Valueception
One of the great benefits — and challenges — of being an educator is that through the act of supporting youth as they learn and discover how to be in this world you too must embark on a journey of self- and societal-reflection. Am I living life in line with what I wish for my students? What stops us from living the lives we want to live? This week I write about valueception and the many preference manipulation machines that distract us from pursuing the highest values.
In Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World Harvard’s David Perkins takes a deep dive into the perennial question “What should students learn?”. He argues for “lifeworthy” content: that which is likely to matter in the lives students are likely to lead. But in our “pre-figurative” Anthropocene where rapid technological innovation means the young are likely to have the best intuitions about daily life of the future, the role of educators in determining and teaching what is lifeworthy is necessarily a collaborative endeavor.
In a future post I will explore in more detail a suite of relational constructs I believe teachers must prioritize in their work with students to be useful in this context, but this week I focus on what seems like an undoubtedly — so much so as to be nearly tautological — lifeworthy skill: the ability to perceive what is of utmost value. This is valueception.
Seeing value
The term valueception is a translation of Wertnehmung from philosopher Max Scheler’s (1874–1928) original German. Two modern luminaries, educator and futurist Zak Stein and psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist, introduced me to this concept in their conversation called Valueception: What does it mean to ‘see’ value? They explore the idea that value can be seriously considered as an ontological primitive of the universe, as fundamental as time, space, or motion (much like how panpsychism holds that consciousness or some mindlike quality belongs in this metaphysical category).
Here value is of course not referring to economic value, though it is no surprise or coincidence that this interpretation is the first that comes to mind; instead, value refers to that which matters most to us and valueception to the direct apprehension of that which is of the highest value in this field. Therefore an educational system, say, oriented around nurturing valueception would be inimical to the reductive human capital theory that drives the primacy of economic value in traditional factory-style education models because the bottom line would be some good, beauty, or truth other than profit.
Scheler believed values could be arranged hierarchically, an idea upon which McGilchrist has overlayed his work as a neuroscientist on right and left hemisphere differences:
The specific hierarchy of values requires some amount of interpretation, but the theory is not reliant on moral relativism. I believe that ideas like moral foundations theory and the reality of moral progress will help us make increasingly better sense of the fundamental value that McGilchrist believes life itself may have evolved to discover and make use of.
Stein and McGilchrist’s conversation is rich with philosophy and metaphysics that I am continuing to try to wrap my head around, but I am drawn to the aspiration that valueception should be a core goal for education today. How would what we do with students change if our guiding question was inspired by valueception? How can I help students know beauty, truth, and goodness? Dramatically, no doubt, so this is a question and aspiration on which I wish to regularly reflect.
With quite a can of worms cracked open now, I will narrow my focus for today to the oppositional forces that we would have to combat to make such a guiding light for education possible.
Preference Manipulation
All of us today — but especially students — face an algorithm-driven onslaught against our ability to recognize and move towards the good, the beautiful, the true, and the sacred. Although social media companies constantly hide behind “We just show people what they want,” they are really running preference manipulation machines of vast power that steer our desires towards the most fleeting, lowest-order wants which they can most easily satisfy.
(This is exactly an example of why I worry about misaligned artificial intelligence systems: companies operationalized the objective “make more money” via “keep users’ attention,” and it turns out the best way their algorithms can do this is to pump violent, conspiratorial content to lonely boys and degrading messages of shame to insecure girls.)
It is easy for me to denounce an app like Tik Tok that I do not use as valueless because none of my daily pleasures are tied up in its use. It is not just the social media platforms, though, that I think are guilty of distracting us from genuine valueception; so much of modern entertainment from Netflix to YouTube is built on this same attention capture and preference manipulation playbook.
Take something I do love as further illustration: following sports. I know sports contain a rich kernel full of passion, aesthetic beauty, pursuit of greatness, camaraderie, unity, and joy that promotes a suite of values I aspire to emulate and practice. But whatever the seed of goodness there is surrounded by a beast ready to cannibalize that core through commercialization, petty drama and antagonization, and attention-to-money conversion factories like fantasy sports and betting. None of this is there to deepen my engagement with the values I came for but rather to stimulate psychosocial addiction and transmute my interest into profit.
In his series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis John Vervaeke describes Socrates’s ta erotika: the ability to love the right things. Vervaeke says that this wisdom is “to keep your truth machinery and your relevance machinery tightly coupled together so that you don’t bullshit yourself.” Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit explains that while lies are intentionally deceptive, bullshit is characterized by a lack of concern for the truth altogether. Bullshit serves only to manipulate or persuade, and is therefore an obvious enemy of valueception. Perhaps where this reasoning grounds out is that a culture of valueception is simply incompatible with the bullshit that attention capture capitalism spews out. I am certainly open to that conclusion.
Valueception with Students
Should we deny youth and ourselves all of the legitimate value and even the trivial pleasures that some of these manipulation machines can provide? Those most concerned might argue yes, but I see this as unreasonable expectation for most of us today. But we should be sober and reflective about the insidious attention economy that lies in wait when we give corporations access to our engagement with those true pleasures. We must build in regular reflection for ourselves and for our students on how our entertainment is or is not in service of the highest values we hold.
In her recent appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast, philosopher L.A. Paul draws an analogy between trying to avoid future values drift and Ulysses preparing to face the Sirens by tying himself to his ship’s mast. Through this lens, we must recognize that there will be forces that distort our desires in ways so unacceptable to our current selves that we must commit to accountability and community that will inoculate us against their power. I believe that in some sense this is a task educators must take on in our work with students if we really hope to send them out into the world with a chance of maintaining the other values we hope to teach.
We can prepare these vulnerable young adventurers for the world’s Sirens by engaging them in conversation and action that help students articulate their core values and goals and then seek alignment in their day-to-day life. It is essential that this dialogue not veer into preaching or fear-mongering, but rather collaborative and supportive of youth in actualizing the lives they know they want to lead despite constant pressure to jump ship.
This work belongs everywhere in our curricula, not just on the periphery. In a future post I will explore how we can help students look for and find beauty even within subjects like math that have traditionally been designed to hold solely economic value in the highest regard.
Organizations like the Center for Humane Technology are taking the lead on the big-picture social and legal change that we need to protect the integrity of our youth’s valueception, but it is parents and educators who are on the front lines of doing this work with students. We need to first engage in this work ourselves and then be open and honest with students about the forces that exist to pull them away from what to their core they know is intrinsically beautiful, valuable, good, and sacred.
