Educating For the Fifth Stage

Some readers may have observed: accounts of the Fifth Stage of Civilization have been somewhat vague and generalized. I'd have to respond, "That's right. They are." The one precedent for this might not be the best: if one reads Karl Marx closely, his work is a detailed analysis of capitalism as he saw it; he doesn't have a whole lot to say about socialism beyond its having stripped the bourgeoisie of their economic power, much less about communism.

Be that as it may, part of my reasoning is that while we can identify tendencies today that might contribute to a Fifth Stage, it would be a mistake to try to plan our way into it. The Fifth Staqe of Civilization will not be a Platonist Republic type of society. It will embody the realization that central planning was a mistake from the get-go.

One consequence is that we can begin building endeavors with this in mind. We'll be building from the bottom up instead of imposing from the top down. This makes all the difference in the world.

I write this following the first week of the Exosphere Bootcamp which began in Santiago on September 23. What exactly is Exosphere? The very difficulty in pinning a label on it is actually a strength!

It's education, for sure, but imagine an education without classrooms and tests in the traditional sense (although there definitely will be tests in a larger sense!). Imagine education for independence and self-reliance, and without meddlesome bureaucrats (thank God!). Imagine education that provides a path to assuming full ownership over your situation and over your personal future. Imagine education that draws people from multiple countries and many cultural backgrounds, all wanting the same thing: self-improvement and financial independence. Imagine education for entrepreneurship that begins with a discussion not of markets but of pain and suffering: their meaning and their causes, which are universal. Imagine breaking down the boundaries between traditional "business school" (which is seldom about entrepreneurship anyway) to incorporate personal development--something therefore very much for those of us who have come to understand that we need to make some changes in our lives. Imagine conversations during "leisure time" that still have sufficient depth that what you want to do is continue taking notes, listing topics and what was said about them: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Taleb's Anti-Fragile, the meaning behind the structure of poetry, the value of thinking in terms of heuristics, how the marketplace given sufficient time has acted as a filter to leave us with the best of the best in art, music, philosophy, and so on--topics to which the marketplace is frequently deemed hostile. We recall Hume's Treatise; but who recalls the reviewers who scoffed at Hume?

To be more specific, it is great to have grand ideas about the future of civilization but not so great to be wondering how you are going to pay the bills a couple of months down the road. As a source of stress and distraction, this interferes with one's best thinking about the future of civilization. It's also a sign of lacking in one's own life. Socrates would probably have called out the person who told him that earning money and becoming prosperous is the final end in life; but I'd like to think he would also have questioned the person who is presumably able-bodied and mentally sound but doesn't have the skills to earn a living.

The other day I wrote some notes about the possibility of a "unified field theory" of the good life, which is, of course, the successful life which can define success on its own terms, not someone else's. That's a place to begin, but the "theory" side is still a bit too prominent. The good life must integrate theory and practice, philosophy and action. It therefore must have solved the problem of how to put food on the table. This can best be done by having created value for some group of others by solving a problem for them. I used to tell my philosophy students in classes: in an important sense, we are problem-solvers. Some of us are very good at it. This was in the context of an introduction to philosophy course that converged on the idea that civilization is the aggregate solution to people's problems, which invariably creates more problems in its wake. A problem is any source of unease or discontent that motivates action; and once solved, the result is an improvement in someone's life.

Little did I know how true that was, but that we have to live the idea, not just grasp it intellectually or be able to teach it in a classroom. Just the first week at Exosphere has shown me how this might happen. I've had a sense of being in contact with some really first rate minds with huge hearts as well!

We are in the early stages of building an educational community, studying what this means as we go along. Behind this is an assumption none of us are dwelling on, as it's potentially a bit negative, but it's there: the premise that the universe is utterly indifferent to whether we succeed or fail. It doesn't care. How could it? But its laws are surely comprehensible to us, at least up to a point. Successful actions are therefore possible for us. We've always known this. Civilization proves it. But to novices at entrepreneurship, or even veterans with sufficient battle scars, that world is probably still intimidating. So why not create a community of mutual interaction, learning, and support? Why not create something that will survive the duration of this Bootcamp, which is just 11 weeks, after all, and pave the way to larger projects both entrepreneurial and educational. There will be more Bootcamps; they will be better than this one, because those in them will be in a position to learn from our mistakes. (An important lesson: when having made a mistake, it's always useful to ask, "What did I learn from this?" And then: "What can others learn from my mistake?")

Assuming the viability of the Stages framework for now, where are we? Contemporary Western civilization, with its blend of multiple stages (the third and fourth being dominant) has problems. Some threaten to overwhelm us. Many specific groups of people have more specific problems which are easier to tackle. If we are problem-solvers whose mission (not job) is using our intelligence and creativity to solve people's problems, then we must learn to live the notion and not just intellectualize about it. Our "unified field theory" of the good life is then more than theory as it integrates theory and practice. Living the notion means that putting food on the table is not a problem for you. You are even in a position to help others learn to do it--especially important in a world in which the employer-employee model has broken down, jobs that pay really, really well have largely disappeared, and job security is a thing of the past.

So here's the question: does Exosphere exemplify educating for the Fifth Stage of Civilization? The question is too simple, in that the last thing I want is for its founders (or anyone else) adopting this Stages model as just the latest ideology and then trying to force-fit their endeavors into the conceptual boxes it supplies. It will encounter the immediate problems it encounters and improvise the best solutions available--perhaps, as it grows, being carried by this dynamic in what may very well be a Fifth Stage direction. The Stages model is a way of looking at civilization in light of its remote and recent past, its present with all its problems, and the prospects for having a future that is better than the past. It's a system of description, that's all. What matters: solving people's problems in the here and now, to solve our own of personal sustenance as well as lighting the way for others, gradually building the community systems that we need, always working from the bottom up and never going where we are not wanted (every ideologue makes the mistake of thinking his/her ideology ought to be embraced by everyone). In this light, Exosphere may be just the first of many such endeavors, others focusing on education for the solution of other problems. Given our need to be able to grow and store food, and prepare it in healthy ways, I can certainly imagine a "school" with that focus. I thus prefer to leave the Fifth Stage of Civilization only partly-specified, in terms of what we may have learned from the limitations of its predecessor stages. Stafford Beer, the British cyberneticist, described the matter this way in his magnificent Brain of the Firm (1972). In distinguishing algorithms from heuristics, he wrote of the latter: "To think in terms of heuristics rather than algorithms is at once a way of coping with proliferating variety. Instead of trying to organize it in full detail, you organize it only somewhat; you then ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go" (p. 53).

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Why I Write

This blog is approaching its first birthday (I penned the first entry I believe on Sept. 1, 2012). It gets some traffic but not a whole lot. Obviously, this being a heavy-duty intellectual blog, it is in no position to compete for attention with far better known (and better supported) mainstream sites or even blogs dealing with popular topics such as Lady Gaga's wardrobe catastrophes. It isn't just that, however. I'd be the first to admit: I'm not a great self-promoter. I hope to learn more in the near future that will help, but that's another story.

Given that this site doesn't generate huge amounts of traffic, has as its purpose something fairly obscure -- developing a relatively new way of thinking about the future, under the assumption that the future is going to come and so it might be a good idea to think about it in the present -- and it doesn't sell anything or attempt to do so, and so doesn't make any money for its author (donations have amounted to less than $25 to date), why bother? Why not just do what I'd been doing, and work the ideas into articles posted online?

In response, let me tell you about one of my favorite online essays, "Isaiah's Job" by U.S. author Albert Jay Nock. In a very recent conversation at Exosphere, I told two of its leaders that this essay saved my writing career twice. I meant that. I was ready to hang it up back in 1997. Then I discovered "Isaiah's Job." Its powerful ideas came as a shot in the arm. Due to my not having found a publisher for a book manuscript I'd written on the deterioration of logical and critical thinking in our time, and to frustration with having to work at a job that made no use of my actual strengths, I was ready to throw in the towel again in 2004. Again I ran across "Isaiah's Job" and gave it a careful rereading. I thought, okay, why not get into one place, in one concise package, what I've learned about the rise to power of the Western power elite and its efforts to establish world government? And if nothing happens, that's it! Since The Matrix was still fairly recent, and its themes coincided with mine, I had a hook to leverage. I began with some well-known dialogue about "taking the red pill." I circulated the 28-page manuscript, and ended up with an essay published in seven parts entitled "The Real Matrix."

Of everything I've written, this one came the closest to going viral online.

Within 24 hours I'd received over 500 emails--all but a couple positive. A handful noted that I'd left this or that out. It is a failing of "The Real Matrix" that it doesn't do enough to discuss the rise of the Rothschild family or say anything about the operations of the City of London based Fabian Society to shift the English-speaking world leftward. So it doesn't fully connect the dots, in terms of the formation of the natural alliance between the Fabians and the global financial elite, forming what I call the superelite, in the early 20th century. Because of the problems I turned down an opportunity to have a print edition published and went back into the manuscript to fix these things. It began expanding, eventually turning into something so long and unwieldy that I was sure no one would read it (we're talking about well over 400,000 words!). So I scrapped that project and began something more manageable that eventually evolved into Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic.

Without "Isaiah's Job" I am sure I wouldn't have accomplished anything further as a writer. So what was in this essay that was so important?

Nock's reference was to Isaiah 1: 1-9. The time was near the end of King Uzziah's reign (around 740 B.C.). The people had turned away from the Lord, and the Lord had commanded Isaiah to preach to them, telling them what a worthless lot they are, that if they do not get their act together they will get what's coming to them. Oh, and of course, they won't listen, and you'll be lucky if you get out with your scalp intact. Isaiah's question to the Lord was the same: then why bother?

You do not understand, the Lord told Isaiah (I am paraphrasing, of course). There is a Remnant out there you know nothing about. You do not know who they are or where; they operate invisibly, unlike a king or politician or celebrity. They work competently and diligently at whatever it is they are doing. They've discovered how to leverage their strengths no matter how hostile their environment. They were the ones that built civilization in the first place; and when everything goes to pieces, they are the ones that will build up a new civilization.

You are preaching to the Remnant, the Lord tells Isaiah (1:9 is the key verse). Your job is to encourage them, shore them up, motivate them to keep trudging along. In the present environment you only know two things about them: that they exist, and that if you do your best, they will find you. But if you compromise, and water down the best you have to offer, they will smell a rat and head the other way. Message: while doing whatever it is you do to make sure you can eat, pay the mortgage, keep the lights on, etc., have at least one written product that does not compromise itself. For me, that is this blog.

Taking care of the Remnant: that's the best job description available for what the Lord had told Isaiah to do, and it's what he did. And so this is what this and any similar blogs are about. We are not writing for the masses, but for those who have it in them to take Western civilization into a Fifth Stage ... shaping its exact nature not through defunct efforts at central planning but as they go along, building from the bottom up, amidst the chaotic and deteriorating present.

That reminds me:

A book recently brought to my attention (within the last 24 hours, in fact) that looks very much worth reading is Nassim Nicholas Taleb's latest effort, entitled Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. I could wait, as I've only read the introductory matter and part of the first chapter, but what I've read is a truly phenomenal, mind-altering package! This is definitely Fifth Stage of Civilization material!

Taleb is best known, of course, for his The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which makes the point forcefully that we don't know as much as we think we do; generalizations about complex states of affairs in the world will inevitably be disrupted by Black Swan events that (1) were not predicted, at least not by most of us, and (2) have enormous consequences.

What I've read of the new book begins the compelling case that fragile systems are those in which everything is predictable but which are easily disrupted and even destroyed by the unpredictable and chaotic. Antifragile systems, on the other hand, thrive and grow in environments of unpredictability and chaos; they can withstand disruptive influences by absorbing and incorporating them. The equivalent notions in systems theory hold that systems can become too ossified or rigid; or they can become flexible and learning. The former are easily perturbed and sometimes cannot respond effectively to challenges from their environment; the latter either have structural defense mechanisms to ward off such challenges or the built-in capacity to withstand or absorb them or incorporate them as part of a systemic change.

I am not in a position yet to develop more fully the ideas behind Antifragile, but I suspect strongly that Antifragility -- becoming Antifragile -- is going to be a key to taking civilization consciously into its Fifth Stage and then not just surviving but thriving at that level. There are people and institutions that are already there. What is worrisome is -- as usual -- the masses. They are not ready, for reasons that vary from case to case. Some will pay dearly for their inattention to the breakdowns going on all around them: the deterioration of the job market which is no longer producing sources of long-term viable income, the deterioration of the culture which is all about mass consumption for instant gratification (i.e., short-term thinking), and the deterioration of the political system which is becoming more thieving, more violent, and less responsive. All of these are fragile systems. What emerges very clearly from the situation with the deteriorating job market is that to be employed, or to seek standard employment, is to be fragile. To work towards self-employment is to work towards becoming Antifragile. That's the personal level; what about the civilizational? The idea here is that to build the future it is necessary to encourage a Remnant that can operate outside the first two and will instinctively avoid the third as much as possible until the financial and political systems' lack of sustainability leads to their inevitable collapse. The collapse will, of course, be the collapse of Stages Three and Four. We will hopefully have learned from these stages which had their strong suits even if their weaknesses finally did them in (see previous entries for the details).

We must, in this case, write for the Remnant, some of whom have probably gone into survival mode and perhaps have become Antifragile without knowing it, and we must work to become Antifragile ourselves. Otherwise, as also noted in a previous entry, there is no guarantee that a Fifth Stage of Civilization will happen. What will happen instead is a techno-feudalism which will continue to draw upon Stage Three and Stage Four thinking. This being an exercise in futility, standards of living will drop everywhere, leading to a new dark age from which it could take the human race centuries to recover, if it ever does.

These themes thus continue to be important whatever the size, scope and composition of their present readership. I do not know, and so am not making any predictions, about how things will turn out. As I have at most 35 years left in this world, I will probably not live to see how everything plays out. But as we said at the outset, the future will come, and it is up to us, prayerfully, to do the work to make it better than our war-torn and impoverished past and present. Although we can say that it's all in God's hands, I am sure that as with Isaiah, He doesn't expect us to sit on our butts. That we can rise to the occasion and do what needs to be done continues to be my hope.

________________________________________________________________________ Steven Yates is the author of Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (Spartanburg, SC: Brush Fire Press International, 2011) and numerous articles in both refereed academic journals and online. Read the Introduction and part of Chapter One of Four Cardinal Errors here. Order your copy by following the link to the Amazon page.

Steven Yates will be teaching a philosophy of science course (in English, yet!) at Universidad de Santiago de Chile; he also "free lance" teaches English and GRE Test Preparation courses; a would-be entrepreneur, he also owns a small editing company called Final Draft Editing Service. He lives in Santiago, Chile.

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The Fifth Stage of Civilization: Proposed Introduction 2013

Greetings from Santiago, Chile. This is the present draft of the Introduction to a work that I fully expect will occupy years, given the environment in which it will be researched and written (doing a small business, teaching, possibly looking after an elderly person although that remains to be seen at this point). Labors of love are like that. This is something more than a labor of love, however. It is not self-love, surely; nor it is simply the enjoyment of writing, although I do. It is with a sense of urgency that I write--a sense of urgency that the larger civilization of the West, with which I tend to identify, is gradually slipping away as the years pass. As I've often said, looking at the U.S., it is not the country I grew up in. I don't think Western civilization as a whole, with its aggregate uncertainty and anxiety, is the place it was 60 years ago during the post-war years--although there were storm clouds on the horizon then if you knew what to look for (the prevailing philosophy & especially the literature). We've seen the advent of nihilism Nietzsche warned about over a hundred years ago, but not any "new values" he urged be created. Professional philosophy, unfortunately, is barely aware that there is a problem.

There are some small scale signs of good things happening, however. There are people beginning from where we are now and forging ahead. A few institutions are either in the business of thinking creatively about the future (The Long Now Foundation comes to mind), or in creating new educational dynamics that bypass existing ones that are proving inadequate (I have been watching an enterprise due to launch here in Santiago in three months called Exosphere). And then there are TED talks, of course, always creative, colorful, and thought-provoking. So there is activity. Where this activity will lead is, of course, something none of us can know for sure. However, every large scale positive development began with a small scale venture, and today's small scale ventures have something their ancestors could never have imagined in their wildest dreams: the Internet. Yet we've a lot of inertia and negativity to overcome. Perhaps this is the nature of the sort of endeavor we have embarked upon: moving, however haltingly, from Stage Four, a stage characterized by skepticism and negativity, to Stage Five, characterized by-- Well, that's still a bit hard to describe in any detail at this point, but evidence is emerging, even here in Chile, that the dynamics of several systems are riding in essentially the right direction.

Introduction.

The purpose of this project is unabashedly to reach for a “big idea” about civilization and develop it.

Such an effort may seem at first glance quixotic and outlandish—even pretentious—but there is everything to gain from making the attempt.

Western civilization faces a crisis of major proportions. We can try to turn away, but the crisis is there. The crisis spans the global economy and is wreaking havoc within national economies, but is far more than merely economic. Our political systems appear to be broken. We are more divided than ever before, as our “leaders” answer not to their peoples but to corporations and pressure groups of various sorts, some of whose irresponsible activities were responsible for precipitating the crisis. Those who refuse to bow to these powerful interests, however, are consigned to oblivion. They may have followings, but no capacity to initiate the necessary fundamental changes. Our educational systems appear equally ineffective. There is, however, something to the allegation that our schools, from elementary up through university, were designed for another age. Charged with “educating” youth for the “jobs of the future” which change annually, even if we accept this vocational model of education we may be asking from them the impossible, at least given their current credentials-centered structure and tendency toward specialism. Our religious “leaders” appear unable to help; many, over the past several decades, have been exposed as charlatans. Perplexed and bewildered, many have turned aside. Philosophers, with rare exceptions, have retreated into invisibility in a culture and marketplace that sees little use for the “free play of ideas.”

Even confidence in the sciences has broken down, not just in their ability to bring about a better human world but in their capacity to deliver value-neutral truth at all. It is not just a cliché that we now inhabit a postmodern world—a world where all is in flux and nothing is stable. This kind of theme permeates the arts, literature, music, TV and film, fashion, cuisine, you-name-it. Media messages scream at us from all sides with the latest you-must-haves. In this world some cling to technology as savior (and employer!) while others see many of our technologies as having jeopardized the very ecosystems on which the sustainability of life itself depends. Fearing cataclysmic breakdown, some have become “preppers,” storing food, clean water, other goods, against a future that isn’t what it used to be! Most people, of course, are less apocalyptic in their outlooks, but nevertheless see the West as in decline and expect U.S. influence to wane in the future—as its people face ever greater struggles to secure the necessities of life.

Where do we go from here? This essay tries to wrestle with this question in a fresh and bold way—in the spirit that again, given the trouble we are in, we have everything to gain from the attempt!

What’s the plan? First, a multitude of writers—philosophers of history and sociology mainly, but also others—have tried to grasp and lay out sweeping “laws of history.” While the present writer sees this phrase as a misnomer, the idea is compelling. Auguste Comte developed the most visible effort with his Law of the Three Stages, which saw the ushering in of an age of science (and technology) as the path to a quasi-utopian order—or, at least, an order allowing a quality of human life vastly superior to all that had gone before. The Comtean vision, one might call it, envisioned a world of advancing science and technology and moral meliorism as we improved social, political and educational institutions with the thought that these could actually make us better human beings.

Today, in the wake of world wars, the breakdown of so-called democratic institutions, the fear of environmental calamity, and the sense that would-be dictators are just waiting to pick up the pieces of the looming fiscal holocaust, we are clearly in a position to see where this vision was wrong—the postmodern world has ushered in a “Fourth Stage,” we will come to call it. This stage is characterized by what some believe to be a devastating critique of all that went before, especially the Comtean vision. The present writer believes the West must get past Stage Four as a condition of civilization's long term survival—and reach a Fifth Stage of Civilization. Unfortunately, we are hardly able to do more than sketch where we should go, or what the Fifth Stage of Civilization will look like. Marx, of course, couldn’t describe Communism, so our position is hardly novel! And surely, given the past century, we can build in proscriptions that will prevent the Fifth Stage from becoming another example of the sort of dictatorship that rose to power during the twentieth century!

There has long been a consciousness of the role of systems in the world and in human life. This consciousness also goes well back into the twentieth century, and almost constitutes a parallel development. This project seeks to tap into this development, and thus “peer beyond” postmodernity into deep systematicity: both by examining how we got here (Auguste Comte’s Law of the Three Stages), considering how the cultures of science, technology and corporatism have broken our confidence in our institutions and in ourselves, and then inviting readers to envision a future which seeks to harness the best and avoiding the worst of what came before. What were best in what came before? Hope, principle, freedom of action, faith, courage, the willingness to innovate, and a devotion to humanly important truth. What were worst? Despair, expediency, slavery, cowardice, deceit, and the lust for power (and to live at the expense of others). Given the rich material recent history supplies, we should know what to promote and what to avoid. What we do not always know are the specifics. Human ingenuity has given us what is best in the present, however. Allowed to develop unhampered, perhaps human ingenuity will give us a future, however unpredictable.

Our paradox is that however unpredictable the future, it is up to us to create it: to learn to think really well about the kind of world we would prefer to leave to our children, and to their children—and what we are willing to do to build that world. If we do not, others will do it for us. Circumstances themselves might do it for us. I’ve said that we have everything to gain by making this attempt. I’ve not said, though I will now, that we have a lot to lose by doing nothing. That is, if as some claim, Western civilization itself hangs in the balance.

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