📚 Doctoral Student in American History | College Instructor | Digital Humanist | AI Enthusiast

⚖️ Exploring the intersection of American history, civic life, and AI

✨ Passionate about revitalizing the Humanities through Technology

🔸Building public tools to explore U.S. historical sources (FRUS, Congressional Record, HSUS, historical newspapers)

🔸Leveraging AI to support civic engagement and counter disinformation

🔸Developing open, reproduciblwe teaching resources for history + technology

• Hello_History
  GitHub link – My first repo learning GitHub basics

• Frus-Explorer (coming soon)
  GitHub link – Ask natural language questions of the Foreign Relations of the United States corpus

• Civic-AI-Tools
  GitHub link – Tools that combine historical data + LLMs for public use and civic engagement

💼 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johntwilder

At a moment when democracy teeters between informed deliberation and tribal warfare, when artificial intelligence reshapes human possibility, and when global challenges demand wisdom that transcends any single discipline, the humanities stand not as antiquated luxuries but as civilization's most essential technologies, the instruments that forge empathy from difference, extract meaning from chaos, and transform information into understanding.

Yet we have betrayed this promise, reducing these magnificent disciplines to academic afterthoughts taught without rigor and pursued without ambition. No more. The future demands humanities education of unprecedented sophistication: scholars who navigate Thucydides and quantum mechanics with equal fluency, students who debate medieval theology while modeling economic systems, citizens who understand how genetic discoveries reshape our conception of human nature.

Artificial intelligence offers not escape from this complexity but new possibilities of engaging with it, enabling us to inhabit the consciousness of Tang Dynasty philosophers, to witness the Enlightenment through the eyes of both salon intellectuals of the metropole and colonial subjects, to trace how incremental scientific developments cascaded into revolutions that rewired the human imagination across centuries. These are not technological gimmicks but potential methodological breakthroughs that make possible forms of historical empathy and cross-cultural understanding previously unimaginable.

We stand at a civilizational crossroad: we can continue producing graduates who mistake opinion for analysis and information for wisdom, or we can forge minds capable of synthetic thinking across the full spectrum of human knowledge. The choice will determine whether democracy evolves or dissolves, whether technology serves human flourishing or diminishes it, whether we face our planetary challenges with wisdom earned through millennia of human experience or stumble forward blind to the lessons of the past.

The humanities, properly conceived and rigorously pursued, are not one option among many but the foundation upon which all other learning becomes meaningful, the disciplines that teach us not just how to think, but what thinking is for.

We presently face an unprecedented intellectual crisis that threatens the foundations of democratic civilization. The postmodern insight that all perspectives are contextually situated was valuable: it revealed hidden power structures and challenged false universalisms. But when this insight metastasized into the claim that no perspective can approach universal validity, it created a self-refuting paradox: asserting as absolutely true the proposition that no absolute truth exists.

This "aperspectival madness" has cascaded into the cultural and political chaos we now inhabit. When universities taught students that all narratives are equally constructed, they inadvertently equipped demagogues with perfect tools for reality destruction. If historical facts are merely "narratives," then Holocaust denial becomes just another perspective. If scientific consensus is merely "Western ways of knowing," then climate change becomes debatable opinion. The very intellectual sophistication meant to protect us from dogma instead left us defenseless against deliberate deception.

I recognize that the humanities bear some responsibility here, having become ground zero for aperspectival thinking. Literature departments deconstructed the possibility of textual meaning while history departments questioned whether the past could be objectively known. Philosophy embraced radical relativism while cultural studies reduced all knowledge claims to power moves. This abdication of intellectual authority created a vacuum that media manipulators and political operatives eagerly filled.

Another important mission of mine is to transcend this crisis through the emergence of integral consciousness, a developmental stage that integrates the valid insights of all prior levels, including postmodern deconstruction, while reintroducing healthy growth hierarchies that distinguish between different orders of truth-seeking without flattening them into equivalence.

I envision humanities education that establishes developmental hierarchies of knowledge, teaching students to distinguish between empirical facts, interpretive frameworks, value judgments, and aesthetic experiences. Students will learn to navigate fluidly between different epistemological approaches, analyzing historical events through empirical data, phenomenological understanding, hermeneutic interpretation, and systems thinking simultaneously, understanding when each approach is most appropriate.

I think AI-enhanced immersive learning can be an important part of this, where students experience how different developmental levels and cultural contexts generate different truth-claims without concluding that truth itself is impossible. They will inhabit the consciousness of medieval peasants, Enlightenment philosophers, and postmodern critics, learning to appreciate each perspective's partial validity while understanding their developmental relationships.

I aim to produce graduates capable of integral thinking: citizens who can understand multiple viewpoints without concluding all viewpoints are equally valid, who can think about thinking itself, and who can contribute to collective problem-solving that draws on diverse perspectives while maintaining coherent direction. This sophisticated perspective-taking and meta-systemic awareness is precisely what democracy requires to address climate change, technological disruption, and other challenges that transcend any single framework.

These interests represent more than educational reform. They point toward a new cultural era that could transcend our current civilizational crisis. By reconstructing the intellectual foundations that democratic civilization requires, I seek to catalyze the emergence of integral consciousness on a broader cultural scale. The humanities, properly revitalized, become technologies for cultural evolution, the means by which human consciousness transcends its current limitations and develops the wisdom necessary for planetary challenges.

The stakes could not be higher: either we develop forms of education capable of producing integral citizens, or we risk continued devolution of democratic discourse into tribal warfare and the collapse of our collective capacity to address existential challenges. At this crucial moment when aperspectival madness threatens to dissolve the very possibility of collective truth-seeking, I am committed to reconstructing not just academic disciplines but the cognitive and cultural foundations upon which conscious civilization depends. The humanities are not relics of the past but civilization's most essential technologies, and their integral transformation is the key to our collective future.