Electrifying The Titanic: The Shipwreck of Industrial Civilization by William Ophuls (2021)

2021 coda to Apologies to the Grandchildren

This booklet (50 pages) is vintage William Ophuls. Brief, pungent, to the point. In fact, it’s probably best seen as a coda to Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences (2018). I recommend reading Apologies first, but then I’d recommend reading his entire body of work. So, start where you will, but start. 

In Electrifying the Titanic, Ophuls breaks no new ground. His theme throughout his books, especially those published in this century (beginning with Plato’s Revenge) share a common theme: our industrial civilization is destined for a reckoning, and the reckoning will not see the survival of industrial civilization. The causes are many, including some causes suffered by civilizations in the past. Our civilization is outrunning its resources, including the resources needed to address its “waste.” Of course, it’s become obvious to all but those most determined to remain obtuse that we no longer are looking at the reality of climate change as a reality ahead of us; we are in the midst of it. And to allow the human project to survive, we will need to see a complete change in our ecological, economic, social, and political systems. Entire worldviews need to change. 

Sounds too much like Chicken Little’s warning that the sky is falling? I wish that I could believe that, but I fear—yes, fear—that Ophuls is on to something. We seem destined to keep our heads in the sand as long as possible to extend the status quo that's melting (literally) before our eyes. We have leaders who acknowledge the problem, but who are unable to move the procrastinators, gamblers, and Pollyannas. We need to slam on the brakes before we collide head-on with reality. Of course, if this seems too harsh, too “alarmist,” then don’t read Ophuls. Ophuls writes with the voice of an Old Testament prophet or (as he apparently is), a Buddhist master who brooks no excuses.  I believe that Ophuls is a Buddhist meditation teacher as well as a leading thinker in the field of ecology, civilization, and politics. His book on Buddhist meditation is aptly titled Buddha Takes No Prisoners. So if you’re looking for solace and encouragement, go elsewhere. On the other hand, if you’re willing to hear a prophetic voice, listen up! 

Again, this isn’t the place to start reading Ophuls, but still, he covers some basics. In short, we can’t continue to consume at the rate that we have been. Much of our efforts will now have to go into preserving what we have, not expanding our capabilities. A replacement bridge, for instance, adds to GNP but it doesn't expand our capabilities. Much of what we do to keep our economic machine humming along involves piling complexity onto complexity in an effort to solve, or more often, simply to postpone resolving our problems. At some point—forced by circumstances—we’ll have to reduce and simplify. Unfortunately, our path of development has kicked the lower (simpler) rungs of the ladder out from beneath us, which will cause a sudden fall and preclude a climb down. When all is said and done, Ophuls believes that we humans will once again become primarily an agricultural species. (In an earlier work, borrowing, I believe, from William Irwin Thompson, Ophuls hopes for something like “Bali with electronics.”)

But is a dignified retreat or realignment of our civilization possible? Ophuls isn’t optimistic. He notes that the American constitutional system doesn’t fit well in our contemporary world. Indeed, he describes the U.S. constitutional regime as “antiquated.” Also, the civil society upon which Tocqueville saw American democracy based has declined precipitously. We lack an “authoritative standard of virtue.” And addition to the disorder of our current political regime, we have “thermodynamic debts” as a result of “degradation, decay, and disorder." All of these factors bode a “time of troubles” ahead. 

Recognizing that our political regime is likely to fail the current challenges, the best advice that Ophuls has to offer is the practice of Machiavelli’s virtu; that is, strength of heart and mind in the face of daunting fate. We will live again in the world of Thucydides, in which the strong will prey upon the weak. We will need Machiavelli’s ethics—a willingness to use evil in the pursuit of a higher good—even more in the future than we have in the past. 

Is the analysis of Ophuls correct? Over the course of his books that I’ve read, I find his case convincing. I’d love for him to be proven wrong; but I fear he’s being proven right. If I could wave a wand and awaken the world to our plight; make the human race utterly sensible; and make politics truly functional for the greater good, I would happily do so. But I can’t do this; no billionaire can do this (and even those hoping to do so). All we can do is muddle through, hoping that we act before our situation deteriorates too much further, as indeed it is deteriorating—despite improvements—by the minute. Truly, Ophuls is a prophet crying in the wilderness hoping to turn the people from their folly, their idolatry. But prophecy is neither fortune-telling nor mere forecasting. It's a call to create the future via an appreciation of the consequences of our choices. 

We’d all be wise to weigh the words of this prophet. 

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 29 August 2021

 

“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves---in their separate, and individual capacities.”--Abraham Lincoln

Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality

Pope Francis

To blame population growth instead of extreme and selective consumerism on the part of some, is one way of refusing to face the issues. It is an attempt to legitimize the present model of distribution, where a minority believes that it has the right to consume in a way which can never be universalized, since the planet could not even contain the waste products of such consumption. Besides, we know that approximately a third of all food produced is discarded, and “whenever food is thrown out it is as if it were stolen from the table of the poor.”

(Location 587)

Inequity affects not only individuals but entire countries; it compels us to consider an ethics of international relations. A true “ecological debt” exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time.

(Location 594)

The warming caused by huge consumption on the part of some rich countries has repercussions on the poorest areas of the world, especially Africa, where a rise in temperature, together with drought, has proved devastating for farming.

(Location 600)

We must continue to be aware that, regarding climate change, there are differentiated responsibilities. As the United States bishops have said, greater attention must be given to “the needs of the poor, the weak and the vulnerable, in a debate often dominated by more powerful interests.”31 We need to strengthen the conviction that we are one single human family. There are no frontiers or barriers, political or social, behind which we can hide, still less is there room for the globalization of indifference.

(Location 614)

Hard to follow Ol' Abe and the Pope, but here are some other voices worth considering: 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

An important aspect of the neural symbols that make up our cognition is that they not only register emotion and sensation together, but also the volume of those signals. An intense emotion or sensation is more likely to get picked up by the limbic librarian than one that doesn’t stand out. Insofar as the Wedge requires a person to be attentive to their sensations and feelings, learning to play with the volume levels is another tool we can use to subtly alter the way we experience the world. As counterintuitive as it may seem, sometimes diminishing our senses is the key to connecting outward.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

No decision you make will ever make it possible to avoid death. Which, in a strange way, means that the whole idea of risk is something of an illusion. If avoiding death was the goal, then we’ve already lost the game. But what if the point of being alive was instead to experience the entire bounty of human emotion, failure, triumphs, love and loss?

Transforming History

Thompson William Irwin

Whether humanity can move up to a transcultural identity in which science and a new kind of post-religious spirituality can reintroduce the fully individuated consciousness of the individual to a multidimensional cosmos is the question of our time.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Basically, when we approach life with our habitually passive attitude (James's “inferiority to our true selves”) we are saying to our robot, “Go ahead and take care of this, it isn't important enough for me to attend to,” and the result is that sense of separation from life, of never really touching it, that plagues so many of us in the modern world.

Apologies to the Grandchldren

William Ophuls

The problem with a purely material and rational society is captured by two well-known Biblical sayings: “Man shall not live by bread alone,” and “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 27 July 2021

 

A prophetic voice

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Absent sophisticated and responsible gatekeepers, public discourse is subject to Gresham’s Law. Bad ideas and information drive out good; saner voices are drowned out by a digital mob of charlatans, schemers, extremists, and trolls disgorging misinformation, disinformation, and venom. Yes, “elite” gatekeepers have biases, blindspots, and axes to grind, but these can usually be kept in check by competing gatekeepers. To expect a good result from throwing the crooked timber of humanity together into one giant arena, instead of allowing the truest timbers to set standards and make rules, is a kind of madness.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

If this necessary distance is midwife to the world of Machiavelli, it also delivers the world of Erasmus. The evolution of the frontal lobes prepares us at the same time to be exploiters of the world and of one another, and to be citizens one with another and guardians of the world. If it has made us the most powerful and destructive of animals, it has also turned us, famously, into the ‘social animal’, and into an animal with a spiritual dimension.

The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning

Iain McGilchrist

From the left hemisphere came the working out of the fruits of natural observation into useful predictions of behaviour of natural bodies, the codification of laws, the creation of maps, the development of some aspects of mathematics, the introduction of monetary currency, the further evolution of written language (at this point starting for the first time to be written, as now in the West only, from left to right), and in general the systematisation of knowledge.

Transforming History

Thompson William Irwin

Whether humanity can move up to a transcultural identity in which science and a new kind of post-religious spirituality can reintroduce the fully individuated consciousness of the individual to a multidimensional cosmos is the question of our time.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Until the invention of antibiotics in 1928, Western medicine couldn’t deliver much better results than indigenous medicine anywhere else in the world. In many cases, going to a shaman or witch doctor offered just about the same likelihood of recovery as seeing a Western doctor.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet.

Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World by Robert D. Kaplan

The books and articles by Robert D. Kaplan that I've read before (and there have been quite a few of them) have usually dealt with far-away lands. But in this book, published in 2017, Kaplan came home. In this book, he again combines his journalist's eye with a background of deep reading.

Taking his lead from trips made with his father when Kaplan was a boy in the 1960s (he was born in 1952), Kaplan acknowledges the effect that these journeys had on this boy from Queens, in addition to the stories his father told of his travels during the Depression that covered most of the "lower 48" states. Those trips must have helped plant some of the wanderlust that Kaplan has exhibited as an adult, with travels to over 100 countries throughout the world. But in this book, beginning on Long Island, and proceeding through Pennsylvania. Ohio, and Indiana and on through the Midwest and the Great Plans, Kaplan begins his drive toward San Diego. But unlike other journeys, Kaplans doesn't conduct interviews along the way; instead, he observes and eavesdrops. He undertook this journey in 2015, so he gained some premonition of the political upheaval to come (he heard little discussion of politics). As he travels and listens, he notices places thriving and places struggling: Wheeling, West Virginia and another city in Ohio are shrinking and obviously struggling, while the small city of Marietta, Ohio, seems to be doing well, apparently because it has a well-regarded liberal arts college there that draws students (and dollars) from around the world. And so it goes. All along the way, Kaplan describes a landscape familiar to anyone from the Midwest: some cities thriving (like Des Moines, Iowa) and other cities and towns struggling and in an acute decline. I can attest to the many small cities and towns in Iowa that have suffered declines in population and standards of living.

In addition to his travels and his first-hand conversations and observations, Kaplan stands-out for his deep reading. Through his reading of Herodotus and Thucydides to contemporary political thinkers like Francis Fukuyama and John Mearsheimer and fellow writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor and Claude Magris in Europe, Kaplan reads deeply about the past to bring perspective to his observations about the places and times that he inhabits. I should note that when Kaplan references a noted author, he's not just checking a box, he proves himself a deep and careful reader. For this trip, Kaplan consults three great authors in the mid-20th century who wrote about the American West and the conquest of the continent, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and Walter Prescott Webb (with a hat tip to William Faulkner as Kaplan by-passes by the South). Each of these writers provides a melody upon which Kaplan plays a riff, noting as he does, that their melodies may not sound completely dulcet to our contemporary ears. But despite some differences from contemporary sensibilities, none of these authors were merely triumphalist in their appraisals of the American project. Kaplan, as he peruses the history of westward expansion while drives across the continent, notes the irreconcilable moral judgments involving the creation of a great nation that led the fight against totalitarian nations in the 20th-century but that arrived at its great power status through the terrible genocide against the American Indians. Part of what attracts me to Kaplan's work is his appreciation and nuance in addressing the moral ambiguities and moral tragedies that politics often entails. (He has repeatedly repented his support of the Iraq War for some time now.) 

Kaplan also makes an important point--and this is perhaps his main point--that our experience as an expanding, continental power in the fertile, relatively underpopulated area of temperate North America, played into our thinking as an international power that began with Theodore Roosevelt and that reached its apex in my lifetime. He also appreciates the distinction between the myth of the Marlboro man (the lone cowboy) and the reality of communal regulation in a land where water is scarce. He describes the success of the Mormon venture (chronicled, at least for purposes of this book, by Wallace Stegner) by noting that the Mormon trek and settlement of the Salt Lake area was very much a communal venture. Not lonely cowboys or gunslingers, but a tightly organized, hierarchical venture, fostered the material success that remains apparent to this day.

Kaplan concludes his journey at the San Diego naval base, where American ships look out toward "Cathy"--China. In his appreciation of the importance of our Pacific shore and outlook, Kaplan seems to capture an outlook forwarded by William Irwin Thompson in the mid-1980s. Thompson described a shift in the center of power and culture from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and, in the late 20th-century, to the Pacific. While one might contest such a construal of historical dynamics, I suspect that Thompson, writing in the 1980s (Pacific Shift (1986)), and Kaplan would likely agree.  I suspect that in part because of his deep reading and extensive travel, Kaplan is correct in his perception of a shift in the center of power (and thus our attention) toward the Pacific and Asia (to include the Indian Ocean area and India). These areas have been topics of his earlier books and with more than half of the current population of the world located in a circle that encompasses an area centered in the South China Sea. This area has gone an immense cycle of economic growth, and no doubt this part of the world will become increasingly important to the Americas as a whole, the people of the United States, and their government.

The Valeriepieris circle: more than half the current world population lives inside this circle

Taking this brief but instructive trip with Kaplan across the United States is well worth the brief time required, and it provides us a perspective upon the future by a deep appreciation of our past. 

Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth, by Peter Turchin

In Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth,  Peter Turchin has another book that translates his sophisticated models of historical dynamics into a prose exposition that non-specialists can enjoy. As in his previous work,  War and Peace and War, he has succeeded in his task by mixing accounts of historical (and pre-historical) incidents and epochs with lessons about the science of evolution. Having admired his accomplishment in War and Peace and War, I held high expectations for this book. He has met and exceeded those expectations by addressing a set of topics of even greater and wider import than those of his first (popular) book. He does this by following the course of most academics whom I admire: they transgress departmental boundaries to explore new connections and arrive at new insights. In his case, he moved from an academic specialization in population dynamics to helping found the new science of Cliodynamics, the study of history using large data sets to create mathematical models of historical dynamics. Although already a fan (and thanks to the internet for allowing groupies like me to follow along with new thoughts and trends between books), I almost shouted “Amen!” aloud when I read:

The situation [of competing theories] is made worse by the division of social science into “tribes” of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and economists. Each discipline tends to emphasize its own set of theories while disagreeing with others (and even among its own adherents). Social scientists are the blind men touching different parts of an elephant and drawing different conclusions about it. -- Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth, Location 567.

The thesis of Ultrasociety is simple: over the course of human evolution, we humans have become the most cooperative species on the planet, outpacing our nearest rivals,  the more numerous and highly cooperative ants. As Turchin points out, several factors account for this distinction, including two factors that take humans beyond the biological. First, in addition to biological evolution, which is slow and random, humans developed culture, the transmission of information via representation. The transmission of information by culture from generation to generation allows changes in human behavior to occur much more rapidly than any change in the human genome would allow. As a practical matter, the lives of humans, especially in the last 10,000 years (since the advent of agriculture) have changed by orders of magnitude far beyond anything that biological evolution by itself could have allowed.  

Mild-mannered look belies intriguing thoughts: Peter Turchin

Turchin identifies a second crucial spur to changes in human ways of life, and it may come as a shock to readers. It’s war. Especially in the last 10,000 years, war is—for all its horrors—the most potent source of cultural evolution. War compels change and change occurs through cooperation within groups. As humans developed societies beyond those of hunter-gatherers, as they developed civilization (a society based on cities), war became more organized and pronounced, and increasing competition for survival ensued. The seeming paradox is at the heart of Turchin’s analysis.

By the way, Turchin notes that the idea of the "noble savage" leading a bucolic, pastoral life is a fantasy; in fact, hunter-gatherers have shockingly high rates of violent death from warfare and other forms of homicide. Note that Turchin is not a war-monger. He concedes the horror of war and that it entails destruction—often vast destruction. He is not, as some--especially during the period before the First World War--who think war a fine tonic for whatever ails society. Not at all. However, he recognizes war as a competitive environment that spurs intra-group cooperation.

Competition between groups and cooperation within groups, whether hunter-gatherer tribes or highly developed and coordinated nation-states are traits that evolutionary theory explain. The controversial (but increasingly accepted) theory of cultural multilevel selection is a key concept for understanding the dynamics involved in these competitions that require so much cooperation. To explain this, Turchin provides a brief history of evolutionary biology and the controversy about whether groups can evolve and undergo a process of natural selection. As recently as the 1970s, with the publication of Richard Dawkins's book,  The Selfish Gene (and more recently in some of Steven Pinker’s work), mainstream biology believed that evolution occurred only on the level of individual genomes and not among groups. Turchin points out that there was an early, naïve theory of group selection that did not hold up to scrutiny. However, in work conducted by by David Sloan Wilson and colleagues, the theory of multilevel selection became more sophisticated. This theory now provides a persuasive—albeit not universally accepted—theory of how groups compete and evolve.

Part of what makes Turchin's work fascinating is that he translates the highly theoretical and mathematically modeled work of evolutionary biology (his native field) into commonplace examples taken from anthropology and history. For instance, he draws upon his academic home at the University of Connecticut, which has a phenomenally successful women's college basketball program (and a successful men's program as well) to frame the problem of cooperation and competition within a group. He uses examples of sports teams as a microcosm of the problem of cooperation and competition. As a member of numerous sports teams and now as a boys varsity basketball coach, this issue has long intrigued me. How does one promote competition within the team to draw out the best individual performances and determine playing time, while requiring those same individuals to coalesce and cooperate unselfishly at the highest level to defeat an opponent? To the extent the team succeeds in cooperating against an opponent, the team will likely win. Maximum success depends on individuals putting aside their selfish interests (glory, pay) for the benefit of the team. Moreover, what applies to something as inconsequential as sports (at least at bill level of high school sports), applies to the level of intergroup competition in something as deadly serious as war. (Of course, this leads one to speculate on the relationship between war and sports, but that's a subject for another time). Turchin explains the dynamics involved and provides some revealing information about how relationships and status among members of a team affect team performance. Studies have shown that wide disparities in pay between professional players correlates with poorer team performance. Those teams with the greatest equality of pay tend to be the most successful. Although Turchin does not mention this directly, one has to wonder how this applies to society as a whole. With an increasing awareness of a growing inequality in American society since the 1970s, one can't help but notice the increasing social and political polarization that occurred during the same period. We have become an increasingly less cooperative polity and society as inequality has grown. Turchin also notes the triumph of individualist philosophies espoused by Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek (which is a selective reading of his total work by some proponents), and others who emphasize a highly individualistic and laisse-fair ideology. Turchin quotes the "greed is good" speech by the fictional character Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street as an exemplar of the ascendant selfish ideology that began running amok in the 1980s. Turchin makes clear that an undue emphasis on individual accomplishment and selfishness hurts the society as a whole.

Turchin can claim to be the founding father of Cliodynamics, a discipline that works to discern patterns in history and prehistory based on the quantification of data through mathematical modeling. Attempts of this sort in the past have been failures. Through the lens of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood (of whom I've been reading a great deal lately), this endeavor doesn’t qualify as history properly understood. For Collingwood, History is the history of thought and not the history of behavior. But Turchin's work and the work of others in Cliodynamics demonstrates the weakness of Collingwood's position. When Collingwood emphasizes history as the history of thought, including the thoughts behind human actions and choices, he limits history to examining the tip of the iceberg. Just as humans are the result of eons of evolution layered one upon another to arrive at our current state, with most of the functions of our bodies running involuntarily and without our conscious knowledge or decision, so with many of the actions of society. Many actions seen together, aggregated over large groups, display behaviors that are not the result of a conscious decision. Often they are the aggregate of individual decisions that reveal a larger pattern. We deal with this every day when considering market "decisions." (But note our personification of markets often leads to poor analysis. The “market” is not a conscious individual; it’s an abstraction of many individual actions aggregated for the convenience of analysis). Turchin analyzes data from the past to better understand the past. (Note: the only source of knowledge is the past!) To me, Cliodynamics is a welcome addition to the field of history. Although I retain my prejudice for history as the history of thought, with an emphasis on political and intellectual decisions, we simply cannot ignore the fact that human beings are both a part of Nature and apart from Nature. To understand the totality of the human past—the highest intellectual endeavor—we need to take advantage of all the tools available. Looking at history through different lenses provided by of social and natural sciences is a resource that we are foolish to ignore. 

Indeed, in this book, Turchin suggests that perhaps we humans can move another step forward on our evolutionary journey and make war obsolete. The massive improvements in warfare and killing efficiency epitomized by atomic weapons make this more than a utopian dream. It's a practical necessity. The next logical—even necessary—step in cultural evolution must be increased cooperation, or we run the risk of regression to a less cooperative, must more barbaric (in the worst sense of the term) reality. Turchin uses the international space station as an example of the level of cooperation that nations are capable of attaining. He suggests that perhaps economic competition can replace war as a means of spurring cultural innovation without suffering the horrors of war. Paul Krugman, another social scientist inspired by Isaac Asimov’s vision of “psychohistory” outlined in his Foundation books, suggests we need an attack of aliens to foster an economic growth and cooperation, which is much in keeping with Turchin’s direction of thought. I believe that with the imminence of global climate change, we—as a species working through nation-states—will either ratchet-up our levels of peaceful cooperation to combat (by abatement and adaptation) what will become an increasingly alien environment—or we will suffer an increasingly deadly level of social and political conflict.

One mark of a successful book is that it leaves you wanting more. You hear yourself saying, “telling me more about this and that.” So it is with this book. The number of issues that it raises, the number of possible areas of explorations it suggests, are too numerous to list completely. But to name just one area of where I’d like to know more:  Turchin describes the idea of “cultural evolution” as a scientific theory “based on mathematical models [that] are empirically testable.” Id., Location 330. Moreover, there is a tradition within sociology of social evolution and development theory, as well as theories of history (addressed by Turchin in War and Peace and War). However, I’m wondering about connections with theories of cultural evolution (or change) based on language and other symbolic systems, such as the work of Owen Barfield, Walter Ong, Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson and Ralph Abraham, and Clare Graves and Don Beck (an eclectic list, I admit). None of these thinkers, I believe, would necessarily disagree with the biologically based theory of cultural evolution espoused by Turchin, but it would be interesting to determine where they mesh and where they conflict.


So, I’ll stop here. With an outstanding book, the temptation is to go on and on about it. I’ll not. Go read it yourself. 

Transforming History: A New Curriculum for a Planetary Culture by William Irwin Thompson

Yesterday I reported on the educational ideas of Dorothy Sayers, who recommended a return to the Trivium. Today, I’ll review the curriculum of William Irwin Thompson, who, while not mentioning the Trivium or suggesting a return to any past curriculum, has created a curriculum that draws deeply on the past and that looks toward the future. I found it compelling and fascinating. Would it work? In fact, it’s the curriculum of the Ross School in Long Island, so it has current real-world application. 

Looks a bit like a leprechaun but don't be fooled!

For those not acquainted with William Irwin Thompson, he’s a rogue academic. After completing a doctorate at Cornell in cultural history and writing a book about the Easter 1916 uprising in Dublin and how the literary imagination shaped those events, he went to faculty appointments at Syracuse, MIT, and Toronto. But Thompson’s interests were too big and too unorthodox to work in the academic mainstream, and he left academia to found the Lindisfarne Association, which worked to cultivate ideas outside the academic establishment. I was introduced to two of his early works, At the Edge of History: Speculations on the Transformation of Culture (1971)and Passages About Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture (1973) by Professor John S. Nelson, one of my political theory professors, who defined his field very broadly (and rightly so!). Since then I’ve read a fair amount of Thompson, although there’s much more I’d like to read (but little on Kindle at this point). Thompson ignites intellectual and historical fireworks in his writings. Put simply, Thompson looks deeply into the human past to develop some sense of where we might be headed. Thompson follows trails first laid down by the likes of Barfield and Gebser in his chronicle of changing forms of consciousness and culture. And as reflected in this curriculum, in later years he teamed with mathematician Ralph Abraham to bring a mathematical perspective to complement the literary. 

What Thompson outlines in Transforming History is a comprehensive K-12 curriculum that tracks both the development of the child and the development of human culture. Ontology recreates phylogeny? In Thompson’s sense, they seem to complement one another, at least. Thompson coordinates the developmental abilities of the children to match the curriculum. (He’s apparently aided in this by the perspective of his wife, who was a kindergarten teacher in Switzerland.) Complementing his appreciation of child development are this theories of “complex dynamical systems” and “cultural ecologies”.

We humans have moved from creatures of the African savannah to dwellers in the megacities of the 21^st century connected by the internet. (N.B. I write this from the Chinese city of Suzhou that is building skyscrapers as fast as it can.) Thompson explains his perspective: 

A technological innovation is itself deeply embedded in various systems of values and symbols; a new tool can emerge synchronous with a new form of polity, as well as with a new form of spirituality. Cultural history, as opposed to the more linear history of technology, is concerned with the complex dynamical system in which biological natural drift, ecological constraints, and systems of communication and social organization all interact in a process of “dependent co-origination”. 

Irwin, Thompson William (2009-04-01). Transforming History: A New Curriculum for a Planetary Culture (Kindle Locations 170-174). Steiner Books. Kindle Edition.

Thompson, in responding to a paper by Ralph Abraham, describes the scheme he uses: 

I proposed in 1985 that “Western civilization” could be re-described as a development that proceeded through four cultural ecologies—Riverine, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the post-World War II aerospace cultural ecology of the Pacific Rim. Now, I would prefer to re-designate them as Riverine, the Mediterranean, the Oceanic, and the Biospheric. Each of these cultural ecologies was characterized by a mathematical and artistic mentality that brought forth a new worldview.

Id. 175-179

Thompson’s scheme looks at cultural change through a variety of lenses: changes in technology, language, identity, and mathematics. He summarizes: 

Each of the five cultural organizations of Culture, Society, Civilization, Industrialization, and Planetization can also be seen to be enhanced and reinforced by a matrix of identity.

1. Sanguinal [family/kinship] identity

2. Territorial identity

3. Linguistic identity (language and religion)

4. Economic identity (class and nation)

5. Noetic identity (scientific and spiritual) [arising since 1945]

Id. 287-292

Thompson believes that we’re on the cusp of further major changes, not all for the good, as the current industrial nation-state system of political economy begins to fray. Thompson believes that we face an “up or out” cultural transition. He writes: 

Religious fundamentalism and right-wing, nationalistic terrorist reactions to planetization are precisely the sort of heat that is released in these transitions. Like the Inquisition and the Counter-Reformation, which sought to stop and reverse the modernizing forces of the Renaissance and the Reformation, these reactionary explosions can do much damage and deter cultural transformation for centuries. Whether humanity can move up to a transcultural identity in which science and a new kind of post-religious spirituality can reintroduce the fully individuated consciousness of the individual to a multidimensional cosmos is the question of our time. The cultural project of bringing forth this new mentality is certainly what Ralph Abraham and I have been seeking to do in all our books and cultural projects, such as the Lindisfarne Association and the Visual Math Institute.

….

[N]othing less than truth, goodness, and universal compassion are going to get us through this transition from a global economy to a planetary ecumené. Frankly, I have to admit that it will be easier for humanity to slide down into a dark age than accept such a cultural transformation.

Id. 299-304; 371-373

Having given us a brief tour of his ideas about cultural change and the possible futures that we face, he then turns to “transforming history”, and by this, he also means transforming the school curriculum. Thompson offers (in a nod to H.G. Wells) not an “outline of history” but a “miniaturization of history” to guide the curriculum. Looking at child development, Thompson designs to curriculum to follow certain intervals: 

Because human growth does not unfold in simple linear and accretive sequences, this curriculum is broken up into pulses of organic growth in three-year sequences. Each triad unfolds in a sequence of formative, dominant, and climactic. A formative movement introduces a new element of consciousness; a dominant movement establishes and develops it, and the climactic movement consolidates and finishes it.

Id. 450-453

It is here that that Thompson notes how this outlines tracks with the suggestions of Rudolph Steiner and the Waldorf school movement. (N.B. This book is published by Steiner books.) 

Thompson outlines how math and other subjects, how a “sacred language, like Chinese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Classical Greek, Latin, or Arabic” can be introduced into the curriculum. So with stories and science. The degree of depth of study is matched the developmental level of the child all through the curriculum. 

In drawing upon his wife’s experience, Thompson sings to praises of the Swiss-German kindergarten. He writes: 

At the source of Origin (in the sense of Jean Gebser’s book Ever-Present Origin), knowledge is integral and not divided into disciplines and technologies. Science and myth, tools and rituals, art and understanding are all together in a cognitive bliss of the sense of the joy, wonder, and fun of being in knowing as a form of being in love—in love with life. Americans tend to view kindergarten as merely babysitting, a time you need to get through as fast as possible until you have got the kids up to speed through reading and computer skills so they can get down to the real work. This is just about as far from the truth as you can get. In fact, what the enlightened adult needs to do is to return to this earlier mind and reachieve it with all the powers that have come from intellectual development. Great scientists and artists have survived their education and have been able to do this, but most people have been beaten into submission and turned into used and abused tools.

           Id. 552-559

 

He continues: 

Kindergarten is a Zen-like place and time, in the sense that it involves a kind of “mind-to-mind transmission” from the teacher to the students. The being and soul of the parent or teacher is more important than pedagogic philosophy, whether Waldorf, Montessori, or Piaget. What truly matters is the sense of soul presence that embodies knowing and reverence. . . . Because knowledge is integral at this early level (as it should be again at the postdoctoral level), there should be no divisions into disciplines such as science, art, religious studies, and languages.

            Id. 592-598

 

Thompson, after spending a good deal of time on kindergarten, takes the reader on up through the grade levels, discussing the abilities of the child and the tasks and learning appropriate to each level. Thompson takes students on trips through time and space (i.e., all manner of cultures, civilizations, and times) to match learning and abilities. For the adult reader, it’s vintage Thompson, taking us here and there for insights into the human project. To have learned this as a kid? I think—although perhaps I delude myself—it would have been a real kick. We did something like this studying American Indians or other lands and times, but nothing with the depth and sophistication (age appropriate, of course) that Thompson suggests. Indeed, the remainder of the book, while outlining a very specific curriculum, also serves as a display of Thompson’s unique and fascinating world cultural history from the earliest humans to the present. That’s always a treat. 

Is education wasted on the young? Sometimes it seems so, but Thompson suggests that the seeds of a doctoral dissertation can be planted during kindergarten. Perhaps. While I read this book with great enjoyment as a work of history and cultural criticism, it is a series work of education as well. No system is perfect, there’s no one size fits all. But education, for anyone living, whether having completed formal education, whether with school-age children or not, must be concerned with what schools teach. 

It would be interesting to learn how Ross School graduates (that use this curriculum) fair in the larger world. Thompson reports he home-schooled his son Evan after grade school, and by all indications, that went well. Evan, now a professor in B.C., has just published another book, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy that’s on my to-read list. Seems like a pretty good test run.

If you’re interested in education curriculum or where our world has been and where we’re going, I highly recommend this book and anything by WIT. And if you’re interested in both, you’ve hit the jackpot.