about bestselling, page-turning books.

So I was looking for something to read before bed, something that had the fluid, exploratory, stream-of-consciousness style we used to get from blogs before they became monetized/politicized, the idea being that I can relax my own mind by following someone else as they relax theirs, and the library had a collection of Ursula K. Le Guin's blog posts in an ebook, great, exactly what I was looking for, and at one point Le Guin mentions that she believes The Grapes of Wrath is the best American novel ever written, and I was all "hmmmmmm I've never read that one," the only Steinbeck I've ever read was "The Pearl" because it was part of the high school curriculum, and at the time the story seemed fairly simplistic although the language was both specific and delicate, and I really should read it again, but instead I started The Grapes of Wrath –

And oh my goodness –

it is like when I was a child and had to sneak books under the desk at school and under the covers at midnight, I cannot stop reading this book, it is overwhelmingly interesting

it is also indelibly memorable, I don't have to do the boring work of keeping track of who is who and what they want and where we are in the storyline because it's just so clear, so evident, so unforgettable

every word exists for a reason

EVERY WORD

EXISTS

FOR A REASON

(perhaps because Steinbeck wrote himself that this time he wanted to "do this book properly" so that it could be "one of the really fine books")

And yes, I know I am too old to be reading this for the first time, and yet Larry would say that now is exactly the right time to be reading The Grapes of Wrath, I am old enough to understand it, and when I was sixteen I was old enough to understand Anna Karenina because the first 400 pages of that book are all about who is taking whom to a dance, and now this book –

It's a bestseller and a page-turner and yet it does not follow any formula that one could learn in a four-week class, in fact Steinbeck dismissed all of the formulaes and came up with a novel idea of telling a story, his entire purpose was –

as he put it –

"My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other."

Which sounds an awful lot like how to solve a problem in a way that allows everyone to remain integrated. ❤️