A Review of Part of Gene Callahan's Review

In The Review of Austrian Economics Gene Callahan reviews Austrian Economics Perspectives on Individualism and Society: Moving Beyond Methodological Individualism, Guinevere Nell, ed., in which I have a chapter "On the Varieties of Spontaneous Orders." Callahan singles out several essays to complement and criticize, and mine is one he criticizes.

Now, I am hardly above criticism. I could have perhaps defined culture better than I did (though I may have used the definition I did for a purpose), and I perhaps could have been a little more precise here and there, but what he defines as a "vacuous platitude" is really no more vacuous than the one he replaces it with. More, he takes the sentence out of context, failing to mention why I may have said what I said in that particular location in that essay and emphasized that particular point rather than the opposite point. In other words, yes, there is little doubt that there are plenty of things in other cultures which we could and should criticize. But equally, the mere fact that there is something in another culture which is different from our culture or how we do things in our culture, that doesn't mean it's necessarily bad. Which is the point. Difference may be good, may be bad, and may be neutral. Given that there are still those who think difference is bad, or that reversing the West is Good and the Other is Bad to the West is Bad and the Other is Good as the postmodernists have done strongly suggests that this point still needs to be made.

Callahan also seems to think that whatever the Pope thinks or historians think negates some of my arguments, as though either are infallible on these issues. There is in fact strong evidence that technological innovations drove scientific discoveries. Yes, there was a change in ideas, but the ideas actually followed the desire to do science unmolested, and the science was driven by technology. Improvements in lenses resulted in better telescopes which resulted in changes in ideas or in the adoption of certain older ideas over other older ideas. I will take his criticism about my statements about religion being concerned about the "world of abstraction" as being a case of less than precise language. However, let us look at the statement in context:

Among the wisdom orders, philosophy should be considered the most abstract, dealing as it does in ideas – often with little or no concern for the real world. Religion, on the other hand, is deeply concerned with the real world, and the ramifications of what we do in this world for the world of abstraction (however conceived). Art and literature (see Camplin 2010 on the arts and literature as spontaneous orders), on the other hand, always deal with the physical world, either directly in the use of physical objects, or indirectly in having concrete referents (the worst thing you can do in fiction or poetry is to be completely abstract – you are no longer creating literature, but rather philosophy, when you are). We of course see any number of overlaps among these orders. Consider all of the religious art, music, poetry, etc. Consider the philosophers who were also religious figures and leaders. Indeed, one of the most productive times in French literature and philosophy was when philosophy and literature overlapped during the Existentialist period. But note that for this to occur, each order must exist as a spontaneous order and be free to interact; when the Soviet Union attempted to impose the philosophy of historical materialism onto literature, the result was bland, identical Soviet Realism.

 In the essay I had delineated several kinds of spontaneous orders and classified them. I argued that there were spontaneous orders that dealt with abstractions, those that dealt with the real world, and those that dealt with a mixture of the two. I argued, for example, that mathematical discovery was in the realm of pure abstraction, technological innovation was in the realm of pure concreteness, and that the natural sciences took place in the realm of concreteness and abstraction. In this paragraph, I made the argument that there were three spontaneous orders we could consider to be "wisdom orders," and which included philosophy in the realm of pure abstraction, the arts and literature in the realm of pure concreteness, and religion in both realms, concerned with real-world realizations of certain kinds of abstractions. Given that his example was a mathematical example, and I had already discussed the mathematical order as a realm of a certain kind of abstraction, one can either conclude that he was either purposefully choosing to misunderstand what I was saying or he has some difficulty with textual analysis and understanding. Each sentence must be taken within the context of not only its own paragraph, but the section in which it's embedded and the chapter, in this case, in which it was found. My statement is very confusing when taken out of context as it was, and it may still be somewhat less clear than it ought to be, but it's not as confusing as he makes it out to be when we place it in its proper context.

We can truly see how petty and purposefully obtuse Callahan is being when he makes the comment that cosmologists are trying to understand the entire universe "which includes us." First, he is about as completely wrong as humanly possible, and he knows it. Cosmologists are interested in studying the movements of planets, stars, galaxies, and other interstellar and intergalactic phenomena. They are not at all interested in parliamentary procedures. And he knows damn well they're not. They are in fact interested in a set of very simple phenomena which follow relatively simple laws. What they study is at a very low level of complexity. Which hardly makes what they study any less difficult.

As a summary of "kinds of spontaneous orders," I had intended to spur people to think about the complexity of our societies and to thus encourage people to start thinking about studying those different kinds of social orders. This includes democracy, which I did not create an argument for being a spontaneous order precisely because, as I note, diZerega has already done so. Surely references to others' work precludes a lengthy argument when the purpose of the paper is in part to summarize a variety of spontaneous orders. If he wanted a lengthy argument for the proposition that democracy is a spontaneous order, he can by all means to read the works to which I referred.

Finally, to return to the beginning of his criticisms of my chapter, I will note that he completely missed the point of my discussion of heterogeneous vs. homogeneous cultures. What he completely fails to mention in the criticism is that I was making a point about the importance diversity when we have the same institutions. He leaves out that important distinction I make, which is really a distinction made by the paper I cite. Again, it was not my job in this paper to completely reiterate others' arguments in the papers I cite, but to pull out certain points relevant to my argument, which is that heterogeneity of spontaneous orders creates a healthier civil society than one would have in civil society in which a single order dominated and that institutions matter when it comes to the overall health of cultures and civil society and the interactions among all the spontaneous orders. But again, he has to take my comment completely out of context to make the point he does.

Certainly Callahan is not the only person guilty of completely misunderstanding (or misrepresenting, if we want to be less generous) what he reads by taking something completely out of context. It seems to be a common sin by altogether too many readers. It is as though each sentence being read is completely disconnected from every other sentence in the work in question. There is a certain strain of postmodern deconstruction in which decontextualization is emphasized. Thus, we have "the death of the author" and dissociation of texts from their cultural contexts. Somehow this trend has extended itself not just to decontextualizing texts from their authors and cultures, but decontextualizing the very sentences within a given text. That is the only way I can understand the criticisms of people like Callahan while still having the generosity of assuming that they are completely well-meaning in their reviews and criticisms.

Apocalypse by Frederick Turner

The SciFi epic poet (and new formalist/expansive poet and universal genius), Frederick Turner, has a new epic poem: Apocalypse. It's being serialized for free. Enjoy!!!

Hear the Screams of the Butterfly

My novella Hear the Screams of the Butterfly has been published by Transcendent Zero Press and can be purchased at Amazon and here.

Read an interview of me in which I discuss the novella here.

Be sure to go buy your copy now! It makes a great birthday or Christmas gift!

Tolerance vs. Acceptance

For the longest time we have sought to ensure greater tolerance for our fellow human beings. We are told we should tolerate other races, other ethnicities, other genders, other sexual orientations, other ways of living and of thinking. And this was important once upon a time (and still is for some people), when the knee-jerk response to difference was to burn the person at the stake. When that's the natural response, then getting people to simply be willing to tolerate other people's existence is a move in the right direction.

But we should not be satisfied with tolerance.

I don't want to be tolerated. To be tolerated means to be put up with. You live over there and let me pretend you don't exist.

I want to be accepted. I want "be yourself" to be meant literally, and when I am myself, that self is appreciated. I want to be enjoyed and loved and I want people to be excited by my presence.

And so do you.

My parents always tolerated the things I (and my brother) wanted to do. They tolerated my interests, but never really encouraged any of them (and discouraged others, such as music). They tolerated my choice of what to major in in college (recombinant gene technology) when they really thought I ought to major in pre-med or pre-law to become a doctor or a lawyer. They were hardly supportive of my deciding to get a Master's in English, and even when I graduated with my Ph.D. in the humanities, my father asked me if I regretted not finishing my Master's in biology (by then he had come around to majoring in biology).

I did the things I did despite the direct lack of support. They never stood in my way, but my parents never quite supported me, either.

I get the same thing with everyone's attitude toward autism, though to be honest, it's only just barely tolerated at all. And nobody wants to understand it, let along appreciate it.

I've had a few along the way who did encourage me. Those were the people who made the difference. There was a biology/chemistry teacher in high school and a biology teacher at the Governor's Scholars Program I did one summer who both encouraged my interests in genetics. There was a poet at WKU who encouraged my poetry. I was eventually encouraged (after some pretty harsh criticism) in my fiction writing at USM. And I was encouraged in my scholarly work at UTD by my dissertation committee. I was encouraged by a theater owner when it came to my plays (too bad the theater went out of business before we could stage my first full length play). This summer my wife has been incredibly encouraging as I have had to go through six weeks of training, which included 5 weeks of  teaching summer school.

Each gave me the strength to go on.

That's the difference between tolerance and acceptance. Those who accept actively participate in our success through encouragement to be who we are. Those who tolerate simply get out of the way. Sometimes that's necessary, but isn't it much better to have a helping hand through life? It's it better to have people love you for who you deeply, truly are?

Fiction for Empathy in Bibliotherapy

It's wonderful to see there are people out there making a living and a career out of the very insights and understandings of literature as developing empathy I've been developing for several years now. I've written about these things here and here and here And now it's even made it to CNN.

The flight from fiction in our culture means reduced empathy creation. Yes, certain movies and even TV shows can contribute to empathy-creation, but I think that books allow us to more deeply investigate and understand the complex motives of people, and thus learn to understand and therefore empathize with them.

What we need is the kind of bibliotherapy being practiced in the CNN article. We need to read fiction that deals with different races, men and women, different sexual orientations and genders, different cultures, and different socioeconomic levels. In doing so, we would stop discriminating against people just because they are members of different groups.

We shouldn't hate people because they are black or white, men or women, gay or straight, rich or poor, etc., etc., etc. The socialists are just as evil for hating a group of people because of their socioeconomic status as are the racists for hating a group of people because of their race. Literature allows us to understand different groups through examples of particular individuals we get to know well, and thus literature breaks down collectivist (and therefore evil) ways of thinking.

The above statement seems to contradict some of what I say here. Indeed, certain kinds of empathizing do in fact make us more tribalist/collectivist in our thinking. But there is something else at work when we learn to empathize with other groups, and other groups, and other groups. If our empathy breaks down the Us-Them, Self-Other dichotomy, then empathy contributes to moral growth. If it only reinforces group cohesiveness such that there is necessarily a hated other against which one compares one's group, then empathy contributes to moral decay.

Literature can thus contribute to virtue-creating empathy if we are open to reading works presenting and representing peoples from other cultures, etc. This can and should be done in our classrooms. But we should not make the mistake of thinking that any work by someone from another culture, etc. than our own is worth reading. The works have to be complex, high-value literary works, regardless of who wrote them where or when. After all, boring garbage is hardly going to create any sort of empathy for anyone.

My Name's Blurryface -- a cultural-textual analysis

For those who don't keep up with contemporary music, the band Twenty One Pilots has a song titled "Stressed Out" that is well worth analyzing and understanding.

Here are the lyrics:

I wish I found some better sounds no one’s ever heard

I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words
I wish I found some chords in an order that is new
I wish I didn't have to rhyme every time I sang

I was told when I get older all my fears would shrink
But now I’m insecure and I care what people think

My name's Blurryface and I care what you think
My name's Blurryface and I care what you think

Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out
Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out

We're stressed out

Sometimes a certain smell will take me back to when I was young
How come I’m never able to identify where it’s coming from
I’d make a candle out of it if I ever found it
Try to sell it, never sell out of it, I’d probably only sell one

It’d be to my brother, 'cause we have the same nose
Same clothes homegrown a stone’s throw from a creek we used to roam
But it would remind us of when nothing really mattered
Out of student loans and tree-house homes we all would take the latter

My name's Blurryface and I care what you think
My name's Blurryface and I care what you think

Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out
Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out

We used to play pretend, give each other different names
We would build a rocket ship and then we’d fly it far away
Used to dream of outer space but now they’re laughing at our face
Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money"

Yeah

We used to play pretend, give each other different names
We would build a rocket ship and then we'd fly it far away
Used to dream of outer space but now they're laughing at our face
Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money"

Yeah

Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out
Wish we could turn back time, to the good old days
When our momma sang us to sleep but now we’re stressed out

Used to play pretend, used to play pretend, bunny
We used to play pretend, wake up, you need the money
Used to play pretend, used to play pretend, bunny
We used to play pretend, wake up, you need the money

We used to play pretend, give each other different names
We would build a rocket ship and then we’d fly it far away
Used to dream of outer space but now they’re laughing at our face
Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money"

Yeah

The song, overall, is not simply about adults missing the simplicity of childhood; no, it's more about adults missing their childhood dreams of adulthood. This is emphasized in the repeated refrain:

We would build a rocket ship and then we’d fly it far away
Used to dream of outer space but now they’re laughing at our face
Saying, "Wake up, you need to make money"

 The dream of being an astronaut is much like, say, my dream of being a fiction writer I have had since I was at least 12, when I penned (literally) my first novel manuscript. I abandoned the idea to major in something sensible in college (recombinant gene technology), only to return to it my senior year and truly follow it after dropping out of my Master's program in molecular biology. Yet, after graduating with my Ph.D. in the humanities from UTD (which I attended for the creative writing program), I was faced with the reality of student loans.

Indeed, the song mentions student loans:

Out of student loans and tree-house homes we all would take the latter

 Little did we know that by going to college to achieve our dreams, we would rack up so many student loans that we would have to settle for some job well outside our dreams just to pay off the loans. The songwriter recognizes the trap that's been set, the (inadvertent) lies we've been told about adulthood. We were told that student loans were an investment in our future, yet what they in fact turn into is a weight that discourages us from taking risks and living our dreams. With debt, we are too afraid to live the dream life we imagined for ourselves, instead settling for a safe corporate reality to pay off those debts. And after so many years doing just that, how many of us just settle in and continue that life, even after those loans are paid off? How many end up with credit card debt, car payments, and mortgages to replace them? Debt piles up, we get safe jobs with safe incomes to pay those debts, and we never live those dreams.

That is, fundamentally, what the song is about.

 We can see this even in the opening lyrics:

I wish I found some better sounds no one’s ever heard

I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words
I wish I found some chords in an order that is new
I wish I didn't have to rhyme every time I sang

I was told when I get older all my fears would shrink
But now I’m insecure and I care what people think

 Modernism was founded on the cult of the new. We are told even now that everything has to be original. It's one of the lies we're told, and the songwriter calls us out on it. Our brains are structures to only like certain sounds, chords, etc. We are restricted in our vocabularies, and people prefer rhymes in their songs (though the violation in that very line is an ironic reference to the fact that rhyming is a convention that has in fact been violated in popular songs just as it has been in much poetry).

Why does he care? Well. caring what other people think is human all too human. As children we don't care what too many people think---our parents, primarily, but certainly not too many others--but as adults, we care more and more about what more and more people think of us. We care what our neighbors think of us, what our co-workers think of us, certainly what our bosses think of us. As he points out, it matters for success. If he came up with sounds no one's ever heard, chords in a new order, and unrhymed songs, how popular  would the band be?

Indeed, we are bolder when we are younger. We take more risks. We become less risky as we get older. Our fears and insecurities multiply. We find ourselves responsible to more and more people (those to whom we owe debts, which only multiply as we get older, and include far more than the lending companies).

What does this do to us?

My name's Blurryface and I care what you think
My name's Blurryface and I care what you think

What is a "Blurryface"? A face that's out of focus and becomes indistinguishable from other faces. That is, a Blurryface is someone who is perfectly interchangeable with just about anyone else. Those who care what others think and live their lives according to what others think. Those who live their lives in response to all of those people who say "Wake up, you need to make money!" Your dreams must die, you have to wake up and be responsible and live the corporate/bureaucratic reality. You cannot be what you once dreamed, whether it be an astronaut or an artist. Because those aren't responsible aspirations.

The rest of the song emphasizes this "going back in time" to the dreams of childhood. There was a safety there, of course, but there was also a realm of possibilities that we seem to go out of our ways to destroy. Perhaps it's a romanticization of the Modernist period (and the Romantic period before that) where artists seemed able to live their dreams, but at the same time, there were people clearly doing that, where it's less clear that those possibilities are as available now as then.

The songwriter here has thus identified a pervasive feeling in our culture. Many of us feel that there is something not quite right. And Twenty One Pilots has given that feeling a voice. Growing up, we were told many things that have turned out to not be true. They were perhaps believed by our parents and the other adults who sold those things to us, but the fact of the matter is that perhaps most of us are terribly disappointed that the reality has completely failed to live up to the hype. There are those who will use facts to point out that we are living in the best of times materially, but we simply cannot dismiss the pervasive feeling that something's just not quite right.

And what happens when an entire culture feels this level of discontent? Can that culture long survive?

Complexity Theory and the Study of History: Overproduction of Elites, Food Shortages, and Power Laws

I have written quite a bit about cliodynamics, the scientific approach to studying history, in the past. Peter Turchin has done quite a bit of work in this area, writing most recently about the inevitable collapse of the European Union.

Turchin's overall thesis is that an overproduction of elites results in inequalities that lead to the collapse of empires. And, as Egypt suggests, not just empires. However, one of the leading complexity theorists, Yaneer Bar-Yam, has developed a complexity model that suggests societal collapse comes about due to food prices increasing. More, network theory predicts power law distributions of revolutions/political collapse.

These are not necessarily conflicting views. Certainly the argument that there is a power law distribution of historical events like revolutions could easily complement the models of Turchin's and Bar-Yam's. It is also not impossible that the same dynamics that result in food prices increasing could result in the overproduction of elites and inequalities to increase.

Bar-Yam's thesis is particularly interesting, though one does wish he understood economics a bit better, especially around "speculation," which actually helps to smooth out prices and make them less volatile. At the same time he's right about the complete idiocy behind turning food directly into fuel, which unnecessarily drives up food prices, especially around anything involving corn (not just for direct consumption, but as feed for chickens, pigs, and cows, driving up meat prices). And he leaves out various farm subsidies, which politicians argue keeps prices down, but which in fact drive prices up (when New Zealand eliminated its subsidies for sheep farmers, wool and mutton prices dropped even as farmer incomes increased).

It would be interesting to map the food price-driven patterns of unrest with Turchin's patterns to see what overlaps there are and to see if one could find similar causes resulting in these two effects. I also don't know that Turchin has looked for power law distributions, but he certainly should. I would certainly be surprised if Bar-Yam's version didn't result in power law distributions. 

My New Journey

I've begun a new journey, and while I'm on that journey I will be absent from the internet in many ways, including from posting on this blog, my other blogs, and Facebook.

I'm currently getting the training required to get alternative certification to teach elementary special education in Dallas ISD. Now you may wonder why it is that I'm not getting it in English. The reasons are many, and involve such things as DISD isn't offering this program I'm in for English teachers, because they don't have a shortage of English teachers, and my own personal arrogance surrounding my refusal to get certified in anything in which I have a Ph.D. because that requirement is incredibly insulting and ridiculous and is the most egregious example of protectionism imaginable.

The reason I chose elementary special education is itself multifaceted. Part of the reason involves my having an autistic child. Part of it involves my brother having dyslexia. Part of it involves my experiences as a substitute teacher taking special education assignments. I took high school and middle school assignments and saw that many of those students had not received the help they needed to mainstream them early on. I saw some overlooked entirely. At the same time, I enjoyed working with the elementary SpEd kids, and I seemed able to reach them. All of those contributed to this decision.

So I'm spending the summer getting alternative certification. I'll spend a year as an "intern," and after that I'll be hired full time.

So the next year promises to be busy. And something has to go.

Economics will be going. Indeed, pretty much all of my scholarly work, including book reviews. I've enjoyed doing those things, but they have not otherwise benefited me. They brought me nothing but personal satisfaction. And that doesn't pay the bills.

Poetry and plays will be the primary focus. They also bring me personal satisfaction, but poems are less burdensome, and the plays are the reason I will be doing everything I can over the next several years to save up to get and run a theatre. (Donations and volunteers are welcome!)

And of course I'll continue learning about autism and posting on it. After all, it will benefit me in my job and in my home life and on my blog. And you never know---one of these days someone may want to hear what I have to say on the topic. My expertise is, after all, both personal and professional, both subjective and objective.

And politics sucks. All it does is divide everyone. That's its great evil. Of course, sometimes we have to differentiate ourselves from injustice, and that too requires politics. There are some people and some things from whom we should divide ourselves. But I'm going through a phase of relative indifference to everyone arguing about which sinking ship to jump onto.

I'm going to focus on beauty, family, and money. That is, things of value.

A Life of Unity -- Reflections on Obsessions and Personal Life

Starting in 1971 (the year I was born), my maternal grandfather, Virgil Inman, started keeping a diary/journal. On my trip to South Bend, my grandmother gave me 1971-1976 (those she had read) for me to transcribe and edit and try to one day get published.

My grandparents were avid birders, and my grandfather's diary seems to be almost entirely about birding. We see lists of birds he saw on this or that birding trip. The most mentions of people involve those who were birding with him, talked to him about birds, and/or were members of the Audubon Society. There are few mentions of his family, and the day of my birth results in a brief mention of that event before he starts writing about birds.

In many ways this and my other blogs are my own diaries/journals, and in many ways I have done exactly what my grandfather did in his. Just search this blog for Anna, Melina, Daniel, and Dylan, and see how relatively few hits you get compared to Nietzsche, Shakespeare, poetry, or spontaneous orders. My obsessions are what I write about much more than anything personal. And if you do search for my family members' names, you will find that much of the time I am writing about some topic in which I use them as an example.

I'm not sure how interested anyone would be in reading about more personal things. I don't know how interested anyone is in reading this blog at all. Its topics evolve, change, jump around, and will continue to do so, I'm sure. I've decided to focus more on theatre, on playwriting, and as a result, I'm sure what I write about here will reflect that change.

I have also written before about how I am my interests, meaning if you have been following this blog, if you have been reading what I have been writing, you have about as intimate an understanding of me as possible.With most people you can disentangle the different parts of their world; with me, you mostly cannot. There are a few exceptions--too much of my employment, for example--but I don't typically write about work. I would if my work and my employment ever managed to overlap. Which is the goal, of course. Because unless and until they do, I will remain unfulfilled in life.

For many a job is a way to make money and life is almost completely fulfilled through relationships with others. My personal relationships are few, and mostly involve my wife and children, who do in fact fulfill pretty much any and all of my needs when it comes to personal relationships. But my wife understands the degree to which my identity is tied in with the writing/work I do. Still, they are prioritized over that work, as evidenced by the fact that I spend time with them when I should be working, and by the fact that I will be starting training for a job I'm taking just to have an income.

Still, I want to live a more fulfilling life. And that's why I have decided to concentrate more on being a playwright and on doing what I need to do to run my own theatre to perform my plays (following a strong tradition of poets/playwrights over the past several centuries) so I can at last concentrate on the writing/work I think is truly most important for me to do. Perhaps I can even get the theatre to a place where we can be a theatre family, so to speak. Complete unity of everything important in my life. That is the ultimate goal.

I'm sure my grandfather would have loved to have such unity as well. For his job he worked with computers. But there's no mention of that in what I've read of the diary so far. And I've only ever heard brief mention of the work he did to make a living over the decades. But there was never any question about the birds. I imagine he would have loved to have been an ornithologist so his life could have achieved unity. I'm too much like him for him not to have wanted the same thing.

A Journey

This past week and a half, I took a trip to South Bend, IN to visit my grandmother. We actually stayed with my Great Aunt Mercedes in Coloma, MI, and drove back and forth. That gave us several trips through rural west Michigan, including a day trip to St. Joseph/Benton Harbor to see Lake Michigan. The downtown area of Benton Harbor is very rough-looking, but the lake shore of both cities is being developed with museums and other arts venues to attract visitors. Another day several us went to Shipshewana to visit Amish country to eat and shop.

My great aunt lives in a farm house with 19 acres left of what was once a pretty big farm where they used to raise apples and cherries and raised various vegetables. She still raises some vegetables, and she has a small strawberry patch the children picked. Melina, Daniel, and Dylan all had a great time, and they all said they would love to live out there.

Among visiting with family and friends I haven't seen in a while and being out in the country and seeing Shipshewana, where we saw a store for sale for less than our house is worth, and the lake front of St. Joseph/Benton Harbor, I came to realize something that has been simmering under the surface for a while now: I'm absolutely miserable living in Richardson. What I find miserable is this suburban pseudo-existence of just barely getting by doing nothing I want to do, always busy and getting nothing done. I'm neither relaxed nor accomplished. In the country one can relax; in the city, you are surrounded by action. But the suburbs have the absolute worst of both worlds. It's neither relaxing nor is it close to anything at all, meaning you have to get in your car to do anything.

Add to this the fact that I'm getting ready to get alternative certification to teach elementary education special ed in Dallas ISD. This is certainly something I can do, but it's not what I'm supposed to be doing.

And that's what I've come to realize this past week. What it is I'm supposed to be doing. It's not teaching, that's to be sure. No, what I'm supposed to be doing is running a theater so that I can perform my plays. I would love to do it in a small town like St. Joseph or Benton Harbor, which attracts just enough people from places like Chicago and South Bend that it could be successful and get a reputation. And the towns are the right size to have things to do and have shopping close by and still have some easy living.

So that's the goal. I'll have to teach for a little while, but the goal is to own and run a theater somewhere. I need to write plays and direct my plays and provide myself with a real purpose. I appreciate the attempts people have made at helping me do just that with scholarly work on economics and higher education. I've learned a lot doing those things. But they are not what I'm meant to be doing. I'm a writer. I'm a play writer. It's time I took my life into my own hands and made that reality into something.

Why Has Community in America Collapsed?

I recently saw a TED Talk in which the person was talking about the seeming rise in DTSD among soldiers. He noted that there are fewer soldiers than in past wars, that the experiences are far less traumatic than in past wars, but that PTSD is much higher now than previously.

What is going on? The speaker suggested that what was happening was that soldiers who had formed close social bonds with their comrades came home to a society that is radically fragmented. They moved from a tribal situation to a radically individuated situation, and that it was that which was traumatic.

I think he's mostly right.

American society is deeply fragmented. I'm not just talking about the increasingly deep divisions among political views, though that's certainly a contributor (and a consequence). I'm not just talking about the increasingly deep divisions among racial and ethnic groups, though that's certainly a contributor as well.

I'm talking about individuals becoming increasingly alienated from each other. We not only do not rely on each other, we are actively discouraged from doing so. We are encouraged to mind our own business--and we then in turn empower government to do all the minding we used to do in our neighborhoods. We even tell our children to mind their own business, as though their friends and families and neighborhoods aren't their business. If other people aren't our business, what is?

There is a certain libertarian thread that emphasizes exactly this kind of minding one's own business that is very common and popular. We are told not to judge anyone for anything they do--and while this has of course resulted in growing acceptance of a variety of lifestyles and ways of being human, cultures and cultural practices, etc., it has also meant not seeking out commonalities and not creating communities. You cannot have a community of people who mind their own business. If you want to destroy a family, have the parents insist the children should mind their own business, and have those parents insist their spouses mind their own business. The fact is that family members ought to be one's business. We ought to be concerned with the way people behave. That shows we care about them.

The irony of this libertarian emphasis on minding one's own business is that in creating more radically individuated and thus isolated people, the social fabric disintegrates, leaving a space for governments to come in as the solution. We need social bonds and to work together, and if those natural bonds disintegrate, governments will offer ways to force those bonds, or the social outcomes those old bonds once made. Neighbor pressure to keep your property looking nice has been replaced with local government passing ordinances to keep your property looking nice, with professional busybodies to enforce them by driving around and looking at everyone's property. The problem with the government solution is that, even with local government, there is a lack of local and tacit knowledge. One's neighbors, when one is close to one's neighbors, knows more about your situation than does some bureaucrat. The bureaucrat doesn't even care about your situation--they just care about being obeyed no matter what. The neighbor knows what your situation is, and adjusts their expectations (and complaints and pressure) accordingly.

This attitude of minding one's own business extends even to our institutions that have historically provided the kinds of social bonds that create community. For example, my wife and I have grown completely frustrated with the church we have been attending because, though we have tried to be involved through such things as having Melina in the children's choir, we have felt almost completely unwelcomed there. Not in an active way, but rather just completely ignored by everyone. It's as though they could care less whether we were there or not. Another example would be our local schools, where we send our children without really ever getting to know the teachers or fellow students, let alone fellow parents. Once the centers of our communities, our schools have become yet another institution of practically faceless, impersonal bureaucrats who seem annoyed more than anything if anyone wants to help or contribute in any real way.

Zoning laws separate neighborhoods from any sort of social meeting places. I have to get in my car to go shopping. If I want to hang out at a cafe, I have to get in my car and go there. And the people there won't be the people from my neighborhood. Even if I get to know a few people at the local Starbucks, I won't know them outside of Starbucks. I won't know where they live. I certainly won't be invited over to their homes. With mixed neighborhoods, where there are local cafes and stores where you see the people from your neighborhood all the time, you get to know people and as a result, you end up looking out for each other more. Zoning thus keeps neighborhoods from becoming true communities by isolating various aspects of our lives from each other.
Licensing also contributes to this problem. It' worse than ridiculous that you have to get a license to hold a yard sale or for your children to have a lemonade stand. These are among the opportunities lost to connect with your neighbors and transform them into communities. Local businesses are less likely to crop up as a result as well. So not only is are community bonds suppressed, but community economies are depressed.

The problem is that there are inevitably anti-social people who don't want any of these things taking place in their neighborhoods. But why should only the anti-social elements of society get what they want? Just because they are going to complain about what's going on, while nobody's going to complain about what's NOT going on? This is a problem of the "seen" taking precedence over the "unseen" that all too often plagues the insights of economics and sociology. We are trading the "tyranny" of community for the tyranny of government, persuasion for force. It's a pretty stupid trade.

The real problem is that when people come to understand that there is something missing in their lives, they then look to government to fix those things when the source seems to come from the outside. We are missing something in our societies, and we then ask the government to provide all the things strong communities once provided. The problem is that when governments do things, they tend to crowd out private solutions. And that undermines the creation of strong communities even more. Licensing and zoning are the consequences of anti-social complainers, and they work to make us all more anti-social and isolated.

The fact is that humans are naturally social, naturally community-minded, naturally compassionate. If we find a group of people not behaving that way, behaving rather more selfishly and anti-socially, we need to ask what is happening in their societies, in their institutions, in their governance that is causing people to behave this way. What is actively encouraging them to behave in ways that are, quite frankly, unnatural? We love to blame "capitalism," but we have had capitalism far longer than this situation. Further, the system we haven't isn't even free market capitalism anyway, but is rather extremely regulated capitalism. Those regulations, as we have seen, have more than just economic consequences, as bad as those are. They have social consequences as well.

We all know there is something deeply wrong with American society. What is wrong is that we have been actively replacing community with government. We are regulating ourselves into isolation. Natural connections are replaced with government regulated interactions. Yes, my traveling several miles to sit at a cafe is a government regulated interaction precisely because I cannot sit at a cafe anywhere near where I live. My having to get in my car to grab a few avocados for dinner rather than walking to the neighborhood fruit stand is a government regulated interaction. We do not even recognize we are being controlled and being separated from each other, but we are. The consequence is more and more government regulations to try to make up for the losses caused by government regulations, causing more and more separation.

The increase in PTSD among returning soldiers is the canary in the coal mine. How many must stop singing before we get the message?

Reality and Liberalism and Ideology Opposed Together

In Aristotle's formulation, virtue aims at the beautiful. The archer must aim high to hit the target because of the effects of gravity. One could put this another way. The political reformer must aim high to hit the target because of the effects of reality. One can never escape the effects of gravity/reality.

The reality is that humans are a complex social species prone to hierarchical organization. We see it taking place when we freely associate with each other to form clubs, businesses, or other kinds of organizations. A leader typically emerges, and the leader is replaced by other leaders. If that's what happens when we freely associate with each other, we cannot expect any less from our political institutions and from governments in general.

There are many other realities about human beings we have to take into consideration. That we prefer to live in social groups of around 150 people -- the famous Dunbar number. That we are a species of social mammal, meaning we are territorial (again, up to 150 people -- meaning we are property-owning in small groups from 1 to 150). It also means that we have alphas, betas, etc. down to omegas. That's how we organize. It's how we relate to each other. We even seem to need scapegoats to stabilize society. Religion contributes to social stability. As do many other institutions that are uniquely human.

Those institutions evolve. As do our cultures. We are traditional, and traditions change, but change slowly. That allows for social stability. Change too fast or don't change at all, and the society collapses.

Humans trade. Of course, there has to be privately owned property in order for there to be trade. Trade allows for the increase in wealth because when two people trade, they are necessarily better off. Trade also allows for specialization, meaning people become more effective and efficient at the work they do. Which further contributes to the increase in wealth. People are also innovative. Innovations of all sort contribute to wealth creation as well, and the more people there are, the more innovations there can be, and the more wealth can be created for everyone.

As a species of social mammal, we, again, have alphas. That means leaders. So long as we remain a species of social mammal, we will have leaders. They will typically force themselves into the leadership position, because nature is hardly democratic. Elections are how humans solved that problem in the best way possible. 

There are many ideal worlds one can imagine. Imagination seems endless. We can imagine ideal communism, ideal socialism, ideal theocracies, ideal monarchies, and ideal anarchies.

Virtuous political economy will mean aiming at the beautiful. Ideals are always beautiful.

However, we make a mistake when we try to actually realize our ideals. We should not mistake the beautiful for the virtuous. Otherwise, we aim too high, and we miss the target.

However, accepting reality means missing the target as well. We aim too low. Things do not remain as they are, but rather degrade. Society falls apart.

In the ideal, mass murder almost inevitably takes place because nobody can possibly match the ideal. In the real, social disintegration almost inevitably takes place because stagnation is death.

Knowing the real, we have to aim for the ideal. But the real must remain to root us. We are always dealing with real humans as they really are. Those humans can change, but they are limited in how much and how fast.

An anarchy is an ideal. We should aim for it. Given that most of our interactions are in fact anarchic in the sense of not needing government to take place, we should do our best to try to make our societies as anarchic as possible. But if and when we find a place where expanding anarchy there makes life worse, we have found the limits. And there is power in limits. We mustn't forget that. Failing to achieve the ideal doesn't mean we have failed. Ignoring those limits does. Finding the limits of our ideals means we have succeeded.

Of course, there are some ideals that can only remain in Cloudcuckooland because they do not match reality at all. Still, there may be elements that are desirable. We can perhaps agree that various inequalities ought to be eliminated without  agreeing on how to achieve equality. At the same time, we have to face certain realities. Network effects can create natural inequalities despite everything we do. And we will often find that the more equally we treat eat other, the stronger the network effects. Another way to say this, is you can have equality under the law or equality of outcomes, but not both.

Another way to understand this is through the idea of criticality. Society should be neither perfectly ordered and unchanging nor perfectly disordered. It needs to be both at the same time. Also, we should reject both reality and idealism/ideology, and embrace the critical space between the two, the most complex, creative space that results in networks and systems with emergent properties. The world view that seems to create this is liberalism, which both seeks to transform reality while rejecting ideology. Liberalism is not an ideology, but rather a world view, an attitude toward the world, especially the social world.

Of course, criticality is part of reality as well. So we never actually get out of reality. But let's face it, there are better realities than others. What we need is the freedom to find those realities and work to realize them. And that means rejecting both the advocates of reality and of ideology, while giving them space to work.

What Do You Do With Rules?

Are you a nihilist? Are you a trickster god?

You're probably neither one.

You either play by the given rules or rebel against the rules. Both acknowledge the power and legitimacy of the rules. Both work to reinforce and strengthen all the rules.

But suppose you come to understand that all the rules could have been other than they are. Yes, all of them. And may yet be. Some rules have great duration--the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, in decreasing duration--even the evolved psychology of humans has great duration, such that we work best in certain social rules that themselves could have been other than they are, but now must be as they are, given our evolved psychologies. And some rules could still be other than they are. See the varieties of languages, foods, poetries in all our varied cultures. Rules that could be otherwise, and have once been.

How, then, do you respond?

Despair? Contempt of the rules? That's nihilism.

Joy? Appreciation of what the rules can do even while knowing they can change? Then you're a trickster god.

We know the nihilists. Sad-sack, pathetic whiners who bomb to bomb, destroy to destroy, despair because nothing matters or has meaning.

But you don't know the trickster gods. Challenging the rules because they're rules, using them when they're useful, ignoring them when they're not, building new things, dancing our of love of life, joyful in meaning-creation and making-matter.

The nihilist is serious and appreciates nothing.

The trickster god appreciates everything and is serious about nothing.

The trickster is bound to ridicule the binds you place upon yourself. The trickster is bound to ridicule you if you seek to tighten all the binds of others. He ridicules your cruelty and misanthropy.

He laughs at autocrats and nihilists alike.

He laughs because he knows you could be free.

Colonizing by Church and State

In Spiral Dynamics, communitarian and individualist stages alternate. The state we are in, the egalitarian stage, is communitarian and the community feeling is created almost entirely by government. The communitarian stage that preceded it was the authoritarian stage, and the community feeling in it is created almost entirely by (typically monotheistic) religion. Between was classical liberalism, an individualistic stage.

In an essay I posted on Medium, I point out that we see alternations between the colonization of spontaneous orders by a single order (itself dominated by a single hierarchical organization) and the separation of the spontaneous orders. The Catholic church dominated all the spontaneous orders in the Medieval period, then the arts, the sciences, morality, philosophy, and even the religious order itself was separated off from it. Over the past century, governments have been colonizing those orders. Now that they have been as colonized as possible, they are being released yet again.

But this was the short version.

The Right Hand Path and the Left Hand Path and the Middle Way

In the Indian religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Sihkism, and Jainism you have the Right Hand Path and the Left Hand Path. The Right Hand Path is the orthodox path; the Left Hand Path is the heterodox path. The Right Hand Path is typically collectivist in nature, while the Left Hand Path strongly emphasizes more individualist approaches. One is order, what is disorder. One leads to unity; the other to disunity. One should note that both paths lead to the same place---enlightenment.

Heraclitus argued that the way up and the way down are the same, suggesting that he had a similar view. Whether you are going up or down, whether you are going left or right, you end up in the same place.

Of course, with Christianity, the way up and the way down are not the same. The way up leads to Heaven; the way down leads to Hell.  The Right Way leads to virtue and God; the Left (Sinister) Way leads to vice and Satan. If the right is collectivist and the left is individualist, we see an equation with collectivism as good and individualism as evil. This is then a deeply Christian equation.

The Buddha emphasized The Middle Way. One could argue then that any emphasis on a Right Hand Path or Left Hand Path is missing the point. One should take the middle way. What is the middle way between orthodox and heterodox? What is the middle way between individualism and collectivism?

F.A. Hayek argued that continental European philosophy gave us collectivism precisely because it argued for a kind of radical individualism, where the individual is inherently unsocial and must be made to be social by "society," which gets equated with government. Collectivism is the solution to the problem of radical individualism. That is, the Right Hand Path and the Left Hand Path lead to the same place; the way up and the way down are the same. However, Hayek argues that Scottish Enlightenment Philosophy argues for a socially embedded individualism, where the individual is individuated in their social contexts, and the social environment is a product of interacting individuals. The Scottish Enlightenment view of the socially embedded individual is thus a Middle Way, a more complex interaction that leads to better things more quickly. Like the Buddhist Middle Way.

Medieval mythology also provides us with a middle way. Many stories provides us with a middle path between those to Heaven and Hell---the path to Fairy Land. Fairy Land is a liminal space where magical things take place in a more complex environment. This path is neither easy (like the path to Hell) nor extremely difficult (like the path to Heaven), but is between these two, through the thick, green forests where the mind and monsters dwell. This middle way provides us with the great stories.

The Middle Way is a more complex pathway, a liminal space, on the boundary land of order and chaos, there creativity happens. It is the place where you are neither obeying the rules (Right) nor violating the rules (Left), which in both cases means you are taking the rules seriously and, thus, are really playing the same game, but rather are questioning the rules, understanding the degree to which the rules could be other than they are, where the rules are no longer taken seriously, even as one appreciates what can be done with the rules, especially good rules, and where play takes place for the sake of place, where truly new things are and can be born.

Preparing for a Culture

Education prepares you for culture, and the kind of education you receive will prepare you for particular kinds of cultures. A liberal education will prepare you for a liberal culture. An illiberal education will prepare you for an illiberal education.

There are of course a variety of illiberal cultures, ranging from theocratic cultures to secular illiberal cultures, from national socialism to international socialism and progressivism to postmodernism. The kinds of educations you would receive in each would involve some sort of unifying, totalizing world view or propaganda-- that is, the "right way" of viewing things. The result would be that you would in fact be for all intents and purposes trained in a particular way of thinking rather than having your thinking freed. But it would result in the creation of a particular kind of culture.

From the perspective of preparing you for culture and tradition, these are clearly forms of education. Yet from the perspective of freeing you to challenge tradition, it is at best a weak form of education.

Yet it would not be fair to training to call this training, either. When you are trained to do something, the goal is for you to master it so well that you can achieve things with it. In the sense that you master something through memorization, you can be considered to be "trained," but in fact, you can't really do much if anything with it other than continue to insist on the maintenance of tradition and to oppose any changes to that tradition, to maintain culture as is.

No, it is properly understood as education. Illiberal education is still education. It is still preparing you for a culture. Whether it's a good one or a healthy one is another issue entirely.

Training vs. Education at The Pope Center

Today I have an article at The Pope Center on training vs. education. I wrote a blog post on it as well, here, where I use the same quotes, but make some different points. I think they mostly complement each other. George Leef also has a short piece at National Review on my article, bringing up several other points. I think the distinction is a necessary one to understand, because each implies different things about what learning is for and how to teach. I think many professors are also frustrated by the fact that they want to provide an education, but are primarily required to provide only training. In the humanities, many of the training classes are handed over to adjuncts and lecturers so the tenured and tenure track professors can teach the educational classes.

One problem too, though, is that too many of the "educational" classes in the humanities have been hijacked and turned into propaganda classes. Thus, they end up being training classes, too. But training for what?

What Is Neurotypical?

About 84% of the genes are expressed in the brain. Given that humans have 20,000 genes, that means about 16,800 genes are expressed in the brain.

We should not be surprised, then, if we were to find more than a bit of variation in human brains.

We should expect to see variation in degrees of creativity vs. copying, on liberalism vs. conservatism, on selfish behavior vs. altruism, introversion vs. extroversion, leadership vs. following, variations in thinking styles, degrees of mental energy, I.Q. and flexibility of I.Q., and of course any of a variety of learning and mental disabilities. These last are of course often disabilities based on a certain accepted mean of learning and/or behavior.

I have noted in some previous posts, linked above, that each of these consists of a spectrum of behaviors, which can be placed in a 20-60-20 grouping of the two extremes and a varying middle. I suspect that the same is true of the autism spectrum as well. The numbers don't seem at first to support this, but I suspect that the number of people with Asperger's is grossly underestimated and that ADD/ADHD is properly on the spectrum, such that the true spectrum looks like this:

ADD/ADHD---Asperger's---autism

About 11% of the population has been diagnosed with ADHD, and while only about 0.2% of the population has been diagnosed with Asperger's (the distinction of which has been lost by being folded into autism), I strongly suspect it's more. Many we would just call "introverted" are probably on the spectrum and specifically have Asperger's. Many upon my telling them I have Asperger's insisted that, no, I was just very introverted. But as anyone on the spectrum will tell you, much of our "introversion" comes from a combination of complete mental exhaustion from having to negotiate a social environment that doesn't make much sense to us, and our not understanding how to be social, rather than a desire not to be social.

If we take these things into consideration, we have an expanded autism spectrum that includes something like 20% of the population. If that is the case, what we have here is not really a disorder, but a natural variation that contributes to social complexity and dynamics. At the other end, constituting another 20% of the population, would then be what we could consider solipsistic thinkers, who are in many ways truly opposite of autistic, as I discuss here.

Also, one may note that there are a lot of overlaps in categories. Many introverts are on the autism spectrum, and vice versa (many with ADHD may be considered extroverts because of their hyperactivity, so the correlation, in my expanded definition of autism, won't be perfect with introversion); many on the spectrum are creative and non-conformists. (It is notable that people on the spectrum, while being non-conformists, also dislike a great deal of change, while the more conformist neurotypicals are more capable of change; this tension also likely contributes to social dynamics in interesting ways that should be investigated.) Variations in thinking styles also maps well onto the solipsistic to autism spectrum.

Variations in brain structure, then, is going to be quite common. Given the number of genes involved in the brain, what should be most surprising is that so much is common among humans. This is in no small part because various streams tend to converge into the same general pathways (as described by constructal theory). This is why there can be a variety of causes of autism, with there being similarities among those who have autism (even with variations in degrees of expression). For there to be complex human societies, it would be necessary to have a variety of ways of thinking or even a variety of kinds of minds so that our societies are neither too stagnant nor too changeable. The most stable societies will be those that both honor tradition and are open to change, that change on the margins rather than abruptly.

Even though we have had literally millennia of species experience with the presence of such variation, we still nevertheless see a great deal of prejudice and discrimination against those who have variations in their thinking. This seems especially true in the postmodern period, where we have developed institutions whose job it is to separate out anyone who has a difference in the way they think, process information, etc. This institutional discrimination is very widespread today, to such a degree that you almost cannot get a job unless you are solidly in the 80% solipsistic-neurotypical range. Businesses quite often, if not almost always, actively discriminate against anyone on the autism spectrum, which is why so many on the spectrum are unemployed.

This discrimination against people who think differently comes from more recent egalitarian attitudes which insist that everyone is/must be identical. Given that these variations in mind/thinking cut across race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and sexual orientation, one can actively discriminate against mental variation even while insisting on acceptance of other categories. Worse, because these mental differences are real and are a consequence of structural differences, insistence that all children are the same and learn the same results in the development of the idea of learning disabilities and of behavioral problems.

The politically correct change of this to "learning differences" has not resulted in any real change in attitude toward those differences as being bad. And differences in processing and interacting with the world are treated as behavioral problems to be solved. But the fact of the matter is that people on the spectrum cannot and should not be expected to behave like neurotypical people, because the are literally structured differently. This isn't a matter of something superficial like culture, which can be written on any individual born into that culture, regardless of race, etc.; no, this is something deep and fundamental that cannot be so readily changed.

And even if the changes can be made--typically, forced--they always feel artificial to the person. It's much like insisting that gays can just ignore their preferences and act heterosexual; it can be done, but it will never feel quite right, and it will likely make the person feel anxious and depressed. Perhaps not coincidentally, anxiety and depression are typically part of autism.

Our societies have been formed by the majority of those not on the autism spectrum. There are obvious reasons for that--not the least of which being that those people make up 80% of the population. As a result, it is not entirely unreasonable to insist that we on the spectrum conform to them and not vice versa. Of course, this seems easy enough to a group of people for whom conformity is natural. But what they need to understand, what everyone needs to understand, is that it's not easy for us.

More, by preventing us from being ourselves--at least on occasion--I suspect that our societies are losing out on a great deal that we could and would otherwise contribute to society. Free to be ourselves, with less anxiety and depression, we may feel more up to innovating and creating and thus contributing to society in the many ways we have in the past. That's all we ask: to be allowed to be ourselves, to be allowed to contribute, to be allowed our humanity.

Some Thoughts on Education

One of my central concerns is education. While on the one hand, I believe that (with obvious exceptions, such as learning disabilities) all students learn the same general way and will learn the same kinds of materials in the same way, there are also bound to be differences in learning speed and in interests (which in turn affects speed, or perhaps vice versa). Because children develop at different rates, learn at different speeds, and have varied interests, I do not believe that children should be educated according to age. I find such a concept ridiculous and arbitrary. While it is true that there is a bell curve of development and learning speed around a child's age, there are a sufficient number who are slower or faster that it makes no sense to make every child advance according to his or her age. Children should advance purely by ability, and that advancement or maintenance of position needs to be determined more often than once a year. This would of course mean a radical change in school structure to accommodate this change, but it is necessary if we want students to learn what they can as quickly and effectively as they can. 

I am persuaded that a lot of lack of interest in subjects comes about because of difficulties in performing certain tasks or understanding the ideas. This happens when a student is moved too quickly through the system. A student should not move until the concepts are fully grasped at a given level. If we divide the school year up into 6 week periods, as happens now, that means a student may master a set of knowledge in one period, two periods, three, or four. Or more. The student would have to repeat that set until it is mastered. With mastery, the student would move into the next section. 

Given the fact that learning is nonlinear, we should not be surprised if a student moves slowly through one set and quickly through another set. Some students have more difficulty getting the foundations--the seemingly simple stuff--but then do exceptionally well with the more advanced concepts. 

Further, learning must be developmentally appropriate. Don't be having students learning the "writing process" when they don't know their alphabet. There is foundational knowledge that must be grasped first. Also, we need to base our system on the way the brain actually works and learns. This means, again, understanding that learning is nonlinear. It also means grooming interest, as interest in something facilitates learning it. I likely would have learned math better and easier had I been made to understand the ways in which it would benefit me in my interests over the years. It really does not take a lot of time and effort to find out what a student is interested in and to connect what is being taught to those interests. It is likely that there are going to be groups of students with similar interests, and coming up with examples that fit those interests should be a part of teaching. 

At the same time, we have to get rid of this ridiculous notion that unless a student can relate to something, we shouldn't teach it. It's ridiculous because no student can relate to anything we teach them until they are taught it, because by definition, you are only learning what you did not previously know. This means we need to teach students more stories, and those stories need to encompass a wide variety of experiences, cultures, ideas, etc. Stories are ways to gain experience without having to actually, physically experience them. Again, we must keep in mind that students who have difficulty reading will not like reading, and as a result they are likely to develop an aversion to reading and then to stories themselves to a certain degree. Of course, so long as a student watches TV or movies, plays certain kinds of video games, or just plain gossips, they are demonstrating their interest in stories. The job of the teacher is to try to get them to enjoy more and more complex stories over time. That means, again, teaching developmentally appropriate stories. And well-written stories. 

It is important that children receive a broad education that includes history, because you cannot know where you're going if you don't know where you've been; social studies, so they can get a sense of where they are in the social world; health and biology, so they can understand themselves from a biological standpoint and from the perspective of being a biological being that needs to be physically healthy; physics and chemistry, so they can understand the structure of the physical world and how it works; economics, so they can learn how money works, the nature of trade and work, etc.; literature, because students learn best from stories, and they need to be taught how to understand more complex stories; mathematical logic, so students can understand relationships among quantities; grammar, so they can learn the structure of language and of thought itself; and ideas, so they can connect everything together, learn logic and reasoning, and understand that they are part of a conversation that goes back thousands of years. Some of this will have to be detailed and particular--grammar and math, for example-- while others, like history and ideas, can be more general, so long as the students understand their place in history in regards to events and ideas. Note that most of these things will necessarily reinforce reading skills. Some, like logic, will reinforce math skills, though it should be encouraged to bring out math wherever appropriate to the subject. In other words, keeping a math journal in an English class is, to put it bluntly, stupid. But showing the importance of math to biology or economics or general living is of course sensible. 

If much of this goes against the way things are currently done, all the better. What is currently done does not work. The primary job of the teacher is fostering as much interest in a student for the subject in question as humanly possible. When that happens, the student will learn. The "because I said so" approach that dominates clearly does not work, has never worked, and will never work. Of course, this means that teachers themselves have to be interested. If a teacher is not interested in teaching every single subject in, say, 1st grade, that person has no business being a teacher. The teachers' attitudes rub off on the students; if the teacher isn't interested, the students will often not be interested, either. 

Of course, education does not end with high school. Certainly not anymore. And that fact, that over half of all high school graduates go to college, is why colleges are in trouble now. The fact is that most are going to college to get job training. But traditionally universities were not designed for that purpose. No, they were designed to provide a liberal education. The switch to becoming trade schools training people in a variety of trades has resulted in the degradation of education to becoming little more than illiberal propaganda and training programs. Since universities have become trade schools, those interested in providing a liberal education need to develop a new institution to provide that education. It cannot at all resemble the current Prussian-style institution, as that is what has degraded into becoming what it now is. The new institution needs to be practically anti-training in nature, wildly interdisciplinary, extremely integrated, and rabidly liberal, with both unity in variety and variety in unity driving the curricula. It should not be narrowly Classical, but rather broadly natural classical in nature. 

But that is an institution whose details I need to develop more explicitly some other time. 

Should Universities Provide Education or Training?

If you were to ask what it is that universities are supposed to provide, perhaps everyone would say that they are supposed to provide a person with an education. But what, exactly is an education? And is that what our universities are in fact providing?

What if I were to tell you that many if not most classes in our universities are not designed to provide you with an education but, rather, are designed to provide you with training? This of course only raises the question of what differences there are between the two. For that, I want to refer you to James P.  Carse’s classical book Finite and Infinite Games, in which Carse makes this distinction between education and training.

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

Education discovers an increasing richness in the past, because it sees what is unfinished there. Training regards the past as finished and the future as to be finished. Education leads toward a continuing self-discovery; training leads toward a final self-definition.

Training repeats a completed past in the future. Education continues an unfinished past into the future. (23)

There are many classes in our universities that on the one hand train us, and others that do in fact educate us. So when, for example, you take a composition class in college, the professor is going to treat grammar and syntax as something that has been finished in the past, which you need to learn as it now is. Grammar and syntax are considered to be established rules you need to learn. If, on the other hand, you take a graduate level class on the grammar of languages, you will discover that the rules of grammar and syntax do in fact change in languages over time, that each language has its own grammar and syntax, etc., and this knowledge then prepares you for when you encounter an unknown language to be prepared for differences from what you know from the language(s) you know. You are thus prepared for surprise.

Education also helps you to be able to continue to make more and more discoveries in the past. The more literature you read, for example, the richer you find all literature to be—and of course all literature is necessarily “past.” As is all knowledge. Even a biologist is studying already-established processes. Economists are studying economies as they once were. In a sense, each is a kind of historian, each trying to discover the rules of those processes. Education is what prepares you for such activities.

Training, on the other hand, is more akin to engineering. The person trained in writing is going to write future books and papers. The genetic engineer is trying to create future changes in the organisms he is working on. The policy maker is trying to create a healthier, stronger economy. Training prepares you to be an engineer, to make things now for future purposes.

Naturally, there are going to be mixtures. Future scholars all have to be trained to write papers in their fields, so need some training. They need to be trained in appropriate methods, and so forth. But most of what they do is get educated in their fields.

What Carse is calling education is of course what we typically think of our universities as doing. However, universities have very much moved away from that model and have embraced the training model. Our universities attempt to train people to write, and there are departments of engineering, business, information technology, and so on, each designed to train people for certain tasks. And this has been happening for a long time. I, for example, did not get my undergraduate degree in biology, a field of education, but rather in recombinant gene technology, a field of training. I was of course educated, because you have to have background information with which to work, but there was an end-goal of producing a technologist rather than a scholar.

Carse argues that training is designed to prepare one for society, while education is will prepare you to participate in culture (50-55). “Society” of course involves engaging in business, governance, and any number of organizations. “Culture” on the other hand involves the ongoing change of tradition, is founded in history, but plays with boundaries. Through investigating the past, we discover ourselves, and as such change the very culture in which we live. Only education can prepare you to do that.

Education, then, would involve the natural sciences as discovery, the social sciences as understanding, philosophy, the study of art and literature as not just things to study to write scholarly papers, but as inspiration for the creation of art and literature. This is the proper role of education. 

Both are kinds of learning. But they have completely opposite results.

If you teach composition, you will train students in grammar, and there is a finality to that grammar.

If you are a linguist, what you teach and learn about grammar its that It changes, varies, and is generative. Grammar is open.

I'm familiar with both. I tried to explain to a linguist why teaching grammar was important to teaching writing, and the linguist couldn't understand my points. Because grammar As open knowledge is nothing like grammar as closed knowledge.

Chemists need education. Chemical engineers need training. Molecular biologists need education. Biotechnologists need training. Physicists need education. Engineers need training. Anthropologists, historians, and politicians all need educations. They are not trades. They participate in culture. 

The maintenance of a culture means working in a certain tradition and maintaining it to work in it on the margins.

Even a good pop star works in a tradition to which they are responding and in which they are educated. That education in that case won't take place in a university. But out is an example of what is meant by education and culture.

Universities help maintain a different kinds of culture. Increasingly a global culture, which involves a classical tradition. This includes the arts and literature, the sciences and social sciences, philosophy and theology. One must be educated to contribute to these things, to the creation of knowledge and understanding in them. 

With an education, you actually never stop learning. An education never ceases. Those working in culture never stop educating themselves. What one learns through such an education, even if one chooses to stop studying (which I don't think actually happens), still affects one's choices in life, decisions, ways one thinks, etc. Further, getting an education, even if one doesn't participate in the culture through cultural production in a direct fashion, can help one to be more creative, more compassionate, more humane in one's societal actions. Which is why it remains an ideal, even if rarely realized. 

Literature creates empathy through allowing us to experience another's mind in a safe place space. More complex literature affects our abilities to experience social complexity. And these necessarily affect behavior. The books don't just reinforce, but create. And while creativity is only learned if you are inherently creative, and the vast majority of people are not because creativity is extremely difficult and requires a great deal of energy, meaning few have what is needed to be creative, one can increase one's inherent creativity--through gaining an education. Whatever creativity a person may have is maximized through an education. The fact that few are creative this way is perhaps why few actually want an education.

But training for trades is what our schools are now promoting. Increasingly, they seem to be eschewing education for training. It is less important to read than it is to learn how to write—as though it were possible to learn the latter without doing a great deal of the former. We are supposed to go to school to become business people, engineers, programmers, and so on. And as more students enter our colleges to get training, they resist getting an education. They are not interested in culture and the continuance of culture. They are interested in getting trained to get a job.

And that is fine. Except that it is increasingly coming at the expense of education. We are not educating people for culture, to participate in culture. We are more and more preparing our students to work at jobs in the economy, but we are less and less preparing them to create, discover, and understand.

Perhaps that is why we are increasingly finding college students engaging in political correctness, resisting new ideas, and calling for limitations on free speech and academic freedom. Perhaps we are seeing students acting this way because we are no longer preparing them for culture. We have been training them, but telling them they are educated. They are not, and the ramifications for that are beginning to show.
 

Too often college classes give students anything but an education. Most are now mere training. And too often the classes that were once for education are now used for propaganda. But it doesn't have to be that way.