Not Left To Chance

Bill Mayer — He loves his mother!! I thought I’d start with that. Religulous, a film by the same people who made Borat, and Borat, too, was purposefully offensive, and it, too, was funny, but it never, not for a second took itself seriously. Borat showed us into some very serious territory. There was the blatantly misogynous college boys scene, and the dangerous war of terror scene, maybe it was the moustache, but the nausea producing, in a culturally discomforting sense, scenarios made us witnesses.  Borat, himself, was nearly invisible. Religulous does something different, and I didn’t like it. The scenes where Maher analyses what we just saw are all gawd-awful. He interviews some fairly stupid people, but Maher’s arrogance, which may have held up, especially with the cuts to clips from Superbad and Scarface, those were hilarious, his arrogance may have held up, but when he was on camera by himself, the weakness of those scenes reframed his arrogance as simply mean. Sure, he loves his mother, but he’s a mean mental weakling himself, bullying other intellectually challenged, differently intelligent people. There’s the difference, Borat’s misogynists exposed themselves and an oppresive cultural undercurrent, while Maher victimized the people he put on film.

The science is in. Consciousness is a chemical energy. Our perceptions are bodily. Chemical and bodily changes affect consciousness and perception. Philosophically I work from the premise that existence precedes essence. Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Sartre, if generally understood would make it easier to argue that we should educate and properly house and nourish everyone. What I’m saying here is that there is no God of Abraham, there are no angels, spirits, demons, heaven or hell, at least outside our language systems. Our language systems exist physically in our bodies, in this sense these things exist, they are within us and communicable. Maher had an opportunity to produce in incredibly informative film. He came close with the Andrew Newberg, MD (University of Pennsylvania research neuroscientist) interview. Newberg discusses the process of imaging people’s brains as they pray, meditate or speak in tongues, but no conclusive statement is made. He also brought in the consciousness changing properties of drugs, but again the neurophysiology that could reveal the chemical and physical contingency of consciousness was not explored.

Maher is content to promote doubt, but there is certainty that consciousness is chemical reactions within organic physical structures. We don’t know how exactly it works, but there is certainty that material is at work. These ideas can also be communicated, but Maher didn’t do the research. And understanding consciousness, the bodily manifestation of these belief, may have softened his, persecution, of these believers. Really what was he doing? In his interviews with Muslims, he was told twice that it was politics and not religion, that the motivation behind terrorists and extremists, but he didn’t accept it. He even made “fun” of the interviewee by writing a text message implying he was a terrorist. Later he analyses these scenes saying that they don’t want to admit to outsiders that there are problems with the religion. Doubt in this sense is not a tool for understanding, it is an analgesic for stupidity. What were the political motivations of the religious George W. Bush and what were the political motivations of the differently religious Osama Bin Laden? Maher is content to doubt everything and everyone.

In Saul D. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals he spends an entire chapter “of ends and means” explaining how political interests are clothed in religious morality. “The Haves,” he writes, “develop their own morality to justify their means of repression and all other means employed to maintain the status quo.” What’s interesting is that Obama was schooled in the Alinsky tradition. Maher’s film is now an historical document. But Alinsky also taught respect for the beliefs and values of the Have-nots and spoke against arrogance. Politically, in the political system, I’m with Sven. This call for compassion, and understanding, when dealing with religious consciousnesses, is not a form of self protection, it comes from an understanding, limited sure, that our bodies and consciousness are totally intertwined, and a massive change, in our society, especially forced from the outside, well, it’s abuse.

And one last thing about embodied knowledge, especially the kind of knowledge that defines a persons existence. This is from wikipedia:

In Carl Jung’s psychology, metanoia indicates a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form. Jung believed that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as existential crises which were sometimes attempts at self-reparation. Jung’s concept of metanoia influenced R. D. Laing and the therapeutic community movement which aimed, ideally, to support people whilst they broke down and went through spontaneous healing, rather than thwarting such efforts at self-repair by strengthening their existing character defences and thereby maintaining the underlying conflict.

With this in mind, really, what the fuck was Maher doing? He loves his mother, but he’s still an ignorant fuck. Had he actually broken through the defences of these people he was attacking, he would have precipitated a moment of realization in which everything previously known is wrong, leading possibly to a physical and mental breakdown. In one scene Maher’s mother reminds him of how upset he was when he discovered Santa Claus wasn’t real. The equation of a childhood fantasy game, with god consciousness or a bodily awareness of god, is ridiculous in itself. In my utopian thoughts after the consciousness of our interconnectivity is widespread, when we are concerned with the care of each other, the issue of religion will have faded away, but until then we need to work toward our own understanding. 

Norm Friesen’s "Heritage of Edupunk" February 2009
    

Gramsci says everyone:

contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.

Benjamin:

…the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.

Friere:

The answer does not lie in the rejection of the machine, but in the humanization of man.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote these bits in 1961:

The European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with a red-hot iron, with the principles of Western Culture; they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to the teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home, whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

I went to the Philosopher’s Café tonight at Cafe Kathmandu on Commercial Drive. The topic was "Empiricism and the State of Evolutionary Biology in an Age of Faith-Based Fundamentalism." It was a discussion about ways of knowing that pitted the knowledge of science against the knowledge of God. The discussion is never-ending. Listening tonight, hearing the old familiar lines, it occurred to me that maybe the church isn’t the obstacle to enlightenment it’s made out to be. Over the past 150 years the values of Capitalism have replaced the values, however similar, of the church. So I asked the question: "Can it be a fluke that children are in the capitalist state run school system from the ages of 5 to 17 and at the end of those twelve years have no understanding whatsoever of their material reality?" The way I see it, Darwin’s Origin of the Species is a revolutionary work, and a true understanding by the population would change the world. What’s so scary about evolution?

This Café was part of the Vancouver Evolution Festival.

The idea that both religion and capitalism might have a stake in keeping quiet the notion that free and uncontrolled variation, the variation that makes evolution possible, has been considered. Check this out: from Jihad vs. McWorld:

To the extent that either McWorld or Jihad has a NATURAL politics, it has turned out to be more of an antipolitics. For McWorld, it is the antipolitics of globalism: bureaucratic, technocratic, and meritocratic, focused (as Marx predicted it would be) on the administration of things—with people, however, among the chief things to be administered. In its politico-economic imperatives McWorld has been guided by laissez-faire market principles that privilege efficiency, productivity, and beneficence at the expense of civic liberty and self-government.

For Jihad, the antipolitics of tribalization has been explicitly antidemocratic: one-party dictatorship, government by military junta, theocratic fundamentalism—often associated with a version of the Fuhrerprinzip that empowers an individual to rule on behalf of a people. Even the government of India, struggling for decades to model democracy for a people who will soon number a billion, longs for great leaders; and for every Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, or Rajiv Gandhi taken from them by zealous assassins, the Indians appear to seek a replacement who will deliver them from the lengthy travail of their freedom.

In his introduction to Chomsky on miseducation, Donaldo Macedo writes, "As our society allows the corporate cultures to reduce the priorities of education to the pragmatic requirements of the market, whereby students are trained to become "compliant workers, spectorial consumers, and passive citizens," it necessarily has to create educational structures that anesthetize students’ critical abilities, in order to domesticate social order for its self-preservation." (Chomsky, 2000, p.4) 

This is hard stuff for teachers to swallow, but Macedo goes on to say that teachers "are technicians who, by virtue of the domesticating education they receive in an assembly line of ideas and aided by the mystification of this transferred knowledge, seldom reach the critical capacity to develop a coherent comprehension of the world." (p.10) I don’t think teachers can swallow this. They may "know it" in the sense that they know there was once an emperor who pranced about in the finest robes until a child saw that he was naked. We "know" this story, but do we experience it in the world? Can we experience it in the world and continue to function in the world of transferred knowledge, can we continue to consciously live "life within a lie." (p.6)

 This is dangerous business, to allow our critical capacity to develop a coherent comprehension of the world. The tradition of Critical Theory is peopled by the unemployed (fired and quit), silent, suicidal, assassinated and insane. It’s easy for Macedo to write that "We must first read the world — the cultural, social, and political practices that constitute it — before we can make sense of the word-level description of reality." (p.11) When Macedo writes that Chomsky "energetically stresses, teachers need to sever their complicity with a technocratic training that de-intellectualizes them so they "work primarily to reproduce, legitimate and maintain the dominant social order from which they reap benefits.""(p.12) can he not see that this voluntary severing from the dominant social order will also sever them from that benefit?

Who has a coherent comprehension of the world? Even if teachers, or anyone who is part of an established social organization, were to sever themselves from the functioning word-level world, the world-level meaning does not become immediately available. Most thinking people have glimpsed the horror of the world, but few can sustain the necessary study of that horror to communicate any meaning. The task is dangerous, but necessary if we are to meet Feire’s challenge to educators, "to discover what historically is possible in the sense of contributing toward the transformation of the world." (p.13)

Here’s the link to Shaping our Future : Toward a pan-Canadian e-learning research agenda. The title is fairly self explanatory. My proposed research might fit under the umbrella a pan-Canadian research agenda, so I joined the conference and have been following the discussion.

I’m making notes right now.

From Terry Anderson’s forum post on what this conference is about: "E-Learning has been recognized by many nations as being critical not only for existing formal education systems, but more importantly for lifelong learning, professional development, re-training of immigrants and creating opportunity for those who are deprived of access to traditional forms of education and learning."

It’s clear from this that this conference is about getting the government to recognize (fund) e-learning as a worthwhile area of research. My question is: Who does will this research agenda serve? 

Terry Anderson (in his own point form) hopes that the conference will help us all to understand:

• What is a research agenda?
• Why we need a pan-Canadian e-learning research agenda in this area,
• what the components of a research agenda are,
• on the third week we will create that agenda on the SCOPE WIkI
• and perhaps the collaborative creation and dissemination of this document will be used by researchers, policy makers and teachers to galvanize and inspire all of us to more effectively use e-learning to improve the lives of all of us

Tags:: learning knowledge sof2008

Right now I’ve got 36 posts sitting as drafts. They are all posts from other blogs that I’ve started and quit. I had this idea that blogs should have a theme, this was pre-labels on blogger, but even now I want some theme. I want a thread running through all my posts, and I want it to be obvious. The drafts are thematically scattered, and once they make their way in there will be no telling what this blog is about.

Education is my research area, but lately I’ve been drawn to the problem of homelessness in Vancouver, I could make the link, but it’s not obvious. I mean if four people were to link homelessness and education, I hope there would be four different diagrams.

Here are three links to the current homelessness situation in Vancouver:

1. Taking it to the UN
2. Taking it to the UN and Olympic Committee
3. Taking it to the street

Here are a few notes I’d like to add to some previous posts that will eventually be rewritten, but for now the notes.

Note 1: In the Britney post I used homelessness as an example of an unseen spectacle. And recently there was a front page story on a group of researchers who found that a housing fix could be implemented with the same funding dollars in current circulation. The story is here on the Tyee. There’s something about the front page article here.

Note 2: A while back I wrote about an article that used Lyotard’s term "performativity" as though it were a desirable approach for education. Dewey called for Education as an end in itself. Life as an end in itself is a Utopian Notion. The issue of homelessness and a desire for performative education are linked. Lyotard makes note in 1979 of a system that can solve life’s problems but doesn’t because it won’t improve the systems performance.

I caught a show the other night. It was an event of the Jokers’ International Day of Action on Global Warming. David Diamond, Joker, and Artistic and Managing Director, of Headlines Theatre led the event billed as “An intimate evening of theatre (without a play) about global warming. “

David Diamond was fantastic. He set up the theatre to come. The story was to come out of the audience, and the actors to come would personify the voices in one audience members head. These are the voices that counsel us to act in ways we know to be harmful to the environment. This was a theatrical workshop in controlling our inner voices that block positive change.

The process was to develop what you can do. It was to focus on the “self, ” our selves each individually because, yes! government and corporations need to regulate and implement sustainable practices but this won’t mean much if we, each of us, don’t control the voices in our head that lead us to actions that are harmful to the environment.

Three audience member shared their stories of a moment when they had to make a choice concerning the environment and voices in their heads called for the environmentally unsound choice. The audience had three choices: 1. Should I devote my life to political “advocacy”? 2. Should I go to work for a multi-national corporation? 3. Should I get on a plane to dance in a warmer climate? The crowd chose #2.

It was an amazing learning experience. The learning that went on was relative to the expression. What came out was in no way intended. There was the collective knowledge, I’d say in some moments a knowledge, expression that betrayed intention. It is an exercise that every educator should be a part of at least once. I’m looking into the possibility of a future workshop.

What follows are comments and bracketed phrases.

Comment A: The choice of story seemed a false choice. Sucked into system lottery – I’m a loser because… Pleasure and its destructive influence – real daily personal choices are very hard to make, they are even harder to acknowledge and as such all but impossible to contemplate. Question: How do you like your coffee? Answer: Grown in enclosed fertile land in a third world country, flown and trucked to my local coffee shop, with a little bit of sugar and cream.

Comment B: Historical perspective – young girl playing paternal voice – had lived on the street, Had to stop and reflect on the question “Have you ever had to deal with having less than you wanted/ needed? The affluent society is only about 50 years old, but inconsistent. More the affluent sector of society has been growing for 50 years. People still live in poverty while we avoid workshopping pleasurable eco-no-nos.

Comment C: This event gives good contrast to the techno-learning lines of thought and cyber-action that proliferate in the edublogosphere. Some distinctions need to be made.

(This environmental discourse – this new person – within this space – exploring the knowledge and the possibility – the external controls within - the outside brought into the space – the multiplicity within the container of the subject.)

Britney has been a topic of conversation lately. The "Britney’s Tragedy" issue of Rolling Stone has been floating around the house… Look if you’re on the internet I don’t need to tell you how "everywhere" she is right now. Britney’s an interesting topic. She herself isn’t that interesting. If you’ve seen her on television in conversation with talking heads you can almost physically feel the vacuum created by such empty patter. But for anyone interested in socialization (I present myself as an edublogger but one day will present the argument that education (as we understand it) doesn’t exist) Britney’s case might someday rival the notoriety of "Little Hans.’"

Britney just doesn’t fit in. That is, in her own society. It’s important to keep in mind that there are many societies, and the difference only really causes a problem, when it’s not acknowledged. Are you slotting what you see into what you already know or are you open to the possibility of difference. The slightest difference, the slightest unacknowledged difference can lead to misunderstanding. Britney comes from a different place, but I see in her, or I’m making an analogy between her situation and the homeless in Western Capitalist societies.

The first similarity, at least in my mind, is their place in the spectacle. And I mean spectacle as in the image of reality given through mediation. The image of reality, and reality are two different objects of consciousness that can be differentiated through testing. My six year old son has a lightsaber, and playing with it one morning he reached out his hand to the lightsabre on the floor about six feet away. He stood there with his hand out and open like Luke Skywalker. After a few moments, and I remember doing the same thing as a child and still occasionally I test the strength of the force within me, say when the remote control is a little too far out of reach. Reality sucks, a child knows the difference between the spectacle and reality, and reality sucks. We don’t get fairy godmothers to grant wishes or broomsticks to fly and every child knows that. I may be, ok I am, reducing the concept of the spectacle. The idea also includes us as spectators and this is how Britney and the homeless are alike. Here in Vancouver, Canada where Canada’s homeless come to enjoy the weather or more likely not freeze to death in the winter, the reality of the homeless becomes a spectacle. It amazes me that there are 2000 or so people sleeping outside in Vancouver every night and there’s not outrage about it. (2019 Canada’s General Strike!!) This should not be a problem, but there it is, and we’re (I am definitely part of this we. Noticing the spectacle, is not the same as engaging in the reality) looking at it and not doing anything. In the Case of Britney, there were unlimited funds to buy her mental health, and still cameras flicker as she falls apart. We see the spectacle, like watching a movie, but Britney is not a fictional character. How is it possible that Britney, with all that money, knows so little of the world?

Compare her to Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Leonardo. These are people of Britney’s society. A society of spectacle, a modern day Olympus, but these four, and many others thrive by banding together and finding the earth. They are friends who give. There’s something to get at here.