Belated April Fool’s Day Post: The Virtue of Silliness

Several years ago I had the opportunity to see a wonderful thoughtful April Fool’s Day sermon by one of my favorite ministers (Rev. Bill Breeden ), on the values of change and surprise and leaving one’s comfortable ruts. In 2007 I was asked to give an April Fool’s day sermon and I imitated several of Rev. Breeden’s playful tricks. Most of that sermon was on a variety of roles that humor plays in religion, and isn’t directly relevant here on this blog. I talked about jokes about religions, and joke religions; about using humors stories in wisdom traditions, like Zen teaching or Mullah Nasruddin jokes, about Buddhist use of humor to deflate egos, of ancient Greek use of humor for social commentary, or Medieval Christmas celebrations of a feast of fools, to help rebalance social relations in the community for the coming year, about Discordeans and Sub-Genii, and Pastafarians. Humor has a lot of important roles in religion, but that isn’t really our topic today. But the end of that sermon was on the transcendent value of silliness in dark times, and that is very relevant to this blog.

Before I get to an excerpt of my writing on silliness, I need to explain a little about Krazy Kat. Krazy Kat was the greatest comic strip of all time, or at least the greatest comic strip in English. I was written and drawn by George Harriman in the US from 1913 to 1944. Its hard to understand for someone from my generation who grew up with the dying leftovers of the comic strip genre, but newspaper comic strips were full on literary art at one point, cutting edge venues of populism and artistic exploration, and genuine cultural commentary. And Harriman was the best of the best. Dali latter admitting that many of the key ideas of Surrealism came from Harriman’s comics, and that the European painters felt that they were hustling to keep up. The best writers and poets of the day swooned over Harriman’s work, we’ll read a bit of E.E. Cummings commentary in a minute. The style of Krazy Kat is a proto-surrealism, with a constantly changing background, numerous use of unconventional page layouts, and lots of whimsy. The dialogue is often in a very thick argot ("A fowl konspirissy — is it pussible?"), but is also often is poetry or near poetry. (“Agathla, centuries aslumber, shivers in its sleep with splenetic splendor, and spreads abroad a seismic spasm with the supreme suavity of a vagabond volcano.”) The “plot” is achingly simple yet bizarre. There are 3 characters, Krazy Kat, whose gender is kept carefully undeclared, Ignatz the Mouse, who is constantly throwing bricks at Krazy or otherwise acting up and disrupting things, and Officer Pupp (a dog) who is constantly trying to arrest Ignatz for law-breaking. But here is the Krazy thing. Krazy Kat is full-on head over heels in love with Ignatz, and refuses to accept the brick throwing as violence. Krazy just thinks that the bricks are Ignatz’s way of showing Krazy that Ignatz loves Krazy right back. So he/she just accepts the bricks, interpreting them as an expression of love. This uhm, love triangle, plays out over and over again in Sunday comics for 30 years, set against the painted desert of Coconino, county Arizona, where the 3 live. Ignatz and Pupp constantly re-enact the cops and robbers struggle, but Krazy just turns every act of violence into an act of love by the alchemy of silliness. And in this bit of silliness is a profound philosophy. E.E. Cummings puts it like this

“The Sensical law of this world is might makes right, the nonsensical law of our heroine [Krazy Kat] is that love conquers all. … But if our hero and our villain don’t and can’t understand our heroine, each of them can and each of them does misunderstand her differently. To our softheaded altruist she is the adorably helpless incarnation of saintliness. To our hardheaded egoist, she is the puzzlingly indestructible embodiment of idiocy. The benevolent overdog sees her as an inspired weakling. The malevolent undermouse views her as born target. Meanwhile Krazy Kat, through this double misunderstanding fulfills her joyous destiny. ”

E.E. Cummings “A Forward to Krazy” in Krazy Kat, 1946.

Alright with that introduction, we are ready for my comments on silliness.

* * *

… So religions have used silliness all across the world, for a variety of legitimate religious and spiritual purposes; as comedy relief, to helping us to be wise, or humble, or remain in right relation with our neighbors. But silliness has never been very popular with religions. Look through lists of religious virtues, and you may find obedience, justice, generosity, compassion, courage, and so on. But you will not find silliness. The Protestant Reformers of the 17th century were pretty staunchly opposed to silliness, for example. The British Puritans banned "games, sports, plays [and] comedies" because they didn't agree with "Christian silence, gravity and sobriety." That is they weren’t serious enough. In Buddhism, lay people are allowed to be silly, but one of the vows of monks and nuns is to give up frivolous talk, ie anything that isn’t aimed at bringing people to enlightenment. Even religions that tolerate silliness well rarely consider it a virtue. Our own hymnal contains beautiful songs and words in praise of peace, and justice, and freedom, and reason, and compassion, and work, of learning, of valuing cultures around the world, of respecting nature, of awe and the spirit of worship. But it contains no praise for silliness. Here we are not an anomaly but, are clearly in the norm.

This is a mistake. The most important spiritual use of silliness is one I haven’t mentioned yet, and one that has become clearer during the 20th century. Silliness is a virtue, and virtue whose time has come.

The 20th century revaluing of silliness has a lot to do with the literary tradition of Absurdism. Absurdism has roots in Kierkegaard’s religious thought, and the brilliance of Krazy Kat, and some other Existentialists, but really comes into its own in the hands of Humanist writers reacting to the horrors of WWII. Here is a story I read somewhere, I can’t find it now, but I think it was in the writing of Polish Nobel Prize Winner Czeslaw Milosz, somewhere. There was a joke shop prior to WWII. It was the kind of place that sold whoopee cushions, and electric handbuzzers. Dribble glasses, fake tits, and bawdy postcards. A sort of Polish Spencer’s gifts. One of their “novelty” products was a pink plastic artificial foreskin, so that Jews could pretend to be gentiles in sex play. And yet WWII was such a bizarre, absurd, silly-yet-deadly-serious conflict, that possession of pink plastic artificial foreskin became all at once a matter of life and death, instead of a casual joke. How do we humans, us survivors, cope with the kind of silly world where artificial pink plastic foreskins are a matter of life and death? We laugh. The world is broken, it is crazy, it is terrible and yet it is silly beyond belief. Silliness is the key to coping with an insane world. This is a theme explored again and again by the Absurdists. It is the heart of Joseph Keller’s Catch-22. It is the heart of Vonnegut’s made-up religion Bokonism, in the novel Cat’s Cradle. It is the recurring theme of the fiction of Douglas Adams.

The story of the 20th century is a story of humanity triumphing over nature, or at least warring with it, and cutting itself more and more away from constant contact with nature. American life is a life of culture, of daily interaction with humanly made things far more than it is a life of constant interaction with nature. The natural order and the divine order recede each year further and further from our daily lives, and the cultural order, the political order, the economic order replace them more and more. And this is NOT healthy, not sane, as WWII and the environmental crises since have clearly shown. The world itself has gone insane, and we have the task of daily coping with the insane world we live in. Silliness is most importantly, a method of coping with an insane world.

This is why religions both conservative and progressive have always been very leery of silliness. It is a spiritual competitor to their programs. The conservative spirituality bids us to be in the world but not of it, and to focus our hopes on the more perfect world that is to come. The progressive spirituality asks us to seriously and earnestly work to heal the world to fix its problems and bring it back to sanity. But silly spirituality bids us to laugh at the insanity of the world and try to enjoy the world despite its manifest brokenness.

Is a deep spiritual silliness then opposed to the social justice values that Unitarian-Univeralists hold dear? Well, yes it is in an important sense, but I want to be very clear about the issue. Pure silliness without any admixture of seriousness, is an uncaring frivolity that is blind to the world around it, and unconcerned with its problems. But not all silliness needs to be pure. Pure seriousness is just as bad, it is a lead weight dragging us down into an abyss of darkness.

The Indigo Girls in their song “Closer to Fine” sing that “Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable, and lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.” If your spirituality is based around trying to heal our insane world, you will be dragged down into the darkness with its insatiable hunger! No amount of serious work or serious progress will even be enough. No matter how good you are you will never be good enough. The man who seriously hungers for riches will never be rich enough. The earnest progressive do-gooder will never do enough good. No matter how many of the world’s problems you succeed in solving there will be more. Gandhi died believing himself a miserable failure, because he had been unable to prevent the partition of India and Pakistan; we see his many amazing successes, he saw his terrible failures.

The only viable spirituality for the 21st century, is a mixture of seriousness and silliness which values and respects both. It is Ok to work to mend the world, as long as one also takes silly delight in the many humorous bizarre facets of its brokenness. Work cannot be healthy with out play, and this is as true of religious or spiritual work as any other kind. Silliness is a lightness of spirit, a call that is hard to hear, especially in times of serious trouble. Our serious side bids us to work earnestly at mending the troubles of the world, our silly side opposes just this impulse and tells us instead to delight in this world despite its troubles. Serious Offissa Pupp tries to stop Ignatz Mouse from throwing his brick at Krazy Kat. Silly Krazy Kat tries to take delight in having Ignatz the Mouse throwing a brick at her. Serious Offissa Pupp tries to use his might, in the best way he can. Silly Krazy Kat tries to use her love to transform the situation. Progressive Seriousness says might, used rightly, makes right, Progressive Silliness says love conquers all. Seriousness calls us to our power; Silliness calls us to our joy.

We live in an insane, broken world, in a time of great spiritual darkness. The traditional spiritual remedy for spiritual darkness has been enlightenment. But the language of light and dark suggest another natural remedy for spiritual darkness. We can treat it instead with de-light. I wear a lot of black, and have been known to listen to my fair share of goth music. And in many ways this is the heart of the goth message. Dwell in the dark places, and do you best to find beauty there, to find delight. Silliness expresses the same basic spiritual message, in a quite different artistic style. Do you best to take delight, and keep your spirit light, despite the gathering darkness around you. And that is my April Fool’s day message to you, in all its earnest pompousness, repeating the jokes of others instead of making my own. Value silliness as a virtue. It helps us to be wise, and humble, and in right relation with each other, and most importantly helps us to keep out spirits light in a dark world, despite the many bricks that the world throws at us.

Inequality and Underconsumption

Here's a nice quote from Palagummi Sainaith's lecture "The Age of Inequality"

"For two decades now the United Nations Development Program, and other organs of the United Nations have been telling us that an additional expenditure of 60 to 80 billion dollars a year will help the human race sort out all the basic problems of hunger, health, sanitation, education, literacy, and issues like that... and it has never happened, because governments have told us "There's no money. There's just no money. We can't do it. Where's the money going to come from?" But when crisis struck The Suits in Wall Street, governments figured out that they could raise one and a half trillion dollars in seven days."
...
"Every great Depression, every economic catastrophe, every major economic collapse in history has been preceded by years of absolutely unsustainable levels of inequality."

Now the question of what causes Depressions is a complex and thorny one. Keynesians have several possible theories (Goodwin's profit-wage oscillation model, Minski's credit-interest rate oscillation cycle, etc.) The "real business cycle" model of Kynland and Prescott imagines fluctuations mostly resulting from after effects of technological changes. Older economists often blamed "external" influences like changes in legal frameworks, warfare, labor union activity, etc. Kalecki even argues for a political business cycle theory, that political interference in the business world has a cyclic effect. The Austrian school of economics still holds that all business cycle effects are results of government interference in money supply and interest rates, and Friedman certainly made that line popular among American and British economists too. Marx thought that periodic depressions were a natural part of capitalism, caused by the nature of capitalism itself, but if you ask him exactly why, he gets cagey and has 3 main theories each of which he explores a little but he never really decides which if any are the underlying cause of depressions, or if perhaps all three are: the underconsumption problem, the full employment profit squeeze, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Now I'm a big fan of Strauss-Howe theory, which sees generational dynamics causing 80-100 year cycles in politics and culture. This in turn could easily be an underlying cause of the business cycle of periodic major depressions, ala real business cycles, or other externalist accounts. Or then again, the Strauss-Howe cycles could simply be correlative rather than causative. Or perhaps changes in generational attitude lead to changes in governmental attitudes towards interest rates, money supply and interventionism, which leads to the depressions via the Austrian picture. Even if Strauss and Howe are right, it doesn't really answer this particular question. And of course, I strongly oppose single etiology theories so probably different depressions are caused in different ways and most depressions have many different causal factors.

But today I want to explore the "underconsumption" hypothesis a little more. Marx toys with it, but he is neither the first nor the last to do so, Malthus had already discussed the issue back in 1820, and Foster and Catchings had fairly non-Marxian interpretations of it in the 1920s pre-saging some of Keynes' ideas. The basic "underconsumption" argument goes like this. Suppose that the capitalists are successful in pushing the wages of labor down and the productivity of labor up. This will increase the rate of surplus value and lead to wealthier capitalists. However, eventually the workers dependent on wages will not be able to afford to buy as much, and the aggregate demand (demand in the sense of what can actually be afforded) will go down, leading to a recession or depression. If the upper class are capitalists, and are too successful at impoverishing the rest, then everyone else won't be able to afford to buy the things the capitalist's companies produce, and slowdowns will occur. Too much economic inequality is itself bad for a capitalist economy.

Now this line of thought gets a lot of criticism. Keynes, famously points out that consumer demand is not the only factor in aggregate demand and that it is possible that even though consumer demand is declining, you can prevent a recession by increasing some other part of aggregate demand enough to counter balance it (the 3 main other parts being fixed investment, government spending, and exports net of imports). That's part of the whole rationale for government "stimulus" spending when a recession is looming. But, there are 2 problems with applying this reply to today's situation. First, unless you can permanently increase government spending (as FDR did), or fixed investment, or the export-import balance, that is a temporary solution, you STILL need to get consumer spending back up, and that often requires increasing real wages, and actually clawing some of the wealth back from the wealthiest to the put it in the hands of the consumers. Consider the advice of Simon Johnson, who worked for years at the IMF, and wrote "The Quiet Coup" in the May 2009 issue of the Atlantic. He argues that emerging economies get into trouble because they borrow too much, and then there are deep allainces between the elites of the political class, and elites of the economic class. As things get bad, you get "public-private partnerships" become "crony capitalism" and things get worse until the only way out is to "squeeze the Oligarchs."

The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

So even for a Keynesian, stimulus can't lead to real recovery from a severe recession or a depression, unless you can find the political will to squeeze the oligarchs enough to reverse the economic inequality that led to the collapse in consumer demand in the first place. But, second notice that to even soften the blow of the recession/depression, for a Keynesian, you have to have increases in trade balance, government spending or fixed investment that are enough to counter-balance the decrease in consumer spending. But right now, fixed investment sure isn't increasing much, and the US isn't repairing its trade balance issues much (nor are most other places in the world) and government spending increases are real, but nothing on the order of magnitude of the decreases in consumer wealth or consumer spending. Keynesianism isn't getting us out of the underconsumption problem this time, if indeed it ever really works.

What about Marxian critiques of underconsumption? Marx has 2 main objections. First, the underconsumption problem is often put in ways that make it a pure redundancy, an analytic truth rather than an empirical fact about economies. If we say the economy is declining because people are buying less; the danger is we may have said the same thing twice in 2 different ways, rather than saying one thing which explained another thing. Fair enough, so we need to phrase things in ways that make the inequality issue clearer. The economy is going down, because non-ultra-wealthy people are so much poorer than ultra-wealthy people that they no longer feel they can afford to buy as much, and are cutting back. If we respond to this situation by replying "well then get banks lending again so that non-ultra-wealthy people will trick themselves into feeling wealthy than they really are and buy things they can't really afford some more" we are either evil bastards, or have missed the point of the underconsumption problem. Even if we could get the banks lending again, it would only delay the issue a little. What the underconsumption problem really hypothesizes is that excessive economic inequality is decreasing aggregate demand.

Marx's second criticism is also interesting

When people attempt to give this redundancy an appearance of some deeper meaning by saying that the working class does not receive enough of its own product and that the evil would be dispelled immediately if it received a greater share,i.e., if its wages were increased, all one can say is that crises are invariably preceded by periods in which wages in general rise and the working class receives a relatively greater share of the annual product intended for consumption. From the standpoint of these valiant upholders of 'plain common sense,' such periods should prevent the coming of crises. It would appear, therefore, that capitalist production includes conditions which are independent of good will or bad will. . . " [in Das Kapital vol II, quoted by Franz Mehring in his biography of Karl Marx, p. 404 of the 1935 Covici, Friede edition, tr. Edward Fitzgerald]

Now I don't know if Marx is right "that crises are invariably preceded by periods in which wages in general rise and the working class receives a relatively greater share of the annual product intended for consumption" at the time when he wrote Das Kapital in 1893 (although I doubt it). But that sure isn't true of 20th century financial crises, and it sure isn't true of THIS ONE. Quite to the contrary, real wages have been stagnating, and inequality has been increasing, for decades. And the effect is much clearer when we look at the global picture of inequality, even though it also hold for looking at the recent history of 1st world workers and capitalists. Marx is just wrong.

Another insight that the underconsumption hypothesis can give us on depressions/recessions, is that over-production is the flip side of the underconsumption problem. In a sense, the current global problem is that Germany, China, and Japan all want to keep producing the things they are producing, even though the market signals are telling them to switch to different products. An easier way to see this is to look at Iceland's story. There was a really insightful article on what happened to Iceland in surprising mainstream women's magazine last month, and I can't remember the reference. But the journalist kept digging and eventually suggested that the root of the problem lay in the success of the reforms of Icelands fishing market in the 70s. For centuries Iceland had focused on fishing, and fishing has long been a very non-lucrative field. Then in the 70's Iceland tried a novel new way of regulating fishing, that was well designed to increase profits. And it worked, Iceland became fairly wealthy. And they invested the wealth largely in education. People sent their kids to school, and there was an explosion of highly educated Icelanders. And these Icelanders by and large didn't want to go into fishing, and their parent's agreed don't become a fisherman if you can go on to bigger and better things. But there were all these highly educated Icelanders without many bigger and better things to do or produce. Some turned to the arts, and we got Bjork. But eventually they discovered that high finance was another good way for educated people to spend their time. Iceland had all this excess productive capacity, and it didn't really want to go into more fishing, so it wound up producing complex and ultimately risky and poorly understood financial products. But in a sense, China and Germany have the same problem. All this excess productive capacity looking for something to do that will be worth doing. What is China going to say? Sorry we have enough factories to fulfill world demand go back to your villages and farm some more? It could. But there'd be grumbling, and it doesn't really want to. The American consumer doesn't really want to cut back consumption, even though they know they are over-extended and probably ought to, but equally the German or Chinese producer doesn't really want to cut back production (and thus switch to a crappier job) even though they also know that they ought to. One function of economic crisis is to force changes in consumption and production, despite our resistance to them. But this is true both directions.

I'm not saying that unsustainable levels of economic inequality are a key factor in all recessions and depressions (although Sainaith does), or that unsustainable levels of inequality are the only important factor in this one (it's not). But I do think that along with many other unsustainable practices, our economy has led to unsustainable levels of economic inequality, and these have led to decreases in aggregate demand that Keynesian strategies have not been able to compensate for. I doubt we'll ever get back to a real growth economy, but I also hold that we will not be able to stabilize or move forward until inequality drops to managable levels via a process of "squeezing the oligarchs." If this can be done via the current political system, so be it, if the current crop of politicians cannot find the courage to squeeze the oligarchs (who many of them also depend on and are friends with) in ways that genuinely lead to decreases in economic inequality, then eventually anger will boil over into extra-legal forms of squeezing the oligarchs and things will get even uglier. And economic inequality has 2 faces, the oligarchs are a lot richer than you and I, but you and I are a lot richer than most 3rd worlders. Part of the solution is going to have to be toppling financial racketeers who pretend to be titans (see Max Keiser's brilliant article "Let Them Have Stained carpets, Obama's Marie Antoinette Moment"), but part of the solution is also going to have to be regular 1st worlders living a lot more like 3rd worlders than we do now. And if the 3rd worlders cannot squeeze the 1st worlders any other way, then they will squeeze us with their dying bodies. You can only shoot so many starving desperate people before you start to question the virtue of your own leaders, and the justice of your own priveleges. I don't forsee a world of equality emerging, but given my poor understanding of economics, it looks to me as if there will have to emerge more equality than there is today, like it or not, and that for most of my readers that will feel like being squeezed down.

Thinking about the Whole Education System

Which Australian 80s band performed “Who Can it Be Now?” and “Down Under” (Oh! do you come from the land down under (oh yeah yeah), where women glow and men plunder …)? Ok, Which US President managed to get the first federal progressive tax passed, pushed for the creation of a “League of Nations” and won the Nobel Peace Prize for the creation of the League of Nations in 1919, even though the Senate blocked the US from joining it?
How many of you knew the answer to the first question, but not the second? America has an extremely effective education system, but the system is much broader than simply what you learn in school, indeed schooling is an comparatively minor part of the overall system. Our system excels at aiding Americans in learning pop cultural information, and in developing strong and complex consumer preferences, but is sometimes lackluster at teaching the ability to enjoy poetry, or to make wise investment decisions. Sharon Astyk has, as usual, a good piece on our education system on her blog, but I wanted to respond with a much longer meditation. I believe that we need to see the whole scope of the education-system, especially how it pervades culture beyond formal schooling; we need to think about why some topics are promoted more heavily or effectively than others; we need to think about why some topics are learned more effectively than others when curriculums are in conflict; and lastly we need to think about what we can do.

The Whole Education System
Adults continue to learn new things throughout their life even though they are no longer in school. One common new thing we learn is the “news,” although we learn facts about the entertainments we enjoy, the names and faces of people we have newly met, and occasionally even new job skills. Children learn things outside of school, at least as much and probably more often as they learn things in school. Humans are constantly learning, but we don’t necessarily learn all different topics at an equal rate. Our own talents and interests are part of why we learn some things more thoroughly than other things, but our culture and education-system as a whole are part of the story too. Too often we think of “education-system” as a euphemism for “schooling,” but even in the US which has a lot of schooling comparatively speaking, only about 20% of the population is in school at any given point, and even for them schooling is probably at most ½ of their total education, although perhaps we do learn more while young and working on learning than later on, so I’d estimate that schooling (public schooling, private schooling, home schooling, and higher education) all together is probably only about 10%-15% of our overall education system. Not trivial, but not exactly central either.
The biggest chunk of our education system is the mainstream media and its curriculum of pop culture, TV, Radio, Movies, pop music, magazines, billboards, etc. Advertising is an especially important part of this section of the education system, but non-advertising content is pretty relevant too. The advertising curriculum focuses on getting to consumers to want or even feel that they need certain products, while the non-advertising content caters to entertaining the consumers. Often an attempt is made to blend other goals besides entertainment in with the entertainment, creating infotainment, edutainment, advertainment, etc. In the US, people watch an average of 4 hours of TV a day alone, (and sleep for another 8 hours) so estimating TV at about 25% of the total US education-system is probably about right. If we add in also movies, radio, magazines, newspapers, other forms of advertising, and mainstream media web sites with advertising, we are probably in the 50% range.
Third, we learn by direct observation of the people around us. By meeting them, talking with them, often imitating them. The brilliant educational psychologist Albert Bandura hammered this point home in many ways during his work over the past several decades, and the school of thought he created is typically called Social Cognitive theory, now. Children watch what adults do, they watch what other kids do and whether they get rewarded or punished for it. They chart out possibilities and options by looking at the people around them (or those they are exposed to via the media), in a process we call observational learning. Adults do this too, although we are typically already more set in our ways. Another form of social learning that adults habitually engage in is the opinion-leader effect. On a topic that one perceives as non-controversial one will form an opinion based largely on their media exposure. On a topic that one perceives as controversial, but well within one’s expertise or in an area of particular interest, one will spend the time to sort through the many competing claims and form your own opinion. But on a topic that one perceives as controversial, but not in ones areas of particular expertise or interest, one will seek out a trusted peer who is perceived as being more interested or more expert in the area and chat with them to form an opinion. For example, I’m a philosopher and I form my own opinions on anything I see as related to philosophy, but if I’m trying to decide what new computer to buy, or which blog-provider to put my blog on, I’ll talk with friends and learn what they have to say on the topic before deciding. An “opinion-leader” needs to be perceived as being a peer, and you need to be able to actually interact with them, but they also need to seem especially knowledgeable or passionate about the topic. Again this is a thoroughly social and cognitive form of learning, we are seeking fellow people directly as sources of learning. Peer pressure is another classic social cognitive learning phenomena. Social cognitive learning within the family is central to early development of children prior to school, and is also pretty key during school years, as well. If we add up these various social cognitive learning situations (early childhood learning, peer pressure, observational learning, opinion leadership, networking, informal mentoring, etc.) I suspect we have at least 10% of our overall education-system, albeit a particularly unorganized, unsystematic section of the overall system.
Fourth, we often learn things on the job, or via our work. Workplace learning is more organized than just social cognitive learning, (although of course, all of the sections I’ve mentioned interpenetrate quite a bit). Most jobs have a pretty high repetition rate, one is doing the same sorts of tasks over and over and over. But there is usually some degree of variation and learning involved as well. Work place learning, often includes occasional seminars or training exercises of various kinds, especially at the beginning, or when major changes are about to take place. Jobs are not focused on learning the way that schooling is, but we spend a lot of time on jobs, and there are a lot more people in work than in schools. I think it is probably reasonable to see working life as 10-20% of our education-system.
Fifth, we have issues of leisure life, high culture, and social capital. Now a lot of our leisure activities revolve around mainstream media, or shopping both of which I’ve already mentioned. But what about a bowling league, or boy scouts, or religious education, or visiting museums? I think there are 3 distinct but related things to talk about here. First, not all of culture has been successfully captured by the mainstream media. There is “highbrow” culture that doesn’t really fit in it, and counter-cultures that are actively trying to maintain some distance from it. Museums, symphonies, theatre, and poetry slams are all contexts where learning sometimes takes place, but so are underground newspapers, local bands in bars, pagan festivals, or Amish barnraisings. Secondly, culture contexts outside of the mainstream media, often revolve around small local organizations, of like-minded folk. Bowling leagues, amateur astronomy clubs, churches, a band’s fan club, etc. Sociologists talk about these in terms of “Social Capital” networks of social relationships that provide frameworks for certain kinds of social action. I, for example, learned a LOT from the Boy Scouts while I was growing up, even though most of my “teachers” were volunteers without particular expertise in what they were teaching. Small, organized groups can provide learning situations which are quite a bit richer than unstructured peer groups, or direct one on one relationships, precisely because of the organization or social capital involved. Small organized groups like this were once a far more prominent part of American life (and education) than they are now, but they are still fairly common, and crop up in lots of different ways. Often, culture and social capital are mixed together. My church, for example, is a cultural context at least as much as a hobby, but one that is run mostly by volunteers (with a few professionals) in ways very in line with the social capital model, and local sports leagues are culture as well as small-scale organizations. The third big factor here is the notion of self-directed leisure. Unlike work or school, participation in these kinds of groups is largely voluntary and thus directly intrinsically motivated (more on that later). Now both for my wife and I, this kind of learning through groups that we have done volunteer work for, or interacted with on a leisure basis has been at least as important as our schooling, but I’m not convinced we’re typical and I can’t find any statistics to use to estimate the overall impact of this style of learning, so I’d guess that it probably collectively less than 10% of the US’s overall education system.
Sixth, I think it does occasionally happen that people engage in self-teaching or directed research. Sometimes we go to a library and try to look up information we want, rather than going to a place where someone will teach us something. Sometimes we experiment with various ways of doing things until we find one we like. Libraries, Wikipedia, and basement workshops are part of our education-system too, even though they don’t really function much like the first 5 I’ve mentioned. My guess is that this is the least significant of the sectors I’ve discussed at the moment, maybe only 1-2% (meaning I have maybe 10% left over for error in estimation, or sectors I haven’t thought of). But self-directed education is also quite cheap, and has a lot of potential for the future.
In a sense, what we have are multiple curricula, math class teaches us one set of things, boy scouts another, and hip-hop music a third. Sometimes the curricula, are designed to be coordinated or work together, sometimes they are disparate but not really conflicting, but sometimes they are in more direct conflict. Boy Scouts teaches one set of values, and some Hip Hop music is teaching a very different set of values. Home economics class teaches us thrifty food prep behaviors, and food advertising teaches us to spend as much as possible to make food prep easier. When curricula directly conflict, it is often because there are conflicting agendas underwriting the education system. And these conflicting agendas mean that in practice the task of teaching, and the task of unteaching or anti-teaching are usually united, and teaching is often persuasion by hidden means.

E-ducation and De-ducation
The food advertiser wants to teach you to use pre-packaged foods as short cuts wherever possible, the cooking instructor wants to teach you to make from scratch wherever possible. Some teaching merely tries to convey facts, but usually you are trying to instill values, habits, and styles of thought as well, and that means that you habitually need to try to undo existing habits, values, or styles of thought. Education, comes from the Latin e-duco to lead out or lead upward, to build up or raise, often specifically to raise a child. The Latin has an antonym, de-duco, to lead downward, to subtract or reduce, to lead away or draw away, as a distraction leads away from the real issue. We do sometimes talk of deduction (where premises “lead down” to a conclusion under them), but we don’t usually use it as an antonym for education. So let mean coin the term “deducation” for the process of leading someone away from a particular pieces of knowledge, skill, value, or character trait, just as education is the process of leading someone towards a particular piece of knowledge, value, skill or character trait. Now deducation is not always a bad thing, breaking a bad habit counts. But deducation does often have fairly horrible motivations, the law forbidding teaching literacy to slaves in the old South were deducation policies, for example. Other cases are trickier, many facts are kept secret even in peacetime as matters of national security, and various tricks are used to prevent them from being known, and sometimes this is clearly defensible, and sometimes it is clearly immoral, and sometimes reasonable people disagree.
Our education-system frequently involves deducation as well, and often for reasons that are not entirely commendable. Governments want to keep some things secret, but they also want to be able to spin things that they cannot keep entirely secret, and the boundaries between spin and outright propaganda via conventional mainstream news outlets gets pretty shaky. Businesses likewise frequently wish to shape public discourse in ways that will prevent certain options from being considered or portray positions hostile to theirs in an inferior light. Advertisers want us to desire their products, but they often wish us to not think about certain downsides of the products as well. American’s die because of poor diet hundreds of times more often than they die because of terrorism, but food advertisers have every incentive to prevent us from realizing this, and are skilled at leading people away from serious contemplation of the dangers of poor diet. The creation of doubt and anti-knowledge as a PR technique (often called denialism) was pioneered by cigarette companies who fought a multi-decade battle against the fact that cigarettes are deadly, but has been applied to many other fields since. Our education system is used, and used effectively for PR, propaganda, to tranquilize legitimate fears, and to channel habits, and patterns of thinking into ways that are convenient for those with power over the education system.
And this happens at levels below government and corporate policy as well, and is often to some extent unconscious. For example, a profession earns its wage, by selling its skills. But the monetary value of those skills depends on exactly how rare they are. Thus, in order to keep a profession well paying, and thus high class, and well “professional” you have to limit how many people in the society have access to the skills. Lawyers command good pay BECAUSE legal skills are not particularly common. So any organization of lawyers (and lawyers are well-organized) has a strong incentive to prevent legal skills from being widely taught. There is a reason we teach very little law in public schools. Lawyer have a keen interest in deducation, and really most professions do even if they aren’t very upfront about it. Adam Smith has some interesting and counter-intuitive insights into the economics of education and apprenticeship for example (Wealth of Nation Book1 chap x part II, and Book V chap I part III).
But how does one go about preventing people from learning something? What are the best techniques for deducation? Well, you can simply suppress or forbid knowledge, as for example, our nuclear launch codes are kept tightly secret and any real attempt to inquire into them has terrible consequences. But suppression is a bad tactic in most cases. It makes the target tempting, it clearly shows the value of the knowledge being suppressed, it piques curiosity and motivates us. What is usually more effective, especially if the knowledge is not exactly dangerous, but merely must not become widespread, is to make the knowledge available, but very inconvenient to get. Put institutional barriers in the way of the knowledge or skill, forms, permissions, hoops to jump through. Make it a pain in the ass to learn the skill unless you do so through the carefully controlled channels. Anyone can learn the legal profession, but if you try to do it outside of a law school it takes an awful lot of work. Another common technique for preventing knowledge from becoming widespread is jargon, structure the knowledge so that the uninitiated will have difficulty understanding it even if they do happen to find it. But by far the best technique for preventing people from learning a particular skill, habit, or piece of knowledge is misdirection, get them to learn something else instead. Humans are wired to learn. We love learning, and we learn a lot all during our lives. No matter how bad your education system is, people will learn. But what will they learn? It is sadly easy to direct our learning away from a particular topic by directing it towards a different topic.
And this is the dark secret of entertainment. Americans are exposed to a lot of entertainment largely to prevent us from learning other things that might threaten the interests of the folk who have power over the education system. If we learned too much history, or politics, or economics, or even just cooking skills or legal skills, things would be quite different.

Competing Curricula
So our education system is characterized by disparate and often competing curricula, where different segments of the system are trying to teach children and adults disparate and often directly conflicting things. Should my values be shaped by my church or by heavy metal music? Or perhaps by the church down the road? Should I spend my time working on math or listening to pop songs? Should I store food, or buy as I go?
When people decry the problems of the education system, they usually mean to point out the problems with the schooling system, but the main problem that the schooling system has is that it can’t really compete with the mainstream media and pop culture. Our children are learning fine, they are just learning the curriculum promoted by the mainstream media corporations, far better than the curriculum promoted by public schools.
Consider the conflict between the math problem and the pop song. Which is more interesting? Which is more relevant to the life of the student? Which is better promoted? Which is taught in ways that better conform to our current best theories about educational psychology? I’m a mathematician so I like math, but even I think that pop songs are usually more interesting than math problems. Further, we focus on boring math problems, because those are the ones that are easiest to test over, and teachers incentives are tied to testing far more than to other areas of teaching. The math skill may eventually be useful to the life of the student (and even there we do a bad job, focusing a lot of math skills that were relevant to the life of the 19th century), but the pop song is relevant right now. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and PBS and a few other organizations may occasionally try to promote mathematics as a topic, but not nearly as extensively or expertly as the music industry promotes itself. Indeed, what are the primary motivations for listening to a pop song or doing a math problem. We listen to pop songs for their OWN sake, but we do math problems to get a grade and perhaps a diploma or good job someday. Everything we know about the psychology of learning tells us that intrinsic motivations (doing something for its own sake) are far more powerful and long lasting, than extrinsic motivations (doing something for so other reward). External rewards teach students that a subject is boring, and that they must be rewarded for the effort of doing it, they help motivation a lot over the short run, but absolutely destroy it over medium and long runs. The pop song probably talks about sex, and relationships, and things that the student actually cares about, but the math problem is probably divorced from anything that might be controversial. It is not JUST that pop culture is much better funded and more powerful, pop culture is frequently simply doing a better job of teaching than schooling is.
But the advantages are not all on the pop culture side. Schooling involves a large segment of a child’s time, and frequently can make good use of peer pressure. More importantly, many teachers manifestly care about the student, whereas even student can often tell that pop culture is trying to sell something to them and manipulate them. Some segments of schooling are things that the students can see the relevance of to their own lives. But many chunks of schooling have only dubious relevance, and far worse, schooling systematically transforms intrinsic motivations into extrinsic motivations, thereby killing most student’s love of the subject matters, and the motivation of all but the most ambitious students.

So what should we do?
First, simply be aware that an education system is more than just a schooling system. Think of education as something that happens over a whole life, and in many aspects of life outside of schooling. Think of schooling as one part of a broader whole. This helps to see that there are many, many possible places to make improvements beyond just school policies.
Second, be able to adopt a critical thinking “mental posture.” Some thinkers like to call this a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The idea is to stop and think, and in thinking try to look at the big picture and to identify the agendas of the various factions involved in the picture. If you see an ad, stop and think, and try to place the ad in a broader context, and try to identify the agendas and techniques of the ad. If your teacher lectures at you, stop and think about the content, try to place it in its broader contexts, try to identify the agendas of the teacher and the techniques he or she used. With enough practice this can become almost reflex. It doesn’t have to be an exercise in cynicism, perhaps the message fits in its broader contexts and the agendas in play are one’s you agree with. Criticism can include admiration for one’s goals or techniques as well as identifying worrisome features that might have slipped your notice if you had not taken the extra effort to stop and think. Critical thinking is a form of intellectual self-defense, and helps to prevent you from being manipulated by agents with agendas opposed to your own. There isn’t really very much teaching of critical thinking in our school system (it gets a lot of lip service, but every study ever done on it has found that it gets very little actual teaching), and it is strongly discouraged by the mainstream media. But teaching critical thinking in little chunks is pretty easy to integrate into social learning situations, and even into workplace learning. Ask someone why they think someone else did what they did. Get people to stop and think about the agenda and techniques that others use to advance their agendas.
Third, realize that learning and teaching in amateur contexts still counts. Learn about the things you love, the things you find yourself intrinsically motivated to learn about. Our society values professionalism too much and amateurism too little. There is a place for professionalism, I’m not really trying to insult it as much as say that we have too much and need to back off. Enjoy what you enjoy and let your enthusiasm show in teaching and learning. Our culture is poisoning our education, and our careerism is poisoning our culture so that everything is done for the sake of a career rather than for its own sake or some other sake. Joy is itself transformative of the educational system.
Fourth, we have lost a lot of social capital over the last few decades. Re-build social capital where possible and use these organizations for teaching and learning especially in amateur and non-school contexts. Similarly, seek to be a little extra knowledgeable on the things you care about so that you can act as a good opinion leader for your friends, and seek the educated opinions of your friends on topics that you think they count as good opinion leaders on. Usually it is a mistake to rely on experts, unless you are at least a “half-expert” yourself and can sort through the disagreements between experts adequately. Instead rely on someone you can trust who is at least half-expert and can sort through the issues honestly.
Fifth, think a little about the techniques being used to seduce people away from learning certain topics. It is hard to see your own blind-spots or hang ups, some tricks are used against us precisely because they are likely to work. But occasionally looking at the big picture, and regularly thinking about the context one step up from whatever issue we are working on, helps provide a little protection from misdirection.
Sixth, some techniques just plain work better in education than others. Often we want to tailor the technique to the context, but there are some fair generalities. Involving several senses in learning almost always helps, as does repetition, as does increasing the interactivity of the technique. Tapping into intrinsic motivations always does better in the long run, than tapping into extrinsic ones. I think there are a lot of things we can do besides trying to reform the school system, but trying to reform the school system makes sense too. We put too much emphasis on standardized tests, and this has a lot of negative consequences. Back off on emphasis on standardized testing a little in the school system would help.
Our education system pervades our culture, we cannot put boundaries around it, we certainly cannot confine it do the school system. But that means that improving our educational system is inseparable from improving our culture, and adapting our educational system for the end of growth economics is inseparable from adapting our culture to the end of growth economics. And I think this involves de-emphasizing the great cultural engines of growth economics, mass media, advertising, careers and professionalism, consumption, and social isolation, and re-emphasizing the cultural factors that were more central before growth economics became quite so bloated, social contacts, small organizations, amateurism, enjoyment, and self-directed exploration. Mass media and careerism and advertising are not going to go away, but it is not impossible for them to be taken down a peg or two.