What to Learn When You Have No Idea What to Learn: Meta-Skills and Tradition
You wake up and your neighbors speak a language you don’t understand, your country is on the brink of war and economic collapse, and you just lost your job to AI. The future is uncertain. Everything you previously learned how to do is no longer competitive. Anything you might learn may be obsolete before you can make use of it.
Skill acquisition always carries the risk of wasted effort, because conditions are never static. Heraclitus said you never step into the same river twice. From the time you're born, change is the only constant in your environment. Learning is required in order to live. Inefficient, insufficient learning means death. What is an individual to do?
Racing to learn the hottest new thing historically spells disaster, because arriving on time to a skill guarantees you will lose to those who were primed for the wave. When the coal industry went under, snarky journalists said “learn to code.” Now that coding is done completely by machines, we don’t even know what our snarky comeback should be.
In any game, the competitive format is referred to as the "meta." "Meta" in Greek means after, beyond, or with, and the gaming term comes from "metagame," the game above the game. In chess, the game is designed to be about thinking further ahead and predicting contingencies better than your opponent. In competitive chess, however, it has become about memorizing the greatest number of opening moves. If you were to practice anything other than the meta, you’d be falling behind. The same prefix shows up in the Greek words for transformation, metamorphosis and metanoia.
Metanoia is the term in Christianity which is translated "repentance," a change of heart. Whether you believe in Christianity or not, pragmatism alone would convince you that the optimal orientation of any human would be an open mind to learn– learn what you don’t know, learn from your mistakes, learn how to learn. And so we revisit the question: what do I learn if I have no idea what to learn?
Meta-Skills
Understanding meta-skills will offer us some useful insights. Meta-skills are common to all disciplines. These are skills necessary across all skill domains: learning how to learn, focus, decision-making, and virtues like humility, patience, discernment, diligence, prudence. There’s a saying: “strength is never a weakness.” This directly relates to our understanding of meta skills. All of the above meta skills will benefit your ability to survive and thrive in the midst of any change, at least as well as the next person.
The difference between a skill and a meta skill is similar to the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Wisdom is related to character, and has to do with the correct application of knowledge in varying conditions. Knowledge alone is highly replaceable, as it is readily acquired by anyone, anytime, and it usually relates to specific, changeable conditions, placing the mere acquisition of knowledge into the initial state of things we have set out to solve.
Learning how to learn is perhaps the meta-meta skill, because once acquired, the individual stands to overcome any skill deficit they may face.
Meta-skills cannot be learned in the abstract, but must be concretized in some practice. You cannot learn how to learn unless you set out to learn something, regardless of whether that something will be relevant in a year or not. Some may lament this, seeking a risk-free time investment for their learning. Risk-assessment and resilience are also meta skills.
The Translation Problem
The difficulty in any communication of genuinely valuable insight is the translation from one worldview to another: my prescriptions are only going to sound remedial to someone already bought into the Christian paradigm. Any advice I could give will ultimately be in reference to my worldview commitments. This isn’t a problem for the person committed to meta-learning, as they have probably already begun to understand that open-mindedness without immediate acceptance is itself a necessary meta skill. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
This is where someone like Jordan Peterson can be very effective: hesitant to make any particular commitment, he attempts to draw out archetypal similarities between religious and philosophical traditions in order to find a way forward for himself and his students. In this, he trades depth for breadth, surveying many different worldviews in an attempt to help the individual understand, at minimum, the role of the worldview in an individual’s journey. This is helpful, especially at the start, because making a commitment to a tradition before understanding how it compares to any others carries the risk of blindly accepting whatever you’ve inherited. And so he and those who resonate with him try as best they can to benefit from (what appears to be) the practical, perennial wisdom of the world religions. This is fruitful for a beginner, because a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver, says Proverbs. That is, the spiritual value within (gold) a piece of wisdom is hidden to those who only consider the outer (silver) practical meaning of a piece of advice, but that outer, practical meaning is still of some value, albeit a lesser value than what one would find if they were to go deeper.
Many people, myself included, have drawn insight from Peterson's psychologization of Christian principles. This was especially useful to me as a post-graduate with no firm foundation to inform my actions. At 22 I had no job, no responsibilities, no moral compass. All that school, and so little learning! Through Peterson’s psychological exegesis, I had begun to learn that there lay practical wisdom in the otherwise mysterious narratives of Scripture. The limitation, however, lies in the fact that the real value of the Christian tradition– or any tradition, for that matter– cannot be totally uncovered from an outsider (that is, uninitiated) perspective. It is only available to those who fully abandon themselves in devotion to the prescriptions of the said philosophy (in this case, the Trinitarian God). Do I advocate participation in other religions? My worldview commitments restrict me from doing so– I cannot endorse what I find to be erroneous. What I endorse instead, for the person who is seeking their way out of a confused modern life in which one feels they have no footing whatsoever to affect their survival, is to wholeheartedly commit to an apprenticeship via tradition.
Peterson actually seems to recognize this, at least subconsciously, because his spiritual fence-sitting (at least in his public persona) has cost him the stability he claims can only be found in a properly constituted religious worldview. I don’t mean to judge Peterson. I only point out that by his own claim as a clinical psychologist, individuals thrive when they are solidly psychologically grounded via an unshakeable worldview, and his lack of commitment is a gap in the public presentation and his personal commitments. By his own standard, this stands to produce instability in the personality, which will negate the sort of thriving we are seeking from our efforts. In other words, picking and choosing from the buffet of worldviews based on what “works” for you is to have already begun with an implicit set of rules (unbeknownst to you) about what you will and won’t accept from each. Saying a given worldview or its pieces “work” for you is to be stuck at the layer of practicality, failing to achieve the depth necessary to survive the waves of change we spoke about earlier. Something “working” has no bearing on whether it is true or not.
Apprenticeship
Funnily enough, in his book Maps of Meaning, I found a key insight that rescued me from a similar state of endless wandering about in the halls of mere spirituality (endless sampling of worldviews without any real commitment, i.e. skin in the game). I grew up culturally Baptist, but my first conscious application of a worldview occurred in college. There I flirted with psychedelic spirituality in an attempt to achieve hidden knowledge or gnosis. When that left me more confused than when I’d begun, I found Nietzsche– therein I became introduced to the thesis that truth and morality were subjective. I really applied what I gathered from Nietzsche, and for a brief period I sincerely tried to experiment with the idea that morality is purely a human construct. I came away with the realization that far from being subjective, morality had an objective basis in reality, and all my flailing had left me broken. It was as if I heard the words, why persecutest thou me? It is hard to kick against the goads.
I’d read C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, and I became comforted by the idea that Christianity was some sort of big tent that many different denominations were all legitimately a part of. From this perspective, my seeking was over. All that remained was for me to sample my choice doctrines from the various rooms of Catholicism, Anglicanism, Pentecostalism, and Calvinism, whatever else I could justify to myself. Lewis spoke of the Christian tradition as a vast hall leading to these various rooms, which painted the picture that no matter where you ended up, any decision was as legitimate as the next. He emphasized that it was necessary to choose a room and go in it, which is similar to what I’m arguing now, except his whole theory that they are all legitimate is in tension with this claim. In retrospect, is this not more of the same fence-sitting? I relate this to you in order to concretize what I am trying to say; don’t think I am offering this advice as someone who has never taken it. My waiting in the hall was still a form of noncommitment. I had not yet risked anything to bite into that golden apple.
In Maps of Meaning, Peterson sets out three mythological categories: the Great Mother (the unknown, chaos), the Great Father (tradition, order, the established group), and the hero who mediates between them. The Great Father is both protector and tyrant. Tradition shelters you, and it can also calcify and crush. Within the Scriptures, this is personified by the Pharisees, who place the letter of the Law above the spirit of the Law. The hero's job is to renew tradition, and Peterson's point is that only someone who has already been shaped by tradition can do that. He describes two failures on either side of the hero. The authoritarian clings to tradition in a way that betrays it; it treats it as something dead to be rehearsed, rather than something living to be transformed by. The decadent, often an adolescent who sees the group's flaws, rejects it before he has earned the right to criticize it.
One must commit to a tradition in order to truly receive any of its benefits. You can't improvise jazz until you've mastered scales. You can't break the rules of painting well until you've learned them. The discipline that feels confining at first is what later makes creative freedom possible. You should commit to one path deeply rather than sampling many shallowly.
To refuse to commit is sometimes referred to as lukewarmness. In the Book of Revelation 3:16, we hear because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. I do not claim to know the gold here, but the silver is at least apparent; expect nothing without commitment, even at the risk of being mistaken.
The risk in this method is choosing the wrong tradition. But greater risk involves becoming so paralyzed that you do not move, therefore destined not to learn from your mistakes.
Vertical Imitation
Elsewhere, René Girard has written about the paradoxical nature of imitation and creativity. “Many people imitate when they think that they innovate… many people innovate when they think that they imitate.” Imitators, oddly enough, stand to produce something more original in the long term than those who feign originality.
Why does this matter to us? Because in the beginning we were concerned with change and the threat it presents to the individual, and the potential avenues for escape. We determined that meta skills are a more reliable investment than trend-chasing. But if trend chasing is an imitation of one’s cohort, doesn’t the above quote from Girard suggest such imitation is our best bet? Not quite.
Here it becomes necessary to understand the difference between vertical and horizontal imitation. Horizontal imitation results from looking across at your rival and seeking to beat them via originality, which is in a certain sense to still define your approach according to how everyone else is learning and competing. Vertical imitation, however, is the meta game we seek to play, because by openly imitating a master, you can build on what they've received via tradition.
Commitment to some apprenticeship in the form of tradition, as well as imitation of the greats within said tradition, are the fast tracks to learning how to learn.
Horizontal imitation copies the peers around you, which produces rivalry and chasing the constantly changing meta. By the time the wave hits, you were focused on chasing the last one. Vertical imitation learns from the greatest of all ages within your tradition. The benefit is twofold: you imitate the meta skills and virtue necessary to succeed across all sorts of eras of change, while simultaneously benefiting from a concrete instantiation or person whose situation may be relevant to your context. Within the Scriptures, Paul makes a statement which points at this. 1 Corinthians 11:1, "Be ye imitators of me, even as I also am of Christ."
The Philosopher and the Saint
When I first realized this, but before I had committed to Christianity as my wedded tradition, I identified philosophy (literally love of wisdom) as the meta-discipline that stood to benefit any road I might take. The philosopher, it appears, is an archetype common to human cultures, and his ability seems to be in his relation to meta learning as a skill. He is able to thrive in almost any sort of culture or political environment, because what he learns is more related to the foundations and application of knowledge than it was to the constantly changing topsoil. The philosopher, it appeared “lives by the city laid up in heaven, whatever city he finds himself in” according to Plato. The philosopher can be thought of as a secular saint. Virtuous or knowledgeable in a generic sense, but unmarried and therefore inconsequential in the face of a proper religious worldview. The philosopher loves wisdom in general, the saint is bound to one Beloved, and the binding is what gives his life consequence. A Don Juan who has seduced countless women impresses the uninitiated, who don’t realize that infatuation is the only trick he knows. The married man is less often the subject of romantic fantasy, but he is the more impressive of the two, because he has to win the same woman again every day. The saint of a given tradition is that married man. What is this but a devotion so complete that he has let go of any learning that doesn’t bring him closer to the ideal he imitates? And because of that devotion, the saint isn’t carried along by the frantic churn of his era’s meta. He rides the wave he saw coming all along. To people outside, his gain looks like a loss! The game he’s playing is so particular, most can’t tell what he’s playing at.
Conclusion
And so learning how to learn, vertical imitation, focus (cutting off of other possibilities), virtue, are all skills that are translatable to any meta. And while you're learning these, you're bound to pick up some non-meta skills on the way that will inform your final result. Whether or not they’re obsolete in a year is meaningless, because the certainty that would make that avoidable isn’t available to anyone. The only thing you can worry about is whether or not you’re an active participant in your own trajectory. The world will keep changing and you can't predict which skills will matter. Marry one tradition, imitate its greatest practitioners; adaptability follows from that.
