10 Things to talk about besides Trump

                I said before that I think we need to spend more time talking about how we change and rebuild than we do focusing on Trump.  Well, here are ten suggestions, in reverse order of importance, that I think are more important and that I would like to work on and talk about.  I’m sure you have your own list.

10.  Free College and Millennial Debt:  We’ve reached the point that a college education should be free.  If people want to tie that to a couple years of national service in some variety of efforts (not all military), that is fine with me.  But we need to get to the point where we help students of all ages transition through the education they need and that we need them to have to be functioning members of a democratic country.  Along with that we should start excusing the debt Millennials have had to take on to get a degree.  As a generation, they got slammed by the rise in tuition brought on by shrinking public dollars in education and a job market that left them few options.  If this economy is going to recover, it has to free the economic power of Millennials from the mountain of debt that is holding them back.

9.  Infrastructure:  This one is too obvious, but it can’t just be infrastructure in the traditional sense.  Sure, we need roads and bridges and airports, but we also need new means of transportation and broad band access everywhere.  We are, at best, a mid-twentieth century power in infrastructure.

8.  Education:  Our education system has become a market for textbook and testing companies at the expense of our students.  We need to rethink schools from the bottom up following some epistemological principle that doesn’t begin and end in a test.  We need to stop the war on teachers and invite them back into the conversation.  Right now, our education merely replicates the socio-economic status of the parents.  We are not preparing our children to think about and inhabit the world that awaits.

7. Multi-Party System:  Our political system is broken.  In order to fix it, we need to find a way to give more people a voice.  Two parties won’t do that, especially when one of them is radically undemocratic.  We need to start transitioning to a multi-party system of government, one more flexible and more responsive to the people.

6.  Guns:  We are the only country in the world that has this problem.  We need to find a way to talk the gun people back off the ledge that the NRA has falsely constructed.  We have to find a way to reduce gun violence.  This is a tough conversation to even get started, but it will only happen in a face to face dialog.

5.  Energy Shift:  We are in the middle of the shift from oil to natural gas, with the beginnings of the shift from natural gas to renewables already underway.  The shift is more economic than it is environmental at this point.  Trump can no more resurrect coal than he can stop automation.  We need to accelerate  these shifts – including phasing out plastic in all but the most essential areas.  It might also finally silence the Koch brothers.

4.  Economic Inequality:  Democracy is not possible with the distribution of wealth that exists and is getting worse.  Unless we are willing to change laws and regulate the financial industry, we will cease to be a democratic nation.  We already aren’t really even capitalistic any more.  Our economy is more monetarist that capitalist.  More of our decisions have to reflect the real interests of the majority.

3.  AI and Work:   I’m tempted to put this first, because it’s the monster lurking under the bed.  Automation has already permanently altered manufacturing, but when you combine it with AI and move it into the rest of the economy, the impact will be devastating.  Whole areas of ‘work’ will disappear, and not in the old sense of new jobs sprouting up in new places, they will just disappear.  Some estimates are that 50% of the existing jobs will be gone in 10-20 years.  Some say that’s conservative.  When I was a kid, ‘utopia’ was always work free.  Now that we may almost be there, that future looks anything but ‘utopian.’

2.  Single-Payer Health Care:  This has to stop.  The rest of the industrialized world has figured this one out.  It’s not hard.  It’s not that complicated.

1.  Climate:  In many ways this is obvious.  The less obvious part of it is that this isn’t going to happen without a cultural reckoning with fundamentalist Christianity.  As with so many of the items on this list, the problem either exists or is exacerbated by a form of Christianity that is opposed to change – and in many ways opposed to the things we always thought were ‘Christian.’  

                The cultural shift we’re a part of has a lot of moving parts.  What connects all of them is that the underlying narrative has gone bad.  We need a new story.  That story should minimally account for what is listed here.  I’m sure I’ve left out important issues or phrased things the wrong way – so be it.  Make your own list.  Tell the next person who wants your vote or your money to answer to it.  

#12  Joy

                If we ground our thinking in our lives and our bodies, what would be the outcome?  What state of consciousness would we be able to attain?  My answer to that is Joy.

                Before explaining that I first want to make it clear that I’m not talking about the kind of joy that most people would conjure up at the mention of that word.  We’ve created this Christian view of joy that is the absence of pain or suffering or anything we might consider negative.  We’ve created, to steal a line from Corso, a “cotton candy heaven of the poor” version of joy.  This kind of joy melts away at the first sign of trouble or rough weather.  It is a version of joy driven by desire, one that serves our ego’s need for a pure and perfect happiness.  It’s an illusion.

                The kind of joy I’m trying to write about isn’t the absence of suffering and pain but the assimilation and resolution of suffering and pain.  Joy arises not because we desire it, but because we have stopped desiring it.  It doesn’t come from resisting ‘bad’ things, but from avoiding labeling things as either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’   Being able to attain a state of Joy doesn’t mean I am happy, it means that I’ve stopped trying to be happy.  Joy is empty; it is the result of no longer focusing on my emotional connection to events.

                Joy allows us to be fully present and not distracted by the trajectory of events we hope will happen.  Like Zen landscape artists, we are looking at all the possible unfoldings of existence, not just the ones that are central to the moment or confirmed by others.  It seems to me that real knowing must somehow and eventually get to this state.  We have to get out of the many entanglements of the body and the mind to ‘know’ what it means to exist.  Joy is the other side of enlightenment and wisdom, a lightness of being that releases us from the greedy needs of the ego.

                Epistemology is not knowledge about an exterior or objective world. Epistemology is more essentially about knowing ourselves and the limits of what that self can know.  Joy is, to me, the ability to face that limit and that potential without flinching.  

Trump and the Greedy Algorithm   

                In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, Aura, he uses the mathematical construct of the greedy algorithm, an algorithm that always points to the simple, right answer, as a way of framing what happens in a society or civilization when the questions that dominate our attention keep producing obvious but useless answers.  What happens is that the deep and important questions are never able to break through the veil of the greedy algorithm and attract the attention they deserve.

                I think we should think of the failed presidency of Donald J. Trump as a greedy algorithm, one that rivets our attention on the cascading decline of his presidency and makes it almost impossible to focus on what is important.  Every news cycle is held captive to the horrific narrative unfolding around this president.  There is no way to know what new low or new threat will greet us tomorrow morning.  It is almost impossible not to watch.  Add in the spectacle of Republican legislators making up health care bills as they vote on them with no deliberation and no sense of what the impact or consequences might be, and there is enough political drama to draw our attention away from what we should be thinking about.  Regardless of what happens to Trump and the Republicans, the only way out of this collapse of the American political system is to turn away from the carnage and focus on what we have to build to combat and replace this.

                I think we should only pay attention to Trump one day a week – let’s say Tuesday.  Every Tuesday we’re allowed wall to wall coverage of Trumpland – like washing down a sugar sandwich with a coke.  One day, that’s it.  After that we have to get back to work.  After that we have to say what should we build to replace what we used to think of as an indestructible political reality.  The world we used to live in is gone.   We can’t go back, and moving forward is going to require us to turn off the nonsense and build a new political alliance.  We should pay due diligence to the legal and political process that will try to contain the damage, but just cheering for the good guys and carrying signs in the streets won’t build a new politics.

                We have become a fractured resistance.  There are more of us than there are of them, but we have lost the knack of making broad alliances that can carry us back into some control over our own lives.  Our allies are not going to agree with us on everything.  They are not going to pass increasingly restrictive litmus tests of purity.  We need to respect our differences and argue for our place in the society, but first we need to build a society that makes that possible.  More than anything else we have to find a way to correct the imbalance in wealth that is killing any prospect of democracy.

                But we must do more.  We must plan for a new economy, a new definition and a new system of education, an infrastructure for the 21^st century, and we must prepare for the economic and environmental changes that will come from changing the way we create, distribute and use energy.  We are going to see massive unemployment as AI continues to change work.  The system we have now has no way to absorb this fast approaching and inevitable outcome.  There was a time when the ‘end of work’ was a utopian pipe dream, but now that it is here in a very tangible way, we have no idea how to act. 

                It is problems like the end of work that make it clear that our intelligence can’t be solely focused on technology and science.  We need to ask hard social, political, ethical and philosophical questions about the new reality that science and technology are going to create.  We need art that will help us imagine what we cannot now imagine.  We are walking off the end of a long pier into the unknown, and the entrenched notions of politics and society we have grown up with will not help us when we take that last step into something new.

                We can’t start any of this focusing on the greedy algorithm of Trump.  He is the joke at the end of the Enlightenment.  The sad clown that modernity was always fated to produce.  If you want to create something worth handing on to your children and grandchildren, you can’t look over your shoulder as it burns.  We have to focus ahead, not with some new sense of progress, but because it’s all we can do.  We can still have Tuesdays to wallow in the mire.  We’ll meet at your place; I’ll bring the popcorn.

Shame

                Today the House Republicans passed a bill that will kill more Americans than all the “radical Islamic terrorists’ combined have managed to kill.  They passed a bill that will let babies die at birth – hard to align with that famous ‘pro-life’ stuff isn’t it – and will shorten the lives of your parents and grandparents.  It will send countless families into bankruptcy and deny women access to basic reproductive health.  If you voted Republican, or even if you voted Independent, you voted for this carnage.

                Of all the preposterous and intellectually incompetent excuses for this action, the one that galls me the most are the votes cast by Republicans who for decades have said they are guided by their Christian faith.  Is there an 11^th commandment that says we should torture the sick and the old?  Is there something in the Gospels that says that your Christ came here to make life more painful and sickening?  As much as this vote strips away any pretext of the Republican party as a moral or humane entity, the most glaring inconsistency is religious.  We should spit in the face of the next Republican evangelical who says anything about God.  There is no God in the Republican party.

                These people have acted as if they had some moral superiority granted to them because they said they were Christian.  Today they proved all of that was a lie, not that it hasn’t been obvious for a while.  This the same party that has said outrageous and inflammatory things about Islam on a routine basis, almost always revealing more about their ignorance than anything else.  They have babbled on about a ‘clash of civilization’ between Christians and Muslims, but if their actions today are any indication, Sharia law would be an improvement.

                Religion isn’t supposed to be part of our politics, but Republicans have propped up their boldfaced move toward a kleptocracy by always falling back on their ‘religious’ principles.  No other group in our politics have done more to wrap themselves in some phony cloak of moral certitude.  Today, all of that is officially a lie.  They haven’t even seen the bill.  None of them can say with any clarity or certainty what the ramifications of this repeal are or might be.  They have lied about it at every turn (there goes another commandment that we don’t need any more), and they have intentionally hurt the people they were elected to serve.

                I take no joy or feel any sense of justice in the fact that the people who follow and vote for them so blindly will be impacted the most.  I would like to think that this will wake some of them up, but I gave up hoping for that when they voted for Trump.  What country takes away protections from its citizens?  What craven band of infidels can’t see the pain and suffering this will bring?  We can organize, protest and vote them out of office, but the fact that this happened at all is deplorable.  I guess Hillary was right.

                I think it’s dangerous to brand any group or religion by the actions of a few, but today we should ask what Fox News always asks of our Muslim brothers and sisters: where are the moderate Christians?  Why won’t they stand up against this act of murder and terror?  Maybe we are in a struggle with religious extremists for the soul of the future, but those extremists are not followers of Islam.  They call themselves Christians and they identify by putting an R after their names.

               

                

Trump at 100

                Well, we’ve reached the end of 100 days of Trump, and I think we can say we’ve learned four things for sure:

1.       He’s a liar

2.       He’s stupid

3.       He’s a big, fat, compulsive liar

4.       He’s really f****** stupid.

That said: what do we do now?

                While we might fantasize about impeachment, I don’t think it is going to happen.  Even if it did, does the notion of Pence, Ryan, and McConnell running the government make you sleep any better?  I think we have to face the reality that our democracy is broken.  The courts and the intelligence agencies are holding up for now, but it’s only been a 100 days and they already look battered.  If we’re going to rebuild our democratic institutions, we have to be ready to take some radical steps.

                One of the things I think we have to work to replace is the two- party system.  One of the parties has decided that democracy isn’t as important as power and has done everything in their power to destroy the process of democracy – which is really all democracy ever is.  The Republicans have destroyed the Supreme Court’s non-political cover, turned the Senate into the House and declared war on everything that isn’t old, white, male and rich.  If the Republicans no longer believe in the system, then an oppositional party is futile.  Between gerrymandering districts and restricting the right to vote, they can continue this tyranny of the minority over the majority for the foreseeable future – which is no way to run a democracy.

                The Democrats aren’t much better.  The Clinton dynasty turned earnest Yale educated hippies into Wall Street/Davos class millionaires, selling influence wherever they could find a buyer.  Even the sainted Big O is now raking in $400.000 speaker fees after never prosecuting even one of the bankers who took us to the brink of disaster.  It’s easy to blame Citizens United for all the evils of money in politics, but the fact is that our fixation on two parties all but makes it inevitable that money will dominate.  Poor Bernie could never compete with the forces that big party politics always has lurking in the shadows.

                Rather than pinning our hopes on another compromise candidate in 2020, isn’t it time to recognize that most of us aren’t really represented by this system.  The Democratic elites will pick one their own when the time comes.  We will be regaled with stories about how they lead can drives for a girl scout troop made up of Syrian refugees who swam across the ocean to freedom – meanwhile, they’ll be selling us down the river in the board rooms of America.  Democrats talk about new generations of candidates, but they will never come as long as they have to be Ivy League grads.

                If we’re going to usher in a new era of democracy we need new democratic institutions.  We need a multi-party system that will allow the real issues people care about to be articulated and acted upon, and an environment that allows the organic leaders of those movements to rise to leadership.  BLM shouldn’t have to hope that the Democrats ‘get it.’  LGBTQ causes shouldn’t have to go to the back of the line while we litigate the ‘real’ issues of the day.  Women’s issues should have their own platform.  One big mush of a party fails everyone.  We need a vigorous debate.  We will agree on some things and disagree about others.  We will form different coalitions over different issues.  It will be messy, but it will be democratic – it will have a process.

                100 days in things look pretty bleak.  But Trump is merely the worst person a flawed system could produce.  In some fundamental ways, he isn’t that different – he’s just the sad clown at the end of the parade.

                

# 11

Machine Language

                Languaging has been the most important feature of human society for 30,000 years or so.  It has sparked what we call civilization and allowed humans to inhabit the globe.  In those 30,000 years, however, nothing has changed languaging as much as computers have changed it in the last 3 decades.  It would be fair to say that our interactions with each other and the world have never undergone such a profound change, and it has happened in the blink of an eye.  Probably nothing marks the rise of the cyborg more than the devices that we now use to navigate our world.  Everyone with a smart phone holds more information and computing power than existed in the world a mere 50 years ago.

                Who was the last person to have read everything published in their language and culture? Erasmus – maybe?  Ever since Guttenberg we have been speeding up the rate at which the meta-languaging of our culture reproduces and travels.  We have reached the point that machines can do it faster and better than the most capable humans.  The best chess master is no match for Watson, and Siri can spit out answers faster than the smartest and most well- read person you know.  Every teacher knows that if they bluff or flub an answer some student in the back row that you thought was dead or comatose just Googled the right answer and, contrary to everything you thought you knew about dead people, is raising his hand to correct you.  Calculations that used to take scientists hours and days to make are now routinely spit out of computerized instruments in seconds.

                What are we to make of the notion of knowledge or intelligence in this new context?  I think we can only make sense of these developments by realizing that we’re really talking about two very different things.  Information is not intelligence.  The purpose of human intelligence is not a more accurate description of what we take to be the external world.  Machine intelligence is not the same and does not operate on the same principles as human intelligence.  The only real danger posed by machine intelligence is to confuse it with the purposes and functions of human intelligence.  We have got to let go of the notion that our ‘brain’ is like a computer and that the more we can cram into it and the faster we can recall it the smarter we are. 

                I want to make it clear that I am not against machine intelligence – unless you want to replace humans with machines – in which case I’m with Hawking saying that is dangerous.    I think machine intelligence makes patterns and data comprehendible in ways that are both fascinating and useful.  I am not arguing against machine intelligence, I just want to draw a distinction between it and what I think are the uses and purposes of human intelligence.  In fact, I would even credit machine intelligence with bringing the West to this point of consciousness that clearly demonstrates that the Cartesian definition of knowing is hopeless.  We are no more a challenge to computers and their ability to store, recall and combine information that John Henry and his hammer were to the steam drill.  Now that we should no longer confuse information with intelligence we have a chance, at last, to ask what it means to know and to think.

                Just as we learned to stop using our bodies as machines to move and control the physical world, we have to now learn to stop using our consciousness as a machine to control and manipulate the social and material world.  The things that are lacking in the intellectual and spiritual world are not lacking because we need more data.  They are lacking because we have lost a sense of connection.  Maturana and Fell like to present the basic condition we all face as having to deal with the fact that we are always already both connected and autonomous.  We are in the world, not outside of it.  I am not saying that everything is relative and there is no reality.  I’m saying that we will never reconnect to the world through reason and science alone.  It’s easy to prove that climate change exists, but almost impossible to get someone who doesn’t already see it to agree.  We argue about facts and let larger truths and greater wisdom escape in the bargain.  Let the machines do what machines do, and let us start to figure out what it is we should do instead.

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.