Ecohumanist Lab

(Can parenting save the World from collapse?)

I am a pediatrician. I worked with kids and families in Poland, The Gambia (West Africa) and then in the U.S  for the last 40 years. It is no surprise that my solution comes from my experience in that field. I can’t change myself, can you? Forget the existentialists, we can not become anything much better. But as a pediatrician, I’m telling you—we can change the next generation.

Completely? No, but substantially, significantly- yes. I saw it happen many times in my practice.

My research also says: yes.

So, our kids. What we do with the little ones is parenting. With the bigger kids: education. Of course, the younger the child, the deeper and more fundamental changes we’d be able to impart. On the other hand, education, unlike intimate and vague parenting, is more structured, organized, and accessible. Ideally, we should try to address both.

I.   Introduction

Our human niche is severely stressed. Our resources are limited and dwindling. But we,  the consumers want more and more things, gadgets, and material goods. And we’d fight for them to the death.

What is worse is that even if the total number of people is not growing fast (“only” 9 billion by 2050), the number of consumers lifted from poverty and subsistence will double—and they are us, the worst polluters.

But the products need to be purchased. If people would not want them or want less, less will be sold and produced.

This is the beauty of the reversed spiral of capitalism. (The more you grow, the more you must grow, but also the more you shrink, the more you need to shrink.)

 You, my reader, will exclaim: this would be terrible, economies would slow down and people would starve. Well, people will not starve. Actually, agriculture would flourish, while some malls and factories could close. Some people might work part-time, the communities, gardens, not-for-profit occupations, and family life, it is what would flourish. But this is not an essay to convince somebody about the environmental crisis. Deniers, bad luck, don’t read it. Read “Laudate Deum” first.(14)

 Here, the question is: how to make people want fewer material goods, buy fewer gadgets, and be less obsessed about these things, in such a pervasive, pernicious way from birth. How to make us, humans, less greedy?

It is impossible, we are rotten to the bones, I agree.

What we are trying to do, like flushing less toilets, recycling, and such, will not do the trick, really.

And my solution has this neat extra bonus: all real and imaginary powers that enslave us, the governments, nationalisms, religions, corporations, conspiracies, aliens, lizard people—all these powers rely on one thing: our greed. Nobody can force you to go to the mall or click into the amazon.com paradise.

Without our greed they are powerless.

With this in mind, during one of our recent Socrates Café meetings, I asked the participants:

Should we:

1. embrace the advances in technology and train our children to become specialists as fast as possible and as best as possible, i.e. continue the recent emphasis on science, business, and computer science /artificial intelligence?

Or should we:

2. make a desperate pivot away from technology and teach our children about lifelong learning and humanities with a new emphasis on the family, relationships, community, nature, history, arts, music, language, literature, and (yes!) philosophy?

The answer was a resounding: “NO” to my call for the desperate pivot. Nobody was ready to compromise our “progress” even if it is responsible for the mess we are in.

I wanted to say, look, guys, alternative education is sprouting everywhere. Well, it was sprouting in my mind. I found these humanistic systems, and they were interesting, but most of them were old, heavy with angels, ghosts, spirituality, and obsolete didactic principles.

Waldorf Schools are the most familiar to me, as my daughter attended this school for a while and my very good friend was the Waldorf School teacher and organizer. The book of M.C. Richards Toward Wholeness (1) makes the concept even more enchanting by the poetic approach of this extraordinary woman—a poet, potter, hippie, and new age teacher at the famous Black Mountain very alternative school. Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophy, a weird Christianity of the early 20th century, permeates the mood and ideas behind the school but is not taught to the pupils. The schools are fantastic, there is art, dance, music and play everywhere. Education is vibrant and alive, the teachers are enthusiastic and attached to their students’ learning with strong emotional bonds. No competition, no grades are necessary. The love of learning is everywhere, learning is shared by students and teachers as an exciting lifelong journey.

The parents are involved—they’d better be as Waldorf education is expensive. And still, this network is growing, with 1200 schools worldwide in 35 countries, and numerous grants that make the students’ profiles more diverse.(2,3)

This is the best example of a humanities-saturated education I could find. The others: Montessori education (4) Paideia Schools (Chattanooga School of Art and Science), Quaker schools, Unitarian-Universalist education, and “Forest Schools” are much more similar to “normal” schooling in America aimed to produce rich or at least employable people.

But even Waldorf’s students end up in a mainstream university—maybe more of them studying visual art, literature, languages, or history. But wthey were not told why to dance around the fire and play with dolls without faces, so they experience , by and by fades away.

Some recent research (5) suggests that humanistic education or even writing your personal worldview (6) by engaging in the “big questions” and philosophy, especially with a supportive small group of students, can shift people’s personal goals and hierarchy of values towards less materialistic worldviews.

And then, about 1 year ago I encountered the work of Frederic Lenoir. (7)“The Happiness”, 2012, and “Le Desir” 2022.

He has a philosophy and practical system “on the ground,” all in French and in six Francophone countries (including Quebec!) The courses teach children humanities- mindfulness and critical thinking. Since 2016 more than 100,000 children have gone through SEVE courses. (Savoir Etre and Vivre Ensemble: “Knowing how to be and live together.”) We do not yet know if these children have a less materialistic worldview or if their families buy fewer gadgets, living a simpler life. Or if they are happier and their environment is improving.

Overall, my research into existing systems was deeply disappointing. It is not only that we don’t know how to make children less greedy, we do not want it. We need a system with a clear-cut philosophy, conscious of what we would do with our children and why. 

We need parenting and educational philosophy linking our curricula with the vision of sustainable society, linking the worldviews of the new generations with human niche’s collapse.

And, at last , linking consumerism and greed with this collapse.

Lenoir points out in his new book the importance of desires “Without them, life is not worth it” and suggests “redirecting” them away from consumerism. To me, desires make only the emotional part of our worldview. A person’s character, habits, dreams, obligations, and many other elements decide how we act and how we influence the world and people around us.

While thinking about the direction in which we want to “desperately pivot” (I am stubborn), we need to consider two types of happiness. (“Happiness” might be not the best term and not the one you like. But in the end, what is a better term describing the “desired situation”—your wishes, drives, habits, what you want? So, for the lack of a more comprehensive term, let’s stick with the H word).

The first type of happiness is ancient: inherited from social mammals and then fine-tuned during the last 10 million years of primate and hominid evolution. It is the mother’s and child’s love, safety, satiation, and belonging. Then: the awe of the unknown, the joy of figuring things out, and friendship of cooperation. With language, imagination, and a love of pattern we created art, music, dance, love of beauty, and nature. Then curiosity and social bonds produced storytelling, learning, and the love of knowledge. Notice the pro-social nature of this type: doing this with a friend or family member actually enhances the experience.

The second type of happiness is the opposite, it works like pie—the more you take, the less is left for me. Money, social power and position, and material possessions work like that.

The first type, call it experiential, is sustainable on two levels:

It takes a lot of time and effort to get it, waiting for the beautiful sunset, reading The Tempest, so you’ll understand the play in the theater, and visiting your grandmother. The satisfaction is short and difficult to measure and requires repeated tries. The results are vague. (A good example is marriage.) But, you have less time for shopping. Instead, you meditate or read Ulysses.

I hope that, with the first type of happiness, practiced since birth, possessions appear less important, so you do not seek them so mindlessly and obsessively.

The second type is easy: it is the pleasure of things, money, the ownership: just step into the garage and your glistening new Tesla is waiting for you, no effort is needed.  This type of happiness is responsible for the economy to hum, also responsible for the environmental crisis, societal recession, violence, wars, personal loneliness, anxiety, and despair.

I believe, as I tried to argue in other essays, that this second type of happiness is very recent, less than 20,000 years old, and way too recent to have a genetic base. It is closely related to symbolic language. As we named things and agents, (8) the survival advantage was almost immediate, the incredible invention of language saving us from nearly certain extinction, which was the fate of 26 or more other hominid branches and perhaps 90% of the Homo Sapiens population.

Ah, the lure of things, now we paying for this dearly; the new extinction is looming.

II.   No greed parenting

We should continue our efforts to mitigate the collapse of the human niche (recycling, community gardens, etc…) At the same time, we should redirect our desires, as Monsieur Lenoir writes, or pivot desperately our parenting and education to attempt a shift in the type of happiness the new generation will strive for. As I said, we can’t change ourselves, but maybe the new generation can become less materialistic. I am calling this program “no-greed parenting.”

Most parents want their children to be happier than they are. The most common pathway is to help your child to have a successful life. That usually means improved outside circumstances like better, more prestigious jobs, more money, and a better place to live. Sometimes that “better life” includes more personal elements: being prettier, funnier, healthier, stronger, and friendlier.

But here with “no-greed parenting,” we wish for the inconceivable; to flourish in the future world, our children need a different worldview, one which for us is difficult to imagine. Lenoir in his recent book Le Desir plans to “redirect” or “rearrange the set of desires.” I suggest that we work on the different types of happiness.

The Principles of No-Greed Parenting: ( This is not a manual. This short list should start the conversation and give you an idea. If you know how to implement it, tell me).

1. Provide secure attachment:

Help children feel safe

Help children feel loved

Help children feel respected

Help children be curious

Help children be joyful

Help children be open to novelty and adventure

2.  Teach a child to like and play with others:

                         Listen to others

                             Try to understand

                        Express yourself

            Be confident and brave

                 See humor everywhere

3.   Teach the child social skills:

                 Surround the child with family, organize visits, cousins, and friends

Parents and family need to spend time with the child, including housework. Make the child a part of the family team.

No TV, no electronic toys, make the child “bathe” in stories, songs, laughter, and dancing.

4.     Teach the child to use hands:

Play with simple toys

Make toys with the child

Draw, and play with clay and plasticine. Use creativity and imagination.

5.     Use magic: for the first few years, everything is magic.

3 to 7- some explanations are not magic, some are magic.

After 7- everything should be saturated by human imagination, curiosity, and love of beauty.

6.     Play outside, climb, swing, make a garden, become a naturalist.

7. Play instruments, dance, tai chi (9), qi gong, hiking, and nature walks(12)

As a pediatrician, for 50 years I tried to talk about these principles to my parents during every well visit, and whenever was the opportunity. My practice brochure (10) contained also some of these concepts.

          III.  Paleo Café

I had grandiose ideas about designing such education ( 11). Now I’ve scaled it down dramatically to a “Paleo Café.” The concept echoes my ideas of Ovids’s Golden Age societies with early human language. Think Atlantis, Stonehenge, pre-Imperial Meso-America or Göbekli Tepe.- These ancient societies are most mysterious to us, we just can’t imagine social structures creating these immense monuments but otherwise, they make no sense- to us. There are no signs of violence, hierarchies, personal richness- no signs of greed. Shared language brought to these humans immediate control over the material world (13)- counting, sorting, measuring, timing- but the lure and the evil of personal possessions and power developed only slowly later. This concept of two separate phases of human becoming materialistic are just my musings, inspired by the strange book (12) but it fits beautifully with my other theories. I am going to write more about the anthropological concepts of that- see the essay:” Zombies, Idealistic Animals and Radical Anthropomorphism”.

But for now, can we create in our neighborhood a glimpse of Golden Age?

The vision:

A small group of 5 to 10 people meets weekly at a community center or even better in a private home. “Paleo” connotes the idea of the simplicity of the setting. No electronics, simple furnishings, few simple toys, Waldorf style.

No money talk, no competition games, no media, no news, no talk about violence and war. There is a lot of sharing, borrowing, and lending. There are young people with children—the gift for the future community. Probably 2 to 5 children would be easiest to handle. There are also old, retired people—the gift of wisdom for the new generation. Among them are also young people without children—friends, aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors.

They all have fun, there is reading, telling stories, singing, and dancing. The religious overtones are fine but in the “Paleo,” mythic form and distance. Instead, wild imagination, curiosity, and openness to the unknown are encouraged.

Everybody is equal, respected, and helped to express herself.

Some cross-cultural activities are important, maybe there is invited an indigenous person, a foreigner, or a newcomer.

The agenda.

The host greets and welcome each person. The agenda and loose schedule are agreed upon.

Somebody is reading to the children, some are playing on their own.

Somebody may make music or sing/dance.

Some people prepare simple food. Everybody eats together, unhurriedly, with gratitude and joy.

The next meeting, the venue, and the agenda are planned.

There is a continuous weekly thread—a story, a book, a play, the art or garden project.

These groups can happen spontaneously but also can be generated with the help of social workers and the staff from the neighborhood’s cultural center—during the monthly meeting to which anybody and everybody is invited.

References:

1. M.C.Richards “Toward Wholeness” 1980

2. Sharifa Oppenheimer “Heaven on Earth” 2006.

3. Jack Petrash “Understanding Waldorf Education” 2002

4. Simone Davies “The Montesori Toddler” 2019

5. Zachary Swanson’s Master Thesis 2021UTC

6. Tom Voychehovski “My Worldview. Dr.Tom’s Method” Amazon, Kindle.2019

7. Frederic Lenoir: “The Happiness “(2012) and “Le Desir” (2022)

8. Merlin Donald “The mind so rare” 2001

9. Tom Voychehovski, Luke Prater “The Dark Attic”  2021

10. Tom Voychehovski, Comprehensive Medical Care,” Parents’ Brochure,” 2001

 11. Tom Voychehovski “The Rome conference or die”, my blog: ecohumanistlab.com 2023

12. David Groebner & David Wengrow, “The Dawn of Everything” 2023.

 13. Ian Tattersall “ Understanding Human Evolution”. 2018

14. Pope Francis “Laudate Deum” Apostolic Exhortation, October 4th, 2023.