Education is Moving in Radical Ways - A Conversation with Prof. Thomas Nail

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The classroom structure, just without saying it, it's obvious that the world has nothing to teach you. If you think about it, it's like a little spaceship or something. You know, there's a philosophical world historical assumption baked into this box and we're here together. We need to call it out for what it is.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me again this week. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. The following conversation is definitely a wild ride. It's not an argument often made, but I believe that one of the effects of our industrialized education systems is to create the illusion that the world is full of somewhat fixed and ordered things. That don't move or change much. Of course, we teach our children about orbiting planets, or the water cycle, or change in historical periods. But, for example, in a previous episode with Vanessa Andriotti, she gave a great example of how we name objects in the world, such as trees, in order to teach about them. And in doing so, we draw a boundary around a tree that separates it from all non-trees. This sounds kind of philosophical and abstract, but I think the effects of it are very real. Most young people then learn to read the world as a collection of more or less —fixed objects, rather than patterns of relationships? My guest this week has been exploring the depths of these questions for a long time, through the lens of movement. And as you'll hear, Professor Thomas Nail started this line of inquiry researching human migration, and went on to develop an entirely new discipline of the philosophy of movement by pulling at the threads of how far our collective obsession with order and stasis goes, particularly in the Euro-Western tradition. Thomas Nail is a distinguished scholar and professor of philosophy at the University of Denver, and is a prolific author and has written numerous books including The Figure of the Migrant, The Theory of the Border, The Theory of the Earth, and Being and Motion. I really recommend digging further into Thomas's work because there's a huge amount that we try to cover in this conversation, so I've put some links to other articles and YouTube videos that I found useful in the show notes. Well, thank you. I heard you say in one of the talks that you really like the feeling of being radically disoriented by new ideas. Yes. And honestly, that is exactly how I felt when I was like, whoa, where does this go? Because I actually came to your work through Dave Snowden. I don't know if you know Dave, but he and I were talking about new materialism. So I found a paper that you'd written on new materialism. That was the starting point. But then I was like, hold on a minute, this goes a whole nother direction into some really interesting places. And that, like, totally knocked me for six and it just felt like such a generative space. Firstly, yeah, thank you for taking the time to do all of that amazing work. And— That's the highest praise. Then maybe we can like, you know, make some connections because I think what you also said about the concrete consequences of this work being really significant. So I think the practical consequences of this, and for me and the podcast educationally, I think are really real actually. So I'd love if we can draw that out. I'm aware that for some listeners it may be like, Wow, where's this going? But I kind of, I also want to knock the listeners a little bit off balance as well, because I think that's important. We need to like have new fresh ideas coming in and to question some of the kind of learned conditioned biases that we have been gifted by this Western tradition that many of us have been educated in.

Yeah, absolutely. And so I don't have any books or articles on education, but the book that I have that's actually closest to answering really some of your questions and like giving lots of really interesting concrete examples that I hope will come out It's not out yet. Oh, okay. So there is a book actually that really gets at like, I mean, it's a pretty empirical book too. Like it's way less abstract than something like Being in Motion. It's really concrete and it looks just like at a range of like scientific papers. I guess we'll get into it, but you know, on patterns of motion basically. And they, those actually have quite a few practical implications for education. And then like myself as an educator, you know, in higher education, I've thought a lot about this stuff too and made a lot of interesting experiments in my classes that we can talk about. Yeah. Oh, amazing.

I'd love to, love to hear about that for sure. But I mean, maybe just to start with, I think it's useful for listeners to hear some of the story of how you came to these ideas, because I think what I understood was coming from a very real practical place of real people and real politics. So yeah, how did you come to this major deep question of movement in your work?

Yeah, so I was, yeah, I'm a philosopher, trained philosopher at the University of Oregon where I did my PhD there on political theory. And toward the end of my degree, I was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to spend a year doing a kind of mixture of academic study and migrant justice activism with this group, No One Is Illegal, in Toronto. And so that was a really great year in which I kind of got to like live the dream of having enough money to live and sort of being able to like read my theory at night and then politically organize in the day, work with incredible group of diverse activists in Toronto. It was a big experience for me. And it was something at the time, this was 2009, so this was a while ago, borders and migration weren't exactly major themes in political theory. That sounds right now hard to believe from where we're at, but if you go back to 2009, it's just not a central category of political theory or, and certainly not movement. In any case, that was what I, I sort of set out to work with these activists in Toronto. Both to do activist work and to kind of research the history of migration, like world, deep world history from like Neolithic to the present and get a sense of like what it's all been about and sort of make that a central topic in political theory. And I happened to get really lucky every now and then academia, one gets very lucky that the thing that you think is important, everyone else also thinks is important for a brief 15 minutes, you know, suddenly, so this is like, this was right before the Syrian refugee crisis. This was right before the, European migration crisis that I was working on all this stuff, really feeling that, like, just, you know, knowing how many people are dying every day trying to cross the Mediterranean. And to me, I was just living that crisis, thinking about it, surrounded by people who were displaced by it in Toronto, organizing. And then the moment hit where suddenly the world was paying attention to the thing that I was researching. And so it was, I want to say happy coincidence, but it's a mixed bag because it's not very happy, which is to say it comes out of a crisis and a deep human tragedy that my book, The Figure of the Migrant, which is what I wrote coming out of that experience, really shifted my way of thinking about migration. But also The Thing About Movement really kicked off for me a whole new way of thinking about everything. It was, there was a reason why migrants have this very disenfranchised, structurally marginalized role in the history of Euro-Western thought. It's not just a now moment. This is a deep moment in Euro-Western history. And to understand that you have to understand how the Euro-Western tradition is related to movement more broadly, because migration is not a one-off. I'll leave it at that. Yeah. Yeah.

No, no, that's amazing because it's like, yeah, it's that conceptual leap from migration and humans moving to the broader kind of conceptual idea of, of movement itself. But I heard you talk about Aristotle and his like antipathy towards barbarians. Yeah. Yeah. That for me, that was like, ah, okay. I can see, like, so maybe you could just draw that out a little bit, cuz that really helped me understand like why there was such suspicion of people that, you know, were nomads, had no home, were constantly moving. As we know the history, we've all come from that place very originally way back. But for some reason, they developed at that point a real, a real kind of particular position that, that, that was not civilized, or I don't know how you would describe that. Yeah, absolutely.

That's like Aristotle to me was the first moment where that came together because he has a whole system. He's got a whole way of thinking about everything that all fits together very wonderfully, but it's also awful. Like what, you know what, like what his conclusions are, are really, I think, awful politically. So it's in that first 2 or 3 chapters of the book on Paul Aristotle's Politics. Where he says, yeah, you know, the problem with all of these barbarians, which is basically for Aristotle, I mean, and for many classical Greek people, just people who don't speak Greek, and that's because they don't speak Greek, they don't have the logos, which is, so the logos is both language, but it's tied to a certain way or a possibility that language can relate to the nature of being. So not having the Greek logos is kind of a big deal. It just, it cuts you off not only from politics because you need to have the logos to engage in politics. And this is why he says, which by the way is like everyone on the planet.

Okay.

So like everyone else, everyone else who's not Greek is a barbarian and is incapable of politics because they can't engage in logos. They're also incapable, and he doesn't say this explicitly, but it's implied in what the logos is capable of for him. If you don't have the logos, you just like no access to the nature of being. You're like, you're cut off from the world. You are cut off from the nature of reality, from politics, from all of these things because of this feature. And he says, Yeah, they're moving around too much. These barbarians, that's the other problem with them is they're, they don't have cities. They don't have the polis. And because they lack the polis, which of course is related to the lack of logos, they can't have the polis, can't have the polis, you can't settle down. And then you're just moving around following the seasons and all these things. And this is basically fundamentally for him, it just undermines the full condition of civilization. And so this is like not a small piece to the story. And it's the one that connects me like, wow, Aristotle really needs for things to be, things can move fine., but that movement all needs to be ultimately grounded, oriented around a central point. And of course, this is not original to him. This is, you know, the Presocratics and so on. Almost all of them describe the cosmos as a sphere. There's a center of the sphere. The sphere can move fine. Yeah, sure. But it's the center that doesn't move as the sphere rotates and moves around. So the world moves, but the unmoved mover does not. And that's what holds it all together because, man, you don't have an unmoved mover. The cosmos is just spiraling out of control. And you can see in his, in Aristotle's physics, like everything is, it's very naturalistic and it's really, there's great stuff there. But then toward the end, you can see he's starting to realize like, oh wow, movement and change are really kind of doing a lot of work here. And what if that movement and change isn't headed in a good way? You know, like what if it's going in a bad direction and how do we know? And then so the final chapter is this like theological apology or something. I, that's my reading anyway, where the unmoved mover. Is like the one who basically directs it all. And that basic idea in Aristotle just tracks all the way through the Euro-Christian tradition where you get kind of God the maker, God the clockmaker. And this is kind of, you know, this early modern deist interpretations. They're all riffs on this Aristotelian idea that God's gotta be up there being that unmoved foundation for everything. So I got into, I just really wanted to understand why do they hate movement? So why does movement always have to be explained away? Now, so again, Einstein, oh yeah. I mean, he, the kinetic theory of matter. I mean, it's golden. It's really brilliant. But also in the end for Einstein, he's really a kind of a classical dude. He's a Newtonian and he doesn't want the world. Absolutely fearful of the quantum world. It's like, look, if quantum physics is true, science is dead. Like he, that was a very depressing thing. Even though he's like one of the founders of its insights, he deeply rejected its starting assumptions. And that's because it really is about movement. Einstein wanted a finite universe. Then if it's not infinite, it becomes possible to know it, master it. So he, anyway, the point is stasis, whether it's foundations that are epistemological or they're sort of cosmological, Descartes, Archimedes, Einstein. I mean, they're all looking to explain motion away. They're engaging with it, but just to explain it away, to give foundations in the same way that Aristotle wanted cosmological foundations. He wanted political foundations. Something fixed and static, but you know, that just doesn't exist. So they're all metaphysical fantasies. But my question was, why are they, why this fantasy? You know, knowing full well that we've never seen anything in this universe that doesn't move. So like, what's with the fantasy of wanting it to not? I mean, why bang your head against this wall, these Europeans, so hard? And what are the consequences of this idea, this commitment to something which is completely unevidenced? But yet seems to be this very powerful imaginary desire to achieve.

I love it. And I, you know, I'm imagining the listeners sitting there thinking, Tim, what has any of this got to do with the future of education? Right? So we'll get there. We will get there.

It does. It does. It does.

It really does. But I just wanted to also ask, because obviously, you know, it's, it's very easy to center the Euro-Western tradition and just this rest of the world, this dark place with people moving around. The center of civilization is the thing we're talking about clearly. That's nonsense. And there was a lot of other stuff going on at the time. But I also know that more recently you've done some incredible work around, so we're kind of jumping forward in your timeline of your scholarly work, but like looking at the way that different stories have shown up all around the world pre that time. So like pre-7th century BC or whatever, to try and kind of describe the way that the world comes into being or the way that life happens or the way that chaos and order and nature and all these different kind of concepts emerge, like without going too far into that realm, cuz it might just take us off on a bigger tangent, but I just think I, I find that so fascinating. But why was that relevant to you in terms of situating then the way that the European Western tradition really went down this strange fantasy route, right? Like it, it feels so different the way that they tried to just absolutely explain away movement. When you look at all the stories that, that you've kind of tracked that came up around the rest of the world.

Yeah, thanks. That, yeah, that is where I'm at right now. And I will try to keep the answer to that short because the project essentially, I mean, I imagine it will probably take the next 7 years to complete the books that I have outlined for this question. It's a simple question, but it's amazing how hard it is to answer this question. Which is what happened. I mean, that's the question really is, and it's not just the Euro-Western tradition. There's a change that happens in across Eurasia. The short answer to this is something like the Axial Age. So this is a time around the 6th century BCE that scholars call the Axial Age, but it's a widely celebrated, most scholars celebrate this. It's like, this is where we get the flourishing of morality and goodness and civilization, and we get rid of all this mythological baggage. And you know, it's a, it's a great age of, is, you know, it's the first enlightenment. It's the ancient enlightenment, so-called, but we should be very— any kind of enlightenment, we should be very kind of suspicious of what's going on here just because of all of like what it takes to produce an enlightenment, what it says about the darkness that came before that. The enlightenment is just predicated on an assumption about the darkness, the evil, and so on that has to be overcome. Anyway, this is saturated in that transitionary period and it's a bit more comp— the 6th century isn't some like hard line. In Sumer and in Egypt, a transition toward transcendence happens earlier, 1500 BCE. So that's, it's quite a bit earlier, but there's reasons for that that I won't go into. But the short story is that I basically tried to track, first of all, all of the world's oldest recorded cosmogonies. And they, and the conclusion very shortly, the biggest one is that they all begin with chaos. And the reason that was interesting to me was because there are some figures that I've found in the Euro-Western tradition, ones that I initially did not suspect. That really privileged movement without trying to explain it away. And the first one inside of the Euro-Western canon is Lucretius because his idea of the swerve is that matter just swerves indeterminately and he's, there's no higher plan, order, structure. Everything emerges out of that. And the people who end up receiving that idea really resented and rejected it because they're like, you know, they're like, what are you saying? Like somehow just this swerving indeterminate movement just produces reality somehow? It seemed just miraculous. They're like, No, you gotta have freedom and the soul and God has gotta be in there somewhere. And so they, you know, versions of Epicurean, Lucretianism where deists put in God and the soul and they put in all their stuff. So you kind of this early modern tradition is hodgepodge, but I wanted to know where Lucretius got this idea and why he, why is he such a weirdo inside of what is otherwise, and probably listeners, because the number one thing people say, oh, Heraclitus, let's not get into Heraclitus. I'm just gonna say he's not on my list. But there's really good reasons why he's not. But if you go back farther, Lucretius is getting this from the poets, from Homer, from Hesiod, from mythology, and the book is saturated with myth, and he's bringing some of that in. Okay, Epicurus is in the background too, even though we don't actually have any primary texts where Epicurus says anything about a swerve, and it's not totally clear. I think that his system requires one, although I think probably at some point he might have said something about it. We just, we don't know. There's testimony and secondary sources. Okay, now I want to get into that. The point is I wanted to to know where this stuff came from. And it came from, in this tradition, Hesiod and Homer, who talk— well, for Hesiod, it's called Chaos proper. And then Homer, it's Oceanus, but this, they're very similar sorts of characters that anyway, everything comes out of Chaos, not just for the Greeks, but it's a world tradition and all these oldest recorded written texts that come in their primary language. Then the question is, well, what happened if that was the oldest substratum as far back as we can see in the textual record? So that's like 3rd millennium BCE in Egypt. And Sumer, if that's some of the oldest stuff, what exactly was going on that caused a transition where China, India, Greece, Egypt, these places would all sort of shift their stories from starting with movement? That's, I guess, the short answer is I was interested in chaos because it was to me the origins of a story about movement. And it's more widespread in all the stories. Not only does the cosmos begin with chaos, chaos is always defined as moving in all the texts. You look at the language and you see that movement is always something that's going on. Now, not determinate movement like you think, not A to B or this object and that object, but movement in some sort of deeply indeterminate way that can't just be reduced to predictions and finite or determinate things. It's a crazy kind of primordial movement. And then out of that tradition, there is a shift happening 15th century BCE and then 6th century BCE. And then after that, and you might be thinking, well, why did that just magically happen? The story is that the Axial Age is this like amazing age of collective enlightenment, that if you civilize enough, long enough, everybody's gonna come to the same conclusion. Why? Because it's the right one, obviously, transcendence. That's the thing that unites all these Axial traditions together, whatever their language and tradition and philosophies and so on. They all believe in transcendence, and that is also called perennial philosophy. Their narrative about the Axial Age is that's, it was all obvious and it's inevitable. My story is actually, it was completely not obvious. Nobody else on the planet ever believed anything like this. So then the question is, how did that happen? And I do have an, as I think as good an evidenced answer to that as is maybe possible, not airtight, but it's, I've got a lot of evidence suggesting that there is a story to tell about the spread of the idea of transcendence. And its origins at the basis of what we now call, you know, civilization. I mean, even the modern version is just, it's a second order transcendence or enlightenment period, which is just kind of reproducing the first transcendence enlightenment period in the 6th century BCE. After that happens, the rest of the story is more documented and told, which is just empire and colonialism. Why is it that, you know, indigenous populations in South America encounter transcendence? That's the same true a— around the world. It's just transcendence arrives on the shores of many countries, but it all stems from this place in Eurasia. It's not some kind of original universal feature of human consciousness.

Right. So it's like an, to put it crudely, it's like a story that then is exported around the world, but a story of, I wanna say control somehow of like there's a story of wanting there to be an explanation for all of this. Yeah. Like, so it's coming from a place of, I don't know, just wanting to orient somehow in the world so that I can explain why this is all the way it is. And as you said, a lot of those explanations ultimately, if you go far enough back, become this unmoved mover, this original source that creates the movement. And it's fine to have a bit of movement and a bit of chaos, but as long as we get it back into some kind of order. So it's like order killing the chaos basically, and the kind of the humans seizing their control of their destiny. And I don't know, all these kinds of narratives, I guess. And then what has any of that got to do with education? Why does Tim care at all about this on an education podcast? So the thing that I, if I could try and explain it, the thing that I find so interesting about that is that the way that then education in its broadest sense, has been implicated in furthering of that story of the imposition of order. So, you know, if, I mean, even in colonial periods, you know, the way that education was used as a weapon to civilize in inverted commas and to perpetuate the story of the colonial powers coming into that country, whether that's in, you know, indigenous communities all over the world, you've seen that happening and less overtly violently, let's say. It's been used as a way to explain to young people how the world works. I mean, that's kind of what we do, right? As educators is we help young people orient and explain to them how the world works. And ultimately that comes from a place of stasis in a way. It's a place of like an ability to explain, like indeterminacy is not what you want in a classroom, right?

It's, it's like we, we're supposed to gain knowledge here, not learn fundamental indeterminacy of reality.

Right, exactly. And so there's a, there's a, a way of of orienting young people that actually just perpetuates the myth of the imposition of order of all the things that you've been describing. And we exactly try and remove indeterminacy, remove uncertainty, remove ignorance, remove humility, let's say, and almost an openness to the world. Often it's like, here's how the world works. Obviously this is a crude stereotype, but there is some truth to here are some right and some wrong answers about the way the world works, right? And it's hard to argue against that, right? On one level, it's like, well, surely, like, you know, the classic response to that is something like, well, maths is real, right? 1 1 2. You know, there's a coherence to the story that makes it pretty compelling when you are in it. But what I found in your work is like, okay, then let's get outside of that and see why have we constructed this deeply coherent story of all these pieces that fit together through science and maths and, and all these other pieces that create this perception of stasis. And empirically, as I've heard you say, there's just nothing in the world that isn't constantly moving. It just does not exist. And so how to help young people orient towards the world in movement when we are all in movement while we're doing the orienting, but helping them feel a sense of safety safety and competence, or, you know, all of these things that we want for our young people to feel effective and self-efficacy, et cetera, in the world while we're all moving without perpetuating the myth that, yeah, it's, it's all pretty clear. We've got some answers for how this works and we just need to like crack on, you know? So it's, so it's like, it's hard to hold and I'm struggling right now to explain it well, but there just feels like something very important about the way that education has been implicated in this story of order defeating chaos, let's say. Absolutely.

Yeah. And that, that's a very good point to make. It's one of the points I tried to, in a short condensed version, to just emphasize that chaos does not mean disorder for the vast majority of human history. Quite probably, if these oldest texts are any indication, chaos has nothing to do with disorder. The fact that we, every, when we hear that word, that's what it means to us. This is the production. This is the result of a kind of historical transformation. And it can only happen when order is first, and then chaos can be the lack of that order. Right. But if chaos is first, that means that order would've had to emerge from it. And if order emerged from it, then you can't look back at chaos and say it was disordered. It's not, it's beyond a simple question of order and disorder. It is the way that order comes into existence. I mean, you've mentioned before your interest in complexity theory. I mean, that is, you know, there's, there's issues with the math behind that. It's a kind, you know, chaos theory is a deterministic theory, but still the idea behind it that patterns can emerge out of what appear to be unknown initial conditions and, you know, really long periods of relational iterations that you can get stable structures that can emerge out of that. That basic idea is an important insight that is really old. It's way older than the 1970s when Europeans finally discovered that basic idea that I think many people on this planet just know intuitively by looking at how water produces a vortex. Yeah. You don't need any special math to see that you can go from a very turbulent watery condition into a distribution of metastable vortices, you know, little whirlpools that happen just in water or in smoke. I mean, they're so obvious that you, these are images that appear over and over again in the cosmogonic literature. But just to your point about education, absolutely. I mean, and I mean transcendence, I'm not just talking here about like religion. I mean, it's science as well. I mean, the transcendence inside science is that there are universal laws and, you know, we might not be God, but through reason, again, this kind of Aristotelian idea that like If we use our reason and we know the laws that are out there and are universal, we are somehow participating in this kind of transcendence, fixed static laws, essentially outside of space and time. I mean, you know, not all physicists agree, but most of them accept the idea that the laws are sort of there in some ways before the universe is, and the universe just spells them out. That's what Hegel says, you know, nature is the dead husk, essentially, of the logic, and the logic is unchanging and eternal., but then nature just is like iterating it out and screwing it up more or less and not doing it perfectly. So science is committed to this and even kind of critical humanistic approaches that still treat humans as, you know, special, like absolutely like more unique than anything else in the cosmos, the degree to which they treat humans as somehow exceptional in a fundamental way, there's also a kind of transcendence and now you can pick what you call that thing., but it's a human exceptionalism, which is still invested in its own way, even if it's not about a transcendent God or a salvation story or one of scientific progress and, you know, universal forms. It's still committed to a kind of exceptionalness that only makes sense if humans in some ways transcend. Now, I'm not saying that's identical with God, but there's a version of humanism and Enlightenment rationality and even critical kinds of humanism that just fall into that same kind of problem in a way that you do not see all these traditions and texts prior to the 6th century BCE. And I mean, you know, outside of that as well, it's— I'm marking that, but it's not a hard line. I mean, it really, it's geographically specific, but in Eurasia anyway, inside of that, inside the traditions of the Axial Age and transcendence, education has always been invested in transcendence. Now that might not be the first thing that any— because it's assumed, but that's what makes it more dangerous and pernicious. Is that the assumptions and the history of it are not checked. I mean, you can read out there, like, there's all these books on the history of religion that say, yeah, you know, as soon as Homo sapiens got this certain brain architecture, they immediately understood God and transcendence. And that's where it happened. There's just no evidence for any of that. I mean, we're dealing with a pre-textual tradition, but there's no reason why any piece of the brain architecture suddenly produced the idea of a transcendent God. And the fact that all the oldest world cosmogonies that we have texts for, none of them have transcendence in them, strongly suggests that like transcendence is not that old. It's an invention. Transcendence was invented and then institutionalized, reproduced through colonialism, imperialism, and education in all of its facilities. That version of kind of post-axial transcendent educational model, man, we're just living in it. But I feel you're, you know, like I, I feel very conflicted because on one hand, You do want to help people live in this world, you know, this world that we are in teaching our students and, and that, you know, it is advantageous in some ways. Like, yeah, this is how math works. Now, why should we accept the fundamental assumptions of all the axioms? Like, you know, it's an important thing to know that like 1 1, I mean, it sounds like simple and obvious, but that's just by habit. Truly, in order to get 1 1, the amount of axioms that you have to accept without any evidence, like you just either accept the more you don't, you know what I'm saying? The logic of identity, of non-contradiction, of transitive property. You have to accept tons of stuff just to get to very simple arithmetic. It's a massive cosmological world in which 1 1 2. And it is not obvious. The whole world does not accept it univocally. It is something, and you do not get that in basic math. You just, you are taught to accept this as a fundamental starting point and not to question it. Because if you question, I mean, you know what I'm saying? Like, I struggle with this teaching a class on Marxism right now. I'm like, I'm teaching you a bunch of stuff, but it is not gonna help you in this world that we live in. Yeah. It might make things harder and more complicated for you. So am I helping to direct people to other possible worlds that currently exist that are in the process of developing, or just teach them the canon that reproduces the dominant ideology in one way? Even if we, you know, it's a, there's a service to it. Yeah. We all have to read these texts and sort of accept some basic things., but is, you know, they're both helpful in some ways, but it's a conflicted relationship that doesn't line up. Totally. I'm gonna say, yeah.

And the thing I think is interesting, it certainly speaks to some basic assumptions about what you think education is for. 'Cause you know, clearly it's not gonna be that helpful to function in the labor market and et cetera. You know, if there's a more instrumental purpose, fine. And that's necessary. But there is, I felt understanding your work more deeply, this question of actually we say We care about critical thinking. So how far do you want to take that really? Because you can talk about critical thinking, but from within the manufactured story that you've just described, or you could then say, well, maybe we can take critical thinking to a point where we actually try and understand where that story that we are living in has come from. So there's a depth of like layers of critical thinking and it, sure, like clearly we're not saying we start teaching this to 9 and 10-year-olds. But at the same time, I think there is an intuitive, you know, you often hear these kind of stereotypes about young children and the way they kind of inhabit the world and their curiosity and all these kind of, these tropes about young children. But actually part of what I think young children are incredibly good at is kind of flowing with the movement of life. And actually what, what we do with education is then say, oh no, that's not how the world works. Order came first, and if it all gets a bit messy, let's clean it up. But actually, they're very comfortable in moving with the mess, let's say, the wildness, the flow of life. And then we try and educate them almost out of that perception or that intuition somehow by fixing the patterns in a way. And that, again, and that's another thing that I've like, honestly, I like, I found it so beautiful on one level and also just really profound to hear you talk about the different patterns that emerge, right? And it, I'm just, I'm so conscious of like this sounding just so out of touch with people's, like, I'm going to work tomorrow, teach in a classroom or whatever, right? But, but anyway, I'm just gonna like totally indulge myself and just like, we're just gonna go for it, right? But the patterns and what you talk about, the metastability of the patterns. So like you, you talked about the vortex, right? The patterns emerge, and then somehow they create this illusion of stasis, which is metastability, right? Am I, I mean, correct me if I'm explaining it incorrectly.

No, that's, yeah, no, that's absolutely right.

Yeah. That I think is the piece where we get lost is because we are lost in the illusion of the metastability. So we see these patterns all around us that seem like they're not moving. They seem like they're fixed into a particular configuration and they are unchanging. And so, and then we, we then start naming those things and drawing boundaries around those things and teaching our young people about those things. But actually they are all moving and we are all in, in movement as we are doing all of that work. But that's such a, feels like such a disorienting kind of revelation to people that we move back to the safety of the metastability and just, oh no, that's all right. That's, that is just that thing and I can, that's a chair and I can sit on it and I can do my work and things that I have to function in the world. So I have to interact with these fixed entities, but none of them are fixed. And so could you talk a little bit about the pattern, the emergence of pattern in the world? Because I think that feels to me like it's a really significant place where we get a bit lost. We lose ourselves in our search for some kind of security or safety.

Yeah, I mean, that experience of thinking, I mean, I would just say that I don't think that the patterns themselves, like, produce that illusion. I think it's a very specific historical cultural illusion. Like, you know, to think that things are absolutely fixed, that's something that is only possible at a certain point in sort of geography and history that some people have made that assumption that's been grounded in deeper assumptions about transcendence and order. So that's not a universal experience. And so in many of the texts that I'm looking at around the world, so this is an Egypt, Sumer, you know, Shinto, Norse mythology, like Mayan Popol Vuh, like I'm just trying to throw out some examples. So Taoism, like these are texts where that's just not the starting point. And so there's, there would be no reason to think that things were actually static and there'd be no cognitive dissonance of like, oh my gosh, you know, I mean, metastability is like a really important thing. And there are the really important part is that some things are more metastable than others, you know, and, and how long are they going to last? Nothing will ever like last forever, but you know, things can— that's why it's a very kind of experimental orientation instead of certainties and stasis. We get kind of a very cautious experimentation and a set of shifting parameters or shifting rules. This is working for now, but it's not going to work forever. So that's the baked-in part of it. And the kid example made like really resonated with me the way that children have this very mutable sense of this kind of relationship. I, you maybe you did this with your kids too, but with my kids, we would play when they were, gosh, really young, like first grade, second grade, we would play games, but they would invent the game, the starting, and then as we played the game, they would sort of add or change rules as we went along. Like, you know, they could feel that, that the first game was like hitting a kind of limit of like, yeah, we've done this rule. Let's put another one on and see what happens. And sometimes the rules like just didn't make sense. So they clearly advantaged one child over the other, but it was this di— you know, it was this kind of experimental change where they were realizing, oh, that's not fair. That's like, change that rule. They would just on the fly start mutating the rules and that allowed the game to just go on sort of indefinitely. We could keep changing and adding rules until we are done. And then the game would never be played again, you know? And that was, I felt like That's the spirit of that kind of experimentation where you, you do things and you have to be responsive and sensitive to whether they're working. You know, you're careful. It's not just willy-nilly, let's just do whatever we want. That is not at all what this is about. It's like you need to recognize that some patterns have been around for a very long time. Like now let me pan out from the child example to like a kind of global planetary situation. There are some patterns that are just really, really make our world possible. And we have to understand those patterns of like massive integrated planetary systems. Our metastability of our bodies is contingent on their metastability. Exactly. Right. And that is something that is like, when I think about like what's important to learn, that's a pretty big lesson. And this is the lesson that starts every one of these cosmogonies in these traditions is sky, earth. These are big beings. And like you said, they're also, I just, there's so many points of emphasize here, but one of them about metastability and our relationship to to it, I'm just gonna throw out this idea as both a modern and con— and a historical point. In many societies is animism, some variation or degree of animism where you think like animism is a much healthier, sensible orientation to a metastable world because these things are much more like people than they are like static fixed objects. They have a kind of character, but they can change. The character can also mutate and change. You're in a relationship with these beings. So animism makes a lot of sense. And in like a more practical, experimental way, just like you would with other people, you don't fully understand another person, but you listen to them. You're sensitive. You, you try to get where they're coming from, but it's just like that with everything. It's just that in this particular culture, we only treat humans as people, and then we think everything else is not a person. And we then, as you say, treat these as objects to be mastered and negotiated. But what, I mean, if they're metastable, then they are closer to what we mean by a person. And this is a big difference. People are older and they come first, and humans are people like the rest of the natural world is persons, you know, tree people, sky people. Persons is a much bigger category. And then humans, we're people too, but we're just some people. In a world of other people. And I think we know how to relate to people. If we could just get a broader sense of personhood, we would have a more sensitive relationship. It's not, I'm not saying it's utopian. I'm just saying it's at least puts you in the right space to be responsive to a world, which is a very relational and metastable one. You got to pay attention to how things are changing and then you can respond to that carefully.

I love it because one of the other things I wanted to bring up was just that some of the things you've just said there, I hear real resonances of things that are coming up all over the different discourses that are popping up now, right? Like the agency of the, of the more-than-human world and like relationality and, and even resonance as a concept. And there's all these different concepts that are coming up into the different dialogues that are happening as people are grappling with the cracks that are emerging in these kinds of certainties, let's say, of the institutions and the, you know, the Euro-Western tradition stuff that's like the progress narrative and how it's cracking and all of these kinds of things. And so there's a real, again, what I found in your work was like a, an explanation, not to fix it, but an explanation as to where some of these patterns might be coming from. That I just think is, I think is incredibly useful and rich. And the other thing I wanted to say was that precisely because, as you said about the, the metastability of this, the things that enable us to just continue and persist as in our world, they are all moving, but they are incredibly important to understand. So it, by saying that everything is movement, it's not saying therefore we should just flow with the movement and we don't need to learn anything because I think that's one of the, unfortunate caricatures of a weak progressive response to a kind of industrial control-based education system is like, you know, you just let, let people flow, let things be as they want to be. And there is a real depth and rigor to understanding the patterns that we are participating in somehow, let's say, that I think is incredibly important for young people, like for everyone to understand. There's real value in that understanding, while at the same time, can you learn about it with depth and rigor and recognize that it's not a fixed state that is forever and always, and because I've understood it, I finally mastered it and I can control it. So there's something really interesting there in that I find really useful. And I take your point about my own biases, about the kind of dissonance that comes with recognizing things are moving in practice. If I'd have grown up in a culture that that accepted all of the stuff that you, you've been talking about, then I wouldn't have that dissonance. But there is a, there's something I find incredibly generative in the idea of talking about the patterning of movement into coalescences, you know, metastabilities, and then learning about those. And like I say, just recognizing that they may not always be like that, but for now, and maybe on the span of time that we are alive and on this planet, they might still be metastable, or as we're finding with climate change, we might really like mess some of it up and create some, like, some instability in what could have been very metastable, but we've messed it up because we've, you know, burned too much fossil fuel. So sorry, I'm going off like, like way into— It's not off.

I mean, all the pieces fit together. And so I have another book called Fear the Earth, which is just that. Yeah. It's the, it's the bigger sort of planetary cosmic history in which Humans by kind of really misunderstanding something really fundamental about the reality, and it's not all humans, it's some humans by this trajectory, it really sets us up for failure to not understand the larger planetary context, which is in a very short nutshell, entropy, sort of optimized entropy, not maximizing or minimizing, but a kind of optimal entropy. Of planetary entropy. And the problem is that, you know, humans, some of them have really got carried away and reduced planetary entropy by half since the Holocene. That's just, it's just too far. I mean, it's destabilized a lot of things because that planetary entropy is not on the map of like, that's the thing we're trying to achieve. But that's like what makes this whole planet even livable is that it be, you know, breaking down a certain amount of entropy, energy in a stable way. And the biggest thing on the planet that does that are plants, trees. We've chopped down, you know, half of them since the Holocene. 6 trillion, we're down to 3 trillion. It's, you know, it's fundamentally destabilized. Yeah. I mean, fossil fuels are part of that, but deforestation is, if we had still as many trees, you know, we could possibly burn more fossil fuel. Not that I'm suggesting that, of course, but that, you know, fossil fuel is only part of the story. And it's again, another way that humans look to themselves as both the problem and the solution. Like, oh, we are the problem. We burn too much fossil fuels. But like, you know, the, the, the deep history of this planet is that plants and trees really know how to trans-evaporate, take energy from the sun, break it down, and then dissipate it into space. That process of, like, if you think about that, from sun to space, the planet is a little metastable loop, you know, that is cycling that energy through, taking high concentrated, like, high energy photons, and then breaking and transforming them and then releasing it out into space. That's, you don't want to do too much or too fast. It has to be optimized. And you know, this planet has had a lot of millions of years of good practice and very intelligent organisms that have stabilized it, you know, into and out of, you know, waves of stability and so on. But the Holocene has been a pretty, a nice stable moment that we've botched. I mean, I, yeah, I ha, I don't know if you had a question about educational practice, if we're there yet, but I had some thoughts about like specific, like things that I've done as an educator that have tried to have, but I—

No, that's, I think it would be really useful to kind of ground some of this in, not fix it, but just, you know, just let it land a little bit into, I'm just really conscious that there's so much here. You've done so much deep scholarship, written so many books that we're trying to kind of cram into this. And then I'm making the segue to education. So it's like, I'm not even sure it's working, but it's just, I'm, I'm having a lot of fun. But I find it, I think it is incredibly profound and gives an important frame for some of the misplaced certainties, misplaced concreteness that we kind of bring into education. And so yeah, finally, maybe thinking about how, how not to do that, how to still orient young people in a good way and build relationship and, you know, do all the things that we know good education does, but with a criticality or, and with a a level of not just perpetuating that same myth. Yeah, I'd be interested. I'd love to hear what you, you know, if you have thoughts specifically about that and what you do in your own practice maybe.

Yeah. I mean, it's hard for perfect and I'm not a scholar of education, but you know, I've got into the literature enough to feel like there are some things that might, like what this bigger picture of thinking about the world as process, as metastability, what that might, what kinds of educational, like ways that people would learn differently. And if those would be shown in any empirical studies to have You know, a kind of positive effect on education. I mean, lots of things. So I have a book coming out called Pink Noise, and there's lots of really important implications, not just for like education, but also aesthetics and so on. But, you know, I've tried some techniques that are sort of grounded in neuroscience, psychology, and education literature that I feel are just good for education and that put people in the right space to learn things that they will actually remember. Because people can learn things you can cram and memorize and so on. But what's actually helpful for people and does it have any resonance with a philosophy of movement starting from that point? Like a couple techniques that I've tried, and I don't know if you've ever done these or listeners have ever tried these kinds of things. I, for one, was always very scared to take my students outside as a professor. I'm like, oh, but they're not gonna pay attention. They'll be distracted. Like, you know, they can't hear me. The acoustics are bad and I had all these reasons, but during COVID I, I just was like, yeah, I can't— everybody inside with masks and numbered seats. And it was like very authoritarian, more than normal being in a classroom. So I just started teaching outside and I was like, you know what? It couldn't be any worse than it already is with all this stuff. So let's just go outside. People can take off their masks, they can move around, we can space out and we'll just deal with it. And it turned out to be vastly more successful than I thought. I did lots of student surveys. I know that's not exactly scientific, publishable material because I gave them the surveys. But you know, just to get feedback and my students always like, I ask and almost everybody wants to go outside. They would rather be outside. And I think this is an interesting thing to ask your students. Would you like to go outside? And that tells you something already. That's not something to be crushed. Like you want to go outside because you don't wanna learn. Is that what's going on? Why do they want to go outside? I'm not saying it's universal. I'm saying, There is, in my experience and my colleagues who have tried this, almost always when the weather is good, everybody wants to be outside. Why is that something we feel like, no, but no serious learning can happen outside, or, you know, outdoor learning. It's just a baby step. It's a totally settler baby step of reintroducing people back out into the, even a landscape university world. Like we're working inside of these parameters. Just to get them back into conversation with the air, the clouds, the trees, the grass. Some of the feedback that I've got has been really interesting. Students with, with ADHD and autism find that they actually, it enhances their attention. I have never seen a student fall asleep outside, whereas in the classroom, I always have at least one student who falls asleep and I can tell they are struggling to stay awake. You know what I'm talking about? This does not happen outside to me anyway. Anecdotal here, but I, I, because you're, they're outside either sitting on the grass or sitting like I have chairs set up that we can be outside and don't get, I won't even get started on the classroom, but I, the idea is to have this empty, totally white-walled thing. Yeah. And the idea is, well, this helps people concentrate because now they can focus on the only interesting thing in class and that is the professor. Exactly. And I just feel like this, that is not actually, when you look at the studies in psychology and attention, that is not how attention works. It does not work by shutting out everything else except that one thing. That actually produces inattention. When you look at the studies about like, there's this thing. So there's a whole area called soft attention. And there's an attentional studies of like psychology and neuroscience. Soft attention is the natural world. Nothing demands your attention., but your eyes begin to roam and they roam in a very certain pattern. And I don't know if I can fully define this, but it's a fractal pattern, meaning, and here's the simple version, a few big movements, a medium amount of medium movements, and lots of little tiny movements that if you look at it on an XY axis, it looks like a slope going down from amplitude, high, a few high amplitude things. A tree is a really good concrete example. A tree has like a big trunk and a few big branches. It's got a lot of medium-sized branches and it has many, many, many more leaves, tiny little twigs. That distribution is a, a distribution common across scales of reality from the cosmological to the quantum. These distributions are really common. They also happen to be the distribution that eyes move. They're called isochrons. When you look at the natural world, be— when you look at fractal patterns, your eyes move in a fractal way. That makes your brain, the distribution of brain frequency. This all sounds like it's not true, but I swear to God, I have all the cited articles putting all these pieces together in a very empirical way. It makes your, the distribution of brain activity more fractal as well. That's a good place for brain activity because from the cells, the, from just like the electrochemical signaling and firing of cells all the way up to really big brain waves, which are huge billions of neurons firing together in synchronized patterns, metastable patterns. When your brain is in this state, this fractal distribution, which to some degree it almost always is, unless you're asleep or unconscious or under anesthetic, then that signal drops. It's a good indicator that somebody is awake and conscious. And when it's firing very well in that pattern, it means that, you know, This is a place of receptivity where things can be integrated. Okay. I realize that I could go on forever about fractal patterns, but I'll just say that education in a context which is more fractal, and I mean that sonically, visually, tactilely, kinetically. When students go on walks, I have my students take walks, you know, this works even in wheelchairs and disability. Like you just moving around in the world changes your relationship and the studies show that when students go on walks, the increase in— okay, now you're gonna laugh, but there are studies that measure creativity and there's, they're a little silly, but look, there's something to them. When people walk, they become more creative. They're able to be more creative on tests that measure this kind of thing in psychology.

Sure. Yeah, yeah.

But walking, and it also is conflict resolution. When people walk, they move together. And that sounds like it's just symbolic, but it's not. It's performative. When you walk with people, your body syncs up, your legs start moving in the same, it's like magic. But that also brings you to a space where you're able to hear people. That relationship of face-to-face confrontation is really not ideal for conflict resolution. When you walk side by side, you're in it together. You're moving together. You're breathing together. You're seeing the same things together. It puts you in the same shared world to have a shared conversation. I'll stop, but I have many more examples of outdoor education. Fascinating. It really puts you in a good context. It's not, doesn't solve all problems.

No, no, sure. No, that's amazing. Thank you for that. 'Cause I, I didn't, I had no idea about any of that fractal patterning stuff. But I mean, obviously there's a lot of talk about nature-based and getting, you know, outdoor learning and, and absolutely like for many of those reasons, even if you, we don't go to the fractal piece, but just very quickly that I've had a couple of ecological psychologists on the podcast previously, and we talked about just the impoverished environments of classrooms and just how, and again, this is like a little bit of a pet peeve for me, but, and maybe slightly crudely said, but the behaviorist and cognitivist kind of dominance, some behaviorist and cognitivist dominance in psychology of learning and the literature around what learning is, has really just perpetuated a lot of what we've been saying about the order piece, right? And to your point, like the explicit, the focus, like the attention, you know, we want this, so we do this linear cause and effect thing to get this thing. We want attention, so we strip away all distractions to focus on this one thing. So this just a very, I think a very simplistic version of the way, as you've just described, the actual way the brain works and the body and the in environment as the ecological psychologists call it, the organism environment system. As you know, it's not, there's just again, more and more insights coming from different disciplines saying the same convergent things that yes, we need young people in much more nurturing, real moving environments and all the stuff you said about embodied practice. Like we've, I did a whole episode on embodied practice in education. I think again, that's a whole nother piece where the moving and the moving with and the synchronized moving and all of that, just there's so much. In all of it that I think has just been massively under or kind of excluded, actually actively excluded from the story because it doesn't fit the ordered narrative that we want, right? Of control. And so like to hear you go there as well, from starting from, you know, all the other places we've been in this conversation feels incredibly interesting to me because it's like, How does this ground out in real practice? Well, it's like, it's pretty simple actually. Get young people into like, into the natural world, into movement, into being in relationality with each other. It's pretty simple, right?

Yeah. There's no need to reinvent the wheel here. I mean, this is old stuff. I mean, this is not like, it's funny that it's taken, you know, academic, I mean, it's not funny. I mean, it's kind of tragic from a European perspective that it's taken us this long to come around to obvious stuff that most humans have known for a very long time. And then we suddenly feel like it's this really big new thing. But I mean, it's not like new materialism, new animism. I mean, these aren't really that new. I mean, they're new to Europeans. And so that name makes sense in the context of European traditions and scholarship. But you know, for most of the plant, I mean, it's obvious that trees have something to teach you, but the classroom structure, just without saying it, it's obvious that trees have nothing to teach you. And that's why you're in a room with nothing in it, the world has nothing to teach you. If you think about it, it's like a little spaceship or something, you know, get into this empty box, there's nothing inside and just blast out into space and you're floating in nowhere. The weird thing about the classroom, it's such a no place that like in a classroom you could be anywhere. So true. Like I ask my students, I'm like, where are you right now? Like you could be in any university almost on the planet. And it would be still looking like this, you know, this basic structure is still there everywhere. Like, does it even matter that it's you? Does it matter that we're here? If none of that stuff matters, like, but you see that that's without even saying any of that, it's baked in. There's a philosophical world historical assumption baked into this box. And we're here together. We need to call it out for what it is, which is this totally abstract little spaceship that makes us feel exceptional. We're outside the world. Do you see any other things in nature doing this kind of classroom nonsense? No, you don't. That's because we are special. You see that humans have made this little box so that we could do this crazy thing to ourselves, but the rest of the world doesn't do that. That's because the world is stupid and has nothing to teach us. Inside this box, we can teach ourselves things that nature is too stupid to understand. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's got totally all of that human exceptionalism baked in. In some way there's, you're right, that education for children is like, it's a condensation of a very specific civilization story, like fast-forwarded, like super condensed. On another level, there's just like a performative pattern structure of behavior. Bell rings, go to the next room. I mean, it's like monastic architecture and institutional, whatever Foucault calls disciplinary power. It's just that. I mean, but we're teaching that, and that might be the main thing they remember is sit down, shut up, raise your hand, be quiet, you know, like move here, bell rings, go to the— and like the university is just still playing that out. And by the end of it, they're just really, really good. And then they can go to get a job and do the same thing there. Follow orders, get up, go to the bathroom. None of this stuff really pertains directly or obviously to the natural world around us. In some ways, that's the lesson is the formal performative lesson of how you move and the patterns of it.

Brilliantly said, and I completely agree and it's, I love it. Thank you. I mean, this is, it's so much here and I've just so appreciated learning myself in reading your work and just, no, I thank you for all of it. And hopefully the first of more conversations, but I really just want to get these things that you are bringing about to many more people. So I'm just so happy we could have this time together and no, thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me and for everybody that, you know, took the time to listen. Listen to your podcast. And yeah, thanks again so much.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us at Good Impact Labs, on our blog, or on social media, or within your own networks.