What Do We Value?

Renaissance Humans, #12

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”  —Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love

Welcome to the Renaissance Humans Newsletter, where I focus on sense-making and story-telling in the turbulent twenties. The Renaissance (“rebirth,” in French) spanned from the 14th to the 17th century and marked a period of cultural, artistic, and intellectual renewal in Europe. A Renaissance Human fosters curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and character in a journey of never-ending learning. They cultivate Mind, Body, and Spirit, in service of Community, and oriented to the Transcendentals.

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In the United States, it’s Mother’s Day. To the moms out there, thank you for all that you do to hold us together— it’s a mostly thankless job, but things would fly apart quickly without your love and attention.

I’ve been on a break from essays— working on my fiction skills. I’ve grown a great deal over the past few months, thanks to feedback from writing groups, editors, and putting the reps in. The debut novel is stronger than ever after another round of developmental editing and revision.

This week, I watched this 110 minute conversation between two interesting thinkers, Nate Hagens and Zak Stein. I always perk my head up when I hear the word “attune” getting thrown about.

Last summer I stopped writing fiction to channel something from the ether. That’s how I think of most of the creative process, but this was a strange situation, because I wasn’t really thinking about the topic. It called to me. Which yes, from one optic sounds weird, wooish, and somewhat unhinged, but from other frames of perspective is perfectly reasonable.

I named it the A Frame, which was Arrogant of me, but I am a sucker for… Alliteration.¹ My….. Argument, was a template for how humans interact with reality. I was dissatisfied with the OODA loop. Don’t get me wrong, I love the OODA loop— I am a fan of John Boyd, but my issue with his framework is: 1. It’s too focused on competition rather than cooperation and 2. It doesn’t account for any higher realm above human interaction. It talks about moral conflict, but nothing about what we should value, other than that which allows us to prevail over our adversaries². And in the essays, I broke out how the very structure of storytelling is designed to mimic the way humans navigate reality— story is a technology to help us better survive and flourish in a complex environment.

A Frame with Story Grid Story Structure and OODA Loop

I went in search of a deeper pattern, and wrote a three part series beginning here. Briefly, I put forth a process in which humans Attend, Appreciate, and Act. These three subcomponents blossom together toward what I call Attunement, which is how humans come into correspondence with reality. Over three essays, I laid out a synthesis of different thinkers. These included complexity and cognitive scientists, psychologists, mystics, and storytellers. I’m playing with different ways to present it. Here are two:

This is still in a handwavey phase of ideation. I haven’t really developed what I mean by Attunement in great detail.³ I’m just laying out the bones. More to follow.

This is all a very long-winded prelude for what I want to talk about, which is values. In their discussion, Hagens and Stein talk about the problems with our education system, and how that contributes to the interlocking set of challenges we face in this decade. I spent the last three and a half years teaching college freshman. The whole time, I had this nagging anxiety that I wasn’t doing enough to prepare them for reality. Sure, I was teaching the curriculum, and mentoring/coaching them to be good leaders. But there was something primal, deeper, more implicit I was worried was not getting transferred. At the base, human level, rather than at the leadership/academic level.

I am deeply worried about epistemic decay. But it could be worse that that. It could be ontological decay. Both these words are pretentious. So, epistemology- what do we know? Ontology- what is real? What exists? And perhaps I’m just calling out an ice cream cone melting on a sunny day. Maybe it’s just the way things always are. Maybe epistemology and ontology always shift.

Stein articulates much of that in a way I couldn’t quite do. He talks about the need for radical changes to the way that we socialize and instruct humans of all ages. As I watched, I was reminded of the part in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig⁴, where the narrator, Phaedrus, speaks to a fellow professor. The woman admonishes him with a shaking finger— “you better be teaching those kids quality.” Phaedrus ends up having a sort of breakdown over what exactly quality is. Spoilers! Go read it, people!

This is why I am thinking about the Transcendentals as orienting values. These are broad words that can be vaguely interpreted, in the same way the word “leadership” can encompass multitudes. So, much briefer than they deserve, a quick definition of each, adapted from Howard Gardner’s Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed:

Truth: Truth is the property of statements. Any statement can be judged as true, false, or indeterminate. It is also the property of practice, in the expert execution of a job or task. Relates to the nature of reality and the correspondence between thought and reality.

Beauty: Beauty is the property of experiences. It is the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit. It transcends mere subjective preference, suggesting a harmony, proportion, or balance that is universally appealing.

Goodness: Goodness describes relations among human beings.⁵ Value found in actions, things, or people, characterized by qualities like virtue, righteousness, or ethical value. Desirable qualities that should be pursued or valued universally across different cultures and moral frameworks.

I’m on the hunt.

Searching for something three very different groups of people can agree with. First, those who belong to a faith tradition, an organized religion. Second, those who believe in something in the spiritual domain, but they don’t quite put too many labels on it— this would be the “spiritual but not religious” group (lots of baggage and criticism of that label, but just go with me for a moment). And finally, those in the farther reaches of the Agnostic/Atheist camp. This is quite possibly a fool’s errand, but that has never stopped me before ;)

What do we value? If we can’t come into correspondence with one other about this question— if we can’t have some basic agreements on this point— we’re going to the intensify the fragmentation, alienation, and separation already occurring. We’ll sow chaos for future generations to wade through and resolve.

The tide is rolling out. Maybe it’s always rolling out. So, our choices are to just send it, que sera, sera style— or find a star to fix our sights on.

I think what we need to ask ourselves revolves around questions like:

1. What is Sacred to us? What do we feel Reverence for?

2. How should we Orient ourselves and our human groups? Around what should we Orient ourselves?

3. What should be put above the mercurial, amoral, and extractive whims of the market?

On the last question— We love to quote Adam Smith and the miraculous invisible hand bit, but we never quote his other stuff— the Theory of Moral Sentiments. There, he asserts the only way the market can function properly is when it is made up of a moral people. Here, the character of individuals determines the degree of regulation of the interactions. This isn’t just a western concept. It’s all over Chinese thought—Confucianism and Taoism— as well. When the people are moral, they don’t require as much regulation. They regulate themselves.

Is anyone going to argue with a straight face that we have moral people making the big decisions in the market today? That they make decisions with human flourishing as their top priority?

To be clear, I’ve benefited greatly from the wonders of the modern world. Engineering and Science have brought miracles. I love getting anesthesia before surgery. I live in luxury because of what the modern world has given humans, and that includes a market. But it’s brought a good deal of toxicity, and degraded so much of our social and spiritual lives in the process of bestowing these material riches.

I’m sure we can argue nuances. Some will contend that “it’s not really the market, it’s X.” But my concern is that we’ve lost the plot. We’ve put the market above Flourishing/Eudaimonia. Do we serve the market, or does the market serve humans?

In the video, Stein settles on a sort of national service as a partial solution to the Metacrisis. A new Civilian Conservation Corps. This is a solution similar to those put forth by many, including retired General Stanley McCrystal.

We can get lost in navel-gazing if we fixate on all the challenges of the moment. I have done plenty of it myself.

I prefer to focus on where we go from here. How should we live, what should we value, what kind of reality do we want to create for our descendants?

While the market is an integral component of that reality, it cannot be our orienting focus. We have to focus on something higher. That’s what I’m getting at with the A Frame and Attunement, and that’s why I’ve settled on the Transcendentals, at least for now.

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Currere Certamen Tuum

1. See what I did there ;)

2. Boyd wants us to “improve our capacity for independent action", but there’s no type of moral guidance in his work, besides that which maintains social cohesion.

3. It’s definitely resonates with the concept of “Optimal Grip” as Merleau Ponty lays out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty

4. I am planning on picking up a copy of the 50th anniversary edition this summer, as it features a new forward by Matt Crawford, who writes Archedelia

5. Gardner breaks out two spheres here- neighborly morality: be a solid, general purpose human, and the ethic of roles: a doctor has an ethical code associated with the conduct of doctoring.