Ideas - Astra Taylor's CBC Massey Lectures | #3: Consumed by Curiosity

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

It’s a paradox — we live in the most prosperous era in human history, but it’s also an era of profound insecurity. Massey Lecturer Astra Taylor suggests that history shows that increased material security helps people be more open-minded, tolerant, and curious. But rising insecurity does the reverse — it drives us apart.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

This is the third of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity, by writer, filmmaker, and political organizer, Astra Taylor. We've been made insecure on purpose, says Astra Taylor. The ecological crisis we face, the threats to political security, all these are tied to the fact that our social order runs on what she calls manufactured insecurity. Our striving for something more stable shapes how we feel about ourselves, as well as shaping what we think is personally and politically possible. Astra Taylor was born in Winnipeg and raised in Athens, Georgia. Her most recent book is Remake the World, Essays, Reflections, Rebellions. Others include the American Book Award winner, The People's Platform,

Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, and Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone. Every year, we record the Masseysey lectures on a cross-Canada tour and this year we went to Winnipeg, Halifax, Whitehorse, Vancouver and Toronto. Today on Ideas, from the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse,

the third of the 2023 CBC Massey lectures titled Consumed by Curiosity. Here's Astra Taylor. Hello, Whitehorse. It is so exciting to be here and to see all of you. I'm so grateful that you all took the time to come here this evening to listen to this talk. So this is lecture three of five. This lecture focuses on education and consumerism, but really it's about education and the different ways we can motivate one another to learn.

And it's called Consumed by Curiosity. My mother, Maria, was born in the spring of 1960 at the dawn of a decade that would come to be synonymous with social change. Her parents were an unlikely pair of outsiders. My grandfather, a Hungarian refugee with a penchant for existentialist philosophy, soon to return to Budapest and rarely be heard from again, and my Ontario-raised grandmother, her own birth circumstances so scandalous that she spent time in an orphanage as a toddler.

When given the chance, grandma severed all attachments to middle-class social mores and embraced a life that was freewheeling. My mom and her sister spent their early years hanging out in Toronto's bohemian enclaves, frequenting beatnik cafes and bookstores, BNs, and happenings. One morning on the bus to school, the kids pointed excitedly out the window, screaming in disgust, yuck, a hippie. My mother turned to look. Her mom's latest boyfriend was walking by. In 1969, my grandmother, fully committed to the countercultural path, heading west and then north with daughters in tow. The day they arrived in the

Yukon Territory, it was so frigid that my grandmother's coat, made of some fashionable synthetic fabric, split apart. But they weren't there to be fashionable. My grandmother had come to help a small group of spiritual seekers establish a buddhist outpost near white horse a town my grandmother would grow to love and would never leave faith that she was helping to usher in a shift in consciousness sustained my grandmother through the hardship of those initial years for her young daughters the move was an adventure but also a challenge at one point they lived in an old shed with an outhouse that had a fur-lined toilet seat. As intrepid as my grandma, my 14-year-old mother added a year to her age and enrolled

herself in an experimental school 50 miles south of Whitehorse on the outskirts of Carcross, a village formerly known as Caribou Crossing for the herds that pass through on their semi-annual migrations and the long-standing home of the Carcross Tagish First Nation. Founded in 1972 and surrounded by 1,600 acres of wilderness, the Carcross Community Education Center was an alternative boarding school, one of thousands of free schools sprouting up across North America during that period. In this context, free meant that they were concerned with freedom, with the authentic and uncoerced expression and development of students. Born of an unusual

partnership between the Yukon territorial government and the Anglican diocese of Yukon Territorial Government and the Anglican Diocese of Yukon, the Carcross Center catered primarily, though not exclusively, to white students and occupied the recently abandoned site of an old residential school, a disturbing history that we'll return to. The new experimental school, to be clear, was not religious. Instead, it was suffused with a countercultural spirit, was not religious. Instead, it was suffused with a countercultural spirit, a belief that people could establish more egalitarian and satisfying modes of coexistence. Students arrived from across Canada, as well as a few from the United States, a good number of whom had been labeled troubled and marked for rehabilitation. The Carcross Center offered them not punishment and discipline, but the possibility of thriving in a wholly different educational environment.

In the late 60s and 70s, many people, an entire movement's worth of people, were attempting to rethink education from the ground up. Best-selling books like A.S. Neal's Summer Hill, which was an account of the legendary anti-authoritarian boarding school in England, Paul Goodman's compulsory miseducation, Ivan Illich's de-schooling society, and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, each signaled a zeitgeist and altogether sold millions of copies. These ideas began to influence public policy and teaching methods. For example, Living and Learning, an Ontario government report that was released in 1968, shocked the Canadian education establishment by advocating for child-centered, democratic, and grade-free

instruction. At Carcross, teenagers like my mother put these radical ideas into practice by running the school alongside teachers or so-called parent members. Lesson plans evolved according to participants' interests, each class a collaborative and open-ended endeavor. Though the school was accredited, grades were regarded as arbitrary and retrograde, the most important learning came from managing the community, from figuring out together how to solve problems and how to live in common. Young people talked philosophy while repairing the buildings and constructing log cabins, farming and occasionally hunting, cooking and cleaning. They baked bread and made crafts that were sold to help keep the school financially afloat. The school's decision-making process required endless meetings,

as democracy always does. My mother enrolled at Carcross in 1974 and stayed for a year. In a charming 30-minute documentary made by the CBC about the Carker Center at this time, the narrator marvels about the school's outlandish teaching methods and remarkable success. The film shows sweet-faced, long-haired students sitting in a circle, deliberating over how to fairly share cleaning responsibilities and thoughtfully discussing power differentials with the parent members. and responsibilities and thoughtfully discussing power differentials with the parent members. In one interview, a girl reflects on the school's commitment to breaking down the traditional hierarchy between teachers and students to facilitate learning through authentic interest and mutual respect, not obligation or fear. As she put it, there's a lot of care here.

It's none of this Mrs. and Mr. and bow to the ground for your teacher, and that sort of helps you work harder. It was this ethos, the idea of education's connection to autonomy, curiosity, and security that would leave the largest mark on my mother. By extension, it profoundly marked my childhood too. One day in 1968, the year before my grandmother and her daughters left Toronto, a young political scientist named Ronald Englehart found himself in Paris, surrounded by protesters. The month was May, and the city buzzed with rebellious energy. Students occupied their universities and workers waged wildcat strikes. Paving stones were ripped from the streets and tear gas hung heavy in the air.

As the economy ground to a halt, rumor had it the president had fled the country. Everything, it seemed, was up for debate. Demonstrators denounced consumerism, American imperialism, outmoded gender roles and deadening teaching methods and demanded new ways of relating and being. Popular graffiti captured the zeitgeist. The barricade blocks the street but opens the way. We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in

exchange for the risk of dying from boredom. Englehart knew that what he was witnessing was not unique. The French demonstrators were part of a global wave of youth rebellion, surging from Mexico City to San Francisco, from Vancouver to London to Tokyo. This wave changed the course of Englehart's career. In 1977, Englehart published a book, The Silent Revolution, Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. It would become a classic. Using survey data from North America and Western Europe, Englehart argued that a generational transformation in outlook was, quote, Engelhardt called this new outlook post-materialist.

In essence, the silent revolution analyzed the cause and political impact of the social movements of the 1960s. What conditions, he wanted to know, had catalyzed the sea change that had swept up millions of people in such bold new cultural and political experiments, my grandmother and her daughters among them. Engelhard didn't believe the younger generations were somehow intrinsically more enlightened and prejudiced or innovative than their predecessors, as some hagiographic accounts of the swinging 60s might lead one to believe.

Rather, he argued, they had come of age in a very different world than the one their parents and grandparents had been raised in, specifically in one that was far less economically different world than the one their parents and grandparents had been raised in, specifically in one that was far less economically and physically insecure. The relatively egalitarian conditions of the post-World War II era encouraged millions of people in North America, Britain, and Europe to become less reactive than prior generations for intuitive, even obvious reasons. People's basic needs were being met. And critically, they believed they would continue to be met in the future.

Thanks to rising wages and expanded welfare systems, even poor people like my grandmother felt secure enough to take risks and to try to live in new ways. They could, in capitalist parlance, afford to experiment. Engelhardt's great innovation lay in extending the psychologist Albert Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs from individuals to societies writ large. We all know the famous image of the pyramid, with life's rudimentary essentials forming the base and more elevated pursuits like respect and purpose up top. Maslow described this framework as a theory of human motivation,

one that sought to describe what makes us tick. As Maslow pithily put it, it is quite true that man lives by bread alone when there is no bread. Material necessities such as food and water and physical and economic security take first priority, according to Maslow. And attaining these things frees us to focus on non-material things, culminating in what he thought was the need for self-actualization. Englehart believed this process was playing out on a vast scale. Those who came of age amid the Great Depression and two world wars valued safety and subsistence most of all because they recalled a time when both were scarce.

They remained preoccupied with the pyramid's lower rungs. But a booming economy had raised expectations from the proverbial chicken in every pot to a car in every garage. Younger people grew up in newly built suburban homes stocked with consumer wonders, vacuum cleaners, curling irons, lawnmowers, jello packets, radios, and TVs. In Englehart's telling, masses of younger people who had grown up within the affluent society's warm embrace felt secure enough to prioritize autonomy and personal growth and to question consumer culture people like my grandmother looked at those cookie cutter houses with those car filled garages all watching the same four television channels and purchasing identical products and thought,

maybe those people in those houses are comfortable, sure, but are they actually happy? At the same time, increasing access to post-secondary education helped make people more open to new ideas and other lifestyles. Attitudes conducive to the emergence of movements for peace, racial equality, women's liberation, gay rights, indigenous sovereignty, and environmentalism. The research at the heart of the silent revolution showed how varying levels of insecurity and security can have profound cultural and political consequences. Security, or its absence, consequences. Security or its absence can usher along the forces of reaction or of progress. It can stifle democracy or it can strengthen it. Englehart, who passed away in 2021,

believed that spiraling insecurity helps explain today's authoritarian tide. Insecurity, he maintained, tends to spark what he called an authoritarian reflux, the closing of ranks behind strong leaders in reaction to perceived threats and grievances. But contemporary insecurity, he noted, differs markedly from the insecurity of the past. Consider Germany before the Second World War. During the relatively secure conditions of 1928, the Nazis took less than 3% of the vote in national elections, only to become the strongest party in the Reichstag in 1933. This, of course, was four years into the Great Depression, which had financially devastated the electorate.

The grim scarcity of economic collapse fueled fascism in Europe. Here we have to remember that insecurity is always subjective. It has as much to do with one's objective circumstances in the here and now as one's sense of the future. Research shows that today's far-right foot soldiers are typically better off than their neighbors, but still feel vulnerable and not always without reason. For example, an analysis of the protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021 found that while they tended to be more affluent than average, a disproportionate percentage of participants who were arrested had also experienced significant money troubles at some point, bankruptcyruptcy, evictions, unemployment,

and the like. The insecurity of an unequal and volatile economy tilts some people rightward. Ours is a strange and scrambled political moment, at once prosperous and precarious, encouragingly open-minded, and dangerously reactive. Like Englehart, I believe there is a correspondence between insecurity, security, and social change, but I do not believe that this relationship is preordained. Human beings do not live by reflex alone, and the forces pushing some people rightward, pushing them toward authoritarianism, are more than automatic expressions of our essential nature. They are products of a coordinated attack on our economic and emotional well-being, an attack aimed at privatizing and commodifying the welfare commons, on strengthening the hand

of the market, and making our societies more competitive and individualistic. The resulting insecurity has left us feeling like we never are enough, have enough, or know enough, pulverizing our self-esteem, stoking consumerism, and corrupting education. Today, we are caught between two conflicting theories of human motivation. One that sees material security as a basis for personal and social growth, and another that is committed to manufacturing insecurity to keep people compliant, anxious, and striving. And yet insecurity is also a complicated thing. It can shut us down, close us off, and threaten egalitarian values. Or it can open us up, nurturing our habits of curiosity and social

connection, facilitating democratic renewal. It was the shared condition of insecurity, for example, that bonded struggling workers with the unemployed during the Great Depression, enabling them to form coalitions and push states to adopt redistributive policies. And we see this all around today in all sorts of movements. I see it in the work I do with the Debt Collective, which was mentioned, where financially insecure debtors come together, overcoming the shame and stigma of indebtedness to build solidarity.

While it is true that disasters and instability can be fertile ground for authoritarian strongmen, ordinary people just as often come to each other's aid. The more we can understand the nature of insecurity, the systems that manufacture it for power and profit, and the existential forms of insecurity that shape us, the more capable of forging solidarity and caring for each other we will be. When I was eight years old, I had a rude awakening. I realized that I actually lived in the 1980s. Until then, I had happily inhabited a kind of countercultural, post-materialist, 1960s time warp. My parents drove two beat-up VW vans, and the kids wore homemade tie-dye t-shirts

and ran around barefoot, true to almost every hippie cliche. There were no bedtimes, no morning alarms, no schedules, no classes, no curricula or teachers or tests in our eccentric ramshackle household. Instead, there was just us, my siblings and me, doing what we wanted to do. We wandered the nearby creeks and woods, unsupervised and unafraid, hands in the mud, clothes stained with red dirt or green streaks from rolling in the grass. We played, squabbled, sang, hung out with the dogs, fought over video games, or watched the two channels that came through on our TV. We spent endless hours reading books or staring at the walls,

bored, and then found something to capture our attention again. My mom never forgot her time at the Carcross Community Education Center with its beguiling ethos of youth empowerment, and she put those ideas and new ones she encountered and ones that she developed herself into practice through her parenting. I have long admired how my mother replicated the good parts of her countercultural girlhood, the playfulness, the lack of judgment, the freedom, without the bad or frankly dangerous elements. And like grandma before her, my mother would never bid me a nonchalant farewell as I set off to hitchhike thousands of miles with no intention of returning home. My siblings and I

were given autonomy, not abandoned. Our home life, however chaotic and admittedly a little encamped, was fundamentally secure. And my sense, looking back, is that this security made me open to learning on my own, to trying, failing, and trying again. This process of learning, of being supported to explore whatever we wanted or needed to know, was usually circuitous and spontaneous. There was no attempt to replicate school in the home, to set up a little row of desks facing a wall, and to follow a predetermined course with mom or dad in the role of disciplinarian, which is to say the person who enforced boundaries on knowledge while also meting out punishments. We were not homeschoolers but unschoolers, a term coined by the educator and author John Holt. My parents shunned coercion

and relied instead on our curiosity to drive us, which they understood to be the most basic human characteristic. This belief was core to Holt's philosophy. As Holt often said, the human animal is a learning animal. Infants learn to speak by being spoken to, right? They want to speak back. They're not tutored in 60-minute sessions with a quiz at the end. Curiosity, in this view, is one of the most powerful forms of motivation that our species possesses, and the goal of education should be to nurture it and to unleash it. It was a happy arrangement for me, but it had one glaring downside. I was lonely. In Athens, Georgia, the sleepy college town we had recently moved to,

unschoolers were few and far between, while Christian homeschoolers, far more prevalent, were openly hostile to heathens like us. Red Rover, Red Rover, send Jesus right over. The children screamed when we first tried to join their playgroup. Out of desperation, I decided to go where the remaining kids spent their days, Gaines Elementary School. The first thing I learned was that I was always doing something wrong. I would line up in the hallway or sit in the lunchroom only to have the tiny human beings that I had hoped to befriend

scold me for whatever grievous social error I had recently committed. I spoke to the wrong classmates because girls were not supposed to talk to boys, turned in my work too fast or too slow. I had a bad haircut. My mom did it herself. And I was not wearing deodorant. I didn't need to, I explained earnestly. I hadn't even gone through puberty yet, a response that quite predictably only made my tormentors mock me more intensely. Most of all, I heard about my clothes. My shoes were uncool, and my outfits were out of style.

They were bad, they didn't match. Other kids, it turned out, did not appreciate Albert Einstein as much as I did, and certainly not enough to wear a T-shirt with his face on it for three days a week. The message was I needed new things, normal things to fit in. Never again would I approach people so openly, so guilelessly as I had walking into that first day of fourth grade. I lost a bit of trust in other people that year, which meant I also lost some measure of trust in myself.

But that, I now believe, is what our educational and economic systems are too often set up to do, to make us feel as though we are lacking and inadequate. Fourth grade was my first encounter with what I call manufactured insecurity, the kind of insecurity generated to keep us competing and consuming, nudging us to act like materialists and compete for scarce resources, even if we might prefer to live another way.

Little did I know back then that a backlash against the countercultural values I was raised with was in full swing. In a roundabout way, post-materialists had prompted a right-wing resurgence. As Englehart ruefully observed in 2017, paraphrasing Marx and Engels, post-materialism had, quote, become its own grave digger. Focused on making society more open and less discriminatory during the 60s and 70s, post-materialists ignored the first levels of Maslow's pyramid of needs. They took a baseline of security for granted. In taking it for granted, they emphasized the importance of social inclusion and environmental sustainability over rudimentary bread and butter concerns. and environmental sustainability over rudimentary bread-and-butter concerns. Movements for racial, gender, and ecological justice were and are, of course, critically important.

But those movements gained momentum at a time when the economy was stalling out. Many people were becoming materially insecure. Material insecurity was increasing as oil prices spiked, inflation rose alongside layoffs, and economic growth lagged. During the 1930s and 40s, a broad and militant labor movement had fought for policies that made the economy more equitable. But by the 1970s, the old labor coalitions that had safeguarded economic security for working people were under assault. More conservative people, overwhelmingly white and older, clung to materialist values in the face of disorienting social change and diminishing opportunities. Political conservative leaders, backed by big

business interests, capitalized on those anxieties. They fueled resentment by railing against racial, religious, and sexual minorities, all all implementing policies that made the lives of ordinary people even more miserable. In this way, the right-wing scapegoated the social movements of the 1960s, blaming emboldened black and brown people, uppity feminists, unashamed queer people, entitled students, and know-it-all professors for the newfound insecurity of the white working class. This strategic misdirection obscured the true culprits, an increasingly cutthroat capitalist regime, and the rise of corporate globalization. In 1979, two years after the publication of The Silent Revolution, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Britain by taking advantage of precisely these dynamics.

Ronald Reagan, playing a similar game, became President of the United States a year later. Together, they remade the global economy and reshaped mainstream attitudes as well. Their influence trickled all the way down into that fourth grade classroom. By changing economic doctrine, Thatcher explained, people's priorities and outlooks could be reoriented. Economics, she said, are the method. The object is to change the heart and soul. Thatcher's goal, bluntly put, was to use policy to manufacture insecurity in order to nudge the public rightward. Instead of looking for help from government programs or joining a labor union to collectively bargain for better treatment,

citizens were encouraged to go it alone. By the time I was growing up, this new supercharged brand of capitalism was ascendant. To varying degrees, it reshaped liberal democratic governments around the world. They deregulated key industries, privatized public goods, and lowered taxes on the rich. At the same time, it channeled the individualism of the counterculture

into the consumer frenzy of the 1980s. In the Cold War logic of the era, democracy became synonymous with an abundance of consumer choice. Freedom was access to commodities, not access to the welfare commons. Wealth and power concentrated at the top, but everyone was free to buy, if not with cash, then with credit. Unhinged from the material security that once sustained it, the post-materialist emphasis on personal freedom and self-expression began to take on a desperate, darker, and more insecure edge. You're listening to the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures on Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM,

in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar, and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and, most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes, I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast, Crime Story, comes in. Every week, I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app.

While we were on the Massey tour, we recorded interviews about the kinds of insecurity we see today. We'll be playing excerpts from those interviews throughout the lectures. From Whitehorse, here's Dana Tiziatram. He's the chair of the Yukon First Nation School Board and a former chief of the Wuntut Gwitchen First Nation. Insecurity for me would really come back to ignorance. You know, if you have a hunter-gatherer society and you have this insecurity, there's nothing more abundant than nature. So if you

had insecurity in there, it would be from lack of knowledge. And that actually works very well as a microcosm into our capitalism and our societies, right? Where we dig a big hole here and we put a big pile of garbage there. So what's a little bit more dubious though, is that in modern society, insecurity is profitable and it's actually in the best interests of most corporations that we are insecure and that they can sell us the life that we already have inside. If you went to our people and you asked them, what does the end of all of this work look like? None of the community members, none of our people are going to tell you we want Manhattan. are going to tell you we want Manhattan. Our people just want to live out on the land and continue following their grandfather's footsteps

and having that for their children. Our kids with crayons, when they're drawing pictures, it's of their caribou camps, and you can see dry meat hanging. We haven't drank the proverbial Kool-Aid on mass consumerism and the rest. You know, my dad says something. He said, you know, I don't need to know about God or if there is one.

I look up at a starry night and I'm filled with awe. And that's good enough for me. So my question to modern society is, when is it good enough for you? When are we going to stop? When can we just be satisfied? That was Dana Tizia-Tram in Whitehorse. And now back to the third of the 2023 CBC Massey lectures, The Age of Insecurity. Astra Taylor explores a paradox. We live in the most prosperous era in human history, but it's also an era of profound insecurity. History shows that increased material security helps people be more open-minded, tolerant, and curious.

But rising insecurity does the reverse. It drives us apart, and it also drives the rise of reactionary politics. We're in the middle of an attack on our essential nature, Astra says, an attack on our economic and emotional well-being. Here's Astra Taylor and Consumed by Curiosity. Human beings have long had a penchant for things. The archaeological record brims with evidence of our appreciation of objects and adornment. The oldest known jewelry, carved shell beads

found in what is now southwest Morocco, date back an astonishing 150,000 years. Consumption of essentials such as food and water, of art and culture, of tools and ornamentals, literally sustains us. If we don't consume, we die. But different cultures can have very different modes of consumption, and there is a difference between consumption for utility or pleasure and consumption that creates feelings of inadequacy that can only be allayed by an endless stream of commercial goods.

The potlatch gift-giving ceremonies long practiced by indigenous peoples of the Pacific coast, including the Tagish community in Carcross, have an element of status competition, but one based in the generosity of giving things away. The giver's prestige is measured by communal munificence instead of private accumulation. But rooted in hoarding rather than sharing, in other words, rooted in insecurity, capitalist modes of consumption are always fraught. It's a conflict contained within the etymology of the word itself.

The term consumption emerged from the Latin consumere, which means to use up, exhaust, waste, destroy, or devour. Consumption, thus initially referred to a kind of physical expenditure, like a log or a candle consumed with flame, or a person consumed by desire, and later a disease that wastes the body away. There was also a related word, consumare, that conjures not depletion but wholeness. Thus consumption, when we trace its roots, evokes more than mere acquisition. The word holds out the promise of completeness while also acknowledging the possibility of sickness and destruction. Thus we can understand consumption as both a wanting and a wasting disease,

one that has now covered the earth with North American refuse. Yet despite our modern excesses, we are hardly the first to worry about material desire getting out of hand. In the 6th century BC, Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu warned, Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Around the same time, the rise of Buddhism called attention to the suffering caused by desire, describing a realm of hungry ghosts condemned to an eternity of insatiable longing for food and things. Soon, Plato linked

excessive consumption to immorality, arguing in the Republic that rulers of a just society must be indigent, holding no property whatsoever, if they were truly to serve the common good. As the historian Frank Trentman has shown, fears of what he calls emulative spending were present at the dawn of consumer society in the 15th century. During China's Ming dynasty and in Renaissance Italy, the emergence of luxury markets and fast-changing fashions caused moral panics. In both places, affluent women took to wearing elaborate hair extensions, while some trendy Italians used napkins at table, the pinnacle of indulgence. Long before keeping up with the Joneses was a phrase, some governments even tried to rein in the trend with restrictions

and fines. So for example, you could be fined for such crimes as wearing a neck scarf too big for your station. The Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith helped change all of this, calming fears of gluttony and immoderation. Today Smith, as we all probably know, is the patron saint of capitalism. He's most famous for his metaphor of the invisible hand, which was said to guide free markets. He's also the first person to use the term consumption in its modern sense as the inverse of production. As he memorably remarked in his 1776 classic, The Wealth of Nations, people have long possessed propensity to truck, barter, and exchange. The existence of markets in human society is nothing new. Commerce long precedes capitalism, and consumption, it's clear, is ancient. Capitalism's distinction lay in turning the possibility of commerce

into the necessity of competitive production, a feat accomplished by manufacturing widespread insecurity. In the 18th century, there were two further innovations. First, capitalism made the mass production of consumer goods possible. Second, it gave rise to a novel ideology that justified and encouraged their purchase and use, an ideology that Smith helped to articulate in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith formulated a theory of consumption that put insecurity, or what he sometimes called anxiety, at the center. After Smith, governments would no longer see private consumption as a problem, nor would they

try to rein in cycles of emulative spending. Consumption became a virtue, not a vice. To make his case, Smith offered a parable. He tells the tale of a poor man's son who, ashamed of his condition and desperate for approval and admiration, works and works and works until he becomes rich. On his deathbed, he of course recognizes the error of his ways. True happiness, he comes to realize, is ease of body and peace of mind. Or as Smith writes, the beggar who suns himself by the side of the highway possesses that security which kings are fighting for. In Smith's words, the idea that attainment is well worth all the toil is a, quote, deception. Yet it is a deception, he insists, that can never be dispelled,

because without it, market society would collapse. Centuries later, Smith's view of human motivation under capitalism remains the prevailing wisdom, though few people speak about it in such blunt terms. Our society assumes that we all need a promise to chase, some extrinsic incentive to drive us, maybe a new car or a beach vacation, lest we cause the wheels of commercial society to stop turning by lollygagging in the sun. Sure, the system is based on a lie and it makes the winners miserable, but that's why Smith thought it worked so well. Part of the paradox of post-materialism is the fact that it emerged from consumer abundance. Beginning in the late 1950s, those houses and apartments I mentioned were filling with vacuum cleaners and jello packets

and TVs, and worries about emulative spending flared up once again. Like the poor man in Smith's fable, residents of the world's wealthiest democracies began to sense the market's deception at work. In his 1958 bestseller, The Affluent Society, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith painted the picture of a people gorging on private luxury while starved of public goods. And as a result,

they lacked overall well-being, he argued. Two years later, muckraking journalist Vance Packard's influential book, The Wastemakers, helped turn consumerism into a dirty word. Both authors sounded the alarm about the stimulation of artificial wants through the shadowy profession of public relations, otherwise known as advertising. Packard quoted a leading businessman speaking at an apparel industry conference in 1950. It is our job to make women unhappy with what they have. We must make them so unhappy that their husbands can find no happiness or peace in their excessive savings. The challenge was persuading people to keep buying even though their closets and bellies were full. To accomplish this, consumption's destructive attributes had to be brought to the fore. Old things, even yesterday's things, had to

be made passe and disposable, tossed away and wasted to engender new longings. Today, this has reached its apogee in cell phones and laptops designed to be upgraded or that break without the possibility of repair. Dissatisfied and insecure customers constantly churning through products are best for corporate bottom lines. Decades after Galbraith and Packard sounded their alarms, advertising remains one of the primary means for which an endless array of nuance and the insecurities that spawn them are manufactured. Now, like consumption, advertising has existed for a long time. Ancient Rome, most famously the city of Pompeii, was bedecked by billboard advertising, from signage on storefronts to announcements of theatrical performances and gladiatorial games,

promotions boosting new literary works, for rent notices and election posters galore. Ads were everywhere. For centuries, though, ads were refreshingly direct. This bakery sells bread. This play will entertain. This clock tells time. This deodorant will help you not stink. During the Great Depression, under the guidance of a man named Edward Bernays, who happened to be

the nephew of the famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, marketing evolved to tap into unconscious fears and aspirations, in other words, our insecurities. In the post-World War II era, the profession helped keep people buying even though their homes were stuffed. Bernays coined the term public relations for the field he developed, which now employs hundreds of thousands of people. By 2025, the global advertising industry is expected to hit $1 trillion of annual revenue, by far more than enough to end world hunger multiple times over. But instead of using those resources to fulfill people's basic material needs, an arrangement that would free them to prioritize non-material needs,

corporations spend this money fueling the deception Adam Smith identified, manufacturing insecurity to keep the treadmill of consumption running. The words curiosity, security, and insecurity all share a root. They stem from the Latin word cura, which means worry, care, attention, and study. There is no learning without a kind of insecurity. Here, I don't mean the material insecurity that I've been talking about, but a kind of existential insecurity that comes from opening oneself up to experiences new and unknown. When we talk about something being secure,

we typically mean that it is fixed in place. When we talk about being secure ourselves, we mean having the assurance of knowing what comes next. To be insecure then means being unfixed and unsure, to be in a place of possibility. Under the right conditions, when it is buttressed by a more fundamental kind of material security and self-confidence, existential insecurity can also be generative and liberating. You cannot have real curiosity or creativity if everything is locked down and you know what comes next. Being open to new ideas means being open to your own limitations.

Being willing to experiment means being willing to possibly fail and also willing to learn something that might change you. Certainty, in other words, is not security. It's a snapping shut, an attempt to avoid the discomfort and insecurity of not knowing. Instead of showing strength, this kind of certainty makes us rigid, brittle, and closed off. Ostensibly about imparting knowledge, the modes of education that dominate today manufacture the destructive kind of insecurity as a spur to study. This approach to motivation turns many kids off learning and numbs their natural, intuitive curiosity.

It's a phenomenon that trailblazing cosmologist Carl Sagan noted in a 1995 TVO interview. When he spoke to kindergartners, he said, they overflowed with enthusiasm and insightful questions. Why is the moon round? What is the birthday of the world? Why is grass green? Why do we have toes? As Sagan put it, profound important questions bubble right out of them. But when he spoke to 12th graders, the kids had become, and these are his words, leaden and incurious. Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and 12th grade, and it's not just puberty. By the time I was a teenager in the 90s, the inequality and insecurity

of the outside world was so palpable it motivated me to enroll in public high school, despite my misgivings. I had never met an adult unschooler in my life, and if I kept educating myself, I feared I'd be labeled a dropout and a failure, forever barred from any kind of opportunity. This time around, my home-cut hair and thrift store clothes were deemed not only acceptable, but the epitome of cool. It was the peak of the cultural phenomenon known as grunge, and I was undeniably grungy. But my relief was short-lived.

In high school, I witnessed the phenomenon Sagan described and began to feel its numbing effects. An institution ostensibly set up to facilitate education was effectively teaching students to despise the learning process. My parents would have been supportive if I had stood up and left in the midst of a lesson, but I never did. I stayed for three years and went on to university. I stayed for the same reason I enrolled, fear of future unemployability. Instead of being supported to follow my own curiosity as I had been at home, at school I was driven by a combination of insecurity-inducing carrots and insecurity-inducing

sticks. The sticks instilled fear and forced many of my fellow students to learn under duress. Threats of timeout, detention, suspension, a red pen, a failing grade. Education under these conditions becomes a defensive maneuver. When driven more by my peers' desire to avoid penalties than an authentic urge to comprehend, they were acclimated to associate learning with punishment and with shame. The better I did, the more I pleased others because I was a carrot chaser, the more insecure I felt. The insecurity produced by the pursuit of extrinsic rewards and a disconnection from my intrinsic motivations and interests. This is what psychologists call contingent as opposed to secure self-esteem. In both cases, by carrot or by stick,

the end result was the same. Insecurity made all of us retreat from risk, fearful of making mistakes, reluctant to get in trouble or to tarnish a glowing GPA, and we paid the price. Reflecting back now, I can see that my cautious, self-protective approach was the death of authentic learning,

because authentic learning requires the kind of generative insecurity that opens us up to wanting to know more. But something even deeper was amiss. Sticks and punishment affected some students more than others. Insecurity was not fairly apportioned across the student body. In that first year, my diverse classroom reflected the fact that I attended a majority black school. The second year, however, I was swept up into the gifted track. My classes got smaller and my classmates whiter and more affluent. We were being whizzed along an academic escalator,

flanked by adults cheering us on for being talented, while our fellow students, overwhelmingly black, Latino, indigenous, and poor, were told their comparatively stilted progress derived from the fact they were average or remedial. Our success was predicated on keeping others down. Accolades, good grades, and opportunities all seemed to be in short supply. And as with all competition for resources, there were winners and there were losers.

But in school, this competition is particularly absurd. Knowledge, unlike food or water, can't be used up, and the desire to learn isn't a need that evolved to be satiated. The boundlessness of curiosity is what makes us learning animals. It is what makes us human. Curiosity is something we can safely be consumed by, since consuming knowledge enriches us without creating waste. Over the last decade, much of my organizing work has focused on expanding access and funding for public education, but also on reimagining it. What would public education look like if it relied more on the generative kind of insecurity, in other words, curiosity, to motivate people, and less on manufacturing insecurity through

those carrots and sticks? But my ideal is very different from the form of high school education that I received. What we need instead is a system of education that is public, universal, reparative, and free. By public, I mean funded by public dollars, not by tuition or debt. By universal, I mean a space for everyone at every stage of life where all subjects can be explored. By reparative, I mean an education system designed to acknowledge and actively redress past and ongoing social inequalities. By free, I mean both price and purpose. Education must be free as in cost, but also aimed at freedom by unbinding curiosity. Should these conditions be met, education could actually be the motor of equality, opportunity, and learning that so many of us really want it to be.

If we dedicate more public resources to cultivating curiosity, we can all be more secure. Before it became the democratic free school that my mother attended in the 1970s, the main building of the Carcross Community Education Center housed the Chutla Residential School. Founded in 1911, Chutla was run by the Anglican Church for half a century. In his book, The Fourth World, George Manuel, the former chief of the National Indian Brotherhood, describes residential schools as, quote, the laboratory and the production line of the colonial system. What occurred across Canada, including at Chutla, was the manufacture of educational insecurity at its colonial and genocidal extreme.

In the property's earlier iteration, education was a tool of racist and religious indoctrination, colonization, and murder. Chutla grounds, like similar similar sites are now being searched for children's remains. In its later phase, the one my mother knew, education became a forum for dialogue, personal development, and liberation. Prior to its demolition in 1993, the same building sheltered two conflicting approaches to education, to curiosity, and to conceptions of security. In the 1960s, buoyed by the era's cresting wave of movements demanding social change,

indigenous activists mounted a new phase of resistance to settler colonialism, including to its teaching methods. The National Indian Brotherhood published an influential policy paper, Indian Control of Indian Education in 1971, calling for school programs that emphasized indigenous principles of self-reliance, respect for personal freedom, generosity, respect for nature, and wisdom. A restoration of some of the longstanding pedagogical philosophies and practices that residential schools had been explicitly designed to obliterate. Two years later, the Yukon Native Brotherhood released Together Today for Our Children Tomorrow, which they delivered to Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, demanding a recognition of indigenous rights and land title, as well as an overhaul of the education system.

Elijah Smith, the guiding force behind the Yukon Native Brotherhood, spearheaded the Together Today report. He was born in 1912, and his experience serving in World War II and then being denied the benefits that white veterans got helped catalyze a lifetime of activism. His legacy includes uniting Yukon Indigenous communities under one organizational roof, alchemizing their shared experience of oppression and insecurity into solidarity. The Together Today report demanded Indigenous control over curriculum, languages, teacher training and hiring, and teaching methods. It cites the classic book Pedagogy of the Oppressed to criticize the colonial banking model of education,

which treats knowledge like something to be deposited by an all-knowing teacher into children's heads, an approach that is anathema to traditional indigenous modes of instruction. Smith led the Yukon Brotherhood to a historic victory that took two decades to finalize, the successful negotiation of a land claim and modern-day treaty with the Canadian federal government. Today, Whitehorse's Elijah Smith Elementary School bears the visionary organizer's name. I learned about Smith and his efforts from Joseph Tsega, a member of the

Kaskadene Nation who grew up in Whitehorse and who knew my grandmother. When we spoke most recently, Joseph, who was born in 1984 and has a thriving career as a visual artist, recalled attending what he described as a dystopian job fair aimed at indigenous youth about a decade ago. There was nothing but military recruitment booths and offers of low-wage jobs at multinational corporations. Strolling the halls, he thought to himself, this is the best your mind can envision for us? Marginalized populations told to work at McDonald's or join the army?

To Joseph, the event epitomized capitalist and colonial systems of education, which in little more than a century helped devastate Indigenous communities that had lived on the land for at least 14,000 years. As Joseph told me, with the First Nation, people living up in the North, relationship is at the core of everything. It's relationship to yourself, to your family, your community, and not to your land, but the land. There isn't coercion in that. It's relationship. The emphasis on storytelling in many indigenous cultures, including his own, Joseph explained,

is one example of a less coercive approach to education. Stories, after all, have multiple levels of meaning embedded in them, some accessible to children, but some that you only get later in life when you hear them again. They combine information with entertainment and help make learning inviting, not fear-inspiring, and insecurity-producing. They spark curiosity and a desire to know what happens next. Today, the UConn Archives holds the records of the Carcross Community Education Center, the records of the Carcross Community Education Center, which operated from 1972 to 1979.

The school, the archive states, offered students, quote, an opportunity to continue high school education while becoming part of a close-knit community, one where education was interpreted in the broadest sense to mean all aspects of living and learning. Though the founders knew the building had been a residential school, at the time they did not know, or perhaps did not want to know, the full details of what had transpired there. In a circuitous and tragic way, the people involved in that experiment in democratic education were groping towards the very thing the original residential school had sought to crush, a pedagogy rooted in land and relationships that aimed to help young people feel secure enough to be curious, to ask questions, to accept what they don't know, and to seek to know more. In January of 2021, my grandmother

passed away at a hospital in Whitehorse. As a Buddhist, she understood death to involve not an ending, but a passing into a new phase in the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. In Buddhist cosmology, there are six realms that make up this cycle, which is known as samsara. The realm of gods, demigods, humans, animals, hell, and those insatiable hungry ghosts. Each position on the wheel of life has its own meaning. The human realm is, in fact, a fortunate realm because it's one where awareness and action can take place. Hell, in contrast, is a land of misery and torment, while the animal realm is driven by basic needs. Demigods live in a state of constant warfare. The gods live in peaceful oblivion.

The realm of hungry ghosts, meanwhile, is dominated by sentient beings who are starving and suffering. Their pinhole mouths and narrow necks can only consume tiny amounts of food and drink, leaving them forever wanting more. Their large bellies, emaciated and distended, illustrate their agony. The curse of the hungry ghost is to be tormented by cravings and desires that can never be satisfied. For some Buddhists, the six realms are places into which

a person, depending on their karma, can be reborn after they die. For others, they represent primordial states of mind that we all, in one way or another, possess. According to this latter understanding, each of us has a little hungry ghost inside us, one whose appetites can shrink or grow, possibly consuming our lives, or, if we all unleash our hungry ghosts at once, consume the entire world. if we all unleash our hungry ghosts at once, consume the entire world. This 2,500-year-old tradition reminds us that desire is endemic to our species condition as incomplete and interdependent beings. The question, as ever, is how we respond to this perpetual lack,

this perpetual need for the things that make up Maslow's pyramid, sustenance, security, and self-actualization, but also, I would add, our need for solidarity, compassion, and care. Within the tradition of Japanese Zen Buddhism, there's a ceremony called Sagaki, the feeding of the hungry ghosts. It is a reenactment of the ancient story of Moggallana, a disciple of the Buddha who had a recurring dream about his deceased mother trapped and anguished in the hungry ghost realm and unable to eat or drink. SIGAKI entails an elaborate ceremony of making offerings to the ghosts in order to ease their suffering. All ghosts are invited to join and to enter a space free of judgment. Sigaki requires the acceptance of others without expectation of repayment for one's kindness, while also presenting a chance to reflect on

one's own cravings and compulsions. When societies come together to ensure material security for everyone, they are, in a sense, engaging in a similar sort of ceremony. The collective establishment of social policies and rituals that can soothe our hungry ghosts. We know this approach works. History shows that increased material security helps people be more open-minded, tolerant, and curious, whereas rising material insecurity too often does the reverse, causing dogmatism, rigidity, and bigotry to spike. Today, young people report rising levels of sadness and distress. Older people are getting lonelier and more depressed. Economic trends indicate that employment will remain unstable and that inequality will continue to climb. Climate disasters, we all know, are only becoming more commonplace. Will all this lead,

inevitably, to an authoritarian revival? I don't believe that it has to, as long as we learn from the past. If we want to mitigate authoritarian threats, we cannot repeat the post-materialist mistake of ignoring economic concerns. When people feel insecure, it is easier to convince them that immigrants are taking their jobs, that pandemics and global warming are grand conspiracies, and that professors are indoctrinating students with gender ideology. The far right knows this, which is why they have been so laser focused on economic policies that promote insecurity. In response, we need to do more than just chastise people for being closed-minded. We need to build both a ceiling and a floor

to implement an upper limit on inequality's spiral and a baseline of support beneath which no one can fall. In Buddhism, hungry ghosts are sometimes thought of as individuals who seek truth but cannot accept the insights that will help them break free. Part of the challenge we face today is creating conditions where people can let go of destructive beliefs. Material security can help, as can, less coercive and more consensual forms of education. One of the lessons of Sagaki. more consensual forms of education, one of the lessons of Sagaki. Here we can learn from James Baldwin, who put it this way, I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates

so stubbornly is because they sense once the hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain. A sense of security can help us approach difficult things with a spirit of curiosity, both our own personal pain and the pain that comes from facing upsetting social truths. A sense of security can open us up to new and different ways of being. When we feed the hungry ghosts, we feed ourselves too. Thank you. You've been listening to Consumed by Curiosity, the third of the 2023 CBC Massey Lectures, The Age of Insecurity,

by writer and political organizer Astra Taylor, recorded at the UConn Arts Centre in Whitehorse. Your local bookseller will have the book version of the lectures, The Age of Insecurity, Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, published by House of Anansi Press. Our partners in the Massey Lecture Series are Massey College at the University of Toronto and House of Anansi Press. The Massey Lecture Series is produced by Philip Coulter and Pauline Holdsworth.

In Whitehorse, special thanks to Genesee Keevil and Kenina Holmes. Online production by Alfea Manassin, Ben Shannon, and Sinicaj Iolic. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. The executive producer of the Massey Lectures and Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad.