Learning

I don’t know when I began being fascinated by language.  I can’t remember not being curious about it.  Etymologies can even be funny.  Diminishing tense forms are intriguing.  And why does American English insist that simple verbs need prepositions to make them real?  “Please finish up your work before you leave?”  Like that.  Certain urbanisms thrive despite the curious images they provoke; “He was over her house.”  Like a helicopter?

In any case, this leads me to the proposition that what language we choose to label something predisposes us to regard it in ways that might not be terribly reasonable and practicable.  It can prejudice our thinking so much that our efforts at positive and constructive efforts actually work the opposite effect.  We definitely have made this mistake with the word “education.”

“Education” represents the interests of the provider or producer, as in “We want to provide education for every child.” (No Child Left Behind)  One high school I know of puts a techno-spin on their slogan: “We work each day to make our students college ready.” (as in “cable ready” TVs)  All of these catch-phrase concepts originate in the providing sphere, education departments and educational leadership programs.  They are articulating theories as proposed remedies.  They are all about education and educators. They are not about learners and learning.  They are about telling and not about listening and observing.

Classrooms, lecture halls and labs are tough places.  In the traditional procedure (educational), the leader (teacher/professor) provides stuff, which someone has determined is what a follower (student) needs.  Right there is what makes it tough.  Traditionally, because time is not on our side, we jam all this stuff (curricula) into this funnel and consider its value in terms of who gets it best, better and not at all.  When the educational “system” works poorly, we question the system but not whether an educational system, or any system, is the reasonable and practicable approach.

We need to concentrate on LEARNING.   Are people engaged in learning?  They need to learn survival skills, yes, but beyond that will they learn things that will inspire them to continue learning, will they discover something about curiosity that becomes their personal way of learning that will lead them in a satisfying direction to respect the idea of becoming a lifetime learner and making them feel better about their lives in their community and country?  Is being an auto technician any less fulfilling than being an actuarial manager? (The high school cited above has quit all of its shop classes.)  The two examples I cited above illustrate how education creates boxes, the prescriptive NCLB box and the college degree box. We all know people who have BAs, MSs and PhDs, boxes called “degrees” that have rendered those people incurious, because they have that job that they hoped for while they were grueling through their education.  A box by any other name…  And we all know how top down prescriptions make everyone feel lousy.  So let’s replace the Department of Education with the Department of Learning.  Let’s think of each other less as educated and more as learners.

Techno-Boon or Techno-Trumpocracy?

In his review of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com 2.0 (2001), Ben Van Heuvelen (Salon) wrote, “the Internet has been a boon to democracy in all sorts of ways, Sunstein acknowledges -- but if new technology gives us unprecedented access to information, it also gives us more ways to avoid information we don't like.”  Sunstein’s position is echoed in Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort, in which the author focuses on geopolitics as evidence of this shrink-wrapping of our society into smiley-faced mutual admiration neighborhoods.  We seek places and people that accommodate our feelings, ideas and beliefs.  This way we are, at least superficially, mollified.

So the media savvy person’s question is: Does this represent potential integration or disintegration of democratic impulses?  And either way, what does it augur for our culture?  We can call our political constitution (i.e., construct) anything we want—democracy, corporatocracy or, my favorite, state capitalism.  The behavior it represents is what counts. 

If “boon” means beneficial, how is our what-ever-cy doing?

Without Twitter, Trump would probably be in a mental institution.  Without Facebook, American children and adolescence would probably suffer less bullying, and millions of us would see fewer pics of people we don’t know or haven’t seen in months and years. Without Breitbart, Bannon would need to find honest work.  Without Instagram we might have time to consider the importance of “instant” in our lives.  And so on.

Without all brands and algorithms of “social” media, instant news bursts on the proliferating info-sourcing, we might have time to think about what’s going on in the world. 

Without all this linkage, we might not be seeping increasingly into our insular, myopic cocoons…which is exactly what the disruptors and chaos merchants love.   

Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Is My Person of the Year

I have just finished reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ two enormously affecting and, I hope, effective books, Between the World and Me and We Were in Power for Eight Years: An American Tragedy.  I have spent my entire adult life, professionally and personally, searching for the meaning of the American cultural ethos, not so much what America is, but rather who America is.  I think Mr. Coates has given me the key to what I’ve been looking for.

After my experience with the feelings and ideas in the books, I had the urge to respond somehow, to agree with Toni Morrison’s insistence that “This is required reading”, to find people who had read them and sit and talk with those people about the experience.  But I couldn’t get started.  Not until December 6, 2017, when President Trump, demonstrating his unique version of the arrogance of ignorance, announced his willy-nilly decision to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, to declare that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, to mock the history of Palestine and the Palestinian Authority, to light the fuse that will enflame the Middle East…and to carry the torch of American arrogance of ignorance and hubris forward.  And in all of this, the American President resonates what has been the greatest of American traditions—what Coates calls the Dream, the plunder and the pillage—all exemplified in the portrait of one of his predecessors Trump apparently most admires, Andrew Jackson, who methodically removed an entire nation of Native Americans from their lands and incarcerated them in alien territories, prefiguring the similar fate of the Palestinian people.

This is the Dream, the stain of plunder and pillage that Coates delineates in both books.  Between the World and Me, a cautionary tutelage for his son, Samori, digs deeply into the African-American experience, how American “exceptionalism” transacts a conscious threat to the African-American physical body and the way that essential experience engenders a fear of imminent destruction and radiates communally from body to body, no matter how one has elevated one’s body in society or isolated one’s body from others, no matter one’s gender or status…it is the mark of one’s persistent and dreadful destiny. 

This destiny links inextricably with the destiny of the Dream, the exceptional exploitation of a virgin land and its indigenous people, using the raped and plundered people of Africa to accumulate wealth and land to build the Dream and foster the incredible acceptance of that Dream to believe it is justified actuality.

The fear for the body arrives in the hearts and minds of one’s parents before one’s birth, is the primary source of learning in and out of school, and remains forever.  And it is the foundational construct of the Dream, the inherent element of dominance carried forward in the pillage and plunder—from Jamestown and the Bay Colony to Charlottesville and the current White House.

The Dream is who Americans think they are and how they appear.  It is characterized by a spirit of presumption and deserving, buoyed by periodic injections of Hope, a Hope based in the assumption of the rights of pillage and plunder, of both animate and inanimate worldly entities.  It is a firmly implanted figment of the dominant Americans who believe it to be the fulfilling continuity of their providential destiny.  This figment functions as a gloss that covers the actions taken to assure that the Hope will materialize, a view of life a former colleague called America’s secularized “polite escape.”  Coates’s lesson for and embrace of his son forms a poetic prelude to his more schematic essay assessing Barack Obama’s ironic tenure as President within the bubble of the Dream with his audacity of Hope, and why it demonstrates the tragedy, not only for African American people but also for all Americans as they are.

We Were in Power for Eight Years clarifies 2008-2016 as a tragedy for America, mostly because the experience signifies the vanity of Hope as attempted by the first (and perhaps last) “black” president of the United States of America.  It is a tragic irony, because President Obama needed to believe and to convince the Dream that he was the necessary catalyst that would meld America into a positive and regenerative force for good in the world, especially for (as Coates says) the people who “call themselves white.”  Coates’s methodical examination and assessment of Obama the person and especially Obama the President is that (and Coates never put it in exactly these words) Obama spent his political life, beginning with his candidacy for senator, fighting a rear guard effort to neutralize the perception of him within the Dream as an outlier and/or “one of them.” 

Coates indicates this struggle in a variety of ways, but perhaps the incident of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s arrest for breaking-and-entering his own home pictures it most clearly.  Obama chastened the arresting officer by saying he “did something stupid,” a muted rebuff, the kind of thing parents might say to their children, something mild and harmless, where he might have accurately claimed “something outrageous.”  And Coates makes note; neither he nor the African American communities thought it was cute and harmless.  Then Obama invites the two men to join him at the White House for a “beer summit,” a press opportunity for the President, an adolescent male bonding over a mishap, which mostly brought a sigh of relief to the Democrats and a shivering shrug in the African American community.  This scenario put in bold relief the pardoning of the Dream’s strong arm, the causation of their fear of imminent harm. They were not amused.

Such was the middle ground and soft amelioration of the Obama Presidency, which, for Coates and for the rest of those living with that imminent fear, formed the cold realization of tragedy, the extraordinary feeling of having come so far so brightly only to set the table for something so terrible in its aftermath.  This feeling of tragedy in his latest book places Coates in the forefront of all the recent attempts to understand how such a thing as Trumpism not only could grasp the Presidency but could also capture the  society in a Congressional chokehold for the foreseeable future.  The tragedy for Coates is the dreadful fate for America.  For me, this makes him the essential contemporary voice of who America is.

Atoms (a revision, first issued in 2013)

 Partially as a reaction to the victory of proposition 8 in CA (banning gay marriage), emails among people in my email loop began arguing that this indicates that organized religion and its practices allow doctrine to trump fundamental morality.  A few even contended that religions are bereft of morality.  The anti-doctrine folks argue that doctrine seeks to control behavior, especially moral behavior (i.e., ethics).  And the pro-doctrine folks argue that the anti-s basically don’t know religious doctrines.  They both might be right.  Let’s consider a look at both sides.  I’ll get to atoms toward the end.

First, what is church doctrine?  More to the point, why is church doctrine?   Church doctrine among Christian sects (including Roman Catholicism) is grounded in the Sacred or Hebraic Laws of Judaism.   Without the Sacred Laws, no Christianity.  The doctrine of this and those of all other religious doctrines are to sustain the believers in their beliefs, give them a system that makes sense out of the nonsense of being human.  All doctrines offer an explicit or implicit contract (e.g., the Ten Commandments) gathered around articles of faith (Christians have the Apostles’ Creed or simply The Creed). 

One either accepts them or does not.  To accept is to express a desire to have faith (blessed by omnipotence to belong to the believing group and its aspirations); to not accept is not to belong.  The doctrine embodies a code of moral and ethical standards.  To violate any stipulation of the code is to distance oneself from the core group and to create personal doubt.  Questioning and/or doubting initiates the slippery slope.  It’s not so much that one becomes a sinner; it’s that one displays a lack of faith. And, by the way, you can’t believe your way into faith (Unlike most English nouns, the word “faith” has no tansitive capacity—can’t be used in the verb position—it is transformative, not transactional.).  And if you lack faith, you lack moral standing.

So morality or moral standing is very much a part of believing.  The doctrine maintains that we are known by our behavior or moral actions around the issue of free will.  We can choose to follow the contract or not. The Puritans, for example, had a sub-contract called the Covenant of Works, which generally maintained that we express our condition of grace (having faith) as we display it in our good works, contributions to the society of saints (i.e., believers).   The morality of doctrine wants to keep the community together by the adhesion of common belief.  It’s like the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.

Which leads me to what most people call secular humanism.  That too concerns the viability and integrity of the human community through its efforts to declare the correct behaviors in order to make sense and safety out of our divine comedy (yes, the Greeks had a much clearer system for all this—humanity’s efforts form the light entertainment for the gods).  The humanist doctrine is a little scary, though.  In it, we humans are basically alone. We share the idea of free will, but we have only immediate consequences, especially the good consequences.  We have a system of morality, but only we can speak for its legitimacy.  What is moral for us might and often does violate someone else’s moral code.  For example, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” for me might mean my goal is peace and well being, whereas for someone else in the next block it might mean as much greed as he or she can muster by whatever means necessary, which might include some suffering for me and others in the community.  It is, after all, a moral code. In the best of all possible worlds, the humanists believe that humans are basically a good lot, who by and large look out for the welfare of others, and who will benefit by that, because the others will return the favor. This so-called Golden Rule is based on one of the Christian beatitudes, love (or caritas).  But notice that it relies on an article of faith.

This is where the atoms come in.  One of America’s most famous and most derided poets, Walt Whitman, is also perhaps the most religious in both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular humanist tradition.  His detractors see him as a hedonistic primitive, not worthy of any moral consideration whatsoever.  And he was not only homosexual but perhaps also bisexual.  Yet this poet embraced the nobility and extraordinariness of all humans and all things.  He observes the natural world and everything in it as the glorious and exhilarating expression of endless spiritual energy, which is impossible to give a name.  He tells us this up front in his “Song of Myself.”

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,


And what I assume you shall assume,


For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

…

Creeds and schools in abeyance,


Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,


I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,


Nature without check with original energy.”

That is, all physical things are atomistic.  We can know them by what we see and by what we can examine.  But ultimately when we get down to the atom, we are confronted by a mystery.  What is the source of the force and energy that binds its matter?  And because we can’t know, we are better off to hold questions and creeds in “abeyance” and simply exalt in being alive.  That is the Whitman article of faith.   Being or having been human is miracle enough.   And this energy never ends.

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses.

And to die is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.”

So much of what we humans are and do is incomprehensible and mysterious.  Libraries and databases bulge with attempts at comprehension and explanation, but ultimately these are unsatisfactory.  And the attempts fall short just when we think they are ready to present the sought after revelation.  So we are left to continue wondering.  Those of us who continue the pursuit continue the search.  Those of us, like the believers and Whitman, are satisfied that all is a mystery that will or will not be revealed when we stop being.