Scouting and Philosophy

Transformative learning, the one that actually makes a difference in the way a person perceives and understands the world, is often achieved when the brain is properly prepared for it. 

In Scouting, we try to do this by applying the “learning by doing” principle not only for technical skills, such as setting a camp or navigating a terrain, but also in the emotional or social areas. 

By immersing young people in a disruptive experience, such as projects involving people living in difficult circumstances or in less privileged areas, we intend to develop empathy and tolerance. Because “walking in someone else’s shoes” is a failsafe way to ensure one sees the world from more than one perspective. 

Preparing the brain to the power of spiritual development was understood since prehistory, and one only needs to look at the paintings in Lascaux, the atmosphere in the medieval cathedrals, Oriental meditation techniques or the hypnotic rituals of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We do not ask fundamental questions and probably won’t achieve a deeper understanding and appreciation of our lives while washing dishes. 

We rarely camp in Lascaux or experience ayahuasca. Nevertheless, we have plenty of opportunities to get people in the right state of mind to ask and ponder on those “big questions” – probably more than any other off-school activity. 

This is mainly because some of the elements of our educational method, namely the peer group, the shared values expressed by the Scout Law, the symbolic framework and, most of all, life in nature, are ideal backdrops to explore concepts which underpin our existence as human beings.

A quiet morning filled with the sounds of the countryside, a sunset by the sea, the last steps before reaching the summit, the Milky Way in a clear night, an evening of storytelling at the campfire or, in my case, the quiet solitude of the underground world, are moments and places where an ineffable term like “beauty” becomes tangible and has a direct, physiological impact on the brain and state of consciousness. 

These are moments when we realise how insignificant we are in the great scheme of things, but also how wonderfully unique and irreplaceable.

I am 100% aware that the colours are just massless photons of various energies hitting atoms in my retina. There is no such thing as “red” outside my own interpretation of the effect of those interactions.  Music is just a pattern of compressed air vibrating my eardrum. There is nothing “beautiful” about it outside my brain’s interpretation of the nervous impulses resulting from those vibrations. 

However, when walking in a forest on a crisp autumn morning or listening to Pink Floyd, I cannot help but wonder how a 1.5 kilograms of basically fat can produce the string of emotions and feelings which makes our lives worth living. And those are the only moments when my strict materialistic and deterministic view of the world is shaken. Shaken, but not stirred! 

Being it the effect of dopamine or something more transcendent, it is real, nevertheless! 

The Florence syndrome, akin to what I described earlier, is named after Stendhal’s visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce, about which he wrote: “Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul.”

Creating and properly managing these opportunities – no one is inclined to ponder on the meaning of life if they’re half dead while climbing a mountain – will allow young people to get in a state which we can then exploit by planting the right seeds of philosophical reflection. 

A long time ago, a fellow Scout leader from Romania, one of those natural-born educators whose stories were listened with mouth agape by children for tens of years, told me that, in  a camp, the most important thing to plan for is a great meal in the middle of the camp and for the last dinner. The rest is irrelevant, it can be innumerable iterations of pasta (which is, generally, the case). Now, you need to know that, in Romanian Scouting, meals are among the most important elements in the camp and they can really set the tone to the entire event!

I thought about this as being the Scouting equivalent of folk tales (though I knew it to be quite true, from personal experience) until a few years back when I read a book called “Your Deceptive Mind”, in which some experiments on the flaws and fabrications of memory are described. 

One of them involved interviewing patients who had undergone a colonoscopy examination!!!! – a procedure universally described as being decidedly unpleasant. Patients in the study group had colonoscopies that lasted from 4 to 60 minutes, but the duration of the procedure did not predict how they felt about it afterwards. Instead, it was the strength of their discomfort at its most intense, and the level of discomfort they felt towards the end of the procedure.

These studies support the so-called  Peak-End rule – that our perceptions about an experience are determined by how it feels at its most intense, and how it feels at the end. The actual duration is irrelevant. Our memories filter how we feel about the things we’ve done and experienced. And they are defined more by the moments that seem most characteristic – the peaks and the finish – than by how we actually felt most of the time during the experience.

Certainly, peak experiences happen almost naturally in our Scouting activities – what I put forward is that we, as Scout leaders, carefully plan and actually use them as a foundation for introspection and philosophical reflection.