IN WHICH FORMEROrion board chair Chris Nye and Philip Francis, director of the Seguinland Institute, discuss the need for a radical rethinking of our education systems and celebrate Chris’s recent book Beyond Tomorrow: Planning a New Civilization.

Philip Francis: Chris, this book is civilizational in scope and yet it feels very personal. It is infused with your characteristic spirit of hard-won hopefulness. Can you share the origin story for this project?

Chris Nye: There are different art forms that don’t fit the usual mold. One of them is imagining communities, and what shape they might take in the future. That has always fascinated me, and back when I was a professor, I taught a course called Strategies for Social Change that focused on how we might get from here to there. In this book, I go beyond that and ask, How can we think differently and creatively about the future? I like the formula “Think radical; act conservative.” That’s kind of the principle behind brainstorming; you want to liberate originality in the first phase. Later you get practical. Sometimes wild ideas contain the germ of something important with practical applications.

PF: Is there a particular problem you are trying to solve in the pages of this book?

CN: Often a problem-solving approach doesn’t get close to the root of the problem. I’m thinking about what needs to change in order for society and culture to be more life-giving or regenerative. Right now, we’re in a kind of death spiral. For example, we have schools that are educating kids for a world that no longer exists. That was true even before AI. Now, schools are teaching content and tools that fall increasingly within the domain of AI. Kids know this and become alienated. We are not equipping them to deal with the speed, complexity, and stress of the world they live in. As the world becomes more high-tech, that deficit will become worse. We already see it reflected in mental health issues, addictions, and the absence of meaning and purpose in many young lives.

To deal with the challenges young people now face, we need something deeper than a problem-solving approach. Too often we merely treat the symptoms of a problem. A child has ADHD; give them Ritalin. Often a political response to a problem involves throwing money at it. That can help, but it’s usually not sufficient, and typically it’s temporary. We need to look at the causes of those symptoms, and in some cases the causes of those causes. When you do that with a society in decline, working backward from symptoms, I believe you get to a point of seeing that a change in consciousness is required.

PF: Can you give us a specific example of a contemporary social symptom and take us through your process of identifying the causes behind the causes? How does this lead you back to “consciousness”?

CN: Many of the best teachers are leaving the teaching profession. Poor salaries are definitely a factor, but more than that, for many, teaching has become profoundly unsatisfying under the current paradigm. Why would a person who wants to instill creativity and initiative in her students be motivated by rigid curriculum frameworks and scripted lessons in a compliance culture that actively discourages creativity? When I think about what might be the cause of this cause, I believe it is a lack of clarity about what education is for. Too many students view education as transactional. I pay my tuition, study, and put in the time. The point of it is to make money. At the same time, employers want graduates who are ready for work. We need to aim higher.

Or take climate change. We tend to approach our problem-solving superficially. Treating that problem symptomatically could involve, among other things, building more nuclear power plants, more wind and solar generation, more clean energy. That’s all good. I’m not saying treating symptoms isn’t important. However, that fails to take into account what gave rise to climate change in the first place. See what I mean? It leaves the causes untouched. There’s a web of causality behind the symptoms that gets pushed aside. These systems are complicated but examining them helps get to the roots of the problem.

For example, we know one proximate cause of climate change is the power and predation of the fossil fuel industry – resisting regulation, lying to their shareholders and the public, greenwashing, etc. So take that a step further and ask, What causes that behavior? And sure enough, capitalism and the way capitalism is understood and applied has a lot to do with maximizing profit regardless of consequences, ignoring externalities. And then you can treat capitalism as a symptom as well, which takes you to popular attitudes and priorities, moral development. The point is, if we go beyond thinking and reacting at the symptom level, all kinds of possibilities for intervention and change become evident, down to the personal level. For instance, that might involve asking oneself, Do I need to give my mother an expensive gift she doesn’t need and probably will never use? Could I instead make a gift in her name to her local land trust?

We could take this cause-and-effect process even further and ask if the lack of meaning and purpose in so many lives has something to do with the slide into materialism and constantly currying personal advantage. In this country, ”net worth” is a dollar figure. There’s no accounting for moral stature, contribution to society, or even intelligence. This has been true for some time. Journalist Robert Quillen (who died in 1948) defined Americanism this way: “Using money you haven’t earned to buy things you don’t need to impress people you don’t like.” This brings us to the need to develop a new consciousness.

If we go beyond thinking and reacting at the symptom level, all kinds of possibilities for intervention and change become evident, down to the personal level.

PF: Your book interacts fruitfully with the work of Otto Scharmer and his concept of emergence.

CN: Scharmer implores us to “lead from the emerging future.” How does human evolution want us to develop? Doesn’t it make sense that we learn how to better care for one another? How can we make change in our local circles – families, neighborhoods, places where we can make a difference?

PF: I appreciate how your thinking is grounded in the concrete example of several successful “utopian experiments.”

CN: Yes, in the book I look at three communities that create something approaching what Martin Luther King Jr. called “A Beloved Community,” even though in their time they were mostly considered impossibly idealistic. The American Shakers, for example. They practiced community living where all ownership was shared, and they lasted over 200 years. What we can learn from them is how to care for one another. (Although obviously, you don’t have to be celibate in order to do that.)

An even more fascinating community, that is thriving today, is Sekem in Egypt. In a desert place northeast of Cairo, where there was nothing but desert rocks and sand, they established a thriving intentional community based on Muslim principles. They have established farms, schools, and various businesses, even a university.

These communities show that where people lead lives with meaning and purpose, a change of consciousness is possible. One way to think about it is to imagine a scale or continuum with Mother Theresa at one end, and your favorite narcissist at the other, and all the gradations of selflessness to selfishness in between. Not many of us aspire to sainthood, but we can ask ourselves where we want to land on that scale. These communities create a climate in which people want to move away from self-centeredness and find ways to be of use to the beloved community and the world. When asked why they weren’t upset that people were stealing vegetables from their gardens, Shakers at Canterbury Shaker Village in New Hampshire responded, “We plant enough for the crows, the thieves, and the Shakers.”

PF: Freedom is perhaps the most misappropriated term in the American lexicon. How do you seek to nurture  a deeper notion of human freedom?

CN: Freedom is fundamental to understanding the direction human evolution wants to go. The word gets thrown around a lot so I think it’s important to identify what I would call “counterfeit freedom.” That would be “I do what I want when I want” kind of thing. When the second amendment partisan says, “No restrictions on guns,” and that puts other people at risk; that can hardly be called an authentic form of freedom.

I don’t think I would call the absence of all outer restraint with no concern for others, freedom. I’d rather focus on inner freedom, where, for example, a person chooses not to get revenge or get angry when they have been wronged. In this incarnation, I occupy this mind, this body. If I think of it as a car, am I going to be a passenger or a driver? In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl explains how even in the most horrible conditions in Nazi concentration camps, he knew he was free to choose his attitude. He could either default into being the defeated victim or find the inner strength and attempt to persevere. From what I can perceive, this is the direction human evolution wants to go. We can choose who we want to be.

Why don’t you say a bit about what you do in the Seguinland Institute to help young people develop this capacity to be inwardly alive in such a way that they can take charge of their lives.

PF: Everything you are saying resonates with our approach at Seguinland, which offers college-age students’ immersive study-away programs on an island on the coast of Maine. We seek to be a site of spacious reflection on the big questions of life, where students clarify their vision of the good life, cultivate inner resources, discern their work for the good of all, and get direct experience with the challenging joy of community-building.

These communities create a climate in which people want to move away from self-centeredness and find ways to be of use to the beloved community and the world.

CN: My wife and I do what we can to support the extraordinary work you do at Seguinland. Students who have completed one or more of your programs describe them as transformative. You provide a prototype for a form of education that allows students to find meaning and purpose in their lives. This is often a missing ingredient in education at all levels, but especially the college level, where you might most expect to find it. If education is truly to be the engine that pulls our culture out of its present decline, schools and colleges will have to rediscover ways to incorporate this dimension. In the 19th century it was common for a college president of a liberal arts college to offer a senior seminar in moral philosophy. The point was to send graduates out with a deeper sense of meaning and purpose for their lives. Your courses, “The Good Life” and “The Good Life for All” accomplish this in a way more appropriate for our times.

PF: It is almost unimaginable for a contemporary college president to teach a course on moral philosophy. Does the average college president today have even one authentic, meaningful connection with a student at their institution? I think of our work at Seguinland as ‘relationship-based education’; a humanly scaled setting in which everyone is well known by everyone — faculty, staff, and students alike.

I was struck by the fact that you begin your chapters on education by emphasizing the centrality of love.

CN:  Dostoevsky said, “To love a person is to see them as God intended them to be.” This is the kind of love we’re talking about. It involves recognizing each child’s, each human’s, essence, their distinctive gifts, and the future potential that resides there. I think of it as a kind of midwifery – the teacher needs to help bring forth what wants to be born. That’s easier said than done when you have a classroom of squirming fifth graders, but I think it is possible to create a loving and supportive classroom environment in which students tend to thrive. The alternative is a climate of fear. “Am I going to fail the next test?” That’s not an environment in which people come to value learning.

PF: If you don’t mind me saying, you are eighty-eight years old, and yet this utopian idealism still courses through your veins and through the pages. What is your advice to others on how to keep these impulses — this hopefulness — alive over the course of a long life and in the face of the sorrows of the world?

CN: It’s pretty certain there are rough waters ahead. The trend lines on climate change, the unraveling of democracy, the absence of deeper meaning and purpose in so many lives. A lot of indicators point to a horrible future. But I’m optimistic for a few reasons. The first is purely pragmatic: Pessimism and despair are disabling. A judicious optimism helps you rally your forces to get things done. A second reason is that I take the long view, a very long view. Even if there’s an apocalypse, there’s apt to be a surviving remnant and a chance to start afresh, even learn from past mistakes. Third, I hold a perception that there are allies and partners in the spiritual world that want to help us toward our highest and best selves, and to have human evolution move forward. This is not blind faith. We don’t live in an age of faith anymore. In medieval times you got by with faith and being obedient. But now we can think for ourselves, exercise our freedoms, and even be disobedient and cause good trouble when it’s called for. I’ve been fortunate enough to know some individuals who could perceive levels of causality that transcend normal consciousness. From these individuals I have learned that what Martin Luther King Jr. said is true, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I would say not just justice, but also other qualities that move us toward greater degrees of forbearance and freedom.

So here I am at eighty-eight, mindful of the ebbing away of my physical and mental strength, wondering what I can do in my remaining days to advance human evolution. One of the things was to write this book, which will never be a bestseller, but it might have some impact, especially over the long-term. You need to be open and awake when these prompts come to you.

Bring home your copy of Beyond Tomorrow, today.