They Hang Traitors, Don’t They?

                In the aftermath of the plundering of the American economy by the GOP and their rich donors, it can be hard to understand what really has happened in the eleven months of Trump’s reign.  So much that we had just assumed was part of the bedrock of our politics and our culture has been eroded or destroyed.  This week they finally found a way to kill off the ACA and start the process that will strip health insurance from millions – which is a wonky way of saying they just decided to kill thousands of people they were elected to represent.  It feels like watching a group of thugs in suits trash the neighbor girl’s lemonade stand, kick her in the teeth, and then, realizing they might have left a dime on the sidewalk, going back to take the dime and kick her again.   The spectacle of rich, old, white senators writing tax breaks for each other while kicking two million kids off health care makes the Grinch look like an amateur.

                As disgusting as this display was, the even more damaging news was that the Right has decided to defend Trump’s ties to Russia by attacking the special counsel.  What worries me is not the issue of collusion – which is pretty clear by now – or even the failure of congress to do one thing to stop Russian intrusion into our elections: what worries me is treason.  Trump has taken actions against NATO, the UN and climate change that have damaged American interests around the world.  Moving our embassy to Jerusalem just gave Russia the upper hand in any future political activity in the Middle East.  This is not just a matter of being incompetent – although he surely is that – it is a direct action that weakens American interests while aiding the interests of a hostile power.  Isn’t that treason?  Trump owes Putin and the Russian oligarchs (otherwise known as the Russian mob) billions for propping up his failing real estate empire.  Now he is paving the way for Russia to dominate world politics by dismantling the American government.

                He has destroyed the State Department, politicized and attacked the FBI, CIA and EPA.  He has nominated people for federal judgeships that have never tried a case.  His pathological lying has opened the door on a politics of deception that threatens the very notion of democracy.  He is still in violation of the constitution every day he doesn’t put his business interests in a blind trust.  I think we’ve just grown numb to the onslaught.  Every day is a new low.  Every news cycle brings an even more disastrous and unbelievable transgression.  We need something to focus our intention in a way that cuts through the noise and the chaos.  TREASON should do it.  Let’s stop talking about the normal political process or anybody’s legislative agenda.  This is basic.  You have to be an American or a traitor.  No more phony umbrage over NFL protests or hollow praising of the troops.  This is a moment to save your country or be part of the mob that aids and abets a traitor.

                Trump and Putin are the prototypes of a new form of post-nationalist power.  They represent the unfettered and unregulated use of wealth outside the structure of nation states.  They need a world of weakened states to allow their form of kleptocracy to flourish.  Trump, Putin and the GOP are in business of unshackling a new class of global robber barrens intent on destroying the environment and controlling the world’s economy.  To do that they are willing to make America a second- rate power and put the safety and health of its citizens at risk.  The interests of America are the interests of its people and not the interests of a craven class of political and economic opportunists.  The ‘tax’ bill they passed this week without even knowing what was in it, was a big step toward a new world disorder.

                This is the greatest existential threat to democracy since the Civil War.  This makes Benedict Arnold look like a clownish frat boy.  It’s time to tell the MAGA crowd that we’re the real patriots.  We believe in the good things that America can still become.  They are the enemy.  Their leader is guilty of treason.  To support him is to share his guilt.  I don’t just want an impeachment, I want a hanging

It’s Come to This

                The Republican Party is on the verge of doing what seemed impossible only a year ago.  They are about to pass legislation that will officially make this country a kleptocracy like Russia.  The new tax bill isn’t just a bad bill, it is the pretext for a new round of government austerity that will make it inevitable to cut social security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, health care and infrastructure.  It will mark the point at which we stopped being a functional democracy and started evolving into a caste system where there are one set of rights for the elites and quite another set of rights for everyone else.  We’re on our way to the same predicament as the folks in Puerto Rico who live in colony that the elites have abandoned and left for dead.

                All of this is brought to you by a party that will openly run a pedophile for the senate and refuse to question the sanity of a man who is quite obviously mentally unstable.  We have reached the point where 30 -35% of the people will now tell the vast majority of their fellow citizens that alternative or oppositional views no longer matter.  We are in the middle of an occupation that will only end when we end it.  The midterms and the 2020 elections are the last chance to stop this short of revolution.  The time to equivocate over candidates is over.  We have to form a coalition – hopefully it will be as diverse as the slate of candidates elected this year – regardless of the candidates to not just drive the Republicans out of office but to drive them to extinction. 

                It is time to call the Trump administration guilty of treason, of selling out America for their own economic connections to Russia.  It is time to demand that Trump be removed from office and treated as the very sick and dangerous man he is.  It is time to hold him accountable for the sexual assault he bragged about committing and to call out the racist supporters of this administration.  It is time to tell the Christian Right that it is impossible to consider them Christians at all anymore.  What good is the idea of Heaven if when you get there you find Roy Moore and Donald Trump?

                This was legislation written up as it was passed.  No one could even know what was in it or what the possible ramifications of the bill would be.  All they knew was that their ‘donors’ told them to do it.  There were no hearings, no scoring of the bill, no debate and no compromise.  The Republican party is not an American political party.  An American political party realizes that the people who disagree with them still have rights.  Usually we talk about this as protecting the right of the minority, but in this case, it’s the rights of the majority that are being ignored.  Nothing in this bill is supported by the majority of the citizens.  The Republicans continue their use of phony data, their lies about what the bill would really do, and they are depending on a president too stupid to know the difference to sign it into law.

                The framers of the constitution never imagined a political party that cared so little about the republic or the people in it.  The Republicans have become the thing they most wanted to avoid: a class of political hacks who would sell the country for their own economic gain.  It’s time to vote them out or it's time to revolt.  Resistance alone isn’t enough anymore.  This era is over – get out of the way if you can’t lend a hand in making a new order.  

Flaked Out

                Arizona senator, Jeff Flake, became the most recent Republican to publicly break ranks with Trump.  He gave a couple interviews followed by a cliché ridden and overly dramatic speech on the floor of the Senate saying it was time to say enough.  Then he went off and voted to cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations while raising them on the poor and middle class.  I guess decency has its limits.  The hypocrisy of Flake’s actions captures the fate of the Republican party.  Flake is a reliable vote for the Trump agenda.  He occasionally has a reflective moment that makes him criticize the way Trump and his ilk have abandoned all pretense of being interested in democracy or serving the people, but there is no daylight between them on critical issues.

                Flake, and others like him, make two things obvious.  First, they will never rein in, let alone get rid of, Trump.  Trump is the logical extension of a party that wondered off in to Rupert Murdoch’s fantasy camp and never found their way home.  Trump may not behave the way they think he should, but he’s their boy when it comes to driving the country back to the good old days of white supremacy and male dominance.  The reaction to the first indictments to come out of the Special Counsel say it all – silence.  Second, the problem facing the country isn’t just that we have a completely unstable and unqualified president, the problem is that he’s not alone in the way he looks at the world.

                The constitution assumes that if a tyrant ever became president that the congress would do its due diligence and remove him.  It assumes that there would never be a party so enamored with its own brand that it would put party before country.  Bad bet.  Not only have Republicans given up on following the constitution and performing their duty to govern, they have turned a blind eye to what amounts to treason.  It is more important to Paul Ryan to give his rich puppet masters a totally unneeded and undeserved tax break than it is to safeguard the country from an attack by an enemy.  Republicans are so far enmeshed in their own agenda that they have completely abandoned the notion that they have to protect the country, unless, of course, it involves another alleged misdeed by Hillary.  Instead of wanting to get to the bottom of what happened in the last election and prevent it from happening again, they sound like first-graders whining that “he did it, too.”

                Flake lives in the same fantasy world as the rest of the far right.  A world where there is no discrimination – except against white folks, of course – where people still mine and burn coal and the environment is run by God.  They are still believers in ‘supply side’ economics and are still saying that tax cuts will do more than just give the people at the top even more money to hoard.  They live in the conspiratorial echo chamber of Fox News and the more extreme fantasies of Steve Bannon.  They are not sane.  They make up whatever suits their purpose and never take responsibility.  If caught in a lie, they point their finger at someone on the other side and start screaming about what they did.  They are led by a pathological liar and malignant narcissist.  What could go wrong?

                So when Jeff Flake stands before the camera with every hair in place and his tie in a perfect Windsor knot, pardon me if I’m not impressed.  While he tries to summon something he imagines to be courage or decency, but is mere flatulence, the country is dissolving.  Until he and other Republicans join the real world and take real action to help ordinary people, address climate change, fund education or any number of obvious and critical needs, it doesn’t matter.  Maybe he made himself feel a little better.  He did nothing to help the country.  

Random Bits

1.       Trump on Korea:  One of the constant mantras Trump uses to justify his stance in Korea is that our policy there is a failure.  Actually, our policy in Korea has been a huge success.  There hasn’t been a war there for 64 years.  That’s pretty good.  Trump thinks we can stop the North from developing nuclear weapons, but that is unrealistic.  Any country that wants to pay the economic and political price to develop a weapons program can do so.  The technology, by today’s standards, isn’t that hard to come by.  Any claim America has to denying North Korea a nuclear program is undercut by Trump’s own actions.  Who in their right mind would agree to a deal with a guy who changes his mind about agreements already signed on a regular basis?  If there was a viable military option in Korea, it would have been used a long time ago.  There is no reason to talk so tough when the options are so limited.  The number thrown around is a million people would die in the first days of the conflict.  But if the North has the ability to hit not just the South but also Japan with a nuclear weapon, that number could be in the tens of millions.  Just shut up, please.

2.       Jimmy Bakker says it’s bad to make fun of God:  Jim Bakker is tired of people making fun of him and says that what they’re really making fun of is God.  Furthermore, God will punish those who laugh.  Well, if that’s the case, Jimmy better join the witness protection program.  It’s hard to imagine someone who has made more people laugh at God than Jimmy Bakker.  How many lives do these guys have?

3.       Trump on ‘Honoring’ the Military:  Trump likes to say that the people protesting at NFL games are dishonoring the military (and first responders and mom and the flag and ice cream).  First, they’re not protesting the flag, they’re protesting police violence against minorities.  Second, how can you dishonor the flag by taking advantage of the rights it represents?  Third, who is Trump to suddenly be so enamored of the military.  When he had a chance to fight for his country he declined.  Some of those deferments were legitimate, but at least the last one was a blatant bribe by his old man.  I don’t care that Trump didn’t serve, but please stop with hypocritical flag waving.

4.         Harvey:  The fallout from the Weinstein scandal continues to escalate.  Recriminations about who knew what when and revelations about other people in the industry are bound to continue.  The real story here is the women who came forward and how it might be a pivotal moment in how we see these issues.  A tangential concern for me is how these few powerful men with their abhorrent attitudes about women dominate our cultural production.  If you follow the money, only a few studios and a few powerful men control most of the entertainment industry.  That industry produces almost all our images of love, desire, sex and romance.  If men like Weinstein control those choices, the art they produce replicates their tastes.  In their hands, everything is reduced to a misogynistic and adolescent male fantasy or fetish.  Rather than exploring desire or sex in a diverse and human scale, we have the same images shoved in front of us over and over, creating a simulacrum of human desire.  Removing them not only protects the women who work in the industry, it may lead to a more diverse and fully human treatment of love and desire.

5.       Meanwhile:  We’re still talking about Trump too much and not focusing on what we might do to improve the world.  One of the regrettable by-products of some versions of American Protestantism is that the chosen can do no wrong.  Once you’re a good guy, you’re always a good guy.  The people who still support him will never change their minds.  It leaves the rest of us frustrated and tired.  Winter’s coming – it’s no time to let our guard down or stop the resistance.  Make some soup and gather your friends around the table and tell some stories or sing some songs to make it through the days ahead.

The Bully in the Pulpit 

                It’s common place to talk about presidents using the “Bully Pulpit” to drive their agenda or promote their ideology.  Now we have a president that really doesn’t have an agenda or ideology.  Now we have a president who is a common bully.  Like all bullies, he sucks all of the air out of the room and wants all attention focused on him and what terrible thing he might do next.  If you cross him, he attacks, throwing tantrums and signing more ‘executive orders’ to let us all know that he’s in charge.

                We’ve reached the point in this presidency where any hint of responsible governance is gone.  He’s like a toddler sent to his room for behaving badly who decides to tear the room apart as revenge.  The ACA or DACA, it doesn’t matter.  As long as Obama did it, he wants to destroy it.  It doesn’t matter that he is hurting real Americans with these tantrums, he just wants to lash out in anger.  It doesn’t matter to him that the states he carried and the people that voted for him will be the ones suffering the most because of his actions.  He just wants to show he’s tough.  While the people of Puerto Rico face months of danger from disease and famine, he threatens to cut off aid.  It’s an open question whether or not he even knows they are citizens.  He lies about (you really could put just about anything in this space) his tax plan helping middle class or working families while orchestrating a huge give away to himself.  None of it matters to the bully as long as the cameras roll and the attention continues.

                The cowards and traitors who run what’s left of the Republican party are afraid of the bully, too.  They pander to his whims in the hopes that he might sign some God forsaken piece of legislation they haven’t even read yet, some small trophy they can waive in front of the Koch brothers claiming to have done what daddy wanted.  They don’t care that the bully is edging us toward a conflict on the Korean peninsula that, if it turns nuclear, could kill at least 40 million people.  All they want is one last tax break for the petro- barons and a way to persecute people they don’t like.  They are willing to ignore the damage the bully does to the constitution every day.  They will do nothing to stop the bully.

                No matter how bad any of us thought it would be, it’s worse.  The magnitude of the bully’s depravity is overwhelming and all-encompassing.  Normally, we would proceed a policy or an issue at a time, but the bully doesn’t know anything about policy or issues, all he knows about is power and destruction.  He puts his own staff in the position of denying what he says because it’s so crazy.  He’s only in it for the attention he gets – and, of course, the money.  He has tapped a dark, sick spot of the American psyche and the pain is only just beginning.  He couldn’t have done this by himself, he’s to venial and stupid to have thought it through this far.  This won’t be fixed by voting for Democrats (although I encourage you to do so).  This probably won’t be fixed by politics. 

                I think we’ve come to the point where this can no longer just be patched back together with laws and policy.  I think we’ve come to the point that in order to move forward we have to reconnect with the people around us, even the ones we disagree with, even the ones we don’t like and who probably don’t like us, even the ones who voted for the bully. The bully needs to divide us.  He needs us to hate people who exercise their right of free speech to protest.  But he also benefits when we hate the people who hate the protesters.  Giving in to the anger is helping the bully win.  It is, as Springsteen sang, “gonna be a long walk home.”  We can protest and resist, but we also have to figure out just what it is we stand for.  What is the bigger narrative that makes us brothers and sisters even if we don’t agree about everything.  Purity is the enemy of solidarity.  Maybe, it’s as simple as the old line from a Dylan song, “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours.”

                

Free Speech

                We’ve all been inundated the last few days with the free speech issues connected to the latest flap over the protests in the NFL.  As the Ken Burns series on Viet Nam, which happens to be running alongside this latest Trump clown show proves, the outlines of this debate are pretty predictable.  While almost everyone agrees that players have free speech, many feel that the flag is sacrosanct.  They think that ungrateful players, black players in particular, should ‘respect’ the flag.  It never occurs to them that respecting the flag is respecting free speech, not just including controversial or unpopular speech but particularly respecting controversial and unpopular speech.  The idea that they shouldn’t ‘politicize’ a sporting event because it ‘isn’t the right time or place,’ simply ignores the value of protest.

                Free speech is meant to be uncomfortable.  Trump and the people who agree with him want to make this about veterans and police officers, as if they are the only ones represented by the flag.  The rights the flag is supposed to represent belong to everyone, there is no special restriction on them that bars everyone from appropriating them however they see fit.  The players aren’t the ones politicizing football.  Playing the anthem at all is politicizing the game – there is nothing that mandates this.  If you don’t want sports to be political, then keep the flag and the anthem out of it.  Once it’s been introduced, no single point of view has the right to restrict how that symbol is used and interpreted.  (By the way, holding the flag horizontal over the field is desecrating the flag, too.)  The NFL is selling, and is getting reimbursed for, a cheesy version of patriotism that, just like the ‘love it or leave it’ crowd during the Viet Nam era, assumes that there is some righteous elite that own what this democracy represents.  The ‘shield’ is being used to recruit volunteers into the military which, again like Viet Nam, is engaged in ongoing conflicts of dubious merit.

                Colin Kaepernick’s protest started as a response to racism.  He wasn’t disrespecting veterans or cops.  Trump made it about him and diverted or attention away from the main issue.  If it’s ok for country singers and Milo Yiannopoulos can wear flag clothing (another violation of the 1926 code for displaying the flag) why can’t football players kneel for the anthem?   This becomes an argument about who owns America.  The answer is that we all do.  It isn’t supposed to be a monolithic thing.  It’s supposed to be a dynamic and evolving ideal.  You shouldn’t have to agree with what a protester is saying to appreciate the protest.  Like all honest protesters, he has paid the price for his gesture. 

                Democracies have to value free speech.  They have to value the dissenting voices, because they mark the areas of concern and disagreement that have to be resolved.  Increasingly, we have become a nation of people that can’t or won’t even listen to a dissenting opinion.  This is true on the right and the left, although in different ways.  Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than college campuses.  Colleges should value a diversity of opinions, even if it makes some students ‘uncomfortable.’  Their discomfort should be addressed, but not at the expense of silencing other points of view.  College should be a physically safe environment but not an intellectually safe environment.  That is hard to do, but rigid codes of behavior will not bring people together.  On the other hand, it puzzles me why someone like Yiannopoulos should speak on a college campus at all, not because of his politics but because of his lack of any semblance of intellectual rigor or honesty.  College isn’t just about expressing any opinion but about the thoughtful and rigorous exchange of opinions.  Name calling just doesn’t fit the bill.  He should be allowed to speak, but it’s hard to see why a college campus should host him.

                As someone who lived through the Viet Nam era on a college campus, it’s distressing to see how little has changed.  It’s distressing to see people shout at each other in more and more combative and shrill tones.  It’s appalling to see a President call a citizen an SOB because of his political views.  Trump can’t help himself.  It’s doubtful he’s even read the Constitution, but we should.  We have a lot to talk about, a lot to work through.  If a football player kneeling for the anthem is too much for us to bear, what are we going to do about the real tough things to come.  As that old civil rights anthem advised, ‘keep your eyes on the prize.’

The End of Vocationalism

                For decades now American education has been vocationalized in delivery and in content.  We have so imbedded the notion that education leads to work that questioning that assumption is almost heretical.  Students arrive on campus with program guides touting the quickest route through the maze of college to reach their career goals.  Eighth graders put together career portfolios talking about what they might become.  There are a lot of reasons to object to this trend.  The idea of a ‘well rounded’ person or a general education are usually trotted out as reasons to resist.  Sometimes the objections mention ‘soft’ or ‘integrated’ skills beyond career concerns.  Occasionally – but only occasionally – citizenship as a goal of a full education is offered as some buffer to the constant drumbeat of vocational education.  Even liberal arts colleges defend their existence by claiming that their graduates do better in professional programs and careers.

                There is, however, a more compelling reason to challenge the dogma that school leads to work: the end of work.  We are at the very early stages of a sea change in the way ‘work’ is thought of and performed in our society.  Automation and computers have already changed manual labor, and AI is about to send all of that into hyperdrive.  Some estimates are that in as little as 10 to 20 years 50% of the jobs in the economy will be eliminated.  Eliminated – not replaced by newer high tech, high paying jobs.  Eliminated.  If our experience with the digital revolution so far tells us anything, it’s that those estimates are too low and too slow.  The already frayed and problematic narrative of education leading to work is about to become an unsustainable fairy tale.  Children entering the public schools today are being introduced to a curriculum that, when they complete it, amounts to a long walk off a short pier. 

                It may be that no culture can prepare for such a profound transition.  Certainly, the banking families of Florence weren’t waiting in the wings with the monetary and constitutional programs that brought forth the Renaissance – they just reacted.  Maybe that’s all we can do.  But if there is something we can do to pile up sandbags before the flood, it must start with separating education and work.  Maybe if we can pull our collective heads out our text book and testing industry asses for a minute, we might find a better thing to do than prepare children for a future that will never come.  The questions they will have to answer aren’t on a bubble answer sheet.

                The next generation of students will have to think about climate and sustainability, including a sustainable level of human habitation.  They will have to wrestle with not just the potential and possibilities but the very real threat of AI.  Those questions will run through the so-called STEM curriculum, but they can’t be solved there.  There isn’t a single significant question facing that generation that won’t require ethics and values that must come from outside the technical and scientific realm.  The algorithms of AI and not human technicians are going to control the STEM world anyway.  What they are going to have to do is create a narrative of their place in the world that doesn’t end up sounding like “A Modest Proposal.” 

                The Fordist/Taylorist schools that served Modernity are not constructed to help students through the cultural transition is front of us.  It makes no sense to teach them to work in factories and businesses that won’t exist in their world.  They are going to have to be more divergent thinkers, more imaginative and more creative.  We can’t solve the problems they are going to face – we could at least get out of the way.

#14  Expertise 

Expertise without Authority

                In the aftermath of the last election there have been countless attempts to figure out why people would believe anything a serial liar would say.  The political parties, the media and the schools have all been widely condemned for their role in bringing us to this moment where ‘alternative facts’ rule the day.  It’s pretty easy to see that we face a crisis of cultural synthesis.  We no longer have a unified story about what is real.  What I think is trickier is trying to find a way to talk about it without simply reconstructing the bad old days on institutional control.

                Modernity pushed aside the authority of the church and the crown to create a new authority in rational and scientific expertise.  In modernity, the answers were validated by the process used to develop them and by the credentials of the people who executed the process.  One of the great inventions of Modernity was the intellectual who became an expert.  Experts were ‘objective’ and gained their authority by operating in discourse communities that critiqued and reviewed their work.  The problem we face is that those discourse communities turned out not to always be so ‘objective.’  It drives scientists crazy when postmodernist point out that science is just another word game.  But as the feminist scientists have aptly pointed out, it makes a difference who’s question is driving the research.  There have been enough ethical red flags about funding and research to make it hard to have complete faith in the way science is ‘practiced.’

                I think it is important to try and sort out what is legitimate in this critique and what is problematic.  Science is a word (or numbers) game, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily illegitimate.  The process that scientists use is generally robust and valid.  People who say, for instance, that climate scientists or evolutionary biologists all just go along with the crowd have never watched them in action or gone through the process of trying to publish an article.  The built in incentive is to rebut and not to confirm the dominant paradigm.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t occasional fraud or that results aren’t sometimes interpreted to benefit a funding source.   While scientists are dismissive of their critics, there are two ways that science is vulnerable to criticism.

                The first is that science is more provisional than it is usually presented to be.  Results have to be replicated and methods are always being tweaked and challenged.  I think the people who work in it everyday take that for granted, and it gets communicated to the public as more absolute than it should be.  “Hot fudge cures the common cold.”   Perhaps Toulmin was on to something in Cosmopolis when he pointed out that in the process of having science replace the authority of religion it adopted some of its rhetorical moves.  It seems to me, that this vulnerability could be addressed by better science education and more contact between science and people instead of the isolation of labs funded by companies.

                The second area of vulnerability is closer to the ruse of Modernity: not everything that calls itself a science is a science.  Bruno Latour has been the most relentless proponent of this critique, calling into question how the process of the physical science ‘travels’ to the social domain.  From a slightly different angle, Stiegler has cast doubt on the model of ‘knowledge’ made by ‘experts’ without input or prox[BA1] imity to the site and the people impacted by it.  Taken together, these critiques cast doubt on the Enlightenment ideals of Modernity.  It turns out that emotion and ‘affect,’ in Massumi’s terms, are as least as important as ‘reason’ when it comes to creating an expertise that helps us live well.

                As the looming impact of combining computers and automation with AI threatens to end work as we’ve known it, this issue of expertise becomes more complex.  There will always be the expertise that youtube videos showing you how to fix your brakes contain, but how will the larger sense of expertise survive the demise of the institutions of Modernity?  How will we educate people to recognize and value expertise without the authority of institutions.  Some critics have blamed postmodernism for the demise of expertise and the rise of what one author calls ‘fantasyland.’  While I think most postmodernists would just be happy that someone knows they exist, it seems to me these critics have it backward.  Postmodernism is descriptive and not prescriptive.  The unravelling of Modernity was going to happen even if French theorists never emerged.  Besides, who wants to return to a ‘unified’ view of the world enforced by torture and death?

                We may not have chosen this path, but it’s the path we’re on.  Expertise will be vital to the way we handle this transition.  Flashing an Ivy League degree or a government position won’t be enough to create it.  We have a long project ahead of us that will require completely reinventing our ideas about learning and schooling.  It may be that wisdom will finally come to the West, or it may just mean that we struggle through this long dark transition without much direction.

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 [BA1]

Welcome to the Persistence

                In the age of Trump, signs of resistance are all around us.  We are all being encouraged to resist the most unqualified and undemocratic presidency in our history.  Resistance is a good thing, but it’s not enough.  Trump was the end of a seven- decade cycle of American political and social history.  His victory wasn’t a momentary step back or unfortunate but temporary aberration.  Trump’s election means that the parts of American culture that have always been there – the racism, misogyny, religious intolerance and anti-intellectualism – have once again surged to the surface.  They will not go back into the same container they were in before.  Resistance is great – even healthy, but it won’t rebuild the village.

                While we need to continue to stand up to what Trump does and stands for, we also need to prepare for a new reality and a new social covenant.  So, while resistance feels good, it’s persistence that will eventually bring us into a new social narrative.  We should and must protest, but it’s more important to start building.  This is the time take the institutions of modernity apart and reconstruct them for a new era.  Our politics, our schools and our government are broken, intended to serve a different time and place, and even when Trump goes, they will still be broken.  Trump will eventually destroy himself; he’s too venial and stupid not to.  He will cause massive damage in the process, but much of that damage will be to institutions and practices that were already in decay. 

                It’s easy to band together to oppose something, especially something as odious as Trump.  It’s going to be much harder to band together to be for something.  I see little evidence that what is loosely called the ‘left’ of American politics has learned how to build alliances.  There are signs of what alliances might form: around the pipeline protests, for instance, but ‘causes’ still seem to be more singular than they are collective.  What are the principles of an inclusive and integrative democracy in this century?  It’s unlikely they will be the same as the romanticized oligarchy we started with or even the post war class politics that defined the end of the last century.  The great energy conglomerates that dominated the economy for the last century and a half are in decline.  The energy of the future doesn’t look like it will be so easily monopolized.  Manufacturing is already a different animal than the large centralized smokestack industries that dominated the Midwest.  Work, the rallying cry of the labor movement and much of liberal politics since WWII, is going to undergo perhaps the biggest change since the shift to agriculture as automation and AI combine to eliminate people from the work force.  All of these things are going to impact the economy in a manner at least as significant as the Black Plague did in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. 

                Trump is serious and dangerous, but he’s really just a distraction to what is coming next.  This may very well be the most significant shift in human existence, period – one we may not survive.  Everything is on the table; nothing can be assumed to be safe or beyond radical change.  Not much of what we have learned has prepared us for what’s next.  The elites from the ‘best’ schools are probably the last people to listen to right now.  Their knowledge is tied to this ‘imagined order,’ and they aren’t likely to be the first people to see the new shape of things.  This is going to be hard.  This is going to cause massive dislocation.  It will not be pretty any more than the Renaissance was.  We will have to learn to persist.  We will fail monumentally.  There will be several shifts and phases before there is any clarity.  If you want to live in a just and inclusive society, prepare to define it and fight for it.  This is no time for alarm or pessimism.  We must persist.

                The next time you turn on your tablet or television only to be slapped in the face by more of the spectacularly stupid and hurtful things that Trump does, remember he’s just a side show.  He and the people that voted for him are here because they weren’t ready to move forward.  By all means resist, but prepare for more.  Learn to talk to your neighbors.  Learn to build alliances.  Learn to imagine.  This is the time embrace the uncertainty and love the possibility.  Think big – and hold on.

# 13  Play

Lavoisier goes to Kindergarten

                Lavoisier is widely considered to be the ‘father’ of modern chemistry.  One of signature accomplishments that contributed to this acclaim is his building of the laboratory at the Arsenal and his use of increasingly precise and precisely recorded measurements.  In other words, he made chemistry more ‘scientific.’  It would be hard to argue that chemistry and physics didn’t benefit from this development.  It’s a little less clear that fields like psychology have really been able to use the method as productively.  One of the problems with the way Lavoisier’s methods ‘travel’ to other disciplines is the linguistic slippage between terms like oxygen and terms like knowledge and stress.  One is a much more finite and reliable signifier than the other.  Can we really ‘measure’ something that only has a signifier and no real signified?

                We’ll let the Psychologists fight over that one as they divide into more and more subdivisions of their discipline at their next convention.  In Epistemology the problem of measurement is grounded in the inability to define what it means to know something or what it means to be intelligent.  We simply don’t know what it means to say we know something or that someone is intelligent.  At first blush, that seems crazy.  There have never been more, and more precise, instruments of measurement that claim to measure ‘intelligence.’  The problem is that there is no concrete way to define intelligence or knowledge outside of the cultural and linguistic bounds that give rise to the term.  All we’ve really done in public education in America is to find a way -decades and billions of dollars later – to find a series of measurements that confirm rich people’s kids are ‘smarter’ than poor people’s kids.

                We’ve brought Lavoisier into Kindergarten with disastrous effect.  In the name of more ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ treatment of ‘data,’ we have locked in on a limited and instrumentalist definition of knowledge that is profoundly biased by socio-economic factors.  We start ‘testing’ kids years before there is any developmental stability to the results and base their education on instruments that in some cases are so flawed that they do little more, in the words of one critic, than ‘turn nonsense into data.’  We do not’ know’ or ‘learn’ the same things in the same way.  We are not an experiment, and we cannot define knowledge the same way in every culture or circumstance.  Sure, there are some things that we can agree are facts and might even agree that everyone should learn those facts or be able to execute the functions that produce them.  That is not, however, the same thing as being able to say that mastery of those things is ‘intelligence,’ or even that the people who mark the right bubble ‘know’ those things.

                In the drive to make education more scientific we have squeezed out play.  We have restricted recess and replaced it with more testing.  We have limited the role that creativity and imagination play for both students and teachers.  We are producing a second generation of students who are more concerned with answers than they are thought and invention.  All of that might be tolerable if we lived in a time where traditional knowledge was adequate, but we don’t.  We are preparing exactly the wrong kind of students with the wrong kind of intelligence for the world we live in.  As Hutchins says in Cognition in the Wild, intelligence is a cultural variable that is only valuable if it solves that culture’s problems.  The genius of the next generation isn’t going to get the highest score on the test; they are going to be able to imagine and tell a new story. 

                Play, like paradox, has always played a role in wisdom traditions.  There are no stock answers to questions that haven’t been formulated yet.  Piaget once remarked that you can tell how bad schools are because they routinely take five- year- old kids who want nothing more than to go to school and turn them in eighteen- year- old students who want nothing more than to stop going.  The fact is that we really don’t know what intelligence is or what it really means to ‘know’ something.   We have a very clear idea about what the cooperate interests that are increasingly in control of our educational system value, but really no idea at all about the ‘intelligence’ that is required to live in today’s world.  School is probably exactly the wrong place to go to nurture and develop that intelligence.

                

10 Things to talk about besides Trump

                I said before that I think we need to spend more time talking about how we change and rebuild than we do focusing on Trump.  Well, here are ten suggestions, in reverse order of importance, that I think are more important and that I would like to work on and talk about.  I’m sure you have your own list.

10.  Free College and Millennial Debt:  We’ve reached the point that a college education should be free.  If people want to tie that to a couple years of national service in some variety of efforts (not all military), that is fine with me.  But we need to get to the point where we help students of all ages transition through the education they need and that we need them to have to be functioning members of a democratic country.  Along with that we should start excusing the debt Millennials have had to take on to get a degree.  As a generation, they got slammed by the rise in tuition brought on by shrinking public dollars in education and a job market that left them few options.  If this economy is going to recover, it has to free the economic power of Millennials from the mountain of debt that is holding them back.

9.  Infrastructure:  This one is too obvious, but it can’t just be infrastructure in the traditional sense.  Sure, we need roads and bridges and airports, but we also need new means of transportation and broad band access everywhere.  We are, at best, a mid-twentieth century power in infrastructure.

8.  Education:  Our education system has become a market for textbook and testing companies at the expense of our students.  We need to rethink schools from the bottom up following some epistemological principle that doesn’t begin and end in a test.  We need to stop the war on teachers and invite them back into the conversation.  Right now, our education merely replicates the socio-economic status of the parents.  We are not preparing our children to think about and inhabit the world that awaits.

7. Multi-Party System:  Our political system is broken.  In order to fix it, we need to find a way to give more people a voice.  Two parties won’t do that, especially when one of them is radically undemocratic.  We need to start transitioning to a multi-party system of government, one more flexible and more responsive to the people.

6.  Guns:  We are the only country in the world that has this problem.  We need to find a way to talk the gun people back off the ledge that the NRA has falsely constructed.  We have to find a way to reduce gun violence.  This is a tough conversation to even get started, but it will only happen in a face to face dialog.

5.  Energy Shift:  We are in the middle of the shift from oil to natural gas, with the beginnings of the shift from natural gas to renewables already underway.  The shift is more economic than it is environmental at this point.  Trump can no more resurrect coal than he can stop automation.  We need to accelerate  these shifts – including phasing out plastic in all but the most essential areas.  It might also finally silence the Koch brothers.

4.  Economic Inequality:  Democracy is not possible with the distribution of wealth that exists and is getting worse.  Unless we are willing to change laws and regulate the financial industry, we will cease to be a democratic nation.  We already aren’t really even capitalistic any more.  Our economy is more monetarist that capitalist.  More of our decisions have to reflect the real interests of the majority.

3.  AI and Work:   I’m tempted to put this first, because it’s the monster lurking under the bed.  Automation has already permanently altered manufacturing, but when you combine it with AI and move it into the rest of the economy, the impact will be devastating.  Whole areas of ‘work’ will disappear, and not in the old sense of new jobs sprouting up in new places, they will just disappear.  Some estimates are that 50% of the existing jobs will be gone in 10-20 years.  Some say that’s conservative.  When I was a kid, ‘utopia’ was always work free.  Now that we may almost be there, that future looks anything but ‘utopian.’

2.  Single-Payer Health Care:  This has to stop.  The rest of the industrialized world has figured this one out.  It’s not hard.  It’s not that complicated.

1.  Climate:  In many ways this is obvious.  The less obvious part of it is that this isn’t going to happen without a cultural reckoning with fundamentalist Christianity.  As with so many of the items on this list, the problem either exists or is exacerbated by a form of Christianity that is opposed to change – and in many ways opposed to the things we always thought were ‘Christian.’  

                The cultural shift we’re a part of has a lot of moving parts.  What connects all of them is that the underlying narrative has gone bad.  We need a new story.  That story should minimally account for what is listed here.  I’m sure I’ve left out important issues or phrased things the wrong way – so be it.  Make your own list.  Tell the next person who wants your vote or your money to answer to it.  

#12  Joy

                If we ground our thinking in our lives and our bodies, what would be the outcome?  What state of consciousness would we be able to attain?  My answer to that is Joy.

                Before explaining that I first want to make it clear that I’m not talking about the kind of joy that most people would conjure up at the mention of that word.  We’ve created this Christian view of joy that is the absence of pain or suffering or anything we might consider negative.  We’ve created, to steal a line from Corso, a “cotton candy heaven of the poor” version of joy.  This kind of joy melts away at the first sign of trouble or rough weather.  It is a version of joy driven by desire, one that serves our ego’s need for a pure and perfect happiness.  It’s an illusion.

                The kind of joy I’m trying to write about isn’t the absence of suffering and pain but the assimilation and resolution of suffering and pain.  Joy arises not because we desire it, but because we have stopped desiring it.  It doesn’t come from resisting ‘bad’ things, but from avoiding labeling things as either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’   Being able to attain a state of Joy doesn’t mean I am happy, it means that I’ve stopped trying to be happy.  Joy is empty; it is the result of no longer focusing on my emotional connection to events.

                Joy allows us to be fully present and not distracted by the trajectory of events we hope will happen.  Like Zen landscape artists, we are looking at all the possible unfoldings of existence, not just the ones that are central to the moment or confirmed by others.  It seems to me that real knowing must somehow and eventually get to this state.  We have to get out of the many entanglements of the body and the mind to ‘know’ what it means to exist.  Joy is the other side of enlightenment and wisdom, a lightness of being that releases us from the greedy needs of the ego.

                Epistemology is not knowledge about an exterior or objective world. Epistemology is more essentially about knowing ourselves and the limits of what that self can know.  Joy is, to me, the ability to face that limit and that potential without flinching.  

Trump and the Greedy Algorithm   

                In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, Aura, he uses the mathematical construct of the greedy algorithm, an algorithm that always points to the simple, right answer, as a way of framing what happens in a society or civilization when the questions that dominate our attention keep producing obvious but useless answers.  What happens is that the deep and important questions are never able to break through the veil of the greedy algorithm and attract the attention they deserve.

                I think we should think of the failed presidency of Donald J. Trump as a greedy algorithm, one that rivets our attention on the cascading decline of his presidency and makes it almost impossible to focus on what is important.  Every news cycle is held captive to the horrific narrative unfolding around this president.  There is no way to know what new low or new threat will greet us tomorrow morning.  It is almost impossible not to watch.  Add in the spectacle of Republican legislators making up health care bills as they vote on them with no deliberation and no sense of what the impact or consequences might be, and there is enough political drama to draw our attention away from what we should be thinking about.  Regardless of what happens to Trump and the Republicans, the only way out of this collapse of the American political system is to turn away from the carnage and focus on what we have to build to combat and replace this.

                I think we should only pay attention to Trump one day a week – let’s say Tuesday.  Every Tuesday we’re allowed wall to wall coverage of Trumpland – like washing down a sugar sandwich with a coke.  One day, that’s it.  After that we have to get back to work.  After that we have to say what should we build to replace what we used to think of as an indestructible political reality.  The world we used to live in is gone.   We can’t go back, and moving forward is going to require us to turn off the nonsense and build a new political alliance.  We should pay due diligence to the legal and political process that will try to contain the damage, but just cheering for the good guys and carrying signs in the streets won’t build a new politics.

                We have become a fractured resistance.  There are more of us than there are of them, but we have lost the knack of making broad alliances that can carry us back into some control over our own lives.  Our allies are not going to agree with us on everything.  They are not going to pass increasingly restrictive litmus tests of purity.  We need to respect our differences and argue for our place in the society, but first we need to build a society that makes that possible.  More than anything else we have to find a way to correct the imbalance in wealth that is killing any prospect of democracy.

                But we must do more.  We must plan for a new economy, a new definition and a new system of education, an infrastructure for the 21^st century, and we must prepare for the economic and environmental changes that will come from changing the way we create, distribute and use energy.  We are going to see massive unemployment as AI continues to change work.  The system we have now has no way to absorb this fast approaching and inevitable outcome.  There was a time when the ‘end of work’ was a utopian pipe dream, but now that it is here in a very tangible way, we have no idea how to act. 

                It is problems like the end of work that make it clear that our intelligence can’t be solely focused on technology and science.  We need to ask hard social, political, ethical and philosophical questions about the new reality that science and technology are going to create.  We need art that will help us imagine what we cannot now imagine.  We are walking off the end of a long pier into the unknown, and the entrenched notions of politics and society we have grown up with will not help us when we take that last step into something new.

                We can’t start any of this focusing on the greedy algorithm of Trump.  He is the joke at the end of the Enlightenment.  The sad clown that modernity was always fated to produce.  If you want to create something worth handing on to your children and grandchildren, you can’t look over your shoulder as it burns.  We have to focus ahead, not with some new sense of progress, but because it’s all we can do.  We can still have Tuesdays to wallow in the mire.  We’ll meet at your place; I’ll bring the popcorn.

Shame

                Today the House Republicans passed a bill that will kill more Americans than all the “radical Islamic terrorists’ combined have managed to kill.  They passed a bill that will let babies die at birth – hard to align with that famous ‘pro-life’ stuff isn’t it – and will shorten the lives of your parents and grandparents.  It will send countless families into bankruptcy and deny women access to basic reproductive health.  If you voted Republican, or even if you voted Independent, you voted for this carnage.

                Of all the preposterous and intellectually incompetent excuses for this action, the one that galls me the most are the votes cast by Republicans who for decades have said they are guided by their Christian faith.  Is there an 11^th commandment that says we should torture the sick and the old?  Is there something in the Gospels that says that your Christ came here to make life more painful and sickening?  As much as this vote strips away any pretext of the Republican party as a moral or humane entity, the most glaring inconsistency is religious.  We should spit in the face of the next Republican evangelical who says anything about God.  There is no God in the Republican party.

                These people have acted as if they had some moral superiority granted to them because they said they were Christian.  Today they proved all of that was a lie, not that it hasn’t been obvious for a while.  This the same party that has said outrageous and inflammatory things about Islam on a routine basis, almost always revealing more about their ignorance than anything else.  They have babbled on about a ‘clash of civilization’ between Christians and Muslims, but if their actions today are any indication, Sharia law would be an improvement.

                Religion isn’t supposed to be part of our politics, but Republicans have propped up their boldfaced move toward a kleptocracy by always falling back on their ‘religious’ principles.  No other group in our politics have done more to wrap themselves in some phony cloak of moral certitude.  Today, all of that is officially a lie.  They haven’t even seen the bill.  None of them can say with any clarity or certainty what the ramifications of this repeal are or might be.  They have lied about it at every turn (there goes another commandment that we don’t need any more), and they have intentionally hurt the people they were elected to serve.

                I take no joy or feel any sense of justice in the fact that the people who follow and vote for them so blindly will be impacted the most.  I would like to think that this will wake some of them up, but I gave up hoping for that when they voted for Trump.  What country takes away protections from its citizens?  What craven band of infidels can’t see the pain and suffering this will bring?  We can organize, protest and vote them out of office, but the fact that this happened at all is deplorable.  I guess Hillary was right.

                I think it’s dangerous to brand any group or religion by the actions of a few, but today we should ask what Fox News always asks of our Muslim brothers and sisters: where are the moderate Christians?  Why won’t they stand up against this act of murder and terror?  Maybe we are in a struggle with religious extremists for the soul of the future, but those extremists are not followers of Islam.  They call themselves Christians and they identify by putting an R after their names.

               

                

Trump at 100

                Well, we’ve reached the end of 100 days of Trump, and I think we can say we’ve learned four things for sure:

1.       He’s a liar

2.       He’s stupid

3.       He’s a big, fat, compulsive liar

4.       He’s really f****** stupid.

That said: what do we do now?

                While we might fantasize about impeachment, I don’t think it is going to happen.  Even if it did, does the notion of Pence, Ryan, and McConnell running the government make you sleep any better?  I think we have to face the reality that our democracy is broken.  The courts and the intelligence agencies are holding up for now, but it’s only been a 100 days and they already look battered.  If we’re going to rebuild our democratic institutions, we have to be ready to take some radical steps.

                One of the things I think we have to work to replace is the two- party system.  One of the parties has decided that democracy isn’t as important as power and has done everything in their power to destroy the process of democracy – which is really all democracy ever is.  The Republicans have destroyed the Supreme Court’s non-political cover, turned the Senate into the House and declared war on everything that isn’t old, white, male and rich.  If the Republicans no longer believe in the system, then an oppositional party is futile.  Between gerrymandering districts and restricting the right to vote, they can continue this tyranny of the minority over the majority for the foreseeable future – which is no way to run a democracy.

                The Democrats aren’t much better.  The Clinton dynasty turned earnest Yale educated hippies into Wall Street/Davos class millionaires, selling influence wherever they could find a buyer.  Even the sainted Big O is now raking in $400.000 speaker fees after never prosecuting even one of the bankers who took us to the brink of disaster.  It’s easy to blame Citizens United for all the evils of money in politics, but the fact is that our fixation on two parties all but makes it inevitable that money will dominate.  Poor Bernie could never compete with the forces that big party politics always has lurking in the shadows.

                Rather than pinning our hopes on another compromise candidate in 2020, isn’t it time to recognize that most of us aren’t really represented by this system.  The Democratic elites will pick one their own when the time comes.  We will be regaled with stories about how they lead can drives for a girl scout troop made up of Syrian refugees who swam across the ocean to freedom – meanwhile, they’ll be selling us down the river in the board rooms of America.  Democrats talk about new generations of candidates, but they will never come as long as they have to be Ivy League grads.

                If we’re going to usher in a new era of democracy we need new democratic institutions.  We need a multi-party system that will allow the real issues people care about to be articulated and acted upon, and an environment that allows the organic leaders of those movements to rise to leadership.  BLM shouldn’t have to hope that the Democrats ‘get it.’  LGBTQ causes shouldn’t have to go to the back of the line while we litigate the ‘real’ issues of the day.  Women’s issues should have their own platform.  One big mush of a party fails everyone.  We need a vigorous debate.  We will agree on some things and disagree about others.  We will form different coalitions over different issues.  It will be messy, but it will be democratic – it will have a process.

                100 days in things look pretty bleak.  But Trump is merely the worst person a flawed system could produce.  In some fundamental ways, he isn’t that different – he’s just the sad clown at the end of the parade.

                

# 11

Machine Language

                Languaging has been the most important feature of human society for 30,000 years or so.  It has sparked what we call civilization and allowed humans to inhabit the globe.  In those 30,000 years, however, nothing has changed languaging as much as computers have changed it in the last 3 decades.  It would be fair to say that our interactions with each other and the world have never undergone such a profound change, and it has happened in the blink of an eye.  Probably nothing marks the rise of the cyborg more than the devices that we now use to navigate our world.  Everyone with a smart phone holds more information and computing power than existed in the world a mere 50 years ago.

                Who was the last person to have read everything published in their language and culture? Erasmus – maybe?  Ever since Guttenberg we have been speeding up the rate at which the meta-languaging of our culture reproduces and travels.  We have reached the point that machines can do it faster and better than the most capable humans.  The best chess master is no match for Watson, and Siri can spit out answers faster than the smartest and most well- read person you know.  Every teacher knows that if they bluff or flub an answer some student in the back row that you thought was dead or comatose just Googled the right answer and, contrary to everything you thought you knew about dead people, is raising his hand to correct you.  Calculations that used to take scientists hours and days to make are now routinely spit out of computerized instruments in seconds.

                What are we to make of the notion of knowledge or intelligence in this new context?  I think we can only make sense of these developments by realizing that we’re really talking about two very different things.  Information is not intelligence.  The purpose of human intelligence is not a more accurate description of what we take to be the external world.  Machine intelligence is not the same and does not operate on the same principles as human intelligence.  The only real danger posed by machine intelligence is to confuse it with the purposes and functions of human intelligence.  We have got to let go of the notion that our ‘brain’ is like a computer and that the more we can cram into it and the faster we can recall it the smarter we are. 

                I want to make it clear that I am not against machine intelligence – unless you want to replace humans with machines – in which case I’m with Hawking saying that is dangerous.    I think machine intelligence makes patterns and data comprehendible in ways that are both fascinating and useful.  I am not arguing against machine intelligence, I just want to draw a distinction between it and what I think are the uses and purposes of human intelligence.  In fact, I would even credit machine intelligence with bringing the West to this point of consciousness that clearly demonstrates that the Cartesian definition of knowing is hopeless.  We are no more a challenge to computers and their ability to store, recall and combine information that John Henry and his hammer were to the steam drill.  Now that we should no longer confuse information with intelligence we have a chance, at last, to ask what it means to know and to think.

                Just as we learned to stop using our bodies as machines to move and control the physical world, we have to now learn to stop using our consciousness as a machine to control and manipulate the social and material world.  The things that are lacking in the intellectual and spiritual world are not lacking because we need more data.  They are lacking because we have lost a sense of connection.  Maturana and Fell like to present the basic condition we all face as having to deal with the fact that we are always already both connected and autonomous.  We are in the world, not outside of it.  I am not saying that everything is relative and there is no reality.  I’m saying that we will never reconnect to the world through reason and science alone.  It’s easy to prove that climate change exists, but almost impossible to get someone who doesn’t already see it to agree.  We argue about facts and let larger truths and greater wisdom escape in the bargain.  Let the machines do what machines do, and let us start to figure out what it is we should do instead.

When Children Play With Cruise Missiles

                Americans love blowing things up.  When Donald Trump launched a few dozen cruise missiles into Syria, some otherwise sane commentators said he immediately became ‘presidential.’  How?  By all accounts, he decided on this course of action after seeing cable news footage of the barbaric chemical attack on children authorized by Syria and, by extension, Russia.  It wasn’t a part of a deliberate plan to seriously intervene in the humanitarian crisis there, a crisis his refugee ban makes worse everywhere in the world.  It represented a retreat from remarks he and his Secretary of State made days earlier.  In fact, the Trump administration, far from playing cowboy hero in this drama, enabled the attack on those civilians by signing off on any serious political intervention.  Trump wasn’t making a serious point; he was throwing a tantrum.

                The last thing Syria needs is more explosions.  Obama has been castigated for not blowing things up in Syria, but he may have done something that Americans have a hard time understanding.  He may have realized that there is no simple answer to the problem and until there is a consensus both globally and in this country about what should be done, the best action is to wait.  During the campaign, Gary Johnson didn’t even know where Allepo was, let alone what to do about it.  Congress denied Obama’s attempt to request for action, not that his policies for the region were all that great.  What do we think we want to do in Syria?  What outcome do we seek, and what process are we willing to follow to achieve it?  We’ve made such a mess of the region, it’s hard to see what we can do to fix it.

                Some people are happy that Trump acted against Putin.  Russia is playing a losing hand in Syria.  They are propping up a Shia dictatorship while millions of Sunnis live on their borders.  Putin is facing increasing dissent inside Russia and the likelihood of growing unrest and terrorism from the Muslim population they are repressing.  Let Putin play that hand.  Let him dig his own grave with his policy in Syria.  Of course, it will be brutal and ugly and difficult to watch, but without an international and domestic agenda that is willing to invest in the decades it will take return the prospect of a safe and productive life to the Syrian people, there is little else to do.

                The ONE thing that Trump could have done to alleviate the suffering in the region is to massively increase the role we play in settling refugees.  He has done the opposite.  He made Syrian refugees, most of them women and children and all of them products of a two- year vetting process, a pawn in his populist rants during the campaign.  He made them part of his ‘Muslim ban’ to protect us from some imaginary danger these refugees posed.  Nothing on that front has changed.  His administration is part of the Eurocentric backlash against people of the region who are part of a diaspora we created  in our quest for oil.  If he was concerned with the humanitarian crisis, the munitions of the United States Armed Forces was a curious choice to address it.

                Trump likely made things worse.  He hasn’t stopped the conventional slaughter by Syrian and Russian ground forces.  He may even have made it worse.  Like everything else he does, the fallout will be someone else’s fault.  Maybe instead of seeing his actions as ‘presidential,’ we should see them for what they really were.  The world’s most dangerous child playing with the world’s most dangerous weapons.  I hope you enjoyed the fireworks.

                

The Second Reformation

                If you’re watching the stream of events coming out the Trump administration and wondering how Republicans can tolerate Trump’s rampant disregard of political protocols and legal restraints, I bet you’re waiting for the first Republican to stand up and uphold the law.  It won’t happen.  What we’re watching is not a political party operating within the boundaries of the institutions and laws we’ve grown accustomed to; what we’re watching is a religious cult.  Like any cult, the Republicans no longer participate in the ‘real’ world, opting instead for an internally manufactured reality that pits them against the world of non-believers.  That means that the real religious wars facing us don’t involve Islam or any other religion, the real religious war on the horizon is the same one that we thought we settled in the 17^th century.  We’re in the middle of a second reformation.

                Sometimes this is very clear.  Listen to Bannon and his version of the coming apocalypse.  He openly talks about a conflict of civilization involving Islam, but the conflict goes deeper than that.  He includes secular institutions such as the government and the press as forces that must be defeated.  Like other neo-cons, he is comfortable with the idea that this conflict could be the final conflict.  They don’t flinch from including nuclear holocaust as an option.  If those of us who are appalled by Trump think that this is just a phase that Republicans are going through, one that they will surely come out of when they regain their sanity, I think we’ve missed the signs.

                Trump is merely the most extreme version in a line of spectacularly unqualified Republican presidents that started with Reagan (you have to give old man Bush a pass).  All of them appealed to a white base that felt persecuted because of their race and religion, and all of them promised to return to a ‘true’ version of America that had been debased by women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, academic egg heads and any other offending group they could imagine.  To these folks, Hillary wasn’t just a politician they disagreed with, she was a witch.  They have increasingly pursued ‘scorched earth’ policies that completely disregard the fact that at least half of the country disagrees with them.  They brush aside any attempt at compromise as weak and not worth of their God’s approval.  They see their political opponents as agents of the Devil.

                In the 17^th century Europe emerged from the Reformation using the combination of the Peace of Westphalia and the growing movement of the New Science.  People like Bacon, Newton and Locke used the New Science not just to change the way we thought of the physical world but the moral world as well.  Unfortunately, that underlying conflict, while temporarily suppressed, was never really resolved.  It often replaced one religious truth with one scientific proof, and while science and reason seemed to rule the day, a parallel set of truths was always in sight.  Today, the ‘Christian Right’ at the center of Republican politics has flipped the order.  They openly defy science and routinely make a mockery out of ‘reason.’  Their goal is to purge society of the other.  They have no interest in a sane, orderly or diverse world. 

                The consequences could be pretty ugly.  In the six months that followed some German princes saving Luther from certain death at the hands of the Roman Church and kick starting the Reformation, 500,000 people died.  Probably all of them will killed by someone they knew and thought of as their neighbor.  This is not a conflict that will be resolved by what we used to call ‘politics.’ 

                Maybe we will continue this dance edging closer to some cultural civil war and then backing away a little before edging closer again.  Maybe we can break down these barriers.  Invite a Republican over, feed them some chili dogs, play the Beach Boys and let them watch reruns of ‘Lassie’ until they come out of it.  Maybe some outside threat will drive us back together again.  Maybe UFOs will land in Times Square or we’ll find out after she dies that Queen Elizabeth was an alien.  Maybe not.  What I do know is that the alternative is no picnic.

#10

Languaging as Learning

                One of the things that I find most perplexing about the current state of knowledge in our culture is the way so little of it ‘travels’ from one part of the culture to another part of the culture.  We keep making significant breakthroughs in field after field, but we just elected a president who thinks we should mine and burn coal.  How is that possible? 

                For me, the answer has something to do with who gets to make the knowledge.  I think every group of people has to make their own knowledge.  That is, knowledge can’t simply be imported from another cultural site.  The problem with the specialized knowledges that we create is that they are made behind the curtain of professional practice.  We’ve taken great care to keep the uncertified out of the conversation.  There are good reasons for this, but the result is that the people who were excluded not only don’t understand the knowledge, they reject it.  Instead, they make their own versions of ‘common sense’ knowledge that they cling to preserve their participatory function in making their own world.  I don’t think it’s possible to simply inhabit someone else’s already constructed world.  As study after study has shown, we tend to seek out people and narratives that confirm what we already think instead of using new narratives to change what we think.

                A lot of people don’t trust science and don’t like math because they have never felt like they were really players in the game.  They’ve had science classes that emphasized memorizing ‘facts’ and took math courses that only valued ‘right’ answers.  Even if they did well – and most of them didn’t- they never really learned how to think using mathematical and scientific processes.  So, when some talking head scientist says that climate change is real they aren’t just skeptical, they’re belligerent.  They will make their own narrative of the world.  They will read one article on essential oils on the internet and tell their board- certified physician to take a hike.   DuBois once argued that if you could educate a vanguard of 10%, the rest would follow.  That might work in a fairly stagnant and extremely hierarchical society – maybe – but it won’t work now. 

                One of the main culprits is an educational system that sees knowledge as inert.  It just is.  We don’t really engage people in making knowledge outside of their specialized or professional domains.  Stiegler in States of Shock argues that ‘education’ must change this dynamic.  The only way to ‘make knowledge’ that is culturally broad and significant is to make it together.  Scientists talk to scientists and humanities scholars talk to other humanities scholars – that’s fine, but when do we talk to everybody?  Education cannot simply be a static transmission of information.  Education has to be a collaborative and contested intermingling of people and standpoints.  Sometimes we need facts or data to do that, but facts and data will not influence people unless they become enmeshed in their narrative of the world.

                An education – an epistemology – of sustainability will require languaging that is based in patience and humility.  It must recognize paradox and blindness.  It must be welcoming and nonjudgmental.  Instead of the stratification of evaluation, it will focus on the equality of knowledge.  Its enemies will be religion and ideology.  I try to talk to people I know I don’t agree with.  It forces me to suspend my judgement – at least as much as I can – and listen for something that will allow me to connect.  It forces me to move slowly and not try for conversion or persuasion.  My goal is to be invited back.  I’m not Buddha – I usually fail.  But it does me no good to ‘know’ something if I can’t use it help make the world better. 

                The hardest obstacle is religion.  People who ‘believe’ leave very little space for another point of view.  I think the only way around that is to engage them outside of that belief system.  I’m not going to change anyone’s beliefs.  But I can chip away at the edges of the other things they think about.  I can be someone they disagree with – maybe even pray for – but don’t summarily reject.  These are small battles and even smaller victories.  I don’t know of any other way to move forward.  This is counter-intuitive for me.  I’m a debater- I was born to argue.  I’m trying to learn how not to try and win.