We Should Have Learned This in School

Hello, inspired humans! I hope you are well.

Last week Justin gave some great perspective on social media and smartphone use. On that note, The Humane Tech “Take Control” page has just been updated and it is better than ever. Worth checking out for quick shifts that make it easier to use your phone without it manipulating you into undesirable use. Also for parents, I think the Screen Time app is worth looking at. I talk to my students all the time about charging the phone outside their room and not looking at screens in bed, but for high-school kids that are inherently obsessed with social-status, this suggestion is insanity. But the other day I had an athlete show up to an early morning workout and she could not use her phone to scan the QR code check-in form because her parents lock her phone until 7 a.m. with the screen time app. I became intrigued and did some digging. As with everything nowadays, it is a double-edged sword. Many of the geo-tracking and location alerting options on this app seem to be a portal to unhealthy safetyist norms. Modernity requires critical consumption. Which brings us to today’s Stuff.

ONE FROM THE AGES

“Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn't mean politics won't take an interest in you.”

- Pericles

ONE FROM TODAY

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”

Source: Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman

ONE FROM US

Two-time presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson, once claimed that in a representative democracy people tend to “get the type of government they deserve.” Our country is seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic and boiling over with ideological animosity. In what would appear to be a perfectly timed presidential election, we are being asked to decide between a 78-year-old, Joe Biden, who is markedly less sharp than 12-years ago (when he fell far behind Hillary Clinton and Obama in the Democratic primaries), and Donald Trump who, among other things, continues to insinuate that he will not honor election results if they aren’t in his favor. I don’t know if we deserve this (Who could deserve what we saw in the debate last Tuesday?). So much of this is just the consequence of the combination of advanced marketing technologies, mass data algorithms, and social media platforms, which humanity was not equipped to handle well.

Still, there is a good deal going on that we the people have to take responsibility for. Americans (not you, per se, but the majority) don’t reliably know much about history, geopolitics, or political theory. In the age of Google search and Wikipedia, we’ve scoffed at history. Anything we need to know, we can just look up, right?

Wrong, of course. Making sense of the world requires an ability to hold and tie together many historic themes at once and to interpret new events with some sort of historic context. A stable, working republic relies on well-informed, educated voters and a sense of citizenship as a duty. This becomes more important as the world increases in complexity. Without a population with these basic understandings we’ve watched (or should I say, ignored) a laundry list of disturbing developments. To the majority, it is all just entertainment. Living amid a steady diet of advertisement and amusement, most have come to believe that we are somehow insulated from the cycles that have defined all of human history.

This strikes me as one of the foremost failures of modern education. Living in a time with nuclear weapons and a conveyor of powerful new technologies, students need to graduate with the ability to critique, dialogue, adapt, and see the world in all its complexity.

With that in mind, I put together a compilation of stuff we should have learned in school. I’ve selected excerpts from history and transcendent literature in hopes of creating a page to reference or share some of the most important lessons of the last 250 years.

We’ll start with the mastermind behind the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, Maximillian Robespierre. Robespierre isn’t who you’d expect would lead the execution of 17,000 people in less than a year. Nicknamed The Incorruptible, he embodied virtue. While running France he continued to rent a meager one-bedroom apartment. Later in the revolution, he even tried to create his own religion based on the revolution’s principles. It was this uncompromising belief in the perfection of the French Revolution’s ideals that led him to justify executing many former supporters and large swaths of the working poor, who he’d set out to help. The night before taking control of France he drafted this:

Robespierre’s Personal Revolutionary Catechism:

What is the goal? The execution of the constitution in favour of the people.

Who will be our enemies? Vicious and rich men.

What means will they employ? Calumny and hypocrisy.

What methods will encourage the use of such means? The ignorance of the sans-culottes (the poor).

It is necessary to enlighten the people.

But what are the obstacles to the instruction of the people? The mercenary writers, who mislead it by daily and impudent impostures.

What can we conclude from this? That it is necessary to proscribe these writers as the most dangerous enemies of the country and to circulate an abundance of good literature.

What are the other obstacles to the establishment of liberty? The foreign war and the civil war.

What are the means to end the foreign war?

To put generous republicans at the head of our armies, and to punish those who have betrayed us.

What are the means to end the civil war?

To punish the traitors and conspirators, above all the deputies and the guilty administrators; to send patriot troops under patriot leaders, in order to reduce the [number of] aristocrats of Lyon, of Marseille, of Toulon, of the Vendée, of Jura and of all the others regions where the banner of rébellion and royalism has been displayed, and to make terrible examples of all the scoundrels who have outraged liberty and shed the blood of patriots.”

I’m struck by how methodical and rational his approach was. He perceived his cause as the noblest there was (as both of our extremes do) and felt that because of the costs of failing, he was justified in extreme measures. Robespierre created watch committees in every community to accuse and arrest anyone who “either by their conduct or their relationships, by their remarks or by their writing are shown to be partisans of tyranny and federalism and enemies of liberty.” Like with all witch hunts, the requirements for such accusations grew smaller and smaller. Wives were guillotined for crying at their husband’s execution. A winemaker was executed for making “sour wine injurious to the health of citizens.” This pattern had played out before (Salem witch trials) and has many times since (Stalinism, McCarthyism, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party purge, etc., etc., etc.) Which leads to the next source:

An excerpt from Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 (credit to the Dark Horse podcast for highlighting this last week):

“Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discover himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks.

Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers. To Captain Black, every officer who supported his Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a competitor, and he planned and plotted twenty-four hours a day to keep one step ahead. He would stand second to none in his devotion to country. When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced the pledge of allegiance, and after that “The Star-Spangled Banner,” one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses. Each time Captain Black forged ahead of his competitors, he swung upon them scornfully for their failure to follow his example. Each time they followed his example, he retreated with concern and racked his brain for some new stratagem that would enable him to turn upon them scornfully again.”

While this humorously highlights the potential to use such tactics in the name of patriotism, it now appears we’re seeing this from the other extreme in their demands that everyone subscribes to woke beliefs or be labeled some “ism”. Which makes reducing you to one conversation and canceling you that much easier. As in the French Revolution, they’ve begun eating their own. Notable progressive darlings turned casualties include JK Rowling, Bret Weinstein, and Sam Harris.

But these examples of political fanaticism are not the only dystopian threats. There is another more subtle and effective dystopian current that contributes to our willingness to watch things devolve. For many, life is very comfortable and all of this political squabbling kinda feels like it’s not even real. It is all entertainment. Which brings us to the last source:

The Circle, by David Eggers

While I love quoting Huxley’s A Brave New World, The Circle (terrible movie - read the book) seems to best critique the social-media related challenges we are dealing with today. The book centers around a Google-esque technology company called The Circle, which has consolidated everything from online shopping to social media into one seamless platform. Most perceive them to be a positive force for increasing social connection, openness, and efficiency. Only neo-Luddites could challenge their obvious social benefits, as the character, Mercer often does:

“It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying. It improves nothing. It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so it’s equally addictive.”

Here though, there are no oppressors. No one’s forcing you to do this. You willingly tie yourself to these leashes. And you willingly become utterly socially autistic. You no longer pick up on basic human communication clues. You’re at a table with three humans, all of whom are looking at you and trying to talk to you, and you’re staring at a screen!”

At first, The Circle isn’t much different from Facebook but after their invention of small cameras that can be placed anywhere and then streamed to a searchable database, they begin pushing for everything to be known. Their dogmas are formatted into concise slogans:

SECRETS ARE LIES

SHARING IS CARING

PRIVACY IS THEFT

These may remind you of the three party slogans from Orwell’s 1984: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength. To The Circle, privacy is theft because it steals what can be known. Again it is Mercer who identifies the problem:

“We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown?... Young people are creating ever-present daylight, and I think it will burn us all alive.”

“If things continue this way, there will be two societies – or at least I hope there will be two – the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.”

“Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes.”

Haunting.

My fear in all of this is coming across as partisan or hyperbolic. Both are not helpful. If anything these texts seem to call for moderation, thoughtfulness, and humility. It is so easy for seemingly good ideas to go bad when placed in an echo chamber. This is the beauty of honest, open dialogue that has the intent of getting things right - not being right. Which brings me to one last quote. From Will and Ariel Durant’s classic book, The Lessons of History:

“It is good that new ideas should be heard, for the sake of the few that can be used; but it is also good that new ideas should be compelled to go through the mill of objection, opposition, and contumely; this is the trial heat which innovations must survive before being allowed to enter the human race. It is good that the old should resist the young, and that the young should prod the old; out of this tension, as out of the strife of the sexes and the classes, comes a creative tensile strength, a stimulated development, a secret and basic unity and movement of the whole.”

*****

Thanks for reading! If you are interested in the subject I touched on it a bit in an article just over a year ago: The Costs of Utopian Delusions.

Life is too short to be normal,

Shane