Welcome to the Persistence

                In the age of Trump, signs of resistance are all around us.  We are all being encouraged to resist the most unqualified and undemocratic presidency in our history.  Resistance is a good thing, but it’s not enough.  Trump was the end of a seven- decade cycle of American political and social history.  His victory wasn’t a momentary step back or unfortunate but temporary aberration.  Trump’s election means that the parts of American culture that have always been there – the racism, misogyny, religious intolerance and anti-intellectualism – have once again surged to the surface.  They will not go back into the same container they were in before.  Resistance is great – even healthy, but it won’t rebuild the village.

                While we need to continue to stand up to what Trump does and stands for, we also need to prepare for a new reality and a new social covenant.  So, while resistance feels good, it’s persistence that will eventually bring us into a new social narrative.  We should and must protest, but it’s more important to start building.  This is the time take the institutions of modernity apart and reconstruct them for a new era.  Our politics, our schools and our government are broken, intended to serve a different time and place, and even when Trump goes, they will still be broken.  Trump will eventually destroy himself; he’s too venial and stupid not to.  He will cause massive damage in the process, but much of that damage will be to institutions and practices that were already in decay. 

                It’s easy to band together to oppose something, especially something as odious as Trump.  It’s going to be much harder to band together to be for something.  I see little evidence that what is loosely called the ‘left’ of American politics has learned how to build alliances.  There are signs of what alliances might form: around the pipeline protests, for instance, but ‘causes’ still seem to be more singular than they are collective.  What are the principles of an inclusive and integrative democracy in this century?  It’s unlikely they will be the same as the romanticized oligarchy we started with or even the post war class politics that defined the end of the last century.  The great energy conglomerates that dominated the economy for the last century and a half are in decline.  The energy of the future doesn’t look like it will be so easily monopolized.  Manufacturing is already a different animal than the large centralized smokestack industries that dominated the Midwest.  Work, the rallying cry of the labor movement and much of liberal politics since WWII, is going to undergo perhaps the biggest change since the shift to agriculture as automation and AI combine to eliminate people from the work force.  All of these things are going to impact the economy in a manner at least as significant as the Black Plague did in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. 

                Trump is serious and dangerous, but he’s really just a distraction to what is coming next.  This may very well be the most significant shift in human existence, period – one we may not survive.  Everything is on the table; nothing can be assumed to be safe or beyond radical change.  Not much of what we have learned has prepared us for what’s next.  The elites from the ‘best’ schools are probably the last people to listen to right now.  Their knowledge is tied to this ‘imagined order,’ and they aren’t likely to be the first people to see the new shape of things.  This is going to be hard.  This is going to cause massive dislocation.  It will not be pretty any more than the Renaissance was.  We will have to learn to persist.  We will fail monumentally.  There will be several shifts and phases before there is any clarity.  If you want to live in a just and inclusive society, prepare to define it and fight for it.  This is no time for alarm or pessimism.  We must persist.

                The next time you turn on your tablet or television only to be slapped in the face by more of the spectacularly stupid and hurtful things that Trump does, remember he’s just a side show.  He and the people that voted for him are here because they weren’t ready to move forward.  By all means resist, but prepare for more.  Learn to talk to your neighbors.  Learn to build alliances.  Learn to imagine.  This is the time embrace the uncertainty and love the possibility.  Think big – and hold on.

# 13  Play

Lavoisier goes to Kindergarten

                Lavoisier is widely considered to be the ‘father’ of modern chemistry.  One of signature accomplishments that contributed to this acclaim is his building of the laboratory at the Arsenal and his use of increasingly precise and precisely recorded measurements.  In other words, he made chemistry more ‘scientific.’  It would be hard to argue that chemistry and physics didn’t benefit from this development.  It’s a little less clear that fields like psychology have really been able to use the method as productively.  One of the problems with the way Lavoisier’s methods ‘travel’ to other disciplines is the linguistic slippage between terms like oxygen and terms like knowledge and stress.  One is a much more finite and reliable signifier than the other.  Can we really ‘measure’ something that only has a signifier and no real signified?

                We’ll let the Psychologists fight over that one as they divide into more and more subdivisions of their discipline at their next convention.  In Epistemology the problem of measurement is grounded in the inability to define what it means to know something or what it means to be intelligent.  We simply don’t know what it means to say we know something or that someone is intelligent.  At first blush, that seems crazy.  There have never been more, and more precise, instruments of measurement that claim to measure ‘intelligence.’  The problem is that there is no concrete way to define intelligence or knowledge outside of the cultural and linguistic bounds that give rise to the term.  All we’ve really done in public education in America is to find a way -decades and billions of dollars later – to find a series of measurements that confirm rich people’s kids are ‘smarter’ than poor people’s kids.

                We’ve brought Lavoisier into Kindergarten with disastrous effect.  In the name of more ‘objective’ and ‘scientific’ treatment of ‘data,’ we have locked in on a limited and instrumentalist definition of knowledge that is profoundly biased by socio-economic factors.  We start ‘testing’ kids years before there is any developmental stability to the results and base their education on instruments that in some cases are so flawed that they do little more, in the words of one critic, than ‘turn nonsense into data.’  We do not’ know’ or ‘learn’ the same things in the same way.  We are not an experiment, and we cannot define knowledge the same way in every culture or circumstance.  Sure, there are some things that we can agree are facts and might even agree that everyone should learn those facts or be able to execute the functions that produce them.  That is not, however, the same thing as being able to say that mastery of those things is ‘intelligence,’ or even that the people who mark the right bubble ‘know’ those things.

                In the drive to make education more scientific we have squeezed out play.  We have restricted recess and replaced it with more testing.  We have limited the role that creativity and imagination play for both students and teachers.  We are producing a second generation of students who are more concerned with answers than they are thought and invention.  All of that might be tolerable if we lived in a time where traditional knowledge was adequate, but we don’t.  We are preparing exactly the wrong kind of students with the wrong kind of intelligence for the world we live in.  As Hutchins says in Cognition in the Wild, intelligence is a cultural variable that is only valuable if it solves that culture’s problems.  The genius of the next generation isn’t going to get the highest score on the test; they are going to be able to imagine and tell a new story. 

                Play, like paradox, has always played a role in wisdom traditions.  There are no stock answers to questions that haven’t been formulated yet.  Piaget once remarked that you can tell how bad schools are because they routinely take five- year- old kids who want nothing more than to go to school and turn them in eighteen- year- old students who want nothing more than to stop going.  The fact is that we really don’t know what intelligence is or what it really means to ‘know’ something.   We have a very clear idea about what the cooperate interests that are increasingly in control of our educational system value, but really no idea at all about the ‘intelligence’ that is required to live in today’s world.  School is probably exactly the wrong place to go to nurture and develop that intelligence.

                

10 Things to talk about besides Trump

                I said before that I think we need to spend more time talking about how we change and rebuild than we do focusing on Trump.  Well, here are ten suggestions, in reverse order of importance, that I think are more important and that I would like to work on and talk about.  I’m sure you have your own list.

10.  Free College and Millennial Debt:  We’ve reached the point that a college education should be free.  If people want to tie that to a couple years of national service in some variety of efforts (not all military), that is fine with me.  But we need to get to the point where we help students of all ages transition through the education they need and that we need them to have to be functioning members of a democratic country.  Along with that we should start excusing the debt Millennials have had to take on to get a degree.  As a generation, they got slammed by the rise in tuition brought on by shrinking public dollars in education and a job market that left them few options.  If this economy is going to recover, it has to free the economic power of Millennials from the mountain of debt that is holding them back.

9.  Infrastructure:  This one is too obvious, but it can’t just be infrastructure in the traditional sense.  Sure, we need roads and bridges and airports, but we also need new means of transportation and broad band access everywhere.  We are, at best, a mid-twentieth century power in infrastructure.

8.  Education:  Our education system has become a market for textbook and testing companies at the expense of our students.  We need to rethink schools from the bottom up following some epistemological principle that doesn’t begin and end in a test.  We need to stop the war on teachers and invite them back into the conversation.  Right now, our education merely replicates the socio-economic status of the parents.  We are not preparing our children to think about and inhabit the world that awaits.

7. Multi-Party System:  Our political system is broken.  In order to fix it, we need to find a way to give more people a voice.  Two parties won’t do that, especially when one of them is radically undemocratic.  We need to start transitioning to a multi-party system of government, one more flexible and more responsive to the people.

6.  Guns:  We are the only country in the world that has this problem.  We need to find a way to talk the gun people back off the ledge that the NRA has falsely constructed.  We have to find a way to reduce gun violence.  This is a tough conversation to even get started, but it will only happen in a face to face dialog.

5.  Energy Shift:  We are in the middle of the shift from oil to natural gas, with the beginnings of the shift from natural gas to renewables already underway.  The shift is more economic than it is environmental at this point.  Trump can no more resurrect coal than he can stop automation.  We need to accelerate  these shifts – including phasing out plastic in all but the most essential areas.  It might also finally silence the Koch brothers.

4.  Economic Inequality:  Democracy is not possible with the distribution of wealth that exists and is getting worse.  Unless we are willing to change laws and regulate the financial industry, we will cease to be a democratic nation.  We already aren’t really even capitalistic any more.  Our economy is more monetarist that capitalist.  More of our decisions have to reflect the real interests of the majority.

3.  AI and Work:   I’m tempted to put this first, because it’s the monster lurking under the bed.  Automation has already permanently altered manufacturing, but when you combine it with AI and move it into the rest of the economy, the impact will be devastating.  Whole areas of ‘work’ will disappear, and not in the old sense of new jobs sprouting up in new places, they will just disappear.  Some estimates are that 50% of the existing jobs will be gone in 10-20 years.  Some say that’s conservative.  When I was a kid, ‘utopia’ was always work free.  Now that we may almost be there, that future looks anything but ‘utopian.’

2.  Single-Payer Health Care:  This has to stop.  The rest of the industrialized world has figured this one out.  It’s not hard.  It’s not that complicated.

1.  Climate:  In many ways this is obvious.  The less obvious part of it is that this isn’t going to happen without a cultural reckoning with fundamentalist Christianity.  As with so many of the items on this list, the problem either exists or is exacerbated by a form of Christianity that is opposed to change – and in many ways opposed to the things we always thought were ‘Christian.’  

                The cultural shift we’re a part of has a lot of moving parts.  What connects all of them is that the underlying narrative has gone bad.  We need a new story.  That story should minimally account for what is listed here.  I’m sure I’ve left out important issues or phrased things the wrong way – so be it.  Make your own list.  Tell the next person who wants your vote or your money to answer to it.  

#12  Joy

                If we ground our thinking in our lives and our bodies, what would be the outcome?  What state of consciousness would we be able to attain?  My answer to that is Joy.

                Before explaining that I first want to make it clear that I’m not talking about the kind of joy that most people would conjure up at the mention of that word.  We’ve created this Christian view of joy that is the absence of pain or suffering or anything we might consider negative.  We’ve created, to steal a line from Corso, a “cotton candy heaven of the poor” version of joy.  This kind of joy melts away at the first sign of trouble or rough weather.  It is a version of joy driven by desire, one that serves our ego’s need for a pure and perfect happiness.  It’s an illusion.

                The kind of joy I’m trying to write about isn’t the absence of suffering and pain but the assimilation and resolution of suffering and pain.  Joy arises not because we desire it, but because we have stopped desiring it.  It doesn’t come from resisting ‘bad’ things, but from avoiding labeling things as either ‘good’ or ‘bad.’   Being able to attain a state of Joy doesn’t mean I am happy, it means that I’ve stopped trying to be happy.  Joy is empty; it is the result of no longer focusing on my emotional connection to events.

                Joy allows us to be fully present and not distracted by the trajectory of events we hope will happen.  Like Zen landscape artists, we are looking at all the possible unfoldings of existence, not just the ones that are central to the moment or confirmed by others.  It seems to me that real knowing must somehow and eventually get to this state.  We have to get out of the many entanglements of the body and the mind to ‘know’ what it means to exist.  Joy is the other side of enlightenment and wisdom, a lightness of being that releases us from the greedy needs of the ego.

                Epistemology is not knowledge about an exterior or objective world. Epistemology is more essentially about knowing ourselves and the limits of what that self can know.  Joy is, to me, the ability to face that limit and that potential without flinching.  

Trump and the Greedy Algorithm   

                In Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, Aura, he uses the mathematical construct of the greedy algorithm, an algorithm that always points to the simple, right answer, as a way of framing what happens in a society or civilization when the questions that dominate our attention keep producing obvious but useless answers.  What happens is that the deep and important questions are never able to break through the veil of the greedy algorithm and attract the attention they deserve.

                I think we should think of the failed presidency of Donald J. Trump as a greedy algorithm, one that rivets our attention on the cascading decline of his presidency and makes it almost impossible to focus on what is important.  Every news cycle is held captive to the horrific narrative unfolding around this president.  There is no way to know what new low or new threat will greet us tomorrow morning.  It is almost impossible not to watch.  Add in the spectacle of Republican legislators making up health care bills as they vote on them with no deliberation and no sense of what the impact or consequences might be, and there is enough political drama to draw our attention away from what we should be thinking about.  Regardless of what happens to Trump and the Republicans, the only way out of this collapse of the American political system is to turn away from the carnage and focus on what we have to build to combat and replace this.

                I think we should only pay attention to Trump one day a week – let’s say Tuesday.  Every Tuesday we’re allowed wall to wall coverage of Trumpland – like washing down a sugar sandwich with a coke.  One day, that’s it.  After that we have to get back to work.  After that we have to say what should we build to replace what we used to think of as an indestructible political reality.  The world we used to live in is gone.   We can’t go back, and moving forward is going to require us to turn off the nonsense and build a new political alliance.  We should pay due diligence to the legal and political process that will try to contain the damage, but just cheering for the good guys and carrying signs in the streets won’t build a new politics.

                We have become a fractured resistance.  There are more of us than there are of them, but we have lost the knack of making broad alliances that can carry us back into some control over our own lives.  Our allies are not going to agree with us on everything.  They are not going to pass increasingly restrictive litmus tests of purity.  We need to respect our differences and argue for our place in the society, but first we need to build a society that makes that possible.  More than anything else we have to find a way to correct the imbalance in wealth that is killing any prospect of democracy.

                But we must do more.  We must plan for a new economy, a new definition and a new system of education, an infrastructure for the 21^st century, and we must prepare for the economic and environmental changes that will come from changing the way we create, distribute and use energy.  We are going to see massive unemployment as AI continues to change work.  The system we have now has no way to absorb this fast approaching and inevitable outcome.  There was a time when the ‘end of work’ was a utopian pipe dream, but now that it is here in a very tangible way, we have no idea how to act. 

                It is problems like the end of work that make it clear that our intelligence can’t be solely focused on technology and science.  We need to ask hard social, political, ethical and philosophical questions about the new reality that science and technology are going to create.  We need art that will help us imagine what we cannot now imagine.  We are walking off the end of a long pier into the unknown, and the entrenched notions of politics and society we have grown up with will not help us when we take that last step into something new.

                We can’t start any of this focusing on the greedy algorithm of Trump.  He is the joke at the end of the Enlightenment.  The sad clown that modernity was always fated to produce.  If you want to create something worth handing on to your children and grandchildren, you can’t look over your shoulder as it burns.  We have to focus ahead, not with some new sense of progress, but because it’s all we can do.  We can still have Tuesdays to wallow in the mire.  We’ll meet at your place; I’ll bring the popcorn.

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.