One year after Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was shot she has resigned her position:
http://www.jta.org/news/article/2012/01/22/3091298/giffords-announces-resignation
Where is our body politic one year later? Beleaguered by violent speech that tries to wrench us from the sense of shared responsibility that holds us together as a nation. Republican candidates use code upon code to detach us from one another and from the Constitutional values of “liberty and justice for all.”
Of course, I am thinking liberty and economic justice here… justice that makes equal opportunity real and within reach of everyone.
Check out this graphic that demonstrates the Rate of Return on Investment for companies that provide paid family leave for both parents, flexible scheduling and early care for children. The graph is from the Center for Partnership Studies (http:// http://www.partnershipway.org/) These companies practice rather than deny the web of relationships that make a society a great nation, that support family investments in human capacity building…. It takes a village to support a family to raise a child….
Monday, January 23, 2012
Sunday, January 9, 2011
A very sad day
In the aftermath of the shocking events in Tucson, it is clear that we are talking past one another in our political discourse, however we may self- identify or label one other.
What is it we are not saying that could move our politics forward? Not for a moment do I mean that campaign finance, corporate control of media, and cacophony of Internet communications do not contribute to our political turbulence. I am trying to get to the core differences among us that are being manipulated by or are propelling the dysfunction in our political discourse.
I propose the differences reside in the way we view the relationship of the individual to the social worlds we inhabit. I take my clue from George Lakoff in Don’t Think Of An Elephant, where he, like many before him, outlines the world view of those for whom the sphere of personal responsibility is themselves and their immediate family versus those for whom the sphere of personal responsibility starts with themselves and extends to a broader definition of community.
The former group understands the world more or less in terms of patriarchy and isolated individualism to whom libertarian and/or anarchist ideologies are compelling. The latter group understands the world in terms of interdependence where the well-being of the individual is considered to be dependent upon, or at least integrally linked to the well-being of the larger community. Both groups value the individual, but understand the capacities and behavior of the individual to be dependent upon different factors. In one instance the individual’s capacities and status are dependent on the will or design of G~d or genetics, and/or the individual alone, and in the other instance the capacities and status of the individual are inseparable from the social conditions to which they are born and within which they mature.
In regard to the shootings in Tucson, an aide to Sarah Palin said today,
"I don't understand how anyone can be held responsible for someone who is completely mentally unstable like this," Ms. Mansour said. "Where I come from the person who is actually shooting is culpable. We had nothing whatsoever to do with this."
To my ears it is almost incredulous that someone could actually believe this, but this may very well be an authentic statement… “Where I come from the person who is actually shooting is culpable. We had nothing whatsoever to do with this.” This is as close to a doxology of the “individualist” political philosophy as one can get today.
How does it differ from the doxology of an “interdependent” political philosophy? And, will articulating the differences be of value for the body politic? One would hope so.
To my way of thinking the sociologist, Karl Mannheim, articulates well the “interdependent” world view:
Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather, it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him.
…Every individual is therefore in a two-fold sense predetermined by the fact of growing up in a society: on the one hand he finds a ready-made situation and on the other he finds in that situation preformed patterns of thought and of conduct. (p .3(from Ideology and Utopia)
From Mannheim’s perspective, words and behavior are part of the environment that informs our thoughts and behavior. In this worldview words do matter as part of the ‘pre-formed patterns of thought and of conduct.’ It is not that Jared Loughner’s mental capacity is the “fault” of anyone, but the power of words and images to have consequences, unintended or intended, is to be taken as a responsibility, especially in these days of intense media exposure.
I recall watching the Senate confirmation hearings for Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts when I realized both were pre-Enlightenment. While under questioning, I believe by Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of them was especially clear that his legal opinions were not at all related to his upbringing. He did not say he systematically thought about how his upbringing might influence his legal analysis in order to understand how and when it might be so. He flatly denied that there was any relationship. I suggest this way of thinking about the individual is a major distinction in the understanding of the relationship of the individual to the state that drives the dysfunction in our political discourse.
How we begin to address the distinction matters because it is fundamental to our differences in interpretation of the Constitution and the role of government, which means of course fundamental to the proliferation of guns in our daily lives per the reading of the Second Amendment, to the role of corporate and special interest financing of elections, to the separation of church and state and to the use of violence to intimidate and diminish our democracy.
Molly Freeman, Sunday, January 9, 2011 - A very sad day
What is it we are not saying that could move our politics forward? Not for a moment do I mean that campaign finance, corporate control of media, and cacophony of Internet communications do not contribute to our political turbulence. I am trying to get to the core differences among us that are being manipulated by or are propelling the dysfunction in our political discourse.
I propose the differences reside in the way we view the relationship of the individual to the social worlds we inhabit. I take my clue from George Lakoff in Don’t Think Of An Elephant, where he, like many before him, outlines the world view of those for whom the sphere of personal responsibility is themselves and their immediate family versus those for whom the sphere of personal responsibility starts with themselves and extends to a broader definition of community.
The former group understands the world more or less in terms of patriarchy and isolated individualism to whom libertarian and/or anarchist ideologies are compelling. The latter group understands the world in terms of interdependence where the well-being of the individual is considered to be dependent upon, or at least integrally linked to the well-being of the larger community. Both groups value the individual, but understand the capacities and behavior of the individual to be dependent upon different factors. In one instance the individual’s capacities and status are dependent on the will or design of G~d or genetics, and/or the individual alone, and in the other instance the capacities and status of the individual are inseparable from the social conditions to which they are born and within which they mature.
In regard to the shootings in Tucson, an aide to Sarah Palin said today,
"I don't understand how anyone can be held responsible for someone who is completely mentally unstable like this," Ms. Mansour said. "Where I come from the person who is actually shooting is culpable. We had nothing whatsoever to do with this."
To my ears it is almost incredulous that someone could actually believe this, but this may very well be an authentic statement… “Where I come from the person who is actually shooting is culpable. We had nothing whatsoever to do with this.” This is as close to a doxology of the “individualist” political philosophy as one can get today.
How does it differ from the doxology of an “interdependent” political philosophy? And, will articulating the differences be of value for the body politic? One would hope so.
To my way of thinking the sociologist, Karl Mannheim, articulates well the “interdependent” world view:
Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather, it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him.
…Every individual is therefore in a two-fold sense predetermined by the fact of growing up in a society: on the one hand he finds a ready-made situation and on the other he finds in that situation preformed patterns of thought and of conduct. (p .3(from Ideology and Utopia)
From Mannheim’s perspective, words and behavior are part of the environment that informs our thoughts and behavior. In this worldview words do matter as part of the ‘pre-formed patterns of thought and of conduct.’ It is not that Jared Loughner’s mental capacity is the “fault” of anyone, but the power of words and images to have consequences, unintended or intended, is to be taken as a responsibility, especially in these days of intense media exposure.
I recall watching the Senate confirmation hearings for Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts when I realized both were pre-Enlightenment. While under questioning, I believe by Senator Dianne Feinstein, one of them was especially clear that his legal opinions were not at all related to his upbringing. He did not say he systematically thought about how his upbringing might influence his legal analysis in order to understand how and when it might be so. He flatly denied that there was any relationship. I suggest this way of thinking about the individual is a major distinction in the understanding of the relationship of the individual to the state that drives the dysfunction in our political discourse.
How we begin to address the distinction matters because it is fundamental to our differences in interpretation of the Constitution and the role of government, which means of course fundamental to the proliferation of guns in our daily lives per the reading of the Second Amendment, to the role of corporate and special interest financing of elections, to the separation of church and state and to the use of violence to intimidate and diminish our democracy.
Molly Freeman, Sunday, January 9, 2011 - A very sad day
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Mea Culpa: See September 24 Rachel Maddow Show
In my last post I inferred some aspersions on the Rachel Maddow Show for its producer’s interests in responding in-kind to the bombastic journalism of Fox News broadcasts. In contrast to that post, I cannot recommend highly enough that you view the Rachel Maddow Show of Thursday, September 24. In one hour Rachel unmasked the fraudulent accusations against the non-profit community organization, ACORN, to which the mainstream media and Congress have fallen prey.
And, the Show provided a forum for Ken Burns, the award winning documentary filmmaker, to portray his new film of the expansive vision of the US government of the 1930s when FDR inspired the National Park Service legislation through which thousands of unemployed were hired to enhance and make accessible to the public the National Parks.
The September 24 Maddow Show and Burns’ documentary are a must see, if we are to understand what Maddow called our current “national tantrum.”
The Maddow Show of September 24 is indeed a model of the journalism we need; in-depth, scholarly in viewer-friendly language, pertinent to key issues of the day.
And, the Show provided a forum for Ken Burns, the award winning documentary filmmaker, to portray his new film of the expansive vision of the US government of the 1930s when FDR inspired the National Park Service legislation through which thousands of unemployed were hired to enhance and make accessible to the public the National Parks.
The September 24 Maddow Show and Burns’ documentary are a must see, if we are to understand what Maddow called our current “national tantrum.”
The Maddow Show of September 24 is indeed a model of the journalism we need; in-depth, scholarly in viewer-friendly language, pertinent to key issues of the day.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
War of Words: Propagainment vs US Democracy
The 24/7 news cycle plus corporate domination of news agencies amplify all politics into propaganda warfare. In this conflict, high intensity words obliterate civil discourse to overwhelm investigative reporting and preclude critical thinking … the life breath of democratic governance. Manipulation of fears and uncertainties in difficult economic times has consistently been the tool of choice for demagogues as they lead populations to support undemocratic regimes.
The current demise of rational discourse is a more serious threat to democratic institutions in the United States than was McCarthyism in the 1950s. Today the threat of demagoguery is increased with the breadth of reach, interactivity and speed of telecommunications, the concentration of media under the control of a few large corporations with profit as the only value driving the enterprise, and with the transformation of US news broadcasts to polemical harangues as entertainment….. trends identified over the years by Edward R. Murrow, Ben Bagdikian, et al.
Regretfully, Bill Moyers’ Journal is on late at night and the Lehrer Report competes during prime time with Olbermann and Maddow. As incisive as are the latter two, they sometimes cross the line into propaganda and entertainment (propagainment), presumably because their producers think they have to compete stylistically with the bombastic broadcasters on Fox News and take their cues from topics that Fox considers most newsworthy.
Where is the US outlet for international news that comes even close to the BBC, the Journal from Germany, the CBC broadcast over NPR? As central as are health care reform, the financial system, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the US, it also matters that citizens of the US remain informed of other global developments. Our republic is deprived of our informed consent if we remain ignorant of the global trends in which our own troubles play out.
Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and SNL are different. They neither feign ‘objectivity,’ nor political fairness. All three are billed as entertainment. Their news theatre is effective political commentary because it unmasks hypocrisy with the razor’s edge of humor. Colbert is sometimes more complex. With all due respect, Olbermann and Maddow do use humor. However, Stewart, Colbert, and SNL consistently let us see ourselves for what we may become and the political minefields for what they are….. by-products of corporate interests and influence peddling that are squeezing the democracy from our body politic.
As our behavior and institutions change with high speed, highly interactive telecommunications there are few models of journalism to support civil discourse, free elections and the elected free of financial dependency on corporate interests. Our legal system privileges corporate interests and our sources of news are for the most part corporate sponsored.
We have become the United States of Corporations in America with global reach and interdependence. Sounds different, is different from the United States of America with liberty and justice for all, Alexander Hamilton withstanding.
May what emerges from the current turbulence be less parts corporate and more parts interdependence with liberty and justice for all. Until then, Stewart, Colbert, Terry Gross on NPR, PBS and a few blogs such as TalkingPointsmemo.com are the only line of defense of our democracy against propagainment.
The current demise of rational discourse is a more serious threat to democratic institutions in the United States than was McCarthyism in the 1950s. Today the threat of demagoguery is increased with the breadth of reach, interactivity and speed of telecommunications, the concentration of media under the control of a few large corporations with profit as the only value driving the enterprise, and with the transformation of US news broadcasts to polemical harangues as entertainment….. trends identified over the years by Edward R. Murrow, Ben Bagdikian, et al.
Regretfully, Bill Moyers’ Journal is on late at night and the Lehrer Report competes during prime time with Olbermann and Maddow. As incisive as are the latter two, they sometimes cross the line into propaganda and entertainment (propagainment), presumably because their producers think they have to compete stylistically with the bombastic broadcasters on Fox News and take their cues from topics that Fox considers most newsworthy.
Where is the US outlet for international news that comes even close to the BBC, the Journal from Germany, the CBC broadcast over NPR? As central as are health care reform, the financial system, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the US, it also matters that citizens of the US remain informed of other global developments. Our republic is deprived of our informed consent if we remain ignorant of the global trends in which our own troubles play out.
Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and SNL are different. They neither feign ‘objectivity,’ nor political fairness. All three are billed as entertainment. Their news theatre is effective political commentary because it unmasks hypocrisy with the razor’s edge of humor. Colbert is sometimes more complex. With all due respect, Olbermann and Maddow do use humor. However, Stewart, Colbert, and SNL consistently let us see ourselves for what we may become and the political minefields for what they are….. by-products of corporate interests and influence peddling that are squeezing the democracy from our body politic.
As our behavior and institutions change with high speed, highly interactive telecommunications there are few models of journalism to support civil discourse, free elections and the elected free of financial dependency on corporate interests. Our legal system privileges corporate interests and our sources of news are for the most part corporate sponsored.
We have become the United States of Corporations in America with global reach and interdependence. Sounds different, is different from the United States of America with liberty and justice for all, Alexander Hamilton withstanding.
May what emerges from the current turbulence be less parts corporate and more parts interdependence with liberty and justice for all. Until then, Stewart, Colbert, Terry Gross on NPR, PBS and a few blogs such as TalkingPointsmemo.com are the only line of defense of our democracy against propagainment.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Variations on meaning-making
On July 3 Bill Moyers’ Journal featured three theologians; Serene Jones, Cornell West, and Gary Dorrien, discussing “what our core ethics and values as a society say about America's politics, policy, and the challenges of balancing capitalism and democracy.” (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07032009/transcript3.html)
Serene Jones described how her students at Union Theological Seminary are responding to the dissolution of the economy and to the general inadequacy of major institutions. She considers this historical moment to be analogous to the time of John Calvin, 500 years ago. Whereas I have considered our contemporary experience to be analogous to the simultaneous occurrence of the Copernican, French and American revolutions, I think the Protestant Reformation is a good contribution to the mix.
Where Serene Jones spoke of a crisis of metaphysics, I see an emerging meta-narrative of complex adaptive systems …. to provide the vocabulary for expressing the interdependence and unpredictability of our online and offline lives and how the multiple connections we have with one another across all sorts of national and communal boundaries are transforming our imaginations of the world and ourselves….….. much of the time more rapidly than we can recognize, let alone anticipate. Eventually, as we may come to visualize the feedback loops of our online relationships, we might come to more deeply appreciate the feedback loops of our offline interpersonal relationships (Gov. Mark Sanford’s revelations this June notwithstanding). As Danny Hillis remarked (WIRED, January, 1998):
We are not evolution’s ultimate product. There’s something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful. But we may never be able to comprehend it, any more than a caterpillar can comprehend turning into a Butterfly. (p. 38)
Of course, we hope our social metamorphosis will be so lovely as a butterfly.
The dynamics I initially perceived in 1999 have become more intense, more rapid and widespread….the dissipation (no longer adequate) of journalism and schooling, the reconfiguration within and among nations, the rapid feedback of news with events about the collapsing economy and the ways continuous synchronous and asynchronous conversations are changing our relationship to how we understand or know ourselves and the world with which we are both participant and witness.
Transformations from individual and independent to collaborative and interdependent experience:
1-Dissipation of newspapers and the centralized practice of professional journalism
2-Dissipation of schooling and the top down teacher- student relationship
3-Transnational, participatory politics
4-Shifts in economic relationships among corporations across and within nations
5-Dislocation of work, emergence of new occupations and fields of inquiry
6-Challenges of future threats beyond our “rational” modes of response, for example taking adequate steps to address long range climate change
In each case where and by and among whom information and knowledge are produced and disseminated are the vortices from or the strange attractors around which the familiar is dissipating before our eyes…. Not so much as a film in slow motion, but as an alternating fast-forward, rewind, and again fast forward anthology of non-linear stories. Rapid social, political, and economic changes are experienced as personal emergencies…..
Consider the word… “emerg” ency…. What is emerging is within us and our environment… inseparable, inexorably contingent and interdependent. Complex systems analysis, complexity/chaos/dynamical systems theories offer vocabulary and conceptual tools for describing our experiences. The conceptual tools are the images, metaphors, words, cultural artifacts and media of our adaptation with the worlds we co-create and interdepend.
Here is how Serene Jones describes her students and their world: from http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07032009/transcript3.html
BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that there's a...you sense a hope, now for a new reformation?
SERENE JONES: Oh. It's a fantastic moment to be standing at a seminary. That's one of the reasons why I decided, after 17 years at Yale, to come to New York and be at the helm of this little school. It has a great legacy, but it's not a huge mega university.
It's because, and you can feel it in New York so palpably, but what is happening globally. Change in forms of technology. The breakdown and reconfiguration of the nation state. Forms of economic interaction that have never before been imagined.
And a crisis of knowledge. And a crisis of value. Parallel, in really profound ways, what was happening 500 years ago when this little guy named John Calvin got run out of Paris because he was asking the secular question. They ran him out of Paris. And he ends up in Geneva. And, in the midst of all of that, begins to listen to what's happening in Europe. That's the challenge right now, is for us to listen to what's happening globally and to be able to track the emergent forms of spirit. The emergent forms of organizations. The forms of love and the forms of hope that people are finding on the ground in the midst of these changes and that is going to be sort of the spirituality that's coming. And it's coming fast.
BILL MOYERS: But channel the good Calvin for a moment, Serene. Who listened, as you said, and heard the rustling sounds of spring sprigs in Europe. What are you seeing and hearing right now that give you some sense of encouragement, despite the fact that everything that's tied down is coming loose?
SERENE JONES: What I see in my students is powerful. It is a sense that, in the crumbling of all of this, what is being unleashed is an intense sense of the embodied character of faith. Call it Pentecostal. You can see it in my students now. What does it mean to call them Pentecostal? It's not the traditional things we think of. But these are students who are coming off the set of "American Idol." Or they've been on a war ship outside of Iraq. Or they've been stocking shelves in Texas. And they're coming to Union committed to social justice. And open to the power of the spirit in physical ways that give them this kind of zealousness that, for a large swath of time, the liberal left lost. They're doing this as a whole new generation for whom tactility, thinking about the way the body lives in the world. It's actually exciting to me. Because I think, in their own lives, we're seeing the contestation of the power of the market to configure desire. Because they don't want those market desires in the same way my generation did. They're critical of them. They're coming up with new forms of music. And they're very committed to a sense of passion in it. To use a very scholarly term, I think we need to use it more often, I think it's a crisis of metaphysics. These students are asking, and their liberal professors, questions about, you know, "Do you really believe that God exists?"
Now, the liberal church is sort of, you know, wanting to say, "Well, it might be a myth. It might be a symbol. We can say this about it. We can back away." These students are saying, "I'm not going to get out there on the front line, and I'm not going to reconfigure my interior world to desire different things..." If this isn't real, they want something real that is an alternative.
GARY DORRIEN: Certainly, from our experience of the course, this is an extraordinary generation. I mean, it's, they are connected. They care. They're looking for, they're always sort of obsessing about what's real. I mean, they've got radar for what's unreal. For what is just merely abstract, or it doesn't really speak to their condition. What isn't going to make a difference. What kind of learning doesn't make any difference at all. They've got radar for that. But they're very hungry for what is going to make a difference. And how it is that they can live out their faith in this world that we're creating.
SERENE JONES: They're not afraid of hard thinking. But they also want, they want beauty. The beauty of the thought to inspire.
-----------------------------------
We can understand the yearnings of the seminary students for “the beauty of the thought to inspire” as their wish to make meaning and to contribute to the changes underway. Their efforts are the ways persons and the social system self-organize around emerging social forms. The meanings we use to explain the changes in which we are voluntary and involuntary participants are in continuous feedback with the changes themselves. Karl Mannheim (1936) puts it this way:
...knowledge is from the very beginning a cooperative process of group life, in which everyone unfolds his knowledge within the framework of a common fate, a common activity, and the overcoming of common difficulties (in which, however, each has a different share). (p. 29)
Serene Jones’ students’ meaning-making within Christianity parallels assimilation of eastern religions and philosophy and native American practices in other parts of our culture. Consider the popularity of yoga, mindfulness, Native American practices. Parallel meanings are being used in relatively "fundamentalist" circles, responding to the emergency of rapid, profound change with apocalyptic visions that are more a rewind of stories past. For this latter group, the emergency of rapid change evokes fear and rejection.
In contrast, Union Theological Seminary students, with the guidance of Serene Jones and her colleagues, at least according to Jones, seek to create significance for their lives somewhat like the way Clay Shirky describes transitions underway in journalism.
Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
“…But over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need” is probably useful for thinking about the current functioning of government, education, religion…. the dissipating institutions for which new forms have yet to emerge.
Our daily lives are full of problems with institutions that were not designed for current conditions. We embody those conditions at that same time that we try to modify the old institutions. We are stressed because our world system is stressed. Things are not going to settle down for a long while.
Among those who have a higher comfort level with interdependence, contingency and unpredictability Eastern philosophy, mindfulness, and yoga, or Native American practices are strategies for living in this learning universe….. self-organizing behaviors to survive turbulent times. Among those less comfortable with the “emergent,” apocalyptic visions are the tools. We are all seekers and meaning-makers.
Molly Freeman July 6, 2009
Serene Jones described how her students at Union Theological Seminary are responding to the dissolution of the economy and to the general inadequacy of major institutions. She considers this historical moment to be analogous to the time of John Calvin, 500 years ago. Whereas I have considered our contemporary experience to be analogous to the simultaneous occurrence of the Copernican, French and American revolutions, I think the Protestant Reformation is a good contribution to the mix.
Where Serene Jones spoke of a crisis of metaphysics, I see an emerging meta-narrative of complex adaptive systems …. to provide the vocabulary for expressing the interdependence and unpredictability of our online and offline lives and how the multiple connections we have with one another across all sorts of national and communal boundaries are transforming our imaginations of the world and ourselves….….. much of the time more rapidly than we can recognize, let alone anticipate. Eventually, as we may come to visualize the feedback loops of our online relationships, we might come to more deeply appreciate the feedback loops of our offline interpersonal relationships (Gov. Mark Sanford’s revelations this June notwithstanding). As Danny Hillis remarked (WIRED, January, 1998):
We are not evolution’s ultimate product. There’s something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful. But we may never be able to comprehend it, any more than a caterpillar can comprehend turning into a Butterfly. (p. 38)
Of course, we hope our social metamorphosis will be so lovely as a butterfly.
The dynamics I initially perceived in 1999 have become more intense, more rapid and widespread….the dissipation (no longer adequate) of journalism and schooling, the reconfiguration within and among nations, the rapid feedback of news with events about the collapsing economy and the ways continuous synchronous and asynchronous conversations are changing our relationship to how we understand or know ourselves and the world with which we are both participant and witness.
Transformations from individual and independent to collaborative and interdependent experience:
1-Dissipation of newspapers and the centralized practice of professional journalism
2-Dissipation of schooling and the top down teacher- student relationship
3-Transnational, participatory politics
4-Shifts in economic relationships among corporations across and within nations
5-Dislocation of work, emergence of new occupations and fields of inquiry
6-Challenges of future threats beyond our “rational” modes of response, for example taking adequate steps to address long range climate change
In each case where and by and among whom information and knowledge are produced and disseminated are the vortices from or the strange attractors around which the familiar is dissipating before our eyes…. Not so much as a film in slow motion, but as an alternating fast-forward, rewind, and again fast forward anthology of non-linear stories. Rapid social, political, and economic changes are experienced as personal emergencies…..
Consider the word… “emerg” ency…. What is emerging is within us and our environment… inseparable, inexorably contingent and interdependent. Complex systems analysis, complexity/chaos/dynamical systems theories offer vocabulary and conceptual tools for describing our experiences. The conceptual tools are the images, metaphors, words, cultural artifacts and media of our adaptation with the worlds we co-create and interdepend.
Here is how Serene Jones describes her students and their world: from http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07032009/transcript3.html
BILL MOYERS: Are you saying that there's a...you sense a hope, now for a new reformation?
SERENE JONES: Oh. It's a fantastic moment to be standing at a seminary. That's one of the reasons why I decided, after 17 years at Yale, to come to New York and be at the helm of this little school. It has a great legacy, but it's not a huge mega university.
It's because, and you can feel it in New York so palpably, but what is happening globally. Change in forms of technology. The breakdown and reconfiguration of the nation state. Forms of economic interaction that have never before been imagined.
And a crisis of knowledge. And a crisis of value. Parallel, in really profound ways, what was happening 500 years ago when this little guy named John Calvin got run out of Paris because he was asking the secular question. They ran him out of Paris. And he ends up in Geneva. And, in the midst of all of that, begins to listen to what's happening in Europe. That's the challenge right now, is for us to listen to what's happening globally and to be able to track the emergent forms of spirit. The emergent forms of organizations. The forms of love and the forms of hope that people are finding on the ground in the midst of these changes and that is going to be sort of the spirituality that's coming. And it's coming fast.
BILL MOYERS: But channel the good Calvin for a moment, Serene. Who listened, as you said, and heard the rustling sounds of spring sprigs in Europe. What are you seeing and hearing right now that give you some sense of encouragement, despite the fact that everything that's tied down is coming loose?
SERENE JONES: What I see in my students is powerful. It is a sense that, in the crumbling of all of this, what is being unleashed is an intense sense of the embodied character of faith. Call it Pentecostal. You can see it in my students now. What does it mean to call them Pentecostal? It's not the traditional things we think of. But these are students who are coming off the set of "American Idol." Or they've been on a war ship outside of Iraq. Or they've been stocking shelves in Texas. And they're coming to Union committed to social justice. And open to the power of the spirit in physical ways that give them this kind of zealousness that, for a large swath of time, the liberal left lost. They're doing this as a whole new generation for whom tactility, thinking about the way the body lives in the world. It's actually exciting to me. Because I think, in their own lives, we're seeing the contestation of the power of the market to configure desire. Because they don't want those market desires in the same way my generation did. They're critical of them. They're coming up with new forms of music. And they're very committed to a sense of passion in it. To use a very scholarly term, I think we need to use it more often, I think it's a crisis of metaphysics. These students are asking, and their liberal professors, questions about, you know, "Do you really believe that God exists?"
Now, the liberal church is sort of, you know, wanting to say, "Well, it might be a myth. It might be a symbol. We can say this about it. We can back away." These students are saying, "I'm not going to get out there on the front line, and I'm not going to reconfigure my interior world to desire different things..." If this isn't real, they want something real that is an alternative.
GARY DORRIEN: Certainly, from our experience of the course, this is an extraordinary generation. I mean, it's, they are connected. They care. They're looking for, they're always sort of obsessing about what's real. I mean, they've got radar for what's unreal. For what is just merely abstract, or it doesn't really speak to their condition. What isn't going to make a difference. What kind of learning doesn't make any difference at all. They've got radar for that. But they're very hungry for what is going to make a difference. And how it is that they can live out their faith in this world that we're creating.
SERENE JONES: They're not afraid of hard thinking. But they also want, they want beauty. The beauty of the thought to inspire.
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We can understand the yearnings of the seminary students for “the beauty of the thought to inspire” as their wish to make meaning and to contribute to the changes underway. Their efforts are the ways persons and the social system self-organize around emerging social forms. The meanings we use to explain the changes in which we are voluntary and involuntary participants are in continuous feedback with the changes themselves. Karl Mannheim (1936) puts it this way:
...knowledge is from the very beginning a cooperative process of group life, in which everyone unfolds his knowledge within the framework of a common fate, a common activity, and the overcoming of common difficulties (in which, however, each has a different share). (p. 29)
Serene Jones’ students’ meaning-making within Christianity parallels assimilation of eastern religions and philosophy and native American practices in other parts of our culture. Consider the popularity of yoga, mindfulness, Native American practices. Parallel meanings are being used in relatively "fundamentalist" circles, responding to the emergency of rapid, profound change with apocalyptic visions that are more a rewind of stories past. For this latter group, the emergency of rapid change evokes fear and rejection.
In contrast, Union Theological Seminary students, with the guidance of Serene Jones and her colleagues, at least according to Jones, seek to create significance for their lives somewhat like the way Clay Shirky describes transitions underway in journalism.
Any experiment, though, designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.
For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
“…But over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need” is probably useful for thinking about the current functioning of government, education, religion…. the dissipating institutions for which new forms have yet to emerge.
Our daily lives are full of problems with institutions that were not designed for current conditions. We embody those conditions at that same time that we try to modify the old institutions. We are stressed because our world system is stressed. Things are not going to settle down for a long while.
Among those who have a higher comfort level with interdependence, contingency and unpredictability Eastern philosophy, mindfulness, and yoga, or Native American practices are strategies for living in this learning universe….. self-organizing behaviors to survive turbulent times. Among those less comfortable with the “emergent,” apocalyptic visions are the tools. We are all seekers and meaning-makers.
Molly Freeman July 6, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Tethers of the mind....images from chaos and complexity
Here is a calculus of sorts for critically navigating the “news” and “analysis;” Web, TV and radio broadcasts of what Republicans say about Democrats, what everyone says about Obama and everything else. It works to use the imagery of complexity and chaos theories to understand global turbulence, which we all experience personally as living from one emergency to the next. In "Chaos, Courage, Choice & Creativity," Frederick David Abraham (1995) captures the poignancy of our historical period as the bifurcation point:
There is a point, the bifurcation point, at which the attractor that is in the process of transforming does not exist: There is neither egg nor chick. This is the old meaning of gap, but mathematical dynamics does not use the term chaos for its semantic roots,…
The bifurcation point is sort of a gap, but it is not possessed of a chaotic attractor. …. In mathematical dynamics the bifurcation point is very unstable (rather than chaotic). (p.68)
Abraham describes the gap in terms of the psyche as a system. The systems analysis goes like this:
A slight alteration of force can tip the system back to the previous attractor or lack thereof, or on to a new attractor or loss thereof, in the portrait. However, it takes energy to change the control in order for this to happen, to create this small change in the balance of conflicting, cooperating, and interacting forces. (p.68)
From the mathematical dynamic point of view, one type of choice is seen as resetting of the "initial position" into a different basin of attraction…. A more active type of choice is to navigate along the controls of the whole potential dynamical scheme, learned or imagined, to create new possible attractors of self. For the psyche, this is individuation, a process of bifurcation leading to a greater complexity and maturity. The psyche, as a dynamical scheme, views potential worlds and chooses among them. (p. 68)
Think 9/11 as the occasion and the Bush Administration’s response as the force that sent us back to an earlier time. Bush et al catapulted the entire international system back to a previous way of perceiving and being in the world…. Although not necessarily a function of 9/11, the appointment of Alito to the Supreme Court certainly set back legal arguments to pre-Enlightenment conversations. In his Senate confirmation hearings he denied the role of his “background” on his thinking and decisions…… This is not a 21st century mind for Alioto may have not even visited Freud or Jung, let alone rejected them.
The current stream of Republican rhetoric maintains the status quo because it ensures that we continue to process habits of mind that are out of synch with where the world could progress. We are all; I mean all of us, in this together. Republican rhetoric and the noise of news and analyses with which it is processed, are tethers, keeping the planet and billions of lives tied to smaller futures. Or, according to Abraham’s explanation, keeping us from ‘navigat[ing]e along the controls of the whole potential dynamical scheme, learned or imagined, to create new possible attractors.”
Among the controls we navigate, see:
Family of Secrets by Russ Baker
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/05/26/family_of_secrets/?ref=fpd
References:
Abraham, Frederick David (1995). Choas, Courage, Choice & Creativity. Psychological Perspectives. Issue Thirty: Quantum Psychology
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