Erasing Barry

                I was just home from the hospital when my Grandmother changed my name to Barry.  I was given her husband’s middle name, Bernard, as my given name.  She didn’t like her husband much.  She had that kind of power.  I’ve grown up with the name my Grandmother invented for me.  Bernard is something I use on official documents, and I mostly only hear it when I’m in trouble.  No one calls me that.  I ran for office as Barry, and I worked long enough at my last job that they even started making out my checks to Barry. The things I’ve published have been published as Barry.   It’s a good name.  I’ve enjoyed having it.  It’s time to let it go.

                It’s not that I plan on returning to my given name, like some last- ditch attempt to gain respectability.  Bernard is just a legal symbol to me; I don’t identify with it at all.  I want to erase my name because after working my whole life to accomplish something, I realize now – hopefully not too late – that the only way I can learn what’s next is to leave the identity I’ve created behind.  The good and the bad.  I feel like I’m at the cusp of the experience at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism where the pilgrim has to turn away from the world and their accomplishments and wonders as a begging monk in search of Enlightenment.  I’m not going that far.  I guess I’m like the believer who prays all night to move the mountain but isn’t surprised when it’s still there in the morning.  What I identify with is the realization that what we know is more of an obstacle than an asset at some point to learning something new.

                We live in a culture saturated with individual identity.  It’s inconceivable to us that our self is an illusion.  I am not, finally, any of the things that make up my identity.  Only by letting go of that can I create a space for wisdom – which I think is a different kind of learning than the kind I’ve been practicing.  I do not want an identity.  It doesn’t matter any more what kind of impression or perception other people have, and it doesn’t matter what I think of my identity either.  I probably have a lot to apologize for, but I have nothing to defend.  I’m not for or against anything anymore.  The world still matters to me, but I think the only way I can change anything is to let go of the changes I’ve been trying to make.

                I’ve written on this blog that human knowledge is understanding the expanse and the limitations of being human.  I do not want to be immortal.  I have no need to be right.  My sense is that the next thing I have to learn in my life cycle isn’t logical, empirical or discursive.  It isn’t personal.  This will be very hard for me, because I’ve practiced hard to be all those things.  To understand the limits of being human is to open up to the possibility of beyond human.  If were going to survive our intelligence isn’t going to be artificial, it’s going to be cosmic.  I’m working on it.

                I’ll still answer if you call.  I still eat lunch, walk and play pickleball.  I will probably still write.  Maybe only poetry (if that happens I promise to have the good sense not to share it with you).   I doubt you’ll notice a difference – at least at first.  But I’m trying to be still. I’m trying to be empty.   I’m trying to be open and not judge things so fast.  I’m trying not participate in our cultural ADHD.  Maybe there won’t be anything there.  Maybe you just reach the end of the dock and step off into nothing.  But maybe there is something I can learn by erasing my identity and trying a new way.

Losing My Religion 

                There are a lot of things wrong about the way we think about the world.  There are a lot of things that prevent us from evolving a more embodied and grounded way of interacting with one another.  But one of the biggest is religion, at least the kind of religion that we have developed in our culture.  I don’t mean to suggest that spirituality or belief is wrong, just the formation of churches and congregations that are really nothing more than tribal enforcers of purity and exclusion.  Religion has done more to eat away at our politics and civility than anything else.  To top it off, the religions that are most adamant about their superiority are the ones who are least likely to actually follow any of the major concepts they supposedly adhere to.

                I was raised by a Catholic mother in a small town dominated by a Baptist church.  My father’s family belonged to a particularly virulent and illiterate branch of Protestant Christianity.  None of this had anything to do with God, at least as far as I could tell.  It was all about adults arguing about who was right and who was saved.  My Grandmother frequently told me I was going to Hell.  I got to the point where it was hard to take any of it seriously anymore.  The Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, transformed a loose affiliation of ‘christian’ practices that were multiple and diverse into dogma.  When the Reformation came as a political and economic struggle cloaked in theology, 500,000 people were killed in six months – most of them probably killed by neighbors and relatives.

                We live in an age dominated by religious conflict.  We live in a country where politics has been perversely focused on ‘religion.’  Too much of American Protestant and Evangelical thought is a strange mix of capitalism, patriotism and an Old Testament oriented Christianity.  It has little to do with an historically accurate or inclusive approach to the Gospel.   When ‘Godfearing’ Evangelicals can excuse and rationalize Trump, what is left to salvage of this mess?  We argue and militarize differences in theology that seem minute and arcane to the rest of the world.  The rest of the world is busy killing each other over the transmission of the Prophet’s message.  Eight-year old girls are raped and murdered as part of a religious caste conflict.  Can’t we just agree that whatever it was that started us on this path, it’s been an absolute failure?

                Identity politics has followed the same dead- end vision of religion, devolving all too frequently in a trial of who is most pure.  My Grandmother would have said they are all going to Hell.  We live in a world that demands we see a bigger affiliation.  Hate groups and separatists are gaining power precisely because they are united by hate in a way the majority of more tolerant souls are not.  None of us has an identity that is sustainable outside of a coalition of people who support us but are not like us. I don’t have to go to your church, believe the same things or identify the same way you do to be a good person.  We have to find a way to get beyond the barriers of identity, not because the identities aren’t true, but because we need a broader, larger community to honor and protect them.

                I feel that the only way for me to reclaim any sense of the spiritual in the world is to lose my religion.  It’s easy for me at this point to set aside the obvious markers of religion; a church, a country an ethnicity.  But I want to go farther than that.  I want to reclaim a sense of becoming as opposed to a sense of belonging to a category or tribe.  I feel like the only way to reclaim what I have lost in all these conflicts is to try and be part of something bigger.  Being old helps.  I’m not as valuable a team member as I once was.  I wear the cloak of elderly invisibility most days – just another old fart in a donut shop, trying to pay with cash instead of credit.  The moment is filled with distraction and anxiety, but the thing that calls us forward is larger that all of this.  I am part of something that is still asking me to try and understand it on its own terms.  Something that keeps reminding me that there is a lot I don’t know.  Maybe we just need to return to the spirits before religion.  We need to listen to the wind.  We need to reacquaint ourselves with the stars.  

               

Game On

                Fifty years-ago Dr. King was shot.  The next morning, I was in Flint at a speech competition when the State Police came into the basement at St. Matt’s and escorted us out of the city during the riots.  Two months later it was Bobby Kennedy, and a few months after that the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.  It felt like everything was falling apart, like the next news flash would send us over the edge.  The civil rights protests and the protests against the war, the opposition to Nixon and the emergence of the movements for women and sexual identity made it feel like we were fighting back and winning.  It felt like we had turned a corner and were never going back, that the George Wallaces were in final retreat. It felt like the battle was over.  But it wasn’t.

                Looking back, it feels like all we did was pick the low hanging fruit and call it a day.  The evil we protested against never really went away.  We never followed through, so now we are at this juncture again, the one where we have to decide how to respond to the part of the American psyche that is permeated with misogyny and racism, with hate and violence, and is once again in power.  It doesn’t seem important to me to ask how it happened.  All that really matters is how we respond.  During Watergate, the Republican party was still a party with respect for America and the Constitution.  It no longer is.  We have to decide which direction we will take as a nation.

                Trump is waking up to the realization that the walls are closing in.  Like any infantile tyrant he will now follow his rage and his worst instincts and advisors.  He will bring in John Bolton.  If we don’t love him, he will attack.  He will continue to sell out the interests of the country to appease Putin.  He is more dangerous now than he has ever been.  He knows he is entering the final phase of a failed presidency, and he has no intention of going quietly.  He will be more erratic and more impulsive as time goes on.

                The Republicans will not help.  A few may be moved by the treasonous way Trump appeases Russia, but everything else he does, they approve of.  They don’t believe in fixing the multiple problems with our elections, because if our elections were really free and fair they would be out of power.  They have manipulated the system so that the minority is in power, and they are using that power to dismantle any part of the government that doesn’t serve their craven interests.  They will not protect the environment.  They will not protect school children.  They will not impeach Trump.

                In 68, the sense of urgency was palpable.  We all knew that the moment demanded something new.  Maybe the kids from Parkland, the womens marches, and the progressive and diverse group of people running for office are signs of a new urgency.  Maybe.  What seems clear to me now looking back on the events of 68 is that it isn’t enough to win the battle.  Throwing Trump out will certainly help, but it won’t get to the root of the problem.  The low hanging fruit isn’t enough.  We have to face who we are.  We have to face how exceptionally destructive and duplicitous we’ve been as a nation.  We have to deal with racism and misogyny and a host of other deeply rooted fears and hatreds that drive our politics.

                I’m reminded of an Ursula Le Guinn story where a wizard is attacked by an evil wizard who has killed off all the other local wizards.  He eventually defeats the evil wizard and sends him to the underworld, but to complete his task he leaves the world of the living to stand guard over his grave to make sure he never returns.  Trump is what happens when the evil wizard is merely left for dead instead of finally defeated.  Each iteration of the Trumpish parts of our national psyche is more and more dangerous and more and more vile.  The forces that brought Trump to power are not going to go quietly.  They will have to be defeated.  It may turn violent – we have a tendency to do that.  This time we have to play for keeps – play to the end.  I hope that fifty years from now one of those beautiful kids from Parkland isn’t sitting by a window thinking about how they missed the chance to do it right.  Game on.

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.