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.