These are notes on and conclusions from a discussion between a few parents and German school Pudong, represented by Mr. Heineken, head of primary school, Ms. Mezger, and head of kindergarten, Ms. Luckhardt. The objective of the meeting, which took place on March 27, 2017, was to find a solution for children of bi- or multilingual families, who want their children to learn both German and Chinese on a native speaker level in both spoken and written word. The German school (DS) does currently not offer such a curriculum.
 
Main Takeaways:

1. It is an extremely complex undertaking to set up a truly bilingual curriculum, i.e. one which teaches children to use two or more languages on a native speaker level and teaches literacy, because of:
   1. Didactics & brain development: Primary year students are not supposed to mix two written languages before the first written language is firm, i.e. before age 8-10.
   2. School resources: a truly bi- or multilingual curriculum can only be provided if teachers in all subjects are available in both languages, with increased costs as a consequence.
   3. Compulsory national curricula: DS has a clear educational objective – the preparation of its students for the German high school diploma. DS must therefore strictly follow from grade 5 onwards the German curriculum, in order to grant German high school graduation certificates, which enable students to attend German tertiary education. Therefore, DS can not change the compulsory curriculum in primary years (21 of 31 total weekly hours) and almost no subjects in secondary years. Similar restrictions are evident in the Chinese national curriculum.
   4. Psychological & emotional & social development: it is not possible to integrate a third language (in most families’ case English) into a bi-lingual native speaker curriculum, because of time limitations. The German standard primary curriculum contains 24 weekly hours of instruction, while the DS curriculum contains already 31 hours. A focus on Chinese would require to either cut the English instruction or increase the total hours of instruction to 40 hours plus (which is anyway the reality in many families). DS would turn into a traditional Chinese school with way too many hours instruction, but too few hours of equally or more important play.
2. DS currently provides to students in grade 2-4 weekly 3 hours of Chinese instruction, 3 hours of self-learning and 4 hours of English instruction. Mr. Heineken told us, that it would be easily possible to ramp up Chinese instruction to 10 hours weekly, if self-learning and English are eliminated. Chinese is thought in 4 proficiencies: beginners, advanced beginners, advanced learners, native speakers. What has to be understood though is that the native speaker level is by far not a genuine native speaker level, not even close to that. We have come to realize that even YCIS which claims to be bilingual and which enjoys amongst international schools an excellent reputation, can not provide genuine native speaker Chinese language instruction, despite best efforts. The problem after all is reading and writing literacy and the vocabulary volume, which lags a year behind children who attend schools which teach the standard national curriculum. Now, there is of course much room to discuss whether the speed of language instruction in China and the speed of information ingestion in general does make sense, but I compare here only learning progress in regard to Chinese language proficiency.
   
3. DS is interested to provide a primary curriculum which uses all complimentary teaching hours (10 of 31) for Chinese instruction, starting with school year 2017/18 and considers to design a bi-lingual German-Chinese curriculum with Chinese as second language and compulsory high school graduation subject (following a model which is already in use in some Hamburg schools) after its move to the new school grounds in Yangpu district, where a cooperation with a local school is planned to resolve pending HR issues.
   
4. Many families leave Shanghai when their children are about to enter primary education. The main driving force behind such decisions are financial considerations. A move back to any European country does usually resolve the huge burden of having to pay exorbitant tuition for international schools in Shanghai. It does though not resolve the desire to provide a bi- or multilingual literacy curriculum to one’s child, in particular if Chinese and German (or English) are the two focus languages. It is therefore possible to identify and prioritize the decision criteria for both leaving China and choosing amongst available curricula in Shanghai. The following consideration apply most likely to all families with children in the kindergarten or primary years’ age bracket; priorities most be understood though on individual basis.
   1. Language competencies: do I want my child to acquire Chinese native speaker literacy?
   2. Cultural context: do I want to socialize my child German, Anglo-Saxon or Chinese? Remember that psychological identification to a group plays an increasing role from age 8 onwards.
   3. Financial requirements: are our funds sufficient to pay for international schooling or other means of instruction next to the national curriculum?
   4. Logistic convenience: how long do I want my child to spend every day on the road to get to school and from school back home?
   5. Education objective: do I attach more importance to inter- and intrapersonal skills or to the instruction of rational-intellectual learning contents like science, literacy, etc.?
   6. Graduation objective: do I want e.g. a German high school diploma, because I want my children to attend a German university? Do I actually know if my child wants to attend university at all? Will there be tertiary educational institutions in 20 years from now?

 
Conclusions:

1. parents who indeed want to have a truly bi-lingual curriculum for their child have currently only one school choice in Shanghai, which is the experimental curriculum taught at Y. K. Pao Chinese International School (YKP). YKP is approved by the Chinese educational authorities as a Chinese school and uses Chinese standard instruction material, but in addition to this implements English on native speaker level. The complexity of designing such a curriculum is evident by looking closer at the amount of resources involved and the unique language instruction program. YKP shifts from initially 80% Chinese language instruction in all subjects to 60% plus English language instruction at the time of high school graduation, reflecting the distinctive learning psychology of both languages.
2. Since YKP can hardly be called an easy accessible school, which remains an elite playground for about 400 students, only second in reputation to Song Qing Ling School’s international division, families who still see an intrinsic value in bi- or multilingual instruction are forced to either compromise with less or look for solution beyond school curricula.
3. Languages are taught on native speaker level in a multi-dimensional environment which nurtures and challenges the learner in a complex variety of situations. Schools with their limited means of interaction in class rooms, on school grounds and occasional field trips are actually not suitable to provide such a multi-dimensional learning environment.
4. Chinese language instruction differs form English instruction widely on terms of neurological conditions. We use the right hemisphere to remember Chinese (graphical), but the left to remember Indo-Germanic languages. The instruction of thousands of graphic elements takes much longer than the instruction of 24+ letters. It is therefore well known that learning Chinese takes much longer than learning e.g. English, and the necessary deep learning is the main reason for the otherwise inexplicable cohesion of the Sinitic civilization, which extends over roughly 3000 dialects which are as distinct from each other as European languages. It could be claimed that Chinese, in particular written Chinese, is not a mother tongue, but a “family” tongue. No other language that I know of requires grand-parents and other relatives to spend so much time to teach their descendants radicals, characters and proverbs, explaining also why mastering Chinese when learned as an adult is extremely difficult.
5. Families who want their child to attain Chinese native speaker literacy are advised to chose local Chinese schools during the primary years and supplement required additional subjects through home schooling networks. Such a solution greatly reduces costs, most likely eliminates long hours on school buses and most importantly helps the child to genuinely socialize with Chinese children. In most other countries this is exactly what third culture child parents would want: socialize with and learn from the local culture.
6. Secondary education is then again a completely different subject; not only because the Chinese curriculum contains 5 years primary, 4 years lower secondary and 3 years higher secondary instruction. But considering the enormous life long benefits our children will harness from spending full 5 years in Chinese primary education, i.e. being able to read and write Chinese on native speaker level, we are also willing to loose a year or two because our children will probably have to repeat classes if they switch to an Anglo-Saxon or continental European curriculum. I am personally more concerned about their play time.
7. Ms. Mezger’s well meant remark that the preparation and implementation of a new curriculum takes time; that a hurriedly planned curriculum might cause our children to suffer form the consequences of being educational guinea pigs, needs to be relativized. Sticking with current curricula and waiting for e.g. the rigid German national education committee to implement changes must be considered an equal experiment. In times of fundamental changes everything is an experiment, but staying with what we knew might cause more harm than reading the signs of the time. Ken Robinson, probably the world’s foremost educator recently said that there is a climate crisis, a crisis of natural resources, but there is also a human resources crisis, a crisis in education. I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you're talking about. It isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people. And I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need -- and the word's been used many times in the past few days -- is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.
8. DS left a big question mark for me in regard to financial requirements. An annual tuition of CNY 140 plus additional expenses for school bus, canteen, etc. summing up to roughly CNY 160k seem to be at the lower end of international schools in Shanghai, but considering that 20% of DS’ expenses are covered by German tax money, one wonders why the school can’t be run more cost efficient. DS in Kuala Lumpur costs all in all EUR 9k per child p.a. and we feel that if paid out of your own pocket there is a pain threshold at EUR 10k p.a. – education should be affordable, even if facilities and teachers are excellent; otherwise the education sector slides into the same swamp of greed and disenfranchisement as Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
   I remember an interview we had with a DS kindergarten teacher for Spatzennest back in 2011. She told us that she gets CNY 31k net salary per month, CNY 11k housing allowance p.m., international health insurance and two return trip plane tickets to Germany. I am pretty sure that salaries won’t have stagnated at 2011 values and one easily recognizes that (non-profit) budgeting is a question of your expenses.
   
   

 
Side Note 1 - Relevance of Play:
 
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the object it loves. [C. G. Jung]
 
It is generally acknowledged that play plays an extremely important role in the formation of a personality and in the development of lasting skills in a social and creative dimension. Play might actually be the single most important catalyzer of teaching our children what they really want to do in their lives. Play, so some say, can show you your vocation. Why is it then that we have a strong tendency to stuff ever more intellectual classroom instruction into our children’s life? What is it that we want for them? Happiness or utter misery?
 
Play here is not to be understood as wasting hour after hour in front of some computer game in splendid isolation, but even solitary computer games can have deep a deep impact on teaching children important lessons as long as they are genuinely interested. 
I acknowledge that in particular in regard to the importance of play two cultural truths seem to collide. Here a European progressive father who wants the child unearth its talents and gifts, there a Chinese conservative tiger mother who wants the child to master the richness of an entire civilization embedded in its sophisticated written language.  In such a situation of crosscultural truths, the only thing that we can do, is to respect both and listen always to the needs of the child concerned. They are, without doubt, exposed to a both demanding, but highly enriching environment.
 
Die meisten Menschen legen ihr Kindheit ab wie einen Hut. Sie vergessen sie wie eine Telefonnummer, die nicht mehr gilt. Früher waren sie Kinder, dann wurden sie erwachsen, aber was sind sie nun? Nur wer erwachsen wird und ein Kind bleibt, ist ein Mensch.
[Erich Kästner]
 
Resources to learn more about play:

• http://www.npr.org/programs/ted-radio-hour/390249044
• http://www.npr.org/2015/03/27/395039920/how-can-playing-a-game-make-you-more-empathetic
• http://www.npr.org/2015/03/27/395062175/who-s-that-guy-riding-the-subway-in-his-underwear
• http://www.npr.org/2015/03/27/395065944/how-does-play-shape-our-development
• https://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_behncke_evolution_s_gift_of_play_from_bonobo_apes_to_humans
• http://www.npr.org/2015/03/27/394918832/how-can-video-games-improve-our-real-lives
• http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hunter_on_the_world_peace_game
• http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action
• http://www.darkmatteressay.org/education.html

 
Side Note 2 – The Human Brain and Language Learning[1]

The Critical Period Hypothesis (CPH) states that the first few years of life constitute the time during which language develops readily and after which (sometime between age 5 and puberty) language acquisition is much more difficult and ultimately less successful.[5] Early language exposure also affects the ability to learn a second language later in life: profoundly deaf individuals with early language exposure achieve comparable levels of proficiency in a second language to hearing individuals with early language exposure. In contrast, deaf individuals without early language exposure perform far worse.[8]

The theory[11] has often been extended to a critical period for Second Language Acquisition (SLA), which has influenced researchers in the field on both sides of the spectrum, supportive and unsupportive of CPH, to explore.[12] However, the nature of this phenomenon has been one of the most fiercely debated issues in psycholinguistics and cognitive science in general for decades.
Certainly, older learners of a second language rarely achieve the native-like fluency that younger learners display, despite often progressing faster than children in the initial stages. The critical period hypothesis holds that first language acquisition must occur before cerebral lateralization completes, at about the age of puberty. One prediction of this hypothesis is that second language acquisition is relatively fast, successful, and qualitatively similar to first language only if it occurs before the age of puberty.[13] To grasp a better understanding of SLA, it is essential to consider linguistic, cognitive, and social factors rather than age alone, as they are all essential to the learner's language acquisition.[12]

Resources to learn more about language learning:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area
• Steven Pinker: The Language Instinct

[1] This is a summary from wikipedia’s entries on Language acquisition and Critical period

Roald Dahl, the great 20th century children’s book author, whom we know in particular through Tim Burton’s movies such as The Big Friendly Giant or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, said this: I think probably kindness is my number one attribute in a human being. I’ll put it before any of the things like courage or bravery or generosity or anything else. If you are kind, that’s it. Water is like kindness. Smooth and forgiving it takes the way of least conflict, that is resistance. Yet, both water and kindness are increasingly scarce resources on this planet. The United Nations celebrate every year on March 22 the World Water Day to remind mankind of the single most precious and increasingly scarce physical resource on Earth. As the human population increases roughly a billion per decade, the availability of clean water decreases correspondingly. The UN predicts that by 2025 roughly 1.8 billion people live under conditions of absolute water scarcity; I predict many more under kindness scarcity, if we do not transform ourselves.
 
Sanitary appliances manufacturer Roca, headquartered in Spain and active in 135 countries, sponsors the WE ARE WATER foundation, which promotes a new water culture that allows the sustainable management of water resources around the world and guarantees the universal human right to access water and sanitation needed for a dignified and healthy life. It’s campaign #NoWalkingForWater encourages us to draw upon man’s single most important spiritual resource, kindness, to provide those in need, man’s single most important physical resource, i.e. water. I couldn’t think of a more purposeful undertaking, but on a fair note, I have to remind, that many others have had this idea before Roca, like e.g. Dane Charlie Uldahl Christensen, who is on his 672th day of a pilgrimage to raise money and awareness for water.

In support of the 2017 UN World Water Day, Green Initiatives, a NPO which promotes sustainable models of growth and consumption, organized at the Shanghai Roca Gallery, an event under the title Why Wastwater? and invited two speakers to talk on the subject from a Chinese perspective. Green Initiatives founder, architect and super-friendly Nitin Dani, opened the event by providing basic numbers on water consumption and availability. The number which should stick in everybody’s mind is 0.0007%. Think of James Bond and you will never forget. Only 0.0007% of our planets water resources are accessible to man.
 
Why is that? Water covers 71% of the Earth's surface, but the oceans contain 96.5% of the Earth's water, which is not potable. The Antarctic ice sheet, which contains 61% of all fresh water on Earth, is visible on the bottom of below Earth’s view from Apollo 17. It is, like the ice caps of Greenland or the glaciers of Iceland not accessible to human use. Condensed atmospheric water can be seen as clouds, contributing to the Earth's albedo, makes up for another 3% of potable water, leaving mankind with a comparable small volume of 0.0007% of freshwater only, which can be found in rivers, lakes, swamps and soil.

One could now with some cynicism argue that more fresh water is set to be available in the years to come with glaciers and ice caps melting due to global warming. The 2016 UN sponsored documentary Before the Flood or Werner Herzog’s 2007 documentary Encounters at the End of the World explain where mankind in its entirety will end up if we, the members of affluent Western and Eastern societies, continue on the track of mindless consumption and waste production.
 
One could also point at the increased use of desalination technology to solve the problem of freshwater scarcity. According to the International Desalination Association, in June 2015, 18,426 desalination plants operated worldwide, producing 86.8 million cubic meters per day, providing water for 300 million people.[5] This number increased from 78.4 million cubic meters in 2013,[4] a 10.71% increase in 2 years. The single largest desalination project is Ras Al-Khair in Saudi Arabia, which produced 1,025,000 cubic meters per day in 2014,[4] although this plant is expected to be surpassed by a plant in California.[6] Kuwait produces a higher proportion of its water than any other country, totaling 100% of its water use.[7]  The downside of desalinating sea water is that it is generally costlier and more energy intensive than the treatment of fresh water from rivers or groundwater, water recycling and water conservation. Just think that you have to build for each large desalination plant a small nuclear or a large photovoltaic power plant next door.

Hence, we don't need to worry. Technology will safe us. But who is us? Will technology only safe those who can afford it? Multinationals like Veolia or Suez, which dominate the water treatment industry globally, are no charities and sell their products for good money to the wealthy governments of affluent nations only. The dominance of Western enterprises in the water industry has prompted China in recent years to take its faith in its own hands and the central government promotes under the general domestic innovation policy | 自主创新 the acquisition and development of advanced water treatment technology.
 
Tongji University’s Prof. Li Fengting, Executive Deputy Dean at the UNEP Tongji Institute of Environment for Sustainable Development, was not available for his scheduled talk. One of his research assistants, Dr. Wu Yinan, presented instead how Shanghai upgrades its waste water treatment facilities and develops new waste water treatment technologies. He failed to provide basic numbers to understand the dimension of this challenge on a global, national and municipal level. But it worried me mostly that there was not a single reference to the reduction of water consumption. China is at a stage in its economical development, at which Western nations can’t expect the behavior of an economy which has already undergone 250 years of industrial revolution, but one would have wished that the UNEP Tongji Institute of Environment for Sustainable Development to present a bit more far sighted perspective on how things develop and what needs to be done apart from re-engineering water treatment technologies, which probably are already available abroad.
 
Shanghai is endowed with water in abundance and has hence grown into one of the largest agglomerations on this planet. Yet this abundance is threatened. All of Central and large parts of Western China drains its waste water into the Yangtze and Shanghai chokes as its dragon head on the accumulated toxins. The city’s wealth has been mocked in 2013, when more than 13000 dead pig floated in Huangpu, as paradise with pork broth freely available. Shanghai residents who have lived in other parts of the world notice that their fingernails grow faster, probably due to growth hormones in the tab water, which can’t be removed by filter or boiling. Same is true for antibiotics widely used in pig farming, which are scientifically associated with causing autism, a disease virally on the rise in China.  
 
Now, this sounds as if Shanghai is not a sound place to live, and yet I am day by day amazed how a city of such scale operates quite smoothly. It's a miracle that millions of people commute from A to B, have electricity and above all potable, albeit polluted, water. Have you ever stopped on the sidewalk when construction workers are busy down in one of those deep sewage pipes? The complexity of these sewage systems is mind staggering and I am in full awe that the city government is able to run this place. The question is then, what we can do, to make such already incredibly complex urban areas run smoother and more sustainable?
 
China currently treats only 10% of its waste water and discharges 90% untreated into its water bodies. This ratio is reversed in countries like Germany or Japan, but China is not alone with such infrastructure problems; environmental pollution is certainly a global issue which increases in correlation to population density. And since water bodies do not know national borders, we have to acknowledge that waste water production and freshwater provision are not domestic, but regional if not even challenges of global scale on which mankind has to collaborate in friendly partnership.
 
The excellent Western Wetland Museum in Hangzhou is a marvelous location to learn about the China Water Tower, the highlands of Tibet and Qinghai which are the main freshwater resources for Asia’s three mightiest rivers, the Yangtze, the Yellow River and the Mekong. A recent visit to the museum drew my attention yet again to China’s extraordinary responsibility of water management, not only in regard to its own population, but in regard to most of Asia’s population. Dr. Wu’s talk sadly showed that researchers at elite universities like Tongji do not look into how to manage water more sustainably or distribute it more fairly, but rather how to manage increased consumption and increased pollution with new technologies. The latter is an important measure without doubt, but it will not be the problem’s single solution. Although he promoted his institute’s work with the slogan green is gold, green is priority, not GDP, it seems that China is in a macroeconomic trap, from which researchers can’t escape: how is it possible to build a society, which until recently was predominantly agricultural and enjoyed a spree of three decades manufacturing madness for the rest of the world, into a domestic consumer society with an annual GDP growth of at least 6% to maintain social stability? There is no domestic solution to this question. China will have to make a choice between increased consumption and less pollution, not only for the sake of its citizens, but for the sake of mankind. And each one of us must make a choice in favor of individual or macro economics, that is economics as if people mattered or economics as if power mattered.

Reducing Water Consumption and Waste Water Generation
 
The evening’s second talk by Mr. Wang Enxue, an experienced water engineer who works for the Netherland based NGO Solidaridad in China, came much closer to this solution. Solidaridad maintains a strong presence in the country to ensure that China continues to develop as a sustainable market and responsible investor, and Mr. Wang reminded us that the production of a single T-Shirt consumes 2700 liters of water, the equivalent of roughly ten bath tubes. Awareness about water consumption starts with an understanding on how we consume water not only directly, but more importantly, indirectly.
 
Water consumption is quite similar to human consciousness, consisting of a conscious and of an unconscious part. There is the water which we see and taste, which goes down our throat as nourishing liquid, which cleans our bodies, rinses our dishes or flushes our intestine’s discharge. And then there is the water which we are not aware of, because it is hidden in a product like a cool piece of clothing, a dry snack or a journey to the Maldives. There is literally no single activity which does not imply the consumption of water. We just don’t pay attention, because we are not aware.
 
A chart with obvious and less obvious typical water consumption would therefore be a good start to raise awareness on how to use this precious resource. One will come to the conclusion that a daily shower is less harmful than the daily usage of makeup. One will be able to confirm what GI founder Nitin told us during the fade out of the evening, that eating less meat makes much more difference than trying to rinse one’s dishes manually and efficiently. It would be great if GI could follow up on this.

I also had a look into our own water fees only recently, because my wife felt that we are being overcharged by our compound administration with monthly invoices undulating between CNY 100 and 350. I learned that Shanghai has three price brackets per ton of water. Please consider that one ton of water equals 1000 liter, i.e. about five full bath tubs. At CNY 3.65 per ton, a compound price of CNY 2.12 for fresh water and CNY 1.53 for waste water, our monthly consumption is roughly 15 to 50 tons of water, equaling roughly 80 to 280 liter per day per person. That’s of course luxury in a global comparison of water availability.
 
So, what to do as a consumer? Pee while having a shower to save a flush? Step back from one’s vanity and let go of cosmetics and fashion products? Are we supposed to run around in rags? Or should we follow the Buddhist teaching and refrain from eating meat all together? I certainly see a light at the end of the tunnel | 否极泰来 as the Chinese say, when we look more inwards for salvation | 回头是岸。We will recognize that the state of our bodies and minds is reflected in the condition of our environment.
 
Think for a second about the Zen koan about the glass of water as a metaphor of our body, respectively our mind; quite a brilliant analogy, considering that ancient Zen masters did not yet know that the human body is made up by 2/3 of water. The disciple asks the master: How do I attain Zen? The master answers: Pour me some more tea and I will show you. The disciple does as he is told, but the master does not let him stop to pour tea into his cup when it is already full. The brew spills all over the table, and in this moment the student attains Zen.
This koan tells us that we have to first empty our bodies and our minds in order to be capable of receiving insight and wisdom; even more so if our bodies and minds are physically and spiritually polluted. It teaches us in our modern consumer societies an additional lesson about physical and mental consumption, about questioning the necessity to purchase yet another designer jacket or watch yet another soap or check yet another time on our phones if we received a new message, while there are more important things to do like listening to a friend or helping those at the other end of the world, who don't even have enough water to drink.
 
In a world which is built on kindness, we would not judge each other for our looks, but for our deeds. There would be no need to go at great lengths and vast expenses to dress and make up. In a world which is built on kindness, managers at Veolia and Suez would convince Middle Eastern governments to finance one desalination plant in African drought zones for each plant they purchase for themselves. In a world which is built on kindness, we do not need to waste enormous public budgets on national security and national defense, but invest these funds into technologies which promote life rather than threaten to destroy it. In a world which is built on kindness, East and West, North and South, every man and every woman under heaven would put their bodies and brains into the service of the greater good not only those tribes they are attached to by bonds of family, organization or nation.
 
***
 
Follow up resources:
Listen:

• Sinica: Water on the Brink
• Sinica: The South-North Water Diversion Project
• Sinica: In Line Behind a Billion People

Read:

• In a Line Behind a Billion People - How Scarcity Will Define China's Ascent in the Next Decade by Damien Ma and Willam Adams
  
• Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered by E. F. Schumacher
  

Visit:

• Hangzhou Wetland Museum: http://sdbwg.hzxh.gov.cn/
• China Energy Conservation and Protection Group: http://www.cecic.com.cn/

Watch:

• Planeat: documentary about nutrition’s impact on our health and the health of planet Earth

In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented and uniformed coolies. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom, and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him. [Lin Yutang]

I haven’t even finished writing my review on his 2014 book Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval N. Harari publishes a sequel, Homo Deus – The History of Tomorrow. I felt a sense of inferiority, when I heard about it. How is it possible that he writes at such a pace and with such lucidity? There are though a few differences between me and Harari, I told myself. I am a slow reader, I have two kids, regular disputes with my wife, e.g. about our children’s education, but I am not fearful about the future. Harari is a marathon sprinter in terms of literary intake and output, he has no children, is professionally managed by his partner (implying some alignment of private and professional interests;) and is seemingly badly worried about the future; at least much more than me. Is there really a correlation between the dimension of one’s intellect and the amount of one’s worries?

It will take probably another year before I will find time to read Homo Deus, but I think I understood the main message by watching a new TED format yesterday evening. It’s called TED dialogues and entails a 60’ discussion between a moderator and some prodigy guest. The first TED dialogue was recorded this February and Chris Anderson himself hosts Yuval Harari to discuss nationalism vs. globalism referring widely to both mentioned books. Winston Chuchill is credited with having said: The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. Historian Harari turning futurologist is then probably a likely calling.

Harari brilliantly explains like an old school systems theorist why nationalist governance models fail in a globalized environment; why e.g. national policies can’t find answers to ecological or ethical questions of global dimension. I am intrigued, because this short dialogue, essentially operates as a rejection of the political system put forward in Henry Kissinger’s brilliant, but somehow outdated oeuvre World Order. Kissinger perceives the national state as the smallest unit of a global order, whereas Harari argues for a global order. Kissinger speaks to us in the 21st century – with all due respect - as a fossil from a different era, whereas Harari’s post-national POV meets the Zeitgeist of an increasingly global audience.
 
I feel though that both Kissinger and Harari propose world orders which are same in essence. Same, same, but different as we say here in our Asian style of simplified English. Why? Because both talk about governance from without. Harari seemingly hasn’t realized this flaw in his argumentation, but his lack of vision for how a global government should look like is telling. Any governance from without will be sooner or later corrupted by mankind. The only governance which can lastingly change such dynamics comes from within.
 
But this is exactly the point of discussion, where I split with Harari despite his analytical brilliance and the breadth of his thinking. Harari is a classic academic who, in particular as a representative of the humanities, was trained to never ever mingle with spirituality or religion apart from describing these subjects from a very distanced POV. I got to know Harari in Sapiens as pessimistic atheist and felt in particular in the last chapters on the future of mankind most alienated from his thinking. Homo Deus, I assume, is a continuation of that style. On a personal note, I recommend to Yuval to listen to author Pico Iyer talking about The Beauty of What We’ll Never Know.
 
If we are to develop visions for the future of our species and of the creation as such, then we are well advised to develop positive scenarios and focus on them. Harari’s atheist pessimism does not convince and it fails to provide such a scenario. Chris Anderson says that we need a different kind of conversation, one that’s based on – I don’t know, on reason, listening, on understanding, on a broader context. He is right. But its not about listening to yet another government from without. Its about listening to the government within.
 
Harari points at the solution for governance himself by – again brilliantly – explaining the difference between intelligence and consciousness, a difference I have noticed, most people don't understand.

Well, I certainly think that the most interesting question today in science is the question of consciousness and the mind. We are getting better and better in understanding the brain and intelligence, but we are not getting much better in understanding the mind and consciousness. People often confuse intelligence and consciousness, especially in places like Silicon Valley, which is understandable, because in humans, they go together. I mean, intelligence basically is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things, to feel joy and sadness and boredom and pain and so forth. In Homo sapiens and all other mammals as well — it's not unique to humans -- in all mammals and birds and some other animals, intelligence and consciousness go together. We often solve problems by feeling things. So we tend to confuse them. But they are different things.

What's happening today in places like Silicon Valley is that we are creating artificial intelligence but not artificial consciousness. There has been an amazing development in computer intelligence over the last 50 years, and exactly zero development in computer consciousness, and there is no indication that computers are going to become conscious anytime soon.

So first of all, if there is some cosmic role for consciousness, it's not unique to Homo sapiens. Cows are conscious, pigs are conscious, chimpanzees are conscious, chickens are conscious, so if we go that way, first of all, we need to broaden our horizons and remember very clearly we are not the only sentient beings on Earth, and when it comes to sentience -- when it comes to intelligence, there is good reason to think we are the most intelligent of the whole bunch. But when it comes to sentience, to say that humans are more sentient than whales, or more sentient than baboons or more sentient than cats, I see no evidence for that. So first step is, you go in that direction, expand.

And then the second question of what is it for, I would reverse it and I would say that I don't think sentience is for anything. I think we don't need to find our role in the universe. The really important thing is to liberate ourselves from suffering. What characterizes sentient beings in contrast to robots, to stones, to whatever, is that sentient beings suffer, can suffer, and what they should focus on is not finding their place in some mysterious cosmic drama. They should focus on understanding what suffering is, what causes it and how to be liberated from it.

Well spoken, but in regard to the first step that Harari recommends, expansion of the sentience horizon, we can not stop at other mammals or creatures we can perceive with our five senses, with the scientific method respectively. Harari should probably down a mushroom and read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. It would help him tremendously to acquire a transcendental POV, one which conceives his mind as part of the mind at large, and thus to understand his place in the universe. It would help him to see, that he has a responsibility to draft an optimistic vision for the history of the future.

In regard to the second step, which he proposes, I am all dumbfounded that he can not see the plan which he has laid out himself: sentience, which implies compassion, is key to the reduction of suffering.