Is politics doomed?

A Halloween post

Quick note — we were going to do a livestream t’night, but ha ha ha it’s Halloween, what was I thinking? Fate requires me to spend the wet, barely-above-freezing evening assisting my children in their never-ending quest for sucrose: so we’re postponing the livestream to next week. (Also, we’ll be experimenting with doing it as a YouTube Live; you’ll find it at youtube.com/@scienceisWEIRD. Thursday, November 7, 9pm Eastern / 6pm Pacific. The subject: geography.)

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We live at a time when every important question about everything is heard through a political filter. I almost think that people miss the interesting specifics as they ask themselves, “Is what you’re saying secretly conservative or secretly progressive?”

So let me say this as clearly as I can about how I see Egan education: Egan education is definitely, absolutely, 100% neither of those. Or it’s both. Or it’s something else entirely. But asking this question is a marvelous way to misunderstand Egan education.

And this isn’t of mere academic interest — it’s actually dangerous to let Egan education become identified as secretly one of those camps. Because the truth is, all kids would benefit from the re-humanized education that we’re teasing out here. That’s why, on this blog, I take pains to ward away anything that sounds like partisan politics (as those of you who participate in the comments can attest!).

But with all the tension in the air right now, I’d like to point out one thing: weird things are happening in global politics, and I think Egan’s framework is key to understanding and fixing them.

To see what I mean in this, I recommend to you an essay just published by Brendan Graham Dempsey. These last few months, Dempsey might have become my favorite thinker. He’s a leading scholar in the metamodernism movement, and a farmer, and a publisher, and a truly excellent podcaster (Apple, Spotify).

I’ve just finished the short first volume of his new series “The Evolution of Meaning”, A Universal Learning Process. (Isn’t that a tantalizing title? Or is it just me?) It’s one of those books where nearly every page is littered with insight and the whole is more than the sum of its parts; I read it like I eat an artichoke: slowly, in layers, and with relish. If you spend time fretting about the question of purpose, then I think this book is for you.

Dempsey argues that we can talk about meaning scientifically — and that when we do, we find it doesn’t start with personal choices (à la the existentialists) or with cultures (à la the postmodernists), but is tied up in the evolution of life from bacteriums on up.

He even suggests we can even talk about meaning before life — we can define it with thermodynamics. I’m not sure I think he’s correct about this part, but I love what he’s doing: recognizing that meaning is at the center of everything.

Long-time readers might remember that the second post of this substack calls this “the hole in the heart of education”:

Heck, reading Dempsey is actually helping me understand Egan better — in short, I think that Egan was a metamodern education philosopher who had the misfortune of working before “metamodernism” was a thing? Hopefully I’ll be able to write about this more in the future; for the moment, I want to recommend the essay that Dempsey just wrote about our political moment:

Political Conformity & the Developmental Constraints on Democracy

Like I said, weird things are happening in global politics, and I think Egan’s framework is key to understanding and fixing them. Dempsey cites the political philosopher Jason Brennan, who divides Americans into three groups: hobbits, hooligans, and vulcans.

Brennan writes:

Hobbits are mostly apathetic and ignorant about politics. …In the United States, the typical nonvoter is a hobbit.

Hooligans are the rabid sports fans of politics. Hooligans consume political information, although in a biased way. They tend to seek out information that confirms their preexisting political opinions, but ignore, evade, and reject out of hand evidence that contradicts or disconfirms their preexisting opinions. …Their political opinions form part of their identity, and they are proud to be a member of their political team. …Most regular voters, active political participants, activists, registered party members, and politicians are hooligans.

Vulcans think scientifically and rationally about politics. Their opinions are strongly grounded in social science and philosophy. They are self-aware, and only as confident as the evidence allows.

Fellow Egan-heads: does this sound familiar? To me, vulcans sound like people who have a PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) understanding of the world; hooligans sound like folk who see the world through a ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️) lens.

I’m not sure what hobbits are.¹ For the moment, let’s play with the notion that they’re people who have a local, simple understanding of things, untroubled by agonizing questions about how it all hangs together: this sounds at least a little like MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️) understanding.

Dempsey points out that, on net, the internet hasn’t helped citizens think more clearly about politics. It’s actually made them stupider about politics:

Unfortunately, as citizens become more informed, they don’t leap from hobbit to vulcan. Rather, they become hooligans; vulcans are practically nonexistent.

That’s to say, the early boosters of the WWW who thought that “more information” was the key to improving society didn’t understand humans. What’s needed isn’t just more information, it’s better (and profoundly different) ways to make sense of the world.

This is what Egan education is pushing for: we want to inculcate PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) understanding. That is, we want to help kids see the world as a vulcan would.

Imaginary Interlocutor: Hold up — don’t you always make a big deal about how Philosophic understanding isn’t BETTER than the other kinds?

A more clear way of saying this might be “each way of understanding is better than the others at different things”.

Do you want an intuitive connection with what’s going on in the world? Do you want your understanding to be emotionally rich? And do you want it yesterday? Then MYTHIC (🧙‍♂️) understanding is for you.

Do you want to uncover the extraordinary things that are hidden in the everyday world? Do you want to join in the grand adventure of the Universe? Do you want your understanding to be full of mystery, wonder, and bold ideals? Then ROMANTIC (🦹‍♂️) understanding is what you’re looking for.

Or do you want to see the patterns that really make the world tick? Do you want your understanding to be clear, objective, and connected to universal truths? And to get a map of reality that can guide you through any complexity, are you willing to take up a system others find “inhuman”? Then PHILOSOPHIC (👩‍🔬) understanding is the best for that.

I.I.: But how is Philosophic understanding better for politics?

Because politics is about running a society, and a society works in counter-intuitive ways. Policies that feel obviously right to the masses are often exactly the ones that the actual experts warn are the most dangerous.²

Richard Hanania puts our problem memorably:

In the 1990s, politicians were boring, and politics attracted mostly boring people, which made the entire discourse smarter. Today, the lines between politics, pop culture, and reality TV have all become blurred, and I think we’re much worse off; people whose energy would have once been focused on pro-wrestling now opine on the most important issues of the day.

(Pro-wrestling is a great example of ROMANTIC understanding.)

I.I.: And you’re saying we want to rid ourselves of it, and become Vulcans?!

We can’t, and we wouldn’t want to if we could. Egan’s paradigm, here, is more insightful than the hobbit–hooligan–vulcan categories, because it recognizes that being a Vulcan is bad, too.³ We need some hooligan in us to oppose the crowd:

Image from Dempsey’s essay

It takes a certain sort of crazy person to stand up and call “crap” on everything they see happening all around them. This sort of ROMANTIC stance is precisely what we need — we just need to inform it with the systematic knowledge that comes from a PHILOSOPHIC understanding of psychology and sociology and anthropology and game theory and history.

Well, this is straight-up Eganism: we want to combine these ways of understanding, and balance them (and more) against each other. When we do that, we achieve what Egan calls IRONIC (😏) understanding.⁴ With it, we gain the strengths of the masters, and can bring their abilities to bear on our problems.

But probably this post is getting too sunny for the political moment! Dempsey asks:

Is democracy perhaps doomed to fail, you may ask? Is human ignorance and group-think so intractably a part of our nature that the very notion of collective governance is actually ridiculously naïve?

Right now, the patterns of groupthink seem to be swirling more powerfully than have in a century, sucking up all within their wake. I think the playwright Richard Foreman put it well, and simply:

But today I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self — evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available”, a new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance — as we all become “pancake people,” spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.⁵

This is bad. Is there a way out of this? Dempsey thinks so, and I do, too:

What is needed is not “more education”; we have seen this. No, what is needed is better education. What is needed is a full, expansive, comprehensive, robust, resourced, and developmentally informed education system that is not just about quantity but quality. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of America depends upon it. In fact, given America’s place of prominence and hegemony on the geopolitical stage, it is not an exaggeration to say that the future of the world depends on it.

I.I.: What are you trying to say?

If you’re feeling forlorn about the current political moment, you might be tempted to look for signs that secretly everything’s fine. Don’t. Everything’s not okay. As they say in Essos, “the night is dark and full of terrors”.

But, as another proverb puts it, “don’t curse the darkness, light a candle”. I love the humility of that proverb — to feel hopeful, you don’t need to flood the world with light; psychologically, it’s enough to take a single, small action.

I’ll just say that, for me, helping to spread a practice of education that can help kids think rationally and take a romantic stand against swirling stupidity is exactly what I find most helpful for keeping my spirits high during dark nights.

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A final note: Above, I said that Richard Foreman’s “pancake people” quote captures our modern problem… but maybe the best take overall is an essay that Erik Hoel wrote last year for Halloween. I think about it all the time, and recommend it to anyone who wants a good seasonal scare:

The egregore passes you by

Happy Halloween!

1. As someone who literally spent a half-hour this morning trying to understand the origin of Beorn, a minor character in The Hobbit, that was a strange sentence to write.

2. “Which policies is he talking about?” is an exercise I’ll leave to the reader.

3. I’ve been trying to follow Jason Brennan’s style of not capitalizing vulcan, but as someone who spent another half-hour this morning reading an oral history of Star Trek, I feel compelled to give up and just capitalize it. (Also, I don’t think I realized how big a nerd I am until these footnotes made me quantify how I’m spending my mornings.)

4. Lately, I’ve been wondering if a better word for IRONIC understanding would be “metamodern understanding”, but that’s a post for another day.

5. This quote has been the most troublesome card in my Anki deck for years; on a good day, I can recite 80% of it by heart.