Musings from the “No Italics Required” series
“And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
That’s a good question.
“What is hip? Tell me tell me if you think you know.
What is hip? And if you’re really hip, the passing years would show
That you into a hip trip. Maybe hipper than hip.
Sometimes hipness is what it ain’t.”
— Tower of Power, “What Is Hip?”
The Education of a Pluralist
My first encounter with philosophy — aside from Saturday morning cartoons with the likes of Mr. Peabody and Sherman — was in Ed Bean’s PHIL-01 at Merced College, where I learned that rationalism and empiricism aren’t opposites—they complement each other. Reason and observation, working together. So far, so good.
Then Ed introduced me to the Romantics, who insisted that feelings and instincts provided understanding that reason alone couldn’t touch. This aligned perfectly with my hippy-adjacent life in the Sierra—backpacking and ski touring with John Muir’s writings, natural history handbooks, and USGS maps. I was prepared for mind-expanding forays into forests and mountains, though at that point I hadn’t yet added Castaneda’s Don Juan to my mountaineering library.
What I absorbed from all this, both in the classroom and on the trail, was something my working-class parents had already taught me: pluralism. Not the academic kind—the lived kind. My father was a cement mason who worked alongside men from different cultures. They coexisted peacefully, mostly, maintaining their unique identities while contributing to something larger. I was taught we were a nation of different ethnic and religious groups, each preserving its traditions, but not at the expense of others.
By the time I reached the CSUC campus, I’d developed what I’d call a pragmatic-constructivism: that knowledge comes from the interplay between theory and practice, actively constructed through human interaction and experience. Different philosophical schools offered diverse explanations of the world, and there wasn’t necessarily one single, absolute truth. Different viewpoints could be equally valid.
A Trip to the Principle’s Office
It didn’t happen often, but in my career as a middle-school classroom teacher, I would send quarreling factions to the office to let the big-money cheeses sort things out while I dealt with the more earnest, or enthusiastic students in my flock.
In my classroom, I did maintain that there are Moral principles: Those that guide ethical behavior and decisions. You know, honesty, integrity, and fairness. There are also Scientific principles or the fundamental laws or truths that explain natural phenomena. Examples of these scientific principles include gravity, thermodynamics, and evolution. And there are Mathematical principles. These are basic truths or assumptions used in mathematical reasoning. Examples include the commutative and associative properties. Lastly and with a tip of the hat to folks like Frank Lloyd Wright or Steve Jobs, there are Design principles. These are guidelines for creating effective designs. Here, examples include balance, contrast, and unity.
These principles seemed to me to be the culmination of our evolved civility and the basis for culture all in the pursuit of progress.
This became the foundation of my teaching career. I believed in it. I built my classroom around it. Teaching rested on the belief that certain principles—moral, scientific, mathematical—provided shared ground. Not that everyone had to agree on everything, but that we could at least agree honesty meant something, gravity worked the same for everyone, and 2+2=4 wasn’t up for debate.
What Changed?
From 1981, when the first Apple II computer arrived in my classroom, to my retirement in 2015, I watched personal technology manifest itself in the internet and social media. And somewhere in that span, something shifted.
Pluralism—the idea that multiple valid perspectives can coexist peacefully—requires something subtle to function: a shared belief that truth exists, even if we approach it from different angles. We can disagree about how to understand the world while still agreeing that the world is there to be understood.
But the internet and social media didn’t just multiply perspectives. They fragmented the very idea of shared reality. Language, power, and social context didn’t just shape knowledge anymore—they replaced it. My students could find “evidence” for anything. Every viewpoint came with its own facts, its own authorities, its own truth.
The postmodernists had warned about this, about the challenge to objective truth. But watching it happen in real time, in my classroom, in the culture—that was different. What I’d understood as healthy pluralism began to look like something else entirely. Not diversity of perspective, but diversity of reality. Not multiple paths up the same mountain, but people insisting they were on different mountains altogether.
Sometimes hipness is what it ain’t.
So How Has That Worked Out?
I was raised to believe that pluralism meant we could hold different views and still find ways to coexist, contribute, build something together. I spent thirty-seven years teaching on that premise.
And now? I’m not sure what we have instead, but it doesn’t feel like pluralism. It feels like something that borrowed pluralism’s language—”multiple truths,” “different perspectives,” “your truth”—and turned it into a tool for avoiding any shared understanding at all.
Pirsig asked, “Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” about good and not-good. The assumption was that we know, intuitively, without needing external validation. But what happens when we’ve lost even that shared intuition? When the passing years don’t show whether you’re “into a hip trip” or just lost in the noise?
I don’t have an answer. Just the sense of standing on a corner somewhere—not quite Winslow, Arizona—watching the traffic and wondering when things changed, and whether anyone else notices. Whether the principled pluralism I was raised on has been replaced by something darker and more deliberate. And whether we can find our way back.
