TrueLife - Technopoly Unleashed: Part 2 - Raw Rebellion Against Technology’s Mind Trap

Episode Date: June 25, 2020

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Inspired by conversations with educators. We make an attempt to envision the future of education. It is often said the best prediction of future behavior is past relevant behavior. I’m hopeful we are on the cusp of a  renaissance in education. In our conversation we will be doing a book review on Technopoly by Neil Postman. We will be interpreting his vision of what the future of education “CAN” be. Often when cultures lose the way they look back to a previous era for direction.Transcript: One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Heiress through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Thanks for taking a few moments to hang out with me today. Wanted to talk a little bit about Technopoli. Pretty good book. I've done a part one on this series. You should check it out.

beginning of the year. The first part was just kind of about the evasiveness and the ability of technology to enter our life and kind of wrap its tentacles around us and find its way into every aspect of our life. Some good, some bad. But it really changes the way we live our life. And they say that the best predictor of future behavior is past relevant behavior, if that's the case.

I think we're in for a lot more technology. The point was brought up to me. We were talking, actually, I got into it this week with one of my child's teachers. Not really argumentation or anything. However, we had a really pleasant conversation about technology and school and how it's changing behavior. And it was really, it was nice. You know, I'm really thankful that my kid gets to go to a really cool school

where they're doing some virtual learning. and they go and they meet on the iPad and have a couple classes a day. It's different though, and it's fundamentally changing the way education is going to be done forever, in my opinion. And that's why this book is so important, at least to me and my family and my kids' education. And I know so many of you out there have kids, and obviously we want the best for them, and we want them to have a better future than us. and so when I was talking at the teacher's conference today about tech technology and how it's changing I had mentioned this book and another book about you know how sometimes technology can almost enslave us

you know we carry this thing with us and we you probably have three TVs in your house two computers four mobile phones and the same a lot of kids schools they have a lot of kids schools they have a of different technology and it can be good but that was pretty much the first the first video i did talked about the kind of negative impacts so this particular video i wanted to talk about some ways to use technology to change behavior and maybe change our society a little bit and it's going to be not only based on this book by neil postman but it's going to be based on uh Jacob Bernowski's The Ascent of Man. It's going to talk a little bit about joining art and science together, you know,

and using an artistic imagination and scientific intuition. So, you know, it's amazing that in today's world, there's billions of people, but one of the biggest problems is loneliness. You know, that's kind of what technology is actually promoting. It seems like we're so connected, but yet we're so alone, too. And so I kind of wanted to go us to maybe read an excerpt here from this book, Technopoly, and then maybe have a little bit more conversation. In any event, the virtues of adopting the ascent of humanity as a scaffolding on which to build a curriculum are many and various,

especially in our present situation. For one thing, with a few exceptions which I shall note, it does not require that we invent new subjects or discard old ones. The structure of the subject matter curriculum that exists in most schools at present is entirely usable. For another, it is a theme that can begin in the earliest grades and extend through college in ever-deepening and widening dimensions. Better still, it provides students with, the point of view from which to understand the meaning of subjects?

For each subject can be seen as a battleground of sorts. An arena in which furious intellectual struggle has taken place and continues to take place. Each idea within a subject marks the place where someone fell and someone rose. Thus the ascent of humanity is an optimistic story, not without its miseries, but dominated by astonishing and repeated victories. From this point of view, the curriculum itself may be seen as a celebration of human intelligence and creativity, not a meaningless collection of diploma or college requirements. I was going to pause there for a minute.

Think about maybe you've had kids that have graduated. Maybe you have a niece or a nephew or maybe an older sibling or maybe you yourself, you need to graduate. you got your cool diploma there's nothing there you know and now you got these student loans I know people that have student loans they're never going to pay them off maybe that's that's that's your case or maybe that's someone you know's case someone you love but I definitely don't want that to be the case for my kid and I think that that's you know one of the issues like this is actually what I brought up with the teachers about what is it that we're teaching you know know how can we make the classes better how can we make the curriculum better and one point we're

going to get to is that we can make every class a history class like think about the classes we had know it the you had 30 minutes a day and you talked a little bit about the subject matter you were able to cover a few textbooks and maybe a little bit of literature or if it was math you just start at the beginning of the book work your way to the end of the book just solving mathematical equations. However, at least for me, what we never did was talk about the history of mathematics. We never talked about the history of language. We never talked about the history of different social, sociological events. It's often said too, the history is written by the winners. I think it's impaired. As you get older and you start reading more, you realize there's a

whole other side to everything you've been told. And I think it's important for our kids to learn both of those sides. It's really easy to pass judgment and live in an echo chamber and get by. However, if you could teach each class, like a history class, I think that the all-around subject matter would be vastly more entertaining and more useful in life. ultimately leading to a better fully formed individual later in life, a more conscious thought process. And so moving back to the book here,

best of all, the theme of the ascent of humanity gives us a non-technical, non-commercial definition of education. It is a definition drawn from an honorable humanistic tradition and reflects a concept of the purposes of academic life that goes counter to the biases of the technocrats. I am referring to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins and growth of knowledge and knowledge systems. To be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced. to learn how to participate, even if as a listener, in what Robert Maynard Hutchins once called the Great Conversation,

which is merely a different metaphor for what is meant by the ascent of humanity. You will note that such a definition is not child-centered, but training-centered, not skill-centered, not even problem-centered. It is idea-centered and coherence-centered. It is also otherworldly in as much as it does not assume that what one learns in school must be directly and urgently related to a problem of today. In other words, it is an education that stresses history, the scientific mode of thinking, the discipline of use of language, a wide-ranging knowledge of the arts and religion,

and the continuity of human enterprise. It is education as an excellent, corrective to the anti-historical, information-saturated, technologically loving character of technoply. Let us consider history first, for it is in some ways the central discipline in all this. It is hardly necessary for me to argue here that, as Cicero put it, to remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child. It is enough to say that history is our most potent intellectual means of achieving a raised consciousness. But there are some points about history.

and its teaching that requires stressing, since they are usually ignored by our schools. The first is that history is not merely one subject among many that may be taught. Every subject has a history, including biology, physics, mathematics, literature, music, and art. I would propose here that every teacher must be a history teacher, to teach, for example, what we know about biology today without also teaching what we once knew or thought we knew is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know and of how we know. To teach about the atom without democratus. To teach about electricity without Faraday. To teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli.

To teach about music without Hayden is to refuse our students access to the great conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots, about which no other social institution is at present concerned. For to know about your roots is not merely to know where your grandfather came from and what he had to endure. It is also to know where your ideas come from and why you happen to believe them, to know where your moral and aesthetic sensibilities come from. It is to know where your world, not just your family, comes from. To complete the presentation of Cicero's thought begun above, what is a human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one's ancestors

and set in an historical context? By ancestors, Cicero did not mean your mother's aunt. Thus, I would recommend that every subject be taught as history. In this way, children even in the earliest grades can begin to understand as they now do not. That knowledge is not a fixed thing, but a stage in human development with a past and a future. To return for a moment to theories of creation, we want to be able to show how an idea conceived almost 4,000 years ago has traveled not only in time, but in meaning, from science to religious metaphor, to science again. What a lovely and profound coherence there is in the connection between the wondrous speculations in an ancient Hebrew desert tent

and the equally wondrous speculations in a modern MIT classroom. What I am trying to say is that the history of subjects teaches connections. It teaches that the world is not created at new each day, that everyone stands on someone else's shoulders. I actually gave my students, I'm sorry, my child's teachers a copy of this book. And I think that they read some of it because when we had our meeting this afternoon, they were pretty well versed in some of the subjects I'm talking to now. And if you take a minute just to go back and listen to what I just read, or if you think about it when you turn this off,

just know that we are denying our children. children, a place in the great conversation. We get so caught up in just abstract thought. And, you know, we're victims of our own greed and selfishness at times. But the great conversation is always changing. And, you know, we're a small part of it. And I really think that there's a lot of good, that I think we could do better. And let me just continue reading and get into the paragraph in here. I am well aware that this approach to subjects would be difficult to use. There are at present few texts that would help very much, and teachers have not, in any case, been prepared to know about knowledge in this way. Moreover, there is the added difficulty of our

learning how to do this for children of different ages, but that it needs to be done, in my opinion, beyond question. The teaching of subjects as studies in historical continuities is not intended to make history as a special subject irrelevant. If every subject is taught with a historical dimension, the history teacher will be free to teach what histories are, hypotheses, and theories about why change occurs. In one sense, there is no such thing as history. For every historian, from Thucydides to Toynbee, has known that his stories must be told from a special point of view, that will reflect his particular theory of social development. And historians also know that they write histories for some particular purpose.

More often than not, either to glorify or to condemn the present, there is no definitive history of anything. There are only histories, human inventions, which do not give us the answer, but give us only those answers called forth by the questions that have been asked. Historians know all of this. It is commonplace idea among them. yet it is kept a secret from our youth. Their ignorance of it prevents them from understanding how history can change

and why the Russians, Chinese, American Indians, and virtually everyone else see historical events differently than the authors of history school books. The task of the history teacher then is to become a history's teacher. This does not mean that some particular vision of the American, European, or Asian past should remain told. A student who does not know at least one history is in no position to evaluate others, but it does mean that a history's teacher will be concerned at all times to show how

histories are themselves products of culture, how any history is a mirror of the conceits and even metaphysical biases of the culture that produce it. How the religion, politics, geography, and economy of a people lead them to recreate their past along certain lines. The histories teacher must clarify for students the meaning of objectivity and events must show what a point of view and a theory are must provide some sense of how histories may be evaluated. It will be objected that this idea, history as comparative history, is too abstract for students to grasp. But that is one of the several reasons why comparative history, should be taught. To teach the past simply as a chronicle of indisputable, fragmented,

and concrete events is to replicate the bias of technopoly, which largely denies our youth access to concepts and theories, and to provide them only with a stream of meaningless events. That is why the controversies that develop around what events ought to be included in the history curriculum have a somewhat hollow ring to them. Some people urge, for example, the Holocaust or Stalin's bloodbath or the Trail of Indian Tears be taught in school. I agree that our students should know about such things, but we must still address the question, what is it that we want them to know about these events? Are they to be explained as the maniac theory of history? Are they to be understood as illustrations of the banality of evil or the law of survival?

Are they manifestations of the universal force of economic greed? Are they examples of the workings of human culture? Whatever events may be included in the study of the past, the worst thing we can do is to present them devoid of the coherence that a theory or theories can provide. That is to say as meaningless. This we can be sure. Technoply does daily.

The history teacher must go far beyond the event, level into the realm of concepts, theories, hypotheses, comparisons, deductions, deductions, evaluations. The idea is to raise the level of abstraction at which history is taught. This idea would apply to all subjects, including science. From the point of view of the ascent of humanity, the scientific enterprise is one of our most glorious achievements. On humanity's judgment day, we can be expected to speak almost at once of science. I have already stressed the importance of teaching the history of science in every science course, but this is no more important than teaching its philosophy. I mentioned this with some

sense of despair. More than half the high school students in the United States do not even offer one course in physics. Another rough guess, I would estimate that in 90% of the school's chemistry is still taught as if students were being trained to be druggists. To suggest, therefore, that science is an exercise in human imagination, that is something quite different from technology, that there are philosophies of science, and that all of this ought to form part of a scientific education is to step out of the mainstream, but I believe it nonetheless. Would it be an exaggeration to say that not one student in 50 knows what induction means, or knows what a scientific theory is, or a scientific model, or knows what a scientific model,

or knows what are the optimum conditions of a valid scientific experiment or has ever considered the question of what scientific truth is. In the identity of man, Bernowski says the following. Quote, this is the paradox of imagination in science, that it has for its aim the impoverishment of imagination. By that outrageous phrase, I mean that, the highest flight of scientific imagination is to weed out the proliferation of new ideas. In science, the grand view is a miserly view, and a rich model of the universe is one which is

as poor as possible in hypothesis. Let me read that again because it's a head scratcher. You take a few minutes just to really soak this in and it'll blow your mind. So here we go. Let's do it again. This is the paradox of imagination and science, that it has for its aim the impoverishment of imagination. By that outrageous phrase, I mean that the highest flight of scientific imagination is to weed out the proliferation of new ideas. In science, the grand view is a miserly view, and a rich model of the universe is one which is as poor as possible in hypothesis. Is there one student in 100 who can make any sense out of that statement?

Though the phrase impoverishment of imagination may be outrageous, there is nothing startling or even unusual about the idea contained in the quotation. Every practicing scientist understands what Bernowski is saying, yet it has kept a secret from our students. It should be revealed. In addition to having each science course include a serious historical dimension, I would propose that every school elementary through college offer and require a course in the philosophy of science

such a course should consider the language of science the nature of scientific proof the source of scientific hypothesis the role of imagination the conditions of experimentation and especially the value of error and disproof if I am not mistaken many people still believe that what makes a statement scientific

is that it can be verified. In fact, exactly the opposite is the case. What separates scientific statements from non-scientific statements is that the former can be subjected to the test of falsifiability. What makes science possible

is not our ability to recognize truth, but our ability to recognize falsehood. On the subject of the discipline use of language, I should like to propose that in addition to courses in the philosophy of science, every school, again, from elementary school through college, offer a course in semantics, and the processes by which people make meaning. In this connection, I must note the gloomy fact that English teachers have been consistently obtuse in their approach to this subject,

which is to say they have largely ignored it. This has always been difficult for me. since English teachers claim to be concerned with teaching, reading, and writing. But if they do not teach anything about the relationship of language to reality, which is what semantics studies, I cannot imagine how they expect reading and writing to improve. Every teacher ought to be a semantics teacher, since it is not possible to separate language from what we call knowledge. Like history, semantics is an interdiscoplarity. subject. It is necessary to know something about it in order to understand any subject,

but it would be extremely useful to the growth of their intelligence if our youth had available a special course in which fundamental principles of language were identified and explained. Such a course would deal not only with the various uses of language, but with the relationship between things and words, symbols, and signs, factual statements and judgments, and grammar and thought. Especially for young students, the course ought to emphasize the kinds of semantic errors that are common to all of us and that are avoidable through awareness and discipline. The use of either-or categories. Misunderstanding of levels of abstraction, confusion of words with things, sloganeering, and self-reflexiveness. Of all the disciplines that might be included

in the curriculum, semantics is certainly among the most basic, because the it deals with the processes by which we make and interpret meaning. It has great potential to affect the deepest levels of student intelligence, and yet semantics is rarely mentioned when back to the basics, or no child left behind is proposed. Why? My guess is that it cuts too deep. To adapt George Orwell, many subjects are basic, but some are more basic than others. Four legs good, two legs bad. Such subjects have the capability of generating, creating critical thought and of giving students access to questions that get to the heart of the matter. Unfortunately, this is my thought process. Unfortunately, that's no longer part of the curriculum.

You know, and as an aside, when we were looking for a school for my daughter to go to, you know, we had to go an interview at a bunch of different schools and there was a wait list for all these schools. and you know I'll give you an example so the school we actually got into it's a really good school I'm really happy to be there so we were on a wait list and then we went and we took the tour of the school and then my daughter and I went into a room of other kids and one parent was allowed to go and the the child was allowed to go and there was a probably seven people standing around with clipboard and they were just all quiet, just watching. So you walk into this room and just think of about like a kindergarten classroom.

My daughter was five when this happened. So my wife was, she was in the cafeteria and she was talking to some teachers. And then myself and my daughter went into the evaluation room, we'll call it. Even though they didn't call it an evaluation room, that's kind of what it was. And so we go in there and, you know, they don't tell you what they're looking for. So, you know, my daughter's playing and everyone's a little bit nervous because they want their kids to get in and there's only a few spots. So the kids are playing together and the teachers are just walking around with clipboards and just monitoring all these things. And, you know, they're judging both the parent and the child.

And I can get into the philosophy of that and what I did and what I thought. But that's like a different video. So after that particular process, then we were brought in for an interview. My wife and I were brought in for an interview where they talked to us about our ideas about education and what we think, what our goals are in life and what our goals are for our daughter. At that particular conversation, you know, I had brought up how what we don't want is for her to go to a school where, they train obedient workers. And luckily I had been reading quite a bit about education at that time. And, you know, I was talking to teacher about how, you know,

I was fortunate to have a pretty good education, at least in my opinion. And what I didn't like about it is that it was based off the Prussian model of obedient workers where you have like these bells that ring. And I told her it might as well be a whistle like I'm some sort of Pavlovian dog. and then she kind of laughed and we got into the the kind of reggio philosophy that they have at this school and so that was my little piece on education and how it differs from maybe a public school education

and I think all of us can't agree that we want our kids to be in a better position and that life is changing faster than ever before so they need to be taught if anything they need to be taught how to think critical which brings us back to the book here. This is not what back to the basic advocates usually have in mind. They want language technicians, people who can follow instructions. Wreck reports clearly, spell correctly.

This is certainly ample evidence that the study of semantics will improve the writing and reading of students, but it invariably does more. It helps students to reflect on the sense and truth of what they are writing and of what they are asked to be. It teaches them to discover the underlying assumptions of what they are told. It emphasizes the manifold ways in which language can distort reality. It assists students in becoming what Charles Wengartner and I once called crap detectors. Students who have a firm grounding in semantics are therefore apt to find it difficult to take reading tests.

The reading test does not invite one to ask whether or not what is written is true. Or if it is true, what it has to do with anything? The study of semantics insists upon these questions. But back to the basics, no child left behind. Advocates don't require education to be that basic, which is why they usually do not include literature, music, and art as part of their agenda either. But of course, in using the as a theme, we would, of necessity, elevate these subjects to prominence. So I think I'll end it there for right now

And I just want to say thanks again for Let me hang out with you guys And get into the second part of this book right here That you should all check out and read Can you guys see that? Technopoli by Neil Postman And this is a part two If you haven't seen part one

Just go down in the videos and check out part one And we'll probably do a part three Because we're not quite done So anyways, I hope everybody's having a good day and you know I love you guys. Take care.