Chapter 18: Educational Justification

Chapter 18:

Educational Justification

Aristotle said that we become just by doing just acts. This is a profound, but deeply paradoxical idea. We become just – or moral – by firstly being moral. But what is meant here is that we are led or coerced to behave in ways that are consistent with just (or moral) behaviour in the eyes of those around us, but before we are capable of understanding what it is to be moral. We learn to conform habitually to their moral rules long before we understand the rules or are even capable of having moral intentions.

The beginnings of reason

We “fit in” and “go along” before we are capable of choosing to follow the rules for ourselves. We “fake it ’til we make it”, though as infants and young children we are mostly oblivious to what is going on. Our eventual ownership of our moral behaviour depends upon emerging awareness of it and our moral reasons for it grow out of blind, habitual “moral conformity”. Moral responsibility is a belated affair.

We can compound this insight into the initial blindness of our moral learning with Freud’s insight into the development of the conscience – the superego – since this is, in the first instance, the internalized voice of authority of our parents. It is not  really authority, of course, since that too is a somewhat advanced concept, learned long after we first hear those voices and what they expect of us. It is initially the internalized approval and disapproval of those who have power over us – the power of satisfaction and discomfort. The internalized approval and disapproval is the internalized commentary of our powerful parents.

Conscience may seem to be a voice of reason, but it is not our reason at all, at least initially. Reasons come after judgement, and not surprisingly these first reasons tend to be the justifications we were given for those feelings we came to have, and for those behaviours that we have already learned to make simply in obedience to the people on whom we were most dependent. It is only with later effort and difficulty that they ever do become our own reasons, chosen by us.  We have to transcend the source to do so, and somewhat self-consciously. Transcending that source isn’t developmentally inevitable, either.

We often smile at the frustration of parents when the child has learned the trick of asking questions. Everything is “why?”, and every answer spawns a new “why?” Many parents struggle with this, because they want their child to learn to be reasonable. When the child asks “why?” the parent feels the obligation of the question, and feels the need to provide an answer, just as the child feels the power that lies in the asking. The questioning does not end. The pressure of circumstance gets to be too much. “Because I said so! Just get in the car now!”

When we see this happening, we are watching the dynamic of internalization, though not the first internalizations  –  these ones now are somewhat down the track, but vivid for us, and a little comical, like a cartoon. The child has found a way to get the parent to jump to their tunes – adults can be controlled by asking them questions. Questions are not quite commands, but from the child’s position, they are good enough. This linguistic discovery provides a little shift in authority. Adults seem to be under an obligation to the questioner.

The dynamic, too, displays how intellectual dependency grows. The parents feel obliged to answer. They are trying to give answers because they want the child to be receptive to reasons, and not just commands. But in giving answers as they do, they are also reinforcing the idea that reasons and explanations come from adults and other higher authorities. It isn’t as if the questions are turned back on the child – “so what do you think? How would you go about working out an answer to that?”

The game is a game of intellectual dependency, which persists into the very structure of schooling, and right into university. Panic ensues when the lecturer does not give answers, but only provokes and challenges. Why isn’t he giving us the answers? How are we ever going to do the assignment? How will we do the exam? If he doesn’t give answers, how are we supposed to know what he wants? Giving “them” what “they” want is, after all, the real point of the assignment, the exam.

In the normal course of events, the process that began by behaviour being shaped up, by ideas and concepts being instilled, is only weakly transcended or surpassed by a process that creates ownership and responsibility. Typically, this is all largely left, rather vaguely and hopefully, to “growing up”, but there is a good deal about the process of growing up that works against acquiring ownership, and not a good deal that is in place to ensure that it does. Just being told to think for yourself or take responsibility, doesn’t really cut it, and believing that your mind is your own is not at all the same as having one that is.

If the child does, in their private moments, turn questions inward, and ask them of themselves, they find a ready-made wall that is building there too – an intellectual super-ego of the intellect. “Why are you always asking questions? Nobody likes someone who is always asking questions! It is so annoying! Your questions are pointless! There are no answers for questions like that – that is just the way things are. If anyone knew the answer to that they would have told you. It is impractical. You are thinking too much. Your question is idle. Stop all that questioning, and just do it! Who do you think you are, questioning that anyway! A frown may be enough.

We learn all the ways of evasion too. We internalize being fobbed off so that we learn to fob ourselves off. And if these voices are quiet, the question just falls against a big grey wall, which gives no answers. We don’t know what to do with it. So instead the young adopt the minds of others, and this continuing adoption persists into adulthood. Their minds are not their own.

The educational point of view advanced repeatedly throughout this book has involved emphasizing, again and again, the vital task of challenging what is received, challenging the instructions, the initiation, the intellectual authority. This challenge isn’t the challenge of going on strike, or ignoring instructions or fomenting rebellion.

The challenge isn’t challenge for its own sake, but the challenge of alternative points of view and of assumptions. The challenge of counter-arguments and examples of contrary experience, the challenge of ensuring linguistic clarity. The challenge must be undertaken in the right way, and in the right context, or people will, quite reasonably, retreat back under their rock. Not much is accomplished if we trigger “flight or flight”, and many patent solutions to challenge simply reinforce dependency.

Often it is vital that we still just follow the established rules and do so decisively, despite doubts that we may entertain – that we do listen attentively to those upon whom we are dependent, that we do get into the car right now. Failure to do so can too easily disrupt the patterns of life for those to whom we owe respect, or it can turn a potentially unsafe situation into disaster.

But this doesn’t mean that we can’t open such dilemmas up for discussion and talk through those rules and instructions at another time and place where it can be made appropriate. Nor does it mean that such discussions finish the matter, once and for all. Doing so properly is the difference between blind acceptance and the simple incorporation of the judgments of others on the one hand, and potential ownership of those judgments in our own right, or building something better for ourselves on the other. To facilitate this, we must discuss discussion.

But this, too, depends upon certain capacities already being in place before any real challenge is developmentally possible, and many routines and habits of behaviour – including obedience – have to be quite firmly established before it is safe to challenge them at all. It needs to be possible, for instance, for the need to obey to be thoroughly accepted when obedience is required, and this kept quite separate from the alternative contexts in which it can be questioned. That is why the process of the ECOI, set apart as it is and with its very large freedom to explore, must be an end in view as early as possible.

Discussing the matter, though, requires skills like listening, taking your turn, and addressing the reason by accepting it or questioning it, or countering it. The disposition to reasoning must come to involve respecting reasons in themselves, and not just as moves in a game you wilfully want to win. Yet again, however, the beginnings of these practices lie in mimicking them, not in arriving at them by reasoning.

But all of this still means that the approach to education that I am offering here is just as fundamentally built upon the irrationality of the developmental loop as any other approach to bringing people up. And since being brought through this involves a mess of contrary conditions, such as the early incapacities of choice that force adults to make choices for the young, or the necessity of having young children follow consistent rules whether they agree to them or not, the whole process can collapse under the weight of a flurry of excuses. For these reasons it would be wise to take further steps into educational justification, going somewhat deeper into the dilemmas of education than educational thought usually tends to go.

The problem of justification

The problem is our justification. How to justify making decisions for them before they can make them for themselves; decisions about how they will later think, how they will be equipped to think, and in some crucial ways what they will tend to believe and be disposed to do. How do we do this without just falling back upon convenient rationalizations that merely simplify the problem from our point of view?

Some of this difficulty can be reduced by ensuring their fullest possible participation in the decision-making about their lives and minds as early as possible. We will still want to delay them in making life-shaping commitments when they are too immature, and quite rightly, but their ability to make such decisions well when the time comes will be dependent upon their experience and insight into their own decision-making so far. There needs to have been a robust process of their participation throughout as much of their early development as possible if they are to do well with these larger decisions.

In order to do this it is not enough, though, to simply enroll them in the decision-making as early as possible. This isn’t just consultation. It isn’t just about representation. There must also be a serious, effective  and on-going practice of learning to deliberate about the issues in skilled ways from as early as possible. We drag our heels badly on both of these aspects of self-determination, and a good deal would be resolved – and would be far more respectful both of them for themselves and of us for them – if we addressed these things with seriousness from a very early age.

But this would still leave us to be making decisions for them; totally to begin with, and still in many respects for the duration of their dependency.

They can’t make many crucial decisions for themselves, and we must make them on their behalf. But how do we do that – “on their behalf”? How do we get away from deciding as we would want, or think that we would have wanted, given all of our own personal peculiarities of history, of temperament, of the commitments we have made and the reasons we have made them, and even of our own physical nature – the realization of our own genetic uniqueness?

How do we get around giving them the present that we would like to have received ourselves? We need our experience to equip us to make these decisions for them, yet our experience is distorted by all these things that are peculiar to us. We need the guidance of some principle that disqualifies, as far as practicable, these clear distortions and yet leave us with powerful ways of deciding.

We can’t sensibly ask the child until long after their own environmental circumstances have already done a lot of decisive work. We need to ask them well before birth – perhaps at the time of conception. But we can’t. What we need, then, is to model such decision-making. We need a virtual decision.

Those familiar with the work of John Rawls on the idea of justice will also be familiar with his imaginary device called “The Original Position”, through which he created a decision-procedure. A task is set for a hypothetical person to decide – in his case it is to establish the principles by which certain goods should be distributed in the society in which they will find themselves once the decision has been made – and to which the society will conform.

Knowledge that needs to be available to the decision-maker is also specified. This includes such things as the nature of the goods to be distributed. The individual, in making the choice, is to secure a list of these goods for themselves in the best way possible to develop a good life for themselves – and without regard for any other people.

Crucial to this process are “veils of ignorance”. These are specifications of things that are not to be known when the decision is made, such as where, in the resulting society they will find themselves to be when the veils are drawn aside, and all personal characteristics, such as age, gender, tastes and abilities become revealed. They do know the rules of reasoning out a good life – “rational life-planning” – and they know that they will want one.

This imaginary device forces respect for all positions and all people, because the individual decision-maker knows that when the veils are withdrawn they could turn out to be anybody, in any position. The structure forces the decision-maker to respect every person and situation, while the requirement that they secure their own good in the best way forces proper self-respect.

I will run through a similar decision-procedure here, tailored in a way that I hope more vividly represents the issues of the developmental loop, while suggesting a way of at least partially transcending it – of creating a situation of “virtual choice” that can be used in educational decision-making. By bringing this hypothetical choice up for critical reconsideration periodically throughout development, we may not be able to eliminate the problem of the loop altogether in educational judgment, but we can at least undermine its more pernicious effects.

To do this we must imagine a decision-point for each individual that is prior to the development of their reason. Prior to, and avoiding, the novel bent that will be given to that reason by virtue of the uniqueness of their circumstances of gestation, birth and early development. Indeed, it needs to be prior to the development of any specific interests, wants or dispositions at all, to the extent that these are always to some extent learning-dependent and culturally conditioned.

We also want that point to be prior to the possibility of any interests that might otherwise emerge because of features of their physical development – such as their biological sex, any features that may determine their longevity, characteristics of height or build, skin colour or native talents – anything that might, in any given society or culture, be built upon or evaluated in any way.

The purpose of specifying such a decision-point is to choose criteria by which a person could, hypothetically, choose the society into which they would want to be born. It is often said, as if it might matter, that one cannot choose one’s parents. Well, here we are considering it – what if we could?

But if we were to do so, we would want to eliminate, for instance, our pre-existing ties of affection, as well as any specific emotional baggage that might have resulted from our relationships with our actual parents, for that would bias those of us who are contemplating this problem to over-represent our own, somewhat peculiar experiences. The more that we know of the ways in which other people around the world have experienced their parents, the more we can cancel out the peculiarities which are our own. The thing we should seek is to avoid choosing our parents specifically, but rather to choose the criteria by which they should be selected; the requirements that parents should satisfy.

But here we are also going far beyond the choice of parents. We are choosing all those features of society and culture that have the potential to have an impact upon human learning. Again, we do not want to be influenced by our actual existing wants, or self-perceptions, because we are not going to know how far they have been conditioned by our own cultural situation.

Rather we should seek criteria which would pick out the characteristics of the society that would control and shape these and any other things that might be learned in the light of principles of harm and benefit that rise above the peculiarities of our own histories, even if we reach these principles as a result of considering many, many experiences across as wide a range as possible of classes and situations and discriminations and distributions.

It is important, too, that this ignorance of any specific features of ourselves extends to us not knowing where in the social system we will end up. We need to set up rules to protect our self-respect wherever and however we turn out to be born.  We want criteria that give the best possibilities of good living, but that do not pre-empt or foreclose features of our specific selves that might result from what we may learn under the criteria. By not knowing where in the society we will be born, our decision-procedure serves to protect everyone who is born into it. When we, as real people, contemplate the decision-procedure, we have to realize that we could end up in anyone’s shoes.

We must, then, eliminate as assumptions or considerations of our decision-making, anything that should be ruled by the decision we are trying to make. Hence, anything that can be learned only as a result  of particular formations of culture and society that could influence the choice of a conception of good living, and the realization of that conception, is to be eliminated from the decision-making process about what sort of society or culture we should choose or create.

At the same time, we need to know the sorts of things that need to be considered in such a decision. One important rule concerning this knowledge will be, for instance, that no life-stage is to be preferred. Setting requirements that would make parenting obsessive would be bad for development, yes, but it would also be bad for the parents. We are developing criteria to rule the society into which the child will be born, but these criteria must protect their value across the entire life-span, a life-span within which one might, among many other things, want to be a parent. And in which one is likely to grow old.

We therefore need to know how reasoning about life works, when it works well. We need to know how reasoning well about how to live is socially dependent, and the social conditions that favour it. We need to know the sorts of issues that can arise over living a life in the best way, and understand the range of courses that a human life can take.

We need to have a grasp of the limits and possibilities of managing these things. We need to know the potential significance, within societies and cultures, of all those features that we are prohibiting ourselves from knowing as the particulars about ourselves – biological sex, physical endowments and so on. We need to understand the diversity of ways in which these things might be judged.

We also need to understand how societies work, how histories proceed, the invention of social arrangements, and the interactions with technology. We need to understand the roles of ideas and ideologies, and how various forces alter them. We need to understand the limits and possibilities of communication among people. We need to understand wealth and power. And no doubt much more. We need to understand education.

At this hypothetical level there are no limits of practicality on this knowledge. What we put in, as knowledge, is whatever is true about these things, because to the extent that there is error, or limitation, this would introduce errors into the conclusion we draw. The question – how could a human being know all that stuff – is therefore irrelevant.

Indeed, the apparent open-endedness here is what we should expect of a process of justification that can grow and change with our experience. Educational decision-making can return to it again and again to refine their understanding and ours,  as we and other learners learn and experience more. The adequacy of the actual understanding we put into it at any one time or stage will be reflected in the adequacy of what we get out of it.

But here, as we are introducing the basics of the educational point-of-view, we aren’t actually going to try to list “all true things of these kinds”. It is enough to specify the position, and consider what such a deliberation would yield if the specification could be met, even hypothetically. It is enough to do this, because the outcome is, I think, pretty obvious.

We can get to the outcome of this decision-procedure just by setting out the specifications and rules, and considering the decision-task – working out its “logic”. Rawls, however, pulled his decision-procedure together with his metaphor of the “Original Position”, and there is a particular wisdom and practical benefit from working the decision-procedure as an exercise of the imagination in ways such as his.

It is useful, for instance if we imagine these educational criteria as being arrived at by a hypothetical individual, prior to their own biological conception and then deployed to create the world into which they are conceived. This is useful simply because education must, in the end, come down to individuals, to their personal motivation, and particularly to their personal duty of self-respect. When we do this well, we will represent, in the hypothetical individual, all the actual individuals that would be born under the decision, since the hypothetical individual, not knowing how or where they will be born, needs to represent them all in their decision-making.

A second benefit is that a hypothetical story pulls the requirements together in an imaginative way which helps us to suspend irrelevant real-world obstacles.  It displays the requirements in a visual structure readily accessible from all sorts of directions. The decision-procedure is not just the elements. It is a process that must be undertaken, and a hypothetical story moves us through the elements with their appropriate restraints.

There is, finally, another reason for creating this sort of myth, or thought experiment, and that is to make the principles vivid.  It is important to bring the decision-procedure to life, animating it with story in this way, because of the place that it needs to adopt in our lives. It must not remain a matter of abstraction. We need to get the feel of it.

This is because I am reasonably confident that very few people will pick up this book who do not already believe that the learner should come first in education, or who doubt the importance of the primacy of their intrinsic worth as human beings. The basic idea isn’t at all novel.

But in our practice we let this value, this priority which we profess to hold, be eaten away everywhere, usually by considerations that we consider to be “practical”, or by allowing ourselves to become complicit in forces that we see to be inevitable. These “practicalities” and “inevitabilities” allow other parties, other interests, other people with other agendas to get their piece of the learner, extracting some use out of the learner at the expense of the respect that is their due.

One of the reasons that we may do this is because, although we hold firmly to the idea that the learner should come first, that idea and its implications are not vivid enough for us when the competing interests present themselves in their concrete and practical terms, and insist upon themselves instead. Respect for the learner, and the intrinsic worth of a human being – these are just abstractions when apparently concrete and practical reality demands to insert itself.

In order for the abstract value of human life to be defended, it must be quickened in our imagination, brought to life and enlivened as it might be at the scene of a motor accident or a house fire, and not as it is in the often barely visible and even invisible learning of everyday experience that we take so much for granted.

If we are able to bring these ideas to life we will be able to create a vivid, if imaginative tool that can be called up within real educational processes, and referred to throughout the course of practical  educational development. We will, in fact, be able to create a kind of virtual contract, that can be confirmed or challenged, and renegotiated in various ways by educators and by learners throughout the conduct of their activities.

This conjuring into the imagination should not be too difficult or necessarily contentious. Plato pioneered the method over two thousand years ago, when he created such things as the myth of the metals and the myth of the cave, and the myth of Er in his book, The Republic. Anyone who can grasp the Republic at all will be familiar with the myth of the cave, and through it will have to acknowledge both the power and the pedigree of this technique.

The myth of Er is not so widely mentioned, and yet it is at least arguable that it has more to do with the purpose of the Republic than does the cave. It is, after all, the note on which he ended it. Where the myth of the metals has to do with pseudo empirical psychology – a bit like our modern myth of IQ or our myth of the meritocracy – and where the myth of the cave has to do with knowledge and opinion, the myth of Er has to do with justice, education and good living; the final insight into the issues with which the Republic began. And it almost tells our story.

A standpoint for justification

Er was a warrior who fell in battle – well, he had a near-death experience. Between the point at which he was struck down, and the point at which he sat bolt upright when they were about to set the funeral pyre alight, he travelled, as souls do, to a place between this world and the doorways both to the underworld and to heaven, a place through which souls passed on their journey back and forth after their death in this world, or when they come back to be reborn into a new life. It was at this special place that each returning soul made a choice that would largely determine the life into which it would be incarnated.

Because he had this brief experience but did not go on, returning instead to his own life, Er did not get to participate in the activities that go on there; he just got to observe.  And this is how it came about that he was able to give us an insight into our existence between lives, and how we come to be living the one that we do.

Travelling with the other souls, he came to a place where they could see a great column of light stretching throughout all heaven and earth, the spindle of necessity, the very spindle of the universe, a wondrous sight into the mechanics of it all. There they were told that they would each pick up lots that would determine when they could take their turn at choosing a particular life from the patterns of life that were laid out on the ground in front of them – an abundance of options, far more than the number of souls in the group. When they chose a life, they were bound to it by necessity, and were warned to take care in their choice.

Er was amazed to see how little notice the souls seemed able to take of this advice. The first “immediately chose the greatest tyranny, and, due to folly and gluttony, chose without having considered everything adequately”.

“He said that this was surely worth seeing: how each of the several souls chose a life. For it was pitiable, laughable, and wonderful to see. For the most part the choice was made according to the habituation of their former life.”(p302)

But of course – if I may comment – since this is exactly how most people choose their future lives within their present lives, it should hardly be surprising that this is how they make their choice between their lives.

He saw Orpheus choosing the life of a swan because of his hatred of womankind; not even wanting to be born of a woman. He saw Ajax choose the life of a lion because of his hurt at not receiving the honours he felt he deserved on the plains of Troy. He saw Atalanta who could not get past the honours of an athletic man, and so chose to have them.

The last to choose was Odysseus’s soul – Odysseus of the nimble wits – and he had taken the time to think; to get over the love of honour so typical of warriors, and to ponder the significance of his many experiences.

“. . . it went around for a long time looking for the life of a private man who minds his own business; and with effort it found one lying somewhere, neglected by the others. It said when it saw this life that it would have done the same even if it had drawn the first lot, and was delighted to choose it.” (p303)

After they had made their choices, the souls travelled on until they made camp for the evening, and there they drank from the river of Carelessness. All were required to do this, and when they did so they forgot what had transpired, and forgot their pasts. The less prudent, though, drank more than they should. All fell asleep, and at midnight there was thunder, and the earth shook, and they were all carried away, each in their own direction to their new lives, like shooting stars.

And so Er suddenly sat bolt upright, called urgently for Pyrotecnicles to put out his match, and asked for a drink. “Gather round, friends” he said. “Boy, have I got a story to tell you!”

“Now here, my dear Glaucon, is the whole risk for a human being, as it seems. And on this account each of us must, to the neglect of other studies, above all see to it that he is a seeker and a student of that study by which he might be able to learn and find out who will give him the capacity and the knowledge to distinguish the good and the bad life, and so everywhere and always to choose the better from among those that are possible.” (Bloom, p301)

Plato didn’t mention that Er had noticed a little annex beyond the area where the lots were drawn and the patterns of lives were lying about. In it was a little soul who seems strangely familiar, sitting back watching a video display. This particular soul, unlike the others, had been around a few times, and that familiarity about it – it wasn’t so much an aroma, because souls don’t carry smells with them when they leave their bodies – so it must be something more like an aura; a hint of primal ooze.

This soul was now a bit jaded by the shards of pottery with the numbers scratched on them and the patterns of lives on the floor, and was even somewhat past the usual video games. Instead of picking up a life, it was allowed to choose the society it would find itself in when it was reborn. It could establish basic criteria that such a society would have to fit. It even had a virtual form to fill in.

Like Bill Murray’s character in “Groundhog Day”, it had grown beyond the basics. It had got Plato’s point long since; that its real job now was to mind its own business – that this real business was to learn how to live a good and fulfilling life, and that the possibility of doing so depended on the nature of the society into which it was born.

The annex was thus a kind of graduate school for souls; a school for those who had come to realize that just picking up a pattern of life from the floor concealed the real issues that lay behind these patterns working out in much the way that they do, namely that their possibilities are conditioned by the histories and organization of their respective societies.

Indeed, it seems pretty likely that Plato’s own soul had passed through the annex at some stage, even if his amnesia led him to miss this part of Er’s story. It is highly unlikely that he picked up his own life from the floor. The hint is in the nature of the Republic itself, because Plato sets up the whole book by arguing that you cannot understand justice in the individual without understanding justice in the society, and he devotes most of the book simply to this.

But when he speaks of justice, he is speaking of living the best life, and that becomes clear in the Myth of Er, the myth with which the book ends, as we have already seen. It is a matter of doing yourself justice – being “friends to ourselves”. He already knew that by picking up the life of a man who minded his own business Odysseus had only solved half of the problem. Such a man, or woman, also needs to find a society that favours such a life. Perhaps Plato’s soul hadn’t chosen Plato at all. Perhaps he’d chosen Athens.

The little soul was, therefore, duly ignorant of all of the things that we have said it should be. There was a dispenser with water at the door, and each soul was obliged to drink a measured amount before it went in. Drinking the water erased all kinds of memories of the past, but it didn’t obliterate its mind. Once you were in the annex it was virtually impossible to call up knowledge of your personal history; the history that other souls retained when they picked up their new lives from the floor, and that so influenced their judgment. The water in this dispenser came from a lesser known spring. It actually sharpened the sense of human diversity and cultural influence.

Here, in the annex, all knowledge of personal history should be irrelevant to deciding upon the society in any case. This is important, because you may not be the same sex, or height or have the same interests or wants or potential talents that you had last time – or any other time. These things weren’t for you to decide now. You have to trust that whatever these are, they will all turn out fine if you do a good enough job of deciding the conditions of society.

So souls in the annex generally experienced just a fairly conventional sort of amnesia. Partly because of all that ooze, however, and in line with Plato’s suggestions, and as a result of the wisdom it had accumulated from all of its previous lives regardless of its inability to recall the details, the little soul knew all of the things that would really matter about minding its own business. It was only when it quenched its thirst at the departure camp that a more comprehensive reset would take place.

You got this option when you had been around a few times, having exhausted what there was to learn from picking up lots and patterns of lives from the floor outside. This annex was there partly to provide a bit of novelty and challenge for more advanced souls –  for those who had been there, done that, and eventually sort of got the point. With this more advanced option, you get to set the rules by which the society will be selected, but it reintroduces a new element of surprise and the novelty of discovering the exact genetic detail you will turn out to have, and what will emerge as your new “context of origin”, once you are conceived. You had to be prepared to accept what you would get and “let go of everything else”.

In this annex, the little soul was laid back with its feet up, watching slide shows, holograms and virtual reality mock-ups and simulations of all sorts of possible societies, and listening to the audio tracks. It was recognized that, by now, a soul was apt to give the matter considerable thought, rather than rush around grabbing impulsively at recipes and patterns of life, and it would even be a step or two beyond Odysseus in wanting to take its time . . . though time, as it were, stood still. Occasionally it would pull up more details.

It is too early to give you any truly definitive results of all this as yet. The sample is still too small, though it is growing. We don’t have enough so far to run the stats properly. But I think we can begin to say with some confidence, after performing a few tests, that those souls who have gone past the lots thing and the designs on the floor stuff, and have used the annex a few times, are tending to show a convergence in the criteria that they come up with – the criteria for choosing the kind of society that will give them the best chance of working out their lives in the best way – of securing their own self-respect regardless of the circumstances of their birth . . .

© R. Graham Oliver, 2018