HEM: Humanities, Ecology, Memory

STEM Education Gets Probed Àla Marshall McLuhan & HEM Starts Stitching

​In an ever-changing, increasingly complex world, where enshitification keeps hitting the fan, where infrastructure keeps falling apart, where polarizing politics put people in disarray, where environmental empathy leads to feelings of despair, it’s more important than ever that the citizens of the world find ways to stitch back together the places where our relationships (with each other, with animals, with the land) have become frayed. People need to know how to navigate predicaments and make sense out of the seeming randomized chaos of modern life. These are the kinds of skill that life long learners develop when they apply themselves to HEM, that is Humanities, Ecology and Memory.

Most everyone knows about STEM at this point: science, technology, engineering, and math, including computer science. It could be said that an education curriculum and mindset too focused on these subjects has left little room for the adaptive powers of intuitive thinking that study of the humanities encompasses. Ecology, which also encompasses systems theory, shows how interconnected everything is, and gives us a greater appreciation for all the creatures in the web of life with who we share the world. Memory and its training are also key, because if we forget history, forget where we come from and the collective wisdom of the past, if we forget how to remember, it leads to the kind of dismemberment of experience so prevalent in the abandoned chopping malls of too-late corporatism.

This article has been written as just one tiny nudge to inspire the next generation of thinkers, makers and feelers with accessible screen free experiences for exploring the life of mind and world. It is just a brief run-down on the idea of HEM, how it contrasts with STEM, and why the HEM alternative might be something other people want to put some energy towards.

STEMMED IN ON ALL SIDES
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Back in the early 2000s after the Y2K fiasco and the dot com bubble collapse, educators still wanted to continue pushing a collective focus on what they then called SMET: science, math, engineering and technology. Perhaps SMET was too similar to the word “smeg” a catch all cuss word in Rob Grant and Doug Naylor’s humorous scifi series Red Dwarf. In the world of Red Dwarf space ships powered by AI with low IQ drift across the universe in hopeless disarray and talking toasters form the only potential hope for Lister, the last human left alive. SMET is kind of smeg, so in its place, the forward thinking president at Winona State University had a functional brainwave and rearranged the letters into STEM.

By this point the idea of rote learning by memory was itself considered stupid. Aging teachers were looking at the world and thinking something along the lines, “shit is getting fucked up, we better teach the next generation to save our asses. And they better learn how to work together.” The idea seems to have been to teach the subjects they thought the citizens of tomorrow would need to come up with the solutions for humanity; so we would finally figure out the pathways to solving any number of problems, such as how to get clean limitless energy in a world powered by dirty, limited, fossil fuels. Problem is, they aren’t just problems, but predicaments, and predicaments don’t have straightforward literal solutions, but require lateral thinking.

Mitigating black swan events arising from our interconnected predicaments, then, requires different modes of interacting with the world. Since the industrial revolution, the pervasive influence of engineers has geared our collective systems to adapt to machines. It is doubtful however that mindset of engineering alone can retool the machine once again. Rather, our relationship to the machine, and the way of thinking it produces must itself be set aside, so different modes of thought and relation may be (re)activated.

There was another idea behind STEM that was part of its overall project. That was to get students to work together in cooperation. In the minds of educators, the breakthrough revelations of solitary visionaries were out, and the communal efforts of groups working together at a shared goal, with their endless meetings and committees, were in. Meetings and committees and collaboration were clearly the way to fix the future. Just putting that on the table for discussion, and possible ratification.

The STEM boosters also crafted their curricula around the idea that memorizing facts doesn’t prepare people for challenges, and that solitary study and immersion in a topic doesn’t produce the same kind of people pleasing people behavior that a focus on collaborative creativity inculcates. One of the key ideologies within the movement was the notion that “facts don’t matter; if there is nothing practical, you get out of them.”
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Facts about the web of life within the cosmos can produce wonder, yet wonder itself was not deemed an outcome worthy of practical effort. Remember, effort must always be practical. This is likely one of the reasons that dream interpretation and do-it-yourself psychotherapy were not part of the curricula of STEM.
As a throwaway bone, some educators proposed the idea of STEAM, with the A standing for Arts. For some reason in our technocratic society, STEAM never got any STEAM, and the only ones who really got into it were a subculture of people known as STEAM Punks. STEAM Punk still remains relevant to the inevitable shift to a lower resource base of living, but most STEAM still requires some kind of coal for combustive power, and much of it is still focused on the supremacy of the machine

Math induced psychosis

​Over the past twenty odd years as STEM has been pushed inside of America’s collective educational systems, the continued effects of Scientism, Technocracy, (cultural) Engineering, and Mathology (arithmetic focused on cold calculation and numeric quantity over numeric quality) has led to some of the following outcomes in the U.S.A:

The Great Dopamine Drain: the ubiquitous use of various social media platforms among adolescents and their adults has rewired their brains, exploiting dopamine pathways for the addictive hit of getting “just one more like.” In person social skills have atrophied. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and issues with body image have all been amplified. Suicide rates have gone up, and loneliness is a national epidemic even while people are connecting endlessly over the always-on-internet.

Computer Aided Disintegration: Over-reliance on Computer Aided Design tools has created a generation of engineers and architects who lack the ability to draw with pen and pencil. The geometric proportions that give harmony to the world are all based on the human form. The geometric proportions of the hand get bypassed when the hand does not know how to draw a plan. Meanwhile the infrastructure in the USA remains in critical condition. Enforced obsolescence of older infrastructure systems (such as the network of copper wires that once powered the telephone and internet) has left some population segments in a lurch when they do not have enough funds to adopt the latest corporate pushed technology. Meanwhile the older systems slip into further disrepair. Brown outs and energy grid failures are one outcome when smart grid nodes are installed alongside energy systems that elsewhere have been left to languish. Instead of repairing old systems, enforced “upgrades” meet with incompatibility issues. Lack of support for those who wish to keep older systems working becomes non-existent at official levels. As cars have become ever more computerized, the ability to work on them without specialized computer equipment has likewise eroded, where it hasn’t been made illegal. This causes many citizens to be “left behind,” yet recuperates walking, public transportation and bicycle culture for those in the underclass.

Quantity over Quality (The Pathology of Mathology): Businesses operating within the competitive capitalist cultures of the past had at least some notion of creating quality products and services for their customers. Creators prided themselves on making something that would last for decades if not a lifetime and beyond. Globalization has reversed this trend, and now the capitalists is focused on quantity of the numbers in bank accounts and asset holding, number games and rackets. This is reflected in the consumer who in many places have become hoarders. The person with the most cheap plastic happy meal toys wins. At their own expense of course, and to the benefit of mathologist accountants and day traders.

Collective Dementia: The ability to recall, to memorize, to hold on to something over a long period of time by the power of the applied mind has likewise atrophied. The ability to google something has diminished the ability to spend long periods of time researching a topic of interest or just a subject that a person needs to know about. The effort required to go to a library or talk to someone who might know what needs to be known, has withered the ability to look things up in books or engage with people with developed skill sets and the knowledge that comes from being alive for a long time (i.e. old people, who now get shut up and carted off to old folk “homes”). Since people don’t talk on the phone as much either, they don’t need to know as many phone numbers and have them memorized. The smart phone allows them to forget more than they ever remembered. Personal memory of special moments in life are likewise uploaded to the cloud in the form of digital pictures. Instead of recalling happy memories in the imagination, memories are scrolled through, as long as bills are paid and access to the correct accounts is maintained. AI further accelerates the effect of this collective dementia by outsourcing thinking and creativity.

All this while the federal government has spent approximately $3.9 billion annually on STEM education programs as they did in 2021. As of 2025 the National Science Foundation alone had a total STEM budget of $1.17 billion dollars. It is one thing to teach about these subjects and make them available. It is quite another to put the full weight of educational institutional support behind them when there are other topics and subjects valuable to teach and inspire young minds.

The great raconteur and thinker Marshall McLuhan developed a fourfold way of looking at media and cultural artifacts to see how they what they enhance, obsolesce in the present, retrieve from the past, or reverse. If we look at STEM through this tetrad lens of McLuhan we find that:

STEM Enhances: After school programs where kids build and design “battle bots” and drones preparing them for future jobs in the military industrial complex designing battle bots and drones for the “theater” of war. STEM also enhances techno-narcissism, even as their competing drives accelerate neurosis caused by a digitally fragmented sense of self.

STEM Obsolesces: An individuated sense of self is hindered by STEM, because outcomes are placed in the hand of machines rather than the personal unconscious. Theater kids required to memorize their lines and pursue active imagination in the amalgamation of the arts are also made obsolete. In many cases they have been replaced altogether by the CGI of computer generated imagery, and voices synthesized by machines. Hand drawn blueprints, schematics, and other detailed plans are no longer required. The slide rule gets relegated to the dustbin (or to the STEAM Punks) along with calculations worked out on pen and paper. STEM attempts to obsolesce death, but does not succeed.

STEM Retrieves: Amateur radio and other old school hobbies, such as photography and film with film, when a few of the STEM kids trickle into the radiocentric fold to become STEAM Punks. As economic disparity gets enhanced, for tech lords on the high quantity of numerals in their bank accounts, it also retrieves feudalism in the form of the sovereign corporation-as-nation-station (sovcorp). The CEO is president and king with a bevy of microserfs to carry out his commands.

STEM Reverses: the other aspects of science that are focused on living systems. As ecology, biology and the life sciences get de-emphasized by engineering brain, they transform and mutate into biohacking, terraforming, blood doping, smart drugs, cryogenics and the desire to extend life beyond its natural span. STEM progress reverses gains in literacy and reading made by the educational system as vernacular video becomes a preferred means of communication and learning among youth.

With these thoughts in mind, it should be clear that the continual problems caused by technology, engineering, and the focus on certain types of science at the expense of others, are in many cases a liability more than an asset. The need for people with intuitive, lateral, and artistic grasp of the world around them is itself a practical way to work-around the many predicaments facing humanity in the decades ahead. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics may not know jack about HEM careers and jobs just now, but they will be “tomorrow’s jobs” because the negative spillover from industry, corporate group-think, and the collective dementia of cognitive detachment is going to continue to tear at the social and environmental fabric holding the world together.
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HEMMING IS PATCHWORK, HEMMING IS STITCHERY

​The great thing about HEM is that no government program is needed to get it up and running. No one needs the permission of anyone else to become a stitcher, to start making your own patchwork quilt exploring the humanities, exploring the terrain and terroir of your local ecology, to cultivate the habit of retention and memory. Permission and official programs may very well be counterproductive to getting any kind of useful work in this area done.

HEM, as I conceive it, is not anti-science. I wrote a book on the history of technology and music, after all. Such technology seems to be more useful when also put into the hands of artists, HEM just takes the emphasis out of the sciences that have put the focus on machines, and instead attempts to re-balance that tipped scale back towards the earth and her inhabitants. HEM re-emphasizes ecology in service to all of life. For that it requires the deliberate training and cultivation of memory. When the stories associated with a part of the land we live are not remembered and consciously transmitted to others who also live on the land, and will dwell with the land in the next generation, vital knowledge is lost. The emphasis on the humanities encourages lateral thinking and the development of individualized artistic intuition. It also gives the mind fodder on which to think, and material worthy of retaining in memory. Stocked with this useful supply of material, new streams of creativity open up to the prepared mind.

Predicaments don’t exist outside of our stories about them, our memories of their causes, and of the web of complex relationships that intermix between them. As such those who keep memory, who train their memory to hold onto stories, poems, and songs, who hold in their mind an aesthetic web of beauty, music and art will be liable to make strong connections and draw water from the common well of deep knowledge to share with their fellows.

If we look at HEM through McLuhan’s tetrad the following can be found:

HEM Enhances: appreciation of the arts, literature, history, including personal history and family history, along with local history. On the ecological side it enhances knowledge of the local flora and fauna, as well as stories of the same from local folklore. Place names often reflect the kind of plants and animals that lived their before they were desecrated into strip malls and suburbs (White Oak Community, for example, or Salamander Hill, etc.) Appreciation of such life is likewise enhanced. When life is appreciated instead of taken for granted and thought of as merely something else to consume, steps can be taken for its protection.

HEM Retrieves: The role of the bard, the storyteller, the griot, the local poet, song writer and epic rapper. It retrieves the mentat’s from Frank Herbert’s Dune and places them back in the trajectory of another possible future. In this possible future the Art of Memory (see Frances Yates) and other mnemonic disciplines are restored. It retrieves oral storytelling on the one hand, but also book learning and deep research in analog archives on the other. Systems theory as a part of ecology is also retrieved as we look at the net effects of small actions and the positive and negative feedback loops they create in the total environment. The cybernetics of Norbert Wiener is likewise retrieved. The humanities retrieve the seven liberal arts and also Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, her nine children.

HEM Obsolesces: Cloud memory storage and data centers. Recording everything on the phone via photo images and video of special events is sidelined in place of savoring the moment and later reminiscence through the power of mind and recall. Personal participation in the surveillance state of data collection is likewise negated as digital spy technology is less readily adopted.

HEM Reverses: globalization and corporate work mentalities. The focus returns to local and bioregional levels of production, participation and activity as the baseline. It also focuses on individual effort and encourages the proliferation of outsider art. It reverses the brain drain on communities, as it gives reasons for people to stick around their hometowns. Other environments and cities aren’t “better” by default. Creativity, culture and cooperatives instead become the norm. The rust belt and other parts of flyover America don’t get gutted by the best and brightest, but the best and brightest regenerate the homefront with their own efforts continuing to nourish the local environment. Perhaps most important, it reverses the decline in cognitive ability by restoring rote learning and the memorization of facts. While what is remembered can certainly be arbitrary, the fact that HEM practitioners are giving their memory muscles and mind a work out ensures that creativity and ability to use their mind will go beyond just recall and into true comprehension and intellectual wrestling in the world of ideas.

As hemmers and stitchers begin to work by reading the classics, studying the traditions of the world, listening to its great music, and looking at artwork and film, it will help stem the tide of slop propaganda (or propaganda slop as one feeds into the other) inundating the mind. As they explore their environment, get back in touch with family history and their personal history, will see the rich world of their own experience and all that it has to give outside of McCulture and the military-entertainment complex. The same with the wonders of the natural world in their corner of the world. Urban dwellers will also have much to love as they learn the history of their city, and also much to love in the form of nature: nature is not absent even when brutalist concrete and even when its pristine ecology has been spoiled by the smegma of sprawl, wonder and beauty are still ever present for those willing to let themselves be enchanted.
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What is held in the mind and memory can never be taken away. Data centers can be unplugged, destroyed, or go offline. What is stored in the cloud can disappear due to breaches or a change in a contract. The eternal memory of the soul withstands even the horrifying and sad vagaries of dementia and Alzheimer disease. When muscles atrophy and the body gives way to old age, the achievements of the mind cannot be stolen back by any corporation. They will never go offline because they are internal, imaginal, eternal.

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