The Day Before the Revolution

I’m writing this before I know what the mid-term elections will bring.  I think it’s important to see this day as a day in a process and not as either a victory or a defeat.  Nothing is going to magically restore whatever fantasy we used to have about America.  We have seen the ugliness beneath – not very far beneath – the glossy surface of our democracy.  The hatred and stupidity that have been exposed have always been there.  If you are privileged enough not to have noticed until now, count yourself lucky.  The real issue, no matter what happens in today’s election, is realizing that tomorrow is not a destination, it is a small step in a long march toward sanity.

In Ursula LeGuin’s short story, “The Day Before the Revolution,” the main character, Odo, is revolutionary leader who has struggled her whole life just to make the smallest inroads into the corrupt power of her society.  In the day covered in the story, she laments her futility, her frustration and the unrelenting task of change.  She suffers a stroke and dies that day.  The revolution bearing her name started the next day.  We have to be prepared to see ourselves as Odo, as servants to a cause we may not fully witness or realize.  In MLK’s famous line, we may not get to the mountain top. 

Our job as we wait results is to prepare, no matter the outcome, to get up tomorrow and continue the struggle.  The forces that we oppose are never going surrender on their own – they will never relent.  We must be prepared to take either a defeat or a modest victory as just another step toward more organizing, more resistance and more hope.  This isn’t a game.  The way we tend to cover elections is more like a sporting contest than an act of civil engagement.  We must stop that.  We have been delivered a great gift, the chance to see what could go wrong, a chance to see just how soulless the future could be.  Despair is the most certain way to waste that gift.  Pessimism is not an option.

We have the challenge, but also the privilege to live in a moment where we can do something important, even remarkable.  We can take the soaring rhetoric and false narratives of our history and transform them into something better – not perfect – but better.  We have the government we have because it suits too many of the people in the country.  We are here because we don’t value families and education.  We are here because we don’t take of the environment, and we are here because we have commercialized the very idea of existence.  We have to “be the change we seek.”  We have to be better.

We need to help each other take the next step.

Extended Embodiment

                One of the features of a deep epistemology is that intelligence is ‘embodied,’ meaning that it involves all of our senses and emotions and is not just a product of the deracinated functions of we call our ‘mind.’  Deep epistemology always situates us within our experience of the world instead of isolating the act of knowing from the organism that experiences it.  Embodiment is a fairly well known concept and is frequently utilized to help overcome the mind/body split that dominates and restricts much of Western philosophy.  What I want to suggest is that we need to extend our ideas about embodiment beyond our individual bodies and even beyond our concepts of human consciousness.  What I’m proposing is an extended embodiment that recognizes that the body, the source of experience and intelligence, is never just and individual organism.  We are autonomous and somewhat unique, but we are not a singular entity.

                As Maturana makes clear, we are constructed by and connected to the world we bring forth with other people through the human act of ‘ languaging.’  Only in contact with others are we able to see meaning or value in they way we encounter and experience the material world.  That world does not impose its ‘beingness’ on us, we – and it is always a we – bring it into being and consciousness by interacting with others.  For Maturana, this is never mere nominalism.  He defines ‘languaging,’ as”the coordination of coordinations of behaviors.”  In other words, ‘languaging’ is never just naming, it is always the coordination of names and meanings with others in an attempt to share and shape our experience.  Thus, the body is always already a construction we share with others.  Even in Des Carte’s meditations, he is never really there alone.  He is always accompanied by the language of his culture and the thoughts of previous philosophers.  To have an embodied sense of intelligence is inherently to have a social sense – a multiple bodied sense – of intelligence.

                Our bodies are in the world in ways that are not explicitly human.  We construct a world through ‘languaging,’ but that world is not just a fantasy.  We are alive in a world that is also alive.  We are made of the same ‘stuff’ that it is made of, so if we have consciousness, why doesn’t it?  Embodiment can’t be fully understood in human terms.  It also has to account for the reality of the rest of the living universe we inhabit.  This is not the same as transcendentalism, where there is a ‘human’ power or consciousness in nature.  It is a more fundamental realization that consciousness is greater and more diverse than the more limited concept of human consciousness.  Our bodies connect us to that sense of consciousness.  We are connected in the awe we experience in nature.  We are connected in the love of puppies and the fear of sharks.  We are connected to the vastness of space.  Embodiment that ignores these connections to only concentrate on the technological or digital spaces we have created is cut off from a critical source of experience and moral action.

                Extended embodiment is a grounding.  It gives depth and integrity to our experience.  It is a recognition of both the limitations and finality of our existence and the limitless expressions of spirit that sustain us.  Moral action and deep intelligence can never originate in individual consciousness.  Every action, thought and word is connected to every other action, thought and word.  In Maturana’s way of putting it, nothing is trivial.  An extended embodiment makes those connections and their consequences manifest.  It is the source of our sense of rhythm, harmony and beauty.  It is greater than God.  Without it, all of our thoughts, creations and actions are in vain.  

Moral Action

                One of the things that a deep epistemology has to account for is moral action.  Just as knowing can’t be reduced to the abstract rational intellect, moral action does not grow out of abstract principles of morality.  Morality is not a principle or theory, it is a concrete and relational element of our daily experience.  Because of this, morality is less concerned with consistency and adherence to an ideal sense of the good than it is with variations of relationships and situations.  Moral action isn’t sustained by platitudes or pronouncements but by the concrete associations of people trying to act intelligently in specific situations.  Like fractal constructions, morality may have one organizing principle one day and another principle the next.

                The melding of Greek philosophy and early Christian theology around Plato’s ideal of the good has inverted both the direction and construction of a moral dimension.  That mashup creates a world where the ‘good’ already exists and every action is a poor attempt to realize it.  We live in a cultural context that tries to impose a definition of morality independent of our lived experience.  In a deep epistemology, morality is created in the opposite direction.  Rather than starting with an idea of what is good or moral, the goal is to build the good and moral out of the specific and contemplative actions we take every day.  It might be helpful to think of it as an ecology that is based on billions of small acts that sustain the evolving of higher and more complex forms of moral actions.  If the billion small ‘bacterial’ acts disappear, so do the larger structures that depend on them.

                From the perspective of a deep epistemology, it makes no sense to talk about laws or principles as the source of a moral life.  Morality is lived and not articulated.  Its presence is only obvious by outcomes it creates, not by the labels it claims.  We build the potential for a moral life in the relationships we engage in.  Most of these relationships are with other people, but we also have relationships with non-human fields of reference, such as the environment.  If actions at the ‘bacterial’ level lack just and moral outcomes, no constitution or system of justice will evolve.  All morality happens at the level of individual responsibility and resonates within the relational constructs we share with other people.  It is not enough for the individual to claim a moral purpose, it can only emerge in the context of relationships with others that we are always already a part of.

                To me – and I claim no academic validity for this comparison – it seems that this is the root insight into the Buddhist idea of the Bodhisattva, the one who is enlightened but stays to work with the rest of humanity and the world.  We may see the way and know what to do, but only in action with others can we bring forth a world that is attuned to what we see.  Knowing and moral action live at the connecting point of our divided nature, linking autonomy to connectedness.  We are always operating in this paradox.  We can never be just one or the other.  Without autonomy there is no insight and reflection.  Without connection there is no avenue of expression or realization for insight and reflection.  We can experience this paradox as a dissonance or as a harmony, but we can’t escape the paradox.

                Maturana is fond of saying that no act of ‘languaging’ is trivial.  With every word and action we are building and/or destroying a world.  There is no free lunch.  We are always challenged, no matter what we think we know or what we have already done, to know and do more.  The context of our relationships and the actors we share them with change.  Sometimes our roles are well defined and sometimes they are vague at best, but our responsibility is the same.  ‘Know thyself,’ sounds to us like a call to individual awareness.  It is not.  In the context of its utterance, it is a call to a deeper knowing that connects us with not just our self but the conditions and relationships that bring that self into being.  Deep knowing is moral action.  Moral action is deep knowing.

Dominos

               

                Now that Brett Kavanaugh is a Supreme Court justice, it may be fair to say that the United States is no longer a functional democracy.  His confirmation by an undemocratic president and an undemocratic senate insured that the tyranny of the minority that has been in place since the Electoral College invalidated the will of people and made Trump president will continue.  It is now total.  The sacred idea of checks and balances and the independence of the three branches of government is now just a cruel joke.  There is no independence and there are no checks and balances.  Our institutions are now controlled by people who do not believe in them and who have no intention of preserving them.  The last domino has fallen.

                The grand illusion of American democracy was that there was something inherently noble in the founding of this nation.  That myth overlooks the fact that the ‘founders’ weren’t very democratically inclined people, except as it referred to them personally.  The Electoral College, the initial restrictions of voting and the election of Senators all point to a system that protected an elite oligarchy and not a broad democratic populous.  Jefferson’s soaring rhetoric may have made it sound like all of us were included, but he certainly never envisioned women or people of color being included.  Hamilton may make a great subject for a musical, but his politics were openly hostile to the common man.  What claim America had to being a beacon of democracy has always come from the people initially excluded in the compact forcing their way in and demanding a voice and a right to participate.  Good luck making that argument in front of the Roberts’ Court.

                The Trump, McConnell, Ryan, Roberts view of government is Calvinist in its orientation and intent.  A small group of chosen elites dictate terms and conditions to the rest of us, all the while stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.  The constitutional ‘purists’ among them will find more and more ways to limit access to justice and participation to those of us of suspect origin and philosophy.  One of their heroes, Scalia, made a career out of claiming to be a strict constructionist while crafting opinions in cases such as Heller and Citizens United that are completely at odds with the historical context of the constitution.  Expect that to continue.  Corporations will have unlimited power while vast swaths of people will be denied the right to even vote.

                The optimistic view is that this can be corrected at the ballot box. Maybe.  Seats on the Supreme Court don’t open up every day.  Maybe people will organize and turn out in numbers sufficient to take control of the House, the Senate and eventually the White House.  Maybe federal prosecutors are going to nail Trump and his family.  Maybe.  Even if that happens, the specter of women cheering Trump as he ridiculed a woman who survived an attempted rape by a privileged punk means that this isn’t going to be pretty.  No mere election will convince people to be inclusive or compassionate.  We don’t just disagree, we hate each other. 

                There’s been a lot of people who have written that this period in our history has made them understand what happened in Germany before WWII.  I get it, but those aren’t the historical comparisons that resonate with me.  I always wondered how America could become so disfunctional that we would descend into a Civil War.  I think I’m starting to understand.  This divide separates not just predictable enemies but friends and family.  Where is the forum that we can use to debate and argue constructively?  What do we agree on that would allow us to heal our differences?  I’m not sure what the possibility of compromise even looks like.

                The other event that the current situation makes me think about is the Reign of Terror, when at the beginning of the French Revolution the rebels carried out mass executions of aristocrats and their sympathizers.  It seemed so brutal and senseless.  Now, I’m not sure that a thousand guillotines at the base of the Washington Monument isn’t inevitable.  

Deep Epistemology

                We tend to think of epistemology as the production of verifiably true statements about the world.  I want to suggest that we shift our focus to what it means for a person to actually ‘know’ something and the value that such knowing brings to our lives.  It is not enough to say that we know something because we possess information or data about a particular subject.  Knowing implies that we have changed as a function of learning, that my situated place in the world is impacted by what I’ve learned.  Dewey tried to capture this by foregrounding ‘experience’ as the primary focal point of philosophy and learning.  Experiential learning always involves other people, so that knowing something is always a social and linguistic operation.  I think the concept of ‘deep epistemology,’ along the lines of deep ecology that places us in the ecology and not as an arbiter outside it, is a way to develop a more complicated and complex understanding and modeling of what it means to ‘know.’

                To begin with, knowing is never about knowing the world ‘as it is’ because we are always already involved in the process of making that world.  Language, or as Maturana puts it ‘languaging,’ is the act of interacting with others to bring forth a world.  This is an active, which is to say experiential, process and not a passive one or one that can be reduced to abstract representations.  A friend of mine tells a story about his seventh- grade daughter winning a contest by remembering the capitols of all 50 states.  Later that week when they were driving by the capitol located in their city, she had no comprehension of what a capitol was.  Because she could say that Lansing was the capitol of Michigan, she got credit on a test, but what did she really know about capitols?  This example is trivial on one level but profound on another.  She manipulated a short-termed stimulus to her advantage, but she had no connection to the activity or process that makes a capitol meaningful.

                In Cognition in the Wild, Edwin Hutchins explains how cultures construct intelligences to make it possible for them to understand and function in the world.  In that context, ‘knowing’ something is always connected to a cultural action.  Maturana likes to say that at some point all knowledge is verifiable by behavior.  In other words, I can talk about playing violin all day, but at some point I have to actually play the violin to be credible.  Turning epistemology into an analytical and linguistic game blinds us to the deeper implications of knowing.  If knowing is social, then everything I know and learn has an inherent ethical dimension to it.  This is particularly true about what I presume to know about other people.  In the last century, a one- dimensional social science assumed we could reduce people to statistics and data.  When I was teaching, I would have administrators occasionally produce aggregated data about my students.  In the end, the report would always talk about the ‘average’ student.  My point was always that I never met that average student.  She didn’t exist, except in some parallel statistical universe.  The data and trends could be helpful.  They could give me different frames and concepts to work with, but they were not ‘true.’  Reducing any particular student to those averages was to replace knowing and working with them with an authoritative abstraction that gave me power over their experience.

                In some basic sense, all learning is a function of narrative inquiry.  That is not to say that it is necessarily solipsistic, because language is always connecting, to one degree or another, what we know with the larger cultural frameworks we operate within.  But our knowing is deeply our knowing.  We use it to connect with others.  We use it impact the social and material conditions we live in, but part of it is always uniquely our own.  Part of it is about our own quest to understand ourselves as simultaneously connected and isolated.  We have to function in both of those realms at the same time.   How we act in our world, the ethics, intelligence and humanity we express is a function of what we know deeply.

                In the same sense, intelligence can never be ‘artificial.’  Machine intelligence can augment, organize and challenge what we know, but it is not the same as human intelligence.  It is not connected to the social and biological reality of our being, no matter how much it might appear to replicate it.  Knowing is more than intellect.  It is the connections we make in the social, ecological and emotional universe we construct.  It is as much a function of the way we connect to music or read a poem as it is an abstract intellectual property.  Both can make us more ‘experienced,’ both can make us better actors and co-creators of the world we share and shape.  Deep epistemology realizes and honors all of that.

               

               

Beginnings

                Beckett once said that we find ourselves “between a death and a difficult birth.”  Both ends of the equation are troubling and threatening.  We live in the midst of constant talk of collapse and decline.  The political system we so proudly hailed has finally produced the clown king, Ubu Roi, in its final act of decay as it slides toward irrelevancy.  The economic stability that meant that a small but significant group of people didn’t have to win the genetic lottery to live free and productive lives is now producing unprecedented disparity and inequality.  The alliances that held the world together for the 75 years or so since the last great war are fraying at the edges, and a new class of global capitalists is emerging outside of and in opposition to the great nation states that have ruled the last couple centuries.  We are like family members gathered in a room in a hospice facility facing the inevitable demise of a patriarch we loved and cherished (at least some of the time).

                A lot of the conversation around this moment in our cultural evolution is centered on reform.  People, understandably, want to ‘go back’ to the old order that seemed to work so well (as long as you didn’t find yourself on the wrong side of some unspoken privilege).  These folks would have you believe that this is just a blip in the grand scheme of things, that the next election and a new policy will correct our course and put us back on track.  It’s an illusion.  The conditions that created this moment have been trending in this direction for a very long time.  The solutions to climate change, economic inequality, racism and misogyny aren’t patches that can be made to the existing system, they are fundamental challenges to the way that system worked and, even more threatening to those in power, a direct challenge to the wealth and power the system produced.  If you believe in a future that is more fair, equal, environmentally healthy and sustainable, then you have to be willing to leave this system behind to create that future.  This system was never meant, the eloquence of Jefferson notwithstanding, to produce those results.

                There is no time to despair.  A difficult birth is not a miscarriage or stillbirth.  Every large shift in cultural narratives and imagined order has been a struggle.  Every struggle carries within it unanticipated challenges and opportunities.  As it unfolds, it will produce a different kind of person, just as the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution did.  We will learn to think differently about the world and our place in it.  Technology will only be so much help.  There is no technological fix to creating a better human, better humans have to learn to manage technology better.  I think the only honest thing to do is to embrace this moment, in both its peril and possibility.  We need to honor and take a sober accounting of the death.  We need to be brutally honest with ourselves about what worked and what didn’t and for whom.

                At the end of Tree of Knowledge, Manturana and Verella tell a little story about how hard fundamental change is.  In the story, a girl lives on an island in an archipelago of islands.  Her people have no boats.  Their island is flat, the water is brackish and the only thing that grows are cabbages.  Everyone complains about the island, the water and most of all the cabbages.  One day our heroine makes a tricky swim across a strait to a new island.  The island has waterfalls of fresh, sweet water and a variety of fruits and beautiful forests.  She makes it back to her island and tells all of her people what she found.  They are all excited to move to the new island and agree to meet the next day at the beach to help each other navigate the strait.  In the morning, the girl rushes to the shore only to find her people there with their arms full of cabbages.  She explains that they will never make the swim to the new island with their cabbages.  Most of the people refuse to part with their cabbages, even though they have complained bitterly about them every day.  In the end, only a small group leave everything behind to swim to the new island, leaving most of the people on the shore with their cabbages.

                We face the same choice.  We can cling to what we have been doing and thinking or work toward a new way of thinking about the world.  I think we have to be willing to put down our cabbages and swim for it.

               

Reset

                One of the worst things about the American political scene is its fascination with gossip, scandal, and personal cults.  That was true before Trump became president, and he has ramped up the drama to unprecedented levels.  Every day is a new crisis that threatens the norms of democracy, and every news cycle is a frantic hand wringing over what went wrong today.  We can’t even remember what seemed so important three days ago.  Some of this is surely by design, but whether it’s intentional or not, the result is that we never spend any time talking about the real issues, the real political concerns that we are on a collision course with.  We should be preparing ourselves for dramatic changes on the horizon, but instead we’re playing this endless game of Duck Duck Goose with an orange clown.

                We should be preparing for the end of oil and the end of work.  We should be talking about the impact that both of these all but inevitable events are going to do to radically change our lives.  Sweden has announced that it is outlawing fossil fuels in 2020.  The EU is seriously considering banning the use of plastic in packaging.  Meanwhile, we’re trying to figure out who Trump is going to pardon next.  One of the consequences of an utterly incompetent president is that we fall further behind the rest of the world when it comes to preparing for what’s next. 

                It’s not a new thing to contemplate the end of oil.  James Ridgeway was writing about it back in the early 70’s.  What is new is that some forward- thinking nations are actually starting to plan for it.  It not only means that we have to rethink the sources of energy that we use, we also have to rethink how that shift alters economic, political and social structures that have been built around the use of fossil fuel.  Oil is a centralizing technology, and using it to generate heat and power requires a fast infrastructure of extraction and distribution.  When oil goes away, how does the new energy source both allow and require us to rethink and restructure our relationship to that infrastructure.  If we think about the military consequences of oil alone, it is clear that there are new opportunities and new challenges ahead.

                If new energy is more diffuse and more local, if it doesn’t depend on energy grids and distribution networks designed to serve the petro-chemical industry, what can we do that was hard to do before?  If everyone could ‘own’ their own energy, even if they had to buy the means to produce it, what would that mean to our patterns of settlement and trade?  The risk is that we’ll plod along thinking that tomorrow will be mostly like today and miss the chance to get out ahead of that change.  The end of oil is going to be the largest economic and social shift since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, probably even bigger than computers.

                The same thing can be said about work.  No country in the world has ever been more dominated by ‘work’ than we are.  It’s how we judge someone’s worth, their position in society, and it determines what standard of living we expect to have.  It is deeply ingrained in our cultural values of personal morality – it’s what Locke said made it ok to take someone else’s land, if you were ‘working’ it and they weren’t.  We are facing the replacement of human workers with AI, robots and computers.  There simply won’t be enough jobs for the number of people who need them.  Whenever a politician says that their goal is create more jobs, mark them off as a liar and a fool.  It ain’t happening.  What are we going to do? 

                We can’t just continue to hope that the tomorrow will be mostly like today mantra will apply to this issue.  Should we be moving to guaranteed work, as some have suggested.  Should we reprioritize work to put more emphasis on education, childcare and the environment?  It this the mechanism to redistribute wealth in a way that makes democracy sustainable?  These issues are not just cosmetic.  They are deeply structural and game changing.

                The next time you turn on the news and see Trump’s face, forget about the scandal of the day and think for a minute about what we’re not talking about.  Whatever happens to him, we’re still going to have to face and work our way through at least these issues and probably more.  Let’s spend our time thinking about what is possible instead of always focusing on what is so obviously wrong.