I have often said, and have occasionally
written, that we have too much education in the modern world. But I have never
been sure how much I mean it.
Looked at from the point
of view of the effect of education on the world’s population, the statement is
obvious nonsense. In that part of the world where people do not even have
access to clean water to drink, or electric light to read by, or even to the
basic opportunity of learning to read and write, education is the key to
improving the lives of millions, one could say billions, of people. I would never have the nerve to stand on one
of those immense trash heaps that surround so many third world cities, where
people actually live and scrabble out a living by desperately recycling useful
items that have been thrown away by those who are better off, and tell one of
the army of children whose world is limited to that trash heap, that the world
has too much education.
From another aspect,
however, the statement makes obvious common sense: we have such a vast amount
of information at our fingertips, a collection of knowledge that is growing
exponentially every year, that it is obvious we have more knowledge than we
know how to control so that it should benefit every person on earth.
Put it another way: we
can explore the far reaches of space, land men on the moon, and perform other
miracles of only marginal use to human kind, spending untold gazillions of
dollars on these projects, while at the same time we cannot find the way to
make sure every person has enough to eat, and that is true, even though we are
able to grow enough food for everybody.
We simply fall short of getting it to those who need it. This is not
only appalling: it is obscene, immoral, disgusting and infuriating.
One of the problems is
the intense specialization that has gone into the development of this
knowledge. Some of our biggest brains pursue knotty problems the solution to
which could create chaos, or even disaster, to our social system, and they do
so simply because they are fascinated by the intellectual problem before them,
and really don’t care about their effects, were they to succeed. I remember one occasion on which I was
researching a film on the subject of the biology of aging, which required me to
talk to some of the world’s greatest experts in the field. One of these top
experts told me when I visited his lab in San Francisco that “if I were to walk
out of my lab holding up a test tube that I said contained the solution to the
problem, any sensible person would smash the tube to the ground.” He knew that
his work might conceivably allow everyone to live until 125 or even 150, but
the impact of that on society would have to be someone else’s concern.
In the last few months
there has been a veritable outburst of concern in the public prints, warning
against some of the bad effects of the sort of technology that everyone
believes has immeasurably improved our lives. For example, the first smartphone
was introduced ten years ago, a phone that can take pictures, record and send
written messages, store whole books and thousands of pictures and tunes, can do
everything, it seems, but sing and dance, and is so widely available that
already medical and educational specialists, not to mention the technologists
who have driven these developments, have become concerned about addiction to
the phone, among children as among adults, that has become a real problem. “The
dopamine-driven feedback loops we have created are destroying how society
works,” says one former executive. And another says that the Facebook platform
“literally changes your relationship with society, and with each other….only
God knows what it is doing to our children’s brains.” The Internet is laden
with sites explaining how Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had limited their
children’s access to this gadgetry that they have invented. And a columnist has
recorded her surprise when she saw that in the home of Jim Balsillie, inventor
of Blackberry, none of the gadgetry she expected was to be seen. He didn’t want
his kids to over-indulge. The case against all this fancy technology was
summarized in one column recently in The
Guardian thus: “We now know --- don’t we? --- that the person who begins
most social encounters by putting their phone on the table is either an addict
or an idiot.” We certainly all know how
the ever-present cell phone has changed manners by constantly interrupting
conversations.
I live in a high-rise apartment in Montreal, and I
take the elevator every day with young men and women whose attention when they
enter is invariably concentrated on
their cell phones. I often think I would like to ask them exactly what they are
doing on their phone, are they talking to somebody, are they texting, are they
doing research, are they looking for somebody’s number, or are they just
pretending as a means of discouraging conversation in the elevator? But I am
too polite, or reticent, to have bothered them.
In Canada we had plenty
of advance warning of these problems. I remember that the highly esteemed
anthropologist and archaeologist Professor Bruce Trigger, gave a lecture on Archaeology and the Future around 1985
in which he classified the most recent archaeological era as one in which
technology is running out of control of the human beings who have invented it,
and getting it under control was going to be the number one problem for society
in the coming generations.
He suggested we do not
have the tools needed to carry out this task, that the nation state is too
limited in scope, and broader planning would be needed involving world-wide collaboration
on over-arching problems that were presently beyond solution.
Later, he wrote s book
called Sociocultural Evolution, a
concept that had fallen into disrepute because for many decades it had been
used to propagate racist ideas. Trigger’s background freed him of any such
suspicion, his master work Children of
Aataentsic, a history of the Huron people until 1660, probably one of the
greatest books ever written by a Canadian, having established his belief that
different societies might be at different stages of development, but that does
not mean one is superior to the other. In fact, he argued that the Huron
society was quite sophisticated, conducted embassies and contacts with
surrounding peoples and in addition ran a huge trading network that covered the
eastern seaboard. It was the proselytizing of the Jesuits, bringing a new
guilt-ridden religion, that caused so much confusion among the Huron that when
attacked in 1640 by the Iroquois --- only twenty years after the arrival among
them of the Jesuits --- they collapsed and disbursed across the continent.
In this book Trigger attacked
the faith right-wing economists have in the invisible hand of the free market,
since, he said, there is no force out there to ensure that everything will turn
out all right in the end. We have to be collectively responsible for our own
future.
"Technology is
morally neutral," writes Trigger. "It's what you do with it that
counts. Technology can help cure diseases and it can lead to weapons of mass
destruction. Thousands of years ago, if somebody built a better spear, the
implications weren't that large. We can't afford to make mistakes anymore --
the technologies today are just too powerful. Look at Chernobyl -- that
affected thousands of lives.”
I got to know Bruce
Trigger quite well after an article I wrote about Children of Aataentsic managed to get the book re-published and
back into bookshops. I was in awe of his intellectual power: his books normally
contained at least 800 references and he gave every evidence of having read them
all. For me, he was the very image of the scholar, the man of knowledge. He
wrote more than 20 books, including several major works, he took up the
struggle for the indigenous people on many issues, and before he died he was recognized
in the archaeological profession as the world’s greatest expert on the history
of archaeology. After studying in Yale university, the world was his oyster,
but against the advice of his American colleagues, he took a position at McGill
university, where he stayed until his death in 2006.
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