The Intellectual Light Web: Better Angels of Our Nature

If there's that intellectual dark web out there running amok, it stands to reason there's the light side as well, and its standard-bearer may well be Steven Pinker. In Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, he forfends against nostalgia for the unified culture of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, or even his beloved Enlightenment, held together as these were by swords more than by plowshares, to argue instead that we live in, if not the best of all possible worlds, the best time there's ever actually been for human flourishing.

With his trademark witty, spirited, and empirically grounded prose, Pinker pries into the reasons for the absolutely remarkable and yet vastly under-reported per capita decline in violence over time. I see no sense in arguing with him, but neither can I muster much enthusiasm for the ultimate so-what he comes to: there's less violence (yay!), but part of what that means is that there's really nothing worth fighting for (meh...).

If he fits Nietzsche's bill for the Last Man, meekly sciencing away at endogenous and exogenous theories for the wonders of the cosmos; if he furnishes gleefully irreverent, all-encompassing objectivity of the sort that sent Kierkegaard scribbling interminable barbs against the Hegelians, Pinker seems perfectly content with that. In the framework of the Prisoner's Dilemma, to which he has frequent recourse towards the end of this big book (shades of Underground Man's "reasoning according to a little table"), he sketches out a loose algorithm for morality convincing in its straightforwardness, supported as it is by the highly rigorous hundreds of pages of historical statistical analysis and psychologically astute neuroscience which lead up to it. Spoilers: less violence comes about thanks to the overwhelming power of liberal authority possessed by an international order of enlightened, free-trading, free-thinking, femininity-embracing Leviathans, that is, governments like ours, which hold an effective monopoly on violence and choose (by and large) not to use it, since peace is so much more profitable to everybody.

For Pinker, with a far sturdier foundation of biological understanding than those insightful diagnosers of cultural crisis, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, et al., there is no problem because there is no telos, no end beyond the immanent one of ever greater discoveries and synthesis with the tools of open-minded, imaginatively compassionate communication and scientific inquiry. I detect little of the partisan commitment to Chomskyan linguistics which stood behind his earlier books (but then I retain essentially nothing from my reading of those books at this remove other than a vague sense of their delightful sensibleness and dazzling brilliance). Instead of optimism for the future, Pinker insists, he is realistic about the potential, however unlikely, for the historic peace to be shattered by an unprecedented cataclysm. While understanding the suffering that still crushes so many, he expresses clear-eyed gratitude for the prosperity he and, presumably, his readers enjoy, if only we can bring ourselves to recognize it. Like Michael Eric Dyson said to Peterson in their Munk debate, "Smile! Don't take yourself too seriously." A quick search confirms that Pinker, too, has participated in the prestigious series. His resolution: "Humankind's best days lie ahead..."

How to Make a Podcast, and Possibly a Reputation, as a Consultant: Three Models

School could be so much better. That's the initial sense, and then comes the chain reaction: the realization that it's not in schools that people are learning anymore, that that's not the point of school; that people want distillations, spoken not written, of some of these great books, to spare them the time and attention needed for reading; that whenever information is propagated, but especially in these new immediate media, it is changed, not least by contagion with the popularity (or lack thereof) of the speaker. So one question underlying all the brilliant ideas you might start to think about: is it sharing and communicating these ideas, or is it attention and aggrandizement you're really after? Respectability, in an older formulation, or nowadays we might say accolades, or simply a reputation? Another overarching question would be, will, over time, the best stuff rise to the top, or will it be lost in the whirlwind?

So for a long time now I've been writing this blog, and for a short time now making podcasts about some of this stuff. The ideal at first was to start a school, but lately it has been the more modest one of simply putting out interesting content. (Or is it vanity, not modesty at all? This blog which no one reads, content no one listens to--perhaps it's how I feel about that vacuum which should let me know whether I'm really humble or vain. Generally I feel all right about it, so humble after all?)

And so what's the next step? Recently a couple of friends, Brian and Alex, have been independently coming to the same conclusion and started telling me about it: what about consulting? Then we talk about it and get all jazzed and then go off and get distracted by something else (at least that's how it goes for me).

Our ideas converge around the areas of coaching teachers online, running tutorials and seminar training, perhaps curriculum restructuring services. I wrote some of this up recently in a post about ROOTS (as opposed to STEM, you see?). We think about drawing up business plans and seeking grants and investors, but none of us knows anything about that, so for my part at least, pretty soon I go back to reading books.

For anyone else out there cogitating on these matters, here we are! Have your people call my people.

Getting Started--

For me, substitute teaching is not a bad day job to allow time for thinking about this more ambitious work, but here are some better role models to look to: Corey Olsen and Jordan Peterson. Their routes to the leadership positions they now inhabit have been quite different. Both, though, started by establishing themselves in academia--getting their PhD, publishing research, being recognized as a top professor at a top school. Now, assuming we can sidestep that foray through the ivory tower and skip to the disillusionment that led to the Tolkien Professor taking off and launching Mythgard and Signum, or to the insight into the zeitgeist the that led Peterson to speak out about free speech and responsibility, which he's parlayed into a best-selling book, that's sort of the goal, perhaps a delusional one.

But I promised three models, and I don't seriously recommend myself as the third--preferring to stay aloof, to do this as a hobby and a fun way to write all those things I would otherwise never get around to, falling asleep reading Concluding Unscientific Postscript, holding the book up in front of my eyes in my sleep-- so here it is: Erasmus.

His colloquys, on courtship, for instance, along with Praise of Folly, have never been more apposite, though he's not quite the popular public intellectual he once was.

Looking more laterally, rather than up into the clouds, and thinking about how popularity works, another good place to look might be Harry Potter and the Sacred Text. More than one person recommended it to me, so somehow they got the word of mouth going. I've only listened to a few episodes, but I'd guess that the podcast's popularity is probably not so much due to their content as their production, their intricate format, the listeners' investment in the hosts' journeys. And again, you might think about how JK Rowling, like Tolkien in his day, has been panned as not actually being all that great a writer. Depending on your tastes, the criticism might be fair. But even if their writing is nothing special in itself, perhaps for that very reason it has spawned indefinite troops of imitators, for what it does show is that everyone has such a story, or the yearning for such a myth to live out, to tell. The nanowrimo instinct, the blog impulse--take and shape it, winnow it down to its basics, reframe this vague impulse into a concrete product and voila!

Voila--

For instance, students learning English as a second language, who know the story and want to read it and discuss it in the original; old folks who have time and can figure out the technology; people our age, wanting to make their own podcasts, their own living as teachers and leaders...

Other resources to start from:

Paideia

Touchstones

Michael Strong

Teach Like a Champion

Partially Examined Life

Great Discourses

Magister Ludi: Play Anything, by Ian Bogost

Ian Bogost writes for the Atlantic, my go-to for that vicarious thrill of instant publication, instant readership, that sense that words still matter even in the most ephemeral online news. He edits the series of games studies books from MIT that make up that recent Humble Bundle my friend Ryan recommended to me. And he's got a new book out with a provocative subtitle: The Pleasures of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games.

So, Play Anything. Here's what I take to be the central claim:

Suddenly, a silly, forgettable activity--reciting words in order--becomes a compelling experience that warrants serious attention. The experience becomes much larger than the constraints that create it.
By embracing more limitations, a seemingly meaningless idea becomes a more meaningful experience. This paradox of play--the idea that fun arises from limiting freedoms rather than enhancing them--isn't only true of board games or card games or playground games or video games. It can be found in any kind of material whatsoever. (140)

Poetry, "reciting words in order," is discussed in the following chapter, and a brilliant synopsis of Homeric style it is! But up to that point, the leitmotif that dominates Bogost's argument comes from an anecdote about going shopping with his daughter, whilst she plays at skipping cracks, propelled by his guiding hand across the tiles on the mall floor.

For more on this--ironic distance and David Foster Wallace-style compassionate angst, shades of Huizinga and Foucault, and the applications of all this to video games--check out episodes 16 & 17 of Bookwarm Games!

How to write a blog

For succinctness, for a window into a conversation with readers, for consistent updates, and for a generally pleasing look to the thing, I should take notes from Brenton Dickieson's A Pilgrim in Narnia. Check it out!

The Rooted Reader

Or, The Radical Reader--let's recall that radical also means going to the root of things. Here's a curated list of readings (or listenings--free audio of the great majority of great works is also easily found) for the autodidact who would stand before the world in wonder and eschew ideological pigeonholing:

Gilgamesh

The Iliad and Odyssey of Homer 

Works of Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho

The Dialogues of Plato 

Works of Aristophanes and Aristotle

The Aeneid of Virgil 

The Bible 

Tao Te Ching and poems of Cold Mountain

Plutarch's Lives

Confessions of St Augustine

Beowulf

The Divine Comedy of Dante

Works of Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Rumi

The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer

Works of Shakespeare

Montaigne's Essays

Cervantes' Don Quixote

Milton's Paradise Lost

Bach, especially St Matthew Passion

Mozart, especially Don Giovanni

Beethoven, especially Ninth Symphony and late string quartets

Lyrical poetry of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, PB Shelley, Keats

Frankenstein, by MW Shelley

Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and Beyond Good and Evil

Which brings us up more or less to modernity. While reading forward to this point, we might also go about reading and listening but also watching and playing back down toward the depths of time from the present moment:

Mythgard podcasts and courses

Atlantic articles

Music of Kendrick Lamar and Sufjan Stevens

Films of Miyazaki and Tarkovsky

Peterson's podcasts and courses

Haidt, The Righteous Mind

Mazzotta's Open Yale Course on Dante

Essays and fiction of Berry, Robinson, Nafisi, Pullman

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary

Wilson, Consilience

Video games from Uchikoshi, Itoi, Miyamoto

Essays and fiction of Morrison, Baldwin, Ellison

Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

Works of Piaget, Jung, Neumann, Frankl, Buber, Solzhenitsyn

St-Exupery's Wind, Sand, and Stars and The Little Prince

Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Essays and fiction of Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Borges, Tolkien

Proust's In Search of Lost Time

Works of James, Darwin, Marx, Freud

Works of Chekhov and Ibsen

Poetry and speeches of Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson

Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky

Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Tolstoy

Works of Hume, Burke, Smith, De Tocqueville

Red and Black and On Love by Stendhal

And so on, until we are right back where we started, left in awe, grounded and liberated at once. So that we can say, with the Soothsayer in Antony and Cleopatra:

In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.

Not that only books can do this, but they express themselves in the words with which to understand them, whereas other things express themselves, so to speak, in silence. As much as possible, we want to do this reading in the original languages, which entails learning them alongside our own. We want to acknowledge the progress and convergence taking place over time in some fields, like math and medicine, while wrestling, too, with what has been lost--or has become hard to recognize or to speak of, regardless of what language we try to use--like faith in religion or beauty in art.

To participate in the nature of things unmediated by articulate speech is of course possible--where else would our words come from? What else would they refer to? Consider the technological and even the social world (think of games, sports, music, dance). Perhaps these ways are even more profound than can be expressed in words, yet we are certainly enriched by close engagement with written works, via whatever media, as they give us practice  expressing ourselves to one another across time and space. These works guide us, individually and as communities, as nothing else can, in threading the needle through difference and sublimating the potential for violence into creative discourse, whether it be harmony or discord. In that sense, the word is literally, as well as metaphorically, eternal, life-giving. In the connections it draws us into, it is bound up with love. It trains judgment. It flexes forgiveness. The proof of these outrageous claims? We hope to live and breath it.

Inevitably, if you've read (or listened and all the rest) as far as this, you'll have a lifetime of reading opening before you, as we all have. Even if you've only glanced at the list, you may well have a bone to pick with the titles and authors on it and not on it, or perhaps with the idea of a list at all. Let it be a library, if you like. Either way, it's something for us to talk about!

And so, down among the roots or up amidst the branches, the buried lead, the dipping bait: this is by no means supposed to be an isolated endeavor; on the contrary, from these seeds--great works--we intend to do the work of growing seminars for citizens, cultivating teachers with classroom coaching sessions, and sprouting fresh thoughts in the clay of even the most recalcitrant students with personalized tutorials. Online and in person, in the shared pursuit of meaning, learning ensues. And at times, even happiness. Such is our experience, and we are happy to have the chance now to share it as widely as possible.

Contact

Reading Observing Orienting Talking -- A ROOT for every STEM to stem from

--Then we put some images on there, make a video out of it...What do you think of that as a draft proposal? Venture capitalists and charitable donors, we want to hear from you, too!

What's Old is New Again: Consilience and the Two Cultures

Steph and I have a joke that Spokane is still in the 90's. I think it's some combination of the architecture, the signs, and the neighborhood streets that remind me of when I was growing up, and the clothes and the people, of course, are a little different but in ways that are reminiscent of that time.

And so, since I like to read things for myself when people seem to be interested in talking about them, I got an old copy of E. O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which dates from the mid 90's, and reading it sitting outside after school or while subbing for classes that could work quietly, the spell was complete. It took me back.

He makes a good point about the hard sciences not being physics and chemistry but psychology and sociology, or even aesthetics and literary interpretation. This made me think about the hard questions people like to ask of intellectual celebrities these days, for Peterson, "Do you believe in God?" and for Pullman, "Where do you get your ideas?" Next to something like that, even the most complex question about black holes or epigenetics seems pretty tame.

The argument reaches a bit further back to C. P. Snow's lecture "The Two Cultures," and to periodic manifestations before that, well documented in the foreword to the Cambridge Canto edition: Ruskin, Arnold, Huxley... Basically, the claim is like in the title of the O'Connor story: Everything that rises must converge. Wilson draws on the image of the labyrinth, the serpent, though the flight of Icarus hovers unsettlingly near, too. Snow decries the concrete problems which collaboration between scientists and political and literary elites could address, but which persist and worsen while the intelligentsia pontificate. Poverty, dismal education, and catastrophic climate change/squandering of natural resources are the specters they raise and seek to dispel with reason. But to my mind, McGilchrist has set forth much the richer picture of human nature, and with it the more compelling call to adventure.

I walked to the river last night, musing on the god who works for six days and rests, and walks in the garden in the cool of the evening, calling to his work, made in his image... Poetry and metaphor, playful irony and earnest jest seem like the only honest way to answer the really hard problems.

Taking Stock

Well, another year drawing to a close here. The mixed joy and sadness of completing another whole from the freedom of fragments, mixed eagerness and anxiousness about the prospect of more free time to turn into open-ended work.

Where do things stand?

To go back to basics: The New School name never was going to work. Seat's taken!

What about ROOT, to play off STEM (or STEAM)?--Reading Observing Orienting Talking.

The old motto, too, is too much of a mouthful, and I like the way Frankl talks about it (cited in McGilchrist), that rather than the image of pursuing happiness, it makes more sense to say that happiness ensues from meaning. Peterson says much the same. But I do like the word synonymous.

And as for a physical building, an actual institution, much as that might be a good goal to strive for, there's also a great deal of learning that can happen already without it. Not just capitulating to what is already available at Khan Academy and Outschool and Mythgard, but primarily I mean directing people to all the books and original works of art which are freely available online. The real immediate task may be to give shape to a curriculum, rather than a school as such. Alex, Brian, and I have each been thinking about how to arrange for this to take the form of remunerative consulting, one way or another. Then again, I'm happy enough just subbing and thinking about this stuff as a hobby for now.

Tedx Spokane, though I didn't make their event, did give me an opportunity to formulate my somewhat more current ideas about this project. Their theme this year is Beyond Ourselves. Here's more or less what I pitched:

As a sub, I am invisible. As you can imagine, I hear some interesting things. When students do notice me, observing and hearing them, and they do look at me, what do they see? White, male, around 30, somewhat educated, assume correctly that I’m straight or wrongly that I’m gay, if any of that matters--but it seems to matter to people quite a bit these days. Not a person, of course, at most a teacher, but probably as a sub I represent to them unfettered freedom, unbounded possibility--the saturnalia impulse, mayhem and glee. Which is great, because what do teachers, all hopeful adults, see when they look at students, but just such boundless possibility? Potential for incalculable good or, more pessimistically, for grave harm.

The first thing I do, what used to be called a captatio benevolentiae, to gain their attention and sympathy, to begin to humanize us all: the production of some moderately articulate but above all warm and sensible statement of greeting, such as Hello, how are you? As you can see, your teacher (insert name here--Mandy Manning, for instance, the national teacher of the year, I subbed for her at Ferris once last year, and got to know her wonderful students and co-teacher Maria Luisa Ovellana-Westbrook) wasn’t able to be here today. My name is Mr Schantz (or Sr, or M). I taught for four years at a great charter school in Arizona, moved up here in 2016 to be closer to family and escape the desert, recover seasons. Prior to that...if they’re still listening, I’ll talk about something relevant to the class, like teaching English as a second language in Uruguay on a Fulbright exchange, or serving with AmeriCorps in a Boston elementary school, or teaching online courses about video games. But quickly I need to move on to calling roll.

I think about this a lot, as it’s in a way my main job. I meant to ask, were any of you students in the public schools here? Did you ever happen to study the WA state constitution at all? I was just looking at that, preparing to give this talk...I’ll come back to why at the end.

As a student, whenever roll was actually called aloud, as subs have to do it, I became highly self-conscious, imagining everyone’s attention was on me, which was absurd, but that’s how it felt, and that’s how it feels for the kids in the classes where I sub. I’m invisible, and they become visible. If I mispronounce a name, woe! Whereas as a teacher, taking the roll becomes invisible, and you’re able to get right into the class--greeting students by name, asking about their lives since yesterday, and when the bell rights, diving right into the big idea for class that day. Here’s mine:

Public schools will be fine. They will. As long as they continue to provide three simple things: access to technology, to books, and to other people. Really just the last, but it helps to tell stories in threes…

Schools can fail all the tests, teachers can walk out, students can become apathetic, even suicidal or murderous--the next day we’ll be back, asking one another how are you doing, what did you get on the homework and what questions did you have on the reading. What accounts for this resolute normality?

Technology - I started thinking about teaching and schools in earnest as a junior or senior in high school. It was around this time of year, when the weather’s getting nice, summer is around the corner, testing season, and it occurred to me that my teachers must already know as I did that I would do well on all the tests, so why did I still have to take them? What was the point? Why was I there? I started to write about it and still blog about teaching and learning...Slowly I realized what by now should be obvious, that with access to technology, we have access to anything we might want to know. Making technology available makes everything available. And we don’t have to understand how it works--we can look it up--but enough kids will want to that they will drive the advance of new technology, until the robots can do it better than we can. Not far off--then realizing we rely on this thing we don’t understand

Books - Before cell phones, I read books. Students still do, remarkably. Shakespeare, Harper Lee, August Wilson...I should mention I hated school. Bored. And this served me well, finding all sorts of things to read outside of class. Socrates, who was the wisest according to the Delphic oracle whose motto was “know thyself”, claiming he knew how ignorant he was, questioning. Montaigne, “what do I know” exploring that through essays and civic action. Holding these sorts of authorities up as models, but not being hypnotized by the author or their context--they, too, become invisible in the reality of their work. As Flaubert says, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi”

Other people - “Love your neighbor” says the book not to be read in school, the topic not to be discussed--and so it attains that much more glamour, becomes that much more interesting, even tempting--and that’s what the first story in it is about, isn’t it? - Pullman. So it’s ultimately not content, nor even skills, that schools teach--they provide a good chance of learning these in the form of access to technology and books--but insofar as attendance is mandatory, what they teach is how to be around other people. Schools will provide this above all else, at least in states like WA where their funding is tied to attendance: article IX: paramount, ample…

So when I am prompted by dissatisfaction with the resolute normality of school, managing to make boring and banal the most human of activities, learning, then I am learning the most. To ask, to seek what to value, how to live. School’s a joke. It’s life or death. Anytime you have something big enough to contain such contradictory multitudes, we should perk up our ears--there’s a story there. And especially if some people take it seriously, while others treat it like it’s a joke, there’s bound to be strong passions on both sides before long, as the buried significance is either pressed down or comes to the surface. Or when some take it as a literal truth and earnestly act on what it says--taking notes, studying,, caring about grades and even about learning--while others take it as a metaphor, a simulacrum of a lifestyle in a society that has systematically negated their importance, as a lie--perhaps a noble lie, but more likely a dirty one.  For explaining the joke, for my tendentious exegesis on the matter, thank you for listening.

If you’d like to get beyond yourself at a leap, get a job as a sub, work when you want to, they always need more.