A pivot to trade schools or technology Imago Diabolī

It could be the first step to a post-liberal education system

Trump is threatening to divert billions from the Ivy League to trade schools. How unlikely — but how marvellous that would be, and how apposite to the moment. Universities are overextended across many disciplines that not-fit-for-purpose and about to be made redundant by supply-side changes in Internet-mediated self-education, as well as a revolution in A.I. which is likely to eliminate whole sectors of routine graduate employment in the service sectors. Trade schools might provide the back door to a much more benign and dare-I-say human version of the future.

Intimations of a preferred future

The Myford Super 7 lathe is a thing of great beauty — the apex technics of the Industrial Revolution combined with skilled worker and his garden shed. These days the shed has become a ‘man cave’ and the lathe supplemented by a home-made CNC router or a micro-extrusion machine. Systems like Arduino have brought the sophistication of factory manufacturing hardware and software within reach of hobbyists or domestic industrialists. Even the life-sciences revolution is being hacked for home-based synthetic biology. The bottom line is that everything is getting smaller, cheaper, more integrated and simpler to use. Companies like Vention are offering micro modular robotic manufacturing systems that you can design and order from the sofa — as easy as dial-a-pizza.

Big is not beautiful: 4IR as if people and communities don’t matter

The 1st industrial revolution centred on coal, steam power and mechanized, centralized production. The 2nd was organized around the more mobile and flexible power of the internal combustion engine, electricity grids and the chemical revolution made possible by fossil fuel stocks. Starting in the 1970s, the 3rd centred on computing and the information economy and culminated with the Internet and ubiquitous PCs. The 4th Industrial Revolution (aka Industry 4.0 or 4IR) is can be seen as a paradigm of synthesis, convergence and integration, blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds with a convergence of entering technologies such as A.I., quantum computing, the Internet of Things, additive manufacturing and the miniaturization and modularization of a suite of hitherto capital intensive and large scale manufacturing and fabrication technologies from complex alloys, printed circuit boards, plastic extrusion and synthetic biology.

The 4th Industrial Revolution is coming. Left to their own devices corporate and government interests will ensure that it takes the form of a top-down, eco-modernist, authoritarian and globalist project for the new economy. This is of course already in train and is the vision promulgated by the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the OECD and the EU during COVID.

Technology Imago diabolī

Certainly, this is the line of travel. The potential for transhumanism, as discussed elsewhere in this blog and extensively by commentators such as

Mary Harrington

, is built into modernity. It is built into the Fall — because the central Screwtape strategy is for human beings to stop being the Image of God and to stop being fully human. This is danger of philosophical materialism combined with prosperity. As CS Lewis’ Screwtape observes:

“Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him”

The danger of prosperity — the comfort of air-conditioned self-driving cars, on-demand and completely immersive entertainment, pornography, drugs, continual (albeit shallow) Internet connectivity and 24/7 Uber-eats — is that it provides a gentle, comfortable and soporific elevator to Hell.

Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Traditional universities have a problem

That said, Screwtape is not having it all his own way. In certain respects the centralized machine technics favoured by the progenitors of 4IR don’t respect the existing hierarchy. The universities provide a stunning example of locked-in, path-dependent anachronism. Like the dinosaurs, it is not clear whether they can survive the new world that they are bringing into being. As Marx observed the essence of capitalism is creative destruction. Old landscapes of production with their technologies, communities and concentrations of capital are abandoned to the ruin of those — who in whatever capacity: working people, investors, managers — are left by the receding tide of investment. And when the crash comes, it can be savage and cataclysmic as with the Great Depression, or slow and pock-marked by revivals and false dawns, as with the rust-belt regions on both sides of the Atlantic. It may also be completely unexpected taking on a surreal quality, as with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent unilateral deconstruction of the Soviet Union. But it is always inexorable — driven by the logic of technical change.

Mainstream universities don’t seem to realize it, but they are in the cross hairs of such a paradigmatic demolition.

Developing and expanding in step with modernity, universities provided intellectual training and certification for that small but significant proportion of the public who provided the technicians, scientists, managers, entrepreneurs and professional workers who filled the ever expanding technical division of labour. From the 1980s, buoyed by the 3rd Industrial Revolution and the idea that the great majority would become knowledge workers, leaving the manual manipulation of the material world to robots, to a minority of skilled workers or increasingly to assembly plants in the global south. So with globalization, higher education expanded in all directions, funded directly or indirectly through taxation and without checks and balances on the quality and utility of the final product. From nurses and youth workers to hotel managers, prison guards, agricultural workers and policeman, everyone had to have a university degree. And as what was learned became more generic and less useful, it was padded out with all kinds of make-work training that has undermined productivity — in domains such as health and safety, safeguarding, research ethics and of course diversity, equity and inclusion.

Four ways to kill off the university

If the economies of the west had needed an endless proliferation of low-grade knowledge workers, this model might have been fine. But in fact, the very technologies of the 4IR — social media, Coursera, Kahn Academy, YouTube, Substack, Udemy — have been undermining the rationale and modus operandi of place-bound campus universities for nearly two decades. This has happened in four ways.

1. The Internet makes people dumb. Eroding the habits of reading, conversing and debating, and creating cohorts of teenagers who absorb what little they do know from Youtube or Instagram, school leavers have become progressively less able to cope with and benefit from a university education — even as ever more of them enter the system.

2. The feminization of higher education is evident in girls outstripping boys on just about every measure: graduation rates across nearly all disciplines; drop-out rates; achievement of higher degrees. It is also evident in the subject matter of arts, humanities and social science disciplines that have become deeply and unreflectively committed to an explicitly feminist agenda that valorizes the purported experience of women ( a tiny minority of women in fact) and excludes or even denigrates men and the male experience. Because of this, men are increasingly switching off higher-education — seeking independent paths offered by the trades or entrepreneurialism. There is strong evidence that as women come to predominate a profession, it is devalued and subject to declining wages. Observed first in relation to clerical work in the early 20th century, the same pattern has been observed in occupations as diverse as computer programming and park rangers.

3. The Internet is decentralized and can bypass any campus-bound institution. The very information technologies engendered by the Internet, have transformed the way that knowledge and skills training can be packaged and disseminated.

4. Grade and certification hyperinflation: Meritocratic ranking and reliable certification are dying together. With the digital resources available on demand over the Internet dwarfing those proprietary resources held by even the best copyright libraries in the 20th century, and online learning platforms providing world class instruction at a fraction of the cost of a university degree — only the monopoly of certification stands between universities and systemic redundancy. But as the quality of graduates declines — not least because of the war on meritocratic testing and ranking of students — and as employers can no longer rely on even prestigious universities to provide a basic filtering mechanism, the certificates themselves are losing their raison d’être.

Elite universities and the globalist version of 4IR

So here is something of a paradox. The elite universities in particular are cheerleaders and promulgators of their own nemesis — an open-sourced, decentralized, DIY education economy that is an intrinsically better fit for the wild-west frontier of the 4IR.

Why is this the case? It is largely a question of path-dependency and the Slartibartfast tendency to stick to a tried and tested model. But even so, there is a distinct feeling of institutions with fingers in their ears. The vacuous stupidity of the both Claudine Gay and those that elevated her to the chief executive position of the most hallowed and prestigious university on the planet, has been played out in every faculty and every university in the West. DEI on this scale amounts to an exercise in egregious self-harm that has no precedent in the history of civilization.

But the same people who are accelerating the intellectual and procedural decline of the great universities are also championing exactly the technological revolution that will make many of them and large swathes of the disciplinary landscape, completely irrelevant.¹

Because, like all agents of a declining power, the universities — and especially those mediocre institutional managers who rise through the bureaucratic ranks to lead them — can’t conceive of a world in which they have no role. It’s a special case of the master-slave dialectic that makes the architects and managers of the status quo blind to their own vulnerability. How else to explain the appointment of such a mediocre plagiarist as Claudine Gay?

Given this inability to orient themselves in the world fast coming over the horizon, the way in which the most affluent and prestigious universities have positioned themselves is unsurprising. With a massive vested interest in the continuing flow of foreign students, mostly from the global south, globalist institutions that have, for decades, selected and filtered for ultra-liberal cosmopolitan faculty, have rushed to join the bandwagon for a post-national, global governance of ‘the good’. The virtuous elite trusted with guiding the world through the ‘polycrisis’ is complex and unaccountable imbrication of high profile academics, university institutes, liberal think tanks, ‘philanthropic’ misanthrope billionaires, NGOs, quangos, industry bodies and corporation — all operating loosely under the aegis of the United Nations, the EU, the World Bank, the IMF and the OECD. The climate conventions are only the most visible part of a sprawling governance iceberg that makes it almost impossible for even the most determined national governments (even Donald Trump) to carve their own path.

Not surprisingly, the ecological future researched and promulgated by the universities — by pretty well every faculty of environment, and engineering, and all economics, social science or arts programmes which register an interest in sustainable development, climate change or social justice — is thoroughly eco-modernist. What this means in practice is that the liberal version of Western modernity is non-negotiable. The ‘ends’ of this Western trajectory — materialism, consumerism, individualism, along with the relationship with intrusive price-setting markets and and an equally intrusive nanny state with the power to determine even the fine details of family and community life — remain sacrosanct. What must change is the means by which these ends are achieved….and unsurprisingly, this means accelerating and intensifying many of the underlying drivers:

• individualism and self-actualization — whatever the cost

• individual spatial and social mobility — but with electric vehicles and green air travel

• existential meaning through consumerism — but with green supply chains

• continual access to unlimited energy — but renewably sourced.

Of course the unspoken, and mostly unspeakable truth, is that for all the lip service critiques of growth that are de rigour for at least card carrying greens, an expanding economy is a prerequisite for all of these commitments. They are all, by definition, high-energy, high-complexity phenomena. Progressive identity politics is a form of pseudo anti-capitalism. Activists lambast globalization and neoliberalism much as they did in the 1980s. But social (racial, environmental) justice is framed in terms of endlessly entitled individuals and against the communitarian commitments of traditional family and neighbourhood. Without a shred of self-awareness they have become the most radical of liberals; their agenda is entirely dependent on generous fiscal transfers and in turn upon global markets, integrated supply chains and bountiful energy.

The natural habitat of activists has always been the university campus. Given these priors, it’s pretty clear why the unwieldy, top-heavy and redundant network of world universities can cater only for the globalist agenda of ecological modernization. Detached from their own civic-national cultures, disconnected from their socio-economic hinterlands, these institutions cater for a tiny, highly mobile, global elite of students. They are unconcerned with the price-tag for the new economy which will come in the form of a massive degradation of work, mass unemployment, societal conflict in the wake of mass migration. The implicit gamble is that conflicts engendered by mass social and economic redundancy and the loss of meaning can be assuaged though the unabated flow of cheap electronics, an ever more compelling virtual world, pornography and drugs, as well as the fragmenting impact of race and gender identity politics.

Happy days.

4IR is coming but there is another way

Now is the time to discover what a bottom-up, entrepreneurial and distributed version of this information-rich technical revolution might look like. If in the long term, the universities are toast, there will be millions of teens and young adults, displaced by the corporate economy, unwilling and unable to get into debt to pay for useless degrees and looking for ways to create a livelihood. It’s not just about money. For sure, one can imagine a post-scarcity society with in which people are paid by a generous state simply to exist —Aaron Bastani’s ‘fully automated luxury communism.’ But who wants to be a goldfish in a transhumanist fish bowl? In reality reality will never be the freedom for dilettantes to combining poetry and creative expression, with a little gentile sheep raising, as described by the young Marx in Die Grundrisse. It will be poverty, enforced idleness and authoritarian control — and perhaps in the end wholesale demographic eugenics and culling.

Although nobody will vote for this, but they might sleepwalk into it. On the other hand, there may be a real opportunity, outside the universities and in the wild hinterlands of the new technologies for ordinary people to reclaim the human capacity to generate meaning through the warp of conscious, collaborative, creative activity/craft and through the weft of relationships.

Couched in terms of a libertarian ethic of self-sufficient families and communities, the P2P economy, combined with micro-fabrication and computer-aided design and married to a renaissance in traditional craft and fabrication skills, could offer a new relationship between hand and brain. The technics of this new kind of political economy could give rise to a positive post-liberal society. For this vision to play out, we also need religion and the kind of virtue-ethical moral vision associated with Thomas Aquinas, Alasdair Macintyre and Pope Leo XIII — so the timing for Leo XIV is perhaps providential.

Many modern discontents have followed in the steps of William Morris, Peter Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Wendell Berry, E.F. Schumacher and Ivan Illich to extol the virtue of a hand made life whilst warning of the danger of technology making human creativity redundant. James Kunstler imagines a post-collapse ‘world made by hand.’   Motorcyclist philosopher

Matthew B. Crawford

hit the best seller list with a paen to the virtues of (old-)school wood and metal work Shop Class as Soul Craft.

And it really isn’t hard to understand why, with the prospect of transhumanism hurtling towards us — humanoid robots, spookily realistic sex-dolls and now even more realistic ‘reborn babies’ (this one below is NOT REAL: more of that in a later post) — the idea that we are in real danger of losing what makes us human is gaining real traction. Why would anyone settle for a sex-doll? Or a robot-baby? These transhumanist simulacra are of a piece with Tinder, with porn, with PRIDE, with commercial surrogacy, with gay men buying accessory babies from poor women — and with the ideology that tries to ban the word ‘family’ because it is ‘white supremacist’ and ‘triggering for minorities’ (Canada of course — Waterloo Region District School Board if you can bear to expose your self to such a stupid/evil combo). What they all do is to sever billiard ball individuals from the texture of their interdependent relationships as human beings and bring an end to healthy procreation. They constitute a sweeping attack on the fertility of the human race — quite conscious on the part of those greens and misanthropes who — having had Wormwood (schooled by Screwtape) whispering the new virtues in their ear — see people as bad for the planet, and themselves as uniquely qualified to make the diagnosis.

So that is one driver — evident in its most benign form in the burgeoning ‘maker movement’. Not necessarily opposed to new technology, modern makers want to recapture the spirit of nineteenth century engineers and self-taught craftsmen who tinkered modernity into being in sheds and domestic workshops across the land. I’m thinking of people like Tom Clough — a working class mining technician who engineered Northumbrian pipes in his spare time and was one of those who saved this musical tradition from extinction. Like the better known Uilleann or Union pipes, Northumbrian pipes in their most sophisticated form are as much a product of the industrial revolution as a pre-modern English pastoral. To this day their craft manufacture involves skilled wood and metal working, the ancient craft of reed-making and the use of the kind of industrial lathes that became widely accessible to working men in the twentieth century — often moonlighting on work equipment.

The potential of the new maker movement has been explored to its furthest outreaches by Marcin Jakubowski’s Open Source Ecology. Based on a farm in Missouri, the wildly ambitious project is a kind of anarchist version of Kennedy’s moonshot. They aim to develop

‘open source industrial machines that can be made for a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free. The goal of Open Source Ecology is to create an open source economy – an efficient economy which increases innovation by open collaboration’

If you want to get the gist of the scale of Marcin’s ambition, just peruse the Global Vision Construction Set.

If you want to understand just how appealing this is to anyone who ever played with Lego or Meccano or tinkered with a motorcycle, check out the OSE version of a tractor that you can build in your garage.

In some ways Marcin is way ahead of Donald Trump. His version for rebooting civilization from below, involves a scaled-up trade-school on steroids — as he describes here.

The political economy for this distributist, P2P vision of post-liberal society is relatively straight forward. What Carson calls the ‘low overhead’ ‘home brew industrial revolution’ will allow ordinary people to produce complex goods for their own consumption and for sale from the confines of their kitchen table, a backyard shed or a community workshop.

Low overhead and family-centrism are THE political project

Low overhead refers not just to the massive reduction in the cost of capital equipment. This development is already in train. However, for Carson’s vision to take off, it needs also a retraction of state control and an inversion of the regulatory costs of doing business. The smaller the business, the lower the fiscal and regulatory burden — until any domestic enterprise operating at the farm gate, should pay nothing and be free of regulatory oversight. As libertarian, Christian and ecological (‘lunatic’) farmer Joel Salatin observes, in the food sector, stainless steel, disinfectant, fridges and social media reputational systems make regulation now completely unnecessary.

But for the 4IR to unfold along from the bottom-up in the ways envisaged by Marcin Jakubowski and Joel Salatin, there needs to be a challenge not just to technology and regulation, but to the familial, ontological and metaphysical basis of society. Firstly, as with the agenda of social catholic distributism, the family must be re-affirmed and supported as the fundamental unit of society. This means a reduction in the scale and intrusion of the welfare state and collectivist interference, material and ideological support for marriage and social pressure against the sexual revolution.

Liberal individualism and materialism will always favour the top-down, corporate, global model of ecological modernization. Decentralized ‘appropriate technology’ for people can be just as high tech and scientifically progressive — although certainly the pace of innovation will slow. But it must be oriented to different ends and embody only only a commitment to human beings but a rejection of secular humanism — because the latter is in fact side-lining human beings completely. 4IR is a means only. The ends must be rooted in the vision of the good, true and beautiful that emerges from Christianity — and particularly those forms that privilege mystical experience, shared rituals, the sublimation of individuals to family and community and beauty in the service of gratitude and worship — as expressed in Psalm 148

Praise the LORD.

Praise the LORD from the heavens, praise him in the heights above.

Praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his heavenly hosts.

Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars.

Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies.

Let them praise the name of the LORD, for he commanded and they were created.

He set them in place for ever and ever; he gave a decree that will never pass away.

Praise the LORD from the earth, you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds that do his bidding, you mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds, kings of the earth and all nations, you princes and all rulers on earth, young men and maidens, old men and children.

Let them praise the name of the LORD, for his name alone is exalted; his splendor is above the earth and the heavens.

He has raised up for his people a horn, the praise of all his saints, of Israel, the people close to his heart.

Praise the LORD.

1. If there is anything left of the university in 20 years time, it may well be those humanities disciplines that centre on interpersonal discussion and debate that require a daily routines of face-to-face interaction, beautiful buildings and a mood of austere reverence.