Languaging Realms Part Two

               

                Languaging realms shape, define and describe the world we bring forth and share with others.  To function properly, they have to include a mechanism(s) for checking what the realm creates and to align it with the coupling that the people in it have with their surroundings.  The danger of any realm is that it will be shut off from these mechanisms and continue to drift further and further away from a sustainable coupling.  What languaged reality convinced someone to cut down the last Easter Island palm tree, commit mass suicide in the jungle or throw more plastic into the ocean?  The consequences of a languaging realm sealed off from the impact it has on the sustainable relationship with its environment can be dire.  The question we face is how do we prevent that from happening.

                America has always had a fascination with realms that devolved into fantasy.  In his book, Fantasyland, Anderson recounts the numerous religious, conspiratorial and get rich quick movements that have littered American history, so unhealthy or unsustainable narratives have been with us for a while.  My sense is that there have been two changes along the way that have made the problem existentially more problematic.  The first is the leveling and destruction of authoritative gatekeepers, and the second is the increased specialization of the discourses of academic and scientific communities.

                Authoritative gatekeepers are problematic in their own right.  While they may tamp down the most outrageous and problematic ideas and conspiracies, they can be just as wrong as any other narrative and they also prevent open access to ideas.  I am citing them here not because I think we should return to them, at least not in their historical forms, but because their absence has exacerbated the flow of unreliable information.  The internet, of course, is the primary reason that this information is so ubiquitous.  We are drowning in factoids, and most people have no idea (or inclination) to want to sort through them or carefully evaluate them.  In short, we are a culture in a transitional phase which is unable to develop legitimate authority in the way we think about and disseminate information, which leads to all kinds of wild ‘truths.’  The best example of that is a president who tells thousands of lies and is still believed by a third of the society.

                To me, the more pressing issue is an educational establishment that has monetarized their specialized ways of thinking.  To be an ‘expert,’ means pulling yourself out of the daily and ordinary conversations of the street to take refuge in a rarified community of other experts.  The people excluded in this process, which is always the vast majority of us, become more and more estranged from the process and method that produces ‘knowledge.’  This becomes entrenched in an educational system that dispenses right answers instead of engaging students in how to connect to and make their own knowledge.  It isolates the knowledge makers from the consequences or application of their knowledge.  They either end up reading papers to each other in the nearly empty conference rooms of large hotels or selling what they know to people who then use it for their purposes.  Either way, instead of informing public opinion and thought, the knowledge produced is viewed with suspicion by every one not in the discipline.

                As a result, people who identify a periodic table doubt the validity of research on climate change.  Patients who spend thirty seconds on WebMD presume to lecture their doctors on what course of treatment they should follow, and everyone mistrusts everyone else’s motives and information.  We need to rethink the relationship between schools and information.  As Stiegler suggests in States of Shock, an expert only form of knowledge production is counterproductive.  The point is not that experts should ‘dumb down’ what they do, but they have to been in constant communication with the whole community and not just the few lost souls at their conference session.  They have to become multilingual in the sense that others can at least participate in deciding what should be studied.  Any language realm that limits participation to elites should expect the kind of isolation and marginalization many of them currently experience.  Authority should come from the validation of inclusion and not from the pulpit or the committee room.    

The Kids Are Alright

                There’s been a lot of noise lately about how the Democrats, and especially the new, young Democrats, should tone down their rhetoric and their policies.  The sentiment is that they have to pay attention to the broad middle of American politics.  Maybe, these voices say, they should consider running a political fossil like Bidden to not scare off the independent voters.  As a card carrying (Medicare and social security) old, white guy, I totally disagree.  The last thing we need at this point is a timid recalculation of our political landscape.  That timid approach has left democracy clinging by a thread and threatened the viability of not just our country but our planet.

                As the most incompetent president in the history of the republic takes time out of his “executive time” to lie to the nation about the scourge from the south imperiling our nation, we need an honest assessment of where we stand.  There aren’t very many of the pillars of 20^th Century America left standing.  We have allowed so much of what we all thought was foundational to our society slip away while we checked how many ‘likes’ we accumulated on Facebook.  Now is the time for a reckoning.  We are still the richest nation on earth, but most of that wealth is concentrated in a class of kleptocrats so small they make the age of the robber barons look paltry by comparison.  They have bought their way into the political process, changing every conceivable law, rule and regulation to their benefit.  Meanwhile, the standard of living for the majority of Americans has declined and their economic future is more insecure.  The response was to pass a tax law stealing another trillion for people at the top.  Our life expectancy is even declining.  Of all the industrialized countries in the world, we have the least mobility and the most segregated and stratified society.

                Our schools have been hollowed out by decades of assault by the right-wing plutocrats who no longer see any economic or social value in making your other people’s children are educated.  They want to stifle your child’s aspirations and dreams because it might syphon off a few pennies of their wealth.  We have created schools that operate more like prisons than schools and created a whole layer of political and administrative nonsense that prevents teachers from helping their students.  We have all but abandoned making an advanced education affordable for a larger and larger section of the population.  The policies that the Koch brothers and their allies promote are so extreme that they want millions stripped of their health care, which is polite way of saying they want to promote mass extinction.  All of this has been done in the light of day by politicians trying to make ‘sensible’ and ‘moderate’ policy.  Even the most basic right, the right to vote. Is under attack by those practicing this politics of exclusion.

                The political reality is rosy compared to the environmental situation.  As so much wealth has been concentrated in fossil fuel companies, we have protected their right to make and hoard money over the right the rest of us have to a world we can actually sustain and live in.  Fish are eating plastic and making it part of the food chain.  A mass extinction is underway that will threaten the diversity and sustainability of ecosphere in ways we can hardly comprehend.  If you own beach front property near an ocean, now is the time to sell and get out.  We are deluged with this information every day but we’ve become numb to it.  Meanwhile, the ‘moderate’ politicians make more tepid policy.

                This is the time for action.  People who want to redistribute wealth, shift from fossil fuels, open up voting, radically change and fund the educational system and fight the racist, misogynist and homophobic forces of moderation deserve our help and support.  Not to do all we can to help is like sending our grandchildren out back with a shovel to start digging their own grave.  This is their cause, their time, their moment to take charge.  If it looks a little extreme, that’s because we let it get this bad.  If it offends you, look the other way.  We blew our chance to make things better.  We sold whatever principles we had for a modest pension and a few municipal bonds.  The least we can do now is get the hell out of the way.

Languaging Realms

                One of the things that distinguishes what Maturana says about languaging from most of the philosophical work on language in the last century is that he doesn’t reduce language to nominalism.  That is, for Maturana there is a strong force that connects languaging to what we perceive as being real.  He doesn’t believe that there is an objective world that we can just describe, but he does situate us as organisms that are coupled to an environment that sustains us.  In his words, we are ‘structurally coupled’ to that environment.  We can say and act as we wish, but we won’t be here long if what we say or do violates the sustainability of that coupling.  For Maturana, languaging is like any other operating mechanism that organisms deploy to identify and manipulate the world they are part of. 

                He is fond of saying that we only know we’re not delusional by interacting, through languaging, with the constructions, observations and behaviors of other people.  If those interactions are going to sustain an autopoiesis between organism and environment, the languaging has to reflect that.  Too often the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy, perhaps best represented by Rorty, lacks the grounding that Maturana’s biological background demands.  Nothing we say or do is trivial.  We operate in these ‘realms’ of languaging bringing forth a world and coordinating both our description of the world and our behavior in it.  (I would also argue the world is itself alive, but that’s another post)  We may agree with other people in our realm to allow certain types of openness, poetry, for instance, but we also coordinate and regulate our responses to each other based on behaviors that sustain and enrich our autopoietic evolution.

                I think the tricky part is how we establish the realm, that is, how do we check on the usefulness and operational accuracy of how we have brought forth a world and coordinated our behaviors in it.  Some realms are relatively closed, reproducing a limited and fairly predictable pattern of descriptions and behaviors.  That’s fine, as long as those descriptions and behaviors ‘work’ to preserve the coupling between the background and the organism (here it might be both individual and social).  Other realms create limitations that make it impossible to sustain the coupling because they do not allow the participants to ‘check’ the responses.  Religions are one example of a realm that MIGHT operate this way, although even religions tend, over time, to track with changes to the coupling.  A fairly recent realm that accentuates self-checking is science, where descriptions are challenged and replicated before being accepted.  That doesn’t make it objective or infallible, but it does give it a greater chance to self -correct. 

                The more interesting and distressing examples are political and ideological, where ‘truth’ is manufactured in limited and limiting practices of languaging.  When people say something like, “how could they possibly think that,” they are seeing the limitations of a realm that has lost its ability to self- correct and maintain its autopoietic structure.  In short, it produces an inaccurate and ultimately fatal misrepresentation of a possible world.  Every realm ‘wobbles’ between healthy and unhealthy descriptions, but some are so off track that they threaten the sustainability of the organisms (social and individual) in the realm.  If the realm is so isolated that the people in just wander off and become extinct, that may be bad but not catastrophic.  When the realm producing this view is part of a large and technological society, it’s another thing all together.  The problem is that there is nothing outside of their realm – there is no logic or evidence that can stop or penetrate their languaging bubble and there is no critical perspective within the realm to self-correct.  When a realm like this is under stress, it becomes more and more orthodox and intolerant, making an external intervention even more unlikely. 

                I’m not sure what the right response is to this situation.  I do know that asking them to be reasonable or check their facts won’t help.  Their realm is internally consistent and it produces reason and evidence that reaffirm its conclusions.  Instead of aligning itself with other, competing, realms, it will most likely work to destroy or dominate those other perspectives.  These realms function as tautologies. Either they have to be broken apart and reconstituted, or they have to be smashed and defeated.  Not a pretty scenario.  It turns out that language isn’t such a flimsy thing after all.

Languaging in the Void

                When Maturana talks about objectivity, he brackets a lower- case o, like this: (o)bjectivity.  What he is trying to say is that everything said is said by an observer and that every observation is subject to verification through languaging with others.  There is no way to tell whether or not any particular observation is valid until it is confirmed by others.  Normally this happens in language games or realms of thought, such as science.  A scientific result isn’t considered valid until it’s replicated.  A theological principle carries weight when it reaches the level of doctrine or dogma.   We are constantly checking our versions of reality against and within a series of realms of languaging.  The confirmation doesn’t guarantee accuracy, but it legitimizes the utterance within the realm.  As Jarred Diamond pointed out in his book, Collapse, one way that cultures fail is to construct political processes that do not reflect the reality they face.

                I say all this to foreground the question of what impact technology has on the critical function of languaging.  If we are ‘coordinating the coordination of behaviors’ through languaging, what happens when the medium of coordination no longer can be depended on to be ‘real?’  By now we know that the Russians ‘hacked’ the 2016 election by using bots to flood social media platforms with fake information.  There are Chinese cell phone farms that are pumping out millions of messages from fake accounts that skew everything from Google searches to Facebook likes.  In an era where more and more people depend on the internet to get ‘information,’ what happens when an increasing amount of that information is cynically and artificially constructed and abused?             How are the coordinations of languaging that construct and ground our social existence being altered in this new environment?

                This isn’t entirely new.  Governments have historically falsified information.  Fox News exists to falsify information.  The Catholic Church has been at it for two millennia, and, of course, you can’t always trust your mother.  In these cases, there were/are always counter-hegemonies that gave perspective.  There were oppositional parties, other news sources and other churches, and your friends always helped straighten you out.  I don’t really see a balancing force to this new form of languaging.  Languaging to get information used to require work and human validation.  People used to have to judge the portals they went through to find something out and judge the people who gave them the information.  In this case, none of that is true.  The technology overwhelms the inbred balances we’ve developed to deal with face to face institutions.

                My point here is not to make some Neo- Luddite rant against social media (although there are days I think that might be justified).  My point is that our political coordinations of behavior are being manipulated in ways that threaten their ability to do the one thing they are designed to do – to help us language with others to create a viable and sustainable view of the world.  The search engines and algorithms of Google and Facebook, to say nothing of the cyber-warfare of the Russians and Chinese, make languaging democratically a difficult thing to do.  It has ushered in the era of the ‘Lie’ as a political weapon.  Saying something is true is more and more the same as making it so.  As Maturana says, none of this is trivial.  There is no way forward that doesn’t confront the questions about technology and languaging.  Whether the alternatives are educational or more limited technology, we have to find a way to sort through this problem.  Maybe the end of the world isn’t a bang or a whimper, but an infinitely blinking curser. 

Languaging and Learning Redux

                One of Maturana’s favorite sayings about languaging is that it is the process through which we “bring forth” a world.  We bring forth a world because there isn’t an objective and inert ‘real’ world that we merely have to describe.  The way we describe it, language it, helps shape what it is we can know, see and say about that world.  Individually and culturally we go through a continual process changing and adapting our relationship to the material surroundings we confront.  We have what he calls a ‘structural coupling’ with that context.  That is, there are certain material conditions that must be met to sustain our continued existence.  We depend on languaging to identify, maintain and reshape those conditions.  The organism, both the individual and social, is responding to, learning about and changing the environment that sustains them.  This process is called autopoiesis.  It requires that the changes sustain the structural coupling while providing necessary or desired adaptations along the way.

                Learning is essentially autopoiesis.  It requires us to both keep what we know that still applies or is helpful while simultaneously languaging new forms of being into existence.  Looked at this way, it should be obvious that the modern project of education has failed.  There is too much preservation and not enough creation.  There is too much expert privilege and too little communal access. There is no doubt that our current system produces new ideas and technology at a rapid rate, but to participate in the change a person has to drag centuries of old knowledge with them.  We have sped up expert learning while excluding most of the population from the language games that produce it.  There is a valid argument to be made that only a limited number of people are even capable of those expert language games and access to them should remain limited.  It is true that we probably don’t want just anybody designing the next bridge we have to drive over with our family, but the expert model has estranged people from the world that we are ‘bringing forth,’ and that is dangerous. 

                I think the problem is a problem of scale.  Obviously, none of us can know everything.  We have evolved expertise in areas that take an enormous amount of specialization to master.  What we haven’t done is to ‘scale’ those advances into a narrative of common purpose.  Only a few people may know how to make an atomic bomb or execute a credit default swap, but for them to enhance or preserve the ecological and social coupling that sustains us, everyone has to know what they are and have a voice in saying that they should exist.  No one can know everything, but everyone has to know what the larger narrative is about the things that only a few people can master.  We have assumed that a few really smart people could decide things for all the rest of us.  They can’t.  We have the expertise to make more and more creative forms of plastic, but should we make any plastic at all?  Technology and expertise unchecked by a communal consensus is folly.  We have the most advanced scientific practices in history, yet more and more people are ignorant, fearful or suspicious of them.  Why is that?

                Cultures are transgenerational engines of autopoiesis.  When the narrative breaks down, they fragment into more and more competitive and disfunctional units, each trying to control narrative of the time.  Some of them are bound to very far away from the things that sustain our structural coupling with the material world.  Some of them are bound to create wild and crazy ideas about reality. (In my household, we call those people Republicans).  Because they are languaging only with people in their group, they became more and more distant from any dialogue of reconciliation.  The way we approach education will not solve this.  A better approach is to rethink the relationship between expertise and community.  People have to participate in making knowledge in order to use and trust it.  More fundamentally, they have to have a say in what knowledge is produced and how it is used.  The citadel approach to the university has outlived its usefulness.  We need a model of education that is inclusive and not competitive.  Smart people doing stupid things is no way to build a future.

               

               

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.