Testimonials

In this essay, we will discuss some urgent challenges for democracy and education in the Deweyan sense in connection with current developments of technologies and questions of sustainability. After a short introduction, we will proceed in four major parts. In doing so, we follow the systematic distinction of four mutually interrelated levels of technologies in culture found in the late work of Michel Foucault. In part 1 of our essay, we focus on the technologies of production. We connect Foucault’s perspective with more recent research on questions of social inequality and the production and distribution of wealth, e.g., the great divide between rich and poor that Joseph Stiglitz has examined in much of his recent work. We discuss implications for questions of sustainability in the world of today and draw conclusions as to urgent democratic and educational challenges in our time.

In part 2, we address the level of technologies of sign systems. Proceeding in a similar way as in the first part, we connect Foucault’s perspective with a more recent critical approach, namely the theory of surveillance capitalism launched by Shoshana Zuboff. We consider implications for sustainability and draw conclusions for democracy and education.

In part 3, we turn to the level of technologies of power and domination. We use Colin Crouch’s critical approach to post-democracy in order to examine some crucial dangers for democracy involved in prevailing economic and political relations, practices and structures that tend to undermine the effectiveness of democratic institutions and procedures. Again, we consider implications for sustainability and draw conclusions for democracy and education.

In part 4, we look at the level of technologies of the self. We consider connections with contemporary constructivist as well as Deweyan perspectives in education that emphasize the role of relationships and processes of social self-creation. Once more, we elaborate on some crucial implications for sustainability and draw conclusions for democracy and education. The essay closes with a summary of the most important conclusions of our discussion.

Neuroscience and neurotechnology has the potential to improve views of cognitive functioning and learning processes, and help refine learning techniques contributing to educational attainment. Optimism about productive dialogue and collaboration between neurotech and education is highly recommendable. Some skepticism, if not cynicism, is also urged in the short term. Overhyped claims about potential “cognitive enhancers” through brain stimulation, in the wake of pharmacological “smart pills,” have arrived. It has already been popularly imagined that neurotech for improving mental abilities won’t necessitate any tough learning or formal education, or much conscious effort at all. Little about developmental psychology, cognitive science, or neurology supports this fantasy, but the fundamental problem is a collective forgetfulness that education itself is already a technology, among the oldest wielded by humanity. By keeping Hickman’s pragmatic philosophy of technology in mind, we can avoid reductionist fallacies about the psychology of learning, and cautiously evaluate how neurotech may best serve genuine education. Tools should improve persons, without making persons into tools.

Neuropragmatism draws on Larry Hickman’s conception of technology and technoscience and his distinction between nature-as-nature and nature-as-culture. Just as the technical precedes the scientific, nature comes before the cultural — all the while science remains technical, culture natural — these parallel distinctions not only clarify limitations within cultural neuroscience or neuroanthropology (notably, the creeping Cartesian materialism) but also provide means for imagining future democratic vistas. This act of imagination is a further call for reconstructing our sense of ourselves in our world by expanding, and thereby enriching, the transaction between organism and environment such that the cybernetic and the neural are no longer restrained to the bodily but become embedded in our biocultural environments.

Neuropragmatism provides a vision of neurotechnological culture, in both means and end, that is an ecologically novel future for how we construct our democratic niches. To achieve such a richly cybernetic culture, a vision must be sketched that is scientifically reasonable, in order to generate realistic hope that such a way of life is readily available from where we are now, given enthusiasms (warranted or not) about technology, and fears (warranted or not) that democracy is on its way out.