Eureka! When I wrote the last post I recognized the common vision, but had not yet fully tracked down the why. That shifted quickly though when I followed up on one of the attendees at the Humanity 2.0 conferences at the Vatican, U-Chicago prof Candace Vogler, since I remembered she was also tied to the NIH-funded Science of Virtues Project covered here http://invisibleserfscollar.com/locating-the-internalized-information-guiding-human-behavior-so-it-can-be-controlled-and-transformed/ . Rereading that post was a reminder of just how very tied the players covered there are to the organized False Narrative of what the Common Core, competency-based education, SEL, and data gathering are all about. That much coordination and coincidence cannot be accidental. Discovering then just how much of Vogler’s work has been financed by the Templeton Foundation, and finally that Templeton had announced its intention to finance and investigate cultural evolution via the individual human mind was my epiphany moment.
Suddenly we were no longer talking about the Social Reconstructionists, UNESCO, and its founder, Julian Huxley’s vision, as covered in Credentialed to Destroy, but think tanks across the purported political spectrum. All the pushes about values and Character initiatives and an emphasis on Truth, Beauty, and Goodness make sense if you believe that “Moral systems are the psychological and sociological ‘glue’ that holds human groups together as adaptive units, at the scale defined by the moral system, establishing a fundamental connection between morality and group-level intelligence” as this Templeton announcement put it https://evolution-institute.org/prosocial-world-receives-grant-from-templeton-world-charity-foundation/ . As a recent book by the Director of the Templeton-supported Jubilee Centre for Character & Virtues in the UK (where I first found the reference to Humanity 2.0) put it in his book Flourishing as the Aim of Education:
In general, human associations across the globe seem to be moving in a morally progressive direction despite recent ‘post-truth’ blips: a direction that makes educational discourse ripe for accounts of human flourishing as its ultimate aim…[The sought self-change in the students occurs because of] these ‘Damascus experiences’ that comes about through the recognition of transpersonal ideals that inspire awe…The awe and wonder we experience in the face of such self-transcendent ideals enables us to envisage new horizons for ourselves; we suddenly see ourselves and the world in a radically different way.
It turns out there is a word for this, ‘cultural cognitive models’ and transforming these has become the stealth means of evolution in the 21st century. As best I can tell, a 1973 paper (tied to the same Palo Alto behavioral change research center now tied to the National Growth Mindset Network) called “Theories of Culture” hatched the plan in earnest. Its author, Roger M. Keesing, laid out a desire for:
Conceiving culture as an ideational subsystem within a vastly complex system, biological, social and symbolic, and grounding our abstract models in the concrete particularities of human social life. [Today’s Evidence-Based Policymaking!]…attempts to map cultures as ideational systems in the light of an emerging understanding of mind and brain should enable clearer insights into the organization of experience and the nature and depth of variation in the thought worlds of men.
With prescribed, globalized learning standards, there won’t be much variation for long! If anyone does not believe me that the ‘thought worlds’ are a bullseye for standardization we have this 2017 paper financed by Templeton called “Cultural evolutionary theory: How culture evolves and why it matters” https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7782 stating:
Deeper analysis of how human culture, human ecology, and the human environment coevolve is necessary for understanding historical and present dynamics, and for predicting future trends. These analyses will provide much-needed tools for the planning and direction of such dynamics. Humans’ worldwide well-being and that of the ecosystem we live in depend on our ability to make such predictions and act accordingly.
Here is another confirmation of this intended aim tied to another Templeton grantee https://singularityhub.com/2018/02/22/cultural-evolution-can-provide-the-tools-to-build-global-scale-resilience/ and on July 17, 2018 the American Anthropological Society announced its intention to make ‘cultural models theory’ (CMT) the path for future research grounded in CMT’s ‘fundamental assumption that the locus of culture is the minds of individuals.” I have alluded to this before since conceptual frameworks and Disciplinary Core Ideas are being laid out in learning standards mandates, but this paper “From Cultural Models to Cultural Categories” helps make the bullseye and the rationale for targeting it even more clear. http://acrwebsite.org/volumes/8631/volumes/v29/NA-29 Making sense of the world and your experiences or ‘cultural meanings’ :
are created and maintained by the interaction between an extrapersonal world of objects and symbols and the intrapersonal world of individual’s mind. Thus, to understand and analyze culture in totality we need to to take into account both the intrapersonal world of cultural values and cognitive structures of mind and the extrapersonal world of cultural symbols and artifacts. The main objective of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework, which derives cultural categories by analyzing culture at perceptual, behavioral, and symbolic levels.
Precisely what outcomes-based education in the 90s and competency-based education tied to learning standards targets now. All designed, then and now, to force a cultural evolution grounded in transforming Values and Thought Patterns as illustrated here https://www.spps.org/cms/lib/MN01910242/Centricity/Domain/125/iceberg_model_3.pdf It really does make the ubiquity of Tranzi OBE quite clear, doesn’t it? No wonder it has been renamed now as Portrait of a Graduate or Learner Profiles. That does sound more appealing than transforming the mind to fit the global collectivist vision for the desired 21st century comrade. Here is one last link that did a succinct job of laying out why altering cultural cognitive models is the new stealth means of revolutionary change that may initially be hard to discern. http://trnerr.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Cultural-Models.pdf which usefully italicized the fact that : “Cultural models are important for communicators to consider because they shape and constrain how people think about an issue and the solutions that they see as effective and appropriate.”
The widely-shared nature of cultural models makes them incredibly valuable for strategic framers who wish to change the conversation about a complex social issue…models derive from exposure to common experiences over time. If communicators can change the context in which people experience an issue–through the media, through advocacy and through policies that change the context–[now just imagine adding the immersive possibilities of digital learning and virtual reality!] they can, over time enact deep, meaningful, and sustainable changes at the level of cultural models. The durability of cultural models means that communicators need to be aware of these ways of thinking and that they need to work hard to create new ways for people to think about social issues.
This has truly been a fascinating journey, especially because of the amount of clarity surrounding what I can document and thus prove. All the sudden references to Aristotle in a recommended template for change in the student that certainly looks to me like the Marxist Humanist template make far more sense if, like me, you located the PhD thesis of the author of Flourishing as the Aim of Education where he laid out the ties between Marx’s thought and its foundations in Aristotle’s. Suddenly the multisyllabic title of “A Neo-Aristotelian Model of Moral Development” created by the Jubilee Centre in 2017 can be accurately seen for the euphemism for an infamous ideology it actually is.
We cannot fight against what we cannot see and as usual, this post is an attempt to create the needed illumination. Otherwise, our childrens’ minds and personalities will remain tools for transformation in what is actually a global Social Reconstruction Project.