A STEM is not a Flower

                It’s hard to go anywhere in academia these days without running across a concern for STEM education.  It makes it seem like science, technology, engineering and math are the only things that even count anymore in defining the outcomes of education.   Universities are whittling away at their undergraduate general education requirements and shrinking the departments in what we used to self-confidently call the ‘liberal arts.’  The University of Wisconsin at Stephens Point went so far as to propose eliminating them.  I think there are two reasons, at least, to pump the brakes on this rush to trim education to training in STEM disciplines.

                The first is simply pragmatic.  Although advisors and administrators are quick to smugly point out the employment potential of these programs, they overlook a very important variable.  The things that students are trained to do in STEM programs are precisely the jobs that will be lost in the economy when a mature version of AI is introduced.  My sense is that the merger of AI into technical fields is much closer than most people think.  When it gets here, it isn’t going to be a slow process of change.  The industrial revolution took centuries to mature, and the computer revolution took only decades.  AI will happen in years and months.  It is foolish and irresponsible to train people to do something that a computer can do better and faster.  It is only a matter of time before a computer will do it better and faster.

                Schools sell these programs because they are little more than corporations themselves.  The people who run them and who advise students have pretty much given up any pretense of being ‘educators.’  They are in business to shill for the latest fad in hiring, regardless of how that fad serves the long -range interests of their customers – I mean students.  Of course, people need to know more about the disciplines covered in STEM programs.  The lack of science literacy has been devastating to our environment and our democracy, but selling these programs as a career path is short sighted.

                The second reason goes to the heart of what it means to be educated.  Being educated is more than getting the right answer on a test or solving a structured problem someone else created. It’s nice, but it’s not an adequate proof of being educated.  The problems we all have to solve right now are unstructured and chaotic.  They don’t appear in text books, and they can’t be solved by technical expertise alone.   At the bottom of every important question or problem we face is a question of value and ethics.  In many cases the important question is not what can we do but what should we do.  Giving someone a job is nice, but it’s not the same thing as giving them a vision of the world.  A job doesn’t make them a better citizen, neighbor or partner.  A job isn’t the same thing as a conscience. 

                STEM education without a context of value and meaning is not only inadequate, it’s dangerous.  As the technology we develop becomes more powerful it also becomes more of a threat.  We can do more damage more quickly than ever before.  We have to have a space to think and discuss what the next phase of the world will become.  We are wired into instant torrents of information but have lost the ability to use what some people call ‘slow’ thinking, the ability to step back and evaluate the scope and rationale of our actions.  STEM education, as it’s currently constituted, isn’t designed to do those things.

                In case you missed it, we’re in a big mess right now.  Everything from democracy to sex to masculinity is up for grabs.  The old system of values and norms is fading fast – and that’s a good thing.  What happens next, however, is not going to be so easy to navigate.  If we’re not going to devolve into warring clans fighting over the last glass of water, we need vision – we need imagination.  We need an education that helps people cope with more than the operating system on their new phone.  If we mess this up, we can’t just ‘die,’ reboot it and start over.  We have information – we lack wisdom.  Before we shove the last Religion and Philosophy professor out the door and fill their office with more machines, we ought to stop for a second and ask ourselves what we want to become.

Broken Bits

                Just as capitalism has reduced everything in the world to a single type of value, computers have reduced all information to binary bits.  Everything a computer transmits has to be stripped of any contextual value it had because of where, how and by whom it was created so it can be shuffled through the internet and delivered without context to your screen.  As a result, we have access to an almost unlimited amount of information, but none of it has any meaning attached to it.  This presents us with a problem people have never faced before: how to construct a world without context.  In the past information was sorted by the tribe, by the school, by the government or church.  Those institutions still exist, and some people still use them to construct meaning, but the more common experience is to be set adrift to drown in random and unconnected bits of information.

                On one hand, this situation is liberating.  People don’t have to rely on the school, the government, or the church to get their information about the world.  I don’t agree with folks who argue we should go back to an institutional check on knowledge.  I think the leveling of knowledge is an important part of liberation.  Going back to the old set up is to go back to the old forms of oppression.  On the other hand, the overabundance of decontextualized information presents us with a challenge people have never faced before, and we are ill equipped to deal with it.  Many people run back to their tribe and use it block out anything that challenges that orthodoxy.  The irony of having so much information is that it is so overwhelming that the easy way out is to block it out and only let in information that confirms what our tribe already believes. 

                We see the impact of this move in our politics and the culture wars that divide us.  It shows up in climate change denial and arguments about abortion and drugs and almost anything else you can imagine.  Anybody can find somebody who supports their beliefs.  Blaming this situation on cultural relativism or postmodernism misses the point.  We were always already ‘relativistic’ in our views, we just used the centralized institutions of modernity to silence the dissonance.  That’s not possible anymore.  That is both a good thing and a perplexing problem.  How do we build a decentralized and democratic space where we can engage with each other in a civil and affirming manner? 

                More than a few Sci Fi novels and movies have taken this problem and resolved it by imagining a future dystopia where there is only one book and one mystery to solve.  This going back to the beginning and starting over path is beyond brutal and unacceptable.  It is futile to keep running out the same institutional elites we’ve used in the past to solve this problem.  We are at a critical point where we are either going to make a collective jump in consciousness or we’re going to perish.  People have made these leaps before – at the end of the Middle Ages – in the speculative philosophy of Greece – and in other times and places where the old way of thinking broke down.  Our situation is all the more intense because if we fail it won’t just be the end of one civilization, it will be the end of civilization, period.

                We are going to have to revise our understanding of learning, education and community.  We don’t need centralized institutions.  We need to shift our focus away from a single solution to multiple and iterative solutions, solutions that work one person and one community at a time.  The only way to create this new consciousness is to work with each person to help them reach the highest frame of consciousness they can attain.  The goal is to work past anger and purification to create small and shifting alliances that can strengthen over time.  We have to revisit the idea of what it means to be human and how we fit in the larger life system we’re a part of.  If you’re thinking that sounds way too idealistic and spacey, consider the alternative.  We have played ourselves into a position that is as dire and desperate as any we have ever been in.  Nothing we’ve already done will work again.  This work will be done face to face, day to day.  We’ll find out if we’re up to the task.  We’ll find out if we have a future.

Why Capitalism Must Always Fail Democracy

                The typical way of thinking about economic systems is that they exist within and along side political systems.  Thus, we think of our culture as being both capitalistic and democratic.  We think of capitalism, socialism, or communism as merely ways of distributing wealth, as a means to match production with distribution.  In a fundamental way, capitalism is more about what has to happen to the world and the people in it for it to become ‘wealth.’  The means of this transformation is shared by both socialism and communism, even if they represent different ways to distribute that wealth.  At its core, capitalism has to destroy what is appropriated in order to make it transactional and void of any value except a monetary value.  Because it operates this way, capitalism and democracy will always and inevitably be at odds. 

                In his book, In the World Interior of Capital, Peter Sloterdijk develops a critique of the evolution of capitalism grounded in maritime expansion.  In order for trade to move beyond the family and tradition bound systems before capitalism, the things that were to be traded had to be extricated from their specific context of existence.  Therefore, every place was just another place instead of someplace specific and sacred to the people living there.  Once that move is complete, Sloterdijk goes into great detail about the way Henry the Navigator destroyed the ‘cosmic’ dimension of reality with latitude and longitude, everything everywhere is open to exploitation.  As Sloterdijk tells it, those ancient mariners got on those leaky ships because they wanted to make money.  They made money by uprooting people and products from their place in a cosmos and reduced them to ‘things.’ 

                At first glance this might seem more than obvious, but we’ve lived in a world without a cosmos for so long that we only have vague remnants of what it means.  All of us ‘own’ things that have more than a mere monetary value.  Maybe it’s something that was given to you by a parent or a loved one.  The extra value comes from its specific context in your life, the way you find meaning in the world.  One of the most famous examples of capitalism destroying the cosmos is the letter from Chief Seattle telling the president that he couldn’t understand how the government could separate the land from the people, the animals, the air and water, and the spirits.  In his Essay on Human Understanding, Locke says that land belongs to people who work it and develop it, not to those who merely appreciate or revere it. The contrast is obvious.  Capitalism only responds its own monetary values; it has no capacity to do otherwise.

                Democracy is supposedly based on another set of values.  Democracy is supposed to express the will of a people, and that will may or may not coincide with the monetary value of capitalism.  We can see this in our current situation where the government makes budgets reflecting only the monetary value (and really the monetary values of a very few) of a ‘need’ over any other way of calculating value.  How else do we understand our current national health care debate.  We have essentially decided to kill people to save money, even though the people at risk are supposed to be represented in the decision.  When GM decided to continue to produce ignitions that were faulty, knowing they were putting people’s lives at risk, they did so by calculating the cost of the lawsuits against the cost of fixing the ignition.

                At some inevitable juncture, the values of capitalism and the values of democracy are going to be incompatible.  Occasionally the social wins, but usually only in the most dire emergencies or in war.  The rest of the time, we live in a capitalistic society with democratic style markers.  Real democracy is possible only with a different idea and calculation of wealth.  Environmentalism is only possible in another economic model.  The challenges we face in this moment of profound social and political danger are being fueled by capitalism.  If we want a democratic future, we have to rethink what it means to be human and be wealthy.  We currently are trapped in a system that is killing us and the planet.  It will not self -correct.  The technology we have only makes it move much faster.  Old Chief Seattle knew something we have forgotten, money can’t buy you a clear conscience or a glass of clean water.

The Day After Trump

                The conventional wisdom about life after Trump is that American Democracy will reassert itself and a new America will emerge to heal the damage his presidency has caused.  I think there is good reason to be skeptical of that narrative.  There is a long list of the institutions and expectations that Trump has battered into submission, but it is a mistake to see him as some isolated aberration in an otherwise healthy democracy.  Trump is proof that in the long running battle for the soul of American destiny, capitalism finally defeated democracy.  We no longer live in a democratic society; we live in a capitalist society.

                In spite of warnings from folks like Chomsky, most of us have comfortably accepted the fairy tale that democracy and capitalism were not only compatible, they were necessary prerequisites of each other.  We thought that the freedom of individual consumption was the same as liberty.  It is not.  If we had been growing in a democratic direction, so many of the people who are supposedly represented in this democracy would not be so poorly served by it.  Perhaps the crowning absurdity of the capitalist mind set subsuming a democratic mind set is the declaration that corporations are people.  We live in a political system dominated by money and the relentless redistribution of wealth to the very few.  The two are joined at the hip.  Trump and the GOP didn’t invent that dynamic, they merely stopped pretending that it wasn’t true.  In the process, they turned what had been a flawed but optimistic country into a fearful and pessimistic one.

                There was a brief period in the last century when capitalism and democracy seemed to be in synch with each other.  The labor movement and the social programs of the New Deal that lasted for seven decades bound the two together.  That was possible because capitalism used to require workers to make money, and as even Henry Ford knew, that meant that workers had to be paid and cared for.  The care never included everyone; there were plenty of folks left out.  The grand narrative, however, was one of equality and prosperity.  Since the 1970’s that narrative has held on the face of overwhelming evidence that more and more efficient production did not mean wider prosperity.  Since the 70’s, wealth has been concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, gradually creating what we now call the ‘one percent.’  This shift created a crisis for democratic capitalism.  What happens when the workers no longer matter, and the interests of capital are contradictory to the interests of democracy?

                The answer is the last forty years of domestic policy that has gradually eroded the safety net of the New Deal and the War on Poverty.  It culminates in the obsessive hatred of the very rich for health care and economic equality.  The last GOP tax bill wasn’t about ‘taxes’ or how to more equitably fund the government, it was a bold- faced heist of cultural wealth by the wealthy and their crony legislators.  Capitalism no longer needs workers, and that is going to become cataclysmically true when the rapidly approaching merger of automation and AI becomes reality.  Capitalism used to be based on a manufacturing base that required workers.  Capitalism today is based on a workerless manufacturing and an even more workerless financial industry.  Robots and computers don’t need rights or benefits, at least not yet.

                The Democratic Party has no real answer for this.  They may try to put salve on your economic wounds instead of gleefully rubbing salt and rubbing alcohol on them, but they have no idea or plan for how to fix this.  They don’t even realize the problem.  A lot of people who voted for Trump feel the anxiety of these changes in their gut.  They were fools to put their faith in him, but they weren’t wrong to sense that, for them, the system is broken.  I hope the ‘blue wave’ of 2018 is real.  I hope that Trump is impeached, and that Republican are beaten to a bloody pulp.  But that won’t really change the dynamics of this clash between capitalism and democracy.  If we stay locked in the silos of identity politics and miss the common enemy we face, then the Democrats taking power will mean almost nothing.  If we don’t realize that the form of capitalism we live under is toxic to democracy, then the first day after Trump will just be another dreary day.

               

               

                

An Imagined Order

                Languaging, Maturana said, is a way of bringing a world into being that we share with others and not a way of describing the world as it already exists.  In his book, Sapiens, Harari calls these new creations “imagined orders.”  We find ourselves in one of those moments where the imagined order has broken down and a new one has not yet emerged to take its place.  Times like these are always fraught with anxiety and uncertainty.  We tend to think of the Renaissance as this glorious flowering of art and invention, but for the people who lived it, it was hell.  In the rear-view mirror, imagined orders look stable, even inevitable, but in the moment of their creation they seem anything but.

                We stand at moment of great wealth and power – the greatest the world has ever known.  Mad men and idiots have the power to destroy the planet.  Fossil fuel robber barons are threating our survival trying to extract the last drop of oil the way a junkie frantically craves the last drop of their fix.  The greatest power of the last century is caught in a Dadaist travesty of noise and decay.  But amidst the chaos and cacophony a new story is starting to take shape.  It is currently being told in small tribal pieces, but a quilt of meaning is starting to slowly take shape.  Its successful creation is anything but certain.  We may not make it.  Much is stacked against it.

                It will be a difficult story to tell.  It won’t have something like the Edict of Milan to mark a clear distinction between past and future.  It won’t be the product of elites leading the masses.  It likely won’t produce constitutions and legal codes.  It won’t revolve around a central power.  It won’t be run by men.  The languaging of this new order will be localized and fragile until it becomes as strong as the root system of the grasslands.  It is a story that embraces contradiction and paradox over certainty and uniformity.  It will not be written by AI bots.  If it is to be written at all, it has to allow new voices and new ways of being to gradually build the resilience and strength to be heard.

                Some are already calling it a failure.  They say we need truth and order, forgetting that the truth and order they refer to was written in the blood of those oppressed by the old order.  We will have to be tolerant.  We will have to learn how to be still.  We have to learn to respect chaos – the thing the Egyptians and Greeks feared the most.  We have to learn how to recognize when we are wrong, and we have to learn to recognize each other.  It will have to start small and stay flexible and contingent.  We can all play a part – we can all be a witness.

                I hear the imperfect cords of this new harmony in Black Lives Matter and in #MeToo.  They have in common the demand that the silenced be heard, that the invisible be seen.  They challenge the old order’s habit of assigning moral clarity to a privileged few.  They broaden the scope and add to the range of the narrative.  They are a long way from being perfect.  The key will be if all of these new singers can recognize the choir.  Their stories need each other.  Right now, that isn’t happening, and it would be foolish to expect it to so soon in the process.  There is a long way to go.

                Can we learn how to equal without being alike?  The language and concepts of the old order will not help.  If we don’t escape the language of the old order it will pull us back in to the same contradictions and limitations it took so long to finally see and resist.  Can we embrace both science and poetry as essential and not fall into the desert of another false Enlightenment?  We are, as Beckett once said, “between a death and a difficult birth.”  This is going to require another leap in consciousness that involves more than a priesthood or professorate.  In the process we may even rediscover and redefine what it means to be ‘human.’  Like anybody getting ready for a life-changing move, it’s time to sort through the attic and decide what to throw away.

                This is all going to seem very frustrating and illusory until it suddenly seems inevitable and natural – until we can’t remember ever not thinking this way.  I don’t expect to be there when that happens.  This is a long road.  But I can lend whatever energy I have left to telling and listening to the stories we have to tell, to put the children to sleep and keep watch in the night.

First, They Came for the Schools

                In 1983, the Carnegie Commission issued a report entitled, A Nation at Risk.  That report accelerated an all- out war on public education.  It turned schools into outlets of the textbook and testing industry and helped kick-start a war on teachers.  The report used data from tests that have since been challenged as unreliable and invalid.  It compiled test scores without reference to age, income, race or gender and concluded that schools were failing, although there was little objective evidence to support that conclusion.  Three and a half decades later, America’s schools have been reduced to detention centers, drug providers and failed technical training centers.  In the bargain, we’ve lost faith in education and see it as merely a means to employment.

                After more than 70 years of mass education through high school, economic inequality is either as bad as it’s ever been or the worst it’s ever been.  Democracy in America has been hijacked by political parties addicted to dark money and less than half of the people eligible to vote do so.  Whatever lofty goals the nation had for our schools coming out of WWII, it’s time to admit that we haven’t been able to reach them.  In fact, it’s time to admit that things are worse.  If there is going to be another chapter of American Democracy, that narrative is going to have include in it an alternative and radically reconfigured idea of school.

                First, we have to face the fact that schools cannot function equally or effectively when the country fails to address the social and economic disparity in our society.  It is ludicrous and beyond cynical to send children who are homeless, malnourished, without parents who live in violent settings to school and expect an underpaid and under supported teacher to perform a magic trick.  Schools are not the corrective to our cultural problems, they are a reflection of them.  If we want, and I don’t think we really do, an equal and fair quality education for all of our children, then we have to address the conditions those children live in away from school.  What we have done instead is to create a text book and testing industry that sucks resources out of our schools and funnels them to companies that produce tests and curricula that replicate the economic and social divides in our country.  If you want your child to do well on the standardized tests their being force fed, you better make enough money to move to a nice neighborhood and nice school.

                Second, we have to stop blaming teachers for everything that’s wrong with schools.  Education might be the only example where ‘capitalists’ have decided that paying less and reducing benefits is the best way to improve performance.  Teaching should be an attractive profession that is able to keep motivated teachers from leaving.  The opposite is true.  In too many cases, we have taken away the ability to teach and replaced it with test monitoring.  Tests mean nothing if the things being tested lack value in the real world.  Teachers are only part of the education puzzle.  They have to be supported and allowed to use their intelligence and creativity.  If you don’t think they possess those characteristics, they shouldn’t be teaching.

                Most importantly, we need to rethink what we think an education is.  Is it just the mastery of some random, socially contextualized facts?  Is it only about memory and recall?  A dogmatic education only works in a culture where change is minimal.  Ours is not that kind of culture.  Children are going to need the ability to imagine and connect with other people.  They are going to have to create or at least recreate a world that is livable and sustainable.  Sure, they need skills and knowledge, but they also need to participate in making that knowledge.  They need teachers able to lead and support them and communities that protect and nourish them.

                The easiest way to dismantle a democracy is to attack the way its children are educated.  In the last 35 years we’ve done just that.  There are smart and well-intentioned people in education, but it’s impossible to ignore what a mess they’ve created.  The influence of politicians and dark money has only added to the problem.  Thinking of schools as these nice little factory buildings where we house kids during the day is not a model for going forward.  We need to radically rethink what it means to learn around an ethic of participation and not one of passive transmission.  We have no idea what our kids are going to need to know to rebuild what we’ve destroyed.  The least we could do is to stop acting like we have the answers and get the hell out of the way.

They Hang Traitors, Don’t They?

                In the aftermath of the plundering of the American economy by the GOP and their rich donors, it can be hard to understand what really has happened in the eleven months of Trump’s reign.  So much that we had just assumed was part of the bedrock of our politics and our culture has been eroded or destroyed.  This week they finally found a way to kill off the ACA and start the process that will strip health insurance from millions – which is a wonky way of saying they just decided to kill thousands of people they were elected to represent.  It feels like watching a group of thugs in suits trash the neighbor girl’s lemonade stand, kick her in the teeth, and then, realizing they might have left a dime on the sidewalk, going back to take the dime and kick her again.   The spectacle of rich, old, white senators writing tax breaks for each other while kicking two million kids off health care makes the Grinch look like an amateur.

                As disgusting as this display was, the even more damaging news was that the Right has decided to defend Trump’s ties to Russia by attacking the special counsel.  What worries me is not the issue of collusion – which is pretty clear by now – or even the failure of congress to do one thing to stop Russian intrusion into our elections: what worries me is treason.  Trump has taken actions against NATO, the UN and climate change that have damaged American interests around the world.  Moving our embassy to Jerusalem just gave Russia the upper hand in any future political activity in the Middle East.  This is not just a matter of being incompetent – although he surely is that – it is a direct action that weakens American interests while aiding the interests of a hostile power.  Isn’t that treason?  Trump owes Putin and the Russian oligarchs (otherwise known as the Russian mob) billions for propping up his failing real estate empire.  Now he is paving the way for Russia to dominate world politics by dismantling the American government.

                He has destroyed the State Department, politicized and attacked the FBI, CIA and EPA.  He has nominated people for federal judgeships that have never tried a case.  His pathological lying has opened the door on a politics of deception that threatens the very notion of democracy.  He is still in violation of the constitution every day he doesn’t put his business interests in a blind trust.  I think we’ve just grown numb to the onslaught.  Every day is a new low.  Every news cycle brings an even more disastrous and unbelievable transgression.  We need something to focus our intention in a way that cuts through the noise and the chaos.  TREASON should do it.  Let’s stop talking about the normal political process or anybody’s legislative agenda.  This is basic.  You have to be an American or a traitor.  No more phony umbrage over NFL protests or hollow praising of the troops.  This is a moment to save your country or be part of the mob that aids and abets a traitor.

                Trump and Putin are the prototypes of a new form of post-nationalist power.  They represent the unfettered and unregulated use of wealth outside the structure of nation states.  They need a world of weakened states to allow their form of kleptocracy to flourish.  Trump, Putin and the GOP are in business of unshackling a new class of global robber barrens intent on destroying the environment and controlling the world’s economy.  To do that they are willing to make America a second- rate power and put the safety and health of its citizens at risk.  The interests of America are the interests of its people and not the interests of a craven class of political and economic opportunists.  The ‘tax’ bill they passed this week without even knowing what was in it, was a big step toward a new world disorder.

                This is the greatest existential threat to democracy since the Civil War.  This makes Benedict Arnold look like a clownish frat boy.  It’s time to tell the MAGA crowd that we’re the real patriots.  We believe in the good things that America can still become.  They are the enemy.  Their leader is guilty of treason.  To support him is to share his guilt.  I don’t just want an impeachment, I want a hanging