Spaceship Earth's Education System

Buckminster Fuller's account of "specialisation" in "An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" is fascinating me because he sets up an opposition between those who anticipate and those who can't, between those who think in systems terms and those who "specialise". In contrast to the majority of the specialised land-dwelling people of the pre-20th century planet who saw only a fraction of the earth and believed the world was flat and "thought its horizontally extended plane went circularly outward to infinity", Buckminster Fuller contrasts "the Pirates", who sailed the seas and

had high proficiency in dealing with celestial navigation, the storms, the sea, the men, the ship, economics, biology, geography, history, and science. The wider and more long distanced their anticipatory strategy, the more successful they became.

Anticipation counters specialism. "Leonardo da Vinci is the outstanding example of the comprehensively anticipatory design scientist." And then the Great Pirates who:

came to building steel steamships and blast furnaces and railroad tracks to handle the logistics, the Leonardos appeared momentarily again in such men as Telford who built the railroads, tunnels, and bridges of England, as well as the first great steamship. 

But this leads to imperialism. Fuller says imperialism was a new form of specialism in which the "Leonardos" were put to work by "sword-bearing patrons".

You may say, "Aren’t you talking about the British Empire?" I answer, No The so-called British Empire was a manifest of the world-around misconception of who ran things and a disclosure of the popular ignorance of the Great Pirates’ absolute world-controlling through their local-stooge sovereigns and their prime ministers, as only innocuously and locally modified here and there by the separate sovereignties’ internal democratic processes. As we soon shall see, the British Isles lying off the coast of Europe constituted in effect a fleet of unsinkable ships and naval bases commanding all the great harbours of Europe. Those islands were the possession of the topmost Pirates. Since the Great Pirates were building, maintaining, supplying their ships on those islands, they also logically made up their crews out of the native islanders who were simply seized or commanded aboard by imperial edict. Seeing these British Islanders aboard the top pirate ships the people around the world mistakenly assumed that the world conquest by the Great Pirates was a conquest by the will, ambition, and organization of the British people. Thus was the G. P.’s grand deception victorious. But the people of those islands never had the ambition to go out and conquer the world. As a people they were manipulated by the top pirates and learned to cheer as they were told of their nation’s world prowess. 

And from there we have the beginning of schools:

And this is the way schools began as the royal tutorial schools. You realize, I hope, that I am not being facetious. That is it. This is the beginning of schools and colleges and the beginning of intellectual specialization. Of course, it took great wealth to start schools, to have great teachers, and to house, clothe, feed, and cultivate both teachers and students. Only the GreatPirate-protected robber-barons and the Pirate-protected and secret intelligence-exploited international religious organizations could afford such scholarship investment. 

And the warning that we all know about: "But specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the "expert" is fooled into accepting his slavery by making him feel that in return he is in a socially and culturally preferred, ergo, highly secure, lifelong position"

Now the slavery of specialization is completely obvious to all who work for universities.

And we have become very much like the land-bound foolish specialists, duped by misconceptions of the powers of the mind by the trappings of grandeur of university life. We believe the horizon to the infinitely extended as our publications, impact, salaries, status (for some, at least) and citations increase - and we believe all of this is what matters. And we are caught in the gears of a machine of our own construction that is shredding everything of value that once existed in those institutions. 

Worse still, our anticipatory powers are fading as we are heralding a new era of anticipatory technology. Just when we should be asking of the next wave of technology where the boundary is between human anticipation and machine learning, or quantum computing, instead we seem destined to replace human anticipation altogether with machines. This is a new wave of specialisation. To put it mildly: it won't work. To put it more strongly: "Extinction is always the result of over-specialisation"

In formulating a new and positive vision, Buckminster Fuller argues that we need new ways of looking at our resources for organising. This he calls "wealth":

"Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives."

Now, where does that organized capability come from? It must come from communication. Drawing on another of Buckminster Fuller's ideas, he always drew the distinction between building by "compression" and building by "tension".  This I think is where our new anticipatory technologies might be very powerful. 

Our ability to communicate depends on anticipation: I cannot write these words if I do not have some idea of how they are likely to be read and understood. But I am communicating to a complex audience, and I would like to try some experiments, see how saying different kinds of things might "play out", and then choose the best form of utterance I can to achieve what I want to achieve. 

This is partly why students go to university - to try things out, to see how things might play out. But universities are increasingly bad at doing anticipation - partly because they've become divorced from their history - and anticipation without history cannot be any good. In place of real anticipation, we have empty promises, and a lot of young people with degrees who can't get jobs. 

A network of communication - a network of friends - is a complex system of inter-acting anticipations - what Husserl called "horizons of meaning". It holds its structure because people understand each other. It is very much like Bucky's icosahedron. That is a structure built from tension, not compression.

The early e-learning pioneers had hoped that the internet itself would create these forms of communicative tension. But what happened was that the networks quickly became new "empires" - indeed a new communicative "life form" which consumed human identities and desires. Rather like the British Empire. 

But the network is only half the story. We have had to wait for 30 years for the missing ingredient - the anticipatory technology. We're very close to having this now. It will soon be a fact of everyday life. Anticipation is the thing which tightens the strings, and gives new structures solidity. While we might one day celebrate the extra flexibility - the extra "wealth" as Buckminster Fuller puts it - that this brings, we will surely find that this is only a necessary adaptation for the survival of humankind.