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| Joint Attention |
[This is part two in a series on Zak Stein's philosophy of education. The current post begins with an edited transcript of a conversation between Zak Stein and Artem Zen. Part one can be found here.]
What is the crisis of education?
Zak Stein: I conceive education very broadly as the kind of social functions that allow the society to reproduce itself, what's sometimes called social autopoiesis. Education is the autopoetic function of society, it's the work society does to continue being itself, it's how the next generation comes to take on the responsibilities, roles, and personalities that are needed to keep the society going. If you have an educational crisis that's bad enough, across multiple systems, then the society can't reproduce itself. The next generation literally doesn't have the skills or capacity to fill the roles in the society that need to be filled.
This is a recipe for civilizational collapse. Some of it is that we've lost the capacity to pass on complex skill acquisition. Some of it is that we've lost the capacity to legitimize the system into which young people are being asked to move, which is to say it's a legitimation crisis. It's not that they can't learn, or we don't know how to teach them. It's that they're saying "Why the hell should I learn this? Why should I work so hard to go get a job in this system, or this government, which hasn't been able to make itself legitimate in my eyes?" So there's the capabilities crisis, but more fundamentally, there's the legitimation crisis, which is that we actually haven't been able to convince young people that they should actually care about contributing to this civilization.
Many of the forms of academic underperformance which we'd like to medicalize are actually a result of this legitimation crisis. It's not that the kid can't do it, it's that you actually haven't given him a good enough reason to do it. So it's a multi-faceted educational crisis, not just a technological or technical problem of improving curriculum to get skill acquisition, it's also a moral/ ethical/ political problem of actually legitimating this civilization in the eyes of the upcoming generations, or else they just won't buy it and they'll just refuse to contribute. And then the thing will degrade quite rapidly. I think that's the situation we're in.
If you turn a social/ political problem into a biological problem, you've just medicalized deviance. If we medicalize political deviance, should we send political dissidents to psychiatric hospitals? This is what they used to do in Russia. "The fact that you politically disagree means that actually it's a biological issue, it's your physiology, it's not a legitimate political disagreement." Similarly with young children, to the extent that we load them with the social problem and then medicalize that problem, characterize them as somehow basically broken biologically, that they can't fit into the system, we've just de-politicized the whole issue. Because now we can't ask questions like "Maybe the school's not set up right? Maybe you haven't given the kid a reason to learn because he's actually sophisticated enough to see through all of this bullshit?" It's just deflecting criticism from the socio-ethical political environment of the school, and putting criticism in medical terms and directing it at the child's brain. And the child is the most vulnerable one in the whole world.
The problem with today's dominant schooling system
Another thing I'll note is that we literally took the factory model. Assigning grades (like A, B, C, D) literally came from the factory model. It was an innovation that was done at Mount Holyoke College, the first place to ever give grades. It was taken from an administrator who had worked in factories where they were grading the output of meat and things of that nature. Grade A meat. We took the notion of grading materials from the factory, brought them into the classroom, the regimentation, the one-size-fits-allness, all of that comes from a kind of "high modernist" theory of large-scale public schooling. You will also find what I would call "late modernist" or "post-modernist" forms of schooling, which attempt to do away with all of that stuff, no grades, no classes, that kind of stuff. "Let the kid do whatever they want." These postmodern schools are just a reaction against the high modernist schools, but end up reproducing a lot of similar problems. So what I'm proposing in my book is basically the end of schools, full stop. Historically, education was much more distributed throughout the entire culture, so we could have a society where these things that we think of as schools basically don't exist anymore, and yet have a more profoundly effective and meaningful educational system than has ever existed.
There's a whole bunch of things that begin to look radically different from the perspective of childhood socialization that could be easily made possible if we just kind of get rid of this these structures that we've inherited. They're like almost a century old now, some of these structures that we're running schools on. And age-segregated classrooms is one of these. It's related to the function of schools as a means of keeping children out of the job market; you can't separate the history of schooling from the history of capitalism. We keep children out of any position where they could actually do real work that would help their society. But if we think about why there's a youth mental health crisis, this is one of the reasons. You become a teenager, you look out on the world, you see all these problems, and yet you are put in a context of school where none of the work you're doing in school contributes to those problems. What that means is that kids feel like they're worthless. There are a ton of problems in the world which they would like to work on, but which they can't work on. They're actually kept out of meaningful work experiences for most of their lives. By the time they get to work, they don't even know what it means to do meaningful work. All they know is how to do bullshit jobs because they're told to do it. But actual work is meaningful.
We've arranged the system to intentionally keep children out of touch with work and put them in a position where they are not able to contribute to solving the problems in the society that they live in. So part of the educational hub network is to almost resuscitate a kind of "guild model" where the kids are brought in at a young age into collaboration with experts in the context of solving actual problems that need to be solved, not made up problems. Children are basically perceived as an economic burden, as freeriders on the work that we're all doing for a productive society. Kids can't do productive work, and so we don't really value them, and kind of resent them, and we think about them in terms of cost-benefit analysis. "How much am I investing in this kid and how much will I get back when he finally succeeds?"
So we're very confused in our thinking about children, in part because we've forced them into lives that are not serious. We force them into trivial bullshit work, when many of them are ready to be quite serious by the time they're 12 or 13. Most prior human cultures had that. People who are about 30 years old now are probably about as mature as 15 year olds from most of the cultures that have ever existed on the earth. I'm not saying "let's do away with child labor laws", we need laws to protect the youth, but I am saying that we are creating a kind of immaturity, and then we're shocked when they're all so immature. But what do you expect? You've given them nothing serious to do for most of their lives and now you expect them to just be mature and serious. Where can they be challenged? Where can they learn to fail? Where can they confront death, and birth, and reality?
Understanding teacherly authority
Learning takes place in the context of what I call teacherly authority. When you're thinking about alternative education, what are the contexts and dynamics of teacherly authority that are being established? I use that word "authority" very specifically because people get a little bit upset, especially the postmodernist, when I'm talking about authority. It's a very primordial type of interaction which is actually everywhere. You can't avoid it even if you want to be a non-hierarchical postmodernist and you don't want to see that there are asymmetries in knowledge and capacity between people.
Schooling replaced what I would call organic teacherly authority which is a spontaneous relationship that emerges in the context of mutual understanding about those asymmetries. It replaced organic teacherly authority, which can occur almost anywhere with anybody, with what I would call institutionalized teacherly authority, which means that you have authority over me as a teacher because the state gives you power to have authority over me as a teacher, not because you necessarily have asymmetric capacity over me. Kids start to detect this very early. Kids know about asymmetric capacity. They know about artists, like hip-hop artists or athletes and other things. "Okay, that guy is clearly better at this than these other people." They get that, and so the question is, does this teacher, that's been mandated by the state and that I have to give authority to, do they have that asymmetry? It's not clear. So the delegitimation of institutionalized teacherly authority leads many people to just question teacherly authority as a category in general.
But kids actually don't want to be completely left alone. If you treat the kid as if they're an adult, you're actually doing a huge disservice to them. You're putting them in a position where they have nowhere to look now for teacherly authority. It's an unsafe situation where the people who should have authority over them are relinquishing that authority. We can't run a society when the older generation relinquishes its responsibility to assume teacherly authority.
Organic teacherly authority is fluid. It comes and goes. In one context you're the teacher, in another context someone else is the teacher. The ability to recognize when that's happening, and to enjoy when that's happening, and to seek out places where you can be a student, to seek out the asymmetries of knowledge and capacity because you want to find someone who can actually teach you these things, that's what needs to be instilled in the youth instead of this attitude that "nope, there's actually no one who can teach me anything." If you give up on the older generation because they've given up on themselves, they've relinquished teacherly authority, and you agree that they should, then you have a younger generation that is arrogantly dismissive of the potential that there could even be teacherly authority with the elders. The elders are kind of saying "I've got nothing to teach you kid, I failed, we failed, my generation failed." ...The generation gap, the animosity between the generations, the only knowledge of teacherly authority being institutionalized teacherly authority, these are really fundamental things. Does the child come to love learning? Does the child come to respect teachers and seek out teachers?
The whole point of healthy teacherly authority, my goal as a teacher, is to bring you up to my level and have you surpass my level. I'm not hiding stuff from you. I'm appropriately bringing you in as you're ready to look at the very thing that I'm looking at. We're looking at the same text together. And I want you to be smarter than me. I want you to know more than me. You're the future. You actually have to take up the mantle of the society when I'm gone, therefore I have to get you to a place where you know as much as me or can surpass me. That's a sign of healthy teacherly authority. When the asymmetry is there, it's recognized, but the whole point of the interaction is to lessen the asymmetry and actually have the student surpass the teacher ["standing on the shoulders of giants", and inverting the relational asymmetry].
And when you feel a teacher is actually deeply invested in you coming to know what they know, or more than they know, it's a kind of love, it's a kind of selflessness that becomes tangible. There are of course pathological forms of teacherly authority and we need to be able to recognize them. But it's tangible when you're in a healthy student-teacher relationship and you can feel the appropriateness of it, the excitement of it, the shared interest in the progress of the student, and the uniqueness of the relationship. What you're doing as a teacher, in a legitimate dynamic of teacherly authority, is empowering. The word's been overused, but you're literally empowering the person and transmitting power.
The problem of reducing education to a commodity
You can't commodify organic teacherly authority. You can do that with institutional teacherly authority. But organic teacherly authority is much more unique. The interpersonal relationship much more subtle. In my book I write about one of the main things that undermines teacherly authority, what I call the educational commodity proposition. It's basically the reducing of educational experience to something like a commodity which can be quantified and monetized and put into market exchange dynamics. What that does is it complicates the relationship between the teacher and the student, because the student is aware that in fact the teacher is getting paid by me to give me this lesson. Is this the lesson they would give if I weren't paying them?
Zak Stein: Should the state have paid your mom to raise you, and then monitor her behavior and paid her more if she was a “good mom”? If I knew that my mom was getting paid in this way, that would be the most devastating undermining of intergenerational transmission I could imagine. Because it would undermine the intergenerational transmission of love, right? “Okay, my mom’s nice to me. Why is my mom nice to me? Because she loves me.” But then in the back of my mind, there’d be this, “Oh, no, she’s actually being nice to me because she’s virtue signaling to the monitors who will pay her more.” You have to understand how much we are approximating this kind of situation in many institutional contexts where intergenerational transmission takes place. The undermining of teacherly authority has ramifications in all of the other aspects of our institutional structures.
This same problem also affects artists. The best art occurs when you're doing it for the love of it, not just because you're getting paid for it. As soon as you become famous and popular, does your art still come from the depth of your heart, or is it made to sell? When you find a true teacher they will help you no matter what, whether they are rewarded or not. That is a message of unconditional support, a message of the unconditional availability of educational resources, which is what needs to be given to kids so they can feel empowered to rise to the challenge.
It goes all the way back to the sophists and Socrates. If you're paying me to be a teacher, then it's not in my interest to challenge you or put you in a situation where you have to learn something that you don't want to learn, it's in my interest to be entertaining and teach you things that will instantly give you return on your investment so that you can make more money and give that money to me. One example of this is the educational student loan. The whole student loan crisis is deeper than the financial thing. It's a huge financial problem, but running higher education on a debt-based model, where you're basically taking out a mortgage in order to go to college, changed the dynamic of colleges. Colleges become more interested in serving customers than in educating students. And of course we know capital classically says "the customer is always right". But if you're a student you actually want to be proven wrong. So this is very subtle, and it's deeply affecting the way we think about education. It characterizes the cultures in colleges and universities a lot and I think explains a lot of the entitlement of younger people in these classrooms, because they're paying to be there.
Similarly with the online courses, if you are supporting yourself financially by selling courses then that's going to affect the type of course you teach. You become almost financially required to make these things palatable and entertaining. So the educational commodity proposition fundamentally undermines the dynamic of teacherly authority. Does this teacher really care about my learning, or do they just care about it because they're getting paid to? So most of the online educational courses right now are these sort of educational commodity propositions. Can we find a way to decouple teacherly authority from the dynamics of basic commodity transactions? That is a subspecies of a broader problem that we're confronting in the late capitalist end game, which is the attempt to just turn everything into a commodity. We're reaching what I would call "peak commodification". I believe that there will be something like a pushback even among consumers against the attempt to commodify everything, and we will come to value anew these things that cannot be commodified, that cannot be measured. We will start to actually recognize those values in a way that we didn't even know we needed to, until we started to see what was happening as it was all being taken from us.
Conversation Three: "Where Do We Go From Here?"
Zak Stein: How do we tell the difference between legitimate and illegitimate teacherly authority? There are many indices. One of them is that the good teacher is trying to give you exactly the skills you need to no longer need the teacher. The good therapist is trying to give you the skills you need to no longer need the therapist. One of the dynamics that you find in the media currently is you're addicted to the trough. You keep going back to eat more of the "high fructose" news stuff. That's just an egregious violation of teacherly authority, of the obligation that the media has. ...One of the reasons teacherly authority fails is because it gets localized. We need to find a way to distribute it. How can you have a legitimate distribution and dissemination of teacherly authority?
John Dewey wondered what constraints on freedom are legitimate, and how enabling constraints can set us up for greater freedom. (He said "that limitation on freedom is allowed which enables greater future freedom".) There's a beauty to that way of thinking about constraint and authority. This is the very stuff of intergenerational transmission. Enduring cultures have figured this out, but we are in a crisis of teacherly authority and intergenerational transmission. ...Things can begin to change so rapidly that it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, for the elders to know what to teach the students. The students may inherit a world that the elders literally do not understand. If the students become aware of that fact, then there can be this weird reversal. This is actually the root of the youth rebellion and the intergenerational crisis. Something like this has occurred, and we don't know how to negotiate this as educators. But I think what it means is that the educator's responsibility is to allow the student to find the problem, that project of their life, that is theirs to work on. This is very vague, so you need to allow for enough freedom and enough support.
We ask the youth "Who will you be in the future?" The elders respond "I cannot imagine." But the youth respond "Now I can, because you've given me the resources to imagine beyond what you're capable of imagining." That's the responsibility. It's not to determine for them, or to pick out of some slot of jobs that we're aware of now, or something like that. It's to give the resources of judgment and discernment, the resources of imagination. We're in that situation of not being able to imagine what it will be like for those who come after us, who will not be like us, who will inherit this world that we've created with its hyper-objects and its risks. It's a letting go, which many parents know, but we're having to exercise this at an intergenerational level. [in conversation at The Stoa]
The way to gauge a society is not by what it says it does with its moral codes and stuff, it's by its demonstrated capacity for ongoing learning. We're looking for growing our ability to learn together as a society. [source] In an ideal world, you would have an educationally focused democracy. [source]
Greg Thomas: "How does your meta-psychology fit within the educational project?"
Zak Stein: "It's completely woven in. For example, visual literacy as an aspect of media literacy is huge. The nature of the imagery. Words capture development, mind, and skill, but image captures personality. That's why, for example, the image of a man being kneeled on is so much more powerful than just the words "a man being kneeled on". There's a lot of things in the aspect of ensoulment that are being addressed, but not head-on. We're working on ensoulment, but we're actually working on personality, character, and value. Some of that will not be in the words, in how the words are presented. As McLuhan said, "the medium becomes the message," the nature of the design, and imagery, and those kinds of choices as opposed to it just being a cognitive, linguistically mediated project. Because, as Daniel Schmachtenberger said, we're curating a space, we're trying to bring in the best of what we can find and build a movement, so as a psychologist a lot of my concern has nothing to do with what people are thinking and everything to do with what people are feeling and the way they're processing their emotions and relationships. So I'm going to be trying to pay a lot of attention to those groups that are looking at the psychological and emotional precursors to even being interested in civil conversation. There's a lot to do in these arenas. So in that sense I think it's very much informing the project. But it's one of many models that are being used." [in conversation at The Stoa]
Conversation Four: Education hub network
Zak Stein: We have to separate education from schooling very clearly because we need an educational renaissance in a context where we have to let certain forms of schooling basically go by the wayside. Part of doing that means distilling out this notion of teacherly authority because teacherly authority occurs whether there are schools or not. As we know them, teachers and schools are done. AI is coming. So we need to somehow build distributed educational hub networks where we can basically create institutions that can reconfigure teacherly authority in the digital world. You get a kind of strange rehearsal/ imitation of prior forms of teacherly authority under new conditions of communication technology (imitation is a ubiquitous part of the joint attentional situation). This is the McLuhan-esque point. There are limitations to each of these, but most of the potential is being misused.
The education hub network basically involves repurposing certain existing educational infrastructures, like large high schools, as hubs in a distributed community-wide education network in which all community members participate. It's a combination between a library, child care center, co-working space, museum, and maker space. And then out of the high school radiates in a hub-like fashion pop-up classrooms that use the resources. The thing is latticed with a back end that's basically a digital portfolio, a content, time, and skill sharing network. Alongside the education hub network I recommend a bunch of other sociological miracles. I call them "social miracles" which would have to be in place to change the education system. I would recommend checking out the book Education in a Time Between Worlds for the kind of full explanation there. It is much more about the networked potentials than just some fancy new form of broadcast like YouTube, Khan Academy, MasterClass, Wikipedia, and that stuff.
Zak Stein: These are incredible resources from a variety of perspectives. They’re just not comprehensive approachs that could be used to handle every child. In general, an informational environment is not an educational environment. Staring at screens all day isn't what education is at a fundamental level. Educational environments are structured in a specific way and involve the dynamic of joint attention and teacherly authority. Technology needs to slot into that richer conversation and interaction between teacher and student, rather than running interference between them, which is what’s happening now.
Zak Stein: In my book I talk about this "decentralized educational hub network", and one of the core ideas there is a basically algorithmically enabled pop-up classroom generator. This is an AI (not a generative AI, it's not talking to you) that's tracking all of the information in the Hub Network. It's tracking who's interested in what, who knows how to teach what, who lives where, availability, ages, skill levels, all that stuff. Then the algorithm says "This Saturday you guys could meet for two hours and study this thing you're all interested in". That's an educational technology. I could have a meeting on Saturday, not with my computer, but a meeting with people, all of whom are interested, with different skill levels. And there's an assigned instructor source. It's a pop-up classroom generating algorithm which drives you into human communication, with other humans in real space and time, not deeper into screen-based exposure to abstract ideas and text. So that's a very simple flip, which is that if you're building AI based educational technology then prioritize the way those technologies can bring humans together rather than prioritizing that technology's ability to capture human attention and distract it from other humans, which is what a ChatGPT model does. The focus is creating a human experience rather than creating some experience you have alone with the screen. So that's my general sense of the design landscape, which means most AI projects just stop because most of them are about building tutoring systems and attention capturing chat-like interfaces and eventually humanoid simulations that have real-time conversations with you, and I think that's the wrong way to go. (Stein: "An AI system acting in your interests would defend you from the AIs that were being created to extract your attention and exploit you.")
I began to address the topic of organically emerging teacherly authority as a graduate student when I was in my 20s, which includes other things aside from asymmetric knowledge, it includes personality interactions, and ethical commitments, and other things. The concept kind of popped for me as an educational philosopher, so I published "On spiritual teachers and teachings" in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice in 2011, specifically looking at teacherly authority in the context of spiritual communities. As Aristotle said, people love to learn. One of the deepest things we love to do is to learn and to deepen our connection to others and to reality itself through relationships, which is usually through a teacher-student relationship. And those kinds of epistemic asymmetries can flip from one moment to the next (in both directions, both parties usually have something to teach the other, a kind of reciprocation in these asymmetric knowledge transfers, which is teacherly authority). We're talking about very flexible dynamic hierarchies of teacherly authority. There's no place for that in schools, and in some kind of guru religious contexts there's no place for that either.
The basic neurological/ sociological pressure points that can be leveraged to do the opposite of education, the dark twin of education, which is basically to transform someone's relationship to information and authority such that they come to believe things and do things which they really wouldn't have otherwise done, this is called undue influence ["The opposite of education is manipulation," Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving]. It looks like they're doing this of their own volition. It looks like they're making choices here. But if you look at the dynamics in place, sociologically and psychologically, they're actually under undue influence. They've been coerced into valuing and thinking certain things that actually don't make sense to value and think. Advertising and public relations were supercharged by propaganda during the world wars and then again during the cold wars, so we're in a society that has become scientifically refined in the administration of manipulative and coercive information.
When you are the more vulnerable party in a demonstrable epistemic asymmetry, are they instrumentalizing you? This is where Socrates says to the sophists: "Why are you charging money?" Is there a non-expectation of reciprocal return on investment, which is to say like they're going to teach you and they don't expect to get anything for it? Asymmetric generosity is complex, you need to know that the teacher holds that regard, that the accomplishment of intergenerational transmission is the goal, otherwise it's a different kind of relationship. It doesn't mean you can't learn from them, but it does mean there's a level of trust and mutual commitment that will not be engaged. [in conversation at Parallax Press]
Conversation Five: "Why Culture War Matters More Than You Think"
Zak Stein: Imagine the young person coming into the culture and having a need to be educated. "I don't know how the world works. How do the adults think?" So they come in. And you've captured the market of their attention. They need to learn. They have to come into that space. So if they're met by elders who in good faith try to tell them what they need to know to learn, then it's educational. (That doesn't mean that we would agree with what's being taught, but the situation is one of earnestly trying to reproduce the values of the society through good faith teacherly dynamics.) The issue is that, in our context, now that youth comes into the culture and there are technologists who say "Awesome, I'm actually going to make a ton of profit off of your need, and I'm going to make that profit by algorithmically augmenting your human development." They do that through attention capture technologies in such a way that the sequence of videos that you see isn't optimized for your education, it's not optimized to meet that need (although that need is what's being ultimately preyed upon). It's optimized to keep you looking. And now we're on the race to the bottom of the brainstem. You're parasitically preying upon the inescapable need of the youth coming into the culture, needing to learn about what the adults have to say. This exploits the legitimate need of an organism to learn. It doesn't really give a damn whether the culture lives or dies, whether the person learns what they need to learn, or whether their needs are actually met.
Social media is an identity formation environment, because of the fragility of identity formation. You're getting your identity populated with images that are not your own but by people who are intending to manipulate you. As we've seen in the neuroscience of film, there's a hypnotic or hypnagogic trance-like state that happens from the infinite scroll.The social media company rents out the brainwashing machine. It sounds hyperbolic, but they're basically saying "We figured out a way to keep people staring at the screen, make them susceptible to suggestions, you want some of this? Pay us and we'll give you more information about these people than they know about themselves, and we will assure you that they will basically stay focused. And we'll do that to kids. (How many people are able to use social media in a disciplined way, or talented enough to turn an informational ecosystem into an educational ecosystem?) The United States federal government is basically getting played by social media and is unable to regulate it. The nature of what the algorithm does needs to be known by the federal government and made publicly available information.
There is a third attractor which uses digital technologies to create an information ecosystem, a form of digital democracy. An education-centric digital ecosystem. If you're a technologist, spend your time creating education-centric algorithms that optimize for learning and education as opposed to creating algorithms that optimize for profit maximization and attention capture. Imagine a dashboard where you set your own learning goals, where the thing that's recommended next would be recommended to me by a trusted elder or teacher, knowing the path that I'm on, as opposed to just being the one that's going to keep me watching. What that means is that people won't stay on the site. Because such an education-centric algorithm would be more challenging. People will have to go away and learn, and study, and come back. They'll have to have conversations. There'll be other things that take place. We're not looking at attention capture technologies, we're looking at actual education, democratic communication technologies, which are completely possible, we just have not incentivized for them. (See Make education not culture war.) [in conversation with Jonathan Rowson]
Conversation Six: Authoritarianism or Human Flourishing
Zak Stein: The situation of teacherly authority is quite acute. The water has become so muddy in terms of how to detect legitimate teacherly authority, that now we don’t even know it when we see it. And when we do see it, there’s often a knee jerk reaction to destroy it, that teacherly authority is not wanted. And that undercuts the ability for intergenerational transmission. So until we get some reasonable discourse taking place within public view, and especially within view of the children about why they’re learning such and such, and why such and such is actually valid knowledge, and what valid knowledge actually means, there’s no way out. There is no way out without renegotiating teacherly authority. A downward spiral seems to be unfolding in the current historical moment.
Zak Stein: "One of the reasons that we've so problematized teacherly authority in general is that we haven't disentangled it from paternalism. It's not our place to tell you what's good for you, it's to equip you to figure out what's good for you. And yet so much education is paternalistic." [in conversation with John Vervaeke]
Dr. Elizabeth Debold: "When you use the word "authority", or "teacherly authority", our post-modern culture has a little bit of an allergy to that."
Zak Stein: "Yes of course, and as they should! There has been so much "pathological authority", and there's been so much pathological teaching. But those pathological versions are parasitic on a core of human experience that can't be neglected, which is the loving relationship between a student and a teacher. That's the key. Love is the key. ...Teacherly authority is legitimate when it actually seeks to use its power to bring you up to its level of authority. You look at the same data, you look at the same texts, you look at the same experiences, you live in the same place together. The educator wants you to reach their level of understanding, and then surpass them."
The concern is that we could lock down into some new authoritarianism. That's a fear produced by the discomfort of a situation in which there is an absence of teacherly authority. And in that absence, you'll take the first remotely viable person who appears, who could potentially close that loop and step into the vacuum of teacherly authority, just to stop the discomfort and chaos of not having someone who knows what to do. The risk of not resolving the teacherly authority crisis in a reasonable way is that we will resolve the crisis of teacherly authority in an unreasonable way.
Who decides educational content, and the quality of that content? That’s a problem at the heart of curriculum studies, and at the root of the issue around teacherly authority. Who gets to decide what the official knowledge is? And so one way to get at this question is that we need to change not the nature of the content that we provide, but the way we make decisions about which content we provide. So I wouldn’t say that there’s one group of people that decides, but I would say that we need to formulate new processes to even think about what counts as the core of an educational system. And so it’s not so much about changing education to change what people think, the goal here is to change how people think. We can maintain the virtue of having local decisions made about the quality and content of what’s taught, but conducted in such a way that the process assures a certain number of baseline requirements. It’s another way of handling the problem of standards, but talking about standards as a discursively redeemed community practice, as opposed to a centralized authoritarian mandate. [in conversation with Jim Rutt, one and two]
In Education in a Time Between Worlds, the final social miracle is about science in the interest of human flourishing and exploration. This is the only place in the book that I talk about outer space. But in fact, for a lot of the book, in part because I had so much science fiction as a kid, I’m thinking “What would be an educational system that could actually get humans to be a species that was involved with more than just the Earth?” There’s this possibility that we flee the Earth because it’s dying, right? Like Elon Musk, we bug out to Mars, and it’s as if that’s the only motive we could have, just survival. But if we take to the stars out of fear, if we take to the stars out of profit-seeking and enslavement and all, then that’s not going to last. So I’m imagining a civilizational kind of architecture in which it’s actually from the excess of our curiosity and accomplishment that we “take to the stars”.
That’s what I call sometimes a religious transhumanism, where high technology is wedded to high consciousness, high aspirations, and radical maturity and sanity. Then it’s a much more reasonable thing to think that humans could actually go and colonize other worlds. Right now, we can barely survive on this one. So it’s looking like the near-term space stuff ends up being quite dicey. It ends up being the asteroid mining, the surveillance satellites, and the super expensive billionaire day trips to outer space, and stuff like that. But there’s incredible potential futures. There’s a radical transformation and reconfiguration that’s coming, that’s imminent, that will make us as different from modern man as modern man is from cavemen. [in conversation with Jim Rutt]
Conversation seven: Augmented Joint Attention
Zak Stein: We gravitate to asymmetric relationships. This is one of my fundamental points about teacherly authority. When it's working well, kids want authority figures, when they're good, legitimate authority figures. People want others demonstrating asymmetric capacity, better skills than them. They want to see that, and they want to be taught how to pursue that. There's something about these machine-human relationships that are fitting this archetypal pattern, and I believe that marketing and consumer driven product oriented AI development will use those archetypes.
But AI is ontologically very different from us. It's certainly not “thinking” like we are. So I prefer the AI interfaces that don't make them seductive and charismatic. It could arrange for you to be in certain kinds of human relationships that would thereby become more powerful, an orchestrator and intensifier of human relationships, as opposed to the oracular humanoid guru tutor/ coach that's always in your visual field, replaces all your relationships, and seduces you into human intimacy. The point is that anthropomorphizing these machines might be one of the biggest dangers.
The choice of how they made ChatGPT is weird. We get to ask it questions, give it prompts. It generally doesn't ask us questions. It pretends to be human, and that's the problem. It talks to you one-on-one. We could have made it where it could only communicate with three or four people, or that it would actually orchestrate a conversation between several people. It could have done that instead of having me talk. It would be like an ‘Uber manager’ of some kind. That's one way to think about it, as an emergent superordinate control structure. That’s what its capacity could be, to enhance the probability of good person to person joint attentional situations. That's the machine as the ‘orchestrator’. There's this whole ability to get a decentralized machine intelligence enabled educational system.
It’s hard to have a joint attentional situation about a physical object on Zoom. You and I can have joint attention about conceptual objects, but like if I wanted to help in my community, like figure out how to help people fix their cars, or the millions of things that adolescents can help do in their community except writing stupid papers (which get written by ChatGPT) it's hard to do that on Zoom. But it's really easy to do that with augmented reality glasses and a bunch of friends where the thing actually could walk you through repairing cars (even though you don't know how to repair cars) because it can overlay on the engine every component and guide you and your friends through fixing a car.
Since you're no longer staring at your screen, you're actually looking out through the augmented reality thing, it could orchestrate human relationships and specifically the joint attentional relationships, where you and I are both looking at the engine, and the engine is overlaid in both of our visual fields with the same metadata. And so we're actually relating to this pedagogical augmented reality overlay. They're already doing this in some fields. More so than Zoom and other things, it could actually bring us into really generative educational relationships. The main thing is to make these technologies optimize and deepen human relationships, rather than create a humanoid that distracts you from actual human relationships. This is just a design challenge to get us out of the attention capture dominant modality of application and machine intelligence.
I remember it was William Irwin Thompson who said “Eventually technology will become sophisticated enough that it will disappear, and we'll be able to hear the bumblebees and birds again”. It will become smaller, completely inconspicuous, and it will enhance our biological experience rather than degrading it. Right now computers are hard on our biology, whereas there are other user interfaces that would be much easier just on our physiology. We would return to the archetypal form of human rather than the hunched over blind human. So a lot could potentially change. That's like just coming back to who we are. A return, in a sense. [See Karl Schroeder's "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature."]
But the most likely course is that the augmented reality stuff will be built as an attention capture model. We’re going to sell people experiences. They will want to have more of those experiences, like an entertainment model, and then it becomes the goddamn most entertaining thing that humans have ever created. If you have augmented reality interfaces built on an attention capture model you could quickly break the nervous system. The opposite of that is minimal invasiveness in your visual field, minimal prompting, mostly enhancing your sensory experience, bringing you deeper into the actual visual perception of a forest. That's all possible with augmented reality. It’s also possible to have that forest destroyed by a bunch of embedded advertising, and have all the bad stuff blotted out. [in conversation at Parallax Academy. Like the left hemisphere itself, words (language, and tools more generally) can either be a great help or a great hinder to us. It's the context that tends to determine whether the emissary is playing the role of a "good servant" and enriching our experience, or fomenting "insurrection" and severing us from the world around us. Our tools should mediate experience only so far as is necessary, and not crowd out the experience of "presencing" overmuch.]
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| William Butler Yeats (cf. Russell) |
Zak Stein: All of this is about the ability to have a nonarbitrary discussion about what is valuable, what we should be doing. How do we have a non-arbitrary discussion, not resolved by mere power or something, but a non-arbitrary discussion about the nature of reality? Which is to say: What's actually the case with how it ought to be between us, given what has happened? These are questions for a ‘value realist’. A value realist would be someone who believes value is real, therefore you can make law in relation to a ‘field of value’. Most modernism is ‘value nominalist’. They call themselves ‘legal nominalists’, which means that the law is just the law: “It’s whatever we make it. There is no way you could ‘carve nature at the joints’ and actually make a Divine Law that would somehow be in keeping with the nature of the cosmos. The universe is a meaningless evolving machine made out of matter that has no ulterior purpose or motive, and certainly doesn't value the things that we value, so law is the arbitrary codification of relativistic human value. We all know that the universe doesn't have any purpose, so therefore our legal codes are as arbitrary as they could possibly be.”
That's modern legal theory basically. It's hard to actually maintain human rights and other things under strictly nominalistic legal conditions. And so that means that this idea, that there is some actually sacred line to be drawn by the law, for example around the inviability of personhood with regards to privacy, the idea that that line is sacred because it exists in the universe, as a vector of reality, becomes just a strange metaphysical belief, a weird premodern thought. In the context of teacherly authority this is where it really grounds home, because when the legal system’s worldview is irrational you get all kinds of terrible stuff and it becomes very hard to be a teacher. At the end of the day the teacher needs to be able to have a non-arbitrary discussion about the nature of the ‘good life’, meaning this outcome is preferable to that outcome for these reasons which can be shared and are not perceived as arbitrary. The time for a retreat to relativism has kind of passed. And we’re in a situation where we no longer have the default common sense sacred axioms of modernity. We’re running off of the legacy of premodernity to kind of shore up our inarticulacies about the nature of a life that has not been misspent, the nature of a virtuous human. And so now we have very little to say about what makes one way of being a person better than another way of being a person (and even that framing is controversial). [in conversation with Tim Adalin. Whereas we might say that value realism provides a 'qualitative orientation' to the world, value nominalism might then favor a "quantitative orientation" to the world.]
Conversation nine: What are we measuring/ testing for?
Zak Stein: One of the most pressing issues is the emerging planetary computational stack, a planetary measurement metastructure sometimes called the 'Internet of Things'. It's a vast sensor, actuator, and measurement network encasing the entire planet. And it's not just using physical measures, but also psychometric measures. As the most basic form of measure is 'the count', the goal is to be able to tag things in such a way that there's an indelible, indestructible index of the 'thing' that can be put on the accounting ledger for all time. At the end of the 16th century the very first inklings of a planetary measurement standard started to emerge which eventually became the metric system. We're looking at another historically significant transformation. We're making that future right now, so we need to start thinking about this massive planetary measurement metastructure that accompanies the planetary computational stack. At this point it's mostly unfolding behind the scenes and the future that's coming is one in which the few measure the many, by means of measures they've devised. And the many often have no access to those measures. 'Metrological injustice' is what I call this in my first book, where you are subject to measures over which you have no choice or control. We don't get the results of those measures, and we didn't decide if we wanted to be measured. But the ability to decide what does or does not count as a measure is not a scientific question, it's a political question.This is Zuboff's 'surveillance capitalism'. A few people are measuring a shitload of people, not telling them what the results of those measures are, and then selling those measurement instances to other folks. Every mouse click is measured. We're being measured every day 24/7. So measurement is at the crux of a lot of issues. (Including the administration of tests in the context of education.) [in conversation with Jeremy Johnson]
Application: Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
While the SDGs may be laudable, for example, there certainly are concerns about environmental, social and corporate governance data (ESG metrics). McGilchrist might characterize our current approach as the triumph of theory over embodied experience: "The assumption that the failing is in humanity if we don’t fit the model, not that there is a failing in the model if it doesn’t fit humanity: the map is, it would seem, more real than the terrain." And this might be why Smart Cities (such as Sidewalk Labs' Toronto project), and perhaps The Great Reset (WEF) failed. Whenever these are approached in such a way that the attempt is to measure and nudge humanity until they fit a specific model, then this may be an example of 'metrological injustice'. This is also possibly an example of "responsibilization", the buck-passing that corporations and other entities commit, blaming the consumers instead of taking responsibility as producers and marketers of unhealthy things (aka "shifting the burden").
To be clear, measurements are of course important and necessary, but the relevant political discussions must occur. And that will include addressing whether we really should fit into this or that social model to begin with. It was avoiding that discussion which ended The Great Reset Initiative, at least under that specific name. The real question here seems to be: Do people want to meet SDGs without also addressing the social models and institutions that were shaped by, and within, a society captured by the left hemisphere? (Relatedly, are SDGs even coherent concepts for such a society?) These challenges illustrate why Zak Stein noted that we can't just change one aspect of our society while leaving the rest of it untouched. To reach SDGs we likely need to change the way in which we attend to the world, need to adopt a 'values realism' stance, need to change our approach to education and to design (at a minimum). The failing is not in humanity, but in the 'machine model' with which we are approaching our predicament. If we can make those changes first, we may find that our measurements do not need to be nearly so invasive to reach SDGs.
How can a discussion about values help clear up the mess we are in? In the context of measurement, we invariably ask “What are we measuring/ testing for?” There are many possible answers to that question, but what’s important is that some answers are better or worse than others. So the first important characteristic of value is that there’s an inequivalence, that is, an asymmetry or hierarchy, just as the perspective of the right hemisphere is more veridical than that of the left hemisphere. The hierarchy of value is something Max Scheler tried to capture with his pyramid. So I might ask: Am I pursuing SDGs because I can satisfy my greed better on a healthy planet than on a sick planet? Or am I pursing SDGs because our beautiful “blue marble” is sacred in and of itself? While each answer contains some truth, one of these reasons is going to be a more reliable guide than the other. If my values only correspond to greediness, I might measure Earth like a factory farm. Alternatively if my values correspond more with sacredness, I might adopt a more systemic approach to SDGs. The values we hold (and attend to) inform the implicit structure of our relationships, so by gaining greater clarity concerning them we can both re-balance our hemispheres and improve the health of our relationships.
A second important insight is that value isn’t relative or subjective, but has the characteristic of being real (hence ‘value realism’). So when we ask about which values are better or worse, we are talking about actual characteristics of the world, that division or union, parts or wholes, or love or hate, is actually better or worse. This makes value, as a topic of discussion, different than just hemispheres. While there is a considerable overlap between these topics, hemispheres evolved in the way they did because value exists in the world, value does not exist only due to some evolutionary accident of our neuroanatomy. This is a very important point. And it’s why flourishing is an objective good. Our hemispheres have the capacity to help reveal and clarify our values, but they do not create value ex nihilo. We are connected to and partake in a ‘field of value’ that we can either choose to respond to or not. If we leave out these insights and ask others to re-balance their hemispheres, they may ask us: “For what reason?” To which we may point to some ostensible good. And so it is the recognition of value, of the good, and so on, and the glaring absence of it when contrasted with left hemisphere capture, that underpins the entire force of McGilchrist’s hypothesis, and the corresponding warning it implies.
There is a vaguely implicit awareness of the sacredness of life within a lot of these organizations, like the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB), but this awareness isn't leveraged to greater effect. And it hasn't penetrated into the global economy or the other cultural and political institutions that need to internalize the implications. (To what degree have any of these organizations been influenced, for example, by Laudato si', the 2015 encyclical by Pope Francis? Does that make it into any of the footnotes or reference material? Or the Declaration of Kawsak Sacha, an indigenous peoples movement with roots in animism? Another organization explicitly calls itself "Defend the Sacred". The lines between religion, political/ environmental activism, and government organizations get blurry, but they are not entirely disconnected from one another.) The ISSB still predominately relies upon narrow mechanistic frameworks to solve a systemic problem by dealing with the parts, which results in attacking the wrong set of causes while neglecting to focus on the root. The filmmaker Park Chan-wook had a character in one of his films poignantly say "You can’t find the right answer if you ask the wrong questions" (cf. law of the insturment). Each of the paths to truth (science, reason, intuition, and imagination) will be needed in order to bring about the dramatic changes that the SDGs suggest, and the changes that Stein would like to see in education. Intuition to access value, science and reason to enrich and refine those intuitions, and imagination to reintegrate and transform the whole.
Conversation ten: Love
Zak Stein: In a lot of what I hear from transhumanists and accelerationists is actually (I'll go psychoanalytical here) I hear a desire to be relieved from responsibility for one's life. This is what I hear. This is also what I hear when people tell me that there's no free will. It becomes very hard to know to what extent the philosophies they're offering are not just psychological defense mechanisms against the terror of actual responsibility and freedom. It's cope. And when I hear people like Nick Land praying for a kind of strange Second Coming (often of a kind of AI variety, which is to say in an artificial super intelligence) that comes to basically rearrange the atoms that are in our bodies into a more efficient universal structure, it sounds like a religious wish fulfillment kind of dream. (Another way out of taking responsibility for our technologies is to become nihilistic, to believe that human value is merely a social construction. It's a strange pathology of the modern worldview. Source)
Iain McGilchrist goes here in The Matter With Things. He makes a very interesting claim which is that when you listen to the metaphysical views and philosophical views of reductive materialists, and the kind of Richard Dawkins, multiverse, Nick Land, transhumanist folks, we end up hearing stuff that sounds a lot like what you hear from people who are actually psychotic or who have severe damage to their right hemisphere. So some of what these people are getting wrong is sanity. "Critical Common-Senseism" (CS Peirce) is the basis of my metaphysics. So it's hard for me not to read many of the views that I hear expressed by transhumanists and reductionists as psychopathological defense mechanisms against reality.
Our culture is characterized by absence, not by presence. It's characterized by the absence of a meta-narrative. It used to be that the center of culture was a meta-narrative. Now it's the case that the center of culture is the absence of meta-narrative, and so this puts us in a complex position. Now the thing we need to overcome is not some story, but it's the absence of story. I think we are approaching that often prophesied end game that Nietzsche lamented but also hastened, which is that descent into a certain kind of nihilism, which is the unstated position hidden within all of those reductive scientistic materialists.
Eros is a superordinate value near the heart of reality itself. What we experience most intensely as sexuality (this is in Augustine, Plato, and other people), what we experience most fundamentally as romantic love, is a 'finger pointing at the moon', a microcosm of macrocosmic reality. The way to Cosmic Love is through individual personal love. A universal field of value can be characterized as erotic, not in the sense that it's sexual, but in the sense that it's connective, intimate, enlivening, alive. It is arousing, not in the sexual sense, but arousing in the ennobling, deeply empowering and humanizing sense. This is what we experience.
[Buckminster Fuller once wrote "love is metaphysical gravity"] but I would say that gravity is condensed, materialized love. This goes back to Charles Sanders Peirce, who articulated I believe one of the best evolutionary non-dual cosmologies. Peirce and Whitehead flipped the script a little bit. They didn't talk about choice, consciousness, and love as if these emerged from matter, but rather they started talking about matter as if it emerged from choice, consciousness, and love. And this is basically what McGilchrist is saying, that we really need to fundamentally rethink our metaphysical primitives, and do so specifically in a way that returns us to sanity.
The evolutionary biology materialism doesn't explain anything. Why do we die for love? Why would we do that? Is it group selection? Am I secretly dying for love in order to protect my own genetic legacy? No, that's not why we die for love. We die for love because it's a fundamental value at the level of the universe itself. We die for love precisely because it is not a social construction. A love relationship that has truly blossomed is a system of very complex obligations. It's a binding energy.
This is why I'm saying people want exculpating worldviews. They want worldviews that relieve them from the obligation of love. Because if I believe that love is just a social construction then I can just leave you and do whatever I want. And all these tears and emotions are just some kind of strange inappropriate reaction. But this is not the case. The binding energy of love, the obligation that comes from true intimacy, these are the most profoundly transformative spiritual experiences we can have. You are woven into the moral and ethical structure of the universe itself, into the fabric of the universe itself. That's a very different way of speaking. Do we want to actually be obligated in that way? Because this is what we freed ourselves from by disenchanting the universe, we freed ourselves from a universe where our actions actually matter. We freed ourselves from the responsibilities of love.
This is what gives me hope: the people who are most confused, who are driving the world towards its end, are actually not capable (given their worldview) of creating organizations as powerful as the organizations that could be created by people who are seeking the value of love, friendship, and trust as primary. In a battle between devils and angels, the angels win. So that's my sense of hope. Now it's very idealistic. When you are in a situation of absence of truth, love, and trust it's very dark. It's very bad. But in that exact situation there is a new and radical premium on those qualities. It's like that saying, that in complete darkness a single candle is extremely bright. So it's that same kind of notion that in a post-truth culture, truth becomes incredibly valuable. There's something in the polarity here that suggests that moving down into one realm will actually result in a new potentiation of its opposite. At the end of the day the truth wins, it just does. That gives me hope. [in conversation with Daniel Kazandjian]
Conversation eleven: God
Zak Stein: The ‘infinite intimate’ is a phrase that has come out of cosmoerotic humanism, which we believe is just another way to refer to God. Theologically it would be like panentheism, complete imminence and complete transcendence. That's the way I speak of God. The field of value is both of those. It is beneath time and eternal, and yet constantly changing and evolving in time. You can relate to it and learn in relation to it. It guides you. Ultimately, the ‘clarification of the will’ or the ‘clarification of desire’ are core practices for relating to God, because they are a way of saying “Okay, the universe has a particular will, there's something that the universe is trying to do. There's something I'm trying to do with my life. Can I align these? What are the practices that would allow me to see value clearly enough to know that, as I act, I'm falling into the stream of the Tao, the experience of living value?”We have the ability to ‘live on the inside of God's face’. That is to say, your face and the inside of God's face are the same. This isn't a ‘God's eye view’ from nowhere. It’s a view from you. It’s precisely your view, but with God's eyes. For example, look at that tree. It is infinitely valuable, intrinsically, no matter what. But that's also the tree you've known for 20 years. There's a ‘unique value’ between you and that tree that does not exist for any other tree or person. So one way to think about the goal of the human, the one aligned with the will of God, would be to create such ‘new value’, to create ‘new God’. This is the idea that there is more God to come. God is a living field of value that continues to express itself. [cf. Alexandre Tannous: “You are the eyes and ears of the universe.”]
If we don't destroy the planet, or make it into a giant prison, then we could create sacred architectures where God could essentially live among us. I call that ‘building the cathedral’. It’s in the Hebrew wisdom discourses about the temple. Creating structures in which the actual presence of the living field of value can reside. What are we moving towards? We're building a temple in honor of, and to invite God back into our lives. Humans have long believed themselves to be involved in some kind of sacred work. Right now we're all so secular we can't imagine what it would be like to have that kind of sacred calling and vocation, but it would be such a gift to be able to create institutions and systems of ideas where young people could start to live with a real sense of sacred purpose. Not some crazy fundamentalist thing, but a ‘post-postmodern’ sacred vocation. I think it’s essential for psychological health.
Michael Levin: “How do you know if you are part of a larger cognitive system? How do we know if we are in fact part of a bigger mind? I don't know. My suspicion is that there is some sort of Gödel-like theorem that will tell you that you can never know for sure. But imagine two neurons in the brain. One is a strict materialist, and one's a little more mystical. One neuron says “We just run on chemistry and the outside world is a cold mechanical universe. It doesn't care what we do. There's no mind outside of us.” And the other one says “I can't prove it, but I feel like there's an order to things, that our environment is not stupid. I feel like it wants things from us. And I kind of feel these waves back propagating through us that are almost rewards and punishments. I feel like the universe is trying to tell us something.” And the first one says “Oh, you're just seeing ‘faces in clouds’. It doesn't exist.” And of course in this example the second one is correct, because they are in fact part of a larger system. They're part of a brain that is learning things. And it's very hard for any one node in that system to recognize that, or even a sub network. But I wonder if we, having a degree of intelligence ourselves, could gain evidence that we were part of a larger system that was actually processing information. And I don't know exactly what that would look like, but my hunch is that it would look like what we call synchronicity. Coincidences are events that have no causal connection at our lower level by mechanistic physics. But at a larger scale, in terms of meaning, the greater meanings of things, they do have some kind of interpretation. And I think that's what it would look like to be part of a larger system. I think it would look and feel like synchronicity. Does it exist? I don't know, but that's what I think it would feel like.” [Here Levin is describing the biological "becoming of man", which may be compared to the theological "becoming of God".]
[In this paraphrased selection, we can see ideas already encountered elsewhere. These include a panentheistic conception of God described by McGilchrist, and the related "McGilchrist Wager", that we are partners in the "becoming of God". This is similar to the notion of "new God" described by Stein. Also recall Gayatri Spivak, who said "The task of a humanities teacher is to provide a non-coercive rearrangement of desire in the classroom." This can be directly compared to Stein's notion of the "clarification of desire". Zak Stein has also quoted William James on God, as well as Ken Wilber: "In whatever comes next, God is everywhere again, in a way that can handle all of the reasonable non-pathological objections that modernity can bring." A capacity of value-ception could eventually lead one to the highest values (das Heilige per Scheler) and God. This may be part of a phenomenological argument for God advanced by McGilchrist. But it is much easier to speak of aspects of a whole than the whole itself, so I am not surprised that one would approach this topic indirectly and only with great caution. We may be apophatic on the nature of God, but kataphatic on the aspects of this "unword" (aspects such as value).]
Conversation twelve: Practice of meditation
Zak Stein: I've done pretty intensive meditation practice. There's this notion of 'negative capability', which is the ability not to know, to hold an open space of creativity and leave the question open. One of those questions is "Who am I?" It's deep inquiry into your own identity and holding open transpersonal forms of awareness and agency. There are higher forms of value and intelligence than we currently embody, and which draw us forward. So this involves the stilling of the mind and body, the opening of the personality to full sensing and greater human capacity, and the opening of the heart and the eye of value. One of the things that is essential now is the deepening of those types of practices that return us to the simplicity of personhood.
There is a misunderstanding of traditions like Zen, or any tradition that cultivates a dissolution of identity. What they actually reveal is more 'unique personality', more 'unique position' within the world. You don't meditate in order to 'disappear from the world'. Some traditions are like that, but the nondual traditions meditate to figure out who and where you actually are. It's an entry into the field of value, which is to say that you're able to step into a space where you can perceive and clarify your own pursuits and relation to cosmic value. In other places and contexts you might clarify your relation to what other people value. But here is where you can come to terms with what reality values. This is the game that you're implicated in, the ongoing evolution of value that you were born into and therefore have some kind of beautiful obligation to continue to express, these dimensions of cosmic value.
So when you meditate, and you find that love and compassion spontaneously emerge from the emptiness of identity, that's because once you get certain parts of you 'out of the way', then the 'unique self' comes forward with a spontaneous expression of cosmic value, which is to say, spontaneously "doing the right thing". That doesn't mean doing the right thing according to what humans say is the right thing (obviously humans don't really know what the right thing is), but rather the right thing by virtue of entering into the universe/ God/ Tao/ Saccidānanda/ nondual field of value. This isn't conventional morality, In terms of accepting a certain list of values that now you rigidly live by. It's a much more fluid embrace of the evolution of value, and of those lineage traditions. It's this conversation about value and the aligning of the human will with the will of God. That has been in religious discourse for a long time. How do we reclaim that now, at a time when our civilization needs to be aligned with reality? It's a very deep question. That's where I'm at. [in conversation with Mario Veen]
Conversation thirteen: The Post-tragic
How do we have conversations about topics of 'existential risk' and 'catastrophic risk'? We had to experience fearing having those conversations with the youth as Covid began. The fear of having to have the conversation about 'when billions watch millions die' and there's nothing they can do about it. So I talk about the need for the future of education to be post-tragic in terms of its orientation in psychology. Basically it means there are different ways to relate to tragedy. Tragedy is inevitable. If you believe tragedy is not inevitable then you're in the 'pre-tragic' state of consciousness. How do you move from the denial of tragedy, to stepping into tragedy (without getting stuck in it), and then to the post-tragic? It's not a new denial of tragedy. It's being in the tragedy still, but having also found a way to manage and transcend the tragedy, phenomenologically, psychologically, emotionally. During the tragedy it's very hard to laugh and love. In the post-tragic there's laughter and love again, but it's different from the pre-tragic laughter and love. That's a simple characterization. But as educators thinking about this dynamic of intergenerational transmission, do we lie to our kids and give them a pre-tragic view? Do we traumatize them by getting them stuck in the tragic, and telling them there's no way out? Or do we have some way to actually become post-tragic? How do we tell stories about our own history that are not just simply tragedies? [in conversation with Elizabeth Debold]
A summary:
In The Matter with Things McGilchrist suggests that: "Every animal, in order to survive, has to solve a conundrum: how to eat without being eaten." These two very different sorts of tasks require two very different hemispheres. "How to eat" correlates with the left hemisphere, while "without being eaten" correlates with the right hemisphere. What does "without being eaten" really imply? McGilchrist suggests that it implies the need for "broad, open, sustained attention for what's going on around you". Yes, but the object of this vigilance is not, as we might suppose, primarily predators to avoid. The best way to avoid being eaten is to learn how to avoid a confrontation to begin with! And so looking for opportunities to learn new skills is what the right hemisphere gravitates to most of all. In Life’s Hidden Resources for Learning (published in Arran Gare's journal Cosmos and History in 2008), Philip Henshaw made just this point, writing that "resourceful avoidance of conflict is the dominant behavior of stable natural systems", that this has been the engine of evolution, and that this can involve both questioning and redefining problems to allow us to better avoid a head-on confrontation. So we might say that, while the left hemisphere is primarily concerned with implementing existing resources and knowledge to maintain the good life, the right hemisphere is, as McGilchrist wrote, "on the lookout for whatever is new", for novel ways to navigate across an ultimately unknown landscape in order to deepen our experience of the good life and truly flourish. This world is replete with both new opportunities, and new dangers and sources of friction. And so learning, and thus access to teachers, education, and the means for intergenerational transmission of knowledge, is a central concern. Most of Zak Stein's thought and evolving body of work concerns healthy human development (teaching/ education) within the context of a metaphysics of value realism, as well as the harm that has been realized (and greater harm that could yet be realized) when the 'eye of value' is blind or distorted. This informs his broader philosophy and motivates his advocacy work.
Just as McGilchrist has to disabuse his readers of the pop psychology concerning hemisphere differences before he can describe the actual differences, so too does Stein have to clarify the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate authority. (He has much to say about the legitimation crisis.) So when asking "Is teacherly authority desirable?" the answer really depends on which we are talking about. And concerning the role of technology in education, there's also a lot to say. The long and short of it is that, like the legitimate teacher who gives you the skills for greater independence, the legitimate role of AI is also one whose presence is felt no more than is necessary, and doesn't pretend to be anything that it isn't. When it's working well, it should effectively disappear. Eliminate the spectacle so we can embrace the substance. (cf. McGilchrist: "In a culture in which computation was not grossly over-prized, an experienced individual would function in almost every aspect of life according to embodied skills, unconscious reasoning, and intuition, with, of course, incursions of analytic thinking, but only when an obstacle was encountered.") ChatGPT is, yes, more about the spectacle. All technologies enable us to do one thing or another, and in that sense they are all 'agentic' or one might say 'anthropomorphic' to some degree. The questions seem to be: In consequence of their use, is our world becoming more impoverished? What are technologies prioritizing today? And can they help to bring us together rather than further isolate us from each other in more harmful ways?
Connecting people with legitimate teacherly authority (recognition of power), enabling them to get the skills they need to do the work that needs to be done (self-efficacy gained through engaging the paradox of reciprocal "opponent processes" for contextual awareness so that "wisdom guides power", cf. kenosis, yin, and tzimtzum), with respect to the nonarbitrary values they hold (connecting power to implicitly felt meaning), and empowering them in turn to become the teachers of others (the transmission of power and wisdom, and discovery of enriched meaning, once again). It all begins and ends with a relationship that connects you to a larger unfolding process. And it's a premise that immediately raises a lot of other questions. How do we establish and navigate these mutually entailed asymmetric relationships? Who are sources of teacherly authority? What are needed skills? When and where is real work? Which values, and why those? All subsumed under an "educational commission" (cf. Matthew 28:19-20 "teach all nations" KJV). But, if the premise is granted, we have an entry point from which to explore these questions, while humbly acknowledging both the scale of the challenge and the urgency to act.
Why did I mention kenosis, yin, and tzimtzum? I think this captures what power means, in the McGilchristian sense. Power (as in "empowerment") is the ability both to extend and to withdraw (tzimtzum), to fill and to empty (kenosis), to give and to receive (yin). It is an intrinsically paradoxical capacity. To put a finer point on it, real power is coextensive with wisdom such that it knows, if it be possible, that given a dichotomous choice, which is the more appropriate, for any particular situation. Divorced from wisdom, power becomes illegitimate. By "premise" I am referring to Zak Stein's proposition that we have a very real need to connect people with legitimate teacherly authority, which aside from the intrinsic value of doing so, is both the key to solving the "legitimation crisis", and that which enables "social autopoiesis".
Thus the technology of social media must support and promote an educational ecosystem, a sort of distributed localism (Helen Norberg-Hodge). It could arrange for us the perfect conversations to be having, with exactly the right people, about exactly the right stuff, and at exactly the right time, to help us actually 'go out and do things'. It needs to become a transformative technology, a bridge to authentic relationships and healthier futures. For those people who are able to use existing social media platforms in a highly disciplined way, this might be the case right now. But for the majority, and especially youth, there is greater exposure to the manipulative side of social media that exploits the legitimate need of an organism to learn. It parasitically preys upon their need for identity formation and places them into a hypnotic trance-like state from the 'infinite scroll', the uninterrupted sequence of AI curated supernormal stimuli, causing us to exchange a healthier, coevolved set of relationships for another set of relationships that are diminished, though selectively enhanced in this way. Companies then monetize this captured attention by renting out the 'brainwashing machine' to advertisers. If we fail to address the psychological and social damage caused by substituting 'legitimate teacherly authority' with this onslaught of decontextualized, manipulative media, we fail the next generation. So we need to recognize our obligation to act. That may mean these companies are gradually (or suddenly) abandoned in favor of better alternatives, transferred to public ownership, severed from an incentive structure based on advertising revenue, or directly transformed through regulatory means. Ultimately, they must conform to high ethical standards if they are to realize their only legitimate raison d'etre as educational hubs.
In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley describes how peyote could teach him what others could not. The phrase “plant teachers” gets at the root of a broad conception of education as a natural phenomenon. Who taught the first teacher? In A source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Wing-tsit Chan noted that the Chinese preferred to learn moral lessons from water. What is a teacher, really? A teacher is a guide, or still more generally, a facilitating agent. Facilitating what? Something like clarifying our relation to value, something like seeing through the surface and into the depth. And so Huxley had peyote (an ‘entheogen’/ nootropic), Carlos Castaneda had the shaman don Juan Matus (spirit guide/ totemic), Laozi had water (animistic), etc. This conception of “teacherly authority” admits of any answer to the question “How did you…?” The role of the guide and facilitator is to enable access to new ways of being. Consider also the teacherly authority of a Zen master, or the ‘trickster’ archetype, which also expands this notion.The film "Limitless" is a warning, not against nootropics per se, so much as against the greed that lies behind the quest for more of anything, and the addictive hold it can have on us. It will steal our attention away from the truly valuable relationships, and make it virtually impossible to appreciate them by comparison. The seductive object of lust, the Sirens' song, ruins all who hear it. And we watch helplessly as our lives fall apart, powerless to stop the descent. Addiction of this sort, Zak Stein points out, will increasingly characterize our relationship with advanced AI as well. And it may end up eroding what is left of humanity. I’ve seen this in my own life only too well. The solution? Return to the relationships from which it all started. Value isn’t addictive like supernormal stimuli, but it has something more important: depth.
For Stein, a guide can only guide, and a facilitator can only facilitate, by virtue of an “epistemic asymmetry, or asymmetries of knowledge and capacity” in regard to alignment with the living field of value (God). This is what makes them legitimate. There’s a long history of deception by illegitimate teachers who claim to be, or are mistaken for, what they are not, and such people/ agents pull us out of alignment with this field. So the question isn’t really what is or is not a teacher, so much as whether or not the ‘alignment asymmetry’ that we think is present, in regard to some given context, really is present or not. And this is what Stein seems to be most concerned about today: the perception of teacherly authority regarding those who are not in fact legitimate, and the neglect of teacherly authority regarding those who are in fact legitimate. In much the same way McGilchrist speaks of a left hemisphere insurrection in contemporary social institutions, Stein said: “The co-opting of teacherly authority by the church is one of the things that happened with pre-modernity. The co-opting by the state is one of the things that happened with modernity. And now the co-opting of teacherly authority by technologists is one of the characterizations of post-modernity.”
Illegitimate teachers are motivated by power (concentrated into the hands of the church, state, or ‘technologists’). The notion of legitimacy, which only makes sense from a RH ‘value realist’ perspective, is fairly incoherent to a LH ‘value relativist’ perspective. From the LH perspective, teacherly authority will only ever be in the ‘eye of the beholder’… it will only ever be ‘determined by people’. But from the RH perspective, teacherly authority is both ‘relative’ and ‘real’ at the same time (just as the RH is able to understand the LH while not being limited by it). We might ask: What makes a teacher’s authority real and legitimate? It is only by virtue of their alignment with that living field of value, values by which the good life can be recognized, and which only the RH is able to perceive/ presence to. So someone who is captured by their LH cannot recognize such values (or any values outside of power and control), nor can they recognize the authority of teachers who respond to any of those other values. The recognition of McGilchrist’s foundational contribution by Stein has enabled others to recognize his legitimacy. There are many who write and speak on the topics of values, education, and so on, but not so many who have incorporated hemispheric asymmetries into the dialogue to the same degree.
Additional Resources:
Peter Harrison. The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. (1998) As quoted by Wendy Wheeler: "By the fourth century there was general agreement among Christian theologians from both East and West that the world was indeed designed to be a school for souls, and that the things of this world, for all their transience and imperfections, could serve to edify the soul in search of salvation." (Harrison, The Bible 17)
Gotthold Lessing: "The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to what lies behind the truth. It is not possession of the truth, but rather the pursuit of truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indolent, vain – If God held enclosed in his right hand all truth, and in his left hand the ever-living striving for truth, although with the qualification that I must for ever err, and said to me ‘choose’, I should humbly choose the left hand and say ‘Father, give! pure truth is for thee alone.'"
Helga Ingeborg Vierich. Gardening in Eden (2018) "The capacity for a learned and shared system of transmitting information between individuals, and across generations... In humans this is a learned and shared collective cognitive niche..." This captures a lot of anthropological work, including Joseph Henrich's "gene-culture coevolution", Michael Tomasello's notion of "joint attention", and Zak Stein's more recent work on the importance of education.
Yogi Hendlin. Environmental Philosophy. "Grief occurs because there's love. And connecting back with that love is what makes us more alive as individuals, groups, nations, and a planetary collective. With true grief you also experience the love that we have for life." Stein speaks of "cosmic love" in a similar way. Hendlin ends with reference to the "lie of separation" near the heart of the crisis we are in. Stein has characterized these lies as psychological defense mechanisms at the heart of an exculpatory worldview that relieves us from the obligations of love.
Iain McGilchrist noted that education involves a measure of personal humility: “The business of education is about enabling you to see another point of view, and orienting to the idea that what we know is not the whole story. We will never know it in full, but it is part of the business of life to try to take ourselves on that journey, towards a fuller understanding of who we are... If you want to completely demoralize a people, cut them off from their history. And they will lose any will to defend themselves or anything else. Tyrants have known this.” History seems easily misunderstood, and easily dismissed as partial at best, or mere myth and therefore fiction at worst. But history is multidimensional in the sense that it is not just a record of events, but more importantly, why those events mattered (aka, “stories of virtuous behavior”). And so, we’re being cut off from not just history, but meaning.
Zak Stein: "Alex Pentland, in the MIT Media Lab, takes responsibility for most of the directions that Silicon Valley has headed in, by his own admission. When you read his book Social Physics, and you do careful readings of Skinner related to it, you see that Pentland is Skinner in a velvet glove. He has in fact 21 or 23 different distinct parallels between his thinking and Skinner's thinking, though he doesn't use Skinner's language or cite Skinner because Skinner is not popular." [in conversation with Paul Chamberlain]
Fairbanks Folk School "Nikolaj Grundtvig started the folk school movement in Denmark during the European Industrial Revolution. It provided alternative learning opportunities through popular education (as opposed to formal education) and enlightenment for the lower classes."
Massive open online course - MOOCs are a form of distance education with online interaction among students and teachers.
Video playlist for more on Zak Stein's thought and evolving body of work. Lots of material here.
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