Shame

                Today the House Republicans passed a bill that will kill more Americans than all the “radical Islamic terrorists’ combined have managed to kill.  They passed a bill that will let babies die at birth – hard to align with that famous ‘pro-life’ stuff isn’t it – and will shorten the lives of your parents and grandparents.  It will send countless families into bankruptcy and deny women access to basic reproductive health.  If you voted Republican, or even if you voted Independent, you voted for this carnage.

                Of all the preposterous and intellectually incompetent excuses for this action, the one that galls me the most are the votes cast by Republicans who for decades have said they are guided by their Christian faith.  Is there an 11^th commandment that says we should torture the sick and the old?  Is there something in the Gospels that says that your Christ came here to make life more painful and sickening?  As much as this vote strips away any pretext of the Republican party as a moral or humane entity, the most glaring inconsistency is religious.  We should spit in the face of the next Republican evangelical who says anything about God.  There is no God in the Republican party.

                These people have acted as if they had some moral superiority granted to them because they said they were Christian.  Today they proved all of that was a lie, not that it hasn’t been obvious for a while.  This the same party that has said outrageous and inflammatory things about Islam on a routine basis, almost always revealing more about their ignorance than anything else.  They have babbled on about a ‘clash of civilization’ between Christians and Muslims, but if their actions today are any indication, Sharia law would be an improvement.

                Religion isn’t supposed to be part of our politics, but Republicans have propped up their boldfaced move toward a kleptocracy by always falling back on their ‘religious’ principles.  No other group in our politics have done more to wrap themselves in some phony cloak of moral certitude.  Today, all of that is officially a lie.  They haven’t even seen the bill.  None of them can say with any clarity or certainty what the ramifications of this repeal are or might be.  They have lied about it at every turn (there goes another commandment that we don’t need any more), and they have intentionally hurt the people they were elected to serve.

                I take no joy or feel any sense of justice in the fact that the people who follow and vote for them so blindly will be impacted the most.  I would like to think that this will wake some of them up, but I gave up hoping for that when they voted for Trump.  What country takes away protections from its citizens?  What craven band of infidels can’t see the pain and suffering this will bring?  We can organize, protest and vote them out of office, but the fact that this happened at all is deplorable.  I guess Hillary was right.

                I think it’s dangerous to brand any group or religion by the actions of a few, but today we should ask what Fox News always asks of our Muslim brothers and sisters: where are the moderate Christians?  Why won’t they stand up against this act of murder and terror?  Maybe we are in a struggle with religious extremists for the soul of the future, but those extremists are not followers of Islam.  They call themselves Christians and they identify by putting an R after their names.

               

                

Trump at 100

                Well, we’ve reached the end of 100 days of Trump, and I think we can say we’ve learned four things for sure:

1.       He’s a liar

2.       He’s stupid

3.       He’s a big, fat, compulsive liar

4.       He’s really f****** stupid.

That said: what do we do now?

                While we might fantasize about impeachment, I don’t think it is going to happen.  Even if it did, does the notion of Pence, Ryan, and McConnell running the government make you sleep any better?  I think we have to face the reality that our democracy is broken.  The courts and the intelligence agencies are holding up for now, but it’s only been a 100 days and they already look battered.  If we’re going to rebuild our democratic institutions, we have to be ready to take some radical steps.

                One of the things I think we have to work to replace is the two- party system.  One of the parties has decided that democracy isn’t as important as power and has done everything in their power to destroy the process of democracy – which is really all democracy ever is.  The Republicans have destroyed the Supreme Court’s non-political cover, turned the Senate into the House and declared war on everything that isn’t old, white, male and rich.  If the Republicans no longer believe in the system, then an oppositional party is futile.  Between gerrymandering districts and restricting the right to vote, they can continue this tyranny of the minority over the majority for the foreseeable future – which is no way to run a democracy.

                The Democrats aren’t much better.  The Clinton dynasty turned earnest Yale educated hippies into Wall Street/Davos class millionaires, selling influence wherever they could find a buyer.  Even the sainted Big O is now raking in $400.000 speaker fees after never prosecuting even one of the bankers who took us to the brink of disaster.  It’s easy to blame Citizens United for all the evils of money in politics, but the fact is that our fixation on two parties all but makes it inevitable that money will dominate.  Poor Bernie could never compete with the forces that big party politics always has lurking in the shadows.

                Rather than pinning our hopes on another compromise candidate in 2020, isn’t it time to recognize that most of us aren’t really represented by this system.  The Democratic elites will pick one their own when the time comes.  We will be regaled with stories about how they lead can drives for a girl scout troop made up of Syrian refugees who swam across the ocean to freedom – meanwhile, they’ll be selling us down the river in the board rooms of America.  Democrats talk about new generations of candidates, but they will never come as long as they have to be Ivy League grads.

                If we’re going to usher in a new era of democracy we need new democratic institutions.  We need a multi-party system that will allow the real issues people care about to be articulated and acted upon, and an environment that allows the organic leaders of those movements to rise to leadership.  BLM shouldn’t have to hope that the Democrats ‘get it.’  LGBTQ causes shouldn’t have to go to the back of the line while we litigate the ‘real’ issues of the day.  Women’s issues should have their own platform.  One big mush of a party fails everyone.  We need a vigorous debate.  We will agree on some things and disagree about others.  We will form different coalitions over different issues.  It will be messy, but it will be democratic – it will have a process.

                100 days in things look pretty bleak.  But Trump is merely the worst person a flawed system could produce.  In some fundamental ways, he isn’t that different – he’s just the sad clown at the end of the parade.

                

# 11

Machine Language

                Languaging has been the most important feature of human society for 30,000 years or so.  It has sparked what we call civilization and allowed humans to inhabit the globe.  In those 30,000 years, however, nothing has changed languaging as much as computers have changed it in the last 3 decades.  It would be fair to say that our interactions with each other and the world have never undergone such a profound change, and it has happened in the blink of an eye.  Probably nothing marks the rise of the cyborg more than the devices that we now use to navigate our world.  Everyone with a smart phone holds more information and computing power than existed in the world a mere 50 years ago.

                Who was the last person to have read everything published in their language and culture? Erasmus – maybe?  Ever since Guttenberg we have been speeding up the rate at which the meta-languaging of our culture reproduces and travels.  We have reached the point that machines can do it faster and better than the most capable humans.  The best chess master is no match for Watson, and Siri can spit out answers faster than the smartest and most well- read person you know.  Every teacher knows that if they bluff or flub an answer some student in the back row that you thought was dead or comatose just Googled the right answer and, contrary to everything you thought you knew about dead people, is raising his hand to correct you.  Calculations that used to take scientists hours and days to make are now routinely spit out of computerized instruments in seconds.

                What are we to make of the notion of knowledge or intelligence in this new context?  I think we can only make sense of these developments by realizing that we’re really talking about two very different things.  Information is not intelligence.  The purpose of human intelligence is not a more accurate description of what we take to be the external world.  Machine intelligence is not the same and does not operate on the same principles as human intelligence.  The only real danger posed by machine intelligence is to confuse it with the purposes and functions of human intelligence.  We have got to let go of the notion that our ‘brain’ is like a computer and that the more we can cram into it and the faster we can recall it the smarter we are. 

                I want to make it clear that I am not against machine intelligence – unless you want to replace humans with machines – in which case I’m with Hawking saying that is dangerous.    I think machine intelligence makes patterns and data comprehendible in ways that are both fascinating and useful.  I am not arguing against machine intelligence, I just want to draw a distinction between it and what I think are the uses and purposes of human intelligence.  In fact, I would even credit machine intelligence with bringing the West to this point of consciousness that clearly demonstrates that the Cartesian definition of knowing is hopeless.  We are no more a challenge to computers and their ability to store, recall and combine information that John Henry and his hammer were to the steam drill.  Now that we should no longer confuse information with intelligence we have a chance, at last, to ask what it means to know and to think.

                Just as we learned to stop using our bodies as machines to move and control the physical world, we have to now learn to stop using our consciousness as a machine to control and manipulate the social and material world.  The things that are lacking in the intellectual and spiritual world are not lacking because we need more data.  They are lacking because we have lost a sense of connection.  Maturana and Fell like to present the basic condition we all face as having to deal with the fact that we are always already both connected and autonomous.  We are in the world, not outside of it.  I am not saying that everything is relative and there is no reality.  I’m saying that we will never reconnect to the world through reason and science alone.  It’s easy to prove that climate change exists, but almost impossible to get someone who doesn’t already see it to agree.  We argue about facts and let larger truths and greater wisdom escape in the bargain.  Let the machines do what machines do, and let us start to figure out what it is we should do instead.

When Children Play With Cruise Missiles

                Americans love blowing things up.  When Donald Trump launched a few dozen cruise missiles into Syria, some otherwise sane commentators said he immediately became ‘presidential.’  How?  By all accounts, he decided on this course of action after seeing cable news footage of the barbaric chemical attack on children authorized by Syria and, by extension, Russia.  It wasn’t a part of a deliberate plan to seriously intervene in the humanitarian crisis there, a crisis his refugee ban makes worse everywhere in the world.  It represented a retreat from remarks he and his Secretary of State made days earlier.  In fact, the Trump administration, far from playing cowboy hero in this drama, enabled the attack on those civilians by signing off on any serious political intervention.  Trump wasn’t making a serious point; he was throwing a tantrum.

                The last thing Syria needs is more explosions.  Obama has been castigated for not blowing things up in Syria, but he may have done something that Americans have a hard time understanding.  He may have realized that there is no simple answer to the problem and until there is a consensus both globally and in this country about what should be done, the best action is to wait.  During the campaign, Gary Johnson didn’t even know where Allepo was, let alone what to do about it.  Congress denied Obama’s attempt to request for action, not that his policies for the region were all that great.  What do we think we want to do in Syria?  What outcome do we seek, and what process are we willing to follow to achieve it?  We’ve made such a mess of the region, it’s hard to see what we can do to fix it.

                Some people are happy that Trump acted against Putin.  Russia is playing a losing hand in Syria.  They are propping up a Shia dictatorship while millions of Sunnis live on their borders.  Putin is facing increasing dissent inside Russia and the likelihood of growing unrest and terrorism from the Muslim population they are repressing.  Let Putin play that hand.  Let him dig his own grave with his policy in Syria.  Of course, it will be brutal and ugly and difficult to watch, but without an international and domestic agenda that is willing to invest in the decades it will take return the prospect of a safe and productive life to the Syrian people, there is little else to do.

                The ONE thing that Trump could have done to alleviate the suffering in the region is to massively increase the role we play in settling refugees.  He has done the opposite.  He made Syrian refugees, most of them women and children and all of them products of a two- year vetting process, a pawn in his populist rants during the campaign.  He made them part of his ‘Muslim ban’ to protect us from some imaginary danger these refugees posed.  Nothing on that front has changed.  His administration is part of the Eurocentric backlash against people of the region who are part of a diaspora we created  in our quest for oil.  If he was concerned with the humanitarian crisis, the munitions of the United States Armed Forces was a curious choice to address it.

                Trump likely made things worse.  He hasn’t stopped the conventional slaughter by Syrian and Russian ground forces.  He may even have made it worse.  Like everything else he does, the fallout will be someone else’s fault.  Maybe instead of seeing his actions as ‘presidential,’ we should see them for what they really were.  The world’s most dangerous child playing with the world’s most dangerous weapons.  I hope you enjoyed the fireworks.

                

The Second Reformation

                If you’re watching the stream of events coming out the Trump administration and wondering how Republicans can tolerate Trump’s rampant disregard of political protocols and legal restraints, I bet you’re waiting for the first Republican to stand up and uphold the law.  It won’t happen.  What we’re watching is not a political party operating within the boundaries of the institutions and laws we’ve grown accustomed to; what we’re watching is a religious cult.  Like any cult, the Republicans no longer participate in the ‘real’ world, opting instead for an internally manufactured reality that pits them against the world of non-believers.  That means that the real religious wars facing us don’t involve Islam or any other religion, the real religious war on the horizon is the same one that we thought we settled in the 17^th century.  We’re in the middle of a second reformation.

                Sometimes this is very clear.  Listen to Bannon and his version of the coming apocalypse.  He openly talks about a conflict of civilization involving Islam, but the conflict goes deeper than that.  He includes secular institutions such as the government and the press as forces that must be defeated.  Like other neo-cons, he is comfortable with the idea that this conflict could be the final conflict.  They don’t flinch from including nuclear holocaust as an option.  If those of us who are appalled by Trump think that this is just a phase that Republicans are going through, one that they will surely come out of when they regain their sanity, I think we’ve missed the signs.

                Trump is merely the most extreme version in a line of spectacularly unqualified Republican presidents that started with Reagan (you have to give old man Bush a pass).  All of them appealed to a white base that felt persecuted because of their race and religion, and all of them promised to return to a ‘true’ version of America that had been debased by women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, academic egg heads and any other offending group they could imagine.  To these folks, Hillary wasn’t just a politician they disagreed with, she was a witch.  They have increasingly pursued ‘scorched earth’ policies that completely disregard the fact that at least half of the country disagrees with them.  They brush aside any attempt at compromise as weak and not worth of their God’s approval.  They see their political opponents as agents of the Devil.

                In the 17^th century Europe emerged from the Reformation using the combination of the Peace of Westphalia and the growing movement of the New Science.  People like Bacon, Newton and Locke used the New Science not just to change the way we thought of the physical world but the moral world as well.  Unfortunately, that underlying conflict, while temporarily suppressed, was never really resolved.  It often replaced one religious truth with one scientific proof, and while science and reason seemed to rule the day, a parallel set of truths was always in sight.  Today, the ‘Christian Right’ at the center of Republican politics has flipped the order.  They openly defy science and routinely make a mockery out of ‘reason.’  Their goal is to purge society of the other.  They have no interest in a sane, orderly or diverse world. 

                The consequences could be pretty ugly.  In the six months that followed some German princes saving Luther from certain death at the hands of the Roman Church and kick starting the Reformation, 500,000 people died.  Probably all of them will killed by someone they knew and thought of as their neighbor.  This is not a conflict that will be resolved by what we used to call ‘politics.’ 

                Maybe we will continue this dance edging closer to some cultural civil war and then backing away a little before edging closer again.  Maybe we can break down these barriers.  Invite a Republican over, feed them some chili dogs, play the Beach Boys and let them watch reruns of ‘Lassie’ until they come out of it.  Maybe some outside threat will drive us back together again.  Maybe UFOs will land in Times Square or we’ll find out after she dies that Queen Elizabeth was an alien.  Maybe not.  What I do know is that the alternative is no picnic.

#10

Languaging as Learning

                One of the things that I find most perplexing about the current state of knowledge in our culture is the way so little of it ‘travels’ from one part of the culture to another part of the culture.  We keep making significant breakthroughs in field after field, but we just elected a president who thinks we should mine and burn coal.  How is that possible? 

                For me, the answer has something to do with who gets to make the knowledge.  I think every group of people has to make their own knowledge.  That is, knowledge can’t simply be imported from another cultural site.  The problem with the specialized knowledges that we create is that they are made behind the curtain of professional practice.  We’ve taken great care to keep the uncertified out of the conversation.  There are good reasons for this, but the result is that the people who were excluded not only don’t understand the knowledge, they reject it.  Instead, they make their own versions of ‘common sense’ knowledge that they cling to preserve their participatory function in making their own world.  I don’t think it’s possible to simply inhabit someone else’s already constructed world.  As study after study has shown, we tend to seek out people and narratives that confirm what we already think instead of using new narratives to change what we think.

                A lot of people don’t trust science and don’t like math because they have never felt like they were really players in the game.  They’ve had science classes that emphasized memorizing ‘facts’ and took math courses that only valued ‘right’ answers.  Even if they did well – and most of them didn’t- they never really learned how to think using mathematical and scientific processes.  So, when some talking head scientist says that climate change is real they aren’t just skeptical, they’re belligerent.  They will make their own narrative of the world.  They will read one article on essential oils on the internet and tell their board- certified physician to take a hike.   DuBois once argued that if you could educate a vanguard of 10%, the rest would follow.  That might work in a fairly stagnant and extremely hierarchical society – maybe – but it won’t work now. 

                One of the main culprits is an educational system that sees knowledge as inert.  It just is.  We don’t really engage people in making knowledge outside of their specialized or professional domains.  Stiegler in States of Shock argues that ‘education’ must change this dynamic.  The only way to ‘make knowledge’ that is culturally broad and significant is to make it together.  Scientists talk to scientists and humanities scholars talk to other humanities scholars – that’s fine, but when do we talk to everybody?  Education cannot simply be a static transmission of information.  Education has to be a collaborative and contested intermingling of people and standpoints.  Sometimes we need facts or data to do that, but facts and data will not influence people unless they become enmeshed in their narrative of the world.

                An education – an epistemology – of sustainability will require languaging that is based in patience and humility.  It must recognize paradox and blindness.  It must be welcoming and nonjudgmental.  Instead of the stratification of evaluation, it will focus on the equality of knowledge.  Its enemies will be religion and ideology.  I try to talk to people I know I don’t agree with.  It forces me to suspend my judgement – at least as much as I can – and listen for something that will allow me to connect.  It forces me to move slowly and not try for conversion or persuasion.  My goal is to be invited back.  I’m not Buddha – I usually fail.  But it does me no good to ‘know’ something if I can’t use it help make the world better. 

                The hardest obstacle is religion.  People who ‘believe’ leave very little space for another point of view.  I think the only way around that is to engage them outside of that belief system.  I’m not going to change anyone’s beliefs.  But I can chip away at the edges of the other things they think about.  I can be someone they disagree with – maybe even pray for – but don’t summarily reject.  These are small battles and even smaller victories.  I don’t know of any other way to move forward.  This is counter-intuitive for me.  I’m a debater- I was born to argue.  I’m trying to learn how not to try and win.

#9  Languaging and Existence 

                As I said in the last post, we bring the world into existence through languaging.  We know what we know through the process of languaging and we coordinate our behaviors around the imagined order that we create.  The next step in an epistemology for cyborgs is to own the things we bring into existence.  We can’t pass them off as trivial or inconsequential, and we can’t underestimate how much the act of knowing is tied up in the act of languaging.

                What I want to focus on here, beyond the inherent instability of language, is how languaging puts us in touch with existence – or at least it has the potential to do so.  A lot of what we communicate is static – it perpetuates a shared order that can seem very solid and immutable.  When we language in these conditions we stand totally in the domain of what is known.  We assume that what has already been coordinated is adequate and sufficient and there is nothing new that we learn.  We are not destabilizing the word games or social context we find ourselves in.  I think probably most of our languaging falls into this category.  It can be dull or playful, but it isn’t disruptive.  It confirms the patterns and assumptions that make it possible for us to share space with others without too much anxiety or fear.

                Sometimes, however, languaging takes us out of the realm of the known and forces us to balance what we know with what we don’t know.  It forces us to practice patience and humility as we coordinate new behaviors and construct a new order.  In these cases, languaging is no longer habitual or programmed.  We are forced to see the role we play in making what we want to say.  My contention is that this is what intelligence boils down to – the ability to shape existence through languaging, including silence.  We learn only when we are forced into new associations and understandings, even if what we understand is the ritualist nature of our ordinary behaviors. 

                Sometimes the biggest obstacle to doing this is what we already think we know and the categories we use to know it.  In a society with so much ambient stimulus, it’s impossible to pay attention to everything all at once.  To survive our daily routines, we construct linguistic and conceptual frameworks that allow us to easily and quickly categorize and normalize what we encounter.  If we couldn’t do this, none of us would make it through our day without going insane.  The point is that unlike a Buddhist landscape painter on a mountain top who can open themselves up to emptiness, we are continually assaulted by messages.  This is even more of a problem when the ubiquitous noise of machine intelligence is added to the mix.  Cyborgs have to seek space to think or meditate; they can’t just walk out the cabin door.  The constant barrage of languaging keeps us constrained because we have to process and respond, leaving very little time for play and imagination.

                I think we have to stop thinking of knowledge as what we do when we process the already known and start thinking of knowledge as that which we create when we put one foot into the unknown.   This isn’t an expert driven process.  None of us are experts of the unknown.  It means letting down the protective shields we carry around with us and let ourselves think new thoughts.  As Kuhn pointed out, even if the sciences new ideas often appear this way and through the tedious replication of existing theories.  If we want to learn we have to let go, which is counter intuitive in a culture that places so much emphasis on correctness and memory.  It’s no coincidence that teachers often attack the grammar and syntax of an idea they aren’t prepared to face.  If the language can be constrained, so can the ideas.  The same mechanism is at work in the explosion of standardized testing.

                Thinking of knowledge in that way might work in a culture where change is slow, but in the world of cyborgs that is hardly the case.  Before we rush ahead with what we think we know, we need to try to think in the unknown and with people that aren’t normally part of our languaging circle.  The idea that expert knowledge created in isolated language games involving only people who are experts in the field will save society has proven to be an abysmal failure.  We know what we can language – not just with words – and we can only share it with people who help us create it.  We don’t have much time to figure this out.  As it becomes more and more obvious that ‘reason’ was a daydream of the Enlightenment that will not sustain a society ripped apart with fear and that the institutions we thought were immutable are crumbling as we speak.  Humility and wonder are part of this journey.  Knowing is not memory = knowing is exploring.