Languaging Realms Part Two

               

                Languaging realms shape, define and describe the world we bring forth and share with others.  To function properly, they have to include a mechanism(s) for checking what the realm creates and to align it with the coupling that the people in it have with their surroundings.  The danger of any realm is that it will be shut off from these mechanisms and continue to drift further and further away from a sustainable coupling.  What languaged reality convinced someone to cut down the last Easter Island palm tree, commit mass suicide in the jungle or throw more plastic into the ocean?  The consequences of a languaging realm sealed off from the impact it has on the sustainable relationship with its environment can be dire.  The question we face is how do we prevent that from happening.

                America has always had a fascination with realms that devolved into fantasy.  In his book, Fantasyland, Anderson recounts the numerous religious, conspiratorial and get rich quick movements that have littered American history, so unhealthy or unsustainable narratives have been with us for a while.  My sense is that there have been two changes along the way that have made the problem existentially more problematic.  The first is the leveling and destruction of authoritative gatekeepers, and the second is the increased specialization of the discourses of academic and scientific communities.

                Authoritative gatekeepers are problematic in their own right.  While they may tamp down the most outrageous and problematic ideas and conspiracies, they can be just as wrong as any other narrative and they also prevent open access to ideas.  I am citing them here not because I think we should return to them, at least not in their historical forms, but because their absence has exacerbated the flow of unreliable information.  The internet, of course, is the primary reason that this information is so ubiquitous.  We are drowning in factoids, and most people have no idea (or inclination) to want to sort through them or carefully evaluate them.  In short, we are a culture in a transitional phase which is unable to develop legitimate authority in the way we think about and disseminate information, which leads to all kinds of wild ‘truths.’  The best example of that is a president who tells thousands of lies and is still believed by a third of the society.

                To me, the more pressing issue is an educational establishment that has monetarized their specialized ways of thinking.  To be an ‘expert,’ means pulling yourself out of the daily and ordinary conversations of the street to take refuge in a rarified community of other experts.  The people excluded in this process, which is always the vast majority of us, become more and more estranged from the process and method that produces ‘knowledge.’  This becomes entrenched in an educational system that dispenses right answers instead of engaging students in how to connect to and make their own knowledge.  It isolates the knowledge makers from the consequences or application of their knowledge.  They either end up reading papers to each other in the nearly empty conference rooms of large hotels or selling what they know to people who then use it for their purposes.  Either way, instead of informing public opinion and thought, the knowledge produced is viewed with suspicion by every one not in the discipline.

                As a result, people who identify a periodic table doubt the validity of research on climate change.  Patients who spend thirty seconds on WebMD presume to lecture their doctors on what course of treatment they should follow, and everyone mistrusts everyone else’s motives and information.  We need to rethink the relationship between schools and information.  As Stiegler suggests in States of Shock, an expert only form of knowledge production is counterproductive.  The point is not that experts should ‘dumb down’ what they do, but they have to been in constant communication with the whole community and not just the few lost souls at their conference session.  They have to become multilingual in the sense that others can at least participate in deciding what should be studied.  Any language realm that limits participation to elites should expect the kind of isolation and marginalization many of them currently experience.  Authority should come from the validation of inclusion and not from the pulpit or the committee room.