Ponder100

The Overton Window is one of my go-to resources whenever I end up in hardcore debates about something political or social. It encourages moderation, diversity of views, commonsense, and the avoidance of extremes.

From economics to philosophy to theology, questions of self-interest take high priority. In what follows, I propose a revamp of the taxonomy.

Back in 1970, Milton Friedman wrote of the responsibility of business to maximize profits for shareholders (stockholders, “owners”) — vs. thinking of businesses as social organizations that must consider a whole range of stakeholders (not stockholders) including customers, employees, neighbors, the local environment, and so on.

The following is the opening gambit of a recent book by Dana Villa on political education.

It is not a matter of indifference that the minds of the people be enlightened.

~ Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws

For the last week and more I’ve been pondering the following passage from an essay by Mortimer Adler, in which he’s arguing for the unprecedented problem of education in contemporary society.

You might know him from this guide, or from his defense of liberal education at the University of Chicago (my alma mater), or from his classic work on literary criticism. A couple days ago I re-discovered Wayne C. Booth’s The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction on a bottom bookshelf. The book is an English professor and literary critic’s investigation of the problem of ethical criticism. Should there even be such a thing?

What do saints and warlords have in common, according to Graeber and Wengrow in Dawn of Everything? And how come we don’t “see” them in history?

Chapter 10 in Dawn of Everything presents Graeber and Wengrow’s theory of states. They assert three characteristics, in different combinations, that best describe various prehistoric cultures:

1) sovereignty, or violent power, e.g. of a king;

2) bureaucracy, involving special record-keeping or (possibly esoteric) knowledge;

3) charismatic or heroic leadership, in a competitive field.

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to solve problems of curriculum and education — what to teach (learn), how, and why?

Particularly for autodidacts who must craft an educational journey beyond formal schooling, how might they organize their studies and materials?

Here’s the proposed scheme.

I’ve spent the last week getting back into David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything. It’s challenging to summarize such a complex project, but basically they are presenting a re-reading of archaeological and anthropological evidence to re-write an overly simplified (and politically stultifying, they think) version of human pre-history.