Lefty Parent » end of an era

From Dawn to Decadence – The End of the Modern Era?

Cooper Zale — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:19:42 +0000

As much as I’m a student of history, I’d like to see us turn our gaze forward, and not obsess on that history and not accept its conventional wisdom. That said, I think it is still important to understand the historic currents that are the basis of those conventions before one sets out to consider challenging elements of that wisdom.

I’ve just finished slogging my way through a dense 800+ page book, From Dawn to Decadence, by Jacques Barzun. It is a cultural history of the Western World during the past 500 years. Between working, writing, and family, it has taken me some eight or nine months to get through it.

Barzun is looking at what is generally called “The Modern Era”, that stretch of Western history from the Reformation to the two great wars of the 20th Century and the fall of the Soviet Union. Barzun’s premise is that this “era” (a useful but certainly artificial construct of human historical analysis) is coming to an end after a five-century arc where some very compelling cultural ideas – in philosophy, science, literature and the arts, religion – were sown, bore fruit, flourished and then played themselves out.

Those compelling ideas Barzun breaks out into ten “themes” which I think it is useful to call out and briefly address in this piece. I must confess I love lists and am always intrigued and just have to know the items when someone announces “five ways to change the world”, “seven steps to enlightenment” or “two paradigms for human society”. So with the giddy pleasure of a list junkie, I present you with Barzun’s ten themes of the Modern Era – abstraction, analysis, emancipation, individualism, primitivism, reductionism, scientism, secularism, self-consciousness and specialism – along with my brief commentary on each.

The preeminent of these ten themes, at least in my opinion, is individualism, focusing on each person as an autonomous and unique being within society’s institutions and other groups. Within this theme fall the ideas of the Protestant Reformation (having ones own unique relationship with God) and republicanism and democracy (one person one vote). Facilitating individualism was the newly invented technology of movable type which facilitated an individuals ideas to be recorded and widely distributed to others in the present (through the flier and newspaper, etc) and for posterity (in books and later movies, radio and TV, etc).

Contemplating ones individualism involves his theme of self-consciousness, which is developing the mental state of being aware of ones own separate existence, narrative, and how one is uniquely perceived by others. Individualism leads naturally to the theme of emancipation, escaping or being liberated from the structures of dominance and control by others. The Modern Era saw the move away from slavery and towards the granting of rights to larger and larger classes of people.

The next most significant of these themes, in my opinion, is analysis, the process of breaking something down into its component parts in order to understand it. This is the methodology of science, and science has been the preeminent means in the attempt to understand “life, the universe and everything” (as Douglas Adams phrased it) during the Modern Era. One of the powerful tools of analysis, and one of Barzun’s themes, is abstraction, defining something not by its observable characteristics but by its underlying essential elements identified and manipulated within the context of simpler “abstract” models.

Beyond the “ism” of individualism, Barzun’s final five themes are “isms” that have emerged from the preeminence of science and the efficacy and appeal of its analysis of “life, the universe and everything”. One is specialism, believing that with the complex body of knowledge revealed by science, we need to rely on experts in particular areas to find the “best way” to do things and otherwise guide our individual and collective lives. Another is scientism, the belief that the methods of science must be used on all forms of experience and will eventually settle every issue.

Scientism has led some to believe in reductionism, that a complex system is just a sum of its component parts or a compilation of its statistics, which has led some to a mechanistic view of human activity that precludes real choice or free will. Think polling in politics and standardized testing and curriculum in education as just a couple examples of a very pervasive ideology.

Science’s challenge of the previous preeminence of religion has created the context for secularism, the creation of ideologies and institutions not based on the revealed wisdom of religions, though in some cases promoting acceptance of a diversity of religious belief.

Also emerging as a reaction and counterpoint to scientism and reductionism is primitivism, the belief in returning to an earlier, simpler state, generally in an attempt to recapture something lost with time and the growing complexity and intrusiveness of civilization.

Throughout the last 500 years these themes have often been in conflict with each other, most obviously the ideas of liberty, choice and free will as embodied in the themes of individualism and emancipation versus the deterministic ideas in scientific reductionism. This conflict comes to a head in massive efforts throughout the Modern Era to change the world through colonization and imperialism, mechanization of agriculture, industrialization, war as an instrument of national policy, and social engineering as another such instrument. These efforts and conflicts have been undertaken with ever greater scope throughout the period.

So again, though centuries and “eras” are arbitrary constructs of historians and other analyzers of the past, I like to think that maybe Barzun is right, and we have come or are at least coming to the end of an era, which stretched from the 16th through the 20th Century. It is an era that began with movable type and the Protestant Reformation and has been embodied by newspapers, nation-states (and the conflicts between those states), and science. Maybe it is ending with the beginnings of the demise of the newspaper as a commercially viable venture and the eclipse of conflicts between states with new conflicts that are revolving around religion and the whole concept of “modernism”. That said, science seems to be continuing to play a primary role, but the scientism it inspired may be being mitigated by newer trends.

I wonder if the Internet, the capabilities of which we are only beginning to scratch the surface of, is a profound new technology with the same transformational power in the 21st Century that movable type and printing had in the 16th. Is this theme of the “network” leading to other new themes around holism and interconnectedness rather than specialism and reductionism? Are themes of holism and interconnectedness a necessary context to address ecological challenges like global warming and fostering perhaps a new interest in and comfort with deeper interconnections through the metaphysical aspects of life beyond scientism and secularism?

Given the caveat of arbitrariness, I feel it is useful for all of us to gather as a circle of equals as if the “Modern Era” has come to an end, with all its rewards and riddance. Let’s take this opportunity to synthesize its wisdom but not be limited by its outcomes and outlooks and find consensus on new themes to move forward with human evolution.

End of an Era? What to do? Back to the ABCs?

Cooper Zale — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:51:28 +0000

The ABCs I’m talking about are agency, balance and context…

I think these are three important concepts as our society moves forward in uncharted waters. Important for everybody, but particularly for our youth, who as the years pass will more and more have to steer the ship of our culture. But first that ever-needed context…

I think our American culture has lost its bearings… and for good reason too. We humans are dynamic and powerful consciousnesses (more so than many of us may know) with a great ability to adjust quickly and profoundly to new circumstances, at least in a timeframe of centuries, but even in the course of a lifetime. I think this is a blessing, but the roller coaster ride it puts humans and our culture through can involved a mind-boggling and nerve-wracking amount of change and adjustment.

I believe we have come to one of those cyclical points in our history where the assumptions we have made about who we are, what we are capable of, what our life and human culture are about, and the institutions we build to support our path forward based on those assumptions, are losing their efficacy and are becoming destabilized and about to transform significantly.

People use the metaphor of taking a “quantum leap”, but you may not be aware, of the scientific details of quantum mechanics and what is involved in such a transformation. I am no physicist, but from my understanding of the process, a sub-atomic system that was stable and predictable for some length of time suddenly receives new inputs (maybe it absorbs the energy from a collision with a photon) and becomes completely destabilized, loses its current form and reassembles itself in a completely new and newly stable configuration.

Recent scientific thinking has also developed the model of the “chaotic system”, where “chaos” is not the complete lack of order that we lay people usually associate with that word, but a complex order involving innumerable factors reacting to innumerable inputs (including the changes to other factors based on those inputs). Chaotic systems can remain stable for long periods of time but then transform completely in a relatively short period of time to a new configuration that then is again stable and predictable going forward.

So some historians and other students of cultural development put forward a theory that European culture went through a transformative change around 1500 CE which was the time of the Protestant Reformation and the first use of the printing press (in Europe, though used previously in China). Now I tend to agree with those thinkers, like Marshall McLuhan, who believe that technological changes, particularly communication technology changes, lead to profound changes in our culture.

But whatever the spark was, in the course of a couple centuries, Europe was completely transformed from a feudal society with a mostly subsistence agricultural and herding economy to a society of nation states with a capitalist economic system, a cultural form that has remained culturally stable well into the 20th Century. Whether source or symptom, the Protestant Reformation, including Martin Luther’s assertion that people could be their own priests, destabilized the religious order that had kept European culture stable and predictable for centuries. It was most assuredly a time of great hand wringing and soul searching.

So I’m convinced we are now in the next great destabilization and transformation of our culture. The invention of the computer, the electronic network and the Internet in our generation I believe to be as fundamental a new thing as the printing press was in the 16th Century. What our revolution in thinking is, akin to Luther’s “you can be your own priest”, I am not sure I can say. That may not be clear for another century or more. But it might be something akin to, “you can chart your own course” or “we all should be peers” or something like that.

I think this may be the underlying reason why so many of our schools and other educational institutions are struggling and don’t seem to be delivering as much value to their students, families and the larger community (including the business community) than they used to. Our current school system is the fruition of a grand top-down design for learning developed in at the apex of the Modern Era (which many argue is ending) and may be too set in their ways and driven by unexamined conventional wisdom to be as effective as they might and ought to be.

Further, I think there is much dis-ease about schools because in many cases we don’t see them delivering to their students the three things I highlighted in the title of this piece: agency, balance and context.

I think most schools miss the opportunity to make their students real agents in their own education. Educational decision making is so cut and dried and handed down from above by decision makers that students and their families cannot identify and will never meet. In K-12 schools, it seems that over 90% of what students do, where, when and how they do it, is mandated by the state. Many students seem to be passive consumers of a one-size-fits-all pre-packaged curriculum designed by a committee to accommodate all the political and educational stakeholders. Students’ parents (as voters) are one of those stakeholders, but I think it would be hard to argue that the students themselves are.

If the standardization of K-12 education were not so ubiquitous, and the marching orders coming down from above with such authority, students could be engaged to play a significant role in individually, and a group helping guide the governance, curriculum and logistics of their schools. There is the rarest breed of schools out there that is already doing this. They are called “democratic schools”, and because the idea of empowering students runs so radically askew to the conventional wisdom of our top-down education system, these schools are force to be mostly private, and be available mainly to well-to-do families.

In a time when conventional wisdom and institutions built on that wisdom may be losing their value in a rapidly changing milieu, it is more important that our youth be given the opportunity to develop their agency sooner (say in middle school by being more involved in running their schools) than after getting through college (which some say is becoming “the new high school” (see my previous posts). If you wake up one morning and the world has changed underneath you, it’s nice not to be dependent on others for guidance on how to move forward.

And if the rules of the game change radically, if the hot finance careers of two years ago are suddenly a relic of the burst finance bubble, if traditional four-year college is no longer affordable to segments of the population, an individual’s and the entire culture’s sense of balance is jeopardized. If after a long calm voyage so far, the deck of the ship is now rocking in a storm, many of us (particularly our youth) do not have our “sea legs” yet to keep our feet firmly beneath our shoulders.

Business culture suffers when departments become separate silos and therefore can not collaborate to take advantage of new business realities. The compartmentalized focus on English and Math (the objects of most high-stakes testing) as separate subjects in their own “silos”, while the real-world is an increasingly complex and holistic hybrid of technical and human issues seems to me in no way gives our youth the opportunity to learn about complex interrelated systems and how to live in an environment of dynamic new relationships between things.

I remember asking my daughter’s veteran geometry teacher what he did to make math relevant to his student’s lives. He shrugged and said that frankly there was not time for that.

Finally, confined mainly to the four walls of a classroom, surrounded by an unnatural preponderance of others of the same age only, separated from even the real decision making of the institution they are the focal point of, kids are shielded from the context of the adult community that surrounds them, which ironically is trying so hard to nurture their growth. Many students go home to difficult and challenging lives for their families that are completely out of context to what they are learning in school.

But again, there are new school models out there that feature promoting student agency, giving students more of an opportunity to chart their own course, develop that inner compass and sense of balance, and then also take advantage of the actual running of the school as an opportunity to experience the real context of the educational institution that is built around them. Unfortunately in the current fixation with high-stakes testing for basic proficiency in English and Math, these more broadly drawn, holistic schools cannot pass muster as public schools and are relegated to a minimal role as alternative private schools, when they ought to be widely available options as charters or other incarnations of public education.