Teaching at Twilight

I recently finished a book group for Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in the Age of Collapse by Professor of Religion and Social Activism Dr. Ahmed Afzaal. It weaved together many distinct but interconnected strands relevant far beyond the proximal audience of college professors: wicked problems, progress paradigms, planetary boundaries, de-growth, stages of awareness, crises of meaning, moral injury, hemispheric difference, the scout mindset, and more. This post contains some of my reflections and processing, but I have also compiled the end-of-chapter Key Points in this document. It is no substitute for reading the full book, but the headings and bullet points provide an overview of the content without the filter of my own interests.

The Predicament

From the outset I appreciated Afzaal’s crystal clear framing of the present global moment: not ‘climate change,’ ‘unprecedented times,’ nor ‘novel challenges requiring novel solutions.’ Instead: overshoot, wicked problems, polycrises, and solution-less predicaments, all far-from-recently rooted in paradigms of endless growth, limitless progress, exploitation, and accumulation. It’s Aurelio Peccei’s world problematique, Scott Alexander’s Moloch, and many great thinkers’ (recently, for me: Rowson, Schmachtenberger, Stein) metacrisis.

Afzaal describes the fundamental and pervasive disfunction of business-as-usual human civilization, where there are “no painless options anymore” (174). He pulls no punches in describing the realities of education in this context:

• “Our current efforts, admirable as they may be, are too small and too scattered; insofar as these efforts assume the continuation of the status quo, they are not even aimed in the right direction”(6).
• “The world in which your current students are destined to live will not be as rich, comfortable, or pleasant as the world in which you have spent most of your own life” (31).

And yet this is not a bitter, hopeless book. The message is not just “We’re doomed,” but more “Life as we know it is doomed…but there remain moral and meaningful choices.” It is not a book about solutions, but responses. Can we minimize suffering? Maximize potential for rebound? Choose compassion and dignity? Identify the sources of our greatest moral injuries and maintain our highest ideals?

Moral Injury

Afzaal asks: “Why is it that such noble pursuits as teaching, mentoring, and the search for truth are not providing us with the fulfillment we crave?” (5). One of his primary answers to this question lies in the weight of the moral injury (“When our values are not being reflected in our environment or in our own actions”) that educators sustain when they “are indirectly participating in an assault on their own cherished values” (86).

Like David Orr’s suggestion that we are often educating students to be “better vandals of the Earth,” Afzaal worries about the ways in which our educational systems were and are designed, funded, and perpetuated by corporate interests whose incentive is only the continuation of business-as-usual to maximize short-term profit extraction. Here the personification of Moloch — called the god of negative-sum games — is useful, for we need not blame malevolent men in suits trying to poison the minds of a generation (though they may exist) but rather an entrenched system of misaligned incentives, of which our education institutions are a key part.

From the content we continue to teach to the ways in which we teach it (for example, how “we are constantly training our students to trust and obey authority figures”), we violate our own growing rejection of a doomed status quo. As the Audre Lorde title reminds us, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and yet we educators year after year keep teaching some of those same tools. That is moral injury.

Psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe writes that, “Experiencing moral injury is a sign of mental health, not disorder. It means one’s conscience is alive.” Afzaal affirms the necessity of educators experiencing this moral injury despite the discomfort. Upton Sinclair’s famous line highlights the challenge: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Afzaal maintains that an appreciation for this moral injury is in fact the lesser of these two evils. Swallowing this red pill of acknowledgement and acceptance is the only path forward, preserving the possibility of dignity and morality as an educator even if staring at the contradictions stings more than the slow burn of the subconscious moral degradation that the alternative dissonance fuels.

Radical Hope

Commenting on the title of the book, Afzaal describes twilight as both an end and a beginning. He invokes David Flemings “climacteric” stage of a system’s life cycle, in which it is especially exposed to a profound change in health or fortune.

Like many writers in this space, Afzaal necessarily takes on a reframe of hope: “Hope is not a belief about what may or may not happen in the future. Instead, hope is a present-moment attitude of trust that something is worth striving for regardless of the likelihood of its achievement.”

In my first blog post I wrote about Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, one of the most influential books I read in graduate school. Lear’s hope is, similarly, “directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is” (11).

Afzaal’s concluding thoughts are therefore not hopeful solution proposals, but gestures towards the directions in which we educators might begin to move. He mixes general provocations (“We need to develop a broader vision of ‘teaching’ that includes the welfare and well-being of all life-forms” (189) and “Avoid wasting our effort at relatively low leverage points” (190)) with more specific competencies to pursue: Learn to Think in Systems, Practice Mourning, Break the Taboo, Deconstruct Solutioneering, and Expose Individualistic Thinking, among others. He highlights in particular the importance of finding a community of practice to sustain and deepen our efforts in pursuing these moral responses.

One of the book’s final bottom lines has echoed through my thinking and my work since I read it:

“We need to overcome our attachment to successful outcomes. There is only one reason for trying to protect the natural world — i.e. the effort expresses our deepest values. That’s it. That’s all the motivation anyone needs to keep trying, even against impossible odds” (190).

Open tabs

As with all provocative books, Teaching at Twilight and my book group’s discussions left me with a few open tabs that I have yet to fully integrate into coherent takeaways. Both relate to the work of Stephen Jenkenson, though the book does not mention him explicitely. I wonder:

• How is teaching as a vocation connected to eldership as a relationship? I plan to explore Jenkenson’s Come of Age: A Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble to broaden my understanding of education in this age of ever-more-obvious metacrisis and welcome other recommendations on this topic.
• How is our fear of our own death related to our inability to discuss cultural and societal death? Afzaal writes: “In the modern culture of denial, most people can’t even tolerate a conversation about their own impending deaths, let along the extinction of humankind or the death of the entire biosphere” (116). Thankfully, my twin sister is focusing much of her Masters of Divinity on death and dying and my grandmother is advocate of Death Cafes, so I have a few places to start!

In my next post I’ll dive deeper into another topic Afzaal devotes a whole chapter to given its implications on the dominant modes of thinking that underlie our societies: Iain McGilchrist’s work on hemispheric difference, which he frames not primarily as a matter of “What?” but rather “In what way?”