What to do in this nebulous post-election ambience
Let’s talk about learning for a spell, and how it relates to you here and now.
Humans learn by spending time in the presence of things. Dewey phrased it as “learning by doing” — the more you do, the more you learn. As anyone learning a new language is wont to tell you, the easiest way to go about it is to both actively speak the words and to listen in on others who speak the language. Immersion goes a long way to facilitate learning, and the more of it you can manage, the more knowledge you can carve out of the experience.
It is worth noting that the “doing” in this equation includes a passive element. Years and years of formal education has instilled a sense of learning through doing alone, where a person either engages dutifully with the study material (and thus learns), or does not engage dutifully with the study material (and thus does not learn). This way of looking at human learning is very convenient for educational systems, who can make assessments about who has learnt what on the basis on who has done the homework. This way of looking at human learning also, ironically, limits one’s understanding of what knowledge actually is. Knowledge is not (only) the result of doing the work, but (also) a more generalized way of looking at the world.
To phrase it another way: learning happens when someone encounters something for the second time.
It should come as no surprise, then, to hear that the things we ambiently surround ourselves with affect our way of looking at the world. We do things every day, using the tools and resources at hand, and through the process of going through the motions of our daily lives we learn (and remind ourselves) that the world is a certain way. By virtue of being immersed in our daily routines and habits, learning takes place. Acting in and engaging with the world is the strongest force of learning for human beings. Being in the world is always a learning experience.
As you probably already know, the US held an election recently. Every day, news flow in about how inept the winning candidate appears to be, and how his appointed cabinet seems to be counter to reason itself in every possible way. This goes even more for how the president elect uses his ever so informal channels of influence to promote the most counter-progressive elements of contemporary society. For those who wish to do so, it is entirely possible to spend every waking moment immersed in the worldviews of these people, learning the implications of what these ideologies have when combined with governmental authority.
My advice is: do not do this. Do the opposite of this.
As you have read but a few paragraphs ago, learning is a function of engaging with the things we surround ourselves with. This goes for the media we consume, too. If we immerse ourselves in the rhetoric and ideological thinking of radically backwards-facing worldviews, then that becomes the framework with which we encounter the world. Whether we agree with it or not, the fact that it is always in and on our minds impacts the learning process. As we go about our daily lives doing things with the latest piece of hate speech or propaganda verbiage in our working memory, these things seep into our worldview as surely as listening to a foreign language eventually attunes us to the melody of that language.
Humans learn by spending time in the presence of things, and after sufficient time in proximity of a given body of knowledge, we encounter the world a second time. Through the lens of these newly acquired ideological understandings, as it were. Most of the ideas spouted by the reactionaries of the day are ridiculous when taken at face value; being exposed to them for an extended period of time blunts the ridiculousness and turns the whole thing into yet another aspect of daily life. Even the most ridiculous idea can be gotten used to, given time.
The thing to do, as you might imagine, is to surround yourself with things that pay no heed to the neofascist creeds of the day. Go back to the Classics, and root your understanding of the present in that eternal body of knowledge. Engage in activities where the doing is rooted in the practical needs of the local community, and bond with your peers in a direct manner. Find ways of being in spheres of interaction that are autonomous from whatever false narratives the powers that be want to foist upon you. Surround yourself with enough good ideas to be able to face the creeping neofascism of our time and say:
That makes no sense.
And then do something else, borne out of your own understanding of the world. Whatever this “something else” might be, it will be an act of resistance, as it is just that: something else than the party line. I don’t know what it might be, but whatever it is, I will be happy to learn.
[Shameless self-promotion: you can find most of my writings listed here.]
