Toffler, The Trivium & The Holy Trinity

I’ve been having an interesting conversation on Twitter with Martin Robinson and Carl Gombrich (a big thank you to both).

Two things had been bouncing around recently: Toffler’s ubiquitous “Learn, unlearn, relearn” and the Trivium, in no small part thanks to Martin’s excellent Trivium 21C. I wondered, slightly loosely, whether they were connected, along the lines of this diagram.

Rather vague wondering

Carl did not see any obvious connection and (sensibly, I think) warned against numerology/seeing patterns in 3 and the like and, broadly, I think I’m coming to the conclusion that he’s right in that the two are not interchangeable (as I’d initially thought). That said, I do think there is a connection. If nothing else, they are sibling concepts in that both are born of the idea that knowledge is fluid and changing.

There are two differences that Carl’s doubt and Martin’s questions highlighted for me. First, the Trivium is not quite so overtly pro-“change for its own sake”. While the unlearning phase seems fairly wholesale under Toffler, the Trivium’s dialectic is more even-handed. Critique doesn’t have to shatter one’s beliefs or force you to reject what you have learned; it can strengthen them too. Second, for my money, the Trivium deals with the social aspect of learning in a more sophisticated, group-oriented way. Toffler’s “learn, unlearn, relearn” works on an individual level (as it did for Carl’s drumming), but the rhetoric phase of the Trivium works at both individual and social (whatever you think you’ve learned, you can’t have learned it until you’ve persuaded someone else of it).

Anyway, enjoyed the tweets. Especially discussing the holy trinity of Xavi, Messi and Iniesta on a Sunday morning. Seem to remember Maradona talking about Messi playing with Jesus, which sort of begs a question …