“To become wiser, you don’t just learn: you learn to keep learning in deeper and broader ways. You don’t just expand your knowledge: you expand your capacity to think.”
— Brian McLaren
A few weeks ago, I wrote about externalizing costs as a way of avoiding reality. Modern thinking so frequently has us focusing narrowly, strictly, and without fidelity to the bigger picture. Like deciding to attend one school over another because you like the dorms or struggling with what went wrong with dinner and only care about whether the oven was set to 350 or 375 degrees. It isn’t just that we miss the forest for the trees — it’s that often we seem to be collapsing the very definition of “forest” to a single tree.
We certainly need to examine the health of individual trees to determine the health of the forest. We have three mature ash trees along the road in front of the church which receive regular treatments and inspections because of the plague-like lethality of the emerald ash borer. And yet forests aren’t composed only of ash trees. Nor are all of the world’s pests ash boring beetles.
My own obsession with revealing what we avoid is fundamentally built on my own observation and study. It isn’t a reflection of what any one of my friends does on a daily basis, but a reflection on the common dysfunction of our time. One built into our economic landscape and inherent to the dominant worldview. As Stephen Metcalf describes in his influential essay for the The Guardian:
“Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” had already given us the modern conception of the market: as an autonomous sphere of human activity and therefore, potentially, a valid object of scientific knowledge. But Smith was, until the end of his life, an 18th-century moralist. He thought the market could be justified only in light of individual virtue, and he was anxious that a society governed by nothing but transactional self-interest was no society at all. Neoliberalism is Adam Smith without the anxiety.”
Neoliberalism, the most dominant economic and cultural force of the last half century, is fundamentally built on the principle that free markets can regulate themselves, as if by magic. Contra Adam Smith’s understanding that companies need constraining to keep them moral, neoliberalism is the belief that companies will only be moral. Therefore, we must strip the power of constraint from them so that they can be moral.
This is as laughable as it sounds.
It is like giving an addict unfettered access to cash and assuming they will refrain from using it to buy booze, drugs, or gamble it away. The question isn’t whether they can refrain — it is the insane assumption they must refrain — especially given so much evidence to the contrary.
It isn’t surprising that neoliberalism took off. It was a promise of magical thinking that grossly benefited the wealthy. The shocking part to me is how ingrained this thinking has become, rooting its way into how we relate to our laws, institutions, and communities. Because all of the evidence proves it’s foundational belief is a lie.
Learning to learn
Since March of 2020, as we entered into a global pandemic which forced us all to become researchers and public health professionals, making decisions about safety for ourselves, our neighbors, and our friends and associates, I’ve been dealing with the impact of overwhelm. As someone with undiagnosed anxiety, this has been a matter of health. I wrestled with particularly obstructive depression that first summer, fueled by the constant ingestion of news and online interactions. While people around me were desperate for human contact, I wanted to silence it all.
Lately I’ve taken to debating my father about acceptable news exposure. He seems to have a “more the merrier” approach and fears that he and anyone he cares about would be under-informed. I’ve taken to a different (though not opposing) thesis: that there is a healthy limit to our exposure and it is built on our mindset.
What struck me about the McLaren quote at the top is that he doesn’t say learning is the goal, but learning to learn. And to do so “in deeper and broader ways.” Reading the newspaper, watching cable news, and filling one’s day with more and more breaking news doesn’t make us wiser. And I’m not sure we’re even doing a very good job of learning this way.
The point is to keep learning to learn. And to do this, we need to go deeper and expand our vision. We need to see the forest when people keep talking about a single tree.
The present moment needs more from us
There is not a lack of news or even credibility. Most of the challenge of the present moment deals with synthesis. In short — making meaning of what we’ve learned.
Part of this is fueled by the impression that things are particularly bad. And not just in politics. Many of our most important institutions, like the media agencies themselves, are famously in decline. That they have been facing decline for decades doesn’t dissuade our assessment that we’re all sunk or that perhaps our assessment needs some adjustment.
I don’t want to minimize the impact of decline, but to name that our concern about the decline displays only the accumulation of knowledge, not the learning to learn we need to better understand the problem.
Decline in the United States seems to exist as a reflection of Zeno’s Paradox, which is to say, it keeps getting worse and worse and also we never, ever reach the end. We always manage to get closer to death and also never die.
The present moment doesn’t need mere fret about truth in journalism, abundant support for our schools who assist our children in their education, or economic conditions which provide health and security to children, seniors, those experiencing poverty, or the incarcerated. We need to be able to say what we believe in, what our values are, and how all of that can be supported by a common action.
In other words, we need to take what we’ve learned and make it into something.
Active Learning
I’m a big believer in active learning. As much as I like to read and listen to podcasts, I know the best way to learn something is to teach something. To literally have to process what we’ve taken in and put it into our own words. This is why I bombard the people around me with ideas. I’m trying to teach them so I can learn from them.
It also looks like asking people to do things before they are ready. Before they have mastered the material. Which I’m starting to think runs counter to common belief — what many of us in the United States have actively learned since childhood. We don’t stand up and speak about it until we know it. We don’t read in front of people until we’ve rehearsed it, perform before we’ve mastered it, offer ideas before we’ve decided they’re the right ones. But the best way to learn is by doing! So can we say we’ve mastered something before we step up to the microphone? And for us who are the audience, must everything be so perfect, so in need of perfecting, that we render the act of learning as a final exam?
We are presently relearning how to do democracy. And that isn’t something many of us think we can just do. Especially considering how undemocratic the last half century has been. How much we have relied on experts to tell us what to do, leaders to decide for us, and for institutions to simply function without us. That the country itself will just magically be moral, sound, and accountable. We haven’t had to exercise the muscles of democracy and they have become flabby without use.
Meeting with others and working through the moment is how we learn. Let’s be intentional to the deepening and broadening, too; the synthesizing is even more important. To see the forest with its biodiversity, the trees and their own inhabitants, the life and the death built within a full ecosystem.
Be well,
Drew
Daring Read: Life After Doom
This is a reflection from my journaling as I read Life After Doom by Brian McLaren; a book that starts at the end and then talks about after. If you want to join with me, read along (I wrote up the schedule here). Or join the weekly Zoom check-in or in-person office hours for those who live local (or want to visit!).
On the Podcast
Check out my podcast, which you can find in any podcast app.
Over on the blog
I play with the question of regularity.
And for Sunday’s sermon, we dealt with fear as the obstacle to resurrection.
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