GBD: Hit Earth’s Pause Button on 21 September
“Watch the seasons go, as sunshine turns to cold snow
Chill in the hard rain, numbers of tomorrow
The great globe spins, the music starts
Every beat knows its part
To keep it spinning in a circle”
— lyrics from “Equinox” by The Grateful Dead
Recently, a colleague and I discussed Global Bildung Day (GBD) and whether he should attend: https://www.globalbildung.net/gbd2023-september-21/. I briefly told him what it was: a one-day, online forum for a wide range of people from around the world to discuss issues such as global citizenship, education, and culture in the context of bildung. He replied, “I don’t understand the purpose. What will it do?” Elaborating didn’t seem to help. However, I probably should have thanked him for underlining my larger sentiment behind this article.
In the West, we live in a predominantly outcome-focused culture. It’s less a criticism than an observation. Safe to say if you’re having a worldwide Zoom call taking up people’s time, there has to not only be a concise, purposeful agenda (and why aren’t you paying people to speak?), but by-golly it’s also got to do something. Create some policy. Make some money. Change the world! Where is the quantifiable output and outcome?
This shouldn’t surprise us. Within a narrower scope, we face the same challenging, consensus view even within a sphere such as education: quantification and “results” to determine not just success, but to reverse-engineer purpose itself (and then “improve” it). I won’t delve into the questionable (and fantastical) claims of organizations like PISA (or for that matter, any number of governmental, private enterprise and yes, even well-intended non-profit organizations) that cannot seem to not perceive, communicate and validate human meaning and worth in terms of tangible quantities, outputs, and of course, money. Suffice to say the bottom line is that there has to be a bottom line. And make it quick.
GBD is about none of that. Oh, not that you can’t get any of those things. But they’re totally beside the point.
GBD is about capturing, within a brief, recurring moment in time (thank you, Earth), an immeasurable but hugely important thing in our endeavors as human beings: each other. Starting with the simple fact that we’re all here, together. Pausing the world (not really — but now do you get the significance of a day when it seems like the earth “balances” so we can do this?) so we can… see and talk to each other. Like humans do. Not to create mission statements, write manifestos, hawk our books or otherwise tangibly do much at all… except possibly understand each other a little better and therefore add some new, intangible-but-real meaning to our existence. Meet new people, learn some things; maybe even reflect. But not about the output or what we “accomplish.” Given there are 8 billion or so of us on this rock, that’s a value that ought to be self-evident.
The tangible output of GBD is whatever you want get out of it.
Our existence till now — and our ability to continue it — is inarguably built upon our simple interaction — constantly, iteratively, and in many ways immeasurably — with each other. Except in our sleeping hours, most of us do this every day, for most of the time — even as we’ve found new ways to distance ourselves from each other physically (and with AIs, perhaps even virtually). We still interact frequently, deeply; complexly whether we attempt to commodify it or not. Human interaction, along with our ability to collectively store and build upon our knowledge, is why we went from a thousand-century period with only 1200 people living on the constant edge of extinction to 8 billion people (and, strangely, again pondering extinction) in only 800,000 years (1/6000th of earth’s history, by the way). We interact, share, cooperate and thrive much more than we argue, fight and dominate each other. It doesn’t feel that way, but it’s the truth and a really good thing. Even those 1200 prehistoric ancestors we all come from understood this as they and their predecessors clung to survival without population growth for, oh, a mere 100,000 years. And you think we have a polycrisis?
Nevertheless, there might be some indefatigable remnant of “what’s the purpose?” rattling around in our everything’s-a-commodity brains, still worrying about what GBD is and what it does.
It is about quality interaction. Not another pedantic marathon of coach-babble, goosebumpy-rah-rah, mind-melding, or a new soothing sleep track for your Alexa. It is also not just another in a long list of platitudinous conferences that you’ll hope to purge from memory. You get to spend 50 minutes out of every hour interacting with fellow attendees and then with the presenters. Or saying as little as possible — totally up to you. The tangible output of it all is whatever you want to get out of it. You and everybody else you interact with. Sure, you could take it back to your organization to create a new concept, or gather some friends and start a fresh initiative based on what you learn (yes, this has already happened). Maybe you’ll meet new people to connect to and improve/grow your already-awesome endeavors. Heck, possibly even start a spontaneous, worldwide revolution (um, call me?).
But it can also be one calm, easy morning/afternoon/evening when you hit pause, sip some coffee, and learn a little more about people halfway around the world — and they about you — before we all step back onto this giant, fast-rotating rock we inhabit and start spinning in a circle again.
Sounds like a purpose to me.
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Notes:
Wangjie Hu et al. Genomic inference of a severe human bottleneck during the Early to Middle Pleistocene transition. Science 381,979–984(2023). DOI:10.1126/science.abq7487
