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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