The Price of “Pie”

Equal Rights for Others
Does Not Mean
Fewer Rights for You.
It’s Not Pie.
—Popular Bumper Sticker

The entropy of any closed system
increases over time
with each energy transformation
within that system.
—The Second Law of Thermodynamics

What I’m about to say is not likely to be news to anyone who isn’t actively living under a rock: simply staying alive has become more expensive. The Waffle House franchise now has a surcharge on its egg dishes (understandable given that the price of eggs has risen 15.2% in just the past four weeks and a whopping 53% since this same time last year). A middle-aged couple in Baltimore must share a row house with five other people merely to meet the $1500 a month rent—that is until they recently received notification of the non-renewal of their lease and are now facing homelessness. The state of Maryland has a $3 billion dollar budget gap it must close by the end of this legislative session, and with more than 50% of households in this country already “cost burdened” (meaning that they must spend more than 30% of their income on housing), Elon Musk and Donald Trump have decided to create additional economic insecurity for tens of thousands of federal employees simply to “save” what is less than 1% of the overall federal budget.

Hmm. That rock is starting to look awfully inviting.

Which is why as I surveyed all the news during the first month of the second Trump presidency, I realized that it might be time to revisit some themes I first explored in what was only my second posting back at the start of the pandemic. Titled “Maybe It’s Pie After All…,” it examined some scientific realities about the natural world that would be worth bringing to folks collective attention again because while this information might not immediately help in the current situation, it can provide what Diana Butler Bass calls “a framework for understanding that helps make sense of where we’ve been” (something she does a marvelous job of for the current situation from a historical perspective). Therefore, let’s turn to what I sometimes refer to in my environmental science units as “the law of homeostasis.”

In the original essay, I introduced readers to the field of population dynamics and the reality that no environment has limitless resources, that even the earth is a finite system, and that therefore there are always only finite ways to distribute those resources as well. The example I gave was how:

in a room of 3 people and 9 balls, the distribution might range from a single person having all 9 while the others have none to each person getting 3. But the number of ways to divide the balls up between them is finite, and the same is true for the resources in any given ecosystem.

I then explained that the consequence of this for a population of organisms is that the size of that population must always fluctuate around a set maximum value because while some specific members of the total population might overuse resources to reproduce, their overuse of those same resources deprives other specific members of the total population to do likewise, resulting in their death. Hence, while some members of a population are always adding to it, others are always subtracting from it because there is only a maximum population size a given ecosystem can support.

What I did not talk about at that time, though, is that this same concept of a set maximum applies to the resources themselves in any given ecosystem as well. The second law of thermodynamics ensures that in a closed system, any order or level of energy in that system can never increase beyond a set value, which means—to use my earlier example—in a room of 3 people and 9 balls, there can never be more than 9 balls. Moreover, with time, the distribution of those 3 balls is guaranteed to be randomly distributed between the 3 people since that is the maximum level of order the room can maintain without an input of outside energy.

But what if that room could somehow get that input so that one person could again snatch up all the balls (i.e. add order)?

Ah! That’s where biology’s “law of homeostasis” comes in. An accepted working definition of “life” in science is any system capable of transforming energy to resist entropy. Or in other words, any closed system capable of taking in energy from the outside to seek to maintain its order. It’s why we as animals eat and why plants photosynthesize (the sun being the ultimate source of energy outside our collective biological systems). However, it is also why all life ages: we are resisting entropy, never stopping it, and that is why all life at whatever level of complexity one wants to describe it—from cells to biomes—is constantly fluctuating around a set point of maximum energy and order.

A reality that is as unchangeable, absolute, and tyrannical as physics’ law of gravity and chemistry’s law of the periodicity of matter: the law of homeostasis.

What, though, does any of this have to do with the price of eggs? Or housing? Or state budgets? The short answer is that it debunks the very foundations of the economic capitalism on which those things currently depend; the long answer is that that claim will take some unpacking.

Let’s start, then, with one of capitalism’s central premises: the continual growth of production. Capitalist economies are built on the concept of always growing one’s production of goods and services. We even measure a country’s worth by its Gross Domestic Production and how much that GDP increases from one year to the next. Yet, in a finite closed system such as the planet Earth, perpetual growth is no more possible than a perpetual motion machine—and for the same basic reason, that pesky second law of thermodynamics! It is why ever since capitalism became the dominant economic system on our planet, we have had regular economic recessions and depressions, crashing things back to the fluctuation point of available resources at that particular moment in time.

However, a strong counterargument has always been made that while these periodic crashes do occur, the economic periods following them show an increase in production that has steadily grown the world’s collective wealth and quality of life over the past two centuries—the foundation of the worn cliché that a rising tide lifts all boats. Moreover, I say worn because as discussed in my earlier essay, the mathematicians who study capitalist, free-market economies have discovered the exact opposite, and now we are in a better position to understand why.

Since our planet—while genuinely finite—is SO enormous, capitalism as practiced around the world is able to create the illusion of perpetual growth in small subsets of our species by denuding whole sections of the planet where those same small subsets do not live. As marvelously presented in The Story of Stuff (which if you have never watched, you should!), our productive wealth in the industrial world completely depends on turning huge swaths of our planet into ecological dead zones and toxic deserts. And because those wastelands are almost never directly in front of our attention, this disconnect effectively makes it seem like there is no homeostatic fluctuation point when in reality, we must deficit spend the world’s resources to achieve this self-deception.

Which is why now, when we have deficit spent for so long, some of the proverbial chickens are starting to come home to roost—or more accurately not roosting at all in the case of actual chickens; hence, today’s price of eggs! It is why people can’t afford housing (the supply is too small to meet the need), and state governments are having to make cuts in programs (finite resources can only meet finite budgetary responsibilities). Even the shell game that Trump and Musk are now playing with their massive layoffs in the federal workforce (before realizing that they might need people to track the avian flu outbreak; curse those egg prices!) is being done to try to convince the general public that the federal government is now somehow saving all this money—that all these “savings” from furloughed federal employees will somehow counteract the deficit spending from the earlier Trump tax cuts that he now wants congress to make permanent.

The simple truth is that finite resources mean finite choices, and all the dismissal of truth in the world cannot make this or any other of reality’s inconvenient truths go away. Furthermore, while a more equitable distribution of this finitude could currently enable 100% of the humans presently on this planet to live lives that meet more than just Maslow’s foundational needs, that still doesn’t make it any less finite. 6% of the world’s population simply cannot consume 38% of the world’s resources indefinitely, nor can that human population continue its current rate of growth for the same reason. Like it or not, it is “pie.”

Of course, as just suggested, that does not mean that the “pie” can’t be more equitably distributed or that decisions about how we allocate our finite resources can’t be more just. That’s what makes the budget shortfall here in Maryland, for example, so unnerving: our so-called progressive Governor wants to balance the books in ways that will negatively impact people with disabilities, short-change our 988 mental health services, and defund portions of our state universities—along with underfunding the massive public education reforms known as the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future that only just got underway this current school year. Worse, the proposed decreases in funding for this Blueprint for next year impacts and harms our most socio-economically vulnerable populations of children more than any other group, meaning that those who were about to finally get their fair share of the “pie” are suddenly facing having it taken back.

Again, it’s about choices, and it is about finite choices. Perhaps most important of all, though, it’s about the values that inform those finite choices. As I quoted Oliver Burkeman in an earlier essay, “every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent time, but didn’t—and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you” (p. 33). Simply put, each of us must decide how we will resist the entropy, knowing full well that the finality of that entropy is itself inevitable.

But even more significantly, each of us must make this choice knowing that how we choose to resist directly impacts how every other living thing resists as well, and right now, I would argue that too many of us are not making very good choices—which (as I remarked last time), if the morality of the situation doesn’t convince, then perhaps pragmatism will: the ghosts of Louis XIV, Marie Antionette, and Czar Nicolaus can all too readily inform what really happens when the “have nots” get desperate enough. Both the French and Russian Revolutions started out as riots over the cost of bread…eggs anyone?

References

Boghosian, B. (2019) The Inescapable Casino. Scientific American, November. Pp. 70-77.

Buchanan, L. (2015) American Entrepreneurship is Actually Vanishing. Here’s Why. INC, May. https://www.inc.com/magazine/201505/leigh-buchanan/the-vanishing-startups-in-decline.html.

Burkeman, O. (2021) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Creswell, J. (Feb. 12, 2025) The Soaring Cost of Eggs is Hitting Your Local Breakfast Spot. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/business/high-egg-prices-restaurants.html.

Hager, E. (Sept. 17, 2024) In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools. ProPublica. https://www.propublica.org/article/ohio-taxpayer-money-funding-private-religious-schools.

Miller, H. (Feb. 11, 2025) How Bad is Maryland’s Housing Affordability Crisis? Ask This Baltimore Couple. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/housing/housing-affordability-crisis-maryland-ZBJJUD54SBH47J5CUNBGOJKNAQ/.

Wolfe, E. (Jan. 16, 2025) University System of Maryland Faces $111 Million Cut in Gov. Moore’s Budget. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/higher-education/maryland-college-budget-cuts-5PWJ2TSRTNAKLBTE5IZFDN5L6Q/.

Wood, P. (Feb. 3, 2025) Hundreds Rally in Annapolis Against Developmental Disabilities Administration Cuts. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/politics-power/state-government/disabilities-budget-cuts-rally-PP6YM4PLHNECNDVIJIPYHGXHXI/.

Wood, P. (Dec. 12, 2024) Moore Suggests Rollbacks to Marylands Public Education Plan are Coming. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/politics-power/state-government/wes-moore-blueprint-trump-23CLWJT7WNHZPELTXS7U7XCZRA/.

The Death of Science?

There was a beginning to it.
There are lots of societies that don’t have it.
It takes very special conditions to support it.
Those social conditions are now getting harder to find.
Of course, it could end.
—Thomas Kuhn

They who are aware do not die;
They who are unaware are as dead.
—The Dhammapada

If you are a member of Jonathan Rauch’s “reality-based community,” this past month has been a rough one. First, the re-election of the premier anti-intellectual in this country to the office of the President of the United States (and most depressing of all by an actual majority of voters this time around). Second, said President-elect’s announcements of his nominees for his Cabinet—including an anti-vaxxer for the Department of Health and Human Services! Third, the CEO of ExxonMobil all but imploring our President-elect to keep the U. S. in the Paris climate accords—and this coming from a company that currently depends for nearly 100% its profits on climate change’s very cause. And fourth, but so subtle that I suspect it flew beneath every radar except NPR’s, the threat of a second Trump presidency to the H-1B visas program.

“The H-1B what?” a reader might ask. Why on earth should a threat to H-1B visas generate despondency in the reality-based community? Simple answer: because the loss of this specific visa program will actually endanger the reality-based community in this country. H-1B visas are how universities, corporations, and engineering firms hire all the highly skilled workers they need (think PhD) to fill all the research positions needed to remain economically viable and competitive. “Foreign-born workers account for about half of the doctoral-level scientists and engineers working in the U.S.” reports NPR, and the reason for this fact is simple: there are simply not enough American-born individuals entering the educational pipeline for these kinds of degrees and scientific fields.

Which means our society’s anti-intellectual streak risks undermining not only our health and physical well-being; it risks damaging the very source of our economic power and standing in the world. If a pissed-off electorate that voted for Donal Trump thinks the price of eggs and rent are too high now, I can only imagine their reaction when major companies close because they don’t have the intellectual capital to compete in the world’s marketplace anymore. As Raymundo Báez-Mendoza of the Leibniz Institute for Primate Research in Göttingen, Germany points out, “a lot of countries in Europe benefited from Brexit, in the sense of capturing really amazing scientists that were working in Britain [because in the world of science] top talent is very mobile.”

Of course, it should not come as that much of a surprise that our country cannot adequately supply its own need for highly skilled workers. Not when we idolize celebrity over the painstaking work of solving an equation. Not when we would rather doomscroll on our phones than read a book that might challenge an assumption. And perhaps most telling of all, not when the brain science clearly shows that the first five years of development are the most critical for wiring a brain that can produce such a worker and yet we pay those responsible for teaching this age SO poorly that 12.3% of them live below the poverty line here in a state with the second highest household income in the country. And where more than a third of Maryland households in this state with an early childhood teacher in them must use at least one (and frequently more!) of the social safety net programs such as Medicaid and SNAP. It is cliché that you get what you pay for, and we as a society simply do not pay to produce the kinds of brains needed to produce highly skilled workers.

Therefore, here I sit, then, a trained biologist, thinking: the CDC is reporting that only around a third of all adults in the U.S. have taken this year’s flu shot and less than 18% have received the latest COVID booster; the childhood disease, measles—one of the most deadly and declared eliminated here in the U.S. more than two decades ago—has already had 16 outbreaks so far this year; and human life expectancy—at least in this country—has actually declined for the first time in centuries. All because, as Dr. Gregory Poland of Atria Academy of Science and Medicine puts it, “as a society right now, we’re in a phase of rejecting expertise, of mistrust of any expert, whether it’s science, meteorology, medicine, government – whatever it is.”

And that causes me to contemplate what I once thought impossible: that Thomas Kuhn may have been right when he suggested that science as a method of studying and understanding the world could actually disappear—perhaps forever.

Science, of course, is the “it” in my epigram from Kuhn as the start of this essay, and the famed historian of science is reported to have said these words in an interview with Scientific American towards the end of his life in the winter of 1991. As the author of one of the single most influential books of the 20^th Century, he comes across in the interview as weary of what he perceives as all the misunderstandings people have had about his ideas, and when pushed, he basically states flatly that science as an intellectual endeavor is just as much a social construct as any other such endeavor and, therefore, like any social construct, it can die.

Now I have recognized for some time that any shared sense of truth in this country was—at best—on life support. The firehose of dis- and misinformation modern digital technologies have made possible have all but ensured truth’s demise. But the idea that the one remaining arbiter of truth could be in trouble, that the one arrow left in our collective epistemological quiver could disappear…naively, that thought had never occurred to me before encountering Kuhn’s words amidst the events of the past month. Suddenly, I had gained a small, existential insight into the voices of the many African American women interviewed following the election: “Damn! Please don’t tell me I have to keep fighting yet again a battle that I should not keep losing.”

But for those of us in the sciences, fight we must. We must become the resistance to every effort of the in-coming administration to dismantle the scientific infrastructure in this country. Furthermore, we must do so anywhere and everywhere we can. In labs and research centers. In classrooms and homes. In legislatures and city halls. In movies and museums. Even in the kitchen!¹ Put bluntly, all of us in the “reality-based community” must join like-minded individuals such as Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers and Scishow and do everything in our power “to make the truth go viral.”² It won’t be an easy fight, and I openly confess that I, too, am growing weary of the constant need to battle ignorance and stupidity. But I could never look the generations of children who have come through my classroom in the eye if I didn’t say I tried. How they will judge me only time will see.

Coda

During my morning run today, I was reminded yet again of how spectacularly and especially beautiful this fall has been here in the State of Maryland. Seldom have I seen such rich colors that have lasted for as long, and there is even this one oak on my walk to school where the rays of the rising sun hit it in such a way that I can only shake my head in awe at the metaphor for God chosen by the authors of Exodus—burning bush indeed!

However, this same beauty has made me recall the opening lines from James Stokesbury’s history of World War I which I reread this past August:

The summer of 1914 was the fairest in living memory. Grass had never been greener, nor skies bluer. Europe lay rich and ripening under the warming sun, and from the Ural Mountains to the wave-beaten west coast of Ireland the cows fattened, the newborn animals played in rich fields, and lovers strolled in the country lanes….So beautiful was that summer that those who survived it invested it with a golden haze; it assumed a retrospective poignancy, as if before it, all had been beautiful, and after it, nothing ever was again. It became the summer that the world ended, and it was somehow fitting that it should therefore be the most glorious summer ever (p. 11).

For a whole lot of people—many of whom don’t yet realize it just as many didn’t in 1914—the world as they knew it ended on Nov. 5. Even science itself in this country may have ended, and what keeps me up at night about the looming battle is that while I am not yet truly elderly, I am also clearly no longer young, leaving me with a fraught and fretful question:

Who’s going to take up the mantle when I’m gone?

¹For more on science in the kitchen, check out J. Kenji López-Alt’s The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015).

²To learn more about Hank Green and his on-line efforts to debunk falsehoods of all kinds, listen to the Nov. 22 episode of NPR’s On the Media.

References

Center for Disease Control (Nov. 22, 2024; latest update) Measles Cases and Outbreaks. https://www.cdc.gov/measles/data-research/index.html#:~:text=Why%20is%20there%20more%20measles,returning%20to%20the%20United%20States.

Elliott, R. F. (Nov. 12, 2024) Exxon Chief to Trump: Don’t Withdraw From Paris Climate Deal. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/business/energy-environment/exxon-mobil-baku-climate-cop29.html.

Hamilton, J. (Nov. 21, 2024) Foreign Nationals Propel U.S. Science. Visa Limits Under Trump Could Change That. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/11/21/nx-s1-5187926/u-s-science-could-suffer-if-trump-limits-h-1b-visas-again.

Horgan, J. (May 23, 2012) What Thomas Kuhn Really Thought about Scientific “Truth.” Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/cross-check/what-thomas-kuhn-really-thought-about-scientific-truth/.

Johnson, S. (2021) Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer (New York: Riverhead Books).

Kuhn, T. (1970) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2^nd ed. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lora, M. (Nov. 11, 2024) Just How Underpaid Are Maryland’s Day Care and Pre-K Teachers? The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/early-childhood/maryland-early-childhood-wages-MAJNPXPOFJGHPJOFZRJ3JJ7TBY/.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Stein, R. & Schmitz, R. (Nov. 27, 2024) As the Respiratory Virus Season Approaches, Where Does the Vaccination Rate Stand? NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/11/27/nx-s1-5199731/as-the-respiratory-virus-season-approaches-where-does-the-vaccination-rate-stand.

Stokesbury, J. (1981) A Short History of World War I. New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc.

Stolberg, S. G. (Nov. 14, 2024) Trump Picks R.F.K. Jr. to Be Head of Health and Human Services Dept. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/us/politics/rfk-jr-trump-hhs.html.

“Prognostic Myopia”

Corporate executives are under immense pressure
to deliver quarterly earnings,
not to save science, democracy, or the planet.
—Jennifer Jacquet

Evolution is still deciding what to make
of the human capacity for causal reasoning.
—Justin Gregg

For most of my career, when I have taught my unit on the brain to my advanced biology courses, I have challenged my students to recognize that the “evolutionary jury” of natural selection is still out when it comes to the value of our large prefrontal cortex. I point out that every other species of the genus Homo has gone extinct (and in the case of our closest cousins, neanderthalensis, directly because of we sapiens), and that, therefore, the ultimate survival value of our proportionally bigger brains amongst the animals is still very much up for grabs.

Recently, though, I came across a book by animal behaviorist, Justin Gregg, that systematically makes the case that the uniquely human cognitive capacities that set our brains apart from those of the other animals actually puts us at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to the process of natural selection. Gregg does not mince words when he challenges that the human mind puts us at greater risk of extinction as a species, and as he puts it, “what if we acknowledge that sometimes our so-called human achievements are actually rather shitty solutions evolutionarily speaking?” (p. 16).

The case he makes is quite compelling, and he starts with the relative value of our capacity for causal thinking. As he puts it, we are “ ‘why?’ specialists,” who can determine how the world works in ways no other animal can, and yet the world is full of animals making successful decisions all the time without needing to know the “why?” of things. Moreover, the paleontological data shows that for the first roughly 200,000 of our quarter of a million year heritage, we got by just find as well without answering questions of cause and effect. Hence, causal thinking doesn’t seem to add much survival value for animals in general (including us), and in fact, a strong argument can be made that as we humans have employed this unique capacity of ours more and more in the past 50,000 years, we have steadily decimated the environments in which we live because “with an understanding of how the world has been built comes the knowledge to break it” (p. 15).

Compounding our brain’s ability to do deliberate damage and harm, Gregg argues, is the fact that the human mind has taken the animal capacity for deception to whole new levels. “Lying” is nothing new in the animal kingdom; from unintentional mimicry to deliberately “playing dead” to the tactical deceptions of male mourning cuttlefish (check it out!), animals of all kinds engage in generating a variety of falsehoods for purposes of survival and reproduction. However, as Gregg puts it, “our species has taken it to absurd lengths” (p. 59) because of our capacity for language and the theory of mind. We can lie about any thought we have, and we don’t just lie to protect ourselves; we lie to try and change other people’s thoughts and beliefs. Furthermore, because we are a social species, we are hard-wired for credulity—to believe what other people tell us to maintain our bonds—and therefore, “we cannot remove the human capacity to both produce and believe lies anymore than we can remove our capacity for walking upright. It’s who we are” (p. 88).

Yet in a world of social media, 24/7 news cycles, and the world-wide web, the scale of human lying now has the capacity to threaten our very survival. Misinformation, disinformation, propaganda…we live emersed in lies, and we can employ all of it to justify whatever harm our causal thinking has enabled us to do—from climate change to genocide. What’s more, our capacity for lying has started to attack the very tools we use to generate actual truth—science, scholarship, public institutions—and therefore, as Gregg puts it, “the question is: can we save us from ourselves before the firehose of falsehoods washes our species from the planet?” (p. 89).

Interestingly enough, I think Gregg’s response to his own rhetorical question would be a qualified “maybe.” He is not a cynic; he simply takes a non-blindered approach to examining our uniquely human cognitive capacities through the lens of evolution and finds no grounds at all for our self-declared exceptionalism as a species within the animal kingdom.

Moreover, where he finds this delusion of exceptionalism most problematic is our cognitive tendancy for what he calls “prognostic myopia.” Basically, he argues that “because our minds evolved primarily to deal with immediate—not future—outcomes, we rarely experience or even understand the consequences of these long-term decisions [i.e. burning fossil fuels, modern food production methods, etc.]. It is the most dangerous flaw in human thinking” (p. 195), and it is compounded by the reality revealed through modern neuroscience that we make nearly all our daily decisions at the subconscious level. Those parts of our brains involved in this process, he points out, evolved over hundreds of millions of years to deal with the needs of the immediate present for survival; there is no “future” for these mental elements. Therefore, “our capacity to understand the future and even envision ourselves in it is competing with decision-making systems whose component parts do not truly understand what they are being asked to do” (p. 207).

Or to put it another way:

urgent survival needs mean that we still engage in impulsive behaviors. And those behaviors, which once promoted our survival and reproductive success, are now suboptimal because we live in an environment in which long-term contingencies play an increasingly important part in our lives (p. 212).

Basically, our brains did not evolve to live in the world those same brains have now created, and Gregg’s ultimate point is that “depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened” (p. 256) from an evolutionary perspective.

And an excellent “case study” of this potential truth is the behavior of modern corporations. In another book to cross my path recently, New York University professor, Jennifer Jacquet, has written a scathing satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal in which she “advises” corporate leaders on how to prevent costly safety and product regulations to maximize profits by attacking the researchers and science that support these regulations. Some highlights of her “advice” to corporations include:

There are few communication products that money cannot buy. Does the Corporation need a scientific journal sympathetic to its research? Fund an editor. Does the proper journal not exist? Create it. Establish a popular magazine. Build a website. Host a scientific gathering. Put together a group of people who appear to be grassroots activists. The digital media landscape in particular offers limitless options for shaping public perception (p. 71).
Another way to make the problem go away is to change the language. The tobacco industry referred to ‘cancer’ as ‘biological activity.’ A consultant to the fossil fuel industry found that ‘climate change’ sounded less frightening to a focus group than ‘global warming’ and recommended the switch in 2002 (and the switch succeeded). The chemical manufacturers insisted on the term ‘biosolids’ instead of ‘toxic sludge’ (p. 96).
The policy might not just hurt people, it could kill them, or already has. Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, which generated hysteria that led to the banning of DDT, and as a result millions have died of malaria. In addition, many of the world’s poor died of hunger because the benefits of pesticides were not realized (ignore the unsavory problem of unequal food distribution) (p. 144).
We cannot fix a problem because we’re not hardwired to fix the problem. (Never mind that we were also not hardwired to read or to scuba dive or to drink milk) (p. 153).

There is much more like this in Jacquet’s book, but as an example of Gregg’s “prognostic myopia,” I can think of nothing better than the headlong pursuit for immediate corporate profit at the expense of the long-term consequences of corporate actions. And at the scale of corporations, this use of human intelligence is not only stupid, but I would argue that it is stupidity at its worst because in normalizes and even rewards being shortsighted at a societal scale. As Jacquet concludes in her appendix to her book:

in the same way that a casino can affect the character of a town, corporate-funded scientific denial has contributed to the erosion of scientific authority and mistrust in the government. In this casino, however, we are gambling with our health, the planet, and our most reliable way of knowing the world. The stakes could not get higher (p. 174).

Of course, not only are the stakes as high as Jacquet states them, they are as high as Gregg states them: the potential extinction of our species. And the problem for all of us is that we are all, in fact, trapped in our own “prognostic myopia.” My entire retirement portfolio, for example, depends on corporate profits; Gregg writes about raising his daughter and taking her to school each day, knowing that “even though that’s what awaits my family in the future [i.e. ecological collapse from climate change], here I am, driving my Subaru around like everything is fine” (p. 220). We have no choice but to live in the now, even when that “now” may be preventing “someday” from being possible

Which brings me to teaching, to what I do for a living and whether it is even possible to have any positive impact in the classroom anymore. Because what actually triggered all this epistolary activity and my reflecting on Gregg’s and Jacquet’s work was some recent stories in the news.

The first, heard on NPR, was about how love songs are in trouble and what this tells us about how younger generations are viewing relationships. Apparently, the top term searched for in music by Gen Z listeners is the word “sad,” and BYU researcher McKell Jorgensen-Wells has found that 86% of love songs in the recent Billboard Top 100 profess an insecure attachment style, have replaced emotional longing with overt sexuality, and leave the listener assuming that their romantic relationships are supposed to be toxic. As one of the people being interviewed put it, “one of the songs in the top 100 right now is from a tremendously gifted and talented and beautiful artist named SZA, and she has a song called ‘Saturn.’ In the first verse, she says, I hate this place.”

And if people raised on toxic love songs aren’t bad enough, the other story that caught my attention in the NYT was about a group of middle schoolers in Pennsylvania using TikTok to create an organized and systematic on-line attack of their teachers, creating fake accounts in the teachers’ names and then posting ugly falsehoods about those same teachers as if the teachers had generated the content themselves. I knew it was only a matter of time before something like this happened, but what disturbed me the most was the fact that when caught and confronted with the evidence, the overwhelming response of the students was that their teachers couldn’t take a joke—as if accusations of pedophilia and spousal infidelity are somehow “joking” matters.

Taken together—the prognostic myopia of our species, the corporate greed that takes that myopia to world destroying levels, media of all types that empower dysfunctional and destructive relating—it has me pondering if we’ve reached the point as a society where what we do as educators in the classroom is irrelevant. And what disturbs me most about that thought is that I know I have had a positive impact for most of my career. I have been blessed to mentor former students into the profession, to attend their dissertation defenses and weddings, and to hold their children in my arms. I know the good I have helped send out into the world.

But between my own struggles this past year with my 9^th graders, reading Gregg and Jacquet, and seeing many of my concerns about social media come to pass over the last few months, I find myself compelled to ask whether any of us in education, myself included, can still do that anymore. Can teachers still have a positive impact? Or are the children now arriving in our classrooms already too damaged by the world we’ve created for them? Right now, I do not have an answer. I wish I did, but I don’t.

However, what I do know is that I have is an almost congenital compulsion to try, and that itself may have to be my only answer for now.

References

Gregg, J. (2022) If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

Jacquet, J. (2022) The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World. New York: Penguin Books.

Martin, M. (July 3, 2024) Love Songs Are Changing. What Today’s Love Songs Say About Us. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/03/nx-s1-4983933/love-songs-are-changing-what-todays-love-songs-say-about-us.

Singer, N. (July 6, 2024) Students Target Teachers in Group TikTok Attack, Shaking Their School. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/technology/tiktok-fake-teachers-pennsylvania.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5U0.kN8_.kvXU-e-H7SD-&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare.

The Good Teacher

We have committed what to the republican founders was the cardinal sin:
we have put our own good as individuals ahead of the common good.
—Robert Bellah

We can defend whatever image of man we choose to defend.
—Norris K. Smith

In their book, The Good Society, Robert Bellah and his team followed up their ground-breaking research about the negative impacts of unrestrained individualism in our society with a presentation of a case for how we as Americans might once again live more in accordance with the republican values argued for by our Founders—values in which the benefits of personal freedom are not found at the expense of the common good. They, like Alasdair McIntyre in After Virtue, make similar arguments that what has gone missing from our society today is a shared understanding of the purpose of communal life and an absence of the internalized personal qualities needed to achieve this purpose. Bellah, et al do not use the actual language of “telos” and “virtue” as McIntyre does, but a teleological understanding of what it means to be a good society and the character needed to achieve it inform their entire case.

I share all this because as I have thought about how I want to make my case from last time that we humans have some common—even transcendent—conceptions of what living a good life entails, I have come see that I may need to follow a similar path in my arguing. I inherit the language of “virtues” and “purpose” and “ends” from thousands of years of human thought, and while it jerks this Kantian’s chain to do so, I find myself needing to employ some pseudo-Aristotelian elements in my argument. Just didn’t want any of my readers with formal training in philosophy to suddenly go “Hey! Didn’t he say he’s an anti-Aristotelian??” and simply dismiss me as a hypocrite.

Okay. Enough digressing. What I want to do today is to explore the nature of the “good,” starting with a narrow lens and working my way out from there, and therefore, I want to start with something I am intimately familiar with and to examine: what makes the good teacher? I’ve clearly written plenty about what I think constitutes good teaching, but what about the character of the individual doing it? In the language of Aristotle, what virtues must one possess to achieve the end, the telos, of being a good teacher? I want to identify three (though I think there are more), and I will explore them individually to try to make my case. They are: integrity, courage, and compassion; so let’s start with integrity.

First, when I use the term “integrity,” I am employing it in its fullest meaning—not just the notion of accurate, honest, and truthful but the concept of having a fully integrated self—and I employ it that way because one of the fundamental tasks teachers have to do nearly every second of every moment in the classroom is to judge other human beings. From grading to classroom management to disciplining, teachers are judging those in their care nearly nonstop, and if a teacher does not have the self-reflective capacity that comes with a fully integrated sense of self, they cannot recognize those moments when they have mis-judged.

Which is, second, why I claim integrity is one of the virtues of the good teacher. Not only do all those judgements need to be made as accurately, honestly, and truthfully as possible, the reality is that when they are not (or are made poorly), that fact needs to be recognized immediately and the necessary steps taken right away to repair a now broken relationship. Because all the research shows that the quality of the teacher-student relationship directly determines the quality of the learning occurring; hence, without integrity, a teacher cannot provide the best environment for student success.

The next virtue I am suggesting is “courage,” and again, I mean it in the fullest sense of the word—everything from bravery to resilience to resolve. Effective teaching involves determination, caring, vulnerability, and appropriately intimate rapport, and as a co-learner, it involves risking and making mistakes, not always knowing an answer to a question, and other similar moments of exposure to the judgement of others. Furthermore, on a pragmatic note, the profession also involves long hours for subpar renumeration compared to similar levels of training, as well as these day enduring the proverbial “slings & arrows” of education’s stakeholders (we do not get a lot of respect from society at large). Yet again, though, it is all about the quality of the teacher-student relationship, and if an educator cannot find the courage to put their best self into that relationship, learning suffers. It is with much reason that renowned educator, Parker Palmer, titled his magnum opus, The Courage to Teach.

Finally, I want to argue that the good teacher has the virtue of compassion—also meant in the fullest sense of empathy, kindness, and forgiveness. I believe that they must have this virtue because to know others truly as we ourselves are known requires love. Without love, the trust children need to risk willingly withers, and without willful risks, growth and change are simply not possible. Hence, the good teacher loves their students and seeks constantly to draw out in their students the power and strength to create the meanings that will surpass the teacher’s, and it is therefore in this gift of loving that the strongest teacher-student relationship can arise and the very best learning can occur. Without compassion, fully effective education just doesn’t happen.

However, the same can be said of a lot of human activity, and that is my ultimate point. Place the word “good” in front of almost any descriptor of a human—good coach, good waiter, good person—and the qualities of integrity, courage, and compassion are central to our understanding of their goodness. Indeed, I suggest that what all those millennia of crowd-sourcing I referenced in my last essay have determined to be true is that integrity, courage, and compassion are intrinsic a priori to any human understanding of the “good.”

Take compassion. Variants of the Golden Rule are found in every religion, culture, and philosophical tradition on the planet. Or integrity. A social species may or may not be able to survive without it (though probably not for long without it), but as countless civilizations that have risen and fallen have empirically demonstrated, such a species will never thrive without it. Courage, of course, is the tough one on my list because synonyms of the word have regularly been associated heavily with militaristic roles and behaviors. Yet even there, I would suggest that the historical moments of nonviolent resistance have demonstrated what true courage actually is and have even regularly evoked the virtue of compassion in others (images such as those from the Edmond Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday helped make the success of the Civil Rights movement possible).

Which brings me back to where I left off the last time I wrote. I made the claim that humans have determined that to live a good life is our telos, and that certain qualities of what that means—a life of integrity, courage, and compassion—are transcendent. You can decide for yourself if I’ve now made good (no pun intended) on the second claim; therefore, I want to conclude by turning my attention to the first one, that the good life is our telos.

But to do that I first need to remind us that the original Greek word as understood by Aristotle was that anything and everything has an ultimate end or purpose and that you cannot understand an object or a structure without discerning what this end or purpose is. A hoe, for instance, has the ultimate purpose of cutting soil in a particular fashion, and the difference between Aristotelian teleological thinking and modern teleology is that Aristotle thought that this telos was inherent to the hoe itself, baked in to the very essence of its structure. A hoe could literally not be a hoe without its telos.

Well, humans can literally not be humans without making meaning. Our brains are genetically hardwired to take our sensory input and add narrative to it. And as I argued last time, billions of minds over millennia of millenniums have regularly, consistently, and continually constructed the narrative—made meaning—that the ultimate purpose of being human is to live a good life. Thus, if something innate to our very nature keeps doing the same thing, I want to suggest that maybe we’re on to something after all.

Why then, though, has our society seemingly either abandoned this telos entirely or reduced it to the isolated “my good life?” This is where the critiques of Bellah, et al and MacIntyre hold up a powerful mirror for us to learn from, and we fail to pay attention to them at our peril. All virtues, of course, are aspirational, never fully achievable. But if we stop aspiring—as the minute by minute news barrage would seem to indicate too many of us have already done—then we are in real danger. As Bellah and his team put it in The Good Society:

We have never before faced a situation that called our deepest assumptions so radically into question. Our problems today are not just political. We have assumed that as long as economic growth continued, we could leave all else to the private sphere. Now that economic growth is faltering and the moral ecology on which we have tacitly depended is in disarray, we are beginning to understand that our common life requires more [of each of us]… and if [individual] power is our only end, the death in question may not be merely personal, but civilizational (p. 295).

I plan to hold up my end of the proverbial bargain and keep striving to be a good teacher who seeks to help their students learn how to be human well, and I am confident that many of my fellow educators will continue to do likewise as well. But we are going to need some allies.

Any takers?

References

Bellah, R., et al. (1991) The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bellah, R., et al. (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd

MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue, 2^nd Ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Palmer, P. (1998) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Our Moral Nature

The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
made by the hands of men.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see;
they have ears, but cannot hear,
nor is there breath in their mouths.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
—Psalm 135:15-18

To a bibliophile, old-fashion bookstores can be dangerous.

Dangerous, that is, to the pocketbook.

Surrounded by shelves and shelves of the most marvelous and magnificent objects in the world, it can be terribly tempting to walk out with more than you intended, and the Siren call of some title or dustjacket is just waiting to make you take a second look until you succumb. Hence, I am confident that I am not alone in having more than one unread book occupying space on my own shelves at home.

However, courtesy of the pandemic, I have a lot fewer of them than I used to (what with libraries closed and other forms of social distancing), and while the habit of consuming the “unread” started as a time-killer during lockdown, it has become a type of quest on my part to have nothing on my bookshelves that has not also occupied my synapses. Since I’m also continuing to read new stuff as well and to keep up in my professional discipline, I am not accomplishing this quest very rapidly. But I am, so far, making progress.

And my most recent now-read book has made me realize that there are some books which you aren’t meant to read in your youth. Alasdair McIntyre’s After Virtue has occupied a spot on various shelves in my various domiciles since I was 21-years old, and though I have started it on two separate occasions that I can recall, I could never get past the opening chapters before my distain for all things Aristotelian caused me to exile it once more to gathering dust in my philosophy collection.

However, a quest is a quest, and so I approached reading it this time with a different type of determination and—as I discovered—with a different level of intellectual maturation. Because what I discovered was that there in McIntyre’s book was effectively a now nearly half-a-century old philosophical roadmap for how and why we, as a society, would end up with the utterly dysfunctional mess we find ourselves in today. The cognitive mess…the environmental mess…the political mess…. The intellectual roots of them all are analyzed and made available in those pages, providing fair warning to anyone willing and able to listen—which I couldn’t do back then because I was too busy being an unwitting part of those same roots.

I won’t recap everything McIntyre has to say (in part because some of it involves some very technical and formal philosophical writing), but if I can do him justice, I would summarize his core thinking like this:

when the Aristotelian thought paradigms employed for most of Middle Ages (and prior to that) were abandoned in favor of the scientific paradigms of the 1600s, it became necessary to discover new rational and secular foundations for defining moral behavior (i.e. what makes a good human). But this Enlightenment project failed “because the views advanced by its most intellectually powerful protagonists, and more especially by Kant, could not be sustained in the face of the rational criticism that Nietzsche and all his existentialist and emotivist successors were able to mount,” (p. 117) leaving us with a world where “good” is simply whatever passes for “good.”

Put simply, virtues (and therefore virtuous behavior) require a telos, an ultimate end or purpose, for what it means to be a good human, and when a teleological understanding of the world is tossed out, we are left with a world without virtues (hence—to state the obvious—the title).

Now, I have no desire go into the nitty-gritty of how McIntyre defends all of this or his reasoning for why his solution is to defend a variant of Aristotelian ethics and politics (it is a very dense and long book, and the reason why I have not written in quite a while). However, what I am going to suggest is that his arguments are strong enough to give this Kantian pause and that his analysis of the logical social consequences of the rejection of the Aristotelian paradigms for the scientific ones are so spot on that, as I said earlier, they are a road map to today. Hence, I am left wondering after finally reading this book whether the notion of a teleological vs. non-teleological approach to our understanding of ourselves may not explain a lot about the current world we live in and therefore might merit further exploration.

For starters, a teleological paradigm does not presuppose an Aristotelian version of one (the self-inflicted mental error in judgment which kept me from reading this book for so long). As a scientist, I understand well why the Aristotelian approach to studying the natural world was deposed (as does McIntyre). Without the fallibilism of the experimental method, it is not possible to determine the laws and rules governing our planet, our universe, and ourselves. That aspect of Aristotelianism had to be tossed to make any progress in our understanding of how the empirical world functions—something, again, that McIntyre does not dispute.

What makes me sympathetic to McIntyre’s general thesis, though, is his suggestion that maybe we didn’t have to throw the proverbial baby out with the proverbial bathwater. That same scientific “progress” has also led to an overpopulated, over-polluted planet baking in our unrestrained individualism that McIntyre does a strong job of tracing back to the rejection of the political and ethics portion of Aristotelianism.

Or more precisely, I want to argue, to the teleological nature of those political and ethical ideas. As an educator, a certain amount of teleology is built into my system. Lessons have goals; curricula have purposes; degrees have ends. Even the educational planning process known in the profession as “backward planning” has the “ideal graduate” of a given program as its navigational beacon. Furthermore, I remain convinced that education’s ultimate telos remains wisdom and to learn to be human well. Hence, I would argue that a teleological understanding—at least to some degree—infuses any and all teaching and learning.

But if a teleological understanding is part of something so central to our society as education, then why is it so absent from the rest of our cultural life? I suspect that it has to do with how we are asking the question, “what does it mean to be a good human?” We have externalized this ideal, assessing someone’s amount of consumption and productivity rather than the worthiness of their character, and we no longer cultivate a shared set of internalized qualities “because success is whatever passes for success [and therefore] it is [merely] in the regard of others that I prosper or fail to prosper” (p. 115). We have made what it means to be a good human independent of an individual’s integrity and so the notion of someone having a telos, a fundamental purpose or end, becomes a meaningless notion.

Furthermore, we see this problem not just in our culture at large but also even in our institutions for education as well. In public schools, the quality of learning is now judged almost exclusively by test scores and other external accountability measures, not by the kind of person we are producing; while in private schools, the focus is on college and university admissions, again not necessarily what sort of individuals we are sending out into the world. In practice, we have divorced our lofty ideals for learning from our actual measures of learning, and the results, I fear, speak for themselves in the abundantly evident dysfunctionality of our general society right now.

Which is not to claim that teachers and schools do not care about the moral character of their students or the graduates they produce. Nearly every educator I have ever met is deeply committed to nurturing worthy and worthwhile inner habits and qualities of mind in the children under their care. They simply do so frequently in antagonism to or in spite of the larger social constraints currently placed upon them. Attempts to cultivate good humans are alive and well in America’s classrooms; they’re just often being done undercover—and if you live in Florida, illegally.

Yet if all these efforts are underway as I claim, then a thoughtful reader might ask what exactly is being fostered? Haven’t I simply backed myself again into the problematic dilemma of what counts as “good” which is what McIntyre is arguing is the central issue for which the Modern (and now Postmodern) eras have no answers that don’t devolve to whim? Can I or anyone determine a purpose or end, a telos, to being human that is innate and not external, and if so, what good(s) does one need to possess to achieve it? And how might teaching and learning be involved?

I think the answers rest on how we want to define “determine.” In both psychological and moral development, every single one of us goes through the stage where we become aware of the relativity of everything and the absence of certainty—the fundamental fallibilism of all human knowledge. Much grist has been milled about this reality, and it has even caused some to declare that truth of any kind is impossible, that all human thought is simply about emotion and will. However, as psychologists such as Lawrence Kohlberg have pointed out, most of us move past the stage of relativity to the stage of commitment—to where we treat a body of knowledge as truthful and live our lives accordingly.

Which as Jonathan Rauch points out in The Constitution of Knowledge does not mean there is neither actual truth nor real knowledge; it just means that we have to find it in the crowd sourcing of the reality-based community. And that brings me back to “determine.” Do I think that we can rationally discover with absolute certainty for all time a telos for being human? No. David Hume dismantled that philosophical quest a long time ago. However, do I think there is a purpose to being human that can be determined and known, that can be committed to? Yes. Because literally billions of minds have been wrestling with this idea since minds first evolved, and after tens of thousands of millennia of crowd-sourcing this fallible proposition, I would argue that humanity has determined that our telos is to live a good life and that our understanding of good has some determinates that transcend culture, place, or time.

What those are and how they relate to teaching and learning I leave for next time.

References

Hume, D. (1977) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.

Kohlberg, L. (1981) The Psychology of Moral Development. New York: Harper & Row.

MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue, 2^nd Ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.