Today’s conversation was a delight and scratched a deep philosophical itch in being able to speak with Brad Kershner. Author of Understanding Educational Complexity, school leader of Kimberton Waldorf School, and long time contemplative practitioner, Brad and I went on a meandering dive into how a philosophical worldview can inform action and embodiment.
He pointed me to some further resources to explore as well:
Lene Rachel Andersen, Author of Metamodernity
Hanzi Freinacht – The listening Society
John Vervaeke – Awakening from the Meaning Crisis
Tomas Bjorkman – author of The World we Create, and co-author of The Nordic Secret
Transcript:
keevin bybee 0:01
Welcome to the one school podcast. My name is keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician exploring how we might be able to turn public schools into 20 473 165 day safe spaces for our children with a lot of integrated social services. Today, I’m lucky enough to be speaking with Brad Kirschner, a school leader, author, and lover of philosophy. He is the author of a book called understanding educational complexity, which I have been flipping through too much delight. And so Brad, thanks for coming on today. And I would love to tell Have you tell us a little bit about yourself? and What brought you here today?
brad kershner 0:42
Hey, keevin Yeah, thanks so much good to be here. I am someone who has worked in schools for a long time and a lot of different contexts. And that that diversity of context has really helped me, I think, have a have a big picture view of what’s going on in education, having worked in public, and charter and independent and Quaker and not Waldorf schools. And I’m also someone who has, as you mentioned, studied a lot of philosophy and religion, and, you know, got my doctorate in education and a graduate degree in philosophy of religions. So I really enjoy and find it really important and meaningful to do sort of big picture thinking on what’s going on in the world, and what’s going on in education. And I’ve tried my best to, to bring what I’ve learned and what I find most meaningful to my direct work with, with with with families and children and teachers. So and I’m very interested in your project, because it sort of shares that same quality of both big picture and very concrete and practical, right. So not just being not not not to be overly critical, but not just being an academic or just theoretical, there is value in being in an academic and theoretical, but trying to really be big picture understanding, you know, trying to really address what we could call the medic crisis in the sense making crisis and the meaning crisis and really understanding the fundamental issues that we’re facing globally as a civilization wide scale, but then being tuned into really practical, concrete pathways for improvement, and potential emergence to actually facilitate the emergence of some meaningful iterations of solution based, you know, ideas and structures and systems and communities. So it’s very exciting. I think this is the work that we all need to be doing in one way or the other book, trying to understand what the heck is going on. And thinking about what we can do and really concrete ways to actually help people’s lives get better. So I’m, I’m right there with you. And I’ve been looking into some of the stuff that you’ve been writing and doing and feeling a deep resonance. So the more conversations like this, that we can have, the more than we can bring people together who are sort of on this wavelength of both personal inquiry and trying to understand the problems and then coming up with practical solutions. I just say, let’s do it.
keevin bybee 3:14
Fantastic. Yeah, I’ve often found for myself, that you know, of the menu of options that life lays in front of you that you might want to pursue. I’ve, you know, in order to know which path to go down, it’s important to have a little bit of a, like you said, 10,000 foot view. And it might seem heady, but it takes time to construct that. And so I’m just curious, like, it sounds like you had a pretty similar path, like trying to figure out a little bit about how everything comes together in order to know what to do in the first place.
brad kershner 3:51
Yeah, and that really is important. And it’s important that we maybe pause there for a little bit because I think part of the issue that we’re facing now in a lot of different contexts is a lack of a big picture view, a lack of a sort of grand narrative or meta narrative, or a way of holding it all together, that that gives an on one level meaning and purpose to people’s lives and also helps people orient toward what really will be helpful or not giving people some sort of framework or story to help them understand what would potential collateral damage be of certain actions or what would be second or third order effects of certain things and having a sort of systematic or meta systematic way of thinking about how things hang together if we don’t understand how things hang together. And if we don’t understand things at their root, then even with good intentions, even even with trying to make things better, we often can accidentally make things worse. So the more complex we can understand the problems the better understanding we have of the problems, the more we can actually move slowly and gently and carefully. For me in ways that will actually be helpful and sustainable, long term. And I think in a lot of different contexts, there are good people doing good work, but there’s a bias toward action. And there’s a bias toward results. And often the, the frameworks or the registers for even understanding what is success, or what people’s goals are, whether it be an education, or healthcare or business, it’s just too narrow and too reductive and too limited. So you can have success in one area, but then be not really addressing the root of the problem. And you find a lot of again, nonprofits, schools, you know, lots of examples of good people doing good work, but ultimately, you know, feeling like they’re overwhelmed by this sufficient task, that’s just, we can’t really get a full grapple on because the scope of the problems are so big and so interconnected. So the need to slow down and pause and really come back to first principles and think about the underlying architecture of what would even potentially be helpful in the 21st century is of the utmost importance. Yeah.
keevin bybee 6:10
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And so with, like you said, the issue of slowing down, definitely, I have the default mode of keeping my foot on the gas, and I’m trying to learn how to slow down. But at the same time, when I see that there is a lot of unmet need, I’m just kind of curious how you balance the sense of urgency with the, the, like you said, the need to make sure we are actually understanding the complexity.
brad kershner 6:44
Yeah, well, that that’s a personal question, you know, so I can give a personal answer in terms of how I do it. And for me, you know, it just connects to more of my background, and actually, that my path has been a very spiritual and religious one. And I actually begin in my early 20s, you know, I came across Ken Wilber and integral theory. And that led me to a lot of different spiritual and religious writers and thinking and Buddhism in particular, and I took meditation very seriously, it’s been a lot of time in my 20s, doing a lot of meditation, both daily and long retreats. And for me, that has been that has enabled the grounding of feeling like I have access to stillness, and silence, and groundedness and peace, frankly, regardless of anything. There, there are fundamental qualities of experience that I believe all humans have access to, that we can be awake to, regardless of external circumstances, and even regardless of what thoughts and emotions are flowing through our body mind. So a cultivation of what I would just call, you know, spiritual capability is actually, I think, part of the answer on the individual level and on the collective level in terms of how do we help facilitate these that skill and capacity for everyone. So I think that’s actually a meaningful piece of the resolution of this meta crisis, which does have to do with how we make meaning of the world. And, and for me, making meaning of the world is intimately tied to how grounded and well established we are in a sort of basis of operation of peace and stability, and groundedness. So for me, that’s been a big part of my journey over the past 20 years is getting grounded, spending time in stillness and silence so that the work that I do, stays grounded, and I’m not going to be, you know, fluctuating either emotionally, or in terms of like what I’m doing in the world. It’s really important. And it’s also tied up with the fact of how hard it is for people to actually take the time in this space to actually have that be a part of their life. Because of the increasing complexity of everything and the acceleration of everything and the financialization of everything, there’s a lot of stress and pressure on everyone to go go go and doo doo doo and make money and survival and, you know, the whole economic infrastructure that we are very, you know, embedded in, basically militates against silence and stillness. So this is part of the question for us in terms of when we think about education. You know, one of the things we’ll have to address is how do we help human beings in general to slow down and develop certain skills and capacities that have to do with their own spiritual and soulful well being insensitive? okayness like fundamental okayness and how do you feel and just your, your existential being in the world and coming from a place of psychological In emotional health, because only from that point, can we actually slow down and think things through, you know, and not just be unconsciously perpetuating habits and patterns that are largely influenced by forces that are external to our to, to our inner sort of silence and wisdom.
keevin bybee 10:24
You’re right, the the sense of body mind, health is absolutely critical to any of the other correlates that we care about in life, you know, GDP, you know, quality life, years lived, et cetera. And as somebody who’s relatively new to a mindfulness practice, you know, myself in the last four years, I just kind of lament that I had, for lack of a better term, a spiritual allergy to anything in general. And it, you know, nobody had quite explained it to me in a way that clicked. And so now that I am, you know, still a pretty beginner in the whole mindfulness and meditation practice, just how obvious the lack of control of our own mind we have, but that there is a potential to develop it in the sense of, you know, as I try to prescribe it to my patients, now, I use, the way that I frame it is like push ups for your focus. And I recognize that that’s not capturing the whole of it, but just as a foothold, and how, in addition to doing your real push ups, or whatever physical movement might, a body might need. The combination of those two, starting from a young age is a critical platform to be able to learn anything else and or sustain good quality life years into being an adult, middle aged and even elderly. The you mentioned how the subjective experience is a little bit neglected these days, one of my favorite physician authors, Dan Siegel, I’m not sure if you’ve heard of him before, I actually have been able to meet Dan a couple of times and had lunch with him. We’re all amazing. But just that how in medical school, the subjective experience is largely neglected. But that’s a reflection of the society at large and how we’re neglecting that the subjective experience, but like I said, if we want to meet any of the other correlates, that in the physical world that we care about, it only behooves us to make that an explicit goal that we do care about, right?
brad kershner 12:34
Yeah, yeah. And Dan Siegel’s work is relevant here, because he does a great job of integrating the science and medical side, but also the mindfulness and spirituality side. And I’ve done some, I was part of a education and mindfulness five day retreat, that that I was invited to, and that he was a co facilitator of, and a lot of his work with groups now is actually doing guided meditations. And he’s really, he’s gotten more and more in that direction, throughout his career of actually getting deeper and deeper into the importance of meditation and spirituality as also he is unfolding, this very interconnected, interdependent, socio like neurobiological view of what mind and body even AR. So again, there’s, he’s a good example of someone and there’s a lot of us who when you go, the further down these roads you go, the more you see how interconnected they are, and how interconnected your understanding of the world is with your own internal subjective experience. And then creating positive feedback loops between your thinking and understanding and your sense of well being. And your being in the world and your activity in the world. And how helpful is your work in the world is also an output of the quality of your quality to some extent. Yeah.
keevin bybee 13:53
And so I, you know, using my own personal history as one example of why we’re not maybe taking the subjective experiences, importantly, as we should, you know, I was raised in rural Iowa with, you know, pretty heavy Catholic background, and, you know, discovering science pretty early, recognizing that a lot of things didn’t match up, I think I overreacted. And like I said, developed a allergy to anything spiritual. And I’m just curious, you know, what would you say to somebody like that, to help bridge the gap and recognize that, you know, what we call spiritual might be, for example, a neurological variable that just needs to get filled by something and how can we fill it in the healthiest way?
brad kershner 14:47
Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, there’s so many background sort of tacit, underlying assumptions that we have about the world and There are deeply rooted materialistic biases in terms of how many people in the modern world over the past few 100 years, sort of look at reality. And I don’t think that’s an easy thing to undermine or evolve or question if somebody just has sort of fundamentally materialistic biases in terms of how they understand reality. You know, I, I think the the journey or the path to sort of complexify that or sort of question that are sort of get more into perhaps understanding and appreciating the fundamentally qualitative subjective elements of our experience, it’s a long road, I think the way to maybe help people get on the path to meditation is through I think it sounds like maybe the way that you found it is in terms of, you know, it’s okay to start with a, with more of a self help orientation, where it’s a you can see how just by slowing down and stealing your own mind, and cultivating your own attention, and focus, that’s going to be good for you on a lot of levels. And a lot of reasons why mindfulness has become more popular, because people are, on one level, seeing how it would just be a benefit to them to have greater mastery over their own mind. And everyone has the experience of mental and emotional, I guess you could say drama, or sort of monkey mind experience of just just being a human being. Also a lot of people fundamentally aren’t that happy or, or at peace. So the more you know, whatever someone’s personal situation is, whether it’s through mental health, whether it’s through feeling unhappy, you know, the the sort of emotional quality of life or whether it’s doing more of sort of modernistic, achievement oriented, like wanting to get better, whatever your whatever is meaningful to you, in that moment, whatever is going to be the hook for you. I think, there there are many avenues to sort of enter into a relationship with, with some sort of meditation or mindfulness practice. And then that opens the possibility that new intentions and new reasons for deepening that practice will emerge through the practice itself, because what we can start to realize is that our sense of self and a lot of our ideas and thoughts and intentions and motivations are actually passing experiences of thoughts and emotions that are moving through our awareness. And the more we start to actually be able to see and objectify those things as actually not fundamentally what we are, but things that are that we are experiencing, we started gains in distance between subject and object there, there’s actually different kinds of development. And that’s actually a developmental process that we’re engaging. So for instance, like Robert Keegan, from Harvard, describes human development, as when the subject of one stage becomes the object of the subject of the next stage, right. So it’s actually when what we used to take to be us becomes something that we can look at, we now are coming from a different perspective, we are looking at our mind, or we’re looking at our mental contents, which we used to be identified with. But now we already fundamentally have this vantage point that is in some meaningful way, broader, deeper, then that which we took to be ourselves. And that’s an iterative process. So once you step on the path, you’re actually unknowingly whatever your initial intentions were, almost don’t matter, you are engaged in this process, that is this catalytic unfolding of the deepening and broadening of your awareness. And that actually is, I think, a apparently universal human capability. And it is it is a path, you know, that can be thought about and talked about in different ways, but fundamentally, any human being who starts to just look within and look at their own mind and look at their own experience, will potentially gain some healthy distancing between again, subject and object and their sense of self, their feeling of self can and will begin to shift over time. And with that, the fundamental underlying assumptions about reality can begin to shift over time. So you know, I would not try to convince anyone philosophically, you know, about too many things, but whenever someone’s wherever someone is, at whatever is the is at that moment meaningful for them, to help them affirm that and confirm that and, and to take it as seriously as possible. I mean, for me in my early 20s, I started reading developmental psychology and integral theory is very theoretical, very philosophical, very abstract. But what it did for me primarily is convinced me to meditate. Because it was it actually revealed to me the correlation between what we do, and the practices that we engage and how we think about and understand the world. And if you actually want to think about and understand the world better, you actually don’t do that only through thinking and reading, but actually through attending to who is doing the thinking, and reading. So that’s, that’s one way of thinking about it, I guess.
keevin bybee 20:32
Yeah, I love that. And being sensitive to you know, stage and code between any two people where they might fall in either one of those two spectrums is critical, and I’m slowly learning that it’s, you know, in family medicine, medicine almost ends up being ancillary to my ability to recognize where somebody is along a developmental stage and where they are in terms of their, you know, linguistic and social code, and being sensitive to that and meeting people where they’re at. And, you know, that something that I have a personal issue with, and something that’s also just not taught very well, explicitly, throughout at least education, in my experience, so I’m just curious, you know, as a school leader, or as an educator, what are your thoughts on how to how to integrate that into curriculum in some way?
brad kershner 21:28
Yeah, yeah, that’s a, that’s a tough one. Because there’s just, there’s so many different ways to do it, you know, and it really just like with any individual, meet them where they’re at same with a community, I mean, one thing that I’ve learned, because I kind of tried and failed, is you can’t just go into a public school and turn it into a progressive oasis of future oriented, enlightened pedagogy and curriculum, you know, like the cotton, the, the whole historical, sort of karmic influx of what may the public education system, what it is, you know, cannot just be immediately transformed by as one strong leader, you know, or one visionary idea. There’s so much collective, just assumption and habit and predisposition and sort of default sort of operating systems in play. So I think, again, context is important there. So the real question is for any particular community, you know, how can they move forward on their path of deepening and broadening the way that they’re thinking about the world and approaching education? So I think, and I’ve jumped from context to context, and I’ve seen the struggles in different ones. So, you know, when I worked in a public charter school in a very urban environment, you know, my work there was like, Okay, this is a very sort of no excuses, sort of really quantified. orientation toward educational success, like the focus is really on test scores and grades and getting kids to college and getting jobs. And that’s meaningful in that context. But my intention was then Okay, what’s next? Like, what? How can that evolve and grow? And evolution and growth in that context, for me, appeared as trying to find ways to bring in the more qualitative, the more the more questioning around what really is the meaning of it all? Like, do we really all want to be oriented toward working kids really hard so that they can get good grades and good jobs? Like, is that really what it’s all about? You know, like, how do we both try to facilitate success within that framework and sort of point beyond it? Right. But then I worked in a progressive, independent school context, where in some ways you can go to the other extreme, where it’s very much about, you know, finding your path and like doing what’s important for you, and, and but also almost almost assuming like success at some level, like, Oh, well, these kids are going to go to good colleges, for the most probably, we don’t really need to just think about that. And I think that’s, that’s great. And in some ways, I think that is a, a potentially healthier environment for children to be in. But there are just next level questions that begin to emerge, right? Like for me, one question that began to emerge working in progressive independent schools is, how do we not just get swept along with sort of cultural waves of like, what is the ideology of the moment? Or what what what are the sort of trends in society that are influencing independent schools because they’re all sort of in competition with each other still, and there is this sort of underlying capitalistic sort of infrastructure that’s putting people in competition with each other in a marketplace where you’re trying to convince parents that your school is the best or whatever? How do you actually not get swept up in that and stay grounded in an event deeper and in some ways simpler picture of like who you are in what you’re all about. And for me, that’s what’s led me to work in Quaker schools and Waldorf schools is trying to have some container of meaningfulness that can hold a community to weather the storms of like cultural fluctuation and trends and fads and economic pressures. But it’s hard. It’s hard. And it also leads me to a question around, you know, with your project, if we’re going to establish, you know, the the centers of learning and health and well being, you know, one question that, that I think we have to engage is how to make it a coherent community feeling where people have a shared sense of, in some ways, identity and meaning making, how do we get people on the same page? Because in my work in school, that’s really a fundamental question. And, you know, when you’re at a progressive, independent school, in some ways, it’s easier because it’s self selected, because people are opting in to it. And they’re paying for it partly because of the values and the ideologies that that community is, is advertising. And in the absence of that, it’s really hard to create cohesion, and collective coherence in this very sort of, you know, sort of fractured multiplicity, society that that we’re living in where we’re at, it’s, you know, it’s it’s getting harder and harder for us to sort of have healthy, small scale sort of tribal identities, that kind of tribalism, that’s emerging nowadays is largely unhealthy. And I think that’s, that’s part of the medic crisis we’re facing.
keevin bybee 26:49
Yeah, the the feedback between the the current state, like you said, we’re fractured, and then not having a meta narrative that we can cohesive around, making it harder for the next iteration to do the same, you know, is forefront in my mind. And, you know, how do we make something like this emergent, because, you know, I’m standing on the shoulders of giants who have done a whole bunch of education reform, because they came in with a bulldozer, and did not respect the the culture that was already there. So I’m just trying to see, is there a question there something to the effect of, I guess, offering resources and maybe a blueprint, rather than a prescription and a top down narrative, and then being patient and allowing the iteration to take place. You know, how, but again, and balanced with it with a sense of urgency, you know, give a give thoughts on that, like, for example, universal basic income, and all of the things that we just need to keep people from not dying on a daily basis as the bare minimum of being born into this world, I think would help. And like I said, maybe, you know, if we could find the muster the VSOs, to say, Hey, this is a cool idea, let’s put a bunch of money in at the ground level and offer, you know, like I said, solutions or a blueprint, rather than coming in from the top down. And just kind of curious, you know, you know, does that resonate? Or is there a way that you would frame it a little bit more eloquently than I just tried to?
brad kershner 28:47
Yeah, I mean, I don’t really know, you know, I think, I think we’re going to need experiments at different scales. And it sounds like what you have in mind is a kind of experiment. I think, ultimately, we could predict a lot of challenges and struggles with any particular experiment, because it’s going to find itself tethered to these even larger scale things in its connected to, like, you know, late stage capitalism, like the sort of health care model that we have within the country that the experiment is embedded in, right, like the still sort of de facto modernist thinking about just the world. Like the sort of polarization that we’re facing in society, it’s still going to be infiltrating whatever small community you try to bring together, right? So there’s these there’s a lot of influences that are having a big impact on everyone. And that will have an impact on any sort of social experiment, even if it’s made with all with great funding and great intentions. But I think it’s still needs to happen. I think we still need to try and I think even even you know, any At any attempts at doing something like that, for instance, creating this hub of, of health and education and community, even if it comes up against struggles, it will reveal the problems perhaps more clearly, right? And we’re going to have to fail iteratively before we get better and better solutions, so you know that there is no just answer, that’s going to work really well. But there are more or less thoughtful attempts. But I think ultimately, what we will see through our thoughtful attempts is that we’re going to keep bumping up against interdependence, and that we’re going to have to actually even see how some of these things are tied to the way our government functions, right. And even the way that we even have a democracy, what does it even mean to have a functioning democracy in this in this country, the United States, and all of our problems are going to keep being tethered to that too, because the regulations and the policies and the ways that our whole just policymaking system works, which will in many ways impact experiments like like this one, it’s all tied together, right? So we’re going to keep bumping up against these fundamental problems. So it doesn’t mean we don’t try, but it also means we’re sober. And we go in knowing that it’s going to be a struggle. And I think for that reason, one last thing I would say is that, knowing that, right, it’s like knowing that not being naive, focus on keeping things simple. And finding simple frames of reference that can bring people together. And that can cut through and transcend some of the cultural pathologies that we’re facing. For instance, for me, a big issue is, is polarization and just this tendency, through the way that I think people are consuming media now and just the way our whole network of journalism and media even works now, it’s very different than it was 2030 years ago. And it’s it’s, it’s incentivizes hyper polarization. And that the I’m seeing in the schools that I work in the impact that that’s having on individual and collective psyches in terms of this, this pressure to kind of pick a side or to be for or against or to be hyper critical, or cynical, or deconstructive, and always sort of tearing things down and saying what’s wrong with everything. And not being not allowing oneself to just be rooted in like, it’s going to sound maybe, maybe it sounds naive, or, or something. But when you think about the people who’ve been successful at bringing people together, the people like Dr. King, or Gandhi, or even the Dalai Lama, just like the simplicity of those messages, and the universality of those messages, and helping people tune back in to these universal human values, and the oneness of the human family, like we have to actually, in our practical social experiment that has to do with education, and health and economics and UBI, I think it’ll be really meaningful and helpful if they’re grounded in language and ideology, that’s really simple and rooted in the oneness of humanity. Because we have to keep pulling people out of Neo tribalism, and polarization and help bring people together and identify with each other and stop perpetuating forms of identity politics, or value politics, or political sort of association and identity that inherently require opposition and friction between different groups of people. And that’s, that is one of the roots of resolving the meta crisis, I think.
keevin bybee 33:44
Yeah, absolutely. I love the framing of experimentation and being explicit, perhaps, that this is an experiment, and we’re looking for some, you know, empirical changes. And, you know, at a society wide level, like, so much of our policy is put out there, as this is the way to fix things, but there’s no and like, there’s no expiration date to say, revise based on x information, which is why I’m really a big fan of that consilience project right there, their whole five year timeline, and we’re either going to fail or succeed. But if in either case, if in five years that we either achieve it or we don’t that means this this particular phase of how we communicate needs to evolve and change or whatever. And then, yeah, I highly resonated with the common humanity, the part of my meditation practices, knowing that, you know, at least for myself, a lot of my motivations come from a place of fear or anxiety that doesn’t have a specific physical location. But knowing that everybody else in the world is having something like And we all have that. And that’s the thing that connects us all together is the fact that we have feelings related to how we’re going to survive and community and, you know, making that this objective explicit as well. And then, you know, you you mentioned the, the larger complexity. And Zach Stein talks a lot about how the international standards of measurement and how those kinds of policy have so many far reaching influences on, you know, how a school curriculum is developed because of the size of doors and desks, and etc. And so so there’s so many invisible tendrils in our larger system. And I’m just curious how you remain sufficiently optimistic in this, in the face of all of this complexity that doesn’t have an easy knob to turn and is significantly out of reach?
brad kershner 36:01
Yeah, well, I mean, two things. You know, one, one, we’ve already talked about in terms of staying optimistic, I think each of us has our own personal quest and path that we have to take up, or that we at least have the opportunity to take up in terms of how are we finding meaning in our lives and making sense in PR and finding purpose in our lives? And I think that has at least two, two aspects that are key one I mentioned, which is actually going in going within and doing some sort of meditation or spiritual quest, where you’re actually trying to ask an answer the deep questions that every human being has waiting for them to ask you like, Who are you? What Who am I? What am I doing? Why am I here? You know, can I can I find this place in myself where I am just okay, everything is actually okay. Regardless of what happens if I end up on the street, starving in survival mode with my family, can I still take every step with integrity and still actually be grounded in my sense of just I am a human, I am awake, I am okay, I am a loving being, I’m going to try to do my best for myself and others like don’t? Are you grounded enough where you will not get pulled away from that, regardless of what happens to you. And the second piece, I think, is just doing meaningful work. And we all have to actually take responsibility for our role in the interconnected systems, you know, every dollar that we spend is a vote for something, the work that we do in the world matters, I believe everything matters, everything counts. So every action we do with how we justify what job we have, you know, and it’s easy, that’s a in some way, that’s a privilege perspective, because some people might have to do jobs that they don’t want to do. But actually, I’d want to go into that a little bit. Because there’s nothing wrong with doing a job like that like that might not be a popular job, right, like being a garbage person, or barista, or, or you know, just some, some brands, whatever, manual labor, there’s nothing wrong with that you can do that with integrity, and with awakened awareness and with love in your heart. And there’s nothing wrong with that there may be some jobs that people actually should stop doing. And maybe, like a very high percentage of the people who do best in school shouldn’t go into finance. Like actually, maybe there’s something about our educational system that actually incentivizes certain kinds of cognition, to be oriented towards just profiting off of the financialization of our economic system. And that’s fundamentally, there’s something actually wrong about that, like, at a deep level, the fact that we are orienting people in that way is a problem. And it’s both a collective problem. And for each of those individuals, it’s an individual problem. And actually, are you as an individual, as a straight A student at an Ivy League school, or whatever? Are you actually right in your soul and your spirit and in your psyche, in terms of how you’re oriented to what you’re doing in the world. And that’s a it’s a parenting issue, it’s an educational issue, it’s a cultural issue. But finding meaningful work in the world is itself a, a generative and purpose.
Just a purposeful way of being, the more aligned you are in yourself, the more optimistic you’re going to be. And I think a lot of the cynicism and negativity and pessimism that permeates our society is actually also a reflection of the fact that so many people are not engaged in meaningful work. They’re not actually themselves day to day working for the improvement and betterment of society. Maybe they don’t know how maybe they don’t see a path to it. Maybe they’re just overwhelmed. But that’s a negative feedback loop. Whereas if you’re not actually making a difference, and working to make things better, you’re more likely to have a negative, cynical, pessimistic view of the world, right? Whereas if you’re engaged in the kind of work that you’re engaged in, if you’re working in a school, you’re more likely to actually have a positive feedback where it’s like I’m doing good. I’m engaged with people who are doing well. That’s To help me feel optimistic and feel good about how things are going. So it’s a question again, we all have to ask for ourselves. And we keep coming back to these. There’s like these big picture cultural things that we want to be aware of. And there’s the way in which the systems and structures of society have a huge influence on us. And at the same time, that does not erase the fundamental individual responsibility that we each have as persons and as souls, right? And that’s that sort of Progressive Conservative tension, right? Do you focus on the external and on systems and the ways that society and environment influence people and you blame the system and you let individuals off the hook? which is sort of the progressive bias? Or do you put everything on the individual and everyone has to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, and you don’t acknowledge how society and environments and systems influence people, right, which is the conservative bias. And of course, both of these things are true, right? They’re both partial truths. It’s definitely a both and that I think, even that in itself, the more we can articulate that and have that be the default sort of obvious truth that that’s a both end. And that if it can just become normal, to not have that Progressive Conservative polarization be justified, but actually keep bringing people back to owning both their influence for how they’re influencing systems which influence other people, and at the same time taking ownership and responsibility for themselves, which they cannot escape and they can’t blame other people for and you can’t just identify as a victim of society and get off the hook for your own existential spiritual quest that you actually have to walk yourself.
keevin bybee 41:40
Yeah, thank you for that. Did you ever see that movie k two kind of a bad climbing movie from the early 90s? No, I heard of it. But I didn’t say that. There’s a scene where the two climber there’s a group of climbers, and they’re fighting with their porters who are going on strike and demanding more money. So one guy starts burning all the cash. And then in the fall out of the scene, the one guy says to the guy who is burning the cat, or that the guy who’s burning the cash is saying, you know, I didn’t make the world the way it is, I’m just trying to get through as fast and as clean as possible. And as partner replies, we all make the world the way it is. And that, you know, was one of them. Really big moments for me when I saw it, right before I went into medical school, I again, so just responding to, you know, what you just said that we we all make the world the way it is. And I just thought that was a funny quote, yeah, what is the hard thing to
brad kershner 42:38
you know, it’s not and again, it’s a feedback on it is a somewhat sophisticated and mature thing to ask people to do, but yet, we have to ask them like, that is actually what’s required. Like, it’s hard to see how both you are responsible, and everything you do matters. And to not feel overwhelmed as though Oh, it’s all your fault, and you should feel guilty, or you should be, you know, or you know, like, maybe because of your positionality, or your race or your gender, you either feel like you’re to blame, or you’re not to blame for the way that things are. And that’s, that’s a trap. Like, that’s actually, that’s not it, like, it’s not about taking it on, in this way, that’s actually going to shut you down or be finger pointing or blame or shame, it’s actually about taking responsibility and being empowered. And that fundamentally, as an individual, and not as, not as a representative of a group, but owning your individuality is a big piece of it. And that’s why there’s a lot of things happening in society right now, where people are, there’s a lot of tensions around around around these ideas, and we have to find a way to, to hold it all in a way that we can honor these, these sort of both and acknowledgments with with integrity.
keevin bybee 43:59
Yeah, I like I like the both and and recognizing that it’s a dynamic equilibrium. I think part of what turned me off from, you know, the contemplate of practices for so long was this idea that you could get beyond the ego or quit striving, when those are necessary functions to keep this organism alive. So I’m like, Well, if I got rid of that, then I’m just going to decompose but more about being able to get out of it for periods of time to recognize, like you had mentioned earlier that we are not the contents of our awareness. We’re the observers of them, and then we can as we take a step back, perhaps reset or at least get, you know, a different perspective on it so that when we do go back to craving, we have a little bit different relationship to that craving, for example.
brad kershner 44:48
Yeah, yeah. And actually it’s a it’s also about being more embodied and more present in an experience not disinvited from it and not not spiritual. bypassing or trying to transcend it all or be above the world or out of the world, but to be more in the world more present, more responsible, more awake, to the ways that we impact and influence other people more sensitive and careful about the things that we say, and do and even think,
keevin bybee 45:19
yeah, I couldn’t remember if it was, maybe I heard it from you, or hanzi. And definitely from Sam Harris, but you know, meditation works, if it works in the sense that you’re taking anything from the contemplate of time back into the embodied and acted, engaged aspects of our life. Because ultimately, I mean, hard to say ultimately. But you know, a big part of existing in the world is existing in relationship, especially to other people, and being able to use that time on the cushion, or however you practice so that you are able to be more in relationship in a healthy way with anybody and everybody that you meet, hopefully, or at least, you know, asymptotically towards everybody. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You had mentioned, your own path was pretty autodidactic. And were able to bounce around for lack of a better term. And, you know, what I would like to see is a society in which more people would have that opportunity if they would want to act on it, the supporting, especially the young kids from a young age to meet their physical and emotional needs and an easy way. I’d like to think that that would be part of the solution for that. And I’m just curious, what, what comes to mind around that topic?
brad kershner 46:49
Yeah. Well, for me that the question there is, you know, what are the fundamental requirements of building blocks that would enable individuals to have the freedom both the freedom and the capacity and an environment that encourages their self actualization, right? Like, how do we help people self actualize? How do we create a positive feedback loop between environments and individuals so that individuals are improving environments and environments are improving individuals. And I think we can fairly easily identify some of the building blocks there in terms of early childhood experience, secure attachment with caregivers, allowing and enabling healthy families having access to, you know, especially just the fundamental levels of need, when you think of like something like Maslow’s hierarchy, like, you know, I think that the foundation has to be strong. And I think that part of the significance of a project like yours is, it’s actually about building that strong foundation, it’s like every single human literally has a right to a healthy, strong foundation of having their basic needs met of having good health care, having education. And the monetary piece of something like UBI is a big part of it in terms of like, you can’t have healthy children without healthy parents to some degree. And there is, again, there’s this, there’s progressive and conservative tensions here in terms of emphasis on society and systems, there’s emphasis on family, and individuals. And of course, both are really important. And I think we, you know, those of us on the more progressive than in this political spectrum, need to find ways to reintegrate and acknowledge the importance of Healthy Families and caregiving, and not just having a work oriented culture. But actually, fundamentally, how much time do parents have with their children with the quality of that time? What are our norms around technology, and food, and there’s going to be diversity there, it’s not about and that’s the thing, we’re just, you know, it’s not about a homogenous, sort of monoculture. Like this is the way the state says you should raise your child and you are not allowed to use screens until your kids are three and no processed sugars for your children. You know, like it can’t be centralized like that. And it can’t be tucked down like that. And yet, those are the things that we want for children and families in order for them to be healthy. So how do we sort of facilitate that? And I think, again, I haven’t having an infrastructure in place for some basic needs to be met is important, but it’s going to be a really the work is so big, and the evolution that needs to happen is so vast, and the place where we are right now society is so not just complex, but in some ways. In some ways, I think there have been some regressions or some degeneration in terms of our just cultural comments and well being and just basic literacy and the way that the we relate to To media and literacy and norms of discourse, you know, I mean, just like how we talk to each other, and
we got a long way to go, I guess is what I’m saying. But I feel like starting small and a community and really helping individual families to feel like they are supported in Okay. Is is the foundational piece for what what, what would you are asking about is how do you basically help someone feel like they both have the freedom to and ability to and would even want to pursue a path of self actualization? Like, that’s really the key question, how do we facilitate self actualization and more people? And I think you’ve already named a lot of those fundamental pieces in the things that you’re trying to put together. And again, we will see that, that there there is no, there’s no outside, there’s no, everything literally is, is, is connected. But you know, you start small, you start with taking care of families, you start with seeing what’s keeping an individual person, or family or community from being oriented toward the good and the true and beautiful. and meeting people where they’re at as much as possible, like, what is their need right now? What are people’s struggles with? Right now? What is this community struggling with right now? What’s keeping them from self actualizing. And that’s going to be different context of context. And that’s the bottom up piece, like it’s not, I think you can have set values and principles and ideals that can be communicated fairly simply, that sort of emphasize the oneness of humanity, and the dignity and rights of every single human being an individual, and also bring in some conservative values, like individualism and family and community, like those things are really important too. And that’s some of what we’ve lost in our, in our in our, in our, in our polarized society. But it’s, it’s, it’s going to be specific to each local community.
keevin bybee 52:03
Yeah, truer words. Have you had any, you know, caregiver education sessions or programs through any of your any of your schools or educational contexts? And if so, what what, what did they look like? And, you know, is there an I, what would a good parent engagement or caregiver engagement program look like? And how could we make it easy for them to engage? Hmm,
brad kershner 52:33
that’s a good question. And it’s also, it’s making me almost a little sad, because I can’t think of like an organization that I really want to point to in terms of that’s really doing it I what I’ve seen is individual schools, doing the work in different ways, you know, and one thing I’ve really seen lacking is pulling parents in in meaningful ways. So I’ve been involved in different kinds of schools, like I worked at expeditionary learning schools. And expeditionary learning is an approach to education that has a lot of good things going for it. And it’s a way of helping teachers to work to teach effectively and in meaningful ways. And I’ve also worked for schools that were part of the coalition that have I’m blanking on a coalition of essential schools or something started by Ted sizer, and Deb Meyer, um, you know, so there’s different approaches to education that are meaningful, but I think overall, schools are not doing a great job of bringing in families, you know, and the individual independent schools that I’ve worked at, do different things and have different ways of building community. Like, you know, the the school I’m a part of right now, we actually have rituals. And we have annual festivals that really bring people together. And they’re tied to the Waldorf tradition. Right, right. And when I worked at a Quaker school, there were specific practices and rituals. And it is important in a broader sense for a community to have, I think, festivals, rituals, annual seasonal things, that are a part of the meaning making of that community. And again, that’s part of what we’re missing in our sort of Neo tribal fractured age of, you know, holidays have kind of lost their meaning and purpose for a lot of people. They’re so commercialized and so secularized and mean honestly, this kind of point between even bigger issue is the loss of religion. And how do you find meaning and purpose in a secular? In a second, there’s a disenchanted world right, what Max vabre called, called called the disenchanted world, we’re still living in this world. And we haven’t really found great answers to how to find meaning and purpose purpose in a secular post secular age. And this is why people like john DeBakey and Jordan Hall are talking about things like what is the new religion, that’s not a religion, right? What is the way that we’re resolving the meaning crisis in allowing human beings have access to a religious orientation to reality, what we were referring to before is spirituality. How do we, how do we enable that? How do we facilitate that? How do we foster a spiritual religious orientation that is free of dogma that is not sectarian that is not tribalistic, that is not inherently divisive, that’s not us versus them. That’s not faith or belief based in a way that’s fundamentally divisive. And yet, allowing people to be rooted in ritual in practices in in seasonal sort of flow of like, the experience of time and temporality. And you know, like, these things are missing for a lot of people. So that’s my broader answer for any community is like, what’s meaningful to you one of the things that you can establish, either pull in from different traditions that are meaningful for you, or create a new, you know, but we have to have something we have to have things that we do together periodically, consistently, that are meaningful. And and I think even like, right now, I work at a Waldorf school and the conversation there is there are these rituals and festivals and things but but maybe some of them need to change, you know, maybe the language around them needs to change, maybe they shouldn’t be the same as they were 100 years ago, maybe the really overly Christian context isn’t appropriate for our community anymore. Or maybe it is, I mean, that’s a conversation. And every community has to have that conversation. And that in itself is a really difficult, complicated, potentially divisive process. But that’s just that’s just the process that has to happen.
keevin bybee 56:33
I love that you brought up rituals, I couldn’t remember again, all this is blending together, because you told me about Hornsey, and then Nora Bateson and somebody and maybe it was you who said we need to ritualize reality because we have lost or become disenchanted with the the calcified rituals that were handed down largely through power structures that were meant to, you know, show in group membership rather than or but like subsuming the community nature of the fact that we are ritual making species? And so right, how can we have a conversation around how we construct rituals so that they perhaps don’t become calcified? And therefore easily disenchanted? Well, I don’t know if that’s a word. But like, that was the problem for myself is all of the things that look like rituals, or traditions to me just seemed calcified and arbitrary and didn’t help me. And you know, that’s largely teenaged atheist angst, you know, seeping through? How do we have a conversation and show that rituals can be dynamic and responsive to the people? And as we learn about the world itself, right,
brad kershner 57:46
yeah, and even just naming that as a need at least is the first step on the path. It also gives us a lens to have empathy. For I think some manifestations of culture, or like what’s coming to mind for me right now is identifying this deep longing that people have, and the twisted and unhealthy ways that that longing is manifest. Like, again, if you think about conservatives, and progressives in this polarization in society, there is this deep longing for, for meaning for ritual for community for for this sort of identity of like this gives value to my life. And that’s a big part of the conservative ethos. And I think it manifests in pathological and unhealthy ways that are rooted too much instructors and ideologies and beliefs that actually are no longer appropriate or timely. But yet that deep human longing is there. And on the other side, you see people actually engaging in new forms of identity, politics and tribalism, around ideology and values that often have to do with social justice oriented orientations to the world. And yet really what’s underneath it is this need to be a part of a group and the end to be like in this righteous orientation toward the world. And the sort of self righteousness that can emerge from that can sometimes be pathological or not helpful. And yet, it’s coming from this deep human need and this deep human positive intention. And the more that we can see that underneath the behavior, the more that we can also just love and empathize with with people which which is which is of course important, and with ourselves.
keevin bybee 59:18
Yeah, yeah. The self compassion piece is sometimes the the hardest in some way. One more question or thing that I’m trying to resolve within myself in your book on one page on page 158, you were quoting Wilber change will only stick if it grows out of an organic background from the group or culture and not imposed from the inside. With few exceptions. The quote layer cake of culture needs to be organically grown, and I really liked that but then when I was listening to Nora Bateson and something that I I’ve noticed too Is she mentions how you try to make an incremental change and perhaps One area of something but because there’s so much momentum in the system, it gets dampened out by the momentum somewhere else. And then we have a regression to the mean. And what brings up to me is the Keystone model, you know how when you build an arch, you know, the, if you build it piece by piece without a frame, until you drop that Keystone in, the whole thing will collapse. And so I’m just curious if you’ve got any thoughts on balancing the iterative emergent layer cake model with the fact that sometimes you might need to shake the snow globe and build an arch and drop the Keystone in rather than thinking that each of those stones by themselves were, they didn’t work because the arch fell apart.
brad kershner 1:00:43
What it brings up for me is is an interesting way of bringing together some some different themes that I think we’ve already been talking about. And also that you and I, I think, talked about pre pre recording in a previous conversation in terms of the tensions around understanding development, versus being critical of developmental frameworks. And I think that, you know, part of what is coming to mind for me is that part of what I hear you saying, Nora Bateson is pointing to, are some of the things that we’ve already been talking about in the way of just seeing how things are interdependent and complex. And you’re gonna find yourself bumping up against external forces, even if you’re just trying to, to experiment in your own context. But also, that notion of a keystone. For me, it’s like, a lot of thinking that we can do around projects like these, it really does help to understand different perspectives. And it really does help to understand human development. And I think I think actually the developmental lens, and just understanding fundamentally different, like you said, cultural codes before in handy friends off and on the fine arts language, understanding stage and code, I think, is really helpful. But to Nora’s point, a key stone that can actually ground a community and that can actually help you to build something is a different register entirely. And and a sort of developmental scheme or an understanding of a trajectory is actually not appropriate. It’s not an appropriate Keystone, right. And an appropriate Keystone or an appropriate foundation for actually bringing a community together, together would be something more like I think what I was referring to earlier, in terms of something simple, something grounded in common humanity, something that actually brings people together, that’s what you need your Keystone to be, if you’re going to actually build a community or an organization, it needs to be grounded in simple ideas that bring people together that anyone can identify with, and anyone finds accessible. And, and ironically, it’s sometimes these, these sort of simple ideals that, in some ways came to light in modernity, right? Like, actually, some of these principles are already in our Constitution and our bill of rights, the fundamental premise that human beings are equal, and are equal under the law and deserve equal treatment. And all human beings have equal, you know, right to pursue happiness and liberty, like these are actually fundamental principles that we don’t want to lose sight of. In our critique of modernity and our critique of society. In the complexification of everything, we have to actually find our way back to what would be appropriate ideals and principles of a new meta modern 21st century organization or community be. I don’t know, how different they need to be, honestly, from some of those modern values and principles. I think that’s an open question. But my sense is that’s, that is partly her point. And she is someone who’s actually been critical developmental models. And I think, in the language you just use there, what I’m intuiting is that critique is actually because a developmental model is not an appropriate or helpful way to bring people together. It’s really not, it’s actually inherently divisive. There’s something about when you talk about different perspectives, it’s helpful because it’s true. And there’s reality to different perspectives. But that insight itself does not itself bring people together, it does not itself create a foundation for a community. And it’s that’s just an important thing to acknowledge as two completely different sort of registers or frameworks or maps and that are appropriate in very different contexts. And I haven’t seen that point really made well enough. In those conversations. There’s been some debates lately around like whether or not developmental views are inherently biased, or Western, or whatever. And I think what we’re coming upon now is as sort of a potential resolution to that conflict.
keevin bybee 1:04:47
If It seemed redundant, that’s just my own, you know, ignorance and trying to make sense of a bit of exactly I really resonated with with what you said. And so yeah, thank you for that. Coming. A lot of ground and a lot of the points that I wanted to touch on, we got to is, do you have other thoughts? Anything else that you’d like to share anything you’d like to plug?
brad kershner 1:05:13
Yeah, thanks, we did, we did cover a lot of ground. And it’s sort of I hope that we circle that enough around the sort of concrete utopian ideas that you’re trying to bring into life here. And I’m assuming anyone listening to this is probably already somewhat familiar with what with what you have, going in terms of trying to create these these centers that are 20 473 65 sort of community building hubs. I, you know, I think that our conversation itself is an expression of the fact that just how complex the world is that that we’re living in. And I think these are the kinds of things that people do need to be thinking about if they have well intentioned concrete ideas, if there’s people who if if you want to build a hospital, or start a school, or start a nonprofit, if you want to solve poverty, if you want to help education, if you want to do good in the world, which millions of people do, but you’re not actually asking these deeper questions. If you’re not thinking about the different layers of the meta crisis, if you’re not actually thinking about the feedback loops between your perspective and the work you’re doing in the world, if you’re not looking at the ways that you can build community and allow a sense of shared purpose and meaning to emerge in a group of people, your work is not going to be as effective as it needs to be. So I think we’re we’re sort of in this place where the demand is really high, actually, we’re sort of asking people who are engaged in educational work, or health care work or nonprofit work to be philosophers in a way, and it’s almost like that’s that sort of notion of like the philosopher, King, you know, of Plato may be outdated in a lot of ways. And yet, there’s still a deep truth there, the deep truth there is that the people who have power, the people who are in charge, need to be deep thinkers, you know, they need to have a deep understanding of what’s going on if they’re going to be good leaders. And, and one of the issues that we’re facing is that there are a lot of sort of default, not well thought out, I’m just sort of largely unconscious assumptions and habits of thinking and patterns of thinking and behavior that are influencing a lot of people in positions of power, and a lot of organizations and we’re not kind of really thinking deeply enough, or slowly enough about this, this quagmire that we are that we are embroiled in. So I think this is important. I personally, I personally think that these, these kinds of conversations are really important for anyone who’s engaged in social service work, nonprofit work. And hopefully, more and more of us will be oriented toward doing that kinds of work through hearing conversations like this, and, and helping to create systems where we’re just up leveling more and more people to do that, you know, because your work is pointing to a certain directionality of the world. And I think that directionality is basically right in terms of like, moving towards something like the need for UBI and moving towards optimization moving towards the complete transformation of the job market. And what are the implications of that directionality. And then, in order to get ahead of that, and to make wise choices about how to both develop and supporting utilize human resources and human capital, these are the things we have to be thinking about. So thank you for thank you for the space and time to, to unpack some of this.
keevin bybee 1:08:49
Well, , thank you. It’s, you know, heartwarming and an understatement to be able to talk with people and listen to people like yourself and Honza and Zach and john vagy. Because at least in my experience, it can be quite isolating to see that there is a trajectory and that there is not an overwhelming voice recognizing the medic crisis, and the few people who are future oriented seem to be the megalomaniacs who get all the press and so anyway, I I just want to say thank you as well. Yeah, thanks keevin.
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