In August 1945, General Henry Harley ‘Hap’ Arnold, the aviation pioneer who led the US Airforce, set an example of leadership that is still mentioned, eighty years later. During an exceptionally turbulent flight over the Mariana Islands, his head remained buried in a novel, apparently oblivious to the crew’s efforts to save the plane. He later explained that, in this instance masking his fear from the crew, with their expertise free from his command, was the way to lead.
Impressionable minds that once were engrained with a prospect of going to Hell are now predicted a diabolical later life on an overheated Earth. Not good. It is paramount that the ideal of education – leading children from chaotic curiosity to an understanding of objective truths – should be promoted with all its positivity and hope; and without the use of fear.
How to distinguish real threats from exaggerated fears is a great challenge of our times. Technology may eventually resolve some of the problems it creates. Until then, learners must be encouraged, gently, to recognise the veracity of digital artistry and manipulated data. The fear of such massively enhanced power of falsification must not demotivate the young from aspiring to be part of a unified effort to control three critical progressions
a) Artificial Intelligence (AI)
As with all machines, computers are not possessed of genuine intelligence – at all. Yet AI is frequently described as a species-threatening force. The reality is that AI struggles with the nuance of language and the drawing of meaningful connections between unrelated ideas – activities at which the human mind excel.
Is AI an artifice of intelligence? Perhaps. Independent thinking? No. Controllable? Yes. Fearful? Most innovations provoke fear when new. The first train passengers, were thought to be at mortal risk by travelling at speeds over 40 mph. Over time, we adapt and manage risk, safely. AI should be species defining, benign and positively transformative.
b) Climate Change
The dominant narrative around climate change, from which dissent is often discouraged or even quashed, can at times seem to resist a broader understanding of Earth’s long-term climate patterns. It rarely acknowledges, for instance, the influence of solar activity or our gradual emergence from an ice age.
We must act more decisively against environmental destruction. But the picture of causation is still developing. Increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide often follow warming events – raising questions about cause versus effect. There are definite human caused environmental catastrophes, with plastic deposits being an obvious example, that would attract more attention if the much less proven environmental concerns were investigated with moderation. We must do much more to care for the Earth, but we should also allow for honest scientific exploration and measured discussion. Eminent scientists should not be cancelled.
c) Evolution
While children need shelter from extreme conjecture, they also deserve a positive, clear-eyed appreciation of the good that exists in the world – and within themselves. Nowhere is this expressed with more symmetrical concision than in John 1:5:“Lux in tenebris lucet et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt.”“The light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not understand it.”John, or whoever wrote this poetic synthesis of Hebrew theology and Greek reasoning, benefited from a classical education that was sufficient to apply academic discipline to sacred mystery. This tradition of intellectual clarity and philosophical modesty survives.
Despite vast societal and technological evolution, we may draw the same conclusions and reach similar emotional responses to thinkers who lived thousands of years ago because, in all probability, our brains are constructed in the same way.
But we may only emulate great classical creators. Do we yearn for their purity of experience in a pre-industrialised world, free from artificial noise and other disproportionate artificialities of nature? Such is the noise of modernity that is unlikely that we will ever begin to replicate the purity of a Mozart concerto. Imagine if JS Bach reappeared, on a scheduled flight from Leipzig. Could he construct the fragile intricacy of his harmonic progressions amidst such engineered noise and stress?
This is why the shared experience with our forebears may eventually be lost. Human cognition might eventually evolve around integrated technology, not dissimilar to the way wild dogs evolved in a sort of symbiotic joint venture with humans. Such is our reliance on hand held devices that this may already be happening but at a pace that is too slow to measure.
A loss of cognitive ‘continuity’ would have compensatory benefits, simply because of the racing certainty that our descendants in several thousand years time will have greater brain power. Children might just be encouraged to consider the positive: that we are moving towards an extended golden age.
Meanwhile, the rigour and the logic of classical approaches to thinking should remain an uncorrupted inheritance. During the first Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, schools continued to teach just classics, and left the inventors and entrepreneurs to develop their steam powered machinery in peace. Educated Georgians of means could then focus on their grand tours, building and patronage of the arts. They left a fine and cheerful aesthetic legacy. (It was also the start of an environmental catastrophe.
When William Blake came to write about the nineteenth century, what has become a great patriotic line is, in fact a rhetorical question. ‘And was Jerusalem builded here, among the dark Satanic mills?’ Er… It would not appear so.)
We must involve children in the current technological revolution with care. Chiefly, we must lead them away from the strange scaremongering of screen-based obsessions and the superficial yet dangerous manipulability of digitalised, two dimensional views.
This will require true leadership. The word education comes from the Latin educare (“to bring out”) and ducere (“to lead, guide, consider”). Ducere shares roots with lux (light). In Sanskrit, the root dhotimeans both “light” and “radiance.” The German verb leiten –meaning “to lead” or “to guide” – is also used to mean “to conduct,” as in conducting electricity. From leiten, we derive the word leader.
And, aa General ‘Hap’ Arnold knew all to well, the greatest quality of leadership is the ability to dispel fear.
Incidentally, could John’s Gospel be right?
It may not matter. Millennia have passed, and few have proposed finer attempts to answer the questions surrounding our existence. Some say that religion is an attempt to understand the infinite using finite means. This is not so much a failure of reason, as an expression of humility.
by Charles Bonas, Founder, Bonas MacFarlane