Dialogue About the Future: Education
A transhumanist, a primitivist, a traditionalist and an eco-modernist walk into a bar...
Introduction
As the classic symptoms of social distress appear and spread across the West, several groups, some old and some new, have come forward to offer alternative worldviews and propose futures different from Business as Usual. Employing the hoary form of the dialogue, I hope to provide the reader with some basics about these ideas while interrogating these proposals about strengths, weaknesses and what appear to be some internal contradictions. At various points, links are provided so that the reader can investigate these proposals for alternative futures using primary sources.
A Dialogue About the Future of Education
Henry Moon Pie: Welcome to Dialogues About the Future which will entail once-a-week discussions among my transhumanist, primitivist, traditionalist and eco-modernists alter egos. This week, we’re asking our worldview representatives to tell us about the role education will play in getting us to their futures, and howw it will be handled once we get there.
Mercury, your manifesto lays out a very ambitious program for the future. I’ll quote:
In the long run, next-generation solar, advanced nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion represent the most plausible pathways toward the joint goals of climate stabilization and radical decoupling of humans from nature.
That’s going to require a lot of researchers, technicians and skilled workers. Given the state of the American educational system, how do you plan on preparing all these people for the ambitious collection of tasks you’ve put before them?
Mercury: That’s a great question. My pronoun is “they” by the way.
Our mission is to use the marvelous technology we have in hand along with new technology already in development to allow humanity’s continued progress while decoupling that progress from adverse impacts on the environment. That’s going to require us to deploy all kinds of exciting tech, especially in the energy space, things like fusion and thorium reactors, carbon capture and renewables, so that our economy continues to grow even as our environmental footprint shrinks.
As for supplying the needed brainpower, the benefits of modernity have already made that critical task easier. In the West, millions have already been freed from backbreaking agricultural work as mechanization of agricultural tasks and improved yields have drastically reduced the need for farmers. People who would once have been walking behind a horse, plowing a field, are now available to become physicists or nuclear technicians. Actually providing the education and training necessary to the available labor will require a sustained effort by both public and private institutions working in partnership…
Protogon (interrupting): Double down, that’s all you people know. Nuke plants? Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima aren’t bad enough? Watching how the nuclear generating plant in Zaporizhzhia has become a pawn in a very dangerous game doesn’t dissuade you?
And your Big Ag with its chemicals and pesticides will not maintain these high yields and reduced labor you’re so proud of. You’re destroying the soil, constantly shrinking the habitat for wild animals, filling the rivers and oceans with life-destroying phosphates and nitrates, and killing so much essential life that Bill Gates is funding robot bee research at Harvard to replace the bees he’s killing with his pesticides.
It’s technology that’s killing the planet, and you want to double down.
Mercury: We don’t just want to stop habitat destruction. We want to reverse it. More intensive agriculture combined with new foods produced by industrial processes will allow us to reduce the amount of land devoted to agriculture, freeing up areas to be returned to wilderness along the lines of the “30 by 30” initiative.
Themis: Yes, I’ve read about this “30 by 30.” It sounds like a government land grab that will be the final nail in the coffin of many local ranching and farming communities here in the U. S. and around the world. It’s another example of some bright idea cooked up in the liberal NGOs and Ivy League universities and then imposed on the “colonies” in flyover country.
Mercury: You don’t want to preserve wild habitat after we’ve lost more than 50% of animal populations around the world?
Themis: I don’t want to lose any more traditional subcultures to liberal overreach.
Hemithea: If we’d like to get back to education, one of the most exciting developments is learning enhancement employing neural implants. Right now, it’s being studied as a way of treating certain cognitive issues, but it could be used to speed up learning, reducing the burden on schools. You could become an expert in experimental physics in a week or two.
Protogon: A Tesla in every garage and an implant in every brain. That’s utopia.
Hemithea: You might ridicule the idea, but people are already using implants as an improvement on trying to sleep with a sleep apnea mask. There is no stopping technological progress. People will use new technology when it benefits them, when it makes things more convenient or comfortable.
Henry Moon Pie: A democratic society can’t just decide that enough is enough and shut down technological advancement in an area because it’s too unsafe or too disruptive?
Hemithea: It’s not that easy for two reasons. First, we are living in the most critical century of human existence. Our environment has outgrown us. Its complexity is too much for our meat brains. The only way out is through. To survive the climate problem, the inequality problem, the social divisions problem, humans need help from a greater intelligence, and we’re building that greater intelligence right now. Second, just as a virus doesn’t control how it will evolve, we are living in a world with evolutionary forces driving us to evolve into something beyond human, something with a longer and healthier life, something that has moved beyond the meat brain shortcomings that produce violence, depression, anxiety.
Themis: It’s like Protogon said about Mercury’s ideas. You’re doubling down on the very things that have brought us to this perilous point. What you’re describing is a dystopic culmination of Mill’s liberal project. Human liberty was supposed to be the product of all this individualism. Instead, it appears we’ll be creating a silicon god to tell us what to do. That’s the ultimate despotism of progress.
Mercury: So your solution is to go back to Mayberry?
Themis: I want to see the concept of a common good restored in our society. Instead of each individual seeking purely personal goals of fulfillment or success, we need to return to the idea that our lives are lived, at least in part, in service to others. Parents sacrifice for the welfare of their children. Community members act as neighbors who can be trusted and relied upon. Those were values portrayed in the “Andy Griffith Show” in the 60s because they were values held by most people in the country at that time, and those times, though not without serious problems, were times when it didn’t feel as if society was about to dissolve into anarchy.
Henry Moon Pie: Let me interject a rather meta question here. Hemithea, you said that the way out was through, something that Themis and Protogon consider doubling down. How is it that you expect the same means to lead to a different end?
Hemithea: We’re at a different point in our evolution. We’ve been piling up technological advancement upon advancement, but we’ve only had our meat brains to figure out how to manage it all. Things have gone wonderfully well in some ways. Life expectancy has increased dramatically in the past 100 years. The world is far wealthier. But there have been problems as well: environmental damage; socially destructive income and wealth inequality, growing mental health problems. We need help from something smarter than us, more rational, less biased. Since no advanced aliens have shown up to volunteer for the job, we’ll have to build that greater intelligence ourselves. And we’re doing it!
Protogon: Exactly. Our meat brains are building it, coding it, training it. Just how is this silicon god supposed to transcend us smelly, disgusting humans? What this AI will be is just a projection of the designers and coders but with greatly enhanced power.
Henry Moon Pie: Thanks for interjecting that, Protogon. Now back to these questions I had. Themis, what you’re proposing is this re-establishment of a prior order when we were not so overwhelmed by technology and the radical individualism of neoliberalism. That strikes me as being like streaming a movie and disliking the ending because the bad guys won. So you rewind back to a point when the good guys were still on top, and hit play. Why do you think the movie will turn out differently this time?
Themis: Greater vigilance? Less naive about the negative impacts of technology or individualism? The liberal project has brought us to an oligarchic system where the rich and their well-credentialed managers decide and everyone else has to swallow it. A return to a focus on the common good will need to be accompanied by changes in the political system to support that focus.
Protogon: The only way to avoid sliding back into this morass is to strictly limit technology. For example, humans have long been gardeners, nurturing some native plants in a forest or jungle, while reducing the population of other less desirable plants from a human standpoint. It’s enhanced hunter-gathering. But when we moved into agriculture, we began breeding plants, altering nature even at the level of the seed with its evolutionary power. That was humans establishing dominance over Nature, and along with that came hierarchy among humans. It’s those hierarchies of man over Nature and elite human over the rest of us that are destroying us now.
Themis: And it has led to us even tinkering with ourselves. A crucial step was the widespread use of the birth control pill. For the first time, humans were using technology to alter the healthy life processes of their own bodies in order to enjoy greater “freedom.”
Henry Moon Pie: Is that really true, Protogon, that the breeding projects that led to corn and wheat inevitably lead to Frankenplants? Can’t we discern some principles that would allow for some technological advancement while enabling us to accomplish two things: bar dangerous developments, for example, nuclear weapons; and slowing the pace of change way down so that our social structures can adapt to the impacts of adopted techs? Even if we were to accept what sounds like your goal, a return to the Neolithic age at least, getting there is going to require retaining some technological capabilities during the transition unless we’re just going to kill off billions of people.
To get back on point, I don’t think we’ve heard from your views on the current state of education, Protogon. What say you?
Protogon: Education is a bad thing. I’m not just talking about its role in capitalist society of creating another brick in the wall. I’m talking about the idea of transmitting what one generation knows to the succeeding generation. Once you get writing, that leads to accumulating more and more knowledge, and you arrive where we are today. I actually agree with Hemithea about the inevitability of all this. Once you allow knowledge to build up, before long you have a big ball rolling downhill and getting bigger all the time. It’s hard to stop. The solution is to never let the process get started.
Themis: You’re only looking at one aspect of education, basically STEM. The most primitive hunter-gatherer tribe must educate its young. They must be taught the skills necessary to survive and contribute to the tribe’s welfare. They must learn the tribe’s stories that give them a place in the universe. They must learn the rituals and taboos that the tribe has developed over time to protect the social structure. Without that kind of education, there is no anchoring: in time; in place; in one’s society.
Hemithea: Oh no, no, no. You want to freeze humanity. Where? In the Neolithic Age? In Medieval Europe? In 19th century America when de Tocqueville came calling? We can’t stand still. Moving forward is in our genes. And technological change requires social and cultural change. We must adapt to the changes in our lives brought about by technological advancement. And our meat brains are struggling with the rate of change. We need help from a greater intelligence. We need guidance. That’s what the future of education is.
Mercury: Wow. You kind of even freak me out. I got interrupted a while back and never did get to finish my point about education meeting the challenges of what I agree will be humanity’s most challenging century ever. Research institutes like this one, funded by public or private entities, will be the vanguard of this all-out effort to move technology forward. Drawing on the best minds available, what they learn will be the catalyst as it’s disseminated through the research space.
Henry Moon Pie: Well, for a first session, people have managed to get a lot of ideas before us. We have some startlingly contrasting visions of the future.
Themis: What we really have are startlingly different views of who humans are.
Henry Moon Pie: Very true. Now for our next session, we’re going to focus on how your different visions for the future and how they impact the sex and gender space, to borrow a phrase. That shouldn’t be too controversial.