And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din.'
He holds him with his skinny hand,
'There was a ship,' quoth he.
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner. — Rime of the Ancient Mariner
"May I interrupt you?"
"Who or what has and will guide, govern, rule and restrain us in our pursuit and use of Education ... and of the knowledge and the power it brings?"
If not God, then who?
In a startling podcast of Uncommon Knowledge titled Part II: Apocalypse Now? Peter Thiel on Ancient Prophecies and Modern Tech, we are invited to consider an obvious danger — GLOBAL GOVERNANCE:
Some argue "One world or none." Those sound like they're exclusive, but they're also exhaustive possibilities. And since we don't want to have no world, we want the one world. — [But] I do not buy it. I'm much more in the Lord Acton camp that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And [one world governance] would be a power with no check. There would be no outside [the camp] left. It would be the biggest crowd, it would be the biggest bubble. Probably a place where the Bible differs from enlightened rationality. Enlightened rationality believes in the wisdom of crowds. The Bible believes in the madness of crowds. And, if you have a world state, that's in some sense the largest crowd, it's the whole humanity closing in on itself. Global mob.
Thiel's argument is simple: power must be "checked" by something or someone which stands "outside" it and preferably, but not necessarily, "above" it [voluntarily or involuntarily] — and if this check is not God, then who or what is it to be? And what does Education have to do with power?
History will speak — if we will STOP & LISTEN
The unfolding of this question is the stuff of history. The oppressed [whether from Egypt, Troy or England makes no difference] gather together and eventually form a republic [res-publica = thing-public] with a constitution [com-sta* = together-stand] to meet common needs. As common needs are increasingly met, knowledge, numbers and desires multiply and power consolidates. The response is expansion [whether promised land, manifest destiny or lebensraum makes no difference] and constitution begins to crack as republic morphs into empire [in-*pere = inward-gather]. Oppressed become oppressors ... and the questions becomes "Who or what will restrain them?". [Read more about the early American elites' claim to a God-given, state-fiat-credit financed right to exploit indigenous people in their drive for expansion of wealth ... and then listen to the classic sermon on Pay-Day Someday to glimpse the depth of the problem.]
The obvious answer is everything will seek to restrain them as they consume more and more. Enemies will arise for no apparent reason and will be called "terrorists" to imply they are irrational. Even nature herself will push back in seemingly unrelated [but errily synchronous] ways from famines to floods. But the resolve of the oppressor only grows as the opposition intensifies. Wars and rumors of war proliferate. Until the threat of complete mutual/self destruction is so great that everyone is finally willing to surrender to one authority — as Tolkein said of middle earth: "one ring to rule them all".
ya‘·ṣōr — behold the man
yasor — rule, reign, govern, restrain, hold back, prevail against — eg. 2Thes2:6
In 1Sam9, we are presented with a simple morality play about this cosmic problem. A growing people, thinking themselves oppressed, have wearied of self-governance in a republic under a simple constitution before God and judges which has brought them recurring conflicts [both internal and external] interspersed with periods of peace and prosperity. They have decided to consolidate their power under one person in order to defeat their enemies and to finally advance beyond their conflicted needs.
In a dramatic display of synchronicity, their aged-now-rejected judge [Samuel] sees a handsome young man [Saul] arrive on the scene as he hears God say:
"There he is ... the man who shall yasor my people." 1Sam9:17
And yet, as with many Hebrew words, yasor is a multi-edged sword that cuts in every direction.
- For the mob, it means a leader who will Make Israel Great Again.
- For the judge, it means a shepherd whose rod and staff will both protect and restrain Israel from evil — external and internal.
- For the man, it's meaning remains a mystery ... of either lawlessness or godliness ... of desire or duty ... but which one it will be [even if already determined by God] is yet to be revealed as the man's life unfolds.
Nothing new under the sun
Of course, history tells us how the acount of 1Sam9 ended. But the cosmic tale in which this Bible story is only a brief chapter continues today. And the drama appears to be intensifying in our time as Peter Thiel notes when he proposes that America may be the antichrist that attempts to wield unchecked power over the world.
- What have we learned?
- What will we do?
- If we refuse the "yasor" of God, then who or what will "yasor" us and our children?
- If we accept the "yasor" of God, then how and what must we do ourselves and teach our children?
- God knows the answers matter — perhaps, more than ever as knowledge and power increase rapidly — and the wise will understand. Daniel 12
More to ponder
There is this very profound sense that there are things that change ... things that will happen that are different from things that happened in the past. ... Society is going in the wrong direction, and Christians simply drop out — that's roughly the idea. I think that's the most accelerationist thing possible. You quit resisting. It sort of clears the field, it's like the line — "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." — [which is questionably attributed to Edmund Burke. What we know Burke did say was “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”].Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for The End of The World as We Know It, Ginie Servant-Miklos, Bloomsbury Collections, 2024
Chapter 2 — Education in Catastrophic Times:Really Good Schools: Global Lessons for High-Caliber, Low-Cost Education, James Tooley, 2021
Placing systems in their historical context demystifies them and allows for closer scrutiny of the realities we take for granted. To understand why the majority of the world’s adult population ... either actively participated in or passively accepted planetary destruction, and how we can do better by today’s children, we need to understand what went wrong with education. ... I cannot achieve what I set out to do with this book unless I bring educators to question whether their mission is best served in the ruts of a dying system, or on the battlefront of a system-wide revolution. That requires the historical and systemic overview I am about to share.
Chapter 9 — A Thought Experiment in Educational Freedom:Historians Debate Ukraine War: Pro-Niall Ferguson vs Con-Scott Horton, Zero Hedge, Nov 2024
Suddenly, there's a blinding flash, then a crashing explosion, and people all around start screaming. ... The apocalypse has begun. An asteroid has struck planet Earth, out of the blue. ... After a while, there is only darkness. Most people have been wiped out. But there are a tiny number of us left ... and slowly we begin to emerge from our hiding places. At first, there is chaos, anarchy. Some start hoarding food and attack those of us who are defenseless. For a while, this terrifying episode unfolds, as some take on the roles of marauders, while others of us are forced to hide in fear for our lives. But eventually, when we've had enough of all this, we pull ourselves together: putative leaders emerge from among us, building support for creating order out of chaos. Our predicament is stark. The technological and scientific infrastructure that previously supported us has gone. The whole social and cultural fabric has gone too. So, what to do?
Our task begins to emerge. We must build a new human civilization from scratch, rebuilding the best of the past and forging it together with new elements for a future, better society. ...
Could this be an end point for a school curriculum that excites and motivates students to learn?
Could it be an end point that begins to justify the content of the curriculum itself and the purposes of assessment?
It is, after all, a real fear but also a real possibility that in our lifetimes we might be faced with the same, real predicament.
Would we be able to survive?
Would it be desirable to survive?
Pro: Empire worked for the British. It was fantastic. The American people will just have to take cuts to their elderly pension programs so that we can afford militarism in the Middle East and Mesopotamia. ... Of course, we shouldn't call it "Empire" when we're addressing the American public: we should always use euphemisms like "Primacy", "Predominance" or "Hegemony" . But between you and me, we know what we're doing.Con: America is bankrupt and you're telling me we've got to cut welfare programs for our elderly people so that we can afford militarism. The Iraq war wasted between 5 and 8 trillion. Now the national debt is 36 trillion. The interest on the debt is $2 trillion per year. I'm sorry, but let ME lecture YOU guys from the Hoover institution a little bit !!
Jesus: "Father forgive them. They don't know what they're doing."
Iain McGilchrist, 'We Need to Act', Rebel Wisdom, Sep 2022
I share a very general fear that our society [and civilization] is moving towards highly undesirable ends and I feel I must say something about it, because it meshes very much with my brain [right-left] hemisphere hypothesis. In fact, what I see is the domination of a way of thinking of the left hemisphere which is relatively simple and aims to help us grab and get [ie. apprehand] things — but not to understand [ie. comprehend] them — and I'm worried that that is the direction in which we're going.Western Civilization Is Already Dead - with Paul Kingsnorth, Jonathan Pageau, Jan 2025
...
When people are immutable in their attachment to an idea and are angry and self-righteous about it and disparage and are disgusted by anybody who could disagree with them, for me as a neuroscientist and as a psychiatrist, that is an alarm bell that these people are going somewhere we do not want to follow. It's exactly the mindset of the Puritans. ... Sometimes a group of people have this left hemisphere drive to the truth as they see [and name] it — and people who think they have the truth are very worrying, because, whatever truth is — and I do believe there is such a thing as truth — we can never attain full certainty about what it is, but we can never, by the same token, give up trying to seek after it.
...
In the past the aim of Education was partly to produce somebody who could give graded ascent and graded dissent to almost any idea. We've lost that. So to get that back into our culture, it would be important to value non-technological subjects more highly than technology in school — subjects that lead to a more rounded, humane, spiritual account of a human being. They were called the humanities. They're now considered less important, because they don't have an obvious utility. But the left hemisphere of the brain has got us into the mess we're in by always pursuing utility ... and utility is not the only thing that we need to be aware of ... [man does not live by bread alone].
Josh Cowen, The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers, Iowa City Public Library | The Library Channel, Jan 2025I have a feeling that the West itself needs to die. In fact, I think it may already have died. Actually this thing we call the West is a sacrifice and is being sacrificed — the plant must die so its seeds can grow — you don't get the growth without the sacrifice. I think we've got to such a point where we have created a culture that is irreligious and Babylon-like and topheavy. It's just fading away. I don't mean that there should be a giant catastrophe or we should destroy it or anything like that. I just think that it's dying — if it's not already gone — and we have to let that happen, because it's not going to be stoppable at this point. Instead of fighting to protect X,Y and Z aspects of the super-structure, we can go back to the root of the culture and write about that instead and build that and protect that.
...
It seems to me that the root of a Christian culture only requires a few ACTUAL Christians — who are probably not people like me who merely say they're Christians technically — but people ACTUALLY LIVING like Christians. ... What follows is a civilization — a normal hierarchy [like the branches of a tree] that sets itself up where these [few real Christians] become beacons and, through their sacrifice, civilization yields families with 10 kids — abundance [from the bottom up].
...
I don't think you can live in this world without building and you have to build to the glory of God. Because I'm Orthodox — and this is why I became Orthodox — I look to the church. We need the structures, we need the teaching, we need the tradition. Otherwise we get the kind of craziness of 10,000 Protestant sects a minute popping up in America, because no one can agree on what the Bible means. We need a self-correcting mechanism all the time. That's what I think the monastics are at their best — you know the Hermits, the poor Christians who are always there trying to ACTUALLY LIVE a [less] sin-full life — always there correcting the emperor. The emperor needs them, otherwise he's just another emperor. [Psalm 82]
The problems in American education will remain as long as they are the problems in American life.
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