First Principles & First Values of Education
A Review Essay by Dr. Brad Kershner
Dr. Brad Kershner, who wrote the below review of my book First Principles and First Values, is the Head of School at Kimberton Waldorf School. He is an independent scholar, integral theorist, co-founder of a meta-political think tank (www.thereconstitution.com), and author of Understanding Educational Complexity: Integrating Practices and Perspectives for 21st Century Leadership. In addition to his work in education, Brad works in collaboration with thought leaders and spiritual teachers from around the world who are engaged in developing wisdom-based responses to planetary problems. You can follow his work on Substack.
You can also read the Introduction to my book First Principles and First Values here:
Review Essay by Dr. Brad Kershner
“The future will not be determined only by technological innovation. It will hinge on the worldviews and philosophies of the groups and individuals that make technical innovation happen. Prior to all the engineering conversations about what can be done is a more basic conversation about what ought to be done. This is not a technical or scientific conversation; it is a philosophical and (dare we say) religious one.” - David J. Temple
Living in a time of rapid technological and social change, it is very easy to get swept up in the narratives and trends of the moment, and very difficult to discern truth from falsehood, trendlines from fads, signal from noise, and information from propaganda. Absorbing the insight of the quote above, we can notice that the overlapping conversations in which we find ourselves—the social, cultural, and relational contexts in which we determine what is true and what to do—are also fundamentally educational conversations. As Dewey and others knew and tried to explain, religious, philosophical, and technological questions all come to a head in the conversation of education, for it is in education, broadly conceived, that we refine and transmit what we know and what to do, individually and collectively across generations. Education is a name for cultural transmission over time, and our ability to prepare ourselves for the changing times ahead is a bellwether of things to come.
The stakes of our decisions—and the conversations that shape and justify them—in this time of rapid change are higher than ever. We are facing global problems that require global coordination and cooperation, and as a species we haven’t figured out how to do that yet. It is becoming clear that if we continue on our collective path—economically, ecologically, politically—we are not headed toward positive and sustainable outcomes. And given that technological innovation is a primary driver of social behavior with global and long-term consequences, we won’t be able to alter our outcomes or choose a positive and desirable path unless we expose, explore, understand, and transform the underlying worldviews, philosophies, and assumptions that are driving our current systems and leaders. In short, we must engage in a global process of learning so that we can have the skills, capacities, and wisdom to steward the planetary systems and societies encircling our precious planet. We are all in desperate need of an education that can meet the demands of the moment and enable us to harness the power that our technology is affording us.
Into this maelstrom of complexity and possibility steps David Judah Temple—a pseudonym and an archetype; a nom de plume and a collaboration of conspirators with a shared mission to make sense, make meaning, and make the most of their collective intelligence in service of this beautiful story that we call life on earth.[1] David’s first book—First Principles & First Values—offers an incisive response to our current meta-crisis, a clear and coherent analysis of what underlies the dynamics of social disharmony, and a powerful and inspiring vision for how we can move “from crisis to crossing.”
This essay is an attempt to distill the message of First Principles & First Values through the lens of education. If we are to cross the bridge of possibility into a brighter future, we will need to consider seriously the principles and values that are currently animating our systems and cultures of learning, and to clarify the principles and values that we want to inform the future.
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Hidden Values and Unclarified Desire: Understanding our TechnoFeudal Predicament
To get where we need to go we must first grapple with the most prominent and pernicious characteristics of our current situation. From there we can determine what would constitute an adequate educational response.
Education presupposes possibilities for learning and growth, and it is inherently value laden. Any process or system of education will inevitably transmit certain values. Unfortunately, our current cultural climate is one in which we lack clarity about our shared values and their importance, so our systems of production, governance, and education are running on stories, rationales, and worldviews that are not adequately vetted, justified, or collectively discerned. It is as if we are operating an emergent global super-system on an unconscious autopilot. Therefore, a current demand for human learning is to disclose the hidden values of these systems, ascertain their merits and dysfunctions, and take up the task of consciously informing our social systems with clear, coherent, and transparent values that can be continually refined over time. Only in this way can we ensure alignment between conscious human values and the possibilities for development and evolution that our increasingly complex global systems require.
As we pursue this work to explore and explicate the worldviews and paradigms that are driving society, we can come to the important realization that at the core of our current socio-cultural milieu there is a deep denial of the reality of value itself. We lack clarity about the status and validity of our underlying values because we no longer live in a world where the presence and primacy of a fundamental field of value is taken for granted as a given and as real. As David describes, “most people who participate in civilization today, East and West, do not understand themselves as participating in a field of value. A subtle, inarticulate, and pernicious nihilism is pervasive, wherein values are seen, at best, only as social constructions–or worse, as subtle ploys for power” (p. 119). Much of the insight and power of this book, and the overall project that David is pursuing, comes from uncovering the implications of this tragic truth, and from tracing the genealogy of how we came to find ourselves living in a materialist, relativist, and ultimately nihilist culture of power, politics, and technology, with no consciously meaningful connection to the reality and importance of value and values.
The story of disenchantment, secularization, and materialism has been told well by many of our best social thinkers (Nietzsche, Weber, Fromm, Habermas, Taylor, and Mumford come to mind), and today we find ourselves both reading and writing this story while looking for a way to change the plotline and find a happy ending. But currently, a dominant theme of our global saga is the experience of living in what Shoshanna Zuboff calls Surveillance Capitalism, and what David calls TechnoFeudalism, which is a way of characterizing the world system that is emerging out of the development of persuasive technologies that surveil, nudge, and influence human behavior. This world of increasing surveillance and behavior manipulation, empowered by rapidly advancing, AI-driven technologies, opens “a fundamentally new political possibility, emerging at the interface of new technologies and currently dominant ideologies and worldviews…. [oriented toward] engineering for large-scale human behavioral coordination” (p. 246).
The exposure of TechnoFeudalism as both a driving force and a totalitarian omega point of our current social system is a crucial and central insight, and one that David is going to explore more fully in subsequent publications. But a central idea in First Principles & First Values is that contra Zuboff, we do not have any chance of combating, transcending, and overcoming the dystopian implications of Surveillance Capitalism/TechnoFeudalism if we do not go to the heart of the matter, which is the ground of value. David points out that many of our public intellectuals who are valiantly trying to understand and impede the forces of technological power and control that threaten to radically change human life for the worse—folks like Zuboff, Lanier, and Carr—do not have a means to effectively combat this force because they do not have a solid ground of value to stand on. They and many others want to oppose, slow down, or stop the direction we are heading in, but they cannot say clearly why. They think TechnoFeudalism is and/or will be bad, but why? What are the values that we can rely on and point to that show that the problems of TechnoFeudalism really are fundamentally and unequivocally bad? Is there a ground of value—or what David calls a shared grammar of value—that can help us to clarify, adjudicate, and actually know what is good and bad?
Tragically, because these well-intended canaries live in the same disenchanted coalmine as everyone else, they can’t bring themselves to say YES. They don’t seem to know. Or rather, they do know, as exemplified by their own deep human common sense—what David refers to as our common-sense sacred axioms—that there is good and bad, right and wrong, value and anti-value, etc., but because of the way they’ve been socialized in the late modern/postmodern world of deconstructed value, they can’t bring themselves to articulate and own it consciously. Value is not included in the story they’ve been told, or in the story they are telling. So the story is inevitably a tragedy, and promises to end tragically, unless we can fundamentally change the plotline by reinserting what was actually always already present in all times and places: intrinsic value!
The essential work is therefore to reveal the values that are hidden in the technological infrastructures and educational social structures of society, and to recognize that our collective ability to live and learn in alignment with shared values ultimately depends on an underlying worldview that knows that value itself is real, and actually serves as the qualitative and experiential basis of our human lives. Values are important; value is essential. What David is working to establish and clarify is the necessity and urgency of establishing “a universal grammar of value, shared by all humanity as a context for its diversity” (p. 6). This grammar of value is essential because without it, we have no basis on which to cohere, collaborate, and coordinate as a global species to resolve planetary problems.
This is the meta-crisis: the sum total of human-created problems combined with our collective inability to be the people who can resolve them. The meta-crisis is therefore an educational problem, because not only do we have to learn the skills and develop the capacities to resolve global problems, we have to grow and mature to become the people who can do so. And as every good educator knows, good pedagogy relies on a good story. As David puts it, “if one desires to change the trajectory of society to avoid suffering and realize the greater good, the most effective way to achieve that goal must be to evolve the story that animates society” (p. 27).
But importantly—very, very importantly—story in this sense is not a mere fiction; it is not a meaningless construction of culture and language. Reality is a story, and true stories are expressions of reality’s ever unfolding and evolving story. The fundamental level of human story that animates social life is the superstructure of society. If we want to transform the social and technological world, i.e., the social structure and infrastructure of society, we must address the underlying superstructure. As Donella Meadows put it, “paradigms are the sources of systems,” and the best leverage point to change any system is to change the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.[2] To change the system, we change the paradigm; to change the paradigm, we change the story—not by making one up, but by perpetually refining and improving the superstructure of our social and cultural world.
In order to be able to tell a new and better story, one that is true and good and beautiful, and able to capture the imagination and ignite the inspiration of future generations to become the global species that lives through the meta-crisis and comes out on the other side into a more glorious and humanitarian world, we have to clarify our desire. This is another central theme of this text: that the work we must do involves the interior science of clarifying what it is we actually want and need. It is only through an interior process, shared and validated intersubjectively, that we can come to know what is valuable, so that we can realize alignment between desire, value, needs, and rights. Justified rights come from real needs, and meaningful values are what we desire when we are clear and conscious about our intentions and aspirations, understood in the context of an evolving world and an evolving field of value. These are all essential features of the story to come, the story we are learning to tell as we learn how to live in alignment with a world of infinite intrinsic value.
Living the Story of the Evolving Tao
As our educational social systems go along with the paradigm of TechnoFeudalism and propagate hype and hysteria about AI (and the vague but tantalizing promises of the AGI to come), we are coming to see that the underlying values of these systems are not coherent, good, or grounded in truth. The educational (and corporate, and political) field is moving along with a trajectory that undermines human agency and the sacredness of personhood through the development of technology that increasingly enables the totalized control of human experience. Seeing the defunct and misguided values at the heart of this paradigm, we can realize that “we no longer have a Story of Value equal to our power” (p. 43). Technology is not values neutral, and it is imperative that we put an end to the reign of nihilistic design and establish a Story of Value at the heart of our collective educational aspirations.[3]
There is much we can learn from the past as we move forward, and a big part of this project is to reclaim and reintegrate the wisdom of past epochs that have been naively left behind as the deconstructed beliefs of yesteryear. We have been led to believe that humans create and contrive value, and merely tell stories to suit their socially constructed and relative whims, but some of our ancestors knew that life itself is an expression of value. And yes, they were right. It is! And even though we continue to live and think in the shadow of modern materialism, the truth of value that can serve as the basis of a new renaissance and a new chapter in the evolution of consciousness and culture has been present in modern and postmodern society all along. We have been unconsciously dependent on the deep and pervasive values of the pre-modern world, and now it is time to reintegrate those values and make them conscious, so that they can help us to direct the trajectory of the planetary evolution to come.
In the words of David, “we [now] realize we have the capacity, for the first time in history, to see the narrative arc of the evolutionary story, from matter to life to mind. We realize that we are this evolutionary story in personal form. We realize that it is an unfinished story. We realize that it falls to us to write the next chapter in the story” (p. 102). And “despite its protestations to the contrary, science enshrined myriad intrinsic values, including truth, trust, community, effort, the capacity for free thinking, courage, elegance, beauty, and even goodness…. and despite the best intellectual attempts to make everything profane and secular, to completely remove value from its place in the Universe–the modern world was in fact shaped by a deep sense of shared value, which drove everything from the early democratic revolutions to the antislavery and civil rights movements” (p. 129-130).
The cross-cultural, trans-lineage, planetary project of meta-crisis metamorphosis is a species-wide gesture of integration, recalibration, and transformation. With a bow to some of our oldest eastern traditions we can conceive of our shared field of value as the Field of the Tao, with the key clarification that “The Eternal Tao is the Evolving Tao” (p. 159). In this evolutionary worldview we can affirm the paradoxical nature of reality by affirming the universal polarities that make up our world: temporality/eternality, hidden/revealed, whole/parts, interior/exterior, and the multiplicity of perspectives that constitute our shared experience. These are some of the metaphysical priors and presuppositions that constitute the First Values & First Principles of our world—and we can know them because we are (literally) the world.
We are an expression of the value-laden and intrinsically valuable cosmos, and that is why our knowing is an expression of it knowing itself. As David puts it: “Cosmos desires what it values. The human being participates in cosmic desire. We are evolutionary desire in person” (p. 113). And “your mindbody at all levels is in a constant exchange of information with the Cosmos–you are in constant conversation with reality” (p. 216). When felt and known from the inside, we realize that evolution desires more consciousness, creativity, uniqueness, and love. The Intimate Universe lives in us, and our own clarified interiors disclose deeper truths about the nature and structure of reality itself. We must reclaim our individual and collective ability to validate and verify our direct human relationship to truth, beauty, and goodness, and affirm that there are reliable ways for us to know collective and convergent truths—knowable universal truths triangulated by various sciences—that are always evolving.
We can also affirm the sacred axioms that have been the (mostly unconscious) foundation of our modern world—and we must build educational systems and cultures that consciously and explicitly affirm and reintegrate these axioms and values. Choice matters; there are better and worse choices; our lives matter and are meaningful; life is inherently meaningful; it is good to love; sacrifice and heroism are good, selfishness is not; effort is rewarded; fairness is important; self-transformation is desirable and good! The pre-modern world was explicit about these values, but they were typically expressed through ethnocentric, group-oriented, non-inclusive language and worldviews. In modernity, intrinsic value was assumed to be self-evident, and these “inarticulate common-sense axioms prevailed,” but over time they began to fade into the background, eventually to be ridiculed and/or forsaken by the postmodern zeitgeist (p. 96).
Through the influences of postmodern culture we began to question not only the cultural manifestations and parochial expressions of value, we also came to doubt that any values can be universal in any meaningful sense, and from there began to conceive of the world as essentially and fundamentally meaningless and valueless. We still go along with common-sense truisms in our personal lives, but underneath, we have lost our basis for affirming that there are truths that are actually real for everyone. So now it is time to get to the other side of that gaping abyss of meaning and purpose—to go “from crisis to crossing.”
Living Through Crisis is Transformative Education
How do we shape the educational cultures that will enable us to facilitate such a crossing?
When you venture out into the nascent edges of cultural emergence and transformation, there is no path but the one that is forged through walking, arm-in-arm. All I can offer here are a few more insights from David to contemplate as you continue your own journey through consciousness, culture, and crisis.
First, we need to get clear about value and values because if we don’t, we won’t have a way to generate the moral, social, and political will necessary to create real social transformation. As we begin to see that the path of Surveillance Capitalism, TechnoFeudalism, transhumanism, and AI hysteria is not the best way forward for humans or the planet, we will need a clear and coherent understanding of why those forces are a violation of what is real. We must clarify our desire for and relation to the world's intrinsic values. If we fail to ground our criticisms, protests, and alternative visions in an adequate and comprehensive worldview, then we will be left with what we have currently: power games, with different groups vying for power in a win/lose (and ultimately lose/lose) race to nowhere. We know that our anti-human, materialist, cynical, nihilist trajectory and philosophy is wrong. Deep down, we know it. Now we must develop our ability to say why and point a better way forward. The metaphysical and philosophical project that David is undertaking is an attempt to support us in that work.
Second, we must create educational environments for young people to develop their full humanity. Our current educational systems have gone so far down the road of default, unconscious, essentially materialist cultures of competition that it is hard to envision the kind of systemic transformation we need without anticipating some form of major collapse or breakdown happening first. I am working every day in a school community that is trying to establish a better way, and we need more people to join the effort. Our children deserve human-centered and nature-embedded environments that protect them from the invasive dangers of attention-grabbing, identity-warping, and information-extracting technologies.
Even more fundamentally, all people need and deserve educational environments where they are treated as inherently and intrinsically valuable human beings. There is a place for healthy competition, but we have reached a point where we have completely normalized the idea that everyone is in competition with each other for materialistic goals, and this leads inevitably to learning that it is okay and expected to treat others instrumentally, as means to our own ends, as opposed to seeing others—and nature and all beings—as ends in themselves. Cultures of materialistic competition lead to strategic manipulation instead of communicative action, to extrinsic pressure instead of intrinsic inspiration, and to propaganda instead of growth-oriented education. We must create and protect educational spaces where we don’t instrumentalize others and where all are seen and appreciated as intrinsically valuable.
All humans have a deep desire for cultural contexts of shared identity and meaning, without losing the integrity of autonomy, agency, and individuality. We all need opportunities for healthy intimacy in cultural environments of shared value and shared purpose. In schools, and in all organizations, we need to encourage the formation of shared identity between people, with a mutuality of recognition and a shared ground of value and purpose, for collaboration and true progress to be possible.[4] Open societies and the educational organizations that constitute them ultimately depend on value being placed at the center of their public culture. Rivalrous conflict governed by zero-sum win/lose metrics cannot be constrained without superordinate first principles and values—and those principles and values must be truly inclusive to serve as a context for human diversity.[5]
Lastly, and ultimately, it’s all about relationship: “Reality is the evolution of relationship. Crisis is an evolutionary driver. All crisis is a crisis of relationship. All crisis is resolved by the emergence of a new order of relationship” (p. 188). The meta-crisis is ultimately a crisis of maturity and intimacy, and unless we continue to grow within, together, we will face escalating calamities and crises without, and will continue to fracture and unravel on a global scale. We must face the tragedy of the commons, and find a way to grow closer, more unified, more intimate, and more human in the process, because “global intimacy is a prerequisite for global coordination” (p. 57).
As we muster the will to face the perils we have enabled, it is also important to realize and accept that “tragedies are not solved, but lived through” (p. 73). But in growing and maturing through the crises we face, we open the potential for calling forth a transformation into a new shared identity. David calls this Homo amor. I refer to this process and potential as Integrated Emergence. Call it what you will, and join us while you can. The path is steep and narrow, but all are invited to walk with us, arm-in-arm, one step at a time, toward the future we desire.
Footnotes
[1] The name David J. Temple represents the work of a collaborative group of authors. It is a long-term group project, and this is the first of what will be many books from this collective. I will refer to this group as David, since that is the penname chosen as ‘author’ of this book (and subsequent books to come). If you want to know more, the book provides more information. You can also learn more at: https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/
[2] https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/
[3] To understand why technology is not values neutral, see: https://consilienceproject.org/technology-is-not-values-neutral-ending-the-reign-of-nihilistic-design-2/
[4] For important reflections on the concept of progress at the heart of humanity’s story, see: https://consilienceproject.org/development-in-progress/
[5] For more on diversity, inclusion, and identity, see: https://integrallife.com/diversity-empathy-integration/