When Children Play With Cruise Missiles

                Americans love blowing things up.  When Donald Trump launched a few dozen cruise missiles into Syria, some otherwise sane commentators said he immediately became ‘presidential.’  How?  By all accounts, he decided on this course of action after seeing cable news footage of the barbaric chemical attack on children authorized by Syria and, by extension, Russia.  It wasn’t a part of a deliberate plan to seriously intervene in the humanitarian crisis there, a crisis his refugee ban makes worse everywhere in the world.  It represented a retreat from remarks he and his Secretary of State made days earlier.  In fact, the Trump administration, far from playing cowboy hero in this drama, enabled the attack on those civilians by signing off on any serious political intervention.  Trump wasn’t making a serious point; he was throwing a tantrum.

                The last thing Syria needs is more explosions.  Obama has been castigated for not blowing things up in Syria, but he may have done something that Americans have a hard time understanding.  He may have realized that there is no simple answer to the problem and until there is a consensus both globally and in this country about what should be done, the best action is to wait.  During the campaign, Gary Johnson didn’t even know where Allepo was, let alone what to do about it.  Congress denied Obama’s attempt to request for action, not that his policies for the region were all that great.  What do we think we want to do in Syria?  What outcome do we seek, and what process are we willing to follow to achieve it?  We’ve made such a mess of the region, it’s hard to see what we can do to fix it.

                Some people are happy that Trump acted against Putin.  Russia is playing a losing hand in Syria.  They are propping up a Shia dictatorship while millions of Sunnis live on their borders.  Putin is facing increasing dissent inside Russia and the likelihood of growing unrest and terrorism from the Muslim population they are repressing.  Let Putin play that hand.  Let him dig his own grave with his policy in Syria.  Of course, it will be brutal and ugly and difficult to watch, but without an international and domestic agenda that is willing to invest in the decades it will take return the prospect of a safe and productive life to the Syrian people, there is little else to do.

                The ONE thing that Trump could have done to alleviate the suffering in the region is to massively increase the role we play in settling refugees.  He has done the opposite.  He made Syrian refugees, most of them women and children and all of them products of a two- year vetting process, a pawn in his populist rants during the campaign.  He made them part of his ‘Muslim ban’ to protect us from some imaginary danger these refugees posed.  Nothing on that front has changed.  His administration is part of the Eurocentric backlash against people of the region who are part of a diaspora we created  in our quest for oil.  If he was concerned with the humanitarian crisis, the munitions of the United States Armed Forces was a curious choice to address it.

                Trump likely made things worse.  He hasn’t stopped the conventional slaughter by Syrian and Russian ground forces.  He may even have made it worse.  Like everything else he does, the fallout will be someone else’s fault.  Maybe instead of seeing his actions as ‘presidential,’ we should see them for what they really were.  The world’s most dangerous child playing with the world’s most dangerous weapons.  I hope you enjoyed the fireworks.

                

The Second Reformation

                If you’re watching the stream of events coming out the Trump administration and wondering how Republicans can tolerate Trump’s rampant disregard of political protocols and legal restraints, I bet you’re waiting for the first Republican to stand up and uphold the law.  It won’t happen.  What we’re watching is not a political party operating within the boundaries of the institutions and laws we’ve grown accustomed to; what we’re watching is a religious cult.  Like any cult, the Republicans no longer participate in the ‘real’ world, opting instead for an internally manufactured reality that pits them against the world of non-believers.  That means that the real religious wars facing us don’t involve Islam or any other religion, the real religious war on the horizon is the same one that we thought we settled in the 17^th century.  We’re in the middle of a second reformation.

                Sometimes this is very clear.  Listen to Bannon and his version of the coming apocalypse.  He openly talks about a conflict of civilization involving Islam, but the conflict goes deeper than that.  He includes secular institutions such as the government and the press as forces that must be defeated.  Like other neo-cons, he is comfortable with the idea that this conflict could be the final conflict.  They don’t flinch from including nuclear holocaust as an option.  If those of us who are appalled by Trump think that this is just a phase that Republicans are going through, one that they will surely come out of when they regain their sanity, I think we’ve missed the signs.

                Trump is merely the most extreme version in a line of spectacularly unqualified Republican presidents that started with Reagan (you have to give old man Bush a pass).  All of them appealed to a white base that felt persecuted because of their race and religion, and all of them promised to return to a ‘true’ version of America that had been debased by women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, academic egg heads and any other offending group they could imagine.  To these folks, Hillary wasn’t just a politician they disagreed with, she was a witch.  They have increasingly pursued ‘scorched earth’ policies that completely disregard the fact that at least half of the country disagrees with them.  They brush aside any attempt at compromise as weak and not worth of their God’s approval.  They see their political opponents as agents of the Devil.

                In the 17^th century Europe emerged from the Reformation using the combination of the Peace of Westphalia and the growing movement of the New Science.  People like Bacon, Newton and Locke used the New Science not just to change the way we thought of the physical world but the moral world as well.  Unfortunately, that underlying conflict, while temporarily suppressed, was never really resolved.  It often replaced one religious truth with one scientific proof, and while science and reason seemed to rule the day, a parallel set of truths was always in sight.  Today, the ‘Christian Right’ at the center of Republican politics has flipped the order.  They openly defy science and routinely make a mockery out of ‘reason.’  Their goal is to purge society of the other.  They have no interest in a sane, orderly or diverse world. 

                The consequences could be pretty ugly.  In the six months that followed some German princes saving Luther from certain death at the hands of the Roman Church and kick starting the Reformation, 500,000 people died.  Probably all of them will killed by someone they knew and thought of as their neighbor.  This is not a conflict that will be resolved by what we used to call ‘politics.’ 

                Maybe we will continue this dance edging closer to some cultural civil war and then backing away a little before edging closer again.  Maybe we can break down these barriers.  Invite a Republican over, feed them some chili dogs, play the Beach Boys and let them watch reruns of ‘Lassie’ until they come out of it.  Maybe some outside threat will drive us back together again.  Maybe UFOs will land in Times Square or we’ll find out after she dies that Queen Elizabeth was an alien.  Maybe not.  What I do know is that the alternative is no picnic.

#10

Languaging as Learning

                One of the things that I find most perplexing about the current state of knowledge in our culture is the way so little of it ‘travels’ from one part of the culture to another part of the culture.  We keep making significant breakthroughs in field after field, but we just elected a president who thinks we should mine and burn coal.  How is that possible? 

                For me, the answer has something to do with who gets to make the knowledge.  I think every group of people has to make their own knowledge.  That is, knowledge can’t simply be imported from another cultural site.  The problem with the specialized knowledges that we create is that they are made behind the curtain of professional practice.  We’ve taken great care to keep the uncertified out of the conversation.  There are good reasons for this, but the result is that the people who were excluded not only don’t understand the knowledge, they reject it.  Instead, they make their own versions of ‘common sense’ knowledge that they cling to preserve their participatory function in making their own world.  I don’t think it’s possible to simply inhabit someone else’s already constructed world.  As study after study has shown, we tend to seek out people and narratives that confirm what we already think instead of using new narratives to change what we think.

                A lot of people don’t trust science and don’t like math because they have never felt like they were really players in the game.  They’ve had science classes that emphasized memorizing ‘facts’ and took math courses that only valued ‘right’ answers.  Even if they did well – and most of them didn’t- they never really learned how to think using mathematical and scientific processes.  So, when some talking head scientist says that climate change is real they aren’t just skeptical, they’re belligerent.  They will make their own narrative of the world.  They will read one article on essential oils on the internet and tell their board- certified physician to take a hike.   DuBois once argued that if you could educate a vanguard of 10%, the rest would follow.  That might work in a fairly stagnant and extremely hierarchical society – maybe – but it won’t work now. 

                One of the main culprits is an educational system that sees knowledge as inert.  It just is.  We don’t really engage people in making knowledge outside of their specialized or professional domains.  Stiegler in States of Shock argues that ‘education’ must change this dynamic.  The only way to ‘make knowledge’ that is culturally broad and significant is to make it together.  Scientists talk to scientists and humanities scholars talk to other humanities scholars – that’s fine, but when do we talk to everybody?  Education cannot simply be a static transmission of information.  Education has to be a collaborative and contested intermingling of people and standpoints.  Sometimes we need facts or data to do that, but facts and data will not influence people unless they become enmeshed in their narrative of the world.

                An education – an epistemology – of sustainability will require languaging that is based in patience and humility.  It must recognize paradox and blindness.  It must be welcoming and nonjudgmental.  Instead of the stratification of evaluation, it will focus on the equality of knowledge.  Its enemies will be religion and ideology.  I try to talk to people I know I don’t agree with.  It forces me to suspend my judgement – at least as much as I can – and listen for something that will allow me to connect.  It forces me to move slowly and not try for conversion or persuasion.  My goal is to be invited back.  I’m not Buddha – I usually fail.  But it does me no good to ‘know’ something if I can’t use it help make the world better. 

                The hardest obstacle is religion.  People who ‘believe’ leave very little space for another point of view.  I think the only way around that is to engage them outside of that belief system.  I’m not going to change anyone’s beliefs.  But I can chip away at the edges of the other things they think about.  I can be someone they disagree with – maybe even pray for – but don’t summarily reject.  These are small battles and even smaller victories.  I don’t know of any other way to move forward.  This is counter-intuitive for me.  I’m a debater- I was born to argue.  I’m trying to learn how not to try and win.

#9  Languaging and Existence 

                As I said in the last post, we bring the world into existence through languaging.  We know what we know through the process of languaging and we coordinate our behaviors around the imagined order that we create.  The next step in an epistemology for cyborgs is to own the things we bring into existence.  We can’t pass them off as trivial or inconsequential, and we can’t underestimate how much the act of knowing is tied up in the act of languaging.

                What I want to focus on here, beyond the inherent instability of language, is how languaging puts us in touch with existence – or at least it has the potential to do so.  A lot of what we communicate is static – it perpetuates a shared order that can seem very solid and immutable.  When we language in these conditions we stand totally in the domain of what is known.  We assume that what has already been coordinated is adequate and sufficient and there is nothing new that we learn.  We are not destabilizing the word games or social context we find ourselves in.  I think probably most of our languaging falls into this category.  It can be dull or playful, but it isn’t disruptive.  It confirms the patterns and assumptions that make it possible for us to share space with others without too much anxiety or fear.

                Sometimes, however, languaging takes us out of the realm of the known and forces us to balance what we know with what we don’t know.  It forces us to practice patience and humility as we coordinate new behaviors and construct a new order.  In these cases, languaging is no longer habitual or programmed.  We are forced to see the role we play in making what we want to say.  My contention is that this is what intelligence boils down to – the ability to shape existence through languaging, including silence.  We learn only when we are forced into new associations and understandings, even if what we understand is the ritualist nature of our ordinary behaviors. 

                Sometimes the biggest obstacle to doing this is what we already think we know and the categories we use to know it.  In a society with so much ambient stimulus, it’s impossible to pay attention to everything all at once.  To survive our daily routines, we construct linguistic and conceptual frameworks that allow us to easily and quickly categorize and normalize what we encounter.  If we couldn’t do this, none of us would make it through our day without going insane.  The point is that unlike a Buddhist landscape painter on a mountain top who can open themselves up to emptiness, we are continually assaulted by messages.  This is even more of a problem when the ubiquitous noise of machine intelligence is added to the mix.  Cyborgs have to seek space to think or meditate; they can’t just walk out the cabin door.  The constant barrage of languaging keeps us constrained because we have to process and respond, leaving very little time for play and imagination.

                I think we have to stop thinking of knowledge as what we do when we process the already known and start thinking of knowledge as that which we create when we put one foot into the unknown.   This isn’t an expert driven process.  None of us are experts of the unknown.  It means letting down the protective shields we carry around with us and let ourselves think new thoughts.  As Kuhn pointed out, even if the sciences new ideas often appear this way and through the tedious replication of existing theories.  If we want to learn we have to let go, which is counter intuitive in a culture that places so much emphasis on correctness and memory.  It’s no coincidence that teachers often attack the grammar and syntax of an idea they aren’t prepared to face.  If the language can be constrained, so can the ideas.  The same mechanism is at work in the explosion of standardized testing.

                Thinking of knowledge in that way might work in a culture where change is slow, but in the world of cyborgs that is hardly the case.  Before we rush ahead with what we think we know, we need to try to think in the unknown and with people that aren’t normally part of our languaging circle.  The idea that expert knowledge created in isolated language games involving only people who are experts in the field will save society has proven to be an abysmal failure.  We know what we can language – not just with words – and we can only share it with people who help us create it.  We don’t have much time to figure this out.  As it becomes more and more obvious that ‘reason’ was a daydream of the Enlightenment that will not sustain a society ripped apart with fear and that the institutions we thought were immutable are crumbling as we speak.  Humility and wonder are part of this journey.  Knowing is not memory = knowing is exploring.

On Being Presidential 

                Earlier this week Trump gave his first presidential address.  Even sober-minded pundits were quick to give him credit for being ‘presidential,’ and the conservative media were euphoric in their praise.  They said he “reset” the tone of his presidency and calmed the fears of Americans across the political spectrum.  Really? 

                All I saw was a slow talking, almost drugged looking, recitation off a teleprompter.  It was a speech that still peddled fear of immigrants and shamelessly traded on the grief of a widow who lost her husband in a raid he still refuses to take responsibility for as President.  To ‘trump’ (pun intended) that he lied about the outcome of the raid.  He babbled through a list of platitudes and generalities that lacked specifics and often any grounding in reality.  After smearing almost everyone in the room for months, he had the gall to call for national unity and said we could rally around him.  There was no accountability for any of the mistakes he’s made or the lies he’s told, and, worst of all in my opinion, he completely ignored the greatest existential threat to our society - climate change.              

                I understand how badly political commentators want to wake up one day and find that things have returned to the same old political gridlock we’ve enjoyed for a decade.  How much we all want to see a news clip of the President of the United States and not feel like stealing a bottle of anti-depressants out of someone’s medical cabinet.  I would be over joyed to see him do anything that resonated with competence or intelligence or even just a little human dignity.  Good Luck!

                Less than two months into the Kali Yuga we call the Trump Presidency, it should be clear it is never going to get better.  We’ve seen his best moves, and I’m afraid we’ve only seen a hint of how bad it can be when he really starts to unravel.  It would be funny, a 21^st century version of the great Dadaist farce King Ebu, if it weren’t so dangerous and depressing.  

                While Trump and his minions swoon over a presentation that would get a C-, at best, in any Public Speaking class, people are suffering the real consequences of his incompetence.  People are going to lose their health care and die.  We’re going to restart a nuclear arms race while gutting regulations that protect our air and water.  In a couple of years none of us will be able to draw water from a public utility and be sure it is safe to drink.  Public education will be degraded to the point that only those rich enough to pay tuition to a private school will be educated.  The list goes on and on.

                If, in the meantime, you’re looking for something “presidential” and can’t find an old news clip of what it looked like when we insisted presidents were at least somewhat qualified, I have suggestion.  Go buy a ticket to Disney World and visit the Hall of Presidents.  Every machine there is more articulate, more intelligent, and more “presidential” than Donald J. Trump.

                

Languaging an Imagined Order #8

                If there is one sentence that could sum up the last several decades of critical analysis, it would be something like ‘the signifier is not the signified.’   That is, we cannot rely on language to represent what exists, only the differences in signifiers.  As much as folks tried to ‘systematize’ what language and other orders of signs mean and how they work, there is always an instability that exists outside the system(this is true with systems that use numbers, too, but that is another post)  Bakhtin described a view of language that moved both toward a structured usage and away from it at the same time.  Language can be made to serve an imagined order, but only for a while.  Eventually, the languaged order has to morph, it has to change through the languaging of changing beings.

                It is Maturana that uses the term languaging.  He defines it as ‘the coordination of coordination of behaviors.’  That is, we are not describing a world which is ‘out there,’ so much as we are making the world through our actions, including languaging, with others.   In the same way that action and non-action are expressions of intelligence, so are languaging and not languaging.  We tend to talk about the bodily intelligence of athletes and mechanics as instinct instead of intelligence, but their actions demonstrate an intelligence within a particular frame or structure.  Why shouldn’t languaging work the same way?  In wisdom traditions, the master often does not speak, or does so in cryptic and parsed phrases.  Because we have mistakenly thought that language describes something, we have poured or energy and time into saying more and more about the thing we’re trying to communicate.  I think that is problematic in at least two ways.

                The first is that more languaging does not create more clarity.  In fact, given the instability inherent in all semiotic systems, the more we flail about in them, churning up more and more instability, the more we are changing and destabilizing what we say.   In the process we trivialize the words or products and move further away from and not closer to the intended message.  Wisdom traditions produce fewer words and those words have to count for more.  A good example of over languaged orders is academic writing.  In science and academia, we produce billions of pages of ‘new’ material every year.  We are hardly producing more clarity.  Some of it is no doubt brilliant and can be used by others in a very small discourse community to create more valuable insights, but the majority of us do not partake in the conversation and most of what is produced doesn’t rise to this level.  As things become more specialized, more people retreat to an imagined order they can understand and participate in, no matter how dangerous and unrealistic that order may be.

                The second reason our assumptions about explaining are problematic involve imagined orders.  Because language creates instead of describing a world, languaging is always already compromised by the rift between imagined orders.  No culture has ever produced the level or amount of technical data or intellectual publication as ours.  Unfortunately, a lot of people we assume will be able to access it not only don’t, they reject it.  They are interpreting the world through the imagined order not using language to understand a preexisting order.  That means that talking to someone who has ordered the world differently will not produce agreement.  If their imagined order includes a God that would not allow the concept of evolution or climate change, presenting evidence of either is unlikely to change their mind

                Machine intelligence only intensifies the problem.  By making languaging a computerized function, we have created even more and even more useless information.  Meanwhile, the assumed commonality of the order we share falls further and further into fragmentation and disorder.   Intelligence in the age of cyborgs requires rethinking our connections to language.  Having the right answer or explanation matters little if it is not based in a shared regime of languaging.  If we want intelligence to be meaningful and culturally valuable, we have to back up and build a coordinated set of behaviors instead of assuming one already exists.  We have to use more foundational checks, and we should probably learn to write poetry and parables. 

My Secret Crush on Betsy De Vos

                It’s hard to figure out exactly which cabinet member of the Trump administration is the worst.  While there are cabinet heads who have more power and have the potential to do more harm, my personal choice is Betsy De Vos.  It’s hard to imagine someone less prepared to lead a department or less knowledgeable about the mission of the department than Betsy – whenever I say that I get a bad feeling about leaving out Ben Carson.  But it’s hard not to side with someone who spent 200 million on bribes and could only get a 50-50 split on the vote.  The point being that I have no argument with how bad she is, but there is still a part of me that loves the fact that she is the Secretary of Education.

                When was there ever a ‘good’ Secretary of Education?  Obama, in spite of his many accomplishments, pretty much whiffed on picking a good one.  In fact, the Federal focus on education has brought nothing but harm to public schools.  We have created a bureaucracy of dunces who have overmanaged and over-regulated public schools.  I understand the need to set standards for learning and to make sure that every child has a good school and a good teacher, but that has hardly been the result we’ve achieved.  Instead of moving forward with the things we know would help children learn, we have created a series of mandates that have drained local budgets and provided little in the way of results. 

                Ever since A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, education has been a national issue.  The report spearheaded a conservative campaign to attack and delegitimize public education.  Teachers became the whipping boy of this effort, and have seen their autonomy and economic situation deteriorate since then.  A national department of education became the clearing house for every one size fits all placebo that would ‘solve’ the problem.  To be fair, there has been progress on helping students with special needs, but even that progress has come at the expense of other educational initiatives. 

                The bad things that started in the 80’s really became toxic with Bush’s  No Child Left Behind program.  NCLB, based on faulty evidence and under resourced proposals, ushered in a new age of blame and recrimination.  If teachers were bad before, they now became literal unionized (never leave out the unions when attacking teachers) monsters, sucking our schools dry with their contract demands and intentionally leaving students to rot.  NCLB introduced us to the advent of corporate sponsored assessment, where we perfected the process of turning nonsense into data.  Instead of real, valid local assessment, we started testing children at ridiculously early ages using instruments that were not valid and reliable.  Furthermore, all these ‘tests’ did was to replicate the existing economic stratification in our society.

                There are several things wrong with this.  First there is no ‘standard’ of achievement for young children being subjected to these tests.  We are creating ‘false positives’ everywhere we look by turning results well within the normal range of development and achievement into ‘failures.’  Second, almost all of these ‘failures’ are occurring in poor and minority students (imagine that).  Rather than enhancing the potential of these students we are suppressing it by taking the bogus test scores and using it as an excuse to subject them to the most mind numbing and draconian form of education imaginable.  What this means is we have blamed schools, and not devastating economic inequality, for the problems these students face.  Third, we have turned our public schools into a ‘market’ for corporate greed.  Text-book and testing companies and an army of paid consultants have made a fortune feeding and entrenching an inhumane and indefensible national educational policy. 

                We need smaller and more diverse schools, schools that develop local assessments and experiment with different forms of assessment that match the specific students they serve.  We need schools that value and empower teachers more than they do administrators.  Teachers need to be able to control their own work, and they need to be able to collaborate.  None of that will happen as long as there is a Secretary of Education who works for a presidential administration that plays politics with schools.  Let the last Secretary of Education be a clown, someone who makes it abundantly clear that the system is bankrupt.  Let Betsy be Shiva (gender differences aside) in our national dance of education.

                So, if we meet on the street and the topic of Betsy as Secretary of Education comes up, I’ll be right there with you.  I’ll match you horrible detail for horrible detail about her performance.  Just know that somewhere in the back of my mind there is a little voice that is saying ‘you go girl.’