“Human nature is infinitely malleable” (No One, apparently, but attributed to Karl Marx)
It is always nice when someone poses a simple question and offers a simple answer. When the medieval historian Jacques Le Goff asked readers whether it was really necessary to divide history up into chunks (Faut-il vraiment découper l’histoire en tranches?, Paris: Seuil, 2014), he pleased us all immensely by answering “yes” in the space of a book small enough to fit in ones pocket. Periodisation, for Le Goff, is the key tool for making sense of history, as it helps us tease a macro story out of the centuries of micro details. Periodisation becomes a hindrance however, an obstacle to the creation of productive meaning out of history, when it ossifies, and comes to be taken as the thing itself which it sought to represent (as if a painting or a photograph of the sea could describe once and for all the trajectory of a wave). Le Goff argues that the work of periodisation is necessary but never finished, that we must seek to establish relations between eras through period concepts, but also that we must in turn periodically reassess those divisions and the stories to which they give rise.
At any given time in history, our “era” is a field demarcated by memory, and that memory is cultural, i.e. not limited simply to what you or I personally remember. This cultural memory is made up of the accumulated memories of the socio-cultural and kinship groups to which we belong. The historical horizon or cut-off point of the kinship memory field is for most of us probably our grandparents, or possibly our great-grandparents (the grandparents of our parents, memories of whom we may receive at second hand from parental reminiscences). As for the socio-cultural memory, this might be expressed, cultivated and transmitted through all manner of forms, from epics and sagas to sacred texts, from temple rituals to school curricula. Who gets to participate in these “menmotechnical institutions” (Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, Cambridge: CUP, 2011), and what gets to be on the syllabus, is the question of culture in all times and places.
In our society, educational institutions (schools, universities, libraries, museums) have long played the role of formulating our cultural memory. Like all memory, cultural memory is selective, and in a circular way the cultural memory of a given moment tends to extol whatever the moment is most excited about. Schooling in Europe during the age of imperialism and colonial conquest in the nineteenth century tended to emphasise the hierarchy of nations and the natural inevitability of European hegemony. In the twentieth century, nationalist exceptionalism was challenged by anti- and post-colonial voices, the student revolution of ‘68, the growing visibility of a global community thanks to television. There was also a movement in thought towards the globalisation (as opposed to nationalisation) of scientific progress, a result perhaps of the spirit of internationalism and shared enquiry that had characterised the development of quantum theory in the early 1900s, and which in turn fed the scientific community at Los Alamos in their race against the Nazis. The heritage of that scientific internationalism, blighted by the Cold War, nevertheless hangs high above us still in the ISS, the International Space Station, physical proof that the competitive “arms race” mentality is not the only way to promote scientific progress.
In our present era, the role of educational institutions in curating cultural memory is being aggressively challenged by private interest groups whose exploitation of the various affordances of digital technology has been wildly successful, catapulting them to the top of the social hierarchy. As a result, educational institutions (along with all the other parts of that civil society which tech magnates have effectively commandeered in an unexpected coup, which they are currently scrabbling to consolidate) are having the pride of this new dominant class bluntly forced upon them. The proliferation of digital artifacts marks as it were the reach of the new imperium, and the density of such artifacts in a given space indicates either the desire of that space to be included in the imperium, or the desire of the dominant class to incorporate it within its territory. The question remains viz-a-viz educational institutions: are they being conquered; or, feeling themselves vulnerable, are they actively clamoring for annexation? The answer, as usual, is probably a bit of both.
To return to the question of periodisation, and to see what it may mean in relation to education today, the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) coined the term “liquid modernity” around the year 2000 to describe the dominant cultural atmosphere of the West which had emerged in the late 80s and early 90s. It was characterised by an intense consumerism engineered by a globalised financial system, itself enabled by the development of digital information-communications technology. This consumerism tore its way through the material, political, social and cultural institutions of the post-war, “post-modern” West. Now that we shop for everything from our identity to our physical health, from our politicians to our romantic partners, it appears almost natural that we should be asked to start shopping for intelligence itself, as OpenAI boss Sam Altman recently asked us to do. But what will the effect of such commercial liquefaction of so precious a resource as intelligence be? Bauman himself warns (Liquid Love, Cambridge: Polity, 2003) that ‘shop-supplied substitutes’ can never replace the real thing, but only dilute them into commodities. ‘The market’s chase after untapped capital’ hidden within the human world of the non-market economy can thus never be won, but this does not prevent that human environment from being devastated in the process, like a seabed scraped by a trawler or a landscape ripped open by an open-pit mine.
Are we going to sit around and wait for tech to do to our relationship with our minds and our memory what it already did to our relationships between each other? Will we all complain about having to use ChatGPT in order to do some thinking in the same way everyone who uses them complains about the degrading, depressing, degenerative effects of using dating apps? If the answer is “yes”, it can only be for one very simple reason: that decades of consumerism, cultivated by an advertising culture predicated on the single premise that we are not enough as we are, has replaced community with a society of individuals who hate themselves far too much to feel they deserve any better.
Nevertheless: while we may have been conditioned to hate ourselves by those who enjoy power in this present era, we should not forget that in the long run these people will only be kings for a day. A great reason to turn our attention away from them and their illusions and towards the world of culture - novels, poetry, paintings, sculpture, music, architecture, science - is that the greatest achievements in this sphere were built to last, at least in some small part because of a belief that future ages deserved to benefit from the effort made to uncover beauty and discover truth. In other words, every document of culture is not only a document of barbarism, as Walter Benjamin sadly realised. It is also, paradoxically, marvelously, a totem of our human dignity, our birthright. Now: what precisely ought to count as such a monument, what work, what text, what deed? Well, that’s a question for classroom after classroom of inquiring minds to decide and decide again forever.
