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. 

From Deleuze and Guattari:

Sexuality is the production of a thousand sexes, which are so many uncontrollable becomings. Sexuality proceeds by way of the becoming-woman of the man and the becoming-animal of the human: an emission of particles. (ATP p278)

As Faulkner said, to avoid ending up a fascist there was no other choice than to become-black. (ATP p292)) note: See William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Vintage, 1948), p.216. Speaking of Southern whites after the Civil War (not only the poor but also the old monied families), Faulkner writes, “We are in the position of the German after 1933 who had no other alternative but to be a Nazi or a Jew.”

Here’s a quote taken from the Arcade Project:

"What! Because a woman would rather not take the public into her confidence concerning her feelings as a woman; because from among the men who would lavish their attentions upon her, only she could say which one she prefers — is she then to become the slave to one man? What! In such cases a woman is exploited. For if she were not afraid of seeing them tear themselves to pieces, she could give satisfaction to several men at once in their love. I believe in the need for a freedom without limits, a freedom founded on mystery, which for me is the basis of the new morality." Claire Demar, Ma Loi d’avenir (Paris, 1834), pp. 31-32

The moment freedom is realized, in Spartacus is the moment it is given up:

"Do you realize… nobody can ever sell you again? Nobody can sell you or give you away. Nobody can ever make you stay with anybody.

I love you, Spartacus. I love you.

I still can’t believe it.

Forbid me ever to leave you.

I do forbid you. I forbid you"

From Chaia Heller’s The Ecology of Everyday Life:

From the Declaration of Interdependence (1989):

“It is our belief that man’s domination over nature parallels the subjugation of women in many societies, denying them sovereignty over their lives and bodies. Until all societies truly value women and the environment, their joint degradation will continue…Women’s views on economic justice, human rights, reproduction and the achievement of peace must be heard at local, national, and international forums, wherever policies are made that could affect the future of life on earth. Partnership among all peoples is essential for the survival of the planet.”

From Google News:

Muslim Khan, the militants’ spokesman, said they would not allow any girls’ schools to operate until the army withdraws from the valley and Islamic law is imposed. "These schools are being run under a system introduced by the British and promote obscenity and vulgarity in society," Khan told AP by telephone from an undisclosed location. Khan said a system of girls education would be developed in line with the teaching of Islam.

Anyone interested in the idea of democracy should check out the Vancouver Public Space Network’s website. When it comes to creating dialogue as a practice for community self-awareness this group is doing great things.

The first VPSN event that I attended was a tiny little dance party in a remote area of a public park. It was repeatedly hassled by Vancouver Parks Police, and that was good enough for me. Any group (not hurting anyone) that gets hassled by any establishment type is probably on to something good.

This past Tuesday the VPSN launched its Where’s the Square Design Competition, with a very well attended forum at the Vancouver Public Library. The panelists Lance Berelowitz, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Bing Thom are all highly regarded experts and practitioners in public space design. They presented the audience with many examples of Public Squares from around the world, and gave what turned out to be a free education in the design and use of public space.

Lance Berelowitz, the author of Dream City gave the most provocative talk. He questioned the need for a central plaza in Vancouver, pointing out that the city is surrounded by public space all looking away from the city toward the ocean and mountains. This space on the edge of the city serves many functions and gives a character to Vancouver that isn’t found in Old World Cities. He did, however, suggest the current Art Gallery’s back entrance as a possible space for a re- and well designed public space.

Let them know what you think.

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 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.

I subscribe to Google Alerts with the search term "education." Every day I get a page of news articles and blogs to go through. The other day I saw this:

More Education Woes
By nospam@example.com (Gman)
And, is anyone disturbed by the fact that poor kids are to blame for the drop in average scores? I refuse to accept the mindset that poverty is a barrier to learning. That mindset has led to the dumbing down of education and the mess …
mtpolitics.net - http://www.mtpolitics.net/

The sentence, "I refuse to accept the mindset…" struck me immediately. I’ve been thinking about it, I’m still thinking about it. After reading the very short post and the comments I left a comment of my own. I had to ask, "Do you refuse to accept that malnutrition is a barrier to athletic performance?"

When poverty is seen as a lifestyle or culture choice its physiological effects may be ignored. Poverty and hunger and malnutrition are barriers to development. More testing doesn’t help feed hungry children. What is the point of education for children living in poverty?

That’s not a cynical or rhetorical question. What is the point of education? What is the point of literacy? Or what are the limits of education and literacy? Is education about solving problems? And if so, at least in part, do children living in poverty need education or nutrition?

It looks like I might have to read and write about Marx. It’s got to be best to avoid mentioning the name, but if I want to use the concept of alienation, even if I want to transform it a little, I should have some idea of how the concept was originally used. I thought for a moment deterritorialization might work, but that’s even more academic and not really synonymous, either way, alienation has a common meaning that circulates outside the academic world.

The wave we’re after, or on depending on your place in the spectrum of alienation, is capitalism’s third. Again back in Harris’ Ontario I saw the effects of policy geared toward business interests on community. The funding for Ontario’s arts organizations was threatened. And these once community based and minded organizations began appealing for funds with business and economic based arguments. The shift in thinking swept these once autonomous community groups up with the wave of capitalism.

Something very similar is happening with this call to catch the knowledge wave, if we understand it as knowledge wave capitalism. Much has been written about the commercialization of our schools and the resulting uncritical acceptance of product placement. But I’ve also read somewhere that capitalism is illiterate, I could look into this and its effect on literacy.

If literacy is seen as being in harmony with a culture’s body of knowledge, then alienation and illiteracy are connected. Developing a method to bring each child individually into harmony with our cultural body of knowledge would be a "micropolitical means of subversion."

Preface
This post, which is essentially a review of the summer issue of Education Canada, might turn out to be some statement of purpose for Not Left To Chance. My main concern today is a proposal for study in a local graduate program. Of course, being afflicted with a philosophical disposition, I tend to space out when defining a field.

It shouldn’t be too difficult to work out a focused study. My interest is literacy and I have a very practical agenda. I want to study tested methods for improving literacy so I can become a better teacher.

A little background: At some point in my efforts to change the world by changing a local media scene, I decided that education could be the field where the work of changing the world holds the most potential. I enrolled in the local Faculty of Education and a year later was a qualified teacher. At that point I went back to work in local media.

A little more background: The time and place of my turn toward the field of education was Harris’ Ontario. Education was overtly politicized by the governing body and teachers and their unions were essentially destroyed. It was a bad time for education in Ontario, and in the spirit of full disclosure, a good time for a middling student to get into a Faculty of Education.

My first complaint is with the education I received. I recall one telling incident every time I bring up teacher education. The lecture based section was led by instructors who told you what to do in the classroom. Once, and only once, I questioned a teaching practice. The instructor looked at me, (it wasn’t like I was out of line, the instructor had asked if there were any questions) and said "This would be a higher level discussion." then continued with the lecture as if no question had been asked. Teacher education generally exercises only lower level recall skills.

And the practicum was just as bad. The student teachers who could most closely ape their mentors were highly rewarded. I learned to mimic tone, gestures and catch phrases for positive appraisal. This wasn’t as foolproof as it sounds. An outside appraisal was also part of the student teacher’s report. My outside appraiser was a retired principal and a strict disciplinarian. During his first appraisal I was being mentored by a teacher with a soft touch. This retired principal gave me a near failing review. Luckily for me, when he came around for my second appraisal I was aping a strict disciplinarian who was retiring from teaching at the end of the year. My second and final outside appraisal was a glowing report, with stars and extra comments written in the margins to note my striking improvement.

In most teaching positions this kind of education/training isn’t a problem. In front of a group of similarly socialized students, you perform an act prescribed by governing bodies and the results sought appear. As long as you are doing what you’re told, remain dependent on outside regulators for instruction, you’ll be a success at the job of teaching. The direction of education is left to policy makers. Teachers have learned not to question, their success is dependent on their ability to unquestioningly do what they’re told. You could clearly see that dependence in Harris’ Ontario. Teachers were powerless to defend the work they do from a government that didn’t have the best interests of education written into their policies. Grudgingly, the teachers followed the governments new prescription.

And in the end what did it matter? Literate households and communities continued to produce reading ready children. Schools continued to stream the children of professionals into academic areas while the kids from lower socio-economic backgrounds were streamed into holding cells. All the exercising and testing helps to reinforce the stigma and heighten awareness of who has what and who doesn’t.