The Rise of the One Percent

                As the Trump presidency looms and the Trump cabinet is coming into focus, the rise of the one percent is closing in.  This is no ordinary transfer of power in what used to be world’s most stable democracy.  This is something completely different.  What is happening marks the end of over eight decades of cooperative government and liberal democracy dating back to the New Deal.  Over 75 years of ascendancy of American global power is about to end as nations – friend and foe – rush to arm themselves in the face of the most internationally  unpredictable and inept administration ever  preparing to take office.  Trump’s cabinet is the clearest sign of the consolidation of power in the hands of old, white, male billionaires who have no interest, experience or facility promoting policies that benefit anyone but themselves.  Trump ran as a populist, but he is setting himself up to rule as a plutocrat and dictator.

                Trump doesn’t deserve all the blame.  Mitch Mc Connell has been guiding us toward the end of democratic process for the last few years.  The refusal to confirm a Supreme Court judge, and the lack of confirmation for federal judges at all levels, has crippled one branch of government.  His refusal to work toward compromise, in spite of the fact that every position he holds is a minority position, has lowered public opinion and confidence in government to an all time low.  So low, that people would see a craven narcissist as a change agent.  Mc Connell has been matched, step for step, by Paul Ryan in the House.  When Trump takes office there will be no checks and balances left in place, and any procedural moves made by Democrats will be met with the same kind of response the Republicans made in North Carolina.  Ryan’s budget provides a clear indication of what we can look forward to.  Every program that benefits the poor and the vulnerable will be gutted to funnel more wealth to the top.  People who used to be in the middle, will find themselves slipping into the poor and vulnerable classes.

                Look at two areas that will be early targets, climate change and health care.  Trump has joked about climate change in the past, and his cabinet is loaded with people from the fossil fuel elite intent on extracting and burning every last drop of that fuel – the climate be damned.  The damage that these policies do cannot be undone.  Scientists are already trying to download as much data as they can from government data bases before they are erased or restricted.  NASA’s climate research will be halted and scientists will be weeded out of their government jobs.  Trump even promised to burn coal – COAL – in the face of economic and environmental arguments against it.  I can’t see even one speed bump in the Trump plan to ravage the environment.

                Health care is no better off.  Ryan and Mc Connell plan to repeal the ACA as soon as possible.  Of course, their public statements promise something better, but that has always been a lie.  The real Republican position is that most of us don’t deserve health care.  The argument that there is a Republican plan for health care is laughable.  The fact is that the ACA IS the Republican plan for health care and they won’t even support it.  We are headed back to the bad old days of people dying in Emergency Rooms and going bankrupt from health emergencies.  Women’s health issues and issues of access for women are going to revert to conditions not seen since the Fifties.  Medical care is going to go from a right to a luxury enjoyed only by a few.  The repeal of ‘Obamacare’ isn’t just the end of a law; it is the end of a philosophy of governing.

                The list of endangered programs doesn’t end here.  Public education, research in innumerable areas, housing, protection of workers and many more face the same fate.  The one percent see government as a way to consolidate and leverage their power, not to share the wealth.  There is a hard core social Calvinism baked into their view of the world.  They are a deserving elite, and the rest of us are an unfortunate and unnecessary problem.  At the end of the last Gilded Age workers were able to balance the political and economic policies a little because that economy need workers.  This one doesn’t.  It doesn’t take a factory or an office full of workers to write a Credit Default Swap.  Labor is not going to be the balancing force this time.  What could play that role is an open question.  The wealthiest among us do not seem to fear even the collapse of the environment.  It seems they have made a bet that a few will be able to survive with unlimited wealth and technology – that their children will live and ours won’t. 

                The rise of Trump and the one percenters marks the beginning of a new political and economic era. The old idea of politics and government will not be adequate to answer this challenge.  What Trump has done is to make the consequences clearer than they would have been under a normal political regime.  Under Trump, there isn’t even the pretense any more that this is business as usual. They are betting that we won’t rise up, that the phony left/right or conservative/liberal dichotomies will prevent us from resisting..  I think it’s time to call that bet.

                

Epistemology #5

Paradox and Wisdom

                Human intelligence is built around the paradox that Maturana and Fell attribute to our biology.  We are always already connected and autonomous.  What we ‘know’ is never just what we experience as individuals (including the intelligence of our bodies), and it is never simply a cultural reaction.  We are constantly balancing the two.  Epistemology has traditionally focused on the autonomous side of the equation, but intelligence is always a product of both of these realities.  In that sense, paradox is a constant feature of human thought.

                Paradox has played a pivotal role in a lot of traditions.  It was central to early Greek thought, and can be found in both early Daoist teaching and later Zen kaons.  In Christianity the Trinity presents a paradox that most current Christians just skip over.  Even modern physics revolves around the paradox that both quantum mechanics and relativity are both ‘true’ but incompatible.  As Heisenberg famously said about that paradox. “the opposite of a small truth is false, but the opposite of a great truth is also true.”  Some have argued that poetry revolves around the paradox of ambiguity and the vatic implications of that kind of interpretation.  Keats once called that ‘negative capability,’ the ability to hold two opposite and competing ideas at once.  It is obvious that paradox has been a constant in human thought and language.

                The same might not apply to machine intelligence.  The algorithmic view of the world revolves not around paradox but simulation.  Algorithms work because they can run variable simulations of the same conditions to determine what is or is not likely to occur.  Every video game player understands that she has to ‘die’ a few times to reach the next level.  Simulation optimizes some options over others to provide a ‘right’ or ‘best’ option.  One of the great advantages of machine intelligence is that by using simulation it can find patterns that human calculation is too slow to uncover.  Computer programs can roll millions of dice to reveal an intricate pattern that no one roll or limited set of rolls can replicate.  In doing so, however, simulation renders any particular moment, including this one, insignificant.  I can ‘die’ as many times as I need to in a video game to get to the next level, but that’s not an option for me in daily live.  Here, I only get one chance.  One of the axioms of chaos theory is that the next roll of the dice or the shape of the next vortex in a tub of water when the plug is pulled is unpredictable.  That doesn’t mean it’s entirely random – it will fall within a range of limited options, but it’s exact shape is unknowable until you pull the plug.

                The difference between paradox and simulation defines the role of wisdom.  As cyborgs we live with both.  We have greatly benefited from the introduction of super fast simulation made possible by machine intelligence.  At the same time, the biological couplings that sustain us as organisms are continually presenting us with paradox.  We might be able to simulate many actions, but we can only take one.  When we take that one action, it is indeterminable how it will turn out in the moment.  We can know how it will turn out 99 times out of 100, but we can’t know about this time in advance.  I think that paradox is connected to wisdom because we have to make – and feel – the choice in the moment.  Paradox creates a pause – a mindfulness if you will – that deepens and enriches the moment we are in.  An epistemology for cyborgs has to entertain the possibilities of simulation without neglecting the need for wisdom.  That is, cyborgs have to possibility in both terms and develop an intelligence that uses both without confusing them.

               

Epistemology #4

Blindness, Authority and the Postmodern Dodge

                When it comes to the limitations of human intelligence, blindness is one the first and most important limitations we face.  The concept of blindness is captured in a lot of different ways.  It is central to the idea in quantum physics that there is a limit to what one measurement can tell.  In interpersonal communication classes it is part of the Johari window exercise designed to show students that there is always a part of themselves that they are not aware of when communicating with others.  The idea of a quadrant of blindness is also found in Ken Wilbur’s work on consciousness.  Maturana frames it in his axiom that everything that is said is said by an observer.  For Maturana there is no Objectivity that is the same for each observer.  Instead, he says that each of us have an (o)bectivity that we can only confirm as real and not delusional by sharing it with other (o)bjectivities.

                Blindness means that epistemology has to have a dialogical or relational metric to it.  No individual can, independent of others, produce a true statement.  Further, every ‘true’ statement is only true in the context of the connected whole.  The true can be wrong or threaten the structural coupling of the group to its environment, but it is still true.  The Western tradition of individual consciousness misses the role that shared observation, as Maturana would have it, plays in defining what is knowable.  In that sense, blindness never really is resolved, it just shifts to a cultural context that either confirms or denies what the individual thinks is real.

                In societies with a strong imagined order, blindness is counterbalanced by authority.  The individuals or institutions that hold authority can make it seem that what is known within that system is valid and complete.  The sanctioned view may – or may not – be accurate, which is one way that authority can be at risk.  But most of the time the authority sustained by the imagined order prevails.  Unless there is a disruption in the order – or a Foucault shows up – individual blindness is occluded by cultural blindness.

                One of the interesting things about this moment is that the imagined order and cultural authority are in disarray.  The intersection of cultural perspectives makes it impossible to take any one perspective as authoritative.  Some commentators blame this on what they call postmodernism (which in most cases is just short-hand for cultural relativism), but it seems highly unlikely that a group of geeky English and philosophy post-docs at a poorly attended conference in some major city had any impact on any of this.  What is really happening is that postmodernism (at least this version of it) is simply describing what is actually happening.  The authority generated in the long running narrative of what the West has called modernity is unravelling.  The election of 2016 is proof of that.  In those circumstances, with no real authority to counter it, individual blindness emerges and is fueled by the unsanctioned communication of the internet.

                A responsible epistemology has to return the concept of blindness to the individual.  In the absence of an imagined order that is sustainable with our biological couplings, the individual who knows is responsible, morally and ethically, for the act of knowing.  That is, the multiple (o)bjectives around us are also our responsibility.  Knowing, as Maturana says, is not trivial.  This epistemology must also navigate a new form of blindness, machine intelligence.  Not everything possible in a simulation or algorithm can be reconciled with the biological couplings of humans.  Not everything that can be simulated is human.

                We have an opportunity to see what blindness can teach us that was always prevented by the intrusion of the church, the state, and the school.   Blindness increases our connections to others and the planet when we act knowing that only in connection can we act wisely.