Climate’s Backdoor

                For a long time now, it’s been obvious that climate change means we have to give up our dependence on fossil fuels.  It is also obvious that the financial interests of the people who own and run the companies that supply this energy are at odds with the global need to find reliable sources of renewable energy.  What I think is less obvious is how the petro dollar has given rise to much of the political nihilism that is sweeping the world.  There are many reasons that this hyper-male, right wing political movement has taken hold, but one of the driving factors may be oil.

                The global network of oligarchs, many of them Russian, who control the fossil fuel economy have formed an international crime syndicate that promotes political instability.  They are not being driven by ideology or religion, just money.  Most, but not all, of this money is generated in the oil market.  They foster instability in democracies and democratic alliances so their financial interests can go unchecked.  They have no interest in the work of governments or the welfare of the people or the environment.  If the roads, schools and legal system are in decay, it just makes it easier to move through and around borders and institutions that would normally restrict their activities and limit the amount of money they could accumulate.  In their wake, are the remnants of functional democracies that are increasingly ruled by and exist for only the wealthiest of their citizens.

                Some of the figures in this cabal are American oil magnets, financiers and politicians.  They are aiding and abetting the extraction of wealth from this country and increasing the economic inequality that is choking our democracy.  In fact, they use their vast sums of money to elect puppet politicians and promote policy designed to tip the scales even more in their direction than they already are.  Trump is both a consequence and an agent of this movement.  Actions that make no sense viewed from the normal way we look at government and policy make perfect sense when viewed from the agenda of the new robber barons.  Sometimes they are connected to each other, and other times they are just operating in random but predictable synchronicity with each other.

                This is why renewable energy isn’t just an environmental imperative.  The decentralization of energy would be the single biggest threat to this international network of oligarchs.  If done properly, renewable energy is scalable.  It can break the global monopoly of the oligarchs and restructure the economic wealth in the world.  In fact, I think it is safe to say that only by breaking that monopoly can democracy become a sustainable option for the future.  We should move away from fossil fuels for the health of the planet, but we should do it with the realization that we can also regenerate democracy.  As long as we are tethered to the economy of oil, the distribution of wealth and resources will continue to undermine the environment and our politics.

                If there is a small bright spot in this dreary connection between oil and despotism – and that’s a big if – it’s that there are people in the Justice Department who have known about this network of oligarchs and their plans for a while now.  One of them is perhaps one of the leading experts on how they operate and how they are connected.  He knows the players and the tactics.  His name is Robert Mueller.

Languaging and Learning

                One of the most profound differences in making the shift from language to languaging is what it means to the way we learn.  All of us understand how important language is to the way we learn.  Schools focus on language at every level, trying to help students navigate the habits and protocols of learning.  Most of that attention, however, uses language as transmission and not creation.  That is, schools see language as basically inert and assume the student will learn through imitation and direction to produce mostly predetermined answers.  Finding the ‘right’ answer has become the unintentional mantra of American education.  It’s a process that assumes a static and enforceable language as its base.  Languaging changes this dynamic in critical ways.

                If we see language as the medium or sense through which we coordinate the coordination of behaviors that we use to create ‘reality,’ then Maturana’s idea of ‘bringing forth a world’ starts to make sense.  When we think of languaging as a behavior and not an artifact, it becomes easier to see how sterile our constructions and assumptions about language and learning really are.  We assume students should be passive receptors of information and that they should use that information to produce results we determine.  Only the most advanced and creative people are given the latitude to use language creatively without sanction or reproach.  In many instances, language becomes an enforcement mechanism that limits access to and participation in the generation of knowledge.  We are limiting the idea and role that language plays to a single frequency and mistaking that very simplistic model for the vast resources of languaging.

                Transmission is certainly part of learning, but it is a very limited and basic part.  Neurolinguists have long known that students have to translate what they learn to their own language to move it out of short-term recall into deeper forms of cognition.  Knowing the answer to a question doesn’t necessarily mean that we understand the answer in a complex or embodied way.  We only begin to use what we know in the process of languaging – of engaging with others to coordinate our behaviors and understandings.  Information can contextualize and enrich that process, but it is never an adequate measure of what we intend or mean.  To make meaning, we have to engage beyond what we already know or perceive and try to come to an evolving and dynamic shared meaning. 

                We are, as Maturana and Lloyd Fell, who draws on Maturana in his own work, like to say simultaneously autonomous and connected.  That is, each of is unique but not individual.  To be “human” is to be part of something more complex.  Languaging is the process we use to create a world.  We encounter that world individually, but we understand it collectively.  If what we know was truly individual, we would never understand each other or be able to use our creations and interactions to build relationships, contexts and realities.  Obviously, some people are more creative and unique than others, but without a larger coordination of context and behavior they would simply be thought of as crazy (they may even write a blog confirming it).  Fell and Maturana are careful to say that we can never move everything we experience personally into a collective space, so we always have a residual component to our thoughts and feelings that is typically interpreted as our self or the individual self.  That component is real, but it is not complete without the other connections in our life.

                Languaging and learning are always played out across these boundaries.  In cultures that are mostly stable with a high degree of conformity in the imagined order, languaging and learning are stable and grounded tropes that are well defined and policed.  We don’t live in one of those.  In cultures such as our own, the border between what needs to be preserved and what needs to change is a constantly moving and extremely fragmented activity.  We are in the process of writing a new imagined order.  It is, as it always is, a messy and dangerous process.  Learning in this context is necessarily pushed to more creative and experimental forms and compositions.  We need to understand that as we face the realization that the educational system we thought was so effective crumbles before us.  We need to understand that learning is languaging and students have no choice but to use it to create a new order.

                We cannot possibly know what that order will evolve to include and define.  What we can do is to step back from our well entrenched positions and realize that we are not arguing about facts; we are arguing over different versions of reality.  I have no idea how to talk to someone who believes that Trump is doing a great job.  But they aren’t the ones writing the new order.  They are defending an order that has already died and is threatening to take everything else down with it.  We need to start letting students not just learn but make knowledge.  They need tools of imagination we don’t have.  We aren’t going to live in the world they create.  There is absolutely no guarantee they will succeed.  This is no attempt at optimism.  What it is, is an attempt at pragmatic realism.  At some point the student or child walks out the door on their own and the world becomes theirs, not ours.

               

               

The Politics of Languaging

                As we watch our democracy try to work through its experience with the pathogen named Trump, I think it is a good time to reimagine what politics is.  We’ve tended to think of the political in strictly institutional terms.  That is, we tend to focus on legislative chambers, laws and policies.  Politics has become an abstraction and distraction for many.  A lot of folks have just given up on it all together. In the current situation, it’s hard to argue that they shouldn’t.  But at its core, politics has never been about the buildings and the office holders.  At its core, politics is the coordination of our lives together, how we bring each other and the relationships between us into being.  It’s about creating an imagined order that can define, inspire and sustain us.

                When politics becomes too big and abstract, it tends to lose the connection to daily live for many people.  Most people don’t live their daily lives on that kind of platform.  Daily life is about relationships, and politics should be, too. This big, abstract view of politics has led people to think that everything runs itself, that their voice or action doesn’t matter.  It also encourages us to make large, often misguided, solutions and not individual action and responsibility the basis of the political.  Our politics has created a static view of our political institutions, a view that is inherently conservative and one that grows increasingly out of touch with reality.  We are stuck with a lot of late 19^th century institutions and protocols that no longer reflect our political reality.  In fact, the Republican Party no longer even pretends to value democratic practices, such as fair elections and majority representation.

                One corrective path would be a radical revisioning of current institutions using the same tools, which mostly come from the Enlightenment, to create a new, rational or ‘scientific’ compact.  This approach has the appeal of seeming like ‘progress’ and retaining the political aesthetic that is now familiar to us. The problem with this approach is that it just set up a new horizon of institutional failure.  Given the accelerated rate of social, economic and cultural change, we are likely to reach that horizon in much less time than it took to create the current misalignment between politics and reality.  Unfortunately, this seems to be the most likely and most popular political direction.

                The alternative is to create a more radical sense of democracy, perhaps best captured in the work of John Dewey.  For Dewey, democracy only worked as an ongoing process, which continuously built new possibilities out of the problems and failures of its practice.  It is not a democracy that builds monumental domes to house legislators as much as it is democracy of dialog and practice.  For me, it is a politics of languaging, of the continual and active process of bringing forth a world we share with others.  Our politics moves at the pace it does because it was designed to let people on horseback convene at distant locations.  It was designed to reflect and protect the agrarian nature of our culture.  Neither of those conditions apply to our current crisis.  A politics of languaging is fluid and adaptive, making it easier to both anticipate and recover from inevitable failures.  The goal is to learn and adapt, not to solve.

                A politics of languaging also recognizes that solutions often have a fractal structure, that is, local conditions are variable and what works in one setting may not work in another.  Knowledge, as Dewey recognized, is created out of specific conditions by a specific set of people engaging with each other.  The idea that experts or think tanks can craft policy for people they don’t know living lives they can’t even imagine is absurd.  We can still study and learn from other people and situations – the goal isn’t a new sort of tribalism – but we also have to be open to the variability of application.  We have to engage our own circumstances and our own neighbors.  If we want to make the commitment to a new form of democracy we have to do more than manipulate the system that is already in place.  We have to start dismantling it from the inside – while in flight. 

Trumped

                As the investigation into the multiple charges against Trump and his family and associates builds to a crescendo, (spoiler alert: he’s guilty), people are starting to talk about the end game of the Trump presidency.  That is a huge mistake.  The assumption is that the ‘rule of law’ will now prevail as the justice department and legal system take up the numerous charges (can anyone even keep track anymore) that will lead to indictments.  Normally, this would be the end of this sad little vignette, and the bad guys would shuffle off, stage left.  Normally.  We can’t count on normal anymore.  We are now living in a governmental crisis that is far bigger than Trump and his corrupt but bungling cronies and kids.  While we’ve been caught up in the tabloid machinations of Trumpism, American democracy slumped into the corner and died.

                It was killed by a Republican congress that allowed two years to go by without a whiff of accountability.  The evil wizard (there’s always gotta be an evil wizard) in this story is Mitch McConnell.  What he’s been doing while we’ve been laughing at SNL parodies of the man is confirming the most incompetent and conservative slate of judges in the country’s history, and doing it faster than ever before.  Those judges will now decide the fate of the legislative moves in states like Michigan and Wisconsin to steal power from incoming Democratic governors.  Those judges will decide if the charges brought against Trump are legitimate.  Those judges are not going to rule in our favor.

                Mitch has known all along that Trump was dirty – Mitch knows dirty when he sees it – and he knows that the clock will run out on this charade.  While we’ve been waiting for hero to ride in and sweep the maiden off the track in front of the oncoming train, Mitch has been supergluing her to the track.  From the beginning, congressional Republicans have been planning for the end of Trump and how they can stay in power.  It’s obvious they will not provide oversight.  It’s obvious they no longer care or believe in democracy or representative government.  They only believe in power and money, and they’re about to play one final hand.  They aren’t worried about elections – Hell, they steal elections and deny people the right to vote regularly. 

                What happens when, in spite of overwhelming evidence, the Republicans refuse to impeach.  It’s entirely possible that Mitch will never even bring it to the floor.  They have backed themselves into this corner of trying to run a democracy as a minority, and they have no choice now but to see if they can make it stick.  Their party is beyond appeal to decency or democratic principles.  They lose if they play by the rules, and Mitch never plays by any rules but his own.  There will be an uproar – they know that.  There will be protests – they know that, too.  They don’t care.  Their survival is based on ignoring the law; it’s the only play they have left.  They believe that the rest of us don’t count.

                When Mitch makes his move, he will be leaving electoral politics behind.  He can no longer count on winning what he needs that way.  He and the judges he put in place will suspend the normal process of governing in favor of a Senate controlled and court enforced rule.  The only man who could stop this is the Chief Justice – you want to bet on that.  I always felt that in a normal political cycle Trump would lose in 2020 – the votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in the midterms support that.  To me, the question that arose on the day Trump took office is whether on not there will be an election in 2020.

The Linguistic Turn

                One of the questions facing any attempt to develop a deep epistemology based on embodiment is how to frame the question of language.  In some form or another it has dominated 20^th century philosophy.  Rorty, barrowing the phrase from Bergmann, claimed philosophy had taken a ‘linguistic turn’ in the last century.  Now, a hundred years out from Saussure and his work on semiotics, the question is where does that turn lead, “Lincoln county road or Armageddon,” to quote Dylan.   The question of language illustrates just how flawed our cultural framework of working with language, mind and thought are.  Language, through a particular use of language, becomes an object in itself, something to be studied and dissected, with language, of course, as a linguistic phenomenon of importance.  I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to get a little dizzy.

                As I’ve written many times before, I prefer Maturana’s use of the term ‘languaging.’ Whenever I use that term, I find people have a hard time understanding it. Some have an intuitive feel for what he’s trying to say and some, perhaps most, just think my spellcheck is broken.  For Maturana, language isn’t a ‘thing,’ it is a biological function of being human.  Fish swim.  Humans language.  As such, it is incorrect to say we ‘use’ language and more accurate to think of us existing in language.  One of the things he often says is that we do not use language to describe a world that already exists but to bring forth a world with others that we then treat as real.  This is not mere nominalism.  In the way philosophers tended to deal with this issue, language was a spare part in the dynamic between thought and mind.  The world had been discarded a couple of centuries earlier.  For embodiment to occur, we have to reframe our relationship to language – we have to embrace languaging.

                Maturana would never settle for the notion that the world we create is merely language, because that would mean that the world and language were separable, and they’re not.  It makes more sense to me to think of language as a sense – just like the other senses – that both connect and restrict our experience of the world with others.  It is a malleable interface through which we manifest and imagine our interactions – or as Maturana puts it , “coordinatations of coordinations of behaviors.”  Cultures do this in different ways.  Some of Maturana’s earlier research is in how color is formulated differently in different cultures – we see what we are trained to see and expect to see.  As Saussure said, the signifier is not the signified, but Maturana makes a further point.  It is true that the signifier is open, but once it becomes a signifier, it now has consequence.  We can say anything, but when we are languaging, what we say has significance and is no longer simply arbitrary.  That is, it can never revert to nominalism.

                This dynamic is ongoing.  Bakhtin said that language was constantly being pushed and pulled by what he called centripetal and centrifugal forces.  We are both expanding and restricting language to find a balance between stable and unstable messaging.  We have to adapt the language to represent what is changing (what is alive), but we have to stay close enough to established form and meaning to make sense.  If we have a strong preference for elegance and closure we would become math majors.  If we were more concerned with imagery and the vatic potential of language we would be poets.  If harmony and rhythm were our focus we would be musicians.  If we lacked any discernable interest in any of this we would be social scientists.  The point is that languaging is part of the vibration and frequency of living and not an external abstraction.

                The final point that Maturana makes about this is that it is far from trivial.  In the nominalist turn in postmodern thought there is a strain that reduces everything to simply trying to be clever.  It’s fine to use language to be playful – being playful is one of the coolest things about being human.  But languaging, even in its playful moments is also profoundly important.  In many wisdom traditions the only thing prior to the word is the breath.  Once we breath, we speak and bring our world into being.  It makes a difference how that happens and what possibilities are available to us in that creation.  A deep epistemology always grounds us in that joy and that responsibility.

Examples

                After retiring, I wondered what it was I was supposed to be doing.  When I was teaching, it seemed like I was contributing something small but tangible to the struggle for a better world.  Absent that, it was unclear to me what I could contribute.  I like the freedom of reading and thinking what I want instead of having other people dictate what I have to respond to.  I like spending more time talking and hanging out with the people I choose to instead having to interact with people I really didn’t care much about.  I liked being retired, but I still wondered what I should be doing. 

                Working my way through the idea of deep epistemology has helped me reframe that question somewhat.  I no longer think of it as what I should do, but how I should be.  At this point, it seems to me that like older men in some Buddhist traditions, my true goal is to work on myself, not for any reward or external affirmation, but because the benefit of age is reflection.  In my working life, my mental reflexes were too amped up to be truly reflective.  Like most men growing up in this culture, I was set on solving problems and doing battle with those who opposed the way I saw the world.  There was never a shortage of either of those provocations.  I judged my contributions to the situation by winning and exerting control.  I suppose that is what youth demands – or at least my youth demanded it.  I tried not to be a complete jerk, and, in my telling of it, at least, my battles were mostly trying to speak truth to power and injustice.  Power and injustice always seemed to win.

                From the perspective of retirement and deep epistemology, I see things differently.  I can be calmer now than I was before.  I still care as deeply about the outcomes, but they aren’t really my outcomes anymore.  Accepting my age means accepting a different role.  I think people who still want to direct things in their 70’s and 80’s are missing the point, not because they don’t “get it,” but because they are wasting their hard earned perspective on moment to moment chaos.  (Of course, it helps that nobody really cares what I think anymore).  Reflection is so lacking in this culture, where the pressure is to act and react instantly.  The way I see it now, our job – or at least my job – is to be an example of virtuous and mindful action.  I want to set aside being clever and aggressive for the opportunity to learn how to be an example of the things I always said I believed in.

                In cultures that have some sense of filial piety, they value age for the perspective, perhaps even the wisdom, it brings.  At the very least, we should be in a position to reflect on what we’ve seen and done instead of just reacting to the next stimulus in an endless stream of new stimuli.  One of the cultural consequences of deracinated and disembodied consciousness is that we lose our sense of mortality – not in some mawkish or fatalistic sense, but as the grounds of our being in the world.  Time is only meaningful to living things.  The gift that time bestows on us is to see what is important and what isn’t.  It is important that we reconnect to our bodies and the rest of the living universe. 

                I don’t plan on being a good example all the time, nor do I expect to overcome my rash and impulsive nature.  Cut in front of me in line and I’ll give you a demonstration.  But I can be an example of becoming to those who care or want to notice.  I can’t open a web site to market it or make money off it, but I can make this phase of my life richer.  Maybe I can help as part of a larger conversation about how we reimagine democracy and virtue.  I can at least listen and wait for a pause in the action for a chance to share what I know.  If that doesn’t happen, I can wait some more.  When I was a kid, I wanted to be a wizard.  That ain’t happening, but the disguise of wizards is often playing the role of an old fool. I’ve got that one down.

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.