Critical Need for Metaphysics in Education

Is our understanding of metaphysics being abandoned for technological progress. And if so, what is the harm and how to we reverse this existential threat for civilization in the world?

Introduction: Circling the Palace

We stand at a threshold no previous generation has faced. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the technical capacity to end civilization — not through some distant apocalyptic accident, but through deliberate, organized choice. Nuclear arsenals, autonomous weapons systems, engineered pandemics, and increasingly powerful artificial intelligence are no longer science fiction. They are operational realities.

At the same time, our ancient tribal instincts — the urge to divide the world into sacred “us” and disposable “them” — have not only survived but have been supercharged by social media, identity politics, and resurgent nationalisms. We have god-like power paired with pre-civilizational ethics.

This is an existential mismatch.

Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher, understood this danger centuries before the atom was split. In his famous Parable of the Palace in The Guide for the Perplexed, he describes humanity’s relationship to truth and to God through the image of a royal palace.

Most people never even approach the palace. Others circle its outer walls, mastering ritual and law but never venturing inside. Only a few enter the inner court, where they gain genuine understanding of reality itself. Today, we are a species that has mastered the outer gates of the palace — science, technology, industry, and global connectivity — while remaining stuck outside the inner court.

We have learned how to manipulate matter and energy with astonishing precision, but we have not sufficiently deepened our understanding of what a human being actually is, what gives life inherent worth, or how we ought to relate to one another.

This imbalance has become the central threat to humanity’s future.

The twentieth century already delivered the warning. It was, by a wide margin, the bloodiest in human history. Between 200 and 262 million people were killed by war, genocide, engineered famine, and political terror — far more than in all previous centuries combined. What makes this fact so sobering is that these horrors occurred during an explosion of scientific and technological progress.

The same era that produced antibiotics, airplanes, computers, and nuclear energy also produced the Holocaust, the Gulag, the Killing Fields, and the Cultural Revolution.

The decisive factor was not insufficient technology. It was insufficient metaphysics. When human beings are reduced to members of groups — races, classes, religions, ethnicities, or ideologies — their infinite individual worth is erased. Once that dehumanization takes hold, technology does not restrain violence; it multiplies it.

Gas chambers, machine guns, bomber fleets, and bureaucratic systems of extermination are simply tools placed in the service of a metaphysical failure: the belief that some groups of people matter less than others. We are now entering an even more dangerous period.

Advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and autonomous weapons are lowering the threshold for destruction. Soon, small groups or even individuals may possess capabilities that once required the resources of entire nations. When that happens, the only meaningful restraint left will be ethical and metaphysical: a deep, internalized conviction that every single human life possesses equal and infinite worth, regardless of group identity.

Without that conviction, further technological “progress” becomes a threat rather than a gift. This is why metaphysics — long dismissed by modern universities as abstract, outdated, or unscientific — has become critically urgent.

Metaphysics is not merely speculation about invisible realities. It is the disciplined inquiry into the most foundational questions: What is a human being? What gives persons inherent dignity? What is the nature of right relationship between individuals? Can any group legitimately be treated as having lives worth less than our own?

These questions cannot be answered by science.

No laboratory experiment can prove the equal worth of every person. No algorithm can derive the principle that no group should be dehumanized. These are metaphysical axioms — foundational truths that must be grasped through reason, reflection on human experience, and honest engagement with history.

Yet they are not arbitrary. As Russell McAlmond has shown in his development of Ethical Individualism, such axioms can be realistically grounded in what history and human nature repeatedly reveal: societies that affirm the infinite worth and uniqueness of every individual tend to be more peaceful, just, and flourishing; those that embrace group-based dehumanization tend toward atrocity.

The central thesis of this book is simple but urgent: In the twenty-first century, metaphysical and ethical progress is more important to the continuation of the human race than further technological progress. We do not need more powerful weapons. We do not need faster ways to manipulate information or biology.

What we desperately need is a deeper entrance into Maimonides’ inner court — a renewed commitment to foundational truths about human dignity that can restrain our worst impulses even as our power grows. The coming decades will test whether humanity has the wisdom to survive its own ingenuity. If we continue circling the palace — brilliant in technique but primitive in relational wisdom — the odds are poor.

If enough people choose to walk through the inner gates and embrace a metaphysics centered on the equal, infinite worth of every unique human being, a different future becomes possible. This book is written in the hope of that better future. It examines the historical warning signs, diagnoses the metaphysical crisis of our time, and presents a practical path forward grounded in Ethical Individualism and a renewed commitment to human relational wisdom.

The stakes could not be higher. Our ancestors survived ice ages, plagues, and world wars. The question before us is whether we will survive ourselves — armed with technologies that make our moral failures far more lethal than ever before.The time to enter the inner court is now.