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!