Boundaries? Are you sure?
The English language insists that there are things, objects, creatures, all sorts of discrete stuff. This is what we teach our children early on. After learning to name things, toddlers start learning to count things: so smart, so clever, so cute! And yet…
That same toddler is learning to inhabit all sorts of imposed strangeness, imposed by people she can’t do without. I read a good piece about transgender people which insisted that such people do not so much change gender as insist that the gender they were forcibly assigned at birth is not the one they feel themselves to be. Where is the “individual” and their gender really located?
We have remarked before about Ubuntu and how it takes a village to raise a child. In a tiny shift of emphasis, the child is indistinguishable from the village in lots of ways.
We in west have a terrible, truly disgusting, record of getting this wrong. Taking babies and children from their context and forcibly reparenting them. The US and Canada took loads of kids from First Peoples families and had them brought up by “Americans” and “Canadians”. The UK sent kids, even in the fifties and sixties, to grow up healthy on Australian farms (where they were abused).
The mistake comes about from thinking there is a child and a context for the child. It is a thinking mistake, and it begins at the start of articulate thinking as a toddler. Make no mistake, the toddler is right and her parents wrong, wrong, wrong.[1] There are no truly separable things.
Nations also have boundaries and borders, don’t they? And hell to pay for transgressing their territorial limits? Well yes and no, it seems. No self-respecting statesman every hung on to formal boundaries. What was the most bombed country in the Vietnam war? Laos, which wasn’t even in the war.
Here is Caitlin Johnstone:
Israelis are arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Qatar is funding pro-Israel organizations in the US. The US is pouring money into propping up NATO. NATO countries are pressured by US to help destabilize Iran. This is from a quick glance at my feed just now. Nations are a fairy tale.
Nationalisms have rightly been ridiculed since forever. The Fatherland is a potent concept despite the fact it can’t be pinned down, or perhaps because it is fluid enough to mean all things to all people, say, in an election campaign targeted on the basis of their Facebook likes. We desperately need to escape this thinking flaw because it sells us down the river every time. Obviously, this is not that, except it is not ever obvious, and the similarities and distinctions are full of subtle interest and illumination if only we can manage to avoid the knee jerk.
The next time (and it is just around the corner) you hear someone say “something must be done about this”, spend some time seeing if the categories introduced (i.e. this is not that) are really as obvious as they seem to be at first. As I tweeted yesterday:
The imposition of reductionist frames actually reproduces thinking errors and locates them in the system. It really seems as though local causation is real, not an artefact of the way observations are made. So destructive.
More gently serious now
If I claim something is wrong, wrong, wrong, aren’t I making a distinction between this and that? Aren’t I assuming that right and wrong are separate and don’t overlap?
Well, I am making a claim and it does make a separation. The claim is that the thinking pattern that uses static, distinct, separate objects as though they were obvious and real (visible facts in the world) is, in my experience, poor thinking that struggles to gain insight: I call it wrong because it doesn’t help. Conversely, the kind of thinking which questions the short-hand, short-cut, quick-and-dirty can be painful but will eventually make progress.
This is clearly a meta-claim: it talks about thinking styles and it talks about real work and it talks about avoiding implicit violence to other people. Not many parents think that their “education” of their child into the way we use language has a hidden violence. Which does not mean that the violence is not there, with sometimes tragic outcomes.
A local infant playgroup boasts that it offers “play with a purpose”, and that we must “teach” our children to feel the wind and taste the rain and so on.
Caitlin calls nations a fairy tale. (My, that is pregnant!) Fairy tales describe not the antics of Little Red Riding Hood but the implied darker forces. We can’t have explicit horrors in books for toddlers, but they understand the violence at the heart of horrors — their terrors are bigger than ours, not smaller. Toddlers can’t escape the backwash from domestic violence, and laying it out in a Janet and John book is not going to help. (This is Jane’s daddy. Jane is scared of her daddy. This is Jane’s mummy. Look at the bruises on Jane’s mummy’s face.) What happens in a fairy tale (not Disney’s version!) is that the richer story is available to the extent that the child has already experienced the implied issues.
There are only things in context. The thing is no more separable from its context than a child is from its family, domestic violence or no domestic violence. (This is Nora Bateson’s concept of warm data.) We cannot describe a thing without describing its context, and if the context changes then the thing is no longer the same thing, despite everything that logic and language wants to say otherwise. In a warm data lab with Nora, this truth is explored so that it becomes the discovery of the people in the lab that they cannot think the way they have been taught to think and still make sense of their world. We each have to discover this for ourselves.
You may have read last week’s blog on fat: fat is not a thing but is carries a whole context with it. Eating a low carb diet which is necessarily high in fats (and all the contexts they bring) turns out, in the latest research, to have a big impact on the efficacy of cancer drugs. Weird? Only if you think things are separable, but almost predictable if you are looking at the contexts and their health. You need to eat lots of (nutrient-dense) fat to be healthy, and you sure need to be healthy to cope with a cancer. But who is really going to be surprised if the “healthy” frame is just the right one to get good outcomes. Trying to say that the diet that is the context for you getting ill is the obvious one for recovery makes no sense, but it is what nearly every cancer patient does.
Sacred cows
Are sacred cows a thing? Certainly, there are bovine animals, often white, that are protected by their religious and social contexts. Certainly, there is nothing in the cowness of these cows that differentiates them. The metaphorical phrase works the same: there is something held to be sacred, but it is the context that establishes its sacredness, not the ding an sich.[2]
In metaphysics, the noumenon (/ˈnuːmənɒn/, UK also /ˈnaʊ-/; from Greek: νούμενον)[3] is a posited object or event that exists independently of human sense and/or perception. Wikipedia.
All we are recommending here is that we need to own the sacredness of sacred cows, and own similarly our disgust at the present POTUS. Tempting as it is to attribute evil, this is to make the same mistake as attributing gender to the child. Evil is a useful concept in understanding the world. If you have had a Steiner education you will distinguish the evil of Ahriman from that of Lucifer. Which may or may not give further insight, but it is insight that comes from the way something is framed by the observer.
We can never get a full context, which would be necessary to fully understand what something is.[4] We tend to get presented with systematically distorted contexts and with descriptions that contain thinking mistakes. We then get a necessarily distorted view of what something is because our understanding of the context is flawed. If that weren’t enough, the marketing people who understand the practical ramifications of how this works are working flat out to provide misleading contexts for us.
Frankfurt’s model of bullshit is a little too ephemeral. We need a term for deep bullshit that sticks around, compounds, and accumulates into mountains and continents of confabulation which are then colonized by the filter-challenged, via self-selection, as cognitive homes. Venkatesh Rao
We need to own the sacredness we attribute to cows if we want to stand a chance of avoiding the marketing men’s nets of deceit. Remember the catchers sent out with nets to ensnare and abduct children in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. The children were being caught by the religious authorities, for use in experiments in cutting away their souls to avoid them sinning. That plot line feels so pertinent to the current moment…
Anything we think is “holy” will be used to elicit behaviour from us that goes against our own motivations. We will be co-opted. Think of the most positive words you can: love, health, nature, trust, youthfulness, energy, nourishment, whatever. Sacredness itself. And then think how these cows are used to corrupt the very concepts they refer to. Then think how this corruption is enabled by the notion that these scared cows can be separated from their context. ‘Trust’ as an abstract property, when trust can only be specific, e.g. trust in a particular person (with their own context), or in a particular principle of the sort we sketch here.
Red lines
Red lines became infamous when it transpired that financial institutions in the US drew literal red lines on literal maps and refused to offer financial products to particular sorts of people, the ones on the wrong side of the line. The UK version was more genteel: in a bank in a properly middle-class area you got service, elsewhere you had to queue for ever. Of course, this is all about context, but the judgments made about whether you are a desirable customer or not are kept hidden. There are racist and sexist subtexts as well, all the more so now that existing biases are built into ‘impartial’ algorithms.
Of course, when campaigners started to force institutions to offer products to all, the result was an orgy of sub-prime lending and the biggest erosion of assets owned by Afro-Caribbeans in the history of the planet. The campaigners had not understood that the context could be radically changed by offering exploitative and dishonest products in the place of actual service.
The way the issue of red lines has surfaced in the Brexit non-negotiations is quite different. Politicians have thundered about their red lines, but it is far from clear who they were hoping to impress. Abstract categories were established and people were expected to care about them. The notion that, Brexit or no Brexit, it is the 27 EU countries that provide the context, and that they have a more inclusive and rational style of deliberation, seems completely lost on the Brexit protagonists. I think the fact that David Davis spent four hours in total talking to Barnier is paradigmatic.
A red line is a device to impose a boundary where there is none. It is an insistence that this is this and that is that. Those people must not be allowed to own their own homes. In the UK, there are catchment areas for schools that are thought to confer an advantage on the already advantaged who can get to live there.
We claimed at the start that such thinking is poor thinking and does not lead to insight. Now we can see that it is also lazy and contains hidden violence. If we did not fall so easily into the traps our language sets us about obvious “things”, then we would recognise this lazy violence for what it was.
Standards and ranking
A standard is pretty much an arbitrary line. It typically tears some measures from the context and elevates them to be “meaningful”. Think “organic” or “living wage” or “green”. Of course, these things have their uses but they are always short-cuts. Remember Ron Stamper: if you want the meaning of something to change, apply a budget to it.
People generally want to deny that exam scores are just a ranking mechanism. Ranking always generates a top student and a bottom student. The ranking itself is anti-educational in its outcomes: it subverts what it is supposed to be about. The ranking itself will be exploited by people selling revision guides and tutoring. It will be exploited by the students to achieve their own ends. I confess very publicly walking out of one of my finals exams early, figuring dimly that there was more competitive advantage in upsetting some colleagues than in trying to pick up some more marks.
So, rank yourself against this standard: how accurately can you decide when to use the proffered abstract framework, decide when you must look at the context to figure out where you are?
“Who we are at any moment cannot be divorced from what other things and who other people are to us” -Varela
[1] I do have recent first-hand experience here from the mouth of a nearly three-year-old: “Mum, I need to tell you. Animals don’t usually float”.
[2] The thing in itself, after Kant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing-in-itself
[3] Being mildly terrified of walking down streets where I can’t read the signage, I learned enough Greek to be able to read that tomatoes are tomatoes, and noumenon is noumenon…
[4] And even if we could, we probably wouldn’t be able to hold it for long enough for it to matter, and by then it’d probably have shifted…
