Variation, Diversity, and Survival

What far too many people seem to forget (or they never knew in the first place) is that variation is key to the survival of living things. From an evolutionary perspective, genetic diversity is necessary for the survival of species. If there is too much similarity or too little variation, species have very little to draw upon for adaptation. In fact, we know what happens when too much in-breeding occurs among animals we raise and among human beings. We need genetic variation just to stay reasonably healthy, not to mention adapt to changing circumstances.

In sociocultural contexts, the same idea applies. Variation and diversity is healthy. New and different ideas can breathe life into situations that can become quite stale or stuck. Creativity and problem solving need variation. Democracies need diversity. Businesses and institutions of all kinds need diversity.

We need diversity and variation in people and ideas, because they help us grow. They help us expand our horizons, our understandings, and our appreciations. They help us develop empathy and compassion. They help us develop wisdom.

A Day in the Life … Terrorism and Bigotry

It’s a fairly typical day for people to get up and get ready for work, get the kids ready for school, eat breakfast, then rush out of the house. Maybe after you drop the kids off at school, you have time to stop at a coffee shop, sit down, read the paper, and drink coffee, then go off to work. At the end of the day, you come home, eat, help kids with homework, maybe go to a park with the kids for a while, then prepare for bed. During the week, maybe you work in a dinner out with the family and maybe a movie. Yes, this was probably a typical day in the city of Homs, Syria in the not too distant past. But, not now. The city has been devastated.

Imagine going to work and getting a phone call from home that you neighborhood is being attacked by those who should be protecting you, and that you’ve got to go get the kids. When you leave work, you find you car has been bombed and shortly after, your office building is destroyed. When you find you kids and wife, you are left with nothing but the clothes you’re wearing, and with no place to go. What would that feel like? What would you do? This is what hundreds of thousands of people are facing right now in Syria, Nigeria, and other places.

People with professional careers, homes, iPhones, and nice watches, all the typical middle class goods and services… but left with nothing. No jobs, no homes, nothing, nothing. It could happen here, but, it is happening to these people. And, all they want is a safe place for their families to live, and a job. Not too much to ask after having your life turned upside down.

It’s pretty disgusting how our politicians are reacting to the refugees. It’s as if they have to intelligence and no compassion whatsoever.

And, just for some perspective… here are some numbers to digest. These are the top 5 countries with mass killings. The numbers reflect those from January 1 to November 23, 2015. The number injured is much higher. These deaths are from terrorists. Many are attacks on mosques and market places. In Nigeria, they’ve included whole villages and universities, killing anyone who wasn’t a conservative enough Muslim.

Nigeria2,405 deaths
Saudi Arabia823 deaths
Syria462 deaths
Iraq327 death
Pakistan259 deaths

By the way, France had 162 deaths during the same time period.

Data from Wikipedia with additional links to original news sources.

Meanwhile, back in the United States our own homegrown, white, “Christian,” terrorists continue to kill men, women, and children, with a government that refuses to take action. It is just so perplexing when the bigotry of our own people, including our leadership, just keeps on going, taking no action.

Blame and Fear

I blame you.
You blame me.
They blame us.
We blame them.
Blame fans the flame
Of aggression and hatred.
Rage burning….
Churning through senseless cycles
Of twisted, knotted stomach wrenching
Heart ripping agony.

Who’s to blame?
We pin it on someone… anyone
We don’t even care anymore
We don’t even know anymore
Who’s to blame.
It matters not.
Just need someone to blame.

Blame teachers
Blame politicians
Blame Republicans
Blame Democrats
Blame ISIS
Blame the U.S.
Blame Iraq
Blame immigrants
Blame ….

Whatever the problem
Must have someone to blame
Like a child falling off a bike
Then blaming the bike.
Gotta be someone’s
Or something’s fault.
Gotta have a cause to blame.
Can’t just be mutuality.
Gotta have a bad guy.
Can’t just be a tangled web.
Can’t just be relationships gone awry.
Can’t be MY fault.
Can’t be OUR fault.
Can’t be WHITE people’s fault.

The endless recursions of blame
And hate
And fear
And blame
And hate
And fear
Run our lives
Ruin our lives
Without us even knowing
We sink deeper into the darkness.

The only way out …
Gotta stop the blame.
Gotta stop the hate.
Gotta stop fear.
Care for everyone.
Everyone who is alive
Has the same desires …
To be loved
To be safe
To feel wanted
To love
To be happy.

Something has been twisted
Completely out of kilter.
When blame, hate, fear take over….
We’ve succumbed…
The strength of humanity
Is in our power to care…
And not to succumb to
Blame, hate, fear.
We need to
Feel our shared humanity.
See our shared humanity.
Taste our shared humanity.
Smell our shared humanity.
From every pore
From every molecule
From every breath
From glimpse of life.

Learning Content is the Trivial Part of Learning

We really have it all backwards. We are completely focused on having kids and adults learn copious amounts of content as the supreme goal of education. But, such a goal is really rather trivial within the entire scope of learning. This is blasphemy in the politico-corporate controlled institutions of education, testing, and publishing, but I do believe we’ve completely gone astray. We’ve lost sight of the depth and extent of learning. We’ve lost sight of children (and adults) and all of their abilities, capabilities, characteristics, and needs. We no longer value curiosity, creativity, inquiry, play, time to ponder and process, time to make mistakes and try again, time to explore, time to talk and argue, time to negotiate.

I’m not suggesting that content knowledge is useless or irrelevant, but it is superficial knowledge compared to other kinds of learning. And, what we have done is create a world of superficiality, while thinking it’s the most sophisticated knowledge ever. It’s an extraordinary illusion. Or, rather it is an extraordinarily confused view of knowledge and what is worth knowing. A mistake that is strikingly apparent in the move to online courses and online degrees, which really amount to no more than a grand scam.

And, let me say here that while this superficial knowledge may have some importance and interest, when it stands as alone as the total package of knowledge, it is more or less meaningless, disconnected, and irrelevant. The way we package knowledge into textbooks and then test the supposed acquisition of this knowledge is just further testament to the decontextualized and disconnected approach we have developed to our relationship to knowing and knowledge. We think that all of these bits of information mean something, like money in the bank, but unlike money in the bank they are worthless without context, meaning, and relationship. On the other hand, these bits of information are money in the bank for testing companies, publishers, and politicians; and very big money at that.

But, what is misunderstood and misrepresented about learning is the big issue. Learning is dynamic and continual. We are always learning … in all situations, whether we like it or not. Learning is not an accumulation of static information in neatly packaged structures. Learning about any kind of relational information is always changing and morphing as new connections are made and lost. Learning doesn’t just happen in the brain, but is distributed throughout our bodies. And, in fact, there seems to be ample evidence that social learning is distributed among people. Look at a highly coordinated sports team where the thinking and immediacy of learning is taking place within the team and no one individual. In fact, learning seems to be distributed among individuals in coordinated contexts much more often than we ever imagined. Our bodies are comprised of more microbes than human cells. And, on top of that, we have millions of other inhabitants living in most parts of our bodies. This vast ecosystem is not just a bunch of individuals disconnected from one another, but is a community of different species living in an interdependent, coordinated way. And, this whole ecosystem has to learn together in order to survive. We are just beginning to understand how complex these interactions are, but we can get a sense that our learning is not just what some book says, but is about how we respond to, adjust to, react to, and make sense of all kinds of information with which we are confronted all the time. Most of the time, we don’t even know we’re learning or where the learning is taking place, but it is happening.

So, we have this distributed learning happening all of the time as we encounter new situations and new contexts. We walk on a new hiking trail, swim in the ocean, ski, ice skate, go to a new country or any new place, we are renegotiating the ways we do things, re-assessing our assumptions, reworking our relationships and ways of relating. These new renegotiations are new learning.

But, let’s return to what I’ve referred to as superficial textbook learning. What this textbook learning tries to address is the accumulated depth and expanse of learning that has occurred by organisms, ecosystems, and living systems of all kinds. Authors and publishers try to condense this knowledge down to discrete bits of disconnected, decontextualized, static informational strings. The vast depth and extent of interrelationships are never explored and discussed. The dynamic, changing, and uncertain nature of our knowledge is never recognized. The knowledge claims are all very clinical, dry, lifeless. We are not presented with the complexity of interacting systems that affect one another in countless ways, and that within these systems are even more relationships affecting aspects of all of the players in the systems.

In a world where the issues are increasingly intense and increasingly important to our continued survival and well-being, we and especially our children need to be learning in ways that enable us to make sense of what is happening. We need to be able to dissect out the nonsense from the sensible. We need to see the complexities and interrelationships. We have to see the faulty assumptions that we and others are making and then take appropriate actions. We can’t do this by learning lots of disconnected, superficial information. We must be learning at deeper levels of relationship and context.

For a great treatment of a different way of viewing learning, read Nora Bateson’s Symmathesy: A Word in Progress.