Bringing out our Worst Selves

Many people believe that the key to effective teaching, particularly at the secondary level, depends primarily on a deep level of content knowledge.  In fact, in many ways it was that perspective that drove me to the field - I had very little background in formal teacher training, and banked my science teaching career on a physics undergraduate degree from a respected institution.  As it turned out, that was enough to get my foot in the door, but I didn't really become halfway decent at my job until I accepted the fact that understanding the way developing minds was AT LEAST as important as content specialization, if not more so.

I spent much of my first few years on the job learning the ends and outs of pedagogy: how to manage a classroom, how to break down concepts in different ways, how to create experiences that help diverse groups of young people connect the dots in their own ways, and so on.  In other words, I learned how to lead a herd of horses to water and talk them into drinking it.  That was crucial, because I assumed when I was a teacher that the horses would drink the water on their own once I told them all where to find the oasis.

Basically, I've grown to believe that a huge part of the teaching profession is facilitating that cognitive development that helps young people bridge the gap between actions and consequences.  The kids that are the most successful (and pleasant to be around) are the ones that learn these lessons quickly.  And on the flip side of that coin, the students that fail the most consistently and spectacularly are pretty much always fixated on a mission to find someone else to blame for their predicament (and in almost all cases do so with the vigorous backing of their enabling parents).

It's the eerie consistency of this pattern that has me thinking about a dark side to the technological golden age in which we currently find ourselves.  Many technologies are designed to protect us from the consequences of our own poor choices; many experts are banking on technological advancements to resolve the impacts of climate change, for instance, and many others are so convinced that we'll be able to come up with clever fixes for whatever messes we make that the idea of considering consequences seems laughable.

Given how many problems have actually been solved by technological advancements, one might be tempted to dismiss such concerns as paranoia, but I think there are at least two reasons to be concerned about the way that our own ingenuity is warping our worldview:

First, there will always be a very real chance that we'll make a mess that we won't be able to clean up.

And second, living a life where we constantly push our pleasure buttons and assume we can clean up the negative repercussions later (even if we're right about that) turns us into crappy people, on an individual and cultural level.  Self-control, thoughtful consideration, stewardship of the world around us, these are values that serve a social good above and beyond the immediate consequences that they steer us away from.  Ask yourself if you want to live in a world where these virtues will become obsolete before you put an unconditional stamp of approval on the unimpeded march of progress.

Eyes Cast Skyward: Technological Relations to Reality

Brian Mahabee is a graduate of Teacher's College at Columbia University, and has been involved in the education world for nearly a decade.  Brian and I work together, and a big part of his job title involves increases the utilization of educational technology in our classrooms, so I thought he'd be the perfect person to ask for thoughts on intersections between technology and culture.

His thoughts are collected in the lovely, poetic essay which follows.

Look down, look down, and look down some more. For years we’ve been taught to look up, gaze at the stars, shoot for the clouds and rise like the sun, but nowadays all we do is look down. More and more we’re being taught to look at the screens we have. Stay connected they say, interact more, look at this new thingy that does that one thing you always wanted to do. So we look down some more. And that one thing you always wanted to do, is it really something you always wanted to do? Are more interactions actually taking place? And the ever present question, are we really interacting?

Culture in my opinion is something that is deeply rooted in a people’s being, in their beliefs and stand for something that is unique to their core. The supposed connections, interactions and new advancements in “things you always wanted to do” will soon be the culture that is passed on to following generations. So can this type of acquisition become a culture? Can making new connections and interacting virtually define a culture? Or does that dilute a culture that already exists? Many times to experience a culture, travel is presumably involved. A new place, to feel the atmosphere, to meet the people and experience the landscape. Nowadays, we are able to do similar things virtually, and what an advancement this is. However, is it a diluted experience? Many would say they would rather have the diluted over nothing at all, including myself in some cases. However, which is better? A powerful video, or no video at all. A glimpse into the Egyptian pyramids, or no view of the hidden treasures?

I recently viewed a video based on Polynesian culture, and it touched me in an emotional way that I would have never known if I wasn’t virtually connected to someone who is of Polynesian descent. With an experience like this, my apprehension slowly becomes undone. Yes looking down at our devices constantly is becoming cultural, and yes superficial connections are replacing in person deeply confirmed interactions, but the connections that give a somewhat diluted experience that nurture an appreciation for the actual thing, whether it be the Polynesian culture, the pyramids of Egypt or the interaction with a person online can have a place in cultural discovery.

A negative impact of the unlimited availability of information is easily tripping over a line that is a mile wide but an inch deep. The vast amount of knowledge is just that: vast. And with its availability users can easily jump to another resource without a depth of knowledge worth having. I now guiltily look at emails, articles and notes by skimming. I skim, then move on. This has now become my culture of reading. I fear that I am becoming acculturated to this type of reading that my breadth of knowledge spans a mile wide with an inch of depth.  I fear the same for present day peoples with the breadth of information available. I fear my reality. I fear present day culture.

Bringing Children into a Mad World

I'm incredibly excited to present the final guest blog post during January's exploration of patriarchy: Dr. Rae Colley, formerly a professor at the University of West Georgia and presently my esteemed colleague. She's a deep thinker on the issues we've probed this month (her dissertation was entitled "Domesticating the Frontier: Representations of Native Americans in U.S. Women's Prose, 1820-1885"). You can read her literary criticism on her blog, Read This Book, Y'all. Below you will find a heartwarming and hilarious exploration of someone who identifies as a feminist and who has raised both daughters and sons.

My first experience wrangling with the concept of patriarchy occurred some years ago (I won’t say how many, because my commitment to feminism does not diminish my commitment to personal vanity) when I was a graduate student at Emory University in Atlanta. I was a young Ph.D. candidate in English, and I thought I would like to earn a certificate in Women’s Studies. Also, I was recently married. And, shortly after making that fateful decision, pregnant. But nevertheless, I wanted to fight the power of the male gaze and began taking classes in Women’s Studies, where I produced papers entitled, “The Hegemony of the Governess: (Re)inscribing the Patriarchy in Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” I love this title because it contains so many of the academic markers of the day: parentheses, dependent clauses, and of course a colon.  [Side note: this paper was a finalist that year for Most Outstanding Paper by a Graduate Student. It didn’t win, and to this day I wonder if I invested too heavily or not enough in the academic markers.]

At the time (ok, fine, it was the mid 90s) I was proud of my commitment to feminism. A professor of mine wrote a newspaper editorial arguing that everyone who was in favor of equal pay for equal work was a feminist, and I couldn’t really argue with her logic (mainly because I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about when she mentioned an Aristotelian paradigm of something or other). I strutted into my Emory class on Women in American Popular Culture full of ideas about how to elevate popular culture (occupied by women) into the stratosphere of intellectual culture (occupied by men.) My pregnancy was a frequent topic of discussion in my all-female class of varying gender identities.  My child was born in June, and when I returned to class in September, everyone was eager to hear about my new daughter. The only problem was that she was a son. I don’t mean that the baby was transgendered or confused about his gender identity (to my knowledge). Rather, in our enthusiastic reimagining of American popular culture, everyone had imagined a culture that included another open-minded young woman. I was so proud of my perfect baby boy and not a little offput when a classmate jokingly [I think] moaned, “Not another member of the patriarchy!”

I laughed, but then immediately began to worry: how would I prevent my innocent baby boy from joining the tidal wave of repressive male power? I thought I had the answer. I would not play into restrictive gender stereotypes! My boy would not play with guns or swords or army men! He would have a Barbie doll, and he would play dress-up! I would buy him a Baby Alive and teach him to change her diaper! He would wear pink, for heaven’s sake! While he was a swaddled infant, it was relatively easy to enforce these strictures. He wore his cute pink onesies with aplomb, and threw up on them just as efficiently as he did on the blue clothes. He gnawed on the Barbie’s shaved head when his teeth were coming in, and he actually asked for a Ken doll on his second birthday (I still don’t know if he knew I was going to get him one anyway, or if he genuinely wanted a tanned partner for Malibu Barbie. Or two Malibu Kens).

In the midst of all my self-congratulatory gender reassignment exercises, I became pregnant again, and this time to the delight of Women’s Studies students everywhere, I had a little girl. I knew what to do: regift her pink clothes and baby dolls to her brother, and make sure she had a full supply of Thomas the Tank Engine books and action figures. A funny thing happened here: Grace exhibited no interest whatsoever in her brother’s collection of Matchbox cars, and the only thing she liked to do with Thomas the Tank Engine was wrap him up in a blanket and pretend to rock him to sleep. To be clear, Thomas is a train. And he was swaddled nicely in a Barbie blanket. At least I think the blanket was a nice, gender-neutral yellow. More horrifying, despite my desire to avoid firearms of all kinds, my son Jackson had a real knack for weapon formation. He could make a gun out of a stick, a pencil, a shoe; he was a regular little Smith and Wesson MacGyver. And he quickly lost interest in the Malibu Ken that he had requested [accepted?] the previous year.

Over the years, my children have accepted and rejected gender norms in varying degrees: Grace never did enjoy the toy trucks I bought her, and I eventually had to cave in and buy her an American Girl doll to replace Thomas the Tank Engine. Jackson enjoyed dolls intermittently, but once he discovered Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that was all over. And to my immense chagrin, he has always loved guns: Airsoft rifles, BB guns, and violent video games. There, I said it. However, for years he played with the kitchen set I bought them, and now he’s studying to be a chef. My daughter is president of her school’s Business and Entrepreneurial Club, and is a master at outside sales (I myself could never even sell Girl Scout cookies). What does all this mean? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.

This entire post has been one long piece of anecdotal evidence about my experience trying to carry the banner of feminism as a mother, first of boys, then of girls (I now am the proud mother of two beneficiaries of the patriarchy and two future breastfeeding advocates [optimism reigns here]). Society has changed a lot in the years since I earned that elusive Ph.D./Women’s Studies certificate, although maybe not so much as my classmates and I would like to believe. We are nearing the end of Barack Obama’s second term as the first African-American president, but we are also forced to listen to debate on how the infidelities of Hillary Clinton’s husband disqualify her from the presidency. Not to veer off into the political, but the personal is political, or so I’ve come to believe. I wanted to end with a pithy quote, but when I went to Tumblr, I kept getting distracted by the vitriolic comments and hate-mongering under each quote. Why is feminism such a dirty word to some? I did find one quotation that spoke to my story, though, from Gloria Steinem: “Though we have the courage to raise our daughters more like our sons, we’ve rarely had the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.” Here’s to a judgment-free, egalitarian childhood, with all the dolls, trucks, cake pans, and sword-wielding turtles that implies!

The Cycle of Expectations

In my personal experience, one of the most prickly parts of debates around patriarchy in its various manifestations how the behavior of those who are subjected to its effects interacts with people's notions of individual and social responsibility.  I'm talking every sort of victim blaming that some folks are inclined to in discussions about sexual violence, for instance, or people that suggest because women (and men) choose to act a particular way, they don't deserve anyone's sympathy.  A woman who experiences sexual harassment at work is free to change jobs, they say.  They stomp their feet and grumble that students who want more sensitivity in the language and practices employed on their campuses aren't entitled to have other people conform to their viewpoints.  People that take these kinds of stances often broadly lament the tyranny of "political correctness" which from their perspective has run amok and threatens to suffocate our American identity.  Let's dig a little deeper into this way of seeing the world, shall we?

Voices of our Choices

To really unpack the tension between the insidious nature of patriarchy and the countless choices we all make that comply with and prop up that power structure, we have to look back to the origins of those patriarchal tendencies: our biological programming.  Millenia of brutishly successful reproductive strategies have infected us all with an evolutionary tendency to play our designated parts in the androcentric mode of social organization.  Speaking in a broad, statistical way, women are born with a tendency to nurture, men to dominate and protect.  Built on top of this biological programming is social programming - human civilization was built by humans, after all, so it isn't surprising that we would produce sociocultural norms that reinforce and justify certain aspects of our biological programming.

So when women derive pleasure from or strive to appear attractive to men or when they hesitate to express their opinions for fear of being seen as "bitchy", they are making choices that make sense within the context of their biological imperatives and the status quo balance of social incentives. Does the fact that they make those choices necessitate that they also surrender their right to criticize the system that threatens them with very real consequences if they don't comply?

The American Way

That is the question, isn't it?  Many people absolutely hate any suggestion that responsibility for a person's decisions might lie beyond that individual person.  These people feel that the buck should stop at the boundary line of each individual's free will.  Choices come with consequences.  I get where they're coming from.  Particularly in the individualistic mythos that dominates the American psyche, that glorifies negative rights (don't mess with me) over positive rights (society owes me something), the idea that people might consider how the broader society plays a role in people's choices is abhorrent.

But here's a counterpoint to consider: to condemn someone for expressing their discontent with a system of power that has incredible influence over their lives is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic, I think.  In just the same way that some knee-jerk conservatives whip out the old "If you don't like America, then you should get out!" line, deploying tactics like victim blaming is analogical; these people are saying "If you don't like patriarchy, you should just get out (of the society that's dominated by patriarchy)!"

Setting aside the tremendous costs this viewpoint imposes on individuals who have the least power and influence in the current social arrangement, let's think about the political implications of such a stance.  It demonizes people who criticize the way the world is right now.  If that perspective had won out in the past, we might all be serfs performing back-breaking labor in service to our feudal lords.

To put it another way, this is a question about hating the player versus hating the game.  It's nearly impossible to opt out of the game, in this case; we're all living it.  The game of democracy includes stipulations that allow players to change the rules.  If you don't like that, then what you're really uncomfortable with is the idea of American democracy, so maybe you should just get out.  Eastern Europe is experiencing significant negative population growth.  I'm sure they'd be happy to have you.

Out of Sync

Here in Sandy Springs the fall semester comes to a close today, and it for me it brings to mind the natural cycles that define the contours of our daily experience.  As a teacher, my senses are finely attuned to the academic calendar, from the micro-oscillation from Monday to Friday to the grander tides that carry us from anxious excitement in August to dreary resignation in October all the way back to excited anticipation in May again.  These are the cycles with which I cannot negotiate, which I'm obliged to live within as a condition for participating in modern society.  Our industrialized sophistication - electric lighting, temperature control, internal combustion engines - has liberated us from subjugation to the passage of the sun and the seasons.

But it wasn't so long ago that Christina and I were living in an entirely different cultural context where social patterns still conformed with the dictates of the local ecosystem.  And it was amazing.

We were both Peace Corps volunteers in the developing nation of Burkina Faso.  Neither of us lived in a large city; she had electricity, while my village was scheduled to get its first power line "sometime soon" (read: "sometime in the next ten years".)  The majority of the Burkinabe live without modern utilities and rely on subsistence agriculture, with grain cultivation ramping up during the rainy season from June to October.  From weather to seasonal imperatives for the agricultural cycle to access to light, most peoples' lives in Burkina Faso, ours included, are influenced by many factors that cannot be controlled.  And I really think it made it easier to be happy, for at least two different reasons.

First, existing within the constraints of one's ecosystem naturally restricts the choices one can make in any given moment. I've blogged before about the problem that choices pose for happiness; life in modern societies place us in the constant position of being able to challenge the natural decision-making that we would otherwise make.  In Burkina Faso, when it's raining cats and dogs outside, no one goes anywhere.  Battling the elements is way too much of an obstacle to consider running around on non-essential errands.  By contrast, in the United States, citing "rain" as a reason not to attend a social function or go to the grocery store is likely to cost you some serious points with your friends and loved ones.  Our expectations are shifted by the array of possibilities made available by technology, such that dozens of times every single day we're asked, even expected to ignore biological signals in order to participate maximally in the efficiency society.  That constant pressure to choose is bad enough in and of itself, but it's particularly bad in those moments when we're being asked to reject natural signals that give us valuable feedback.

Which brings me to my second point: I think that although we may think that our scientific knowledge production is sufficient to measure and mitigate all the consequences of our evolving technological society, we may very well be drastically wrong.  I am by no means anti-science; in fact, I strongly believe in rigorous empiricism as a means to build human knowledge.  However, whereas many "science-minded" people center their worldview around a sort of scientific positivism ("I only believe in things that can be definitely established through repeated scientific observation"), I believe that we'd all be better served by negativism: "I don't reject the possibility of any phenomenon unless it can be definitely rejected through repeated scientific observation".  The hubris implied in positivism, that we are capable of testing and understanding all aspects of our Universe - it just seems laughable, not to mention seriously challenged by the evolving nature of scientific knowledge itself.

Consider, for instance, the current level of scientific knowledge as it exists in various domains.  On the one hand, we can make mind-bogglingly precise predictions about the trajectories of subatomic particles in high-energy collisions.  On the other hand, we have extremely limited understanding of the biological processes that govern sleep and nutrition, perhaps the two most fundamental elements of human health.  If we can't even make a reasonable hypothesis about how and why sleep contributes to our normal biological functioning, how in the world can we confidently assume that the monumental changes inflicted on human sleep cycles by electric lighting haven't had significant impacts on our physical or mental health?

I can tell you from my own anecdotal experience that when I was living in a place where I could go to sleep with and get up with the sun, I never slept better.  Even when it was miserably hot and humid, I slept like a baby.  I felt better.  I could listen to the messages my intuition was sending me, about when I needed rest and solitude, about when I needed fellowship and celebration, and so did everyone else, and it made it exponentially easier to deal with all the little physical discomforts of life.

All I'm saying is that what we gain in technological efficiency and productivity comes at a cost that we haven't even begun to understand how to measure.  But I've lived it, and I'm telling you that it's real.

The Imagination Cycle

I've had quite a few conversations with friends and family and a number of significant personal experiences in the last few years that have reaffirmed one of the major pillars of my worldview: that the perspective we bring to each moment in our lives has a profound impact on the content that fills up each day.  Put another way, life isn't a series of events occurring independently that we simply react to and form emotional perspectives on, but rather our own emotional perspectives strongly influence the outcomes of situations we encounter in life.  The two aspects ("objective" external reality and "subjective" internal experience) are impossible to separate, and continuously influence each other in a dynamic cycle.

Well, I've been reading this wonderful little book called Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, which is exactly what the title promises.  Chapter after chapter dives into brilliantly imagined thought experiments that explore the nature of time.  Einstein was renowned for proposing and exploring these gedanken experiments (German, not the most elegant language, right?), and I think that book at least implies that such imaginative exploration were essential to the groundbreaking challenges Einstein went on to make to our notions of space-time.  Considered against the backdrop of the other personal reflections I've had this year, the idea that the terrain we let our imagination tread might significantly impact our understanding of the world was really compelling.

And it got me thinking - maybe the world would be a much better place if each of us started our day with a meditation where we imagined the world as we wished it were.  If we visualized walking through our day being kind to everyone we met and receiving that kindness in return, considering the consequences of our choices and wrapped in the comfort of knowing we exist in a world of social relations that we each value and protect... it might make us more likely to make choices that push that world closer to existence.

So I'm issuing a call to anyone who's interested seeing the world become a nicer, happier, more loving place: start your day with five minutes of meditation on what you want the world to be, and see if the rest of your day feels any different.  I'd love to document anecdotes that anyone is willing to share.

We hold the key to our shackles

Every year as the month of November approaches, I prepare for my annual Black Friday centered anti-consumerism rant.  I've watched as year after year, the desire to buy expanded beyond the temporal limits of a single day and an increasing number of stores opened their doors earlier and earlier.  First came the midnight sales, and then 11pm open times, and on and on until many stores have come to expect their employees to show up not only on Black Friday but most of Thanksgiving Day as well.

We are all responsible for this, collectively, as a society.  We have become comfortable with elevating the joy we get from buying garbage that we'll throw away weeks or months later above the value that real human relationships and communities bring to our lives.  There are many reasons for this, many simultaneously interacting players in this game, but that doesn't change the fact that we all have the ability to opt in or opt out of the materialistic orgy that epitomizes much of our broader cultural dysfunction.

But for the first time in many years, I have inspiring, optimistic news to report.  The Facebook stories about REI have already begun to proliferate, so I'll make my recap brief: REI has decided to close ALL of its store on Black Friday, to delay processing any online orders until Saturday, and to give all its employees a paid day off.  The corporate office is encouraging them to go outside and do something they love.

It could very well be the case that there are cold, calculating motivations behind this decision.  It could be that this move is primarily motivated by a desire for positive PR and building a head of steam behind outdoor adventurism that will increase demand for the niche products that REI sells.  In fact, I'm certain that's at the very least an element of the choices we're seeing here.  But ultimately, I still praise this as an amazing development.  If a company has figured out how to create profitability by making choices that enrich the lives of its employees and encourage people to make positive, healthy life choices that will reward them and build enduring value for them, instead of leaving with a hollowness that can only be filled with more meaningless consumption, then I won't complain.

The Tie is dead... Long live the tie?

For most of my life, I had no interest in the ornaments of formal presentation.  By the time I graduated from college, I probably owned three ties.

Flash forward five years, and after a few months of working at a job where I was expected to wear ties five days of the week, I began to develop an appreciation for the opportunity to express myself through my tie selection.  My collection grew into the double digits, and even included a nice selection of bow-ties (not the easiest to tie, by the way).

in case you can't tell, this isn't me.

Flash forward again, and now, under the leadership of a new administration, our expectations for professional dress have been realigned, and the tie has moved from mandatory to optional.  I have some colleagues that have been advocating for this for years; one, in particular, who came to teaching from the world of finance commented several times that for employees without direct customer interaction, ties are a thing of the past in many industries.

In fact, I think an argument can be made that the role of the tie in our culture has dramatically shifted from an indication of professionalism and prestige to an almost totally aesthetic one.  Bow-ties and skinny neck ties have become a hallmark of hipster style; if I take a stroll through Little Five Points in Atlanta (grunge-hipster central, for those of you who aren't local), I guarantee you I'll see a few ties being sported by the locals - perhaps more than I might see if I drove a few miles north and took a tour of Experian headquarters.

As I reflect on my own experience vis a vis the tie, I'm conflicted.  I did enjoy selecting and matching ties, using them to accent my wardrobe in ways that expressed my flippant personality.  And yet, absent an external requirement to wear one, nine times out of ten I don't bother with them.  Even considering my positive motivations for wearing the tie, they're all driven by fashion, and not a compulsion to be taken more seriously as a professional.

So really, I suppose I have to end with a question for the readers - what do ties signal to you?  Is the tie still a garment with professional significance?  I have a sense that we're in a moment of cultural ambivalence as the democratizing forces of technology diminish our collective reverence for institutional credibility and shift the focus onto individual personalities and ideas.  But I'd like to hear what the rest of you think.

Listen to the Old People!

Our culture places a lot of value on empirical evidence - we love science and technology, we require safety studies for new products, we generally believe that repeated observation leads to greater understanding about the way the world works.  It's inherent in almost every aspect of our lives and our zeitgeist.

So then, I wonder why we don't spend more time listening to what old people are saying about their lives, which choices worked out well for them, and how they wished they had shifted their priorities.  This logic is the cornerstone of parenting - the idea that more experienced humans who have tasted more of life will be able to make better choices and therefore provide guidance and structure to the younger humans that will help them lead good lives.  Somehow I think we lose that sense once we reach adulthood.

My grandfather with my nephew & brother-in-law at my wedding.  trefpool.com

A palliative care nurse collected the dying regrets of her patients in the last months of their lives (no mention of how many individuals were included in this anecdotal research, but it's enough that she's writing a book about her findings), and the most common sentiments follow below.

1. I wish I had been more true to myself
2. I wish I had worked less
3. I wish I had expressed my feelings more
4. I wish I had kept better contact with my friends
5. I wish I had let myself be happier

The theme that flows beneath this collection is clear to me.  We all walk a negotiated boundary between our articulated sense of self and our sense of the expectations and norms of the society in which we live.  This list of regrets sends a clear message: Embracing conformity to the world's expectations is not the path to a life well-lived.  Working more, bottling up our feelings, transforming ourselves after gauging others' expectations, these are things we all do in the modern world, and while it helps grease the wheels of capitalist production, it's making us miserable.  I must ask again, why on earth are we so fixated as a country on economic growth, on protecting the means of wealth generation, when doing so comes at the expense of our happiness and sanity?

My (millennial) generation has been occasionally labeled as lazy and self-absorbed; a cultural discussion about how to persuade millennials to work harder has arisen in the wake of this digital debate about the character of today's crop of young American adults.  Maybe we're just wise enough to realize that there are bigger fish to fry in the finite allocation of time we've been given on earth than satisfying all the whims of our corporate overlords.

De-Localized

I've had some interesting conversations about the merits of technology and how our technological devices affect our lives - conversations that explored the cultural, physical and psychological connotations of constant access to global connectivity.  I've heard some fairly persuasive arguments about the ability to build connections that otherwise wouldn't be possible, to expose people to phenomena and perspectives that they would never have been able to see a hundred years ago.  And I can accede that there is some truth in these arguments.

Still, there's at least one aspect of our technological lives that I dread.  Whatever wonderful experiences come from our technological interactions, they come at an absolute trade-off: immersing our sensory and mental focus on information flowing through the internet takes it away from our immediate surroundings.  We are becoming de-localized, in almost every sense.

When I was in the Peace Corps, I lived without electricity in a country that spoke a different language from the one I grew up speaking.  Multiple layers of necessity kept my mind in the present.  And it was wonderful.  I discovered the joy inherent in a thousand simple tasks - bathing myself with a cup and a bucket, walking to the market, negotiating for produce.  Even waiting at the well line for water.  With the expectation of constant external stimulation removed, I found myself instead experiencing insignificant moments with a life-enriching relish that escapes me most of the time in my American life.

Even in the cases where digital interactions simply replace analog versions of the same activity (for instance, when we chat with people online, rather than face to face), it feels like something is lost.  Anecdotal as this may seem, consider the following - there's plenty of data to document the hormonal chain of responses that begin when you gaze into another person's eyes.  When we communicate with each other, its about more than just a simple transfer of verbal information.  We read and understand each other in countless ways that we probably haven't understood and documented.  When we cast aside that analog form of communication and replace it with text messages, we can't even quantify all the dimensions of connection that we've thrown away.

The World is our Canvas

Don't you hate it when you're duped by a crazy internet rumor?  It was just about a year ago that one of those got me particularly badly - another iteration of the identification and arrest of the well known graffiti artist Banksy.  My reaction at the time was visceral, for two reasons I think.  First, because Banksy's work is brilliant - do a google search and enrich your life today.  But more significantly, I think I was really disturbed at the idea that what Banksy had been doing was a crime.

from Key West, FL.  trefpool.com

Graffiti, public art, makes us and our communities better in every way.

Graffiti is the ultimate expression of the backlash against cookie-cutter mass production capitalism.  It is art for the home brewer, the musician, the creator.  It resists the tremendous gravity of uniformity and helps express and even define the personality of local communities.

From Vancouver, Canada.  trefpool.com

Graffiti is inherently both democratic and evolutionary.  The expression of free speech in the public commons is a cornerstone of the American Constitution and the proper functioning of our democracy.  Graffiti is the visual manifestation of speech, an enduring documentation of ideas and dreams that accept and amalgamate contributions from all who wish to participate.  Like the digital twitterverse, the palette of local graffiti expresses the dominant zeitgeist.  If money is speech, why can't art be speech?

And finally, graffiti stirs the imagination.  It challenges the rigid frameworks that structure most of our interactions.  These public works of art create dissonance, sometimes beautiful sometimes jarring, that can stir moments of creativity and inspiration.

Choices are for Chumps

It's fascinating how many assumptions we carry around with us, use to judge situations- assumptions that often drive major life choices- that we leave completely uninterrogated.  One of the most ubiquitous, complicated and problematic is the notion that if we have more choices in life, we will be happier/better off.

Let's start with the argument for choices.  It goes something like this: people walk into situations with pre-existing preferences.  If they have more choices, they are more likely to find an option that is more closely matched with their preferences.  They get what they want, they are happy!  End of story.

But is it, really?

First off, we all know that we encounter decisions every day into which we carry no real preferences.  In that case, having more choices can be an inconvenience.  Ever been with a group of friends trying to pick a restaurant, and no one is particularly motivated to go any place in particular?  And yet, no one wants to rush into a decision when there are thousands of tasty options available in any major city.  Sometimes I wind up so hangry that I'd rather just be by myself eating a sandwich, rather than standing around with a group of intelligent people dithering between five equally good choices.

Which brings me to point #2: happiness is not about the satisfaction of objective needs and wants that you've already identified for yourself.  Human beings constantly measure their happiness relative to expectations, not relative to objective measures.   Remember that old adage about the grass always being greener?  Read any of the happiness studies that have been published in the last five years demonstrating that after an initial surge of pleasure, lottery winners end up about as happy as they were before they won the lottery?  Choice factors into this picture of expectations as well.  You walk into a store, looking for a pair of jeans.  On the racks in front of you are literally hundreds of options to choose from.  There are hundreds more in other stores just down the street.  With thousands of jeans to choose from, your brain (perhaps subconsciously) is telling you, you are guaranteed to find the perfect pair of jeans.

But we all know that isn't going to happen.  Even if you have hundreds of options, you don't have the time or energy to explore all of them.  Many of the options are redundant.  Many combinations of characteristics that we fantasize about (amazing fit and quality, low price) are virtually non-existent.  But our emotional brains don't weigh these logical considerations - we only feel in that moment that we live in a land of plenty and we still find ourselves unsatisfied.  We judges ourselves, judge our personal character, when what we are really experiencing is a natural response to choice overload.

One final plug for the value of fewer choices - go to a nice restaurant, some place with three or four stars.  Count up how many menu items they offer.  My bet - less than ten.  And they'll all be delicious.  The next night, go to the Cheescake Factory, and explored the encyclopedic menu of offerings.  You'll have all the choices and options you can handle.  And no matter what you order, it's going to taste like lumpy garbage.

Welcome to Post-modernism: Object < Process

The world is full of extremely difficult question about causes and correlations, volition and conditioning, attributions of responsibility, now more than ever before.

trefpool.com

The challenging discussions around race and policing provides an excellent case study to illustrate my point.  Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown - how do we distribute responsibility for that event?  Michael may have acted aggressively toward Darren, and he certainly attempted to flee - those actions suggest some culpability on his part, if not the entirety of the blame.  On the other hand, Michael was unarmed, and fleeing/surrendering at the time of his fatal shooting.  This clearly points to the officer's being responsible for Michael's death, doesn't it?

These were the talking points that followed the shooting - determining what literally occurred that day, as if a total understanding of the facts would allow us to decide everything that needed to be decided about what happened that day.  The news media was focused on resolving the objects involved in the discussion, and for many people, that is a logical stopping point.

But for our larger culture, understanding the facts on the ground is no longer sufficient.  In the months since then, the discussion grew to consider both the accumulation of experiences over the course of his short life that might make it totally reasonable for Michael to either be aggressive toward Darren or to run away - institutional racism, aggressive police tactics, and so on.  These questions have also begun to be explored from the officer's side - a lifetime of policing, accumulating anecdotal evidence about how he expects African Americans to behave.  Simply put, we transcended a discussion of the facts of that day and instead engaged the processes that brought us to a time and place that made it possible for those facts to exist.  We don't just want to know that Michael Brown ran away - we want to know WHY he ran away.

I would argue that this phenomenon, this shift to understand not just the objects of our everyday experiences, but more importantly the larger processes that work behind those objects, is playing out in a number of national conversations.  I would also argue that this is a VERY GOOD THING.  This shift is the hallmark of postmodern philosophy - a family of thought that seeks to understand people as a confluence of socio-politico-cultural forces, rather than as tabulas rasa.

For many, this is extremely uncomfortable territory because it takes away our ability to place blame and moral responsibility for acts squarely on the shoulders of perpetrators; it seems to excuse bad behavior because "society" makes people do bad things.  I think, however, if our ultimate goal is to build a better, happier, more just, more sustainable society, we must let go of the need for blame and punishment.  Postmodern analysis allows us to move beyond the little details to understanding the big picture, and to address underlying causes.  That's the only way to really make a dent in the big, important stuff.

Maker's Mark: Protest Against the Efficiency Society

Being "a maker" is a badge that many wear with tremendous pride; along with being "a disruptor" and "an innovator", I'd be willing to bet that "maker" is one of the fastest growing social media descriptors people apply to themselves.  The appellation is has become so prolific that many people refer to the identification as a movement - the Maker movement.

So what does it mean to be a maker?

The bins of goodies in our school's maker space

As far as I can tell, a maker is someone who physically produces something - i.e. "makes" something, whether that something is a craft project like home-made coasters or super fancy drag-racing box cars.  Advocacy for the maker movement is tremendous, particularly in progressive educational circles.  I've heard speakers on NPR advocating for the creation of "maker spaces", in some cases as a way to save school media centers as interactive spaces both for information and objects.

The most puzzling thing to me about the head of steam that coalesced behind this maker idea is that 99% of the things that seem to fall into this category are hobbies and crafts that have existed for decades.  There is nothing new about this whole emerging cultural meme, except perhaps for the idea that people that make things and interact with objects in a tactile way should be lauded; that "making" should be a point of pride.

The romanticism of the maker movement is, I think, an outgrowth of a broader cultural trend that we all struggle against - the disempowering nature of overwhelming access to information.  It's natural to lose the enchantment of building a cool box car when google can show you 500 other peoples' models that put more time and energy into it than you did; we live in an age where the natural pool of comparison for any endeavor has become global in scope.  The natural consequence of that for many has been a shift into a life mode totally focused around knowledge processing (understanding things that other people have done), rather than knowledge creation (understanding things by first-hand interaction with phenomena).

students working on a functional decomposition of a bicycle

I don't think that's a bad thing.  We've outsourced so much of our life experience to the information processing power of the efficiency society, working on the assumption that doing so will leave time in our lives for other, more meaningful pursuits.  Has it been the case for those of you out there that have lived through the emergence of the modern information age that your life has become more meaningful?  I'd be willing to bet that the answer is no.

The maker movement is  an expression in the Zeitgeist of this intangible sense of loss we've collectively experienced; a realization that what makes our life meaningful isn't connection to a vast and powerful apparatus of data analysis, but the thousands of small discoveries that populate a life of curiosity and engagement with the present.

Cops and Black People: Security and "the Enemy"

Security politics have been a major component of America's political history (for particularly potent or cynical examples, see: the Mexican American War, Japanese-American internment camps, HUAC, or pretty much everything the CIA does). In the modern era, our relationship to securitization has been defined by 9/11 and its aftermath.  Many have posed the question of whether our attempts to mortgage our freedom for physical security have actually been effective - considering the whack-a-mole character of the War on Terror, I am personally persuaded that trading in Al Qaeda for an accumulation of global terrorist networks (which still includes Al Qaeda, by the way) isn't really an upgrade.  But then again, I can't tell you anything about the operational capacity of any of these networks or how they compare to their state 15 years ago, nor have I done any statistical research about the frequency of terrorist plots against US citizens or interests.

There are a few things I can say with confidence, however.  One of them is that literally millions of civilians have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan because of our security fetish, and millions more have been the victims of terrible non-lethal tragedies.

Another is that in a world of free flowing information, controlling the flow of people and materiel by limiting our physical freedom is totally futile.  Two cases in point - the Fort Hood shooter and the gunmen and the beyond tasteless Muhammed cartooning event were either inspired or guided by the ideas of radical Islamists that they gained via digital communication. Building walls and bombing people isn't going to stop terrorism motivated by radical interpretations of Islam, because radical Islam is an ideological identification. Killing people and abandoning our own core values is a double victory for those the United States government is trying to defeat; we provide further motivation for people to hate us while at the same time altering the elements of our society that we've fought hardest to protect.

The terrible fallacy of security politics plays itself out in all aspects of life, not just foreign affairs.  Examining police violence against blacks through the lens of securitization provides some illuminating insights.  Many black people perceive the police as their enemy, which leads them to act in a way that may reinforce the prejudiced beliefs of officers (Freddie Gray ran from officers for no apparent reason, for example). Conversely, police, who spend much of their time "looking for bad guys" and psychologically conditioning themselves to act towards others will aggression and suspicion are likely to interpret innocuous actions as criminal.

This could play two different ways in the long term. On the one hand, police could continue to militarize and bank on keeping the peace by reinforcing their superiority of force and monopoly of legally sanctioned violence - the controversies around military-grade armaments being distributed to some police jurisdictions suggests that many cops may prefer this route.  On the other hand, police could work to re-establish themselves as members and allies of the constituencies they police - the calls for "community policing" tactics give me some hope that we can figure out a non-Orwellian way forward.

For the cops out there, it's not good enough to blame the communities you police for not getting it- people feel they way they do about cops for good reasons based on their lives and collective experiences.  If you have ever wondered why some people think you're the enemy, and you're sincerely interested in finding an answer to that question, then move beyond dismissing the cop-bashers as thugs and criminals, and start to think about what their life experiences might have been.

Why every argument against gay marriage is wrong

We have arrived at a historic moment.  The Supreme Court finally heard arguments challenging states’ rights to deny marriage licenses to gay couples and to refuse to recognize those couples’ legal marriages performed in other jurisdictions.  I should be overjoyed that we are perhaps approaching a national moment that will resolve, once and for all, another instance of blatant institutionalized prejudice.

And yet, I’m furious!  As the case was presented, attorneys for the states had to make their case; naturally, the whole “the Bible says no” fallacy wasn’t really viable in front of the SCOTUS, so instead we heard horrific bigotry and mind boggling irrationality dressed up like proper argument.

For the benefit of anyone that needs to explain to somebody else why there is no argument against gay marriage that is both rational and morally palatable (or for gay marriage opponents interested in being outraged), here is why every argument against gay marriage is wrong.

“It will destabilize procreation as the center of family units, and nuclear families are the basis of society.” 

First off, this is a utilitarian question, which has no proper place in what is clearly a discussion of human rights.  A quick primer on the difference between utilitarian considerations and considerations of rights:

Utility questions ask how to achieve the best outcome – will invading Iraq lead to peace?  Will bailing out Greece stabilize the Eurozone?  Will signing an FTA with a bunch of Asian countries strengthen the US economy? Rights questions ask what individual people should be allowed to take or what actions individuals should not be subjected to – should gay people be allowed to marry each other?  Should women be able to vote?  Should police be able to beat up black people?

Naturally, sometimes these sorts of questions interact with each other.  Often utilitarian choices infringe on well established rights – as when Japanese Americans were deprived of their right to freedom of movement and sent to internment camps during World War II, or when many Americans became political prisoners in their own country during the anti-communist fear mongering époque.  Two things are true about both of these examples (and which I believe are true in most acknowledged cases where utilitarian concerns trumped rights) – first, they occurred during a time when people were terrified of an external enemy and felt the country to be in a state of emergency; second, in retrospect, they are horrible national embarrassments that are universally acknowledged to have been tremendous mistakes.

So back to gay marriage – questions of rights are not about asking what’s best for the world or society.  Rights questions are about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, and thinking, “If I was that person, what basic freedoms should I be able to expect?”

Even beyond the wrong-headedness of asking these sorts of questions in a debate about rights, there are other problems with this argument.  For one, there is no data to support this utilitarian prediction.  In some states, gay marriage has been legal for a decade or more – can somebody show me the stats about society collapsing or birth rate plunging in Vermont or Massachusetts?  For another thing, there is no reproductive requirement for straight couples to marry – no fertility testing required, no letter of intent to procreate.

Can you imagine how horrified the world would be if Americans decided that sterile people couldn’t get married because it would undermine the reproductive basis for marital unions?

“Children will be better off with a male and female parent; men and women bring different perspectives to parenting.”  

If you’ve been reading carefully, you’ll notice that this is also a utilitarian question, and so has no business being part of this conversation (see above).  It suffers from some of the same issues as the previous question – first, a lack of any substantial data to support the assertion, and second a ridiculous double standard that we want to place on gay people, but not on straight people.

The gist of this argument is that kids will be most likely to thrive if they have one mom and one dad – and yet we allow straight couples to make all sorts of decisions that break this social arrangement.  Straight people can have children out of wedlock and never see each other again.  Married couples can get divorced.  Women can conceive using fertility procedures and never have any contact with a man.  According to the above argument, all of these choices shouldn’t be legal because they create a non-ideal parental arrangement for the resulting parents.

And yet, no one is trying to amend their state constitutions to entrench these expectations on straight people.  Why?  Because all of these utilitarian arguments are just flimsy pretexts to cover fundamental discrimination on the basis of sexual preference.  If anyone took any of these arguments seriously, they would also be crusading against divorce and in vitro fertilization.

“States that don’t want gay marriage shouldn’t have it imposed on them.” 

Finally, an argument about rights! Except that this too, is a logical fallacy.  The general premise here is that people shouldn’t have others’ morality imposed on them; citizens in Ohio and Michigan (both part of the suit in front of the Court) shouldn’t be subjected to the moral and social judgments of people in Massachusetts and Vermont (and Idaho, and 33 other states).

There are two problems with this argument.  First, states aren’t people.  When states choose to ban gay marriage, they don’t represent the moral sensibility of one state, or of one hundred percent of the population of that state; that choice made by Michigan, Ohio, and other states imposes a particular morality on millions of citizens in those states who find it reprehensible.  I, for example, live in Atlanta, and the Atlanta metro area is broadly supportive of gay marriage; if Atlanta was a state and gay marriage was on the ballot, it would pass with flying colors.  More than a third of Georgia’s population (more than 6 million people now) live in the Atlanta metro area, but we as a community don’t get a legal environment that represents our values because we are arbitrarily lumped together as a political unit with 9 million other people outside of Atlanta who have more conservative views.

Second, allowing gay marriage doesn’t impose anything on anybody.  This is the equivalent of saying we shouldn’t have imposed black peoples’ right to vote on poor innocent white people who didn’t like it and were upset about how it might affect society.  A permissive legal environment allows each individual to define for her or himself what they think is appropriate, and to act according to their own values – straight people can marry straight people, gay people can marry gay people.  A restrictive legal environment imposed the values of one part of the population on another part of the population – straight people can marry straight people, gay people can suck it up.

The only people trying to impose their values on others are the bigots standing in the way of inevitable human progress.  Hopefully they’ll live long enough to be ashamed when it becomes obvious that contemporary opponents of gay marriage are standing on the same moral and legal ground as apologists for slavery.