We saw in blog 58 that the slow disintegration of our society as an organic whole can probably only be halted by introducing a radical change in state education. State education MUST try to inculcate all its learners into a sense of responsibility to, and membership of, the society. The whole purpose of education is to secure the continuance of the culture of a society. An education system which conspicuously avoids trying to inculcate the values of society is a complete absurdity.

The complexion of the nation state changes when there is a landslide general election, like the recent one which has brought about a Labour administration. But society remains as a kind of brotherhood and sisterhood which remains, whatever new relatively minimal new emphases of governance are introduced.  The No. 1 job of state schools HAS TO BE to impart to every girl and boy in every class this heavy obligation… that  they have to contribute to the commongood… otherwise the society will disintegrate.  We all owe, as individuals, a superordinate allegiance to “our” society, because it has formed us in a thousand unseen ways… many of which we ourselves are hardly aware of.

The hard question is of course: How? In today’s state of frenetic confusion such an intention sounds extremely naïve: because we are all nowadays socialised into a deep cynicism about the state,  and an even deeper cynicism about any leaders which may emerge to steer it. We have become acclimatised to constant scandals, blunders, corruptions, chaotic situations…  We all know subconsciously that a bottomless general despair happened in the 20th century, and that unqualified optimism about the future is not just a non-starter, any reference to it is anathema.

Up to the 1960s the established Anglican Church managed to project a sense of continuity with the past. But it was getting weaker and weaker, and this presumption disappeared eventually, with the student chaos of 1968.

Commongood prospects collapsed around 1972. Everything was falling apart: any sense that there was a secure, trustworthy vision of the future still intact somewhere in the society disappeared.

Well,  a new, trustworthy vision has now dawned.  It starts with the realisation that during the 20th century we were far too trusting towards total maths, which had ceased to be commongood-minded in the 1900s. (That was when the privileged maths gurus decided that their subject was only a higher intellectual artform… one with no obligations to society.)

This (self-chosen) splendid isolation has failed abysmally. The present author has written many blogs about this, including his essays in the New English Review which list eight major existential blunders made by the gurus of higher maths in the 20th century.   The gurus of maths, in effect, handed over the important, substantial part of maths to the computerists.

In spite of which, paradoxically, maths has become the chief pathfinder for the future. Everything has quietly been mathematicised. Originally Alan Turing and John von Neumann created the all-purpose computer, and this has led to automated maths, which can organise and regiment society far more “efficiently” than before.  Actually it has become more oppressively than before.  Algorithms are being used all the time to manipulate unwary people.

A great truth has emerged:     You can have too much of the regimentation which hidden, automated maths stealthily imposes.

This has finally led to an amazing discovery: anti-maths.

No one expected anti-maths. In the 1960s the maths gurus themselves made a fetish out of what they considered maths’ great, privileged, timeless, advantage —its utter uniqueness. Nothing, they thought, could ever match or rival maths as the supreme form of human knowledge.

Well, they were wrong.  They kidded themselves that the structures created by maths were “out there” like abstract mountain ranges… even though they knew perfectly well that they were man-made artefacts.  Originally these man-made artefacts were mostly attempts to match features of the real world. But from about 1830 onwards doubly-pure maths was devised creating a vast array of structures which bore no resemblance whatever to the real world. These “modern mathematicians” became a law-unto-themselves, utterly triumphant, utterly adrift from commonsense, flouting their contempt for commonsense and privilege.

This era ended around 1972 with a dramatic collapse in the credibility of “New Maths for Schools”.

Now Anti-Maths has emerged. It is constructed in exactly the same way as maths, but its building block is not the neutral, static tally “/”,   like maths. Instead Anti-Maths imposes structures —by mental willpower— onto transient features arising from a vast field of absolutely random different tally streams.  So Anti-Maths may be defined as <<the study of the logic of transient reality>> in contrast to maths which is <<the study of the logic of timeless reality>>.

Transient reality is the obvious norm. We are all mortal. Shakespeare observed that everything inevitably falls into decay.  Probably all the fundamental particles of physics, e.g. electrons, have transient lives, though one never hears of today’s maths-indoctrinated physicists looking for the moment when an electron fizzles out. (We know that photons generated by the Sun must fizzle out somewhere in the room which they have entered.)

Whether there are any bona fide “timeless realities” is a moot point. If there are such things, we shall never know, because it would be necessary to live for ever to verify such a fact.

When Plato pronounced that “only the timeless is real” he managed to hoodwink the human race for more than 2,500 years.

So a quite new era has dawned. Forget AI, a bubble which is already beginning to burst. The new dawn is based on BI, the Boundless Insights which Anti-Maths will clearly begin to deliver.  (For example, it shows us why nothing can move faster than light, and why there is a universe at all…)

A new era of hope will have to banish thousands of items of gnawing doubt, of negativity, of accepted lapses… which have become part of the furniture.

In terms of practicalities, it will probably take years to re-focus the thinking of the human race. A first step would be to send every teacher onto an eight-week course to socialise them into the absolutely imperative basis of modern education: the need to project a sense of the commongood, a sense that every learner should be expected to prioritise service, as Sir Keir has promised his government will. This is not propaganda:  it will only succeed if it is fully open, fully internalised, fully believed.

Does this mean that the DfE should send thousands of teachers as soon as possible on 8-week ethics courses which might be set up by opportunist entrepreneurs?

No! No! No!   That won’t do any good at all, because the intensity and imperative-mindedness of the tutors will be poor.  This is not an exercise in brainwashing. This needs 100% genuine, 100% personally believable tutors to make sure that the key message is 100% absorbed.  It will be necessary to find a handful of really convincing super-tutors before the first course can begin. A great deal of preparation will also be needed to design such courses, so they allow every participating teacher to experience a full immersion in the central message.

Some teachers who are successfully converted to hope might eventually be recruited to form a second 8-week course team. This kind of slow progress is absolutely essential:  anything hastily thrown together will self-destruct.

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CHRISTOPHER ORMELL 1st August 2024 chrisormell@aol.com