The End of Vocationalism

                For decades now American education has been vocationalized in delivery and in content.  We have so imbedded the notion that education leads to work that questioning that assumption is almost heretical.  Students arrive on campus with program guides touting the quickest route through the maze of college to reach their career goals.  Eighth graders put together career portfolios talking about what they might become.  There are a lot of reasons to object to this trend.  The idea of a ‘well rounded’ person or a general education are usually trotted out as reasons to resist.  Sometimes the objections mention ‘soft’ or ‘integrated’ skills beyond career concerns.  Occasionally – but only occasionally – citizenship as a goal of a full education is offered as some buffer to the constant drumbeat of vocational education.  Even liberal arts colleges defend their existence by claiming that their graduates do better in professional programs and careers.

                There is, however, a more compelling reason to challenge the dogma that school leads to work: the end of work.  We are at the very early stages of a sea change in the way ‘work’ is thought of and performed in our society.  Automation and computers have already changed manual labor, and AI is about to send all of that into hyperdrive.  Some estimates are that in as little as 10 to 20 years 50% of the jobs in the economy will be eliminated.  Eliminated – not replaced by newer high tech, high paying jobs.  Eliminated.  If our experience with the digital revolution so far tells us anything, it’s that those estimates are too low and too slow.  The already frayed and problematic narrative of education leading to work is about to become an unsustainable fairy tale.  Children entering the public schools today are being introduced to a curriculum that, when they complete it, amounts to a long walk off a short pier. 

                It may be that no culture can prepare for such a profound transition.  Certainly, the banking families of Florence weren’t waiting in the wings with the monetary and constitutional programs that brought forth the Renaissance – they just reacted.  Maybe that’s all we can do.  But if there is something we can do to pile up sandbags before the flood, it must start with separating education and work.  Maybe if we can pull our collective heads out our text book and testing industry asses for a minute, we might find a better thing to do than prepare children for a future that will never come.  The questions they will have to answer aren’t on a bubble answer sheet.

                The next generation of students will have to think about climate and sustainability, including a sustainable level of human habitation.  They will have to wrestle with not just the potential and possibilities but the very real threat of AI.  Those questions will run through the so-called STEM curriculum, but they can’t be solved there.  There isn’t a single significant question facing that generation that won’t require ethics and values that must come from outside the technical and scientific realm.  The algorithms of AI and not human technicians are going to control the STEM world anyway.  What they are going to have to do is create a narrative of their place in the world that doesn’t end up sounding like “A Modest Proposal.” 

                The Fordist/Taylorist schools that served Modernity are not constructed to help students through the cultural transition is front of us.  It makes no sense to teach them to work in factories and businesses that won’t exist in their world.  They are going to have to be more divergent thinkers, more imaginative and more creative.  We can’t solve the problems they are going to face – we could at least get out of the way.

#14  Expertise 

Expertise without Authority

                In the aftermath of the last election there have been countless attempts to figure out why people would believe anything a serial liar would say.  The political parties, the media and the schools have all been widely condemned for their role in bringing us to this moment where ‘alternative facts’ rule the day.  It’s pretty easy to see that we face a crisis of cultural synthesis.  We no longer have a unified story about what is real.  What I think is trickier is trying to find a way to talk about it without simply reconstructing the bad old days on institutional control.

                Modernity pushed aside the authority of the church and the crown to create a new authority in rational and scientific expertise.  In modernity, the answers were validated by the process used to develop them and by the credentials of the people who executed the process.  One of the great inventions of Modernity was the intellectual who became an expert.  Experts were ‘objective’ and gained their authority by operating in discourse communities that critiqued and reviewed their work.  The problem we face is that those discourse communities turned out not to always be so ‘objective.’  It drives scientists crazy when postmodernist point out that science is just another word game.  But as the feminist scientists have aptly pointed out, it makes a difference who’s question is driving the research.  There have been enough ethical red flags about funding and research to make it hard to have complete faith in the way science is ‘practiced.’

                I think it is important to try and sort out what is legitimate in this critique and what is problematic.  Science is a word (or numbers) game, but that doesn’t mean it is necessarily illegitimate.  The process that scientists use is generally robust and valid.  People who say, for instance, that climate scientists or evolutionary biologists all just go along with the crowd have never watched them in action or gone through the process of trying to publish an article.  The built in incentive is to rebut and not to confirm the dominant paradigm.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t occasional fraud or that results aren’t sometimes interpreted to benefit a funding source.   While scientists are dismissive of their critics, there are two ways that science is vulnerable to criticism.

                The first is that science is more provisional than it is usually presented to be.  Results have to be replicated and methods are always being tweaked and challenged.  I think the people who work in it everyday take that for granted, and it gets communicated to the public as more absolute than it should be.  “Hot fudge cures the common cold.”   Perhaps Toulmin was on to something in Cosmopolis when he pointed out that in the process of having science replace the authority of religion it adopted some of its rhetorical moves.  It seems to me, that this vulnerability could be addressed by better science education and more contact between science and people instead of the isolation of labs funded by companies.

                The second area of vulnerability is closer to the ruse of Modernity: not everything that calls itself a science is a science.  Bruno Latour has been the most relentless proponent of this critique, calling into question how the process of the physical science ‘travels’ to the social domain.  From a slightly different angle, Stiegler has cast doubt on the model of ‘knowledge’ made by ‘experts’ without input or prox[BA1] imity to the site and the people impacted by it.  Taken together, these critiques cast doubt on the Enlightenment ideals of Modernity.  It turns out that emotion and ‘affect,’ in Massumi’s terms, are as least as important as ‘reason’ when it comes to creating an expertise that helps us live well.

                As the looming impact of combining computers and automation with AI threatens to end work as we’ve known it, this issue of expertise becomes more complex.  There will always be the expertise that youtube videos showing you how to fix your brakes contain, but how will the larger sense of expertise survive the demise of the institutions of Modernity?  How will we educate people to recognize and value expertise without the authority of institutions.  Some critics have blamed postmodernism for the demise of expertise and the rise of what one author calls ‘fantasyland.’  While I think most postmodernists would just be happy that someone knows they exist, it seems to me these critics have it backward.  Postmodernism is descriptive and not prescriptive.  The unravelling of Modernity was going to happen even if French theorists never emerged.  Besides, who wants to return to a ‘unified’ view of the world enforced by torture and death?

                We may not have chosen this path, but it’s the path we’re on.  Expertise will be vital to the way we handle this transition.  Flashing an Ivy League degree or a government position won’t be enough to create it.  We have a long project ahead of us that will require completely reinventing our ideas about learning and schooling.  It may be that wisdom will finally come to the West, or it may just mean that we struggle through this long dark transition without much direction.

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 [BA1]

Welcome to the Persistence

                In the age of Trump, signs of resistance are all around us.  We are all being encouraged to resist the most unqualified and undemocratic presidency in our history.  Resistance is a good thing, but it’s not enough.  Trump was the end of a seven- decade cycle of American political and social history.  His victory wasn’t a momentary step back or unfortunate but temporary aberration.  Trump’s election means that the parts of American culture that have always been there – the racism, misogyny, religious intolerance and anti-intellectualism – have once again surged to the surface.  They will not go back into the same container they were in before.  Resistance is great – even healthy, but it won’t rebuild the village.

                While we need to continue to stand up to what Trump does and stands for, we also need to prepare for a new reality and a new social covenant.  So, while resistance feels good, it’s persistence that will eventually bring us into a new social narrative.  We should and must protest, but it’s more important to start building.  This is the time take the institutions of modernity apart and reconstruct them for a new era.  Our politics, our schools and our government are broken, intended to serve a different time and place, and even when Trump goes, they will still be broken.  Trump will eventually destroy himself; he’s too venial and stupid not to.  He will cause massive damage in the process, but much of that damage will be to institutions and practices that were already in decay. 

                It’s easy to band together to oppose something, especially something as odious as Trump.  It’s going to be much harder to band together to be for something.  I see little evidence that what is loosely called the ‘left’ of American politics has learned how to build alliances.  There are signs of what alliances might form: around the pipeline protests, for instance, but ‘causes’ still seem to be more singular than they are collective.  What are the principles of an inclusive and integrative democracy in this century?  It’s unlikely they will be the same as the romanticized oligarchy we started with or even the post war class politics that defined the end of the last century.  The great energy conglomerates that dominated the economy for the last century and a half are in decline.  The energy of the future doesn’t look like it will be so easily monopolized.  Manufacturing is already a different animal than the large centralized smokestack industries that dominated the Midwest.  Work, the rallying cry of the labor movement and much of liberal politics since WWII, is going to undergo perhaps the biggest change since the shift to agriculture as automation and AI combine to eliminate people from the work force.  All of these things are going to impact the economy in a manner at least as significant as the Black Plague did in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. 

                Trump is serious and dangerous, but he’s really just a distraction to what is coming next.  This may very well be the most significant shift in human existence, period – one we may not survive.  Everything is on the table; nothing can be assumed to be safe or beyond radical change.  Not much of what we have learned has prepared us for what’s next.  The elites from the ‘best’ schools are probably the last people to listen to right now.  Their knowledge is tied to this ‘imagined order,’ and they aren’t likely to be the first people to see the new shape of things.  This is going to be hard.  This is going to cause massive dislocation.  It will not be pretty any more than the Renaissance was.  We will have to learn to persist.  We will fail monumentally.  There will be several shifts and phases before there is any clarity.  If you want to live in a just and inclusive society, prepare to define it and fight for it.  This is no time for alarm or pessimism.  We must persist.

                The next time you turn on your tablet or television only to be slapped in the face by more of the spectacularly stupid and hurtful things that Trump does, remember he’s just a side show.  He and the people that voted for him are here because they weren’t ready to move forward.  By all means resist, but prepare for more.  Learn to talk to your neighbors.  Learn to build alliances.  Learn to imagine.  This is the time embrace the uncertainty and love the possibility.  Think big – and hold on.

# 13  Play

Lavoisier goes to Kindergarten

                Lavoisier is widely considered to be the ‘father’ of modern chemistry.  One of signature accomplishments that contributed to this acclaim is his building of the laboratory at the Arsenal and his use of increasingly precise and precisely recorded measurements.  In other words, he made chemistry more ‘scientific.’  It would be hard to argue that chemistry and physics didn’t benefit from this development.  It’s a little less clear that fields like psychology have really been able to use the method as productively.  One of the problems with the way Lavoisier’s methods ‘travel’ to other disciplines is the linguistic slippage between terms like oxygen and terms like knowledge and stress.  One is a much more finite and reliable signifier than the other.  Can we really ‘measure’ something that only has a signifier and no real signified?

                We’ll let the Psychologists fight over that one as they divide into more and more subdivisions of their discipline at their next convention.  In Epistemology the problem of measurement is grounded in the inability to define what it means to know something or what it means to be intelligent.  We simply don’t know what it means to say we know something or that someone is intelligent.  At first blush, that seems crazy.  There have never been more, and more precise, instruments of measurement that claim to measure ‘intelligence.’  The problem is that there is no concrete way to define intelligence or knowledge outside of the cultural and linguistic bounds that give rise to the term.  All we’ve really done in public education in America is to find a way -decades and billions of dollars later – to find a series of measurements that confirm rich people’s kids are ‘smarter’ than poor people’s kids.

                We’ve brought Lavoisier into Kindergarten with disastrous effect.  In the name of more ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ treatment of ‘data,’ we have locked in on a limited and instrumentalist definition of knowledge that is profoundly biased by socio-economic factors.  We start ‘testing’ kids years before there is any developmental stability to the results and base their education on instruments that in some cases are so flawed that they do little more, in the words of one critic, than ‘turn nonsense into data.’  We do not’ know’ or ‘learn’ the same things in the same way.  We are not an experiment, and we cannot define knowledge the same way in every culture or circumstance.  Sure, there are some things that we can agree are facts and might even agree that everyone should learn those facts or be able to execute the functions that produce them.  That is not, however, the same thing as being able to say that mastery of those things is ‘intelligence,’ or even that the people who mark the right bubble ‘know’ those things.

                In the drive to make education more scientific we have squeezed out play.  We have restricted recess and replaced it with more testing.  We have limited the role that creativity and imagination play for both students and teachers.  We are producing a second generation of students who are more concerned with answers than they are thought and invention.  All of that might be tolerable if we lived in a time where traditional knowledge was adequate, but we don’t.  We are preparing exactly the wrong kind of students with the wrong kind of intelligence for the world we live in.  As Hutchins says in Cognition in the Wild, intelligence is a cultural variable that is only valuable if it solves that culture’s problems.  The genius of the next generation isn’t going to get the highest score on the test; they are going to be able to imagine and tell a new story. 

                Play, like paradox, has always played a role in wisdom traditions.  There are no stock answers to questions that haven’t been formulated yet.  Piaget once remarked that you can tell how bad schools are because they routinely take five- year- old kids who want nothing more than to go to school and turn them in eighteen- year- old students who want nothing more than to stop going.  The fact is that we really don’t know what intelligence is or what it really means to ‘know’ something.   We have a very clear idea about what the cooperate interests that are increasingly in control of our educational system value, but really no idea at all about the ‘intelligence’ that is required to live in today’s world.  School is probably exactly the wrong place to go to nurture and develop that intelligence.

                

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.