After the Future

Technocratic v. Humanistic Education 1

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.  --Friederich Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

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[W]hat is at issue here is evaluating the danger of what might happen to our humanity in the present half-century, and distinguishing between what we want to keep and what we are ready to lose, between what we can welcome as legitimate human development and what we should reject with our last ounce of strength as dehumanization. I cannot think that choices of this kind are unimportant. --Jacques Ellul

I have come to look at schools as a critical focal point in the fight for the soul of the nation, because schools are so foundational for our cultural life, and so much depends on our having a flourishing, humanizing public-education system. The battle over the schools is a microcosm of the battle that is going on everywhere else, but which most people feel too powerless to fight.

But most people understand that it's not good for their kids to have their schools run like the big corporation or governmental agency they or their neighbors work for. They understand that it's not good for their kids to have their schools turned into testing mills with a narrowly focused curriculum. And they realize that it is critical for them to organize to fight off the aggressive, well-funded efforts by national corporate-reformers to privatize their schools and turn them into just that. Because no sane parents want that for their kids, it's possible to channel their energy into resistance to the technocratic machine that otherwise dominates their lives. 

If public school education is a critical battleground for the soul of the nation, who are the combatants? I see them as broadly falling into two camps: technocrats and humanists. Let's define terms. I mean 'humanist' in the broad sense as the affirmation of the value and dignity of particular, individual human beings and of their individual potential to become more densely realized as a Selves in community with other Selves. This contrasts with the technocratic tendency to see humans as abstractions in the aggregate, as data points on a spread sheet.

I also mean 'humanism' in its more common sense as the study of the humanities, that is, the study of the human condition--history, languages, literature, philosophy, religion, the arts--and the free-ranging quest for knowledge through the sciences. I mean it in the classical, renaissance sense, in which humanist thinkers revolted against the utilitarian, dead, mechanistic scholasticism that had rigidified learning in the universities in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Renaissance humanism was whole-brained in the McGilchrist sense, and it laid the foundation for a remarkably spirited efflorescence in literature, the visual arts, architecture, science, and scholarship that we now associate with the quattrocento in Italy, and later in the low countries and England. 

The European renaissance was one of those moments in which the whole human being--as embodied, ensouled, and spirited was celebrated. Leonardo's and Michelangelo's genius would not have been realized had this underlying rich, deep understanding of the human and of human possibilities not been the soil from which they drew nourishment for their development.

Our culture no longer produces such great souls--at least none that are widely recognized. It produces plenty of smart people but few, if any, who could be called "big souled". Can you name one person born in the developed world since World War I who 500 years from now will be ranked at the same level of greatness with Leonardo, Michelangelo, Goethe, Bach, Beethoven, Lincoln, Tolstoy, Dostoyevski, to name just the ones that come quickly to mind? The only two I can think of who come close are Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, and neither represents a typical 20th-Century, developed-world upbringing. And one we killed, and the other we threw into prison for twenty-seven years. What then are the conditions that allow for the emergence such human beings? What is it about our culture now that seems to impede their emergence? What is wrong with us?

This Renaissance lasted for about 150 years, drying up around the time of Descartes and the subsequent obsession with a constrained, rationalistic need for certainty. Romanticism and German Idealism revived something of the renaissance spirit, but it was quickly quashed after the mid-19th century, as an antihumanist, soul-crushing, reductionistic materialism came to dominate Western societies. The collective meaning framework of the West was shattered, and with that followed in the 20th century the loss of a broad cultural sense of purpose or of higher aspiration. (See Nietzsche quote above.) 

That is now our condition as diffident, no-longer-moderns. There was the Age of Faith, then the Age of Reason, and now we have devolved into the Age of Whatever, and the vacuum created where there was once a soul is now filled with the craving to consume. And so everywhere the forces for the soulful 'human' are in retreat. A basic human decency still pervades the culture, but there is no greatness anymore, no big souls, only the parody of greatness in celbrityhood or in corporate buccaneering. That's what's wrong with us.

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So then, what of technocracy and why is it a problem that should concern us? What are the characteristics of the technocratic mindset that pose such a serious threat to the soulful human? The technocratic mindset feels at home in governmental, corporate, and foundation bureaucracies. It is procedure oriented and lacks practical wisdom or adaptability to the unforseen or the uncontrolable. 

Large organizations are hierarchical, and they attract ambitious people who seek to climb to the top. It recruits the best and brightest, but filters out anyone who would challenge its narrowly defined assumptions. The people who succeed in rising into positions of leadership are Hi-IQ, very articulate, and have been promoted precisely because of their aggressiveness and confidence in promoting the technocracy's mission. Their success within the paramaters defined by the technocracy's mission has reinforced their self-perception as the best and the brightest, and this breeds in them a we-know-better arrogance, and so they are too often contemptuous at worst, patronizing at best, of anyone who disagrees with them, especially if they are "soft" humanistic types.

Technocracies as systems are very uncomfortable with what they cannot control or predict. They therefore see the lively, eccentric, and unpredictable as irrelevant or as a problem to be eliminated. It revels in the general, and is allergic to the concrete and particular. It cares about the abstract and quantitative and regards the qualitative as soft, unmeasurable, and thus trivial. As McGilchrist points out, it lives within a rigid template of reality, in its own mirror world, and anything that doesn't fit gets chopped off. 

And so technocratic projects are always naively, if not cynically, "data driven". Naive because technocrats don't understand the limitations of the impoverished interpretive framework they use to find meaning in the data, and they don't understand how irrational interests shape their supposedly rational methods. They are cynical when they know their interpretations of the data are arbitrary or manipulated to serve predetermined agendas. While they present themselves as "impatient optimists", they too often develop elaborate and fundamentally wrongheaded, if not delusional, strategies to change the world for the better by some limited metric of their own contrivance, and in doing so too often create even bigger messes than the one they hoped to clean up. 

It's a mentality that religious fundamentalists share with ideologues on the left and right because it's not the content of their thinking that matters so much as the quality of it. This is the mindset that supported, for idealistic reasons, the invasion of Iraq and is also the mindset that makes it impossible for those who have it to see that they were wrong until the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible. It's the mindset of economists who believe in things like perfectly competitive markets and have a hard time understanding why reality won't conform to their theories. Technocratic thinking starts with an abstraction, and then insists that the world conform to it, and if it won't do it willingly it will use force if it can.  

It's the driving force behind idealistic social engineering projects that so often lead to destructive, bloody ends. These impatient optimists, all with the best of intentions, in extreme cases gave us Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Terror in France, and the Spanish Inquisition. It's the abstract, delusional thinking behind the idea that there can be a war on drugs or that all kids who live in poverty can succeed academically if we improve their teachers without changing their life conditions outside of the school building. It's the McDonald's mentality that wants to standardize everything so the hamburger you get in Dayton, Ohio, is the same one you get in Anchorage, Alaska. But our kids are not hamburgers or widgets or anything that should be treated in a standardized way. Don't be confused by the humanistic rhetoric of technocrats. Look at their policies. Obama talks like a humanist, but Duncan's policies are technocratic through and through. 

No, our culture no longer produces great souls--we produce instead celebrities, experts, and technocratic warlords like Bill Gates, Dick Cheney, and Michelle Rhee. They are in their own minds right, and everyone else wrong. They don't realize, however, that they are working with only half a brain, hypertrophied though that half might be. They have their arguments, and some of them are very clever if you accept their basic assumptions, but how do you talk to someone about an alternative vision with different assumptions that embraces the beauties of red and green and blue when they are colorblind and think that anybody who isn't is crazy?

Video of the Day: Matthew Taylor

 

This video by RSA's chief executive, Matthew Taylor, interests and encourages me. Near the end he's asking if we can outgrow the limitations of the a world given to us by left-hemisphere dominant rationality that has been with us at least since the of Descartes. And he actually asks the old Aristotelian question that most late moderns and no-longer-moderns seem allergic to, the question about 'ends'. So this talk also builds nicely on Iain McGilchrist's ideas about the proper role of rationality as a servant. The 18th-century enlightenment mindset was flawed by its over valuing of left-brain rationality, and that led to the hall-of mirrors trap we find ourselves in now. Taylor says: 

Rationality can tell us how best to get from A to Z, but without ethical reasoning, we cannot discuss where the Z should be. So what we aim for might be as important to our well being as what we achieve. . . . The 21st century enlightenment calls for us to look past simplistic and inadequate ideas of freedom, of justice, and of progress. Perhaps it's time to stop chasing those myths. To stop being transfixed by abstractions, and instead to reconnect a concrete understanding of who we are as human beings, the political debate about who we need to be, and the philosophical and even spiritual exploration of who we might aspire to be. 

Abstractions as ends in themselves are death. They lead to all manner of Jacobinisms. And what we aim for can be inspired only by that which comes from outside the left-brain rationalist hall of mirrors. It must be inspired, and all truly creative people know what that means. Remember what McGilchrist said about the left hemisphere dominant view of the worldin the video posted with the previous post?

In our modern world we’ve developed something that looks awfully like the left hemisphere’s world. We prioritize the virtual over the real; the technical becomes important; bureaucracy flourishes. The picture, however, is fragmented. There's a lot of uniqueness; the How has become subsumed in What; and the need for control leads to a paranoia in society that we need to govern and control everything. 

Why this shift? I think there are three reasons: One is the left hemisphere’s talk is very convincing because it shaves everything that it finds doesn’t fit with its model off and cuts it out. So this particular model is entirely self-consistent largely because it’s made itself so.  

[Two] I also call the left hemisphere the Berlusconi of the brain because it controls the media. It’s very vocal on its own behalf.  The right hemisphere doesn’t have a voice, and it can’t construct these same arguments.

And I also think rather more importantly that [Three] there’s a sort of hall of mirrors effect. The more we get trapped into this, the more we undercut and ironize things that might have led us out of it. And we just get reflected back into more of what we know about what we know about what we know.

It's this hall of mirrors effect that has become for us the trap, particularly of the well-educated and clever. It's a problem for anyone who lives in a closed system. But McGilchrist's point is that the right brain works as a kind of receiver for information that comes from outside the hall of mirrors, and this information would lead us out of the trap if we would listen for it and heed it.  The problem lies in that the information too often sounds like something clever people have heard before, thought about briefly, and rejected--cut out because it didn't fit preconceived rationalist criteria--when the real problem lies in that they haven't really understood it on its own terms. They've read the score, but missed the music.  

The Master and His Emissary

This is the title of Iain McGilchrist's important new book. It's subtitle is "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". The video below summarizes very succinctly and broadly the argument he's making, but it's based on a story by Nietzsche:

There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted.

Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he trusted most to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not influence, and on his missions on his master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

McGilchrist comments: At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however, gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary.

Echoes of Dostoyevski's Grand Inquisitor story, no? Or Prospero and Antonio?

Have you ever wondered why there are these historical moments, renaissance moments, that bloom and fade: 5th-century Athens, 15th century Florence, Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries? Why can't these moments be sustained? Well, McGilchrist has an unusual take on it that is rooted in hemispheric brain research. So he starts from characterizations about the roles the right and left hemispheres play in the way individual human beings relate to reality, but it's particularly interesting for its implications about the way human beings develop their collective habits of mind--their cultures, their politics, and economics. 

The right brain is the Master, and the left is the Emissary; people and cultures begin to decay as soon as the emissary begins to think it no longer needs the master. Left-brained scientistic and bureacratic thinking sees itself as the master of its domains, but it's not. And that's why they are so arrogant, because they have forgotten whom they serve. The first claims to serve the truth, but it is such an attenuated, meaningless notion of truth as to be worthless. The second claims to be serving the public, but all bureaucracies serve themselves and their own institutional interests first. And both modes of left brain thinking are all about control and about filtering out or de-legimitating whatever they cannot control. 

If you have ten minutes to spare, watch the RSA video. It mainly focuses on how the right and brain hemisphers function, how they relate to one another, and suggests at the end the price we pay when the left brain operates independently from the right. 

 

I have the book on order, so I haven't had a chance to read it yet.  But anybody who has been a long-time reader here can see how it relates to themes I've developed over the years.  

I also want to relate it to my recent involvement in Public Schools and the politics of education reform. The reformers are egregiously left-brained in their understanding the of the challenges, and the results have been predicatably disastrous.

I've characterized the the conflict as one between technocrats and humanists, but the humanists are at a very severe disadvantage, not only because they haven't near the money or the media megaphone that the technocrats have, but because they don't really have a coherent, legitimated world view that gives them a strong place to stand and fight back. The video clip above refers to the difficulty when it talks about the Berlusconi function of the left brain. It controls the messaging, and it tends to filter out anything that does not fit its preconceptions.

Many people who are inclined to be open to humanist thinking feel ambivalently about it because they have come to accept that the discussion is to be held on left-brain terms following left-brain rules, and so the humanist cannot talk about the colors red, green, and blue in a discussion where the rules stipulate that only black and white are permitted. The argument, therefore, is lost from the get-go because the master, the part of us that has the most important things to say, is locked up in the back room bound in chains.

More when I've had a chance to read the book.

UPDATE: Interesting review of the book here.