A Modest Proposal (Part One)

                I try to be reasonable.  Most days I manage to at least look like I’m pulling it off.  Not today.  Today, I skipped my meds and am going to let you know how I really feel about all the political garbage I’ve been trying not to write about.  I can’t stand one more day of people thinking that simply electing a new president or congress will significantly change the course we’re on.  We keep watching the destruction of what is left of our country assuming that it will turn out all right in the end. Really?  Apparently, Mueller is about to end his long- awaited report.  Maybe it will blow the top off things, but it seems to me – after Barr finishes playing hide and seek with it – there is at least an equal chance it will end not with a bang but a whimper.  So here is my modest proposal – with all due apologies – or at least the first five things I think have to happen if we’re serious about turning things around.

1.        Disband the Republican Party and classify it as a terrorist organization:  Let’s stop pretending that the Republican Party is part of democratic society.  They nominated a candidate singularly unfit for the presidency and have obstructed every attempt to investigate and prosecute his wrong doing.  They are supporting and protecting a Russian asset who is destroying our alliances and will soon gut the economy.  They lack the basic civil decency to be ashamed of what they’ve done.  They should all be investigated as traitors and terrorists.

2.       Try Trump and McConnell for treason:  As bad as Trump is, Mitch may be worse.  It is his job to check Trump, and he refuses to do it.  He has violated the constitution in withholding a hearing for Obama’s Supreme Court nominee and has aided and abetted Trump at every step of the way.  Together they have created a crisis that has locked the government into a pattern of gridlock where nothing ever happens.  That means that the bad guys are winning.  If you want to add Ryan to this list for what he did as Speaker, that’s fine with me. 

3.       Nationalize the wealth of the richest 1000 people in the country:  The idea that they have accumulated this wealth legally and with merit is absurd.  They rob the system in countless ways.  The own more than the rest of us combined.  They stole a trillion dollars in 08 and came back last year in the tax bill and stole a trillion more.  Think of that the next time you drive down a pothole invested freeway.  They can keep some arbitrary sum – maybe 100 million.  If they complain they should be sent to ‘reeducation camps’ where they watch videos of guillotines in action.

4.       Vacate every judgeship filled by Trump and McConnell:  All of these judges were appointed by a president who was elected illegally.  A president who is an asset of our greatest enemy.  They have no right to serve, and if left in place will erode the faith in the justice system and hamper real efforts at reform.  This is the most insidious thing Mitch has done.  They need to be removed now and filled by a new president and congress.

5.       Double down on the Green New Deal:  We have to start making a serious move on climate change.  This policy is a good start.  The real question is not “can we afford it?”  The real question is how can we not afford it.  Decentralizing energy will open up the economy and the society in ways that could profoundly change the way we live.

There’s more, but they are coaxing me into a quite room to take my meds. 

Languaging a New Order

                I’ve been writing about Maturana’s use of the word languaging as the way humans, all humans, bring forth a world they share and maintain with other people.  Harari calls these worlds an ‘imagined order.’  We all live in one of these imagined orders, and by living in them we change them.  The story we tell ourselves to create the imagined order is subject to the same process of autopoiesis that our material presence in the world is.  Just as we are always conserving the essential structural couplings that keep us alive while simultaneously adapting them, we do the same thing with the imagined order.  It seems reasonable to assume, that at some point the imagined order has been stretched and pulled so much that it loses its elasticity.  At that point, a new order has to emerge that sustains the balance and integrity of ourselves and our environment.  A new order could have disastrous consequences and end the society and individuals that follow it, or it could usher in a new and dynamic period that is energized by new possibilities obscured by the old order.  My contention is that we are at one of those crossroads. 

                We are living on the fumes of the Enlightenment, an imagined order that privileged freedom, democracy and most of all reason.  It was assumed that humans were essentially rational, and that by using that rationality they fashion a world of participatory governance and personal freedom.  For a while, it was a roaring success.  The great democracies of the world and the great advancements of science social policy were a clear advancement, a better imagined order, than the religious chaos of kings and princes fighting over the allegiance of their subjects.  Over the last two and a half centuries, the concepts of freedom and democracy evolved and became more inclusive.  In America, a democracy of oligarchs was pushed and expanded to become a much more inclusive and dynamic form of democracy.  Personal freedoms expanded to include greater economic, sexual and social options.  But over time, the autopoietic push and pull of these adaptations has hollowed out the ideas of the Enlightenment.

                Freedom is easy to understand in relationship to a tyrannical king or a despotic church, but what does it really mean today?  Absent the countervailing influence of order or duty, freedom becomes a toxic example of extreme uncoupling.  Democracy started out as a limited experiment for the few before morphing into enfranchisement of the many, but we can already see how the pursuit of power is trying to limit participation and access.  Perhaps most fundamentally, reason went from a universal tenet to a situational privilege.  As Derrida pointed out, reason depends on who is talking and where you stand in relationship to them.  As a result, the words that use to coordinate behaviors in our world now lack the power to do so.  We keep trotting out the same phasing only to confronted by people using the same language to point in a completely different direction.  We struggle to realign and sharpen what we mean, but perhaps, we should face the fact that we need a new story.

                In the American and French revolutions it was a new class of actors that lead the move to a new way of thinking about the imagined order.  They, in turn, were constantly pushed by new groups of people who wanted a new version of the story, one that included them and their desires.  We live in a moment where a mentally limited president uses the trappings of ‘America’ to induce racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic hatred.  The only people I see capable of telling a story consistent with what Lincoln called our ‘better angels’ are young women and people of color.  They are the most energized and inclusive voices on the stage, but they need to turn their languaging toward a new horizon.  It is too late to save this order; a new one must be created.  If democracy has a future it has to be an economic and environmental concept and not just a political one.  If freedom is going to be redeemed, it has to be in the context of social and environmental consciousness.  Capitalism can’t be saved.  They have a lot of work ahead of them.  May God bless them.

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.