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.