What it Means to Be Human — IJKLMNOP
At the Global Meeting on Equinox on 22 March 2025, we will continue the discussion about What it means to be human and what kind of bildung we need. This time the theme will be: Relating; how can we do it better? How can we relate better to each other, to nature, to ourselves, to our past, the generations before us, and to the 8 billion people living on the planet at this very moment? And not least: How can we relate to coming generations? We are defining a substantial portion of their life conditions through our actions, our choices, and — perhaps most importantly of all — the choices that we do not make because we do not meet the challenges of our time.
As a backbone for our discussions, we have chosen eight topics that we need to take into consideration as we move on as a species and try to relate:
· Indigenous peoples and cultures
· Justice
· Knowledge
· Life experience
· Mental models
· Nutrition
· Openendedness
· Peoplehood
As you can see, we are building up a Human Alphabet. At the Global Meeting on Equinox on September 21, 2024, we started with ABCDEFGH and What it Means to Be Human. You can find the article about those eight themes here: https://medium.com/bildung/abcdefgh-and-what-it-means-to-be-human-b292ff10856d. That article also includes concrete suggestions for how to address some of the challenges we are facing, not least how we can cooperate better. In fact, the overall theme for the Global Meeting on Equinox, September 21, 2024, was Cooperation: How can we do it better?
To cooperate better, we need to relate better, and we need bildung that serves this purpose. So that is what we are up to discuss at the next event. We hope you will find the topics important and intriguing, and that you will join our global online discussion about them on March 22, 2025.
You can sign up for free here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/OV6en6dJQfOaf5DZ2UskRw#/registration
Indigenous peoples and cultures
Indigenous peoples around the globe are among the most marginalized and vulnerable; they also possess some of the oldest and most important knowledge about the ecosystems on our planet and about what it means to be human. We need to relate and align indigenous and other cultures with each other so that we can better live in harmony with nature and with ourselves.
For somebody living in the most high-tech cities of the 21st century, indigenous peoples and their knowledge may seem irrelevant. “Why would I need to relate to somebody who still lives in the stone age?” you might ask, smart phone in one hand, coffee to-go in the other. Well, because you and everybody else on this planet were born as a stone-age baby. Your emotional needs, your social needs, your spiritual needs, your behavioral patterns, your very essence of being human, are the same as they were for humans 300,000 years ago. And some peoples have been kind enough to keep alive the most intimate relationship with nature so that both they and nature can thrive. Those of us who live in cities have lost that relationship. And many of us are not doing very well. We’re glued to our phones, and many are suffering from a mental health crisis. We have forgotten who we truly are, but indigenous peoples have not. We city dwellers have a lot to learn so we can relate to ourselves again.
Besides this relationship to ourselves and what it means to be human, there is the indigenous relationship to nature, which is not a relationship of extracting resources, but a relationship of intimacy and regeneration. Regeneration is necessary if we are not going to ruin the only habitable planet that we have, and indigenous peoples know things about flora, fauna, humans, and their spiritual connections that we as a species cannot afford to lose. So-called ‘modern’ people lack bildung if they cannot see this, so what should we do about it?
Nature is fierce, but it is also caring. Here a small pride of lions and some cubs learning not to annoy dad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0J9aHMOb2k.
Justice
Justice is a deep-seeded human need, we share a sense of fairness with many animal species, and rule by law is the foundation of any society of city-size or larger. Without responsibility, power is corruption; without legislation, justice will be corrupted; and without justice, peace is oppression.
Particularly for women, minorities, and indigenous peoples, legal recognition and justice are the first and most crucial steps toward equality and freedom. We need to promote not only rule by law (that there is legislation at all) but rule of law: that the same rules apply to everybody, nobody is above the law, and there can be no retroactive legislation. That is how we can achieve justice, fairness, and responsibility; with rule of law, many other benefits can follow, such as peace, opportunities for everybody, and freedom. Rule of law and justice are required if we are going to have the necessary freedom that allows us to relate honestly to each other. In a society based on rule of law and justice, we can let down our guards when we meet other people, and we can generally relate to them in emotional honesty.
This is also the case in global relations. Multilateralism, globalization, climate, and even war have and will demand the strengthening of justice and settlement systems; we need new legal structures for the 21st century. We must develop global systems of responsibility. The earth is a “commons,” and justice requires a set of rules that allows us to avoid the commons becoming a “tragedy.” We need global fairness. Capitalism has become a steep pyramid where a few own the most, and the distance between top and bottom seems to expand exponentially. Likewise, global relations where money speak louder than justice are not just. Together, they are unfair, and they are a continuation of the errors and inequities of colonialism. Global relations must address fairness, so that what is fair thus becomes a global question.
On paper, many people will probably agree to the above, but actually promoting it, voting for politicians who promote it, and accepting that fairness and justice must be global will require levels of bildung that no country seems to be providing today. Most countries don’t even provide educational systems that promote the kind of bildung that would allow the development of fairness and justice for all of its own inhabitants.
This video with capuchin monkeys shows how infuriating unfairness is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg and why a lack of fairness and justice leads to violence and war.
Knowledge
Knowledge has become a currency of its own. Bildung ought to be the educational goal so we can also appreciate the many kinds of knowledge and promote all of them.
Nations that lead in Biotech, Information technologies, Nanotechnology, and Cognitive technologies (BINC technologies), including AI, have a massive advantage over others and are showing a willingness to weaponize their knowledge advantage. AI, the ultimate generator of Knowledge as well as biased misinformation and complete nonsense, is a competitive space where the contesting powers are currently entering a “duel to the death” of all humanity in their quest for dominance.
Before we hand over the fate of humanity to algorithms that we will never be able to fully understand, we need to salvage human knowledge and use it wisely. This human knowledge exists in many forms, and we need all of them, but we also need to be able to distinguish among them:
Indigenous knowledge has gradually emerged over millennia, nobody knows who came up with it or when, and most often it has been embedded in songs and stories so that it can be recalled and applied whenever necessary. As a species, we cannot afford to lose the indigenous knowledge that is still around: we need it to restore the biotopes that are about to collapse; we probably won’t survive without this deep and ancient form of knowledge.
Traditional knowledge emerged from the big, imperial civilizations of the bronze age and iron age, and most of it is known as myths and religion today. For existential and cultural reasons and for aesthetic and moral meaning-making, we need this heritage. To relate to each other and to communicate at a deeper and poetic level about the things in life that really matter, we need the traditional knowledge and its concepts, realizations, and vocabulary. The knowledge embedded in the traditions is not factual in any modern sense, but it deals poetically with how we relate to each other, to nature, to culture, to morality and justice, and to the universe.
Modern knowledge is produced through the scientific method of hypothesis, testing, and peer reviews. We cannot solve our problems without good science. Science is not as much a series of answers as it is a method, and it is the best method for creating objective knowledge about the world, i.e. fact-based knowledge that works for anybody irrespectively of their background, culture, personal emotions, history, identity, etc. Scientific knowledge is a special category of knowledge that is capable of answering a special kind of questions — while it has no answers for some of our most important questions, such as existential, spiritual, and moral questions. This is not a flaw in science; on the contrary, it is a strength. Fundamentally, the difference between science and religion or other traditional knowledge is that religion and tradition tend to take a religious or traditional truth and then do whatever they can to keep confirming it; science takes a hypothesis and does whatever it can to prove that it is wrong, and when that keeps failing, there is new scientific knowledge. Science is crucial for our understanding of how the world works, including humans and our cultures, and for solving the polycrisis, i.e. the problems we have created for ourselves.
Postmodern knowledge is deconstruction of the way things appear. We need this to throw light on the unlit places of the other kinds of knowledge, but it cannot be the basis of a society. We cannot relate through deconstruction; we self-deconstruct and fall apart if we try to do so. We fall apart as a society, and we fall apart as individuals and families if we cannot relate to each other deeply, honestly, and without deconstruction of the relationship.
All these kinds of knowledge are essential if we are going to thrive. As these forms of human knowledge face artificial “knowledge” we need to learn how to relate to our own knowledge in such ways that we stay in control of our own fate and do not hand it over to algorithms. Which means that we need more and better bildung.
Some indigenous knowledge in relation to some modern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN6qPJm1hmg
Some traditional knowledge in relation to some modern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s3kQSZ_Qxk
here is the song itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD6fvzGIBfQ
Some modern knowledge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZoKfap4g4w
Deconstruction of some postmodern deconstruction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WID6w4_gtwo
Life Experience
Life experience cannot be replaced by knowledge coming from others or from literature. Life itself is the great school of existence, and the most valuable life experience often comes from mistakes. We therefore need to make more mistakes early in life when the consequences are not too big, so we can take that learning with us into adulthood when mistakes may have much bigger consequences unless we know how to think and handle them. We cannot survive without life experience, and we need room to get some of it! We need to relate to one another in such ways that there is room for messing up and learning from it.
“Mom, can I have that apple?”
“It’s not an apple, it’s an onion.”
“No, it’s an apple!”
“OK, if you insist, eat it…” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L9Stzf6ZLc
Poor kid (not least because that video is very likely to be online for as long as the internet exists), but what a bildung moment!
Mental Models
Mental models hold this alphabet together. They also hold us together: us and our fears, hopes, and aspirations that embed our humanity. Mental models allow us to navigate the world and to relate to each other through symbols, rituals, and language. Over time, our mental models have become fractured by the binary underpinnings of the past and the present. We cannot relate what was with what is and what ought to come.
Now we, without thought, guardrails or conscience, are in the process of outsourcing our collective mental models and our collective imaginaries to AI; machine intelligence. And machine idiocy, for that matter; the other AI: Artificial Idiocy. Previously, we outsourced our manual labor, first to animals, then to machines. Now we are outsourcing our mental models, our meaning-making. This is the big outsourcing. It will fundamentally change, not just the world around us and how we manipulate the outer world, but our inner world as we are manipulated by our own invention.
Our collective Mental Models were yet to mature as a species. Simultaneously, the common institutions broke down. The hegemony of race, superiority of cultures, the sense of entitlement of a few — these are mental models that keep us from maintaining and creating the institutions we need. The very future of humanity rests on our mental models and how we make sense of the world. Mental models are at the heart of and the common thread to what humanity is about, and we have let them ossify. Everything emanates from or is affected by the mental models of the individual or the collective. We need to see them, analyze them, and relate to them so we can know ourselves and figure out what we need to do to relate to each other and to the planet in deeply meaningful ways that allow all of us to thrive. Doing so would promote bildung, but it would certainly also require bildung.
Breaking down a mental model; first words, then a crowbar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNK8FCFpmm4
Nutrition
Nutrition is defining for human development, both at the individual and the collective level. Childhood malnutrition affects all aspects of life, including the ability to learn, and highly processed foods and high levels of sugar and fat cause all kinds of health problems. An unforgivable fact about humanity in our time is that almost a billion people are still suffering from hunger while another billion are obese, and yet another 1.5 billion people are overweight: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and-overweight.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way that we deal with food in the most technologically complex societies. Many people have never fully learned how to cook, they may not even have developed a sense of “a meal,” the most fundamental of human gatherings: sitting around food that is supposed to be shared and eating together. Beginning and ending the meal together. Talking to each other while you eat. The equivalent of the indigenous gathering around the campfire — waiting together and perhaps munching on some berries and veggies as the meat brought home by the hunters is roasting over the embers. Meals are more than food and food is more than mere physical nutrition. It is also food heritage, food tradition, community, and nourishment of the soul.
Instead of home-cooked, healthy meals in healthy amounts, people around the globe are becoming increasingly overweight. In the most affluent countries, it is particularly the poorest who suffer the most from obesity. Our relationship with food is increasingly a broken one unless we make an effort to redefine it and relate differently to what we eat, why we eat, and how we eat. We need food bildung.
There is actually a tv-show called Worst Cooks in America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OtcbaakdOM
Openendedness
Openendedness is generally not something we sit easily with as humans: we want predictable outcomes. We want to feel secure. So, since the dawn of humanity we have looked to the stars, to the patterns in birds’ flying, and to the intestines or smoke from sacrificed animals to predict the future. Today, in the modern world, we set KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, on everything from factory output and national budgets to individual human behavior. In between there have been at least 300,000 years of humans fretting the unforeseeable, of consulting soothsayers and consultancy companies, and yet we are about to burn down the planet.
We need to turn our attention around and not base our choices and actions so much on the goals we want, but on the quality and ethics of our actions, the broader vision that is worth pursuing, and the capabilities and resources at hand that will allow us to move in that direction. We need to do so, knowing that unforeseen things will happen, and even better ideas will emerge in the process. We need to have an idea about where we would like to go, but we also need to let the outcome be open, embrace openendedness, and allow ourselves to learn and think in the process. It requires bildung to have this inner robustness and existential compass that allows us to embrace openendedness and to relate to the process more than to any goal.
Ironically, one of the places where open-endedness is pursued is in the development of AI. Instead of letting humans unfold in as many ways as possible, we are being coerced into uniformity, while the creators of artificial intelligence are trying to make it creative.
Paolo Freire about curiosity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFWjnkFypFA
Kenneth Stanley about open-endedness and AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLi0eIdyQU4
Peoplehood
Peoplehood is the way we are connected through a language, a culture, a shared history, and a sense of a collective fate. We all rely on at least one people, culture and language for our meaning-making and mental models. We cannot make sense of the world without a shared language and a culture that allows us to connect with other people: to grow up and be socialized into a larger group than just the small group of our closest relatives. In parts of Africa, this is captured by the concept of Ubuntu: I am because we are.
Joining a people is hard, leaving a people is even harder, because you have to leave behind a substantial part of yourself: your language, your mental models, and your meaning-making. Without your people, you will never be able to entirely express yourself, because between languages and cultures, there are always concepts and sentiments missing, no matter how good a translation somebody may come up with.
The concept of peoplehood has caused some of the worst atrocities in human history. From Nazi Germany to the genocide in Rwanda and elsewhere. What is often called nationalism is an othering that we all carry the potential for within us: the need for a “Them” in order for “Us” to know who We are.
By using the word ‘nationalism’ as a bad thing, unfortunately, a lot of people hear it as if they are not allowed to love their country. We should love our country — or at least not hate it or care nothing about it. We can only have functioning countries and rule of law within them if the people living in them care about the country as a whole and perhaps even love it. We could thus refer to the toxic version of national Us versus Them as national chauvinism instead of nationalism. That would make it clear why defining your own people and nation based on the hatred of other peoples and nations is toxic and degrading to everybody. Celebrating your people and its cultural heritage ought to be joyful, not only to your people, but also to other peoples.
To have a meaningful life and to be able to express ourselves in meaningful ways, we need to relate to the culture, language, and heritage that allow us to make sense of the world at all; we need bildung.
Here Belarusians are protesting against their regime’s oppression by singing together in a shopping mall in 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdXSqaCalHg.
A Maori Haka in the Aotearoa Parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8m9negKqZLo.
Looking forward to seeing you online
We hope that you have an opinion about what you just read and that you would like to join us on March 22 online and discuss it. If so, please check out the program and sign up here: https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/OV6en6dJQfOaf5DZ2UskRw#/registration
