Dear Christer and other Friends of Wisdom
As someone brought up in a pacifist farming community, I have always
understood that every member of all sentient species without exception must
undergo their own learning process as they mature through the different
seasons of their life-cycle as the condition of their species’ variability.
The most intelligent social species celebrate the arrival of every new-born
and grieve every loss. They devote their lives to caring for each other by
preventing every premature death as the only method they know to enjoy life
on earth until its natural unpreventable end, just as we did in our
community
The rest of animalkind does not have the prescience of humankind, and as far
as we can tell, never will have. So they will never know what every
university-educated person should know by now — that earth’s solar system
will disintegrate at the natural unpreventable end of its life-cycle.
The crisis has arisen because universities are not teaching their students
that the re-creation of sentient species on earth until the natural
unpreventable disintegration of earth’s solar system is conditional on every
member of every sentient species without exception preventing its species’
premature extinction by cherishing the life of every member of its species
without fear of favour until its natural unpreventable end.
I had learned this conditionality of humankind’s viability before I left
school, but I was not taught it at school. I wasn’t overtly taught by
anybody in the community, I just always understood that if the prevailing
authorities don’t come to the same understanding, increasingly destructive
wars will destroy the conditions necessary of sentient life on earth to
continue evolving until its natural end.
That understanding led me to join the socialist society when I went to
Bradford University to study chemical engineering. At the time, the main
debate amongst young socialists was whether the USSR was based on a similar
understanding and in my judgement it was not, so I joined the socialist
group with a critique of the USSR that most closely matched my naïve
understanding. This group (which became the WRP) expected every member but
particularly graduates like me to study the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Trotsky, and the antecedents of Marx — particularly Kant, Hegel and
Feuerbach.
Since the disintegration of the USSR, I have used that study to critique the
degeneration of the WRP, and was expelled for my trouble.
I began writing the attached essay when I retired as a teacher of science in
2007. I circulated early versions for discussion in the Socialist Alliance,
United Socialist Party and Labour Representation Committee, but hardly
anybody showed any interest.
I submitted a version for discussion at EGOS subtheme 44: Marxist
organization studies, and was delighted when it was accepted. However, my
domestic circumstances prevented me from attending. The next EGOS Colloquium
is in Edinburgh in July, with the general theme of Enlightening the Future.
I plan to submit another version in the hope it too will be accepted, in
which case I will attend.
The premise of the essay is that unless the world’s universities can be
prevailed upon to work together to peacefully repudiate misconceptions about
the common origin and purpose of the compassionate instincts and
intelligence that are common to all sentient species, the conditions
necessary for them to continue re-creating themselves on earth will be
destroyed by increasingly-industrialised warfare, just as Immanuel Kant
conjectured over two centuries ago.
Feedback from any Friend of Wisdom would be particularly appreciated at this
stage.
Best wishes
From: Group concerned that academia should seek and promote wisdom
<[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Christer Nylander
Sent: 16 January 2019 17:41
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: SV: Crisis
Dear Nick,
Yes, there is only one possible outcome if the individual and collective
wisdom of the global population is not upgraded. Collapse!
I believe that every human on this plant needs their own process to develop
wisdom. We are all different. BUT, we can use a common tool. Why not use
artificial intelligence? We know that the education system will gradually be
transformed into MOOCs that use artificial intelligence. We know that
digital assistants like Siri, Alexa and Google assistant use artificial
intelligence. These two tools will certainly join, perhaps with other apps.
The digital assistant will be our daily companion 24/7 and there is ample
scope to integrate wisdom augmenting activities into this tool connected to
all the things we do. It would include super-short educations, reflections,
roll-plays, etcetera. In theory, it would be possible to offer this tool
package to every human on this planet. It would cost a few trillion dollars,
but the return would be out of imagination. It is of course not about
indoctrination - wisdom cannot come from that.
I believe it is necessary to include all people on earth. Why? Because we
are all voters, consumers, opinion builders, investors and sometimes
entrepreneurs and politicians. We are all important. If a majority would not
be wise, it would be easy to lure them into extreme politics. If a majority
would not be wise they would not understand what the wise people say, and
conflict would be the result.
I believe development will go in this line because for example the World
Economic Forum, which is the biggest think tank in industry, has concluded
that people need more inner abilities in order to cope with the fourth
industrial revolution. They do not express it in terms of wisdom, but it is
not far from that. Thus, there is a demand from industry that supports a
global movement to enhance individual and collective wisdom.
My book "Why and how to upgrade human collective wisdom" tries to explain
this.
I am writing articles in newspapers in Sweden (a list of 155 news papers)
and try in different ways to convey this message and others. I do not say it
is super effective, but it is a small piece of the puzzle.
All the best
Christer
_____
Från: Group concerned that academia should seek and promote wisdom
<[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> >
för Maxwell, Nicholas <[log in to unmask]
<mailto:[log in to unmask]> >
Skickat: den 16 januari 2019 17:32
Till: [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Ämne: Crisis
Dear Friends of Wisdom,
We face an unprecedented crisis –
as I am sure almost all members of Friends of Wisdom recognize. That this
is the case becomes apparent when one considers the very serious global
problems that confront us: population growth, destruction of natural
habitats, loss of wild life and mass extinction of species, the lethal
character of modern war, pollution of earth, sea and air, the menace of
nuclear weapons, and perhaps most serious of all, the impending disasters of
climate change. These global problems interact with one another in various
ways so that they become all the more serious. Climate change may render
vast tracts of land in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere uninhabitable; ocean
levels may rise to drown heavily populated coastal regions and cities,
prompting massive migration, in turn likely to provoke right wing
governments and war. As the population goes up, food production goes down.
And wild life will continue to suffer catastrophically.
Why do we face this crisis now? As
I see it, it can be put quite simply like this. Humanity faces two great
problems of learning: (1) learning about the universe, and about ourselves
and other living things as a part of the universe; and (2) learning how to
become civilized, enlightened or wise. We have solved the first problem; we
did that in the 17th century when we created modern science. But we have
not yet solved the second great problem of learning. It is that combination
of solving (1) and failing to solve (2) that is so dangerous, and has led to
our current crisis. For, as a result of solving the first problem of
learning, and developing modern science and technology, some of us
enormously increase our power to act. This can have immensely beneficial
consequences – as it has. It has led to much that is good about the modern
world. But, in the absence of the solution to the second great problem of
learning, vastly increased power to act, bequeathed to us by science, may do
as much damage as good, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
And that is just what has happened.
Modern science and technology have led to modern industry and agriculture,
modern hygiene and medicine, modern armaments, which have led to much that
is good but also to population growth, destruction of natural habitats and
mass extinction of species, lethal war, nuclear weapons, pollution, and
climate change.
We urgently need sufficient wisdom to be
able to anticipate the emergence of serious global problems due to new
actions made possible by science and technology, and take action so as to
stop such problems emerging before they become serious. Failing that, we
need sufficient wisdom to have the political muscle able to act so as to
resolve global problems humanely, effectively, and intelligently.
But how is humanity to acquire the global
wisdom that is required? Political events of the last two years or so seem
to indicate that we are getting more stupid, not wiser. Most people, I
think, would regard the idea that the world might learn how to become a bit
wiser or more civilized somewhat absurd. And so they tend to despair at
anything serious being done about our global problems.
For decades, now, I have argued that there
is a solution this problem of how we can solve the second great problem of
learning – the problem of learning how to become more civilized, wiser.
We can learn from our solution to the first
great problem how to solve the second one. We can learn from scientific
progress how to make social progress towards a good, civilized, wise world.
This is not a new idea. It was the basic
idea of the 18th century Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment.
But the idea was developed in a seriously defective form. We still suffer
from it today – and that is the source of our current incapacity to resolve
our grave global problems.
In order to implement the profound
Enlightenment idea properly, three steps need to be got right. (i) the
progress-achieving methods of science need to be correctly identified and
characterized. (ii) These then need to be generalized, so that
progress-achieving methods become fruitfully applicable to all worthwhile
problematic endeavours in life. (iii) These generalized progress-achieving
methods then need to be got into the fabric of the social world, so that we
may make social progress towards civilization, enlightenment and wisdom in a
way that is somewhat comparable to the astonishing intellectual progress of
natural science.
The Enlightenment got all three steps wrong.
Most disastrously, the philosophes got the third step wrong. They thought
the task was to develop the social sciences alongside the natural sciences.
This got developed throughout the 19the century by people like J.S. Mill,
Karl Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, and built into academia in the early 20th
century with the creation of disciplines and departments of social science.
The outcome is what we still have today: academic inquiry devoted in the
first instance, to the pursuit of knowledge.
Our institutions of learning may be good at acquiring specialized knowledge;
they are not good at helping humanity acquire wisdom.
The big blunder was to concentrate on improving
knowledge of the human world, rather than on helping the human world to
resolve its conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively
rational ways – in ways which enable people to achieve what is of value in
life, and make progress towards a good, civilized, wise world.
So here is the paradox. Our universities today
are the outcome of putting the great Enlightenment idea into practice:
namely, learning from the solution to the first great problem of learning
how to go about solving the second one. Our universities are intended, as
it were, to help humanity learn how to acquire wisdom. But because we still
have not acknowledged, and put right, the blunders of the 18th century
Enlightenment, what we possess today is deeply flawed, in a wholesale,
structural way.
What we urgently need to do is correct the
blunders of the Enlightenment. My latest effort at spelling out what these
blunders are, and what we need to do to correct them, can be found here: The
Scandal of the Irrationality of Academia
<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325498502_The_Scandal_of_the_Irrat
ionality_of_Academia> (2019). It was first spelled out long ago in detail
in my From Knowledge to Wisdom <http://www.pentirepress.plus.com/#wisdom>
(1984; 2007).
We have to learn how to resolve the grave global
problems that confront us. That in turn requires that our institutions of
learning, our schools and universities, are rationally designed and devoted
to the job. At present they are not. That is because we have failed to
correct the 18th century blunders of the Enlightenment. There is a clear
prescription as to what we need to do. It has been around for at least 40
years. But few academics seem aware of what needs to be done.
Somehow, we Friends of Wisdom need to get the
message across, to our academic colleagues (if we have them) to politicians,
to members of the public – to whoever will listen. That is how I see the
matter, in any case.
What can we do? What are we doing? Is my diagnosis,
and my prescription, correct? If not, where does it go wrong? I would be
interested to hear what others think.
All good wishes,
Nick Maxwell
Website: www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom
<http://www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom>
Publications online: http://philpapers.org/profile/17092
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html
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