The Politics of Languaging

                As we watch our democracy try to work through its experience with the pathogen named Trump, I think it is a good time to reimagine what politics is.  We’ve tended to think of the political in strictly institutional terms.  That is, we tend to focus on legislative chambers, laws and policies.  Politics has become an abstraction and distraction for many.  A lot of folks have just given up on it all together. In the current situation, it’s hard to argue that they shouldn’t.  But at its core, politics has never been about the buildings and the office holders.  At its core, politics is the coordination of our lives together, how we bring each other and the relationships between us into being.  It’s about creating an imagined order that can define, inspire and sustain us.

                When politics becomes too big and abstract, it tends to lose the connection to daily live for many people.  Most people don’t live their daily lives on that kind of platform.  Daily life is about relationships, and politics should be, too. This big, abstract view of politics has led people to think that everything runs itself, that their voice or action doesn’t matter.  It also encourages us to make large, often misguided, solutions and not individual action and responsibility the basis of the political.  Our politics has created a static view of our political institutions, a view that is inherently conservative and one that grows increasingly out of touch with reality.  We are stuck with a lot of late 19^th century institutions and protocols that no longer reflect our political reality.  In fact, the Republican Party no longer even pretends to value democratic practices, such as fair elections and majority representation.

                One corrective path would be a radical revisioning of current institutions using the same tools, which mostly come from the Enlightenment, to create a new, rational or ‘scientific’ compact.  This approach has the appeal of seeming like ‘progress’ and retaining the political aesthetic that is now familiar to us. The problem with this approach is that it just set up a new horizon of institutional failure.  Given the accelerated rate of social, economic and cultural change, we are likely to reach that horizon in much less time than it took to create the current misalignment between politics and reality.  Unfortunately, this seems to be the most likely and most popular political direction.

                The alternative is to create a more radical sense of democracy, perhaps best captured in the work of John Dewey.  For Dewey, democracy only worked as an ongoing process, which continuously built new possibilities out of the problems and failures of its practice.  It is not a democracy that builds monumental domes to house legislators as much as it is democracy of dialog and practice.  For me, it is a politics of languaging, of the continual and active process of bringing forth a world we share with others.  Our politics moves at the pace it does because it was designed to let people on horseback convene at distant locations.  It was designed to reflect and protect the agrarian nature of our culture.  Neither of those conditions apply to our current crisis.  A politics of languaging is fluid and adaptive, making it easier to both anticipate and recover from inevitable failures.  The goal is to learn and adapt, not to solve.

                A politics of languaging also recognizes that solutions often have a fractal structure, that is, local conditions are variable and what works in one setting may not work in another.  Knowledge, as Dewey recognized, is created out of specific conditions by a specific set of people engaging with each other.  The idea that experts or think tanks can craft policy for people they don’t know living lives they can’t even imagine is absurd.  We can still study and learn from other people and situations – the goal isn’t a new sort of tribalism – but we also have to be open to the variability of application.  We have to engage our own circumstances and our own neighbors.  If we want to make the commitment to a new form of democracy we have to do more than manipulate the system that is already in place.  We have to start dismantling it from the inside – while in flight. 

Trumped

                As the investigation into the multiple charges against Trump and his family and associates builds to a crescendo, (spoiler alert: he’s guilty), people are starting to talk about the end game of the Trump presidency.  That is a huge mistake.  The assumption is that the ‘rule of law’ will now prevail as the justice department and legal system take up the numerous charges (can anyone even keep track anymore) that will lead to indictments.  Normally, this would be the end of this sad little vignette, and the bad guys would shuffle off, stage left.  Normally.  We can’t count on normal anymore.  We are now living in a governmental crisis that is far bigger than Trump and his corrupt but bungling cronies and kids.  While we’ve been caught up in the tabloid machinations of Trumpism, American democracy slumped into the corner and died.

                It was killed by a Republican congress that allowed two years to go by without a whiff of accountability.  The evil wizard (there’s always gotta be an evil wizard) in this story is Mitch McConnell.  What he’s been doing while we’ve been laughing at SNL parodies of the man is confirming the most incompetent and conservative slate of judges in the country’s history, and doing it faster than ever before.  Those judges will now decide the fate of the legislative moves in states like Michigan and Wisconsin to steal power from incoming Democratic governors.  Those judges will decide if the charges brought against Trump are legitimate.  Those judges are not going to rule in our favor.

                Mitch has known all along that Trump was dirty – Mitch knows dirty when he sees it – and he knows that the clock will run out on this charade.  While we’ve been waiting for hero to ride in and sweep the maiden off the track in front of the oncoming train, Mitch has been supergluing her to the track.  From the beginning, congressional Republicans have been planning for the end of Trump and how they can stay in power.  It’s obvious they will not provide oversight.  It’s obvious they no longer care or believe in democracy or representative government.  They only believe in power and money, and they’re about to play one final hand.  They aren’t worried about elections – Hell, they steal elections and deny people the right to vote regularly. 

                What happens when, in spite of overwhelming evidence, the Republicans refuse to impeach.  It’s entirely possible that Mitch will never even bring it to the floor.  They have backed themselves into this corner of trying to run a democracy as a minority, and they have no choice now but to see if they can make it stick.  Their party is beyond appeal to decency or democratic principles.  They lose if they play by the rules, and Mitch never plays by any rules but his own.  There will be an uproar – they know that.  There will be protests – they know that, too.  They don’t care.  Their survival is based on ignoring the law; it’s the only play they have left.  They believe that the rest of us don’t count.

                When Mitch makes his move, he will be leaving electoral politics behind.  He can no longer count on winning what he needs that way.  He and the judges he put in place will suspend the normal process of governing in favor of a Senate controlled and court enforced rule.  The only man who could stop this is the Chief Justice – you want to bet on that.  I always felt that in a normal political cycle Trump would lose in 2020 – the votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in the midterms support that.  To me, the question that arose on the day Trump took office is whether on not there will be an election in 2020.

The Linguistic Turn

                One of the questions facing any attempt to develop a deep epistemology based on embodiment is how to frame the question of language.  In some form or another it has dominated 20^th century philosophy.  Rorty, barrowing the phrase from Bergmann, claimed philosophy had taken a ‘linguistic turn’ in the last century.  Now, a hundred years out from Saussure and his work on semiotics, the question is where does that turn lead, “Lincoln county road or Armageddon,” to quote Dylan.   The question of language illustrates just how flawed our cultural framework of working with language, mind and thought are.  Language, through a particular use of language, becomes an object in itself, something to be studied and dissected, with language, of course, as a linguistic phenomenon of importance.  I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a little dizzy.

                As I’ve written many times before, I prefer Maturana’s use of the term ‘languaging.’ Whenever I use that term, I find people have a hard time understanding it. Some have an intuitive feel for what he’s trying to say and some, perhaps most, just think my spellcheck is broken.  For Maturana, language isn’t a ‘thing,’ it is a biological function of being human.  Fish swim.  Humans language.  As such, it is incorrect to say we ‘use’ language and more accurate to think of us existing in language.  One of the things he often says is that we do not use language to describe a world that already exists but to bring forth a world with others that we then treat as real.  This is not mere nominalism.  In the way philosophers tended to deal with this issue, language was a spare part in the dynamic between thought and mind.  The world had been discarded a couple of centuries earlier.  For embodiment to occur, we have to reframe our relationship to language – we have to embrace languaging.

                Maturana would never settle for the notion that the world we create is merely language, because that would mean that the world and language were separable, and they’re not.  It makes more sense to me to think of language as a sense – just like the other senses – that both connect and restrict our experience of the world with others.  It is a malleable interface through which we manifest and imagine our interactions – or as Maturana puts it , “coordinatations of coordinations of behaviors.”  Cultures do this in different ways.  Some of Maturana’s earlier research is in how color is formulated differently in different cultures – we see what we are trained to see and expect to see.  As Saussure said, the signifier is not the signified, but Maturana makes a further point.  It is true that the signifier is open, but once it becomes a signifier, it now has consequence.  We can say anything, but when we are languaging, what we say has significance and is no longer simply arbitrary.  That is, it can never revert to nominalism.

                This dynamic is ongoing.  Bakhtin said that language was constantly being pushed and pulled by what he called centripetal and centrifugal forces.  We are both expanding and restricting language to find a balance between stable and unstable messaging.  We have to adapt the language to represent what is changing (what is alive), but we have to stay close enough to established form and meaning to make sense.  If we have a strong preference for elegance and closure we would become math majors.  If we were more concerned with imagery and the vatic potential of language we would be poets.  If harmony and rhythm were our focus we would be musicians.  If we lacked any discernable interest in any of this we would be social scientists.  The point is that languaging is part of the vibration and frequency of living and not an external abstraction.

                The final point that Maturana makes about this is that it is far from trivial.  In the nominalist turn in postmodern thought there is a strain that reduces everything to simply trying to be clever.  It’s fine to use language to be playful – being playful is one of the coolest things about being human.  But languaging, even in its playful moments is also profoundly important.  In many wisdom traditions the only thing prior to the word is the breath.  Once we breath, we speak and bring our world into being.  It makes a difference how that happens and what possibilities are available to us in that creation.  A deep epistemology always grounds us in that joy and that responsibility.

Examples

                After retiring, I wondered what it was I was supposed to be doing.  When I was teaching, it seemed like I was contributing something small but tangible to the struggle for a better world.  Absent that, it was unclear to me what I could contribute.  I like the freedom of reading and thinking what I want instead of having other people dictate what I have to respond to.  I like spending more time talking and hanging out with the people I choose to instead having to interact with people I really didn’t care much about.  I liked being retired, but I still wondered what I should be doing. 

                Working my way through the idea of deep epistemology has helped me reframe that question somewhat.  I no longer think of it as what I should do, but how I should be.  At this point, it seems to me that like older men in some Buddhist traditions, my true goal is to work on myself, not for any reward or external affirmation, but because the benefit of age is reflection.  In my working life, my mental reflexes were too amped up to be truly reflective.  Like most men growing up in this culture, I was set on solving problems and doing battle with those who opposed the way I saw the world.  There was never a shortage of either of those provocations.  I judged my contributions to the situation by winning and exerting control.  I suppose that is what youth demands – or at least my youth demanded it.  I tried not to be a complete jerk, and, in my telling of it, at least, my battles were mostly trying to speak truth to power and injustice.  Power and injustice always seemed to win.

                From the perspective of retirement and deep epistemology, I see things differently.  I can be calmer now than I was before.  I still care as deeply about the outcomes, but they aren’t really my outcomes anymore.  Accepting my age means accepting a different role.  I think people who still want to direct things in their 70’s and 80’s are missing the point, not because they don’t “get it,” but because they are wasting their hard earned perspective on moment to moment chaos.  (Of course, it helps that nobody really cares what I think anymore).  Reflection is so lacking in this culture, where the pressure is to act and react instantly.  The way I see it now, our job – or at least my job – is to be an example of virtuous and mindful action.  I want to set aside being clever and aggressive for the opportunity to learn how to be an example of the things I always said I believed in.

                In cultures that have some sense of filial piety, they value age for the perspective, perhaps even the wisdom, it brings.  At the very least, we should be in a position to reflect on what we’ve seen and done instead of just reacting to the next stimulus in an endless stream of new stimuli.  One of the cultural consequences of deracinated and disembodied consciousness is that we lose our sense of mortality – not in some mawkish or fatalistic sense, but as the grounds of our being in the world.  Time is only meaningful to living things.  The gift that time bestows on us is to see what is important and what isn’t.  It is important that we reconnect to our bodies and the rest of the living universe. 

                I don’t plan on being a good example all the time, nor do I expect to overcome my rash and impulsive nature.  Cut in front of me in line and I’ll give you a demonstration.  But I can be an example of becoming to those who care or want to notice.  I can’t open a web site to market it or make money off it, but I can make this phase of my life richer.  Maybe I can help as part of a larger conversation about how we reimagine democracy and virtue.  I can at least listen and wait for a pause in the action for a chance to share what I know.  If that doesn’t happen, I can wait some more.  When I was a kid, I wanted to be a wizard.  That ain’t happening, but the disguise of wizards is often playing the role of an old fool. I’ve got that one down.

The Day Before the Revolution

I’m writing this before I know what the mid-term elections will bring.  I think it’s important to see this day as a day in a process and not as either a victory or a defeat.  Nothing is going to magically restore whatever fantasy we used to have about America.  We have seen the ugliness beneath – not very far beneath – the glossy surface of our democracy.  The hatred and stupidity that have been exposed have always been there.  If you are privileged enough not to have noticed until now, count yourself lucky.  The real issue, no matter what happens in today’s election, is realizing that tomorrow is not a destination, it is a small step in a long march toward sanity.

In Ursula LeGuin’s short story, “The Day Before the Revolution,” the main character, Odo, is revolutionary leader who has struggled her whole life just to make the smallest inroads into the corrupt power of her society.  In the day covered in the story, she laments her futility, her frustration and the unrelenting task of change.  She suffers a stroke and dies that day.  The revolution bearing her name started the next day.  We have to be prepared to see ourselves as Odo, as servants to a cause we may not fully witness or realize.  In MLK’s famous line, we may not get to the mountain top. 

Our job as we wait results is to prepare, no matter the outcome, to get up tomorrow and continue the struggle.  The forces that we oppose are never going surrender on their own – they will never relent.  We must be prepared to take either a defeat or a modest victory as just another step toward more organizing, more resistance and more hope.  This isn’t a game.  The way we tend to cover elections is more like a sporting contest than an act of civil engagement.  We must stop that.  We have been delivered a great gift, the chance to see what could go wrong, a chance to see just how soulless the future could be.  Despair is the most certain way to waste that gift.  Pessimism is not an option.

We have the challenge, but also the privilege to live in a moment where we can do something important, even remarkable.  We can take the soaring rhetoric and false narratives of our history and transform them into something better – not perfect – but better.  We have the government we have because it suits too many of the people in the country.  We are here because we don’t value families and education.  We are here because we don’t take of the environment, and we are here because we have commercialized the very idea of existence.  We have to “be the change we seek.”  We have to be better.

We need to help each other take the next step.

Extended Embodiment

                One of the features of a deep epistemology is that intelligence is ‘embodied,’ meaning that it involves all of our senses and emotions and is not just a product of the deracinated functions of we call our ‘mind.’  Deep epistemology always situates us within our experience of the world instead of isolating the act of knowing from the organism that experiences it.  Embodiment is a fairly well known concept and is frequently utilized to help overcome the mind/body split that dominates and restricts much of Western philosophy.  What I want to suggest is that we need to extend our ideas about embodiment beyond our individual bodies and even beyond our concepts of human consciousness.  What I’m proposing is an extended embodiment that recognizes that the body, the source of experience and intelligence, is never just and individual organism.  We are autonomous and somewhat unique, but we are not a singular entity.

                As Maturana makes clear, we are constructed by and connected to the world we bring forth with other people through the human act of ‘ languaging.’  Only in contact with others are we able to see meaning or value in they way we encounter and experience the material world.  That world does not impose its ‘beingness’ on us, we – and it is always a we – bring it into being and consciousness by interacting with others.  For Maturana, this is never mere nominalism.  He defines ‘languaging,’ as”the coordination of coordinations of behaviors.”  In other words, ‘languaging’ is never just naming, it is always the coordination of names and meanings with others in an attempt to share and shape our experience.  Thus, the body is always already a construction we share with others.  Even in Des Carte’s meditations, he is never really there alone.  He is always accompanied by the language of his culture and the thoughts of previous philosophers.  To have an embodied sense of intelligence is inherently to have a social sense – a multiple bodied sense – of intelligence.

                Our bodies are in the world in ways that are not explicitly human.  We construct a world through ‘languaging,’ but that world is not just a fantasy.  We are alive in a world that is also alive.  We are made of the same ‘stuff’ that it is made of, so if we have consciousness, why doesn’t it?  Embodiment can’t be fully understood in human terms.  It also has to account for the reality of the rest of the living universe we inhabit.  This is not the same as transcendentalism, where there is a ‘human’ power or consciousness in nature.  It is a more fundamental realization that consciousness is greater and more diverse than the more limited concept of human consciousness.  Our bodies connect us to that sense of consciousness.  We are connected in the awe we experience in nature.  We are connected in the love of puppies and the fear of sharks.  We are connected to the vastness of space.  Embodiment that ignores these connections to only concentrate on the technological or digital spaces we have created is cut off from a critical source of experience and moral action.

                Extended embodiment is a grounding.  It gives depth and integrity to our experience.  It is a recognition of both the limitations and finality of our existence and the limitless expressions of spirit that sustain us.  Moral action and deep intelligence can never originate in individual consciousness.  Every action, thought and word is connected to every other action, thought and word.  In Maturana’s way of putting it, nothing is trivial.  An extended embodiment makes those connections and their consequences manifest.  It is the source of our sense of rhythm, harmony and beauty.  It is greater than God.  Without it, all of our thoughts, creations and actions are in vain.  

Moral Action

                One of the things that a deep epistemology has to account for is moral action.  Just as knowing can’t be reduced to the abstract rational intellect, moral action does not grow out of abstract principles of morality.  Morality is not a principle or theory, it is a concrete and relational element of our daily experience.  Because of this, morality is less concerned with consistency and adherence to an ideal sense of the good than it is with variations of relationships and situations.  Moral action isn’t sustained by platitudes or pronouncements but by the concrete associations of people trying to act intelligently in specific situations.  Like fractal constructions, morality may have one organizing principle one day and another principle the next.

                The melding of Greek philosophy and early Christian theology around Plato’s ideal of the good has inverted both the direction and construction of a moral dimension.  That mashup creates a world where the ‘good’ already exists and every action is a poor attempt to realize it.  We live in a cultural context that tries to impose a definition of morality independent of our lived experience.  In a deep epistemology, morality is created in the opposite direction.  Rather than starting with an idea of what is good or moral, the goal is to build the good and moral out of the specific and contemplative actions we take every day.  It might be helpful to think of it as an ecology that is based on billions of small acts that sustain the evolving of higher and more complex forms of moral actions.  If the billion small ‘bacterial’ acts disappear, so do the larger structures that depend on them.

                From the perspective of a deep epistemology, it makes no sense to talk about laws or principles as the source of a moral life.  Morality is lived and not articulated.  Its presence is only obvious by outcomes it creates, not by the labels it claims.  We build the potential for a moral life in the relationships we engage in.  Most of these relationships are with other people, but we also have relationships with non-human fields of reference, such as the environment.  If actions at the ‘bacterial’ level lack just and moral outcomes, no constitution or system of justice will evolve.  All morality happens at the level of individual responsibility and resonates within the relational constructs we share with other people.  It is not enough for the individual to claim a moral purpose, it can only emerge in the context of relationships with others that we are always already a part of.

                To me – and I claim no academic validity for this comparison – it seems that this is the root insight into the Buddhist idea of the Bodhisattva, the one who is enlightened but stays to work with the rest of humanity and the world.  We may see the way and know what to do, but only in action with others can we bring forth a world that is attuned to what we see.  Knowing and moral action live at the connecting point of our divided nature, linking autonomy to connectedness.  We are always operating in this paradox.  We can never be just one or the other.  Without autonomy there is no insight and reflection.  Without connection there is no avenue of expression or realization for insight and reflection.  We can experience this paradox as a dissonance or as a harmony, but we can’t escape the paradox.

                Maturana is fond of saying that no act of ‘languaging’ is trivial.  With every word and action we are building and/or destroying a world.  There is no free lunch.  We are always challenged, no matter what we think we know or what we have already done, to know and do more.  The context of our relationships and the actors we share them with change.  Sometimes our roles are well defined and sometimes they are vague at best, but our responsibility is the same.  ‘Know thyself,’ sounds to us like a call to individual awareness.  It is not.  In the context of its utterance, it is a call to a deeper knowing that connects us with not just our self but the conditions and relationships that bring that self into being.  Deep knowing is moral action.  Moral action is deep knowing.

Dominos

               

                Now that Brett Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court justice, it may be fair to say that the United States is no longer a functional democracy.  His confirmation by an undemocratic president and an undemocratic senate insured that the tyranny of the minority that has been in place since the Electoral College invalidated the will of people and made Trump president will continue.  It is now total.  The sacred idea of checks and balances and the independence of the three branches of government is now just a cruel joke.  There is no independence and there are no checks and balances.  Our institutions are now controlled by people who do not believe in them and who have no intention of preserving them.  The last domino has fallen.

                The grand illusion of American democracy was that there was something inherently noble in the founding of this nation.  That myth overlooks the fact that the ‘founders’ weren’t very democratically inclined people, except as it referred to them personally.  The Electoral College, the initial restrictions of voting and the election of Senators all point to a system that protected an elite oligarchy and not a broad democratic populous.  Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric may have made it sound like all of us were included, but he certainly never envisioned women or people of color being included.  Hamilton may make a great subject for a musical, but his politics were openly hostile to the common man.  What claim America had to being a beacon of democracy has always come from the people initially excluded in the compact forcing their way in and demanding a voice and a right to participate.  Good luck making that argument in front of the Roberts’ Court.

                The Trump, McConnell, Ryan, Roberts view of government is Calvinist in its orientation and intent.  A small group of chosen elites dictate terms and conditions to the rest of us, all the while stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.  The constitutional ‘purists’ among them will find more and more ways to limit access to justice and participation to those of us of suspect origin and philosophy.  One of their heroes, Scalia, made a career out of claiming to be a strict constructionist while crafting opinions in cases such as Heller and Citizens United that are completely at odds with the historical context of the constitution.  Expect that to continue.  Corporations will have unlimited power while vast swaths of people will be denied the right to even vote.

                The optimistic view is that this can be corrected at the ballot box. Maybe.  Seats on the Supreme Court don’t open up every day.  Maybe people will organize and turn out in numbers sufficient to take control of the House, the Senate and eventually the White House.  Maybe federal prosecutors are going to nail Trump and his family.  Maybe.  Even if that happens, the specter of women cheering Trump as he ridiculed a woman who survived an attempted rape by a privileged punk means that this isn’t going to be pretty.  No mere election will convince people to be inclusive or compassionate.  We don’t just disagree, we hate each other. 

                There’s been a lot of people who have written that this period in our history has made them understand what happened in Germany before WWII.  I get it, but those aren’t the historical comparisons that resonate with me.  I always wondered how America could become so disfunctional that we would descend into a Civil War.  I think I’m starting to understand.  This divide separates not just predictable enemies but friends and family.  Where is the forum that we can use to debate and argue constructively?  What do we agree on that would allow us to heal our differences?  I’m not sure what the possibility of compromise even looks like.

                The other event that the current situation makes me think about is the Reign of Terror, when at the beginning of the French Revolution the rebels carried out mass executions of aristocrats and their sympathizers.  It seemed so brutal and senseless.  Now, I’m not sure that a thousand guillotines at the base of the Washington Monument isn’t inevitable.  

Deep Epistemology

                We tend to think of epistemology as the production of verifiably true statements about the world.  I want to suggest that we shift our focus to what it means for a person to actually ‘know’ something and the value that such knowing brings to our lives.  It is not enough to say that we know something because we possess information or data about a particular subject.  Knowing implies that we have changed as a function of learning, that my situated place in the world is impacted by what I’ve learned.  Dewey tried to capture this by foregrounding ‘experience’ as the primary focal point of philosophy and learning.  Experiential learning always involves other people, so that knowing something is always a social and linguistic operation.  I think the concept of ‘deep epistemology,’ along the lines of deep ecology that places us in the ecology and not as an arbiter outside it, is a way to develop a more complicated and complex understanding and modeling of what it means to ‘know.’

                To begin with, knowing is never about knowing the world ‘as it is’ because we are always already involved in the process of making that world.  Language, or as Maturana puts it ‘languaging,’ is the act of interacting with others to bring forth a world.  This is an active, which is to say experiential, process and not a passive one or one that can be reduced to abstract representations.  A friend of mine tells a story about his seventh- grade daughter winning a contest by remembering the capitols of all 50 states.  Later that week when they were driving by the capitol located in their city, she had no comprehension of what a capitol was.  Because she could say that Lansing was the capitol of Michigan, she got credit on a test, but what did she really know about capitols?  This example is trivial on one level but profound on another.  She manipulated a short-termed stimulus to her advantage, but she had no connection to the activity or process that makes a capitol meaningful.

                In Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins explains how cultures construct intelligences to make it possible for them to understand and function in the world.  In that context, ‘knowing’ something is always connected to a cultural action.  Maturana likes to say that at some point all knowledge is verifiable by behavior.  In other words, I can talk about playing violin all day, but at some point I have to actually play the violin to be credible.  Turning epistemology into an analytical and linguistic game blinds us to the deeper implications of knowing.  If knowing is social, then everything I know and learn has an inherent ethical dimension to it.  This is particularly true about what I presume to know about other people.  In the last century, a one- dimensional social science assumed we could reduce people to statistics and data.  When I was teaching, I would have administrators occasionally produce aggregated data about my students.  In the end, the report would always talk about the ‘average’ student.  My point was always that I never met that average student.  She didn’t exist, except in some parallel statistical universe.  The data and trends could be helpful.  They could give me different frames and concepts to work with, but they were not ‘true.’  Reducing any particular student to those averages was to replace knowing and working with them with an authoritative abstraction that gave me power over their experience.

                In some basic sense, all learning is a function of narrative inquiry.  That is not to say that it is necessarily solipsistic, because language is always connecting, to one degree or another, what we know with the larger cultural frameworks we operate within.  But our knowing is deeply our knowing.  We use it to connect with others.  We use it impact the social and material conditions we live in, but part of it is always uniquely our own.  Part of it is about our own quest to understand ourselves as simultaneously connected and isolated.  We have to function in both of those realms at the same time.   How we act in our world, the ethics, intelligence and humanity we express is a function of what we know deeply.

                In the same sense, intelligence can never be ‘artificial.’  Machine intelligence can augment, organize and challenge what we know, but it is not the same as human intelligence.  It is not connected to the social and biological reality of our being, no matter how much it might appear to replicate it.  Knowing is more than intellect.  It is the connections we make in the social, ecological and emotional universe we construct.  It is as much a function of the way we connect to music or read a poem as it is an abstract intellectual property.  Both can make us more ‘experienced,’ both can make us better actors and co-creators of the world we share and shape.  Deep epistemology realizes and honors all of that.

               

               

Beginnings

                Beckett once said that we find ourselves “between a death and a difficult birth.”  Both ends of the equation are troubling and threatening.  We live in the midst of constant talk of collapse and decline.  The political system we so proudly hailed has finally produced the clown king, Ubu Roi, in its final act of decay as it slides toward irrelevancy.  The economic stability that meant that a small but significant group of people didn’t have to win the genetic lottery to live free and productive lives is now producing unprecedented disparity and inequality.  The alliances that held the world together for the 75 years or so since the last great war are fraying at the edges, and a new class of global capitalists is emerging outside of and in opposition to the great nation states that have ruled the last couple centuries.  We are like family members gathered in a room in a hospice facility facing the inevitable demise of a patriarch we loved and cherished (at least some of the time).

                A lot of the conversation around this moment in our cultural evolution is centered on reform.  People, understandably, want to ‘go back’ to the old order that seemed to work so well (as long as you didn’t find yourself on the wrong side of some unspoken privilege).  These folks would have you believe that this is just a blip in the grand scheme of things, that the next election and a new policy will correct our course and put us back on track.  It’s an illusion.  The conditions that created this moment have been trending in this direction for a very long time.  The solutions to climate change, economic inequality, racism and misogyny aren’t patches that can be made to the existing system, they are fundamental challenges to the way that system worked and, even more threatening to those in power, a direct challenge to the wealth and power the system produced.  If you believe in a future that is more fair, equal, environmentally healthy and sustainable, then you have to be willing to leave this system behind to create that future.  This system was never meant, the eloquence of Jefferson notwithstanding, to produce those results.

                There is no time to despair.  A difficult birth is not a miscarriage or stillbirth.  Every large shift in cultural narratives and imagined order has been a struggle.  Every struggle carries within it unanticipated challenges and opportunities.  As it unfolds, it will produce a different kind of person, just as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution did.  We will learn to think differently about the world and our place in it.  Technology will only be so much help.  There is no technological fix to creating a better human, better humans have to learn to manage technology better.  I think the only honest thing to do is to embrace this moment, in both its peril and possibility.  We need to honor and take a sober accounting of the death.  We need to be brutally honest with ourselves about what worked and what didn’t and for whom.

                At the end of Tree of Knowledge, Manturana and Verella tell a little story about how hard fundamental change is.  In the story, a girl lives on an island in an archipelago of islands.  Her people have no boats.  Their island is flat, the water is brackish and the only thing that grows are cabbages.  Everyone complains about the island, the water and most of all the cabbages.  One day our heroine makes a tricky swim across a strait to a new island.  The island has waterfalls of fresh, sweet water and a variety of fruits and beautiful forests.  She makes it back to her island and tells all of her people what she found.  They are all excited to move to the new island and agree to meet the next day at the beach to help each other navigate the strait.  In the morning, the girl rushes to the shore only to find her people there with their arms full of cabbages.  She explains that they will never make the swim to the new island with their cabbages.  Most of the people refuse to part with their cabbages, even though they have complained bitterly about them every day.  In the end, only a small group leave everything behind to swim to the new island, leaving most of the people on the shore with their cabbages.

                We face the same choice.  We can cling to what we have been doing and thinking or work toward a new way of thinking about the world.  I think we have to be willing to put down our cabbages and swim for it.

               

Reset

                One of the worst things about the American political scene is its fascination with gossip, scandal, and personal cults.  That was true before Trump became president, and he has ramped up the drama to unprecedented levels.  Every day is a new crisis that threatens the norms of democracy, and every news cycle is a frantic hand wringing over what went wrong today.  We can’t even remember what seemed so important three days ago.  Some of this is surely by design, but whether it’s intentional or not, the result is that we never spend any time talking about the real issues, the real political concerns that we are on a collision course with.  We should be preparing ourselves for dramatic changes on the horizon, but instead we’re playing this endless game of Duck Duck Goose with an orange clown.

                We should be preparing for the end of oil and the end of work.  We should be talking about the impact that both of these all but inevitable events are going to do to radically change our lives.  Sweden has announced that it is outlawing fossil fuels in 2020.  The EU is seriously considering banning the use of plastic in packaging.  Meanwhile, we’re trying to figure out who Trump is going to pardon next.  One of the consequences of an utterly incompetent president is that we fall further behind the rest of the world when it comes to preparing for what’s next. 

                It’s not a new thing to contemplate the end of oil.  James Ridgeway was writing about it back in the early 70’s.  What is new is that some forward- thinking nations are actually starting to plan for it.  It not only means that we have to rethink the sources of energy that we use, we also have to rethink how that shift alters economic, political and social structures that have been built around the use of fossil fuel.  Oil is a centralizing technology, and using it to generate heat and power requires a fast infrastructure of extraction and distribution.  When oil goes away, how does the new energy source both allow and require us to rethink and restructure our relationship to that infrastructure.  If we think about the military consequences of oil alone, it is clear that there are new opportunities and new challenges ahead.

                If new energy is more diffuse and more local, if it doesn’t depend on energy grids and distribution networks designed to serve the petro-chemical industry, what can we do that was hard to do before?  If everyone could ‘own’ their own energy, even if they had to buy the means to produce it, what would that mean to our patterns of settlement and trade?  The risk is that we’ll plod along thinking that tomorrow will be mostly like today and miss the chance to get out ahead of that change.  The end of oil is going to be the largest economic and social shift since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, probably even bigger than computers.

                The same thing can be said about work.  No country in the world has ever been more dominated by ‘work’ than we are.  It’s how we judge someone’s worth, their position in society, and it determines what standard of living we expect to have.  It is deeply ingrained in our cultural values of personal morality – it’s what Locke said made it ok to take someone else’s land, if you were ‘working’ it and they weren’t.  We are facing the replacement of human workers with AI, robots and computers.  There simply won’t be enough jobs for the number of people who need them.  Whenever a politician says that their goal is create more jobs, mark them off as a liar and a fool.  It ain’t happening.  What are we going to do? 

                We can’t just continue to hope that the tomorrow will be mostly like today mantra will apply to this issue.  Should we be moving to guaranteed work, as some have suggested.  Should we reprioritize work to put more emphasis on education, childcare and the environment?  It this the mechanism to redistribute wealth in a way that makes democracy sustainable?  These issues are not just cosmetic.  They are deeply structural and game changing.

                The next time you turn on the news and see Trump’s face, forget about the scandal of the day and think for a minute about what we’re not talking about.  Whatever happens to him, we’re still going to have to face and work our way through at least these issues and probably more.  Let’s spend our time thinking about what is possible instead of always focusing on what is so obviously wrong.

Rebuilding

                When I used to argue with people about what postmodernism meant, the most common complaint was that pomo undermined the ‘truth.’  My response was that ‘truth’ was already undermined and that a weak sense of truth was better than an absolute sense of truth anyway.  In other words, the critique of postmodernism has always been more descriptive than prescriptive – it merely showed what was already going on.  Now we’re in the midst of a presidency where truth has taken a sabbatical.  Trump makes up new stuff everyday that is demonstrably untrue, but he uses it to build support among his followers, who mimic everything he and Fox News put out there.  It gives Trump too much credit to say he is cleverly manipulating the system.  The real problem is that the system has been broken for a long time, and Trump is just the logical conclusion.

                The ‘norms’ that Trump is accused of breaking on a daily basis have been crumbling for a long time.  Advertising has more to do with the way most Americans construct the world than reason.  We have made a world that we want to live in and have abdicated responsibility to obtuse institutions.  It is both comical and pathetic to see reporters point out another transgression and then wait for someone to spell out what the consequences for it should be.  There no consequences.  The capitalist fantasy that we’ve constructed has no controls.  We have taken the ‘right’s’ that people in the 18^th century only dreamed of having and turned them into libertarian privileges that prevent us from ever assuming responsibility for our actions and intentions.  The right to speak freely has become the right to be freely stupid and the privilege to revel in our stupidity.

                Maturana says that no act of ‘languaging’ is trivial.  Everything we do and say has consequences and we are responsible for them.  When people talk about ‘rebuilding the institutions of democracy,’ they are forgetting that without rebuilding the people in the democracy the institutions are useless.  We have gutted our educational system and turned what is left of it into a vocational wasteland.  Not even science, that supposed champion of modernity, stands a chance against a population of entitled morons.  If we want a better government, we have to be better people.  We can talk about STEM education all we want, but without an education that produces adults and not just technicians, education is not just futile, it is dangerous.  We are training people to do things without giving them the capacity or even the inclination to ask if they should do them. 

                Just as no one can eat fast food all the time and be healthy, no one can consume the constant diet of media we produce and be responsible.  We market everything to everybody, but we don’t sell a reality that is sustainable and healthy.  Even our most personal and intimate relationships are fragmented and sold off as fetishized illusions of sex and power.  This isn’t a sermon, but if we want to be a great country, we have to be better people.  We have to care about things that define our humanity and our purpose.  I’m not here to sell a version of what those should be.  We have to build them together, or the best thing that could happen to the planet is that we descend quickly and quietly into insignificance. 

                What we’re watching is not just a spectacularly bad presidency.  What we’re watching is the end of what cultural theorists have called modernity, the age of reason and science.  What fuels Trump and the 40% or so of the people who support him is the pleasure that comes from living in your own little fantasy without the guilt of thinking about what it does to others or the planet.  Trump is high on power, and the people around him are getting a contact high off that.  He might be impeached.  He might walk away.  He might not be reelected, although I wouldn’t bet on any of those.  It doesn’t matter.  He has brought us to the end of grand political and social experiment that began in the Enlightenment. 

                When religion failed to be the basis of a world after the end of Kings, we propped up reason and it’s fair haired offspring science as the new bedrock of society.  It had a nice run.  It did some good things.  Of course, it also destroyed the planet and brought us horrific wars, but let’s not quibble.  It’s over.  Who knows what’s next.  What we do know is what the end of modernity looks like:  an orange clown with a ferret for headpiece.

               

About Time

                Ever since I took a course called ‘Physics for Poets,’ I’ve read theoretical physics books and articles.  In a recent article trying to summarize some of Hawking’s work, the concept of time was discussed.  The article restated the claim that nowhere in Super String Theory does the concept of time exist.  It is not one of the 11-14 dimensions that physicists think describe the universe.  I had heard that before, but the next claim really stopped me in my tracks.  The article said time was a function of biology, that it only really exists in that realm.  If so, then ‘life’ as we understand it is primarily about time.

                It may even be fair to say that life is time, that all we mean when we say that something is alive is that it exists in time.  To exist in time means that the process of living is necessarily a transient process.  As long as we experience time, we are eventually going to die.  That may not be palatable to Silicon Valley billionaires and other egomaniacs, but biology is a process of decay.  To be human is to be limited to the dimension of time.  Time creates reflection – it’s what allows us to have a sense of process and movement.  I think time is the root of all consciousness, although the scale of time can be manifested in almost infinite ranges.

                I have written about the quandary of trying to tell what consciousness is.  It is clearly not just a human characteristic.  We have too much evidence of animals and even plants possessing what can only be called ‘conscious’ reactions.  Even brainless earthworms show the capacity to adapt to the density of the soil they are tunneling through.  Everything that experiences time experiences the process of becoming – it is part of an adaptive (what physicists would call a dissipative) system.  These systems are both conscious and overlayered with indeterminate events.  That is, unlike nonliving systems that can be closed and adequately defined by the information collected about them (theoretically it would be possible to everything about one of these systems and render it completely predictable) living systems ‘wobble.’  If you knew everything there is to know about the system up to the moment, it would still be impossible to absolutely predict what comes next.  That doesn’t mean anything can happen, because the system still has properties that define its horizon of the possible, but with those boundaries there is an element of the unknown.

                Consciousness is the expression of that process.  A poem can be written in one form but read and interpreted in multiple forms.  When we have talked about aesthetics in our tradition we have spent too much time on the form and not enough on the process.  I am becoming what I read.  The process of interaction with the world is a becoming – it is still an open question what happens next.  The kind of aesthetics that throws an army of labels out in front of the encounter hoping to normalize and neutralize it, defeats the purpose of the encounter.  As we all have experienced with any painting, poem or song that we love, every reading is a new discovery, some subtle and some radical.

                We can create machines that can learn without this process, but we cannot follow them into that realm.  We shouldn’t want to.  Immortality is the absence of time – which means it is the absence of life.  Embracing time is to understand timelessness.  We exist on this small band of a larger wavelength.  We help tune and direct that band with our actions because they express our consciousness.  Being in the world is being temporary.  Joy is riding on the wave of becoming.

68

                I graduated from high school in 1968.  I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, watching the specials on MLK and RFK.  Fifty years- ago something changed in America – more accurately, something died.  The 60’s were turbulent, with civil rights, women’s rights and the war.  New music, new movies and a new sensibility was fueling a youth culture that was developing against a backdrop of riots and violence across a broad spectrum of society.  The fact that television had saturated the American culture meant we watched Viet Nam, Selma and the riots in LA, Newark and Detroit from a new vantage point.  There was plenty of racial violence in America before the 60’s, but TV meant we all got to see Bull Conner’s police dogs and fire hoses and the state police over the bridge in Selma.  America had been to war before, but now we watched old Cronkite crouched behind sand bags while a kid from somewhere in the heartland died on the national nightly news.

                In spite of all of the violence and turmoil, it felt like we were moving forward; it felt like we were winning.  There was a sense that America was about to leave its racist and misogynist past and become something new.  There was hope.  Dr. King was hope.  Bobby was hope.  California was hope.  Heading into 68 it felt like all those things were tugging us, reluctantly and slowly to be sure, in the right direction.  When Dr. King talked about bending the moral arch of history, I felt like I could see it on the horizon.  Some of the change was trivial. Wearing bell-bottoms and paisley shirts or growing your hair long (mine was ¾ of the way to my waist) meant nothing in the long run, but it felt like it was marking a new territory.

                In 68 the wheels came off – the empire struck back.  King and Kennedy – gone.  Nixon and Wallace on the rise.  A ‘secret’ plan to end the war.  Draft lotteries and bombing in Cambodia.  Kent State were just down the road.  The political system broke in 68.  It broke in Chicago, and it broke in November when Nixon, probably the most morally ill-equipped man to be president until Trump, rallied the ‘silent majority’ and won the presidency.  George Wallace appealed to the not so subtle racism in America and heralded the beginning of a Southern shift in American politics that catapulted racism and some virulent form of Protestant patriotism to prominence.  Nixon won following Lee Atwater’s ‘southern strategy,’ turning the old southern Democrats into Republicans.

                Somewhere in that mess we lost our hope.  Somewhere in the culture, even youth culture, we went from ‘all you need is love’ to ‘fuck you.’  I think a lot of us smugly thought that the future couldn’t possibly belong to those who so represented all that was wrong in America in the first place.  Surely, we thought, we were going to continue to expand and not contract civil rights.  Surely, we would be more tolerant and more accepting of difference and diversity.  But the powers that emerged out of the carnage of 68 weren’t ready to roll over and disappear.  Helped along by an economy that tilted toward financial wealth and away from manufacturing and union labor, the gains of the 50’s and 60’s were being erased.

                Looking back on 68 from the political circus we live in today, it seems so clear that this was inevitable.  It seems so obvious that the abnormality isn’t what has happened since 68, the abnormality is what happened before.  The struggles of the 60’s are the struggles we still face today.  We have been fragmented and distracted into thinking that we don’t need unions or public schools or even public decency.  We’ve been conned into thinking that someone else would do all the hard stuff for us.  We have allowed ourselves to believe that words written by a slave owning oligarch were intended for the rest of us.

                I think we are at a crossroads of democracy, one that has little to do with Donald J. Trump.  We have been travelling this road for a long time now.  68 may have been the high point of democracy in America, not because things were so great but because the vision was so grand.  We thought victory was inevitable.   It wasn’t.  No democracy can tolerate a distribution of wealth as out of whack as ours is.  No democracy can withstand a police mentality that makes it legal to publicly execute black men.  No democracy can survive the putrid public schools we’ve created.  If we are to finally become a democracy, then we have to face the reality that America has always been an oligarchy, a political system ruled by elites for their benefit.  I think what died in 68 was the dream that the words we have all been raised to revere are as self-evident as Jefferson said they were.  

Erasing Barry

                I was just home from the hospital when my Grandmother changed my name to Barry.  I was given her husband’s middle name, Bernard, as my given name.  She didn’t like her husband much.  She had that kind of power.  I’ve grown up with the name my Grandmother invented for me.  Bernard is something I use on official documents, and I mostly only hear it when I’m in trouble.  No one calls me that.  I ran for office as Barry, and I worked long enough at my last job that they even started making out my checks to Barry. The things I’ve published have been published as Barry.   It’s a good name.  I’ve enjoyed having it.  It’s time to let it go.

                It’s not that I plan on returning to my given name, like some last- ditch attempt to gain respectability.  Bernard is just a legal symbol to me; I don’t identify with it at all.  I want to erase my name because after working my whole life to accomplish something, I realize now – hopefully not too late – that the only way I can learn what’s next is to leave the identity I’ve created behind.  The good and the bad.  I feel like I’m at the cusp of the experience at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism where the pilgrim has to turn away from the world and their accomplishments and wonders as a begging monk in search of Enlightenment.  I’m not going that far.  I guess I’m like the believer who prays all night to move the mountain but isn’t surprised when it’s still there in the morning.  What I identify with is the realization that what we know is more of an obstacle than an asset at some point to learning something new.

                We live in a culture saturated with individual identity.  It’s inconceivable to us that our self is an illusion.  I am not, finally, any of the things that make up my identity.  Only by letting go of that can I create a space for wisdom – which I think is a different kind of learning than the kind I’ve been practicing.  I do not want an identity.  It doesn’t matter any more what kind of impression or perception other people have, and it doesn’t matter what I think of my identity either.  I probably have a lot to apologize for, but I have nothing to defend.  I’m not for or against anything anymore.  The world still matters to me, but I think the only way I can change anything is to let go of the changes I’ve been trying to make.

                I’ve written on this blog that human knowledge is understanding the expanse and the limitations of being human.  I do not want to be immortal.  I have no need to be right.  My sense is that the next thing I have to learn in my life cycle isn’t logical, empirical or discursive.  It isn’t personal.  This will be very hard for me, because I’ve practiced hard to be all those things.  To understand the limits of being human is to open up to the possibility of beyond human.  If were going to survive our intelligence isn’t going to be artificial, it’s going to be cosmic.  I’m working on it.

                I’ll still answer if you call.  I still eat lunch, walk and play pickleball.  I will probably still write.  Maybe only poetry (if that happens I promise to have the good sense not to share it with you).   I doubt you’ll notice a difference – at least at first.  But I’m trying to be still. I’m trying to be empty.   I’m trying to be open and not judge things so fast.  I’m trying not participate in our cultural ADHD.  Maybe there won’t be anything there.  Maybe you just reach the end of the dock and step off into nothing.  But maybe there is something I can learn by erasing my identity and trying a new way.

Losing My Religion 

                There are a lot of things wrong about the way we think about the world.  There are a lot of things that prevent us from evolving a more embodied and grounded way of interacting with one another.  But one of the biggest is religion, at least the kind of religion that we have developed in our culture.  I don’t mean to suggest that spirituality or belief is wrong, just the formation of churches and congregations that are really nothing more than tribal enforcers of purity and exclusion.  Religion has done more to eat away at our politics and civility than anything else.  To top it off, the religions that are most adamant about their superiority are the ones who are least likely to actually follow any of the major concepts they supposedly adhere to.

                I was raised by a Catholic mother in a small town dominated by a Baptist church.  My father’s family belonged to a particularly virulent and illiterate branch of Protestant Christianity.  None of this had anything to do with God, at least as far as I could tell.  It was all about adults arguing about who was right and who was saved.  My Grandmother frequently told me I was going to Hell.  I got to the point where it was hard to take any of it seriously anymore.  The Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, transformed a loose affiliation of ‘christian’ practices that were multiple and diverse into dogma.  When the Reformation came as a political and economic struggle cloaked in theology, 500,000 people were killed in six months – most of them probably killed by neighbors and relatives.

                We live in an age dominated by religious conflict.  We live in a country where politics has been perversely focused on ‘religion.’  Too much of American Protestant and Evangelical thought is a strange mix of capitalism, patriotism and an Old Testament oriented Christianity.  It has little to do with an historically accurate or inclusive approach to the Gospel.   When ‘Godfearing’ Evangelicals can excuse and rationalize Trump, what is left to salvage of this mess?  We argue and militarize differences in theology that seem minute and arcane to the rest of the world.  The rest of the world is busy killing each other over the transmission of the Prophet’s message.  Eight-year old girls are raped and murdered as part of a religious caste conflict.  Can’t we just agree that whatever it was that started us on this path, it’s been an absolute failure?

                Identity politics has followed the same dead- end vision of religion, devolving all too frequently in a trial of who is most pure.  My Grandmother would have said they are all going to Hell.  We live in a world that demands we see a bigger affiliation.  Hate groups and separatists are gaining power precisely because they are united by hate in a way the majority of more tolerant souls are not.  None of us has an identity that is sustainable outside of a coalition of people who support us but are not like us. I don’t have to go to your church, believe the same things or identify the same way you do to be a good person.  We have to find a way to get beyond the barriers of identity, not because the identities aren’t true, but because we need a broader, larger community to honor and protect them.

                I feel that the only way for me to reclaim any sense of the spiritual in the world is to lose my religion.  It’s easy for me at this point to set aside the obvious markers of religion; a church, a country an ethnicity.  But I want to go farther than that.  I want to reclaim a sense of becoming as opposed to a sense of belonging to a category or tribe.  I feel like the only way to reclaim what I have lost in all these conflicts is to try and be part of something bigger.  Being old helps.  I’m not as valuable a team member as I once was.  I wear the cloak of elderly invisibility most days – just another old fart in a donut shop, trying to pay with cash instead of credit.  The moment is filled with distraction and anxiety, but the thing that calls us forward is larger that all of this.  I am part of something that is still asking me to try and understand it on its own terms.  Something that keeps reminding me that there is a lot I don’t know.  Maybe we just need to return to the spirits before religion.  We need to listen to the wind.  We need to reacquaint ourselves with the stars.