The Rise and Fall of... [Scope]

If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.

-Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization

Today on the train I had a bizarre moment where I burst out laughing, burgeoning with energy over the clear reality that our society is much further gone than we think it is.  The irony of this thought as I rode to a 40-hour-week job was just too much.  The excitement I experienced was in reaction to the confirmation of a feeling I've had for some time now, that our society is ultimately unsustainable, and continues to worsen.  Mondays can do that to a person, huh?

For those of you who have read his other books, the above quote from Daniel Quinn (Ishmael, The Story of B, My Ishmael) is somewhat old-hat.  For those of you who have not, it may not make a whole lot of sense, so let's break it down quickly:

Quinn's M.O. is the salvation of humanity through a radical paradigm shift away from civilization as we know it and towards something more resembling tribalism (don't knock it until you've read it!).  Here he is describing the difference between vision (unified cultural memes that we look back at and declare, "there's no other way that history could have gone!") and programs (solutions that work to change the flow of vision by impeding its progress or diverting resources).

What he's saying here is that programs, while helpful in a way similar to the paramedic at the scene of an accident, are no replacement for a unified cultural infrastructure (analogy:  hospital with its resources and doctors and nurses and so forth).  What we need to "change the world" is a new Vision, a unified idea of what it means to be Humanity, NOT a series of better-funded or more-radical programs whose stated goal is to fix social ills.  Another way of saying it is, we need to create a new future, not fix an old one.

That's actually not ALL that radical an idea, but Quinn is entirely correct, we will need new minds, or at least changed minds.

How Big Is Your Picture? [Scope]

Today let's talk about scope.

I was tickled/annoyed the other day by a woman calling in from an AIDS research society who was unaware that there were style standards for writing scholarly papers.  Oy, vey.  I thought to myself, there is NO way she got through school without learning that!  And I have quite a bit of evidence that this is the case.

As I sat back and marveled at her seeming ignorance, I of course began to recognize that there were many, many reasons why despite having this drilled into her skull, this person with a PhD was oblivious to the concept of standardized writing style.  She was simply coming at the question of writing a paper from a different perspective, and it was outside the scope of my job to consider hers as a valid way of being.

The Outsider Perspective

Observation is a powerful tool, and we use it from the moment we're born until the moment we die as a way to gather information. Our culture has formalized observational technique into multiple disciplines such as anthropology, behavioral biology, quantum physics (paradoxically), sociology, and so forth. The list is long because of how important observation is to our ability to gather information, and our senses seem designed to operate in a way that allows us to be absent as an agent but present as an observer.

Some will state that it is impossible to be an observer in our society, that we are all influenced by the situations we see and the way in which we process them. This is absolutely true, but only to a point. For the most part, the faculty most incapable of remaining impartial is our emotive capability, and the influence of our emotions seems directly tied to our investment in the situation at hand. To put it another way, the further removed from a situation you are, the better you will be at observing it impartially.

This premise is difficult to argue with; it is relatively clear that emotions and logical processes inhabit separate locations in our minds and while they certainly create feedback, noise, and difficulty for each other at times, it is theoretically possible to distill one without the other. Philosophy finds this as the ONLY method by which to approach problems of life, the universe, and everything.  The scientific method is based on this idea, on the assumption that there are facts and laws and mechanisms that can be known and understood based on observation and variable elimination.

And yet, almost to a person, we believe that the most essential way of knowing a person or a group of people is to be that person or a part of that group of people.  The distinction is incredibly important, because there are intrinsically subjective elements to being a unique organism or being part of a unique culture that cannot be understood from a separate context.  We have words to describe the inaccessibility of this knowledge, the most notable is Empathy.

To be empathetic is to have, for a split second, an understanding of what it means to be a part of the situation being observed.  This point of reference is used from that point onward in order to alter the situation, but at no point has the observer become the observed.  This is akin to our forays into astrophysics, which are based entirely on snapshots--generally stationary--of systems we cannot touch, feel, or measure directly.  We know that in all reality, this is the closest we'll come to a true understanding of the cosmos or of each other.

Interestingly, there are cases in which we do trust others to have more knowledge about ourselves than we do.  Psychotherapy is a perfect example of this, in which a total stranger is asked to help illuminate things about ourselves that we would otherwise be relatively blind to or in denial about.  The methodology surrounding psychology/psychiatry is such that rather than building a catalog of all the possible personalities, a good therapist will look for markers that indicate more common TYPES of personalities or ways of coping with life.

All of this is just a lead-up, though.  I want to talk specifically about efforts to "improve" the world (quotes for subjectivity).  Activist groups are a special breed, passionate to an intensity head and shoulders above the rest of their respective cultures and generally interested chiefly in solving problems that affect them at their specific social locations.  Western progressive activism tends to center itself around the concept of intersectionality, under which characteristics of a person decide their unique social location and end up creating subtly different communities underneath the larger progressive umbrella.

Race, class, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, body type, educational level, and geography all play into this matrix of forces that influences us every day.  People at certain locations have more privileges than others due to history, context, and the Isms that describe the multiple types of discrimination faced by regular people every single day.  And thus, activists tend to rally in order to overcome these Isms.

(Full disclosure:  I'm white, male, well-educated, generally straight, without any disabilities)

The general feeling within these activist groups is one of emotional support, empowerment, re-education, and direct action.  There is not a huge amount of room for scientific discovery, which is in part due to the rejection of science as a valid way of describing human society (see this post).  However, there also seems to be a general sentiment that empathy is not enough.  To effectively  fight an Ism, you have to be affected by it.

And that's fine!  I'm not whining that I can't participate in empowerment campaigns for groups I don't belong to.  Being a progressive, forward-thinking individual, though, I do see room for improvement.

Activism could benefit greatly from a big dose of Outsider Perspective.  Not the hostile, "what are you whining about?" type, because this is given all too willingly and all too often.  I'm not even talking about the sort of white guilt that results in somewhat well-intentioned but ultimately doomed efforts to "save the children" of poorer, less-western, less-white cultures.  What I'm referring to is the perspective held by those of us who empathize with the cause but cannot participate due to the hypocrisy that would result.

And this is where I tend to get into trouble.  How do you approach a group of legitimately marginalized people and tell them, here, my privileged life has yielded a more helpful way of doing things!  I used to do this as a kid, before I understood the error I was making, by questioning the submissiveness and lack of academic integrity embraced by many young girls my age simply because they were girls.  It just wasn't my place to tell them that something was off, but it didn't change the fact that I knew.

Rather than end with a resolution, I end this post with a dilemma:  how do the well-intentioned, entirely devoted outsiders of a cause make a positive impact?  There has to be a way, just as there was a way to overcome the problem of powered flight, just as there was a way to fuel the civil rights movement in the 1960s, just as there now is a way to communicate nearly instantly using invisible ones and zeroes over thousands of miles.

Prime Optimism

There's a beautiful, delicate irony about the desolate situation our culture finds itself in at the moment. A year and a month ago, we performed our national duty and voted in a president who stood for "change we can believe in." He was so different, in the way he spoke, the words he had to say, and the hope he instilled in us. No longer would we sit idly by while our lives were dictated to us by politicians! We were getting back our freedom, our civil liberties, and we resolved never to allow ourselves to be disenfranchised again.

I stand at a very unique distance from these events, being young, just out of college, and having grown up knowing only the failed policies of George W. Bush. In fact, my political awakening didn't occur until after 9/11, at which point I was a freshman in high school. This put a lot of pressure on this past election to bring about the first real change anyone in my generation could be a part of directly. And boy, did we take advantage of the opportunity! We went to the polls in record numbers, raised record funds, worked record hours, and drank record amounts when the results came in. We felt a sense of relief, like we could rest easy knowing our patriarchal leader and his matriarchal spouse were watching over us at all times.

And I think for many of us, that sense of safety and comfort has not worn off yet. Here we are, a year later, and none of the big promises Obama made have been kept. We've been thrown into a recession forcefully and without choice by behemoths of business so poorly understood that the measures implemented to save the economy did little more than funnel money back into their hands. We're a part of two wars we were promised would end, and the war in Afghanistan is poised to grow in scale, not shrink. Jobs don't exist, but the stock market continues to go up. Education budgets are slashed and public welfare services are cut, but the richest 1% continue to gain wealth. The environment has been told that we are very sorry but we have more pressing matters at hand right now. And most importantly, we have been told that our health is negotiable and subject to a bottom-line.

How is it that "change we can believe in" seems so much like the status quo? I think a lot of people would make an appeal to governmental accountability at this point, declaring with fire and brimstone that politicians will descend to the deepest depths of societal hell if they don't change their ways. Others will point to apathy and the consumerist in us all that whispers in our ear, saying "it'll be OK, go indulge yourself and the stress will go away." But neither of these explains why a year ago we were so gung-ho regarding shaping and electing "our" candidate, and why now we seem so complacent and willing to let the new administration get away with so much. We didn't become zombie slaves over the course of a single year, and most of us still have the same ethical standards. So what is it that has frozen us in our tracks?

The answer isn't pretty. It isn't hopeful, and it isn't fun. But it is something we can rally around, and we can use it as a wake-up call to spur the growth of effective interest in REAL change. The answer is: reality. Hope and change are words, feelings, and descriptions that are used to show the way in which an event occurred AFTER the fact. They can motivate, inspire, and cure the wounds of apathy and disillusionment. But they can't write policy, and they don't understand the nuances of working within a system. It's time to actually get to work; we can have a real, tangible influence on the way the rest of Obama's term plays out, but we cannot take any more time to rest on our laurels.

It's time to get up, unwrap ourselves from within the "United for Change" posters we still sleep with at night, and implement the change we want to see in the world. You're just one person, true, but look at what we did last November. We can do that again, easily, in an instant. We have the internet, limitless ideas, and hearts full of love. We have an understanding of the world that no one else can lay claim to, and it sees us all better off as equals instead of subject to arbitrary hierarchies. So get out there, let out your battle cry, and do the work! Fight for change, sweat for it, spread your hope and spread your love and show the world that last November wasn't a blip of progressive thought--it was the beginning of a new tomorrow.