Learning, Complexity, Improvisation, & Relationships

Many years ago, during my second year of teaching middle school science in Brooklyn, New York, we took our students to a 5-day long, environmental studies program. The program took place at a summer camp during its off-season. It was late May in the Adirondack Mountains. We had taken these same students to a different program in Vermont the year before, which is where the students, who were new to the middle school, went this particular year. The principal of the middle school and several teachers went with the group to Vermont and several of us who had gone the previous year went with the “veteran” students to the Adirondacks.

Middle school kids during the first trip to Vermont.

When we arrived at the camp, the kids came off the buses and cars and started running around in their typical fashion, while cursing and laughing and letting off steam after a long ride. Shortly, after arriving, the camp personnel held a meeting, where they laid out the RULES. “This is an elite camp. There is no cursing. The boys’ cabins are off-limits to the girls and the girls’ cabins are off-limits to the boys. Blah, blah, blah…” And, so it went on for 30 minutes. We, the teachers, were looking at one another and rolling our eyes. The kids were squirming and rolling their eyes.

Afterwards the kids were sent to unload their packs in their assigned cabins. The teachers obediently went to the cabins to which we were assigned. When I walked into my boys’ cabin, they were diligently unpacking, while cursing and laughing and groaning about the camp personnel. I, of course, cursed at the kids to stop cursing. It broke the tension.

We then met for the first set of activities. It was hot and humid, and the black flies (if you are not familiar with black flies, they are small and aggressive biters) were eating everyone alive. The activities were boring and lifeless and mostly involved being talked at by the camp people.

The next day was rainy and very chilly. The kids and teachers survived another day of dreadful activities. And, the kids were amazingly patient with and tolerant of the people running the program, but their patience was running thin. In the middle of that night, a camp counselor came into my cabin and woke me up. “I just wanted to warn you that we’ve had 2 feet of snow and all of the power and phone lines are down, and the roads are impassable,” he whispered.

No one packed for winter. We arrived in shorts and sneakers. I packed rain boots and a raincoat, with a sweater and light jacket. In addition, a small group of our kids went on a 3-night survival trip… in sneakers and light clothing. By the time they arrived back at the camp after their first night out, they all had hypothermia. A few of the boys, who in most schools would be the troublemakers, leapt into action. They went around to all of the cabins talking other kids out of extra blankets to use to get their hypothermic classmates warmed up.

The entire trip became a survival trip, which in an odd way saved this trip. All of the rules were dropped and everyone helped in dealing with this unforeseen event. On the last day, the principal who had gone to the Vermont trip, showed up. The other camp had had the same snowstorm. He left that camp as soon as he could to come check on how we fared.

It took a disaster to prevent a disaster at the Adirondack trip.


In looking back on this trip, the school, the teachers, and the kids, a few things jump out at me now. Although I really liked the kids, the teachers, and the school at the time, I was still near the bottom of my multi-contextual-learning-about-teaching arc. I don’t want to call it a “learning curve,” because the learning doesn’t go up and then down, the learning just keeps going, while getting deeper and more integrated with one’s life. But, now with many years of experience and learning under my belt, I’m finding this story, and many others, to be very interesting. In one sense, which I will not go into here, there are glimmers of various themes that developed and grew into major guiding “frameworks” for my own thinking and practice as an educator and ordinary human being — by the way, I don’t like the word “frameworks,” because it is much too static. In the other sense, I can look backwards and see how “advanced” we were at the time, as well as to see how many of the ideas involved in complex systems were remarkably evident.

Relationships

As far as I can remember, as teachers, we never really talked explicitly about relationships. But, most of us seemed to work on developing relationships with the kids and with one another. Going to the camp and sitting through that awful initial meeting was a shared experience of shock and disappointment. The teachers knew it and the kids knew it. And, my going into the boys’ cabin and saying, “Stop the *$@#& !&%@#! cursing,” was a way of connecting into that shared sense of relationship. The kids laughed and we moaned together, while comparing how different this year’s trip was to the previous year in Vermont. But, the relationships went much deeper. We all showed our vulnerabilities, even though some of the kids tried to hide them. We also trusted and respected one another. The kids were never shy about giving teachers advice, any more than we were shy about giving them advice.

Taking the helm. These kids could always be relied upon in a pinch.

As teachers, we tried to work with the kids to share in the running of the school… in making decisions, dealing with issues, and so forth. We weren’t always successful in this endeavor, but I do think that such an emphasis played out in situations where they could step out and take control, such as with helping the kids with hypothermia on this trip and on a sailing trip where most of the kids were seasick and the ones who were not sick manned the helm and ropes, when the others couldn’t. No adults ever needed to tell them what to do.

Complexity

In order to understand complex living systems, we need to see the webs or matrices of relationships that are involved, that arise, and that disappear. There’s a fluidity in these relationships. When the kids were reprimanded in the beginning of the trip by people with whom they had no relationship, it broke the relational potentiality and trust. But, as a group of kids and teachers who had developed relationships of trust, at least some degree, the group “identity” and relationships were maintained. Had we, the teachers, sided with the camp counselors, we would have threatened the integrity of our complex system. As it was, the interaction between the two systems of the camp and our school group was problematic, but to our own group system, this interaction was more of an interruption or interference to our more established system. Our group system recalibrated and adjusted, while maintaining our own relationships within the system. After the snowstorm, our more established system recalibrated again and self-organized to meet the newly imposed demands. The camp system became irrelevant except as the source of local knowledge.  

Improvisation

The highly structured and mechanized system of the camp with its strict set of rules and regulations (could be policies, laws, etc. in other contexts), had little flexibility to address drastic changes in the context. Even though the individuals within that system changed their approaches, the camp system faltered. The relational “structure” cracked. However, the school group system was inherently flexible. Middle school children are in the midst of testing limits, exerting their own control, and of becoming adults. Trying to restrict and solidify the boundaries and processes in this age group is self-defeating. But, this school’s approach provided the space and contexts for children to develop within a supportive environment and, in reflection, as a complex living system. As a result, flexibility was built-in. With such flexibility, the kids and the teachers were free to improvise. The notion of being a leader was not some static and singular entity. Yes, the teachers were leaders, but not autocratic. The children were free to jump in and be leaders.

Having been prepared for a spring trip, but finding ourselves in a winter environment, forced kids and teachers to improvise. My summer rain and shallow wading boots along with layers of socks became tolerable winter boots. Layers of clothing worked for everyone helped us deal with the cold. Improvisation became a survival strategy.

Learning

The learning that took place was more aligned to the type of learning described by Nora Bateson: Symmathesy or mutual contextual learning (SEE the symmathesy chapter in Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns). This type of learning is at the interface between contexts, systems, groups, and/or individuals.

Note that individuals, groups, contexts, and systems are all the same. Each of us is a context made of contexts, as are groups. Each of us is a system made of other systems and connected in various ways to other systems. You can even use “system” and “context” interchangeably.

We are not always aware of this kind of symmathesetic learning. It occurs in the immediacy and intimacy of our interactions with others and other contexts. It seems to me to be the most fundamental of learning that occurs at the level of perception. Although this learning is not the same as what we usually think of as learning, such as learning facts, concepts, theories, and so forth, symmathesy feeds the raw nuggets of information on relationships to this other area of learning that creates what we can think of as our individual and social epistemologies or sets of knowledge.

The Dissolution of the Personal and Social Fabric

by Jeff Bloom
posted 2020-02-07
first posted in the Exploratory Nook & Store Blog

Disconnected Connections… New York City (Jeff Bloom, 1970)

From individuals to families to society to the global context, the connectedness or integrity of individuals, as well as social integrity is crumbling. Although throughout history there have been conflicts and acts of incredible aggression towards one another, we seem to be entering a new and frightening era of disconnection at all levels of scale.

We disconnect with ourselves, while falling into patterns of not engaging in our worlds, not being kind to ourselves, feeling sorry for ourselves or feeling somehow entitled, or acting out in ways that are hurtful and dishonest. Family life for many is similarly disconnected from the beginning. And, as families grow older, family members disperse with varying degrees of disconnection to others in the family. Schools and classrooms have become more like factories, where teachers, by not particular fault of their own, attempt to mold children into some sort of clones of “normality,” while focusing on teaching to tests and forgetting about the beautiful diversity, creativity, emotions, and individuality of each child. In societies, people rarely interact with one another in meaningful and empathetic ways. We’re divided by politics, religion, skin color, language and accents, nationality, livelihoods, how much money one has, or how many and what kinds of “things” one owns. We also suffer from lack of long-term relationships. People move away from their childhood community, then continue to move chasing dreams and money or running away from oneself or various forms of aggression, loss, and upheaval. The same patterns of disconnects are occurring globally. As we’ve become a global “society” of sorts, we’ve also increased the psychosocial, emotional, and cognitive demands on people from extremely diverse cultures and belief systems.

The pressures on individuals and social groups that have been leading to massive changes in the dynamics and relationships within oneself, between people, and even to our environments and to learning itself, has not been a recent onset of some singular cause. This trend has been going on for millennia.

From the beginning of humankind, people have clustered together. We are social animals, after all. We have always wanted to be loved and appreciated. At the same time, we have helped and cared one another, we have protected our social groups, and we have worked to maintain the integrity of our group. Some current tribal cultures that have kept and valued important aspects of their lineages, of their belief systems, and their ways of life. As a result, they have been able to maintain a certain individual and social integrity. David Maybury-Lewis’ wonderful TV series and book, Millennium: Tribal Wisdom in the Modern World, provides a powerful examination of the wisdom found in such tribal societies. And, that wisdom is based on notions of connectedness and interdependency, as well as on the relationships to their environments, to their ancestors’s wisdom, and to one another.

However, the increasing disconnectedness across most human societies has been due to a variety of changes in technologies, in the way humans have organized their societies, and in the way that philosophies and religions have viewed people and the living natural world. From the first wood and stone tools to huge passenger jet airplanes, humans and their societies have undergone huge and dramatic changes periodically. This sort of pattern of big changes after periods of very little change is similar to Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium in biological evolution. I suppose we can refer to these big social and cultural changes as “punctuated equilibrium in cultural evolution.”

Some of the big moments of changed occurred with the technological advances of manufacturing of wood and stone tools and of controlling fire. All of a sudden humankind could hunt more easily, keep warm, and cook food. Pottery allowed food to be stored and even transported. And, with each transportation advance can huge changes in the mixing of culture and trade. Horses, the horses pulling vehicles with wheels, boats and ships allowed travel up and down rivers, across lakes, and then across the oceans. Trains provided for fairly rapid travel from one place to a distant location. Motorized vehicles suddenly made huge differences in travel to places of work and even migrating across one’s country or to other countries. Propeller planes and then jets made travel across the country or halfway around the world possible in only a matter of hours instead of days, weeks, or months. Each such change made huge differences in how we related with one another, with our environments, and with ourselves. These changes transformed violent conflicts from face-to-face battles in relatively contained areas to remote killing and destruction from an armchair or from miles above ground. The extent of disconnection has seemed to increase exponentially. Even when driving a car, we can curse and disparage other drivers and drive in ways that are like video games, but with much greater risks. We can shop without ever talking directly to another person. And, we can sit at family dinners and be totally engrossed in a remote world, while never even talking to our families. We can walk through forests listening to music or talk shows and never hear a cricket, a bird, or the wind rustling the leaves of trees. We no longer allow time to relate to our own experiential worlds or to wonder about big questions.

Although all of these advances are not necessarily “bad,” we have allowed the technologies to usurp our hearts and minds. As with technologies, we also have succumbed to ways of thinking that separate us, from the Biblical notion of the Earth is here for humans to use as desired to the separation of humankind from nature by René Descartes to the Ayn Randian ego supremacy and to the notions of technology as savior. As a result of all of these changes mixed with greed for power and money and the separation of the elite and wealthy from everyone else, we are now facing major intertwined issues across all sectors and contexts of our lives and our environments.

As Robert Bly discusses in The Sibling Society, we live in a society of adolescents and run by adolescents. The lineage of increasing disconnects and superficial learning and thinking promoted by schools, families, and societies has brought us to a point where our fellow citizens do not have “the thinking and conceptual tools” that have been side-stepped by the politics of schooling, where the agenda, under the guise of raising standards and improving teacher accountability, is to keep the general population “dumbed down” so that they can be controlled. A wide assortment of resources that discuss aspects of this agenda can be found in the Learning and Teaching section of The Exploratory Nook & Store, where many of authors follow the history of intertwined contexts and agendas that have contributed to our current state of affairs. Other authors offer ways to counter such agendas through the way we can create contexts of deeper learning and complex thinking.


© 2020 by Jeffrey W. Bloom

Mullings on Libraries, Bookstores, and Other Public Spaces… Attraction vs. Repulsion

A friend just posted something about how much he loves libraries, which initiated a whole string of emotions and memories of time spent in libraries. My reactions did not particularly involve “love.” I wouldn’t say they involved “hate,” either. My usual time spent in libraries, which have been mostly college and university libraries were highly focused on getting what I needed, maybe browsing a bit more widely while in a particular section, then getting out of there.

I also don’t like borrowing books. I always find that I want to highlight something or write some comments, and I just won’t do that in somebody else’s books. For some reason, books are more like family members. And, these family members are my mentors, my guides, my conceptual challengers, my inspirers, and so forth. My wife, who lives in libraries and reads a lot, is always bugging me about getting rid of some of my books. And, yes, I did get rid of about a third of my books when I retired. However, these books were like acquaintances and not even friends. They were the technical books of my profession that I used for reference and to lend to students, but really had very little to do with my core interests and passions.

I love my own library and I tend to love other people’s private libraries. I also love used bookstores, as long as I have enough money to spend. New bookstores tend to be out there with public or university libraries. If I go into a new bookstore, I’m usually looking for something specific and get out of there as quickly as possible. Gone are the days of the family-owned new bookstore to which I reacted differently. I could spend hours in these bookstores.

I think what I’m reacting to in terms of personal vs. public libraries and used vs. new bookstores has to do with atmospheric factors. I do not find public libraries and new bookstores to be particularly inviting. They have a cold and disconnected atmosphere. The quiet of libraries is almost morose, and certainly lifeless. Although the new corporate bookstores are not necessarily quiet, they do share in the lifeless quality. Both public libraries and corporate bookstores tend to be sterile and lacking in character, warmth, inclusiveness, and connectedness.

Walking into City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco or Strand Bookstore in New York City is like entering a new world that is stimulating, exciting, yet is warm and inviting. You can spend hours looking at books and reading. Years ago when my children were relatively young, we were looking through Strand’s. At one point, my younger son asked me where a restroom was. I had forgotten, but asked a middle-aged man sitting on a footstool reading a book, if he knew where a restroom was. He gave my son detailed instructions. I said something like, “you must spend some time here.” He said, “I practically live here. I’m here for hours almost everyday.”

In Arizona, there is a small used bookstore chain, which I still go to occasionally, but they went from a very warm and inviting atmosphere to one that was much more sterile and corporate. It lost its charm after their “idea” to upgrade. But, for many years, they maintained a great little place to hangout and explore. You could bring your dog (they always had treats), order and drink coffee, and sit in comfortable chairs, while browsing an ever-changing stock of used gems. They even carried some used musical instruments, electronics, albums-tapes-CDs, and DVDs. They still have a trading system, where you can bring in your own “stuff,” and get trade credit (or cash, but a lesser amount). But, this chain was still family-owned, and had some of that flavor.

But, this is the world we live in… a corporatized, sterile, disconnected, and cold world. As with libraries and bookstores, the same pattern of warmth vs. sterility is characteristic of the family-owned vs. corporate-owned restaurants, coffee shops, retail shops, auto repair shops, and businesses of all kinds. Unfortunately, most of the locally-owned businesses have disappeared as the corporate versions moved in. And, now, as online corporate entities have become more popular, they are even putting the local corporate chain stores out of business. Amazon treats their employees terribly, but have mastered the customer relations part of their strategy (e.g., making returns easy and usually with very little or no resistance). Personally, I have begun my own boycott of Amazon, unless there is absolutely no choice. I don’t buy into Prime any more. And, I’m finding small family-owned local or online businesses that offer the same or similar products for less money and cheaper or free shipping.

In addition to the library and business world of warmth vs. sterility, the same pattern applies to changes in schools, colleges, and universities. Over the past few decades, the process of corporatizing educational institutions has been changing these institutions from what were once warm and inviting (at least a fair number were like this) to what are now devoid of passion, compassion, warmth of any kind, character, and so forth. In fact, the windowless public schools look more like prisons and university classrooms look sterile, clinical, and lifeless. And, then online courses, put the world shebang of the teaching-learning dynamic into the garbage can. But, universities are making tons of money through online programs.

Windowless Elementary School… the new approach to subjugating children.

See my blog entries on online courses and related issues:

The Poison That Will Destroy Humanity… & What We Need to Do About It

From the Merriam Webster Dictionary:

definition of poison

1 a : a substance that through its chemical action usually kills, injures, or impairs an organism
b (1) : something destructive or harmful
(2) : an object of aversion or abhorrence
2 : a substance that inhibits the activity of another substance or the course of a reaction or process
a catalyst poison


It eats away at our hearts
It erodes our minds
It clouds our vision
It destroys our relationships
It poisons the depth of our humanity
And, it poisons everything and everyone we touch.

The more we indulge, the more addictive it becomes
The more we indulge, the stronger we rationalize
The stronger it becomes, the more isolated we become.

It crushes the essence of our humanity
It’s the master of disconnection
It eliminates our conscience.
This poison spreads like the plague
We can no longer love or be loved
And, as social contagion, it can extinguish all human life.


This poison is hate… hatred. It’s being promoted by our leaders, notably Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, Jair Bolsonaro, Giuseppe Conte, and far too many more. They are barely human. And, the poisonous hatred they spread will do no more than destroy our societies and undermine any hope of surviving the impending disastrous convergence of over-population, ecosystem collapse, collapsing biogeochemical cycles, disappearing resources, water shortages, food shortages, rising sea levels, desertification, massive immigrations to and from all corners of Earth, and probably extinction-level human deaths.

If we really want to start dealing with our survival, we have to start working together. Hatred will tear us apart and prevent any kind of meaningful action. We must work despite our differences. In fact, an appreciation of the variation and diversity among us can and should be the very antidote to the poison that permeating all parts of the world.

Hatred has taken over societies in the past. And, they did poison societies. But, the stakes are much higher now. The issues listed in a previous paragraph are going to reach a peak, while the hatred grows. We have no time to bicker and waste.

When a forest faces a crisis, competing species of trees and other plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria work together to help the survival of the ecosystem. There’s no individual survival. They all must survive to maintain the system. But, people seem dead set on individual survival. And, that is not possible.

Major Contexts, Systems, and Issues Involved in Civilization Collapse

There appears to be a very high probability that human civilization will collapse within the next three decades or so. I’ll probably be dead by the time the mass extinction occurs (if there is reincarnation, there may be nothing left to come back as). But, I’d rather die knowing that my children and all children living today will have a reasonable shot at living a full life.

If we are concerned about averting civilization and massive ecosystem collapse, we can do something. But, we need to take massive and drastic action quickly. But, our actions must be wise and comprehensive. We can’t get caught in trying to find a savior (i.e., a person, a group, an institution, a government, a technology, or whatever). We have to take transcontextual actions (i.e., actions that span multiple contexts, situations, systems, etc.) involving as many diverse people as possible working in between (in the liminal spaces between) institutions and governments.

However, before we go any further with how to take action, I’d like to provide a brief overview of what I consider some of the major contextual or systemic issues that need to be addressed. Although I’ve listed these separate issues, it is best to think of these as intertwined aspects of one major systemic issue.

  • Population — This may be the single most important issue to tackle. There is no way our planetary resources can support a burgeoning population. We must begin efforts for negative population growth. Maybe actions could include global distribution of free birth control, education of women, global economic and equitable wealth distribution, increased taxation on families with more than one child along with tax benefits for having no children, readily available women’s health clinics with abortion services, and so forth.
  • Global Warming, with concomitant sea level rise, flooding, devastating climatic and weather events, desertification, etc. — All of these will tank economies, kill and displace hundreds of millions or more people, increase warfare, increase starvation, decrease resource availability, increase forced immigration for mere survival, and so forth.
  • Capitalism and Emphases on Economic Growth — The current economic system will continue to over-tax multiple complex living systems, deplete resources, increase proportions of those living in poverty, etc., and will magnify all of the other issues.
  • Energy Use and Production — So far, most “green” energies are not so green. I just read about hydrogen cars. They have no emissions, except for water, but all the emissions and resources are front-loaded (manufacturing) or remote (hydrogen production is energy intensive and produces CO & CO2).  The same sort of pattern is true of electric and hybrid cars. Solar has it’s own issues, with resources and the need to replace them every 15 to 20 years. Wind has similar issues, as well.
  • Peak & Dwindling Resources — Almost all resources (e.g., metals, minerals, oil, gas, farmland, water, etc.) are at or near “peak” and are dwindling rapidly.
  • Carrying Capacity (the ability of any particular ecosystem or even the biosphere) to support its living systems) — Most countries are well past carrying capacity. In such cases, what appears to be living normally, is analogous to running out of money, then borrowing a $100,000 or more on which to live. But, you don’t have any way of paying back the debt without drastically reducing your entire lifestyle.
  • Ecosystem Collapse and Loss of Biodiversity, as well as a Corresponding Resistance to Valuing Human Diversity — All living system thrive and depend upon diversity. Ecosystems collapse as they lose their diversity. The current situation with massive losses to insects and other species of living things is going to have a huge impact on ecosystem survival, which in turn will negatively impact human survival.

In addition to addressing these issues, we need to address the core features of what it means to be human living in various contexts. If we don’t address the “warm data,” we will not be able to affect change. We must take into account the emotions, aesthetics, values, beliefs, and other dimensions of being human in today’s world. We also have to short circuit our addiction to “finding one solution,” “finding the savior,” reductionism, mechanistic thinking, and so forth. There have to be multiple possible solutions that address all of the issues in different ways. It has to involve a change in the way we think. It has to involve transcontextual approaches. And, although governments, corporations, and various institutions can help, they can’t solve this crisis. They are too stuck in procedures, policies, and other inflexibilities. Wherever we work, we have to step out of the institutional mindset and join others to work in the liminal (in between) spaces where we can take action without the typical constraints.


SEE:

Disconnection, Collapse, Complex Systems, and Working Now in the Liminal Spaces

Over the span of my life so far, I’ve been noticing some disturbing trends, which may very well be contributing to our current situation on the brink of disaster, if not extinction. Some of these trends probably have been in existence for hundreds, if not, thousands of years, while others are more recent. And, some seem to be more characteristic of one country (or a few countries) or region.

  • An increase in aggression becoming our default response to uncertain situations or more intense situations..
  • An increase in our emotions driving our decision-making in almost all contexts…. From fear to desire, from joy to repulsion….
  • Tending towards a complete loss of empathy (not to mention compassion) towards fellow human being
  • Tending towards a complete loss of empathy and disconnect from other living beings, from pets to wildlife and our critically important invertebrate cousins.
  • The development of a total disregard for the environments and ecosystems in which we live and upon which we depend
  • An increase in mind-less buy-in to the myths of capitalism
  • An increase in the mind-less buy-in to religious dogma and a loss of the connection to the core meanings of different religions
  • An increase in intolerance, if not hate, of those who are “different”
  • An increase in racism
  • An increase in addiction to our devices (phones, TV’s, cars, etc.), to our foods, to careers, to substances of all kinds, and to our own neuroses and habitual patterns of thinking and behaving
  • An increase in the loss of integrity – decreases in trustworthiness, dependability, reliability, responsibility, honesty, forthrightness, and so forth.

These tendencies are just a few of the more “ig-notable” ones. I’m sure we can add many more to the list. At the same time, all of these tendencies intertwine with one another. There really are no distinct borders between one and another.

I am sure there are multiple factors that have contributed to the increases in these tendencies. Technology has certainly played a big role in disconnecting people in various ways. The concerted effort of the “institution of education” to dumb down the population has had major effects on these tendencies. Political and corporate brainwashing has been a major factor. “Religious leaders” – who do not have deep and extensive training in their spiritual disciplines and in their religious teachings and who edit what teachings they know to conform to their own egotism and biases – have contributed to many of these tendencies.

The corporate world and its greed and disregard for social and environmental responsibility has had huge effects.

And, again, there are many other contexts that have had and continue to have effects on how we relate to the world.

Our complete buy-in to Objectivist, Positivist, Reductionist, Mechanistic thinking (from Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and others) has been a core contributor to our disconnects to one another, to other life forms, to society, and to the ecosystems and environment upon which we depend.


At the same time, human beings have so much potential. We can love. We can care for others. We can create amazing powerful, thought-provoking, and/or beautiful music, dance, works of art, novels, stories, film, and poetry. We can develop incredible technologies and structures. We can explore and develop incredible scientific understandings of our world.

Yet, we have brought ourselves to the brink of destruction. Ecosystems are collapsing, Rates of extinction are skyrocketing. Resources are being depleted. And, climate patterns are changing so radically and so quickly that the weather-related disasters that were once rare and becoming common events, which in turn is creating havoc in some parts of the world. And, what is happening in a few areas now will become commonplace everywhere else in the world over the next decade or so.


Our global situation is absolutely beyond grim. However, governments and other institutions will not be “the answer” to the “wicked” problems we’re facing. But, they can make a difference in providing a more workable context for change. And, that change has to come from between the institutions (in the liminal spaces)…. In other words, change needs to arise from as many people as possible working together to address the very complex, transcontextual, and very slippery interacting systems and the pathologies that are plaguing these systems.

And, we need to start NOW!

On the Eve of Destruction

Far too many people, especially in this government, do not “get it.” They are clueless about how multiple systems (e.g., agriculture, chemical pesticides, ecosystems, bees and all other animals, human health and survival, etc.) are intertwined and interdependent. We’re losing more than bees and this could lead to a total collapse of ecosystems and the biosphere. It’s already happening. And, the more we continue doing stupid things, the faster and more intense the collapse will be. We could recover, but that will take a lot of work to stop the patterns of destruction we continue to perpetuate.

From the Center for Biological Diversity: “Trump EPA OKs ‘Emergency’ to Dump Bee-Killing Pesticide on 16 Million Acres” — read this article at the link below:

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-epa-pesticides–2629292283.html

Shock of the Other: Poetry and the Loss of Imaginable Worlds

This morning I was talking with some people (a fiction writer, techie, and retired elementary teacher) at a local dog park. The topic of reading books came up, I think when someone passed by and mentioned reading a book. We commented how great it was that there are still people reading. At that point, I mentioned OpenCulture.com and a page that list Patti Smith’s favorite books. I wasn’t sure if they knew who Patti Smith is, so I said that she was the grandmother of punk rock, but started out as a poet. The moment I mentioned “poet” everyone groaned and ranted about how awful poetry was.

The shock of the other always leaves me speechless and dumbfounded. And, it’s an epistemological shock, too. I’m left trying to figure out what just happened. In this case, I was left pondering how people come to hate poetry. And, the only thing I can come up with is lack of exposure to poetry that was more relevant to them and to never writing poetry as a way to explore experiences, emotions, textures, etc. They were taught about poetry as something external and disconnected to their own experiences.

So, we end up with people who are missing entire worlds — real and imagined — that could expand their horizons and provide ways of understanding ourselves, others, and our worlds. I’m sure they’ve never read or listened to Patti Smith, John Giorno, Gregory Corso, Ann Waldman, and Diane DiPrima. Listening to these poets may change you life, but at the very least affect you. If you listen to John Giorno’s “Suicide Sutra” (not embedded here) and are not left feeling raw afterwards, that would be odd indeed.

Patti Smith reading poetry in 1975.

John Giorno reading “Thanx for Nothing”

How We Think About Animal Behavior — Moving Beyond Behaviorism, Mechanism, Positivism, and Other Problematic Biases

This post has been stimulated by a posting in the “Animal Cognition” group in Facebook that shows a video of a crow trying to break up a rather intense fight between two cats. The crow repeatedly caws loudly at the two cats, then pecks at the base of the tails of the cats (it’s difficult to distinguish whether the crow is pecking at the same cat or at both cats, since the two cats look very similar).

Courageous Crow Tries to Break Up Cat Fight

I’ve been watching my Doberman do the same sort of thing for almost 8 years. If two dogs get into a fight in the dog park, she’ll run up and bark at the two dogs. If that doesn’t do anything, she’ll try to figure out who the aggressor is and pull its tail and run away. She’ll also do the same thing with people who are vehemently arguing (e.g., my wife and I or two people in the dog park), except there are no tails to pull.

In the past, we were stuck in a behaviorist paradigm, where the ideas of animal emotion, animal cognition, and animal consciousness or sentience were dismissed. But, we’re moving beyond such behaviorist views. However, there are still lingering remnants of this paradigm and its companion paradigms of positivism and mechanism and how they affect the way we perceive and think about animal behavior. We may need to consider that behavior, cognition, emotion, learning, etc. manifest:

  • as falling along a continuum of complicatedness (I want to avoid using “complexity,” since I don’t want to confuse this aspect with complex systems, even though behavior, cognition, emotion, etc. do play roles in thinking and learning as complex systems);
  • as adaptive characteristics for the contexts in which an organism lives; and
  • as fundamental characteristics of life.

We seem to get stuck in comparing thinking, acting, learning, etc. to the way we think, act, learn, etc., rather than looking at such things from the contextual perspective of the particular organism. For my Dobie (Dobermans are very sensitive and do not like yelling or fighting), she takes on a role of peace-keeper, which also extends to protecting the perimeter of the house, by alerting us to the presence of people. However, she is extremely observant, so if a person “passes” her visual and other sensory assessments, they can come into the house without further ado. We’ve never had to deal with this, but if a dangerous person tried to enter, I suspect she’d go through several levels of warning before she would neutralize the threat. She did try to warn me about a new vet I took her to. The minute the vet walked into the exam room, she started snarling. I had never seen her do this around any other person, even local gang-bangers who approached admiring my dog and asking how mean she was. But, as I found out, the vet was a money-grubber and psychopath. I should have trusted my dog’s judgment and left immediately.

However, the point is, that every living organism, thinks, learns, reacts emotionally (the biochemical substances associated with emotions are found throughout the spectrum of living things), and interacts with other living things cooperatively and competitively (both can happen with the same organism, but the type of interaction depends on the specific contextual circumstances of the moment).

So, the crow in this video, which like dogs, has developed in ways to or adapted to live in conjunction with humans and their pets. Both crows and dogs are quite intelligent. And, it very well may be that the crow is the neighborhood peace-keeper. This is not to say that all crows act this way. However, this particular crow may have had sets of experiences and particular inclinations that have led to his or her taking on this role. My dog has assumed this role. Not all dogs do, but I have observed other dogs act as peace-keepers, as well.

Intelligence, emotions, and sentience seem to be characteristics of life. From bacteria to humans, organisms think, learn, and act in ways that are appropriate to their experiences in the contexts in which they live. We can’t directly compare and assess intelligence, etc. in terms of our own intelligence and emotions. We can only compare how different organisms’ intelligence and emotions are suited for their own contexts. From this perspective, bacteria may be the ultimate in appropriate emotions and intelligence. They not only survive through multiple assaults from the environment and from humans, but they help other organisms survive (from individual survival to the survival of all life) and have created and regulated the Earth’s atmosphere and biogeochemical cycles that have provided the contexts of survival for all organisms. We, on the other hand, seem to be hell-bent on destroying ourselves and other species. That is not very intelligent in any context.