Nothing matches the shrill accusation that an assertion is not “fair and balanced.” Make a claim. Someone hollers “not fair and balanced” from the wings, and an opposing, contradictory theory, and the evidence for it, spring into existence. Poof. The surest thing in the universe- a punched return ticket on the Faith Train.

This is how the argument seems to work. No statement, opinion or fact can be credible, unless it is accompanied by the “other side of the controversy-“ a contradictory “fact.” Any point of view can be summarily dismissed unless it is accompanied by its negation: the credential of a balancing, opposing point of view.

No simply stated assertion can be valid.

But let’s face it. Facts aren’t each packaged with a bonus self-contradiction. Opinions don’t come with symmetrical counter-arguments attached. The worst ones certainly don’t. The bizarre utterances of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck and their ilk are inflammatory, irresponsible and unsupportable. They do not politely supply opposing views.

We know that this apparent nonsense derails sensible conversation. We cannot quite make out why. We fumble with the baffling power this “fair and balanced” thing has in the minds of those who use it. This does more sinister damage than first appears. With some analysis we can see how it works. We can resist and reclaim.

The accusation that opinions or assertions are not “fair and balanced” does nothing (really) to discredit them. It does not constitute a counterargument. It isn’t even an argument. It certainly isn’t evidence. It is a personal attack on the person making it  – ad hominem– for being unfair and unbalanced. It pretends to discredit their legitimacy or authority or integrity. It contemptuously dismisses their standing to make an assertion or have an opinion.

We hear a commonplace aphorism about what makes a claim or a theory “scientific:”

To be scientific, assertions or theories are subject in principle to the possibility of disproof: that there is conceivable evidence that would contradict them.

(Karl Popper and provenance of theory of Falsifiability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability)

Sometimes we hear this as a definition of science itself. It does have the ring of a “theory.” This alone doesn’t appear to mean much or do much harm in our culture wars. Maybe it confers some vague middle-brow legitimacy. It does in some trivial sense help to give meaning to the term “science” within the narrow box-canyon of unprovable, faith based beliefs. But it is not clear that we need it.

We often hear this little trope –this “theory” – foreshortened: The scientific is disprovable. This foreshortening is an error. To say that the scientific is disprovable is utterly different from the theory we attribute to Popper and Kuhn. It has proved to be a very damaging linguistic mutilation. It seems like a harmless (if mindless) trope, until we examine how it engenders murky, destructive beliefs that do startling damage.

We invite slippage and imprecision in the usage of the term “disprovable.” Can “disprovable” here mean “can be disproved?” Can it mean “disproved?” Uh-oh. “Scientific” theories are disprovable. Science Philosophers say so.” That means there is evidence that disproves them.

Anti-science polemic relies on a popular vulnerability to the mistaken idea that anything considered scientific has evidence that contradicts it.  Incredible. A “thing” is only eligible to be true if it is equally, symmetrically, not true! Any “theory,” any “evidence-based” claim, automatically manifests an opposing “anti-claim.” This will be in the form of a belief. It will be undetectable, undisprovable and unprovable. Like anti-matter and anti-gravity, this is anti-science. Yet it will convey a veil of scientific validity. Think this is crazy? Go ask someone at the local evangelical church.

It isn’t enough that recruiting scientific validity for an assertion invents an opposing belief. In the popular imagination, it implies that there is –equally scientific–  evidence to support that belief, and that this fictive evidence disproves the original claim. Under the rubric of… science!

Parenthetically, we know that evidence that contradicts (or disproves) a proposition does not affirmatively prove anything. But there is a popular belief that disproving or discrediting a theory or proposition somehow proves that a contradictory or opposing explanation exists and is true. 

This series of (in)convolutions is a mutilated, logical horror. It is muddled and fallacious enough to be difficult to disentangle. We are temporarily stunned and baffled by tautological shock-and-awe. Suddenly the rubric of science seems to somehow validate blurry, unstated claims that are overtly anti-science. We are wordless. We wonder why those who intone the magic words – fair and balanced– look at us, wordlessly, with such triumphant defiance. It is because we haven’t imagined the magnitude of the logical blunders that fly before our eyes.

We do get a useful inversion or (commutative operation) from our little “definition,” though. This is of more value to genuine thoughtful inquiry. It seems to be the real point. It goes beyond identifying what are credible speculations and claims about the world, and significantly, helps us see what are not:

Assertions for which there is no conceivable evidence that might contradict them are not regarded as scientific.

We seem to allow, without questioning, the following distorting simplification:

There is no conceivable (“scientific”) evidence that might support them. And this seems to be accepted as amounting to the same thing: Assertions for which there is no imaginable evidence are not regarded as scientific. There isn’t, and can’t be, any such evidence. Hence, they are not “scientific.” They are beliefs, taken on faith, only.

We are vulnerable to another foreshortening, too. We truncate: “faith-based beliefs are not subject to evidence that might disprove them” becomes “faith-based beliefs are not subject to disproof.” Popular usage interprets this as “faith-based beliefs cannot be disproved.” Say that again. Faith-based beliefs can’t be disproved. What have we done? If this strains credulity, pose this question at tea-bagging soiree and see how people really unleash the hunt for coherence.

This (inadvertent?) series of fallacies and errors distracts us from reasoning. We have gotten this far without remarking the obvious fact that scientific “theories” (like evolution and human causation for climate change) regarded as credible- not to say “true-” just do not have meaningful evidence that contradicts them.

“Rules For Axioms: I. Not to omit any necessary principle without asking whether it is admitted, however clear and evident it may be. II. Not to demand, in axioms, any but things that are perfectly evident in themselves.”

Blaise Pascal: Thoughts, Letters and Minor Works: Part 48 Harvard Classics. Blaise Pascal and Charles W. Eliot. F.F.  Collier New York: 1910 pp. 413

“Then there’s the problem of “balance” – the idea that reporters must give roughly equal space to two different “sides” of a controversy. When applied to science, especially in politicized areas, this media norm becomes extremely problematic. Should journalists really grant equal time to the small band of scientists who deny the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS when the vast majority of researchers accept the connection between the two? Should they split column space between the few remaining global warming “skeptics” and the scientific experts who affirm the phenomenon’s human causation? Again, experienced science journalists will know best how to cover such stories and will be aware of the scientific community’s very justifiable abhorrence of unthinking “balance.””

Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirschenbaum: “Unpopular Science”. The Nation (August 17, 2009 ed.). (Our emphasis.) http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/mooney_kirshenbaum

We know from clinical observation that right-wing, conservative “faith” operatives are anti-science. And to what purpose? They are intolerant of the “evidence-based” pursuit of public policy. Who profits by this? They resist the admission and consideration of factual knowledge and critical analysis into our public conversations about how we are to conduct ourselves. The Faith Card.

We acknowledge that right-wing doctrine is anti-science. We predictably foreshorten this to “faith is anti-science.” Is faith per se anti-science? I have no idea. How could I, really? I don’t believe I am making claims based on faith. I guess your faiths are anti-science if you say they are. Faiths are specific, particular and not “per se.” There is no recognizable category of as-yet formed faiths for which we can apply logical operators like “anti-science.” Maybe we should discipline ourselves to make statements only about specific, articulable beliefs or “faiths.” Faith is a noun. Do you have faith? Do you have cheeses?

We allow another unthinking inversion (commutation), this time of the trope “faith is anti-science.” We inadvertently give birth to another unfortunate, bastard linguistic error: “science is anti-faith.” Allowing this illogical imposture into the right-wing play-book has invited all sorts of mental mayhem.

If we set aside uncertain arguments about scientific “methods,” the body of science is nothing more (or less) than the accumulation of sensibly agreeable observations about reality. The body of physical science isn’t anti-faith. The body of social science is clear:

It is overwhelmingly evident that organized faith does staggering harm. Not only because it opposes science in public policy.  Not only because it is instrumental in power and oppression. Organized religion produces wholesale injustice and violence.

Beliefs for which we cannot imagine any evidence are a very special, very particular class of claim. They differ fundamentally from observations of reality. We are tricked into mistaking that they merit recognition and equal footing with the reasoned, the rational, the scientific –with claims that are within the ambit of observable evidence and actual theories. They do not. We are fooled into giving them some kind of “legitimacy through association.” They do not have similar gravity, or moral weight, or intellectual standing.

Let’s tally the damage we have done to sensible discourse.

Science and the scientific are categorically maligned as inherently contradictory and self-disproving. This disdains and dismisses all rational, logical discourse, not to mention those zany philosophers, as ridiculous, naïve and stupidly self-contradictory. Reasoned dialogue is mangled and reduced to nonsensical rubble. We can dismiss science itself.

This kind of malicious dishonesty mocks intellectual and logical integrity. No wonder we are confused.

We are obliged to summarily reject right-wing claims to recourse to “logic” or “reason” or “evidence,” or “science,” or, for god’s sake, “truth. They gave up any such claims too long ago for us to brook that bullshit. A reasoned response is an undignified disservice to mental –and moral– integrity. If we analyze with this kind of care, we can rehabilitate for ourselves the proper usage of the word “theory” from those who would appropriate and contaminate it. We can reclaim for serious conversation the terms “proofs” and “proved.”

By all means. Take seriously all ideas that claim to truth, meaning, and mere usefulness. Examine them rationally and with reason. Subject them to skepticism, counter-evidence and to possible disproof. Feel free –intellectually free– to discredit them.

But dismiss, without evidence, apology or justification, that which is presented without evidence. (Provide citation.) Do not dignify as “controversy” the shrill assaults of bitter, acquisitive extremists who would discard what we know.

So many things are just… true. And so many things are just… uncontroversial. And so many things are just… preposterous. Give no credence to unfounded claims to controversy. The unfounded belief and the reasoned, supported and “evidence-based” argument do not have the same standing. Disregard refractory, schizoid and insane demands that you be “fair and balanced.”  As we have seen, they do more harm than immediately appears. Let’s not be insane.

(end)

Fair and Balanced.  If you don’t quickly insert a counterclaim into your assertion, not only your claim, but you, our dear ad hominem Reader, will be shouted to pieces.

God help us if we aren’t Fair and Balanced. Nothing equals the trump power of the shrill accusation that a claim is not “fair and balanced” in sanctioning its contemptuous dismissal. Our paperwork will not be processed at all if it isn’t accompanied by the proper credential: an opposing “view.”

You, our dear Reader, know what we think of those who dismiss ideas because they are not “moderate” and “balanced” and “centrist.” And if you don’t, by gosh, you will find this essay to be well paired with our previous essay: http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/2009/05/09/when-there-is-nothing-moderate-about-the-horrors-you-oppose-how-can-you-be-a-moderate/1559

Here’s how it goes. Our assertion can only be credible if we fairly present a balancing, opposing view. In fact- no observation can be valid if we do not supply its negation (in the space provided).

“Then there’s the problem of “balance” – the idea that reporters must give roughly equal space to two different “sides” of a controversy. When applied to science, especially in politicized areas, this media norm becomes extremely problematic. Should journalists really grant equal time to the small band of scientists who deny the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS when the vast majority of researchers accept the connection between the two? Should they split column space between the few remaining global warming “skeptics” and the scientific experts who affirm the phenomenon’s human causation? Again, experienced science journalists will know best how to cover such stories and will be aware of the scientific community’s very justifiable abhorrence of unthinking “balance.””

Chris Mooney & Sheril Kirschenbaum: “Unpopular Science”. The Nation (August 17, 2009 ed.). (Our emphasis.) http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/mooney_kirshenbaum

To be considered scientific, assertions are subject in principle to the possibility of disproof: that there is conceivable evidence that would contradict them. (We promise to supply later some proper citations of Stephen Popper and Thomas Kuhn).

The inversion of this is of particular value to thoughtful inquiry: that assertions for which there is no conceivable evidence that might disprove them are not regarded as “scientific.” This is useful: They are not  “disprovable ” (and hence not scientific). But this leads to an unfortunate shorthand reference: hence, scientific claims ARE “disprovable.” We think this shorthand is a linguistic mutilation and terribly unfortunate.

Popular usage has bastardized and perverted this. Anti-scientists seem to rely on an uncritical popular vulnerability to the idea that something can only be considered scientific if there is some evidence that contradicts it. Hence, a “thing” can only be regarded as credible -or “true”- if it is equally –and credibly- “untrue.” “Disprovable.” At will. Have been and will be disproved.

Theories. Let’s reclaim this word for ourselves so we can go back to using it in real, sober, reasoning deliberation. Overlooked in popular discourse is the condition that “scientific” theories (like evolution and climate change) that are regarded as credible -not to say “true”- do not have substantial evidence that contradicts them. They are not disproved.

Look at the injury this does not only to science, but also to public discourse (and language itself). Science, and very scientificness, are mangled and reduced to nonsensical rubble. By the way, the notional “the exception that proves the rule” is bullshit. Rules don’t have exceptions and exceptions don’t prove anything. Don’t get us started.

And who profits by this? Those who would hack away at intellectual honesty to advance ideological aims achieve this jaw-dropping perversity: nothing can claim to be “true” or valid or meaningful unless it stands there, proudly, with its arm around its own self-proclamation that it is untrue! Good god!

Science and the scientific are categorically defined as inherently contradictory and self-disproving. One cannot recruit a claim for scientific (or rational) validity for any assertion without suggesting that there is (equally scientific!) “evidence” to the contrary.

Thus- looky! we can discount, disdain and ridicule any scientific claim. Because it is… scientific. And we can dismiss science itself. Logic and rational discourse too. While we are at it. As ridiculous, naïve and stupidly self-contradictory. Woa!

That would be really perverse and insane, wouldn’t it? Any claim to truth is simultaneously and symmetrically a claim to untruth?  That, Reader, is what we have done.

Whatever else you, Reader, might do, don’t allow these people to fool you into allowing them to make claims based on “logic” or “reason” or “evidence,” or for god’s sake, “truth. They gave up claims to that kind of “truth” way too long ago for us to brook that bullshit. They have no claims to such things. We are more than justified, nay obligated, to shout them to pieces. We must save them from the embarrassment of their own screaming hypocrisy. Oh and, of course, you’ll agree that we must all applaud Bill Mahr’s film Religulous.

Please. Dismiss without evidence that which cannot be presented with evidence. Give no credence to the idea that these ideas or people operate within the realm of reason and proofs. They don’t, and it is a disservice to honest intellectual discourse to be fooled into responding. They attempt to make it look like the unfounded belief and the reasoned, supported argument have the same standing. They don’t.

By all means. Examine ideas rationally and with reason. Subject them to skepticism, contradiction, counterargument and disproof. Take seriously all ideas that claim to meaning, truth, validity, and mere usefulness. With intellectual integrity and honesty, feel free to discredit them. This our beloved search for meaning, and it is its own truth. This is the kind of truth we most admire.

But do not accept as “controversy” the shrill idiocies of extremists who challenge what we know. So many “things” are simply… uncontroversial. And so many are simply… true. Reject without argument assertions that an “opposing point of view” makes them controversial, or untrue… and vilify you, Reader, as not “fair and balanced.”

Dismiss, without reason, argument or recourse to sense, those who would deflect, dismiss and silence the obvious with refractory, schizoid and insane demands that you be “fair and balanced.”

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image

Joan Didion (b. 1934), U.S. essayist. “In the Islands,” The White Album (1979).)

INTRODUCTION

The work of adolescent imagination is play, and the play of teens is work. As with children, the growing and shaping and forming of identity takes place in places of the imagination. Kids and teens try on identities as they explore who they are and who they might become. Personhood is imagined into being, in places that are invented.

SYMBOLIC PAST

Children signify the past and future, desired or undesirable, savage or idyllic, sylvan or polluted. Childhood symbolizes a desirable future, imagined both collectively and individually by each of us. Each childhood is symbolic of each of our cherished individual pasts. They present and represent childhoods in a past sacral space in which each of us had an infinitude of imagined, remembered, desired futures. Our childhoods

Kids experiment with imagined selves. They impersonate. They im-person themselves. They try on identities like costumes, theatrical figures or heroic and romantic archetypes.

The secret places of imaginary play, of a childhood or a (re)-remembered childhood of two generations ago, may be in the fantastic and figurative space of children’s literature. Children can imagine being bad, or free of the socialization of childhood like Robin Hood or Peter Pan.

Kids on the internet can seamlessly experiment with being mean, or older, with romantic archetypes, or they can adopt entirely new invented identities. Yet the imaginary play of the internet and of contemporary childhood in the urban wild is both occupied and surveilled in a way that is completely unlike any library or secret glades, burrows, forts.

CARTESIAN CHILDHOOD

A part of adolescent work is learning and feeling a place, a community, a home, a belonging among a known people and place. Growing up is learning geography- the geography of knowing of where one is in the world.

Childhood and The Child, in a Piagetian, Cartesian/modernistic conception, are socially invented. (Cite). Children so conceived are a discrete category of persons, and childhood an ordinal sequence of categorical events. These milestones must be mediated and titrated by adults, so that events are not experienced too early or out of order (cite). It is a series that cannot be disordered or cross-contaminated or The Child will be polluted. Today what falls within the taxonomic categories of acceptable children and acceptable childhoods are socially negotiated and continually refigured.

In this modernistic conception, the child is assembled. Like a card game or a book, it is nonsensical if it is out of order. There are places that children must not see out of order. These are sites of contamination. Children seen in these places are seen as deviant or illicit. Their parents are seen as derelict. They are out of place.

DISCREDITING THE MODERN

This conceit of Childhood as a category or as an ordered sequence has not survived postmodernity in any sensible, unproblematic way. (Cite).

Many adults have shared and personal memories of fantasy play that took place unseen in burrows and forts and glades, in unclaimed and wild, undiscovered, abandoned places, and in cherished children’s literature. Our imagined, remembered and re-remembered childhoods of two generations ago are rendered fantastic by contemporary experience.  (Cite Goodenough)

The cyber-reality and urban wild of contemporary teens are fantastic to many adults. Childhood is sexualized, consumerized, digitized, kidnapped, unmoored from categories and the ordinal. Childhood has volatized into the hyper-real.

Childhood is compressed and disordered in space and time. It is curiously uncoupled from places. There is no longer a familiar, expected geography, a distribution of places like playgrounds where the presence of children is an expected familiarity. Rather, the appearance of children may more frequently mark places in which they are (un)expected.

DERACINATED REALITY

Desirable affluent homes these days have suites for each child, and each suite has a comprehensive complement of electronic computing, gaming and entertainment equipment. Much of teen self-construction is within these surrounded, solitary spaces, through magic portals into an undisciplined, unsurveilled cyberspace. It is like Alice’s rabbit hole into a space of imagination, but it also a wormhole into an entire streaming, hyper-real atomic world that is altogether too real in a new, unimaginable way.

Electronic and online games have become so complex and interactive that they are encompassing, subsuming game-worlds. Much of self-construction takes place through the looking glass of a video monitor. It is a space of imagination. Some games are shockingly brutal. Some are online, reproducing death after death of the player, killed again and again by adversaries in other rooms and suites.

Kids experiment in unprecedented ways in the hall of mirrors of the internet. They explore being anonymously mean. They distort their ages as markers of status as children or teens, or they literally impersonate radical assumed identities. This is a routine of total self-invention that took place in only the most romantic of children’s literature.

Peter Pan. The Boxcar Children. Tom Sawyer. The Secret Garden.

Teens share their social self-invention in the illusion that facebook.com and myspace.com. and texting are secret places of play. Secrets become ominous, and the dangers become electronically charged. Teens disclose their experiments in ignorance that they are not protected as children. They enact and disclose acts that, when made visible, will render them deviant and criminal because they are out-or-place and out-of-order. Social display takes place in a harsh, unmediated virtual and (post-public) space where we no longer have presumptive civil commitments to children, or to one another. People are not what they seem and children are not tacitly safe.

KIDS OUT OF PLACE

Some kids play baseball and do theatre. These are social practices that are adult-sanctioned and adult-mediated. They are legitimate, because they not out-of-order. They are (in order).

Children who are at risk lead to teens who are threats. (Cite). Children that are out of order are children who threaten, who have given the slip, who have slipped the noose of category. Kids in trouble become young men charged as adults. (Cite)

Kids without sanction are kids at risk. Without adults to sanction them, they are illicit. They have been let down and developmentally abandoned. They don’t have adults mediating or modeling for them. Where adult legitimation is literally absent, they need and find (or make) illegitimate places in which to construct themselves.

The ‘space’ of childhood no longer includes as safe a family and community, and there is virtually no space outside of the body of the child from which threats to the child cannot come. There is no ‘safe space’ of childhood. There are literally no safe children. (Cite Stephens). Are the streets of the late-industrial city and suburb simply categorically unsuitable for children? Is the domesticity of child and family evaporating? (Cite.)

TEEN BODIES

The invention of the idealized persona may take place as a molding of the physical body. Young bodies are sites of adornment. They can be rubbery and plastic, Like Barbie and Ken. Teen bodies are malleable. They can be written upon with piercings and tattoos. They are modeled with cosmetic plastic surgery so they are invented as (mimetic) duplicate celebrity figures. Conversely they are altered and marked and imprinted by injuries and defacements. Or they are invaded by cosmetic distortion- the introduction of alien substance into the body and the erasure of distinctive personhood.

Today this subjugation of the rampant body makes possible significations of belonging and difference, of inclusion and exclusion that are remarkable. Continually refigured technologies of body alteration produce a startling range of markings and costumes.

Teens expertly critiques the nuanced signification of subtler emblems: a wallet chain, a golf cap, the relative elevation of a beltline, elements of goth costuming. An anxiously and continuously compared, examined and recrafted ‘look’ is carried around as a reminder of subject-permanence like a blanket or doll. Belonging is tried on and skinned off, often at the mall. Different species of teen are seen watering at the same hole and foraging for fetishes at malls and at stores like Urban Outfitters.

Teen bodies and persons are ferociously contended, mobilized and eroticized. They are both more than and less than archetypes. They are highly sexualized and frantically turgid sites of post-modern cultural production and reproduction. (Insert Text about advertising?)

Access to money and influence over spending has made teens an unprecedented and fertile ground for formative rhetoric, commercial speech and advertising in the social reproduction of consumer identity, money and politics. Children and teens are branded through an unbelievably intense storm of media content to render them compliant consumers. Much of the content of advertising and commercial media projects models of ideal teens. It re-presents a commercially invented material culture of youth as desirable to all consumers: They signify your youth, your idyllic past, your possible futures. (Cite Kalle Lassen)

Here is the sharpest edge of the media/consumer/product/ identity nexus. Just think- were these figures and differences racial, spiritual, ethnic or linguistic, such violent, visible appropriation and colonizing of bodies and selves would be unconscionable. This argument posits the voices of ageism with the discourse of post-colonial resistance.

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

Teens Are:

Unformed

Plastic, like modeling clay

Unconstructed- like legos

Self-assembling

Undisciplined

Imagined into being

Invisible

Where sticky terms in a discourse of power and identity attract such varied and fervently contentious social claims, they become both dangerous and vacuous. Symbols of desirable and undesirable futures become glued together in a noisy mass that cannot signify shared meaning.  Such terms only have utility as rhetorical blunt instruments, and only have real interest as artifacts that can be deconstructed.

Teens are subject to uniquely forceful categorical expulsion. There may be no persons that are so subject as adolescents to being violently and instantaneously ejected, flung from insider to outsider, and exiled from places. They can snap from category to category with the perplexing immateriality of Schrodinger’s cat.

Is your categorization of teens problematic? Interfering? Evict. Expunge the offending object. Pass it across the boundary of the category. Teens are (not)children and they are (not)adults.

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

Teens Are/are not:

Children

Adults

Political

People

Agents

Outsiders

Insiders

Accountable

Sacred

Profane

Attractive

Repulsive

Ideal/real

Deviant

Innocent

Primitive

Domestic

Our future

My past

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

Teens Are:

Teens are highly charged symbols. Most of all they are slippery. They, like the category of “the family,” are especially stubbornly resistant to dismantling into constituent elements or units of analysis.

Stretchy

Sticky

Spongy

Rubbery

Cloaking

Magnetic

Convenient

Pliant

Visible

Kids don’t know the difference between

help and manipulation. 

Undergraduate College Student

The teen communications network is a marvel. Their dexterity with text and instant messaging and cell phones have made email archaic and primitive. Today’s youth-oriented technologies for instantaneously communicated data and access to cars enable facile access to fertile opportunities for misdeeds and risks. Many kids simply don’t believe that their problems and risks can be shared with adults, and this puts them at an especial risk. This lead to a teen perception (and reality) that the worlds of teens are so removed from the adult world that most adults would be unable to handle knowing what really happens. In the movie Traffic, affluent drug abusing teens are so sure of the ignorance and ineffectiveness of their absent parents that they have no better idea of what to do with an overdosing boy than roll him out of a car at an emergency room. If kids are to perceive that adults are even in the game, or determined to be, adult pursuit must be at least as tenacious and as exhausting as chasing a toddler.

GEOGRAPHY OF BELONGING

It’s easy to not see teens. If you are not looking you might not see them or their particular physical culture. If you are looking you will. They are seen/not seen. Ours is a world of hybridity and disappearance, of the collapse of space and time in which social differentiation among us is deranged. Where there is no sensible adult geography and domesticity disappears, teens have to invent their own terrain. Like the Boxcar kids, they have no stable adult geography into which to grow.

I am certain this can go wrong. When I was an adolescent, I began to bond into the community where I lived. I began to know adults as the substance of the community, and value my relationships to them. I came to believe that these people were coming to value me. This took place in a landscape in which I knew where I was. I knew my way around.

An inseparable part of finding my way in this community was knowing (and learning) the community as a place. Knowing place names, back roads, magical places and local history, even the weather, was the material of shared meaning with people. People came to and knew and loved the place and the community, because of where and how and who it was. The reflection and reinforcement of my coalescing self among these people gave a beginning to my adult personhood.

Part of knowing and being accepted there is the cachet of being local, of having been there before and during and back then. People there now know each other as (figures) here, by place. Knowing and recognizing and being is through native knowledge. I went away, and my adolescent bonding was interrupted. The valley has seen lots of changes in the past decades. Seeing the physical transformations of the place over decades of occasional visits has sometimes been physically shocking. My relationships with the people there were interrupted. I know who some were, but that is not who they now are, and they don’t know me. I have relationships with very few of them. I am not acquainted with the ones who have come since. I am not local, I am not a part of this place, and I am not a part of their knowledge of native geology. It is not my community, and I cannot discover if I know how to make one or find one or cultivate one now. Maybe I don’t trust that I can, or believe that a place can be stable and trusted. Maybe this is a part of development that, like language acquisition, is timely and its interruption can dislocate a life. Anyway it is somehow insensible to think about identity without place.

TEEN GEOGRAPHY

Teens are no longer known by geography, their where, to us, but they are to one another. They are known to one another by place.

Teen geography is populated by kids who are or want to be unsurveilled, unsocialized, unregulated and unimprinted by the disciplined adult world. It also serves as a place of contention about police control and power and authority. The presence and visibility of teens is the locus of social conflict about the presence and visbility of power, resistance, and the wild.  A geographical place serves as an icon and pole star for derelicts and runaways. Theirs is a wild of utter defiance and escape from the discipline of publicly constructed space where desirable future citizens are formed or found. 

FORTRESS

Seen through another oculus of geography, Childhood takes place in a contemporary place that is disciplined: surveilled, structured, and regulated: socially contested territory. It is overlaid and etched with claims and counter-claims of power, money and identity. Each claim makes a unique valorization of what is unique and special, and each reflects the stakes, turfs and imagined futures of developers, merchants, bankers.

Each commodifies the edginess and grit of those parts that are made and shaped the most radically. Each would in its own way make it into something else, a frangible and fungible commercial pastiche of life/style, an illusory difference. Place becomes a life/style commodity that can be “skinned off”  and skinned on to a consumer like a Patagonia jacket, and urban space is a deposition of places so overlaid with the politics of money and identity that its character is suffocated by contestation. Cultural and specifically economic claims are made in space, on space, of space.

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

Contemporary Urban Space Is:

Disciplined

Colonized

Surveilled

Structured

Appropriated

Contested

Regulated

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

TEEN RECLAMATION

Wild, uncolonized places subsist in the alleys and vagrant seams and on the rooftops. The etching of teen identities gives what remains of its edginess and difference. It appears in seams, interstices, boundaries, edges and cleavages. Abandoned, unwanted, forgotten, vacant, underground, uncategorized, imaginary and empty, these are invisible like the place of raves.

Sometimes this work leaves the visible artifacts of tagging and graffiti: signing, naming. It takes place at the edges of the downtown, at the edge of transient rental neighborhoods, on rooftops and in unseen alleys. It is outside of the contended borderlines of the territorial powers of the political. These places are like the raw, unsanded edges stage set-pieces. They are unfinished and un-marked and un-remarked because they are irrelevant to the illusion of the stage-craft illusion of the magic of the temple. They are criminalized, categorically suspect places of vagrancy. If a teen is seen here, she is vagrant and “out of place.”

THIS TAKING PLACE:

It is not a sterile, fluorescent (re)construction of the disciplined, carceral space of the school or the hospital. It is not a place of detention. It is not assembled by adults. It is a physical place where teens can disclose a succession of experimental identities. But it is safe. It is safe because it is a physical place. They inhabit it. They occupy it. They populate it.

It is an incubator, a perfect vessel in which the culture can find purchase and begin to grow. It is a physical redoubt that is neutral, because it is uncolonized, unclaimed and uncontested.

Where is it? It is a node in the underground network of teen circulation. It is interconnected with the material web of teen places by the railroad right-of-way, by bus lines and by an encryption of occult markings like the signs used by hobos to identify places of sodality.

It is in a place that is just outside and beside enough that it doesn’t lap up against too many legitimate claims. It is close enough and alongside enough that it isn’t patently unsupervised or unregulated. It doesn’t attract police attention. It isn’t proper enough to become a nuisance, and it isn’t suspect enough to be troublesome. It isn’t really inside your town, but it isn’t outside either. It is astride an edge and adjoins the seam of the railroad and the counter-weave of the conduits of teen pedestrians. 

HOW TO FIND THIS TAKING PLACE

 It appears in seams, interstices, boundaries, edges and cleavages. Abandoned, unwanted, forgotten, vacant, underground, uncategorized, imaginary and empty, these are invisible.

Look along the railways and threads that interconnect the underground, the vacant, the unclaimed and empty. Relax the focus of your eyes so that you can see the invisible. Just look. Follow along those edges and ridges where the material culture of teens is visible. This Zone will be a widening in the stream, an eddy or backwater. The countercultures and counter-territories and underground circulations that flow in interstices and seams and margins will intersect here, at the edges of the wanted and the claimed and the categorized.

It won’t be an exile. It won’t be in the pathological space of the forsaken or the overtly dangerous or the obviously contaminated. It won’t be an apparent place of abandonment or forsaking.

Ironically, there is often competition for unfound places: artist’s cooperatives, dance studios, and repertory theatres. Now, upscale redevelopments for the gentry are appropriating such places.

MAKE THIS TAKING PLACE

It works because it is not mediated by adults. It is a neutral vacuum. It can only be filled with the imagination of teens because it can resist relentless pressure like an evacuated hull, and sustain a neutral vacuum.

It is adults who defend a remembered past, an imagined childhood, a vision of a positive future, who assail the territory of the Place. But the imagined past and the envisioned future are not here.  It is neutral and insulated from the claims and presence and the imagined presents of adults.

Adults simply cannot see the naked material claims and presence of the teens that are there.

The Places Of Imagination Are:

Plastic

Formless

Unassembled

Unconstructed

Undesignated

Unpopulated

Invented

Neutral 

•    ●  ◊  ▪  ◊  ▪  ◊  ●    •

INSIDE

Inside, this Place is most intensely a place of music and poetry. It is a substantial place where young men and women of substance are born and celebrated.

 The rhythm and spirit that can take place here, the guts and heart and sheer creative horsepower that riot inside the space are astounding and unsuspected by many adults. The stage of the theatrical invention of personhood is conjured. It is pulled into being and held open by the embrace and affirmation of teens and complicit adults. Bodies are liberated and voices are amplified. Bodies are amplified and voices are liberated.

OUTSIDE

(OUTSIDE) it is quiet and veiled from the outside. It is…  not/seen.

A geographical or physical connection with the geography of other underground, illicit places would be a problem if visible.

CONCLUSION

This Place is so fully and ardently claimed, appropriated, written in, written on, imprinted, marked, signed, tagged, and imagined that it is impregnable, impenetrable. It cannot be endowed, or bestowed, or conferred. It is where the work of play and the play of work take place. It is continually imagined into being.

It may be that for most of us, the best way to make a place like this is to go away. The developmental task of adolescents, like toddlers, is to learn to say no.

This Place makes itself. It is self-assembling. It takes hold and grows as a culture within the labrum of the sanitary, uncolonized space of the abandoned.

We are gradually outsiders in the lives of our kids and our teens until we can no longer assemble, form and imagine them into being. When their work takes place, they are the inventors and we are no longer magicians.

You are gradually outsiders in the lives of your kids and your teens until you can no longer assemble, form and imagine them into being. When their work takes place, they are the inventors and you are no longer magicians.

(end)

Saturday, 27 March 2009

“One of the researches most urgently needed is into the whole problem of compromise and noncompromise. I am dangerously and mistakenly much against compromise: “my kind never gets anything done.”  The (self-styled) “Realists” are quite as dangerously ready to compromise. They seem never sufficiently aware of the danger; they much to quickly and easily respect the compromise and come to rest in it. I would suppose that nothing is necessarily wrong with compromise in itself, except that those who are easy enough to make it are easy enough to relax into and accept it, and that it thus inevitably becomes fatal.  Or more nearly, the essence of the trouble is that compromise is held to be a virtue itself.”

James Agee: From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Cited in Robert Coles: Teaching Stories. Modern Library, New York: 2004. Pp. 233.

Centrism may not really exist. Moderation may be an illusion.  Please consider this premise for the moment.

Maybe there is a “center.” While you read our argument, please keep in mind our openness to this proposition. Maybe you are a scholar and a leader in the domain of that “center.” It may exist. Maybe there are several! There may be substantial, reasoned and reasonable policy positions, ethically supported and credible, somewhere around the region of space we fondly and fuzzily call “the Center.” 

We, the Editors, are willing to have this whole line of inquiry be completely wrong. Divisive, inflammatory and offensive, even. Oh, yeah. But we ask you to consider the following as a radical thought experiment. As always, our postulate is not a solution. We theorize not to conclude anything, but to deepen the question and invite the conversation. (We urge you to read our Essay entitled HYPOCRISY IS BAD: A deliberate, Numbing Assault On Our Public Conversation and dated 05 November 2008 at  http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=904 ).

So please indulge us for a moment. We apologize for some weak geographical metaphors, and we ask you to consider this proposition:

Centrism may not really exist. At any “center,” maybe there is no substantial policy, no ethically supportable stance, no passionately held and shared belief (or indeed belief of any kind). Or even a valid opinion. Just observing reality from a place can only be fuzzy, soft, incorrect and epistemologically incomplete.

“The real power of junk thought lies in its status as a centrist phenomenon, fueled by the American credo of tolerance that places all opinions on an equal footing and makes little effort to separate fact from opinion.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason: Pp 211

Is it an illusion that there is anything at any sort of “center” that is not vacuous?

There really is no “place” in this region of the map. There is no “center” that can be reliably found and identified by any honest geography, or any honest geographer.

At the empty space at the “center” of our peculiar cartographic discourse there is really only fear and directionless immobility: inertia.

There is something at this certain “Center,” but it is not opinion, policy, ethical conviction, or shared belief. It is nothing of the kind. This something is not without “gravity.” It is fact extremely dense! It is like a black hole of Infinite Ignorance, from which no meaning and communication can escape. (Please see our Essay entitled EXTREMISM IS SAFE: How Is Radical Extremism reassuring? and dated September 5, 2008 at http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=174 ).

It is a kind of perch where the unsure, insecure and ignorant find a craven, sanctimonious pulpit from which to chortle and dismiss.

Have we have simply lost any shared clarity of language about a real, responsible “center” of policy positions and ethical substance? Maybe this is nothing more than a semantic issue, or a matter of confused and uncertain definitions. Has it become confusing and opaque due to imprecision? Intellectual sloppiness? Failure to consult our dictionaries?

We assert that if so, this is in itself a bad thing. At best things are certainly muddied and blurred by confusion. Imprecise, ambiguous usages are simply incorrect. We owe it to ourselves, and to one another, to commit ourselves to certain, precise and respectful use of language.

The richer, more nuanced and multi-dimensional our dialogue is, the more understanding we will share. Multiple meanings and metaphor add immeasurably to the art of communication.  Language is a living thing. Do we kill it by disrespecting its whole, ineffable existence? Believe us; we (the Editors) are social and anthropological radicals. A look around this website should convince you that we strive to be anything but dogmatic stiflers of language.

To be sure, the fearsome matters before us are complex, contradictory and multi-dimensional. Do we imagine we are simply being respectful of cultural and ethical difference? Do we accept another’s unique usage of terms because of her “unique social position, experience and subjectivity?” No. Mutual respect for cultural and personal difference does not allow us to simply invent our own language from our respective “experiences.” It is dishonest and destructive. We can only recover intellectual honesty, and the means to understand one another truly, with intellectual rigor about our meanings.

“Rereading Hofstadter at the end of the nineties, I was struck by the old-fashioned fairness of his scholarship- not the bogus “objectivity” or bland centrism that always locates truth equidistant from two points, but a serious attempt to engage the arguments of opponents and acknowledge evidence that runs contrary to one’s own biases.”

Susan Jacoby: The Age Of American Unreason: pp. xvi

Confusion and blurring may reflect more an intellectual sloppiness than a moral weakness- but we believe that both do us great harm. Mutual respect requires us to commit to complete, mutual integrity and shared, dogged pursuit of what we -and our words- truly “mean.” To fail is a moral weakness.

Moral weakness exposes us to genuine peril, though. We detect a theft of our language-  abstruse and dishonest: a hijack of  our public conversation. We witness the discursive appropriation of power through the appropriation of language and discourse. Done by “Blue Dog” Democrats, yes? Heinous! Grave injury is done to shared meaning, real ethical commitments, and convictions. Honest public conversation is suffocated by the instruments of power and identity. The true natures of ideas (and of ideological conflicts) are trivialized and debased.

But! Maybe worse yet: maybe the “center” is an epistemological falsity, a tautological error and a failure of reason. Under cover of smug righteousness, it mesmerizes us, and confounds and paralyzes serious contemplation of matters of ethical gravity. 

“Moreover, the much lionized American centrists, sometimes known as moderates, are in no way immune to the overwhelming pull of belief systems that treat evidence as a tiresome stumbling-block to deeper, instinctive “ways of knowing.”"

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason:___ (***) Pp 211

Okay. Maybe you are not religious, but not antireligionist. (And not an activist.) Maybe you are uncomfortable with the consequences of religious extremism. Or  hey- maybe you are an anti-religionist. More power to you.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about violence, or dislike it.  Or maybe you are passionately, committedly opposed to it, and you abhor violence by extremists— from any of the cardinal points of extremism. Or maybe you are actively anti-violent. More power to you.

But maybe you are just uncomfortable with conflict. You just don’t like -or don’t engage in- shrill, polarizing conflict.

Maybe you passionately, devotedly oppose hate and intolerance. Hurray. But maybe you are just not that angry with, or hateful toward, others. 

Maybe you are uncomfortable about some of what “extremists” and “extremism” produce. Or maybe you have complete conviction about the unethical and moral wrongs that some extremisms produce.

Maybe you are just- UNCOMFORTABLE. But not an activist.

But does this discomfort distract and obstruct us from having real convictions about what might discomfit us most? Discomfort may push you away from positions of real conviction- about racism, about sexuality, about violence. This is not neutrality, or even reason. Often, it is not even very complicated.

Our greatest discomfort should be at failed convictions, and failed resistance to racism, oppression and violence of all sorts. We should honor, and embrace, this sort of discomfort.

Only a strongly polarized moral compass will allow us to navigate surely.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about men having sex with other men, or women having sex with other women. But… maybe you are anti-gay.

Or maybe you just don’t want to have sex with other men, or women. Maybe you’re just altogether a bit uncomfortable about sex. Shouldn’t we be? It’s fun, but it is really quite an abyss, isn’t it? But maybe you are truly intolerant.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about wholesale violence undertaken abroad by your country. Maybe you are uncomfortable -but just a bit- that it is undertaken in your name.  Maybe you are also uncomfortable with people openly opposing and condemning that violence. You may be afraid to resist it yourself. You may be uncomfortable that you may be a victim of violence. But… maybe you are an ultarnationalist warmonger and advocate, nay embrace it. We don’t know.

Maybe you are uncomfortable about black people starving in Africa, and the oppression and killing there. Maybe you are uncomfortable about black people approaching your car. Maybe you are racist, and oppose the enfranchisement of others. Dunno.

Does discomfort ”pull” you diametrically into the center of a spectrum of beliefs? No. This is repulsion, not attraction. There is nothing “attractive” about it. The only thing “attractive” about the center is that the instinctively craven feel more secure when surrounded by the like-minded (-or the similarly un-minded). The “center” o(of a herd) is a matter of perceived reproductive advantage (for those of us who “believe” in evolution). There is an evolutionarily conferred reduction in the statistical likelihood that one will be eaten- especially by one’s own kind. (Please see our Essay on herd-opinioning, titled “EXTREMISM IS SAFE: How Is Radical Extremism Reassuring?” and dated 05 September 2008 (http://www.takebackourlanguage.com/blog/?p=174 . It is quite funny).

Could the following be true? If you are a “centrist:

This is not pallid neutrality.

You are not Neutral.

You are not Sober. 

You are not Responsible.

You are not Moral.

You are not “Moderate.”

You are not a “Centrist.”

You are not in the “Center” of anything.

You are Nowheresville, man.

You are not in a safe, secure and comfortable place.

You are not a political “actor,” or an “actor” in the world at all. You are not an “agent” and you are not a civic participant.

Centrism and moderation are not a moral stance.

Maybe there is no such thing as responsible moderation.

Try this: If you are a “centrist:”

You are at the margin.

You are at the sideline.

You are “on the bubble.”

You are at the junction of Apathy, Inaction and Passivity.

But you are not safe. You are at risk. You are in danger. You expose us all to extremisms.

You are next.

This is the absence of a moral or ethical stance.

You have an absence of conviction.

An absence of belief.

Maybe this is not really the opposite of taking a stance. That would be taking a stance, wouldn’t it? Maybe it isn’t Anti-stance. But it is an absence of stance, a failure of stance. It may not be the opposite of conviction, but it is an absence or failure of conviction. Not anti-conviction but a-conviction.  It may not be opposed to morals and mores, but it may be a-moral. Actually, it is anything but amoral. We assert that it is immoral, especially because it disguises itself as principalled and gives protective cover to evil. That is not amoral, is it? But let’s not lose sight: does it do wholesale damage to the operations of morals and mores in the world? Does it pretend to morality? Does it do violence to shared meaning, and to language itself?

Maybe you just don’t give a shit. You are still not a “centrist.”

But it may be that these are really horrible failures. Our proposition is that to fail to believe, to commit and to act may in fact be immoral. It may admit and abet the spread of extremisms and destruction. When there is nothing moderate about the beliefs and practices (and horrors) that you oppose, how can you be a “moderate?”

Is there no such thing as responsible moderation?

We argue that what we describe here far worse than irresponsible. Worse than merely sanctimonious, self-righteous and craven.

“Centrism” paints itself as reasoned, sound, grounded, and pragmatic. A sympathetic, accepting understanding of multiple dimensions and nuanced perspectives. It propounds to be knowledgeable and tolerant and honoring -perhaps embracing- of positions that it situates as, well, extreme. Relative to itself.

“Moderation” may seek to materialize and validate “solid” ground simply by finding a sort of “middle” ground among competing claims and calling it some sort of “common” ground. It is defined, manifested, and located in the world only by the coordinates of the “grounds” around it, however unfounded and spurious the claims thereto may be. It is “ungrounded,” and unfounded in the way that colonies and settlements may be unfounded.

It then (perfidiously) presumes to define all else, all that lies around it as far as the eye can see, as “extreme.” It paints all that is “extreme” as fundamentally immature. As lacking its multi-perspectival maturity.

Here: the premise is false that “centrism” is a measured, calculated response to real, complex and consequential situations. It is not measured, calculated or real. By positing other positions as extreme, relative to itself, IT POSITS EXACTLY NOTHING. It is vacuous.

Without inherent substance, “moderation” nonetheless endorses -even requires- the rejection, without serious consideration, analysis or understanding, of anything that another extremist might call “extreme.” 

“…With a renewed esteem, it may be the scholarly equivalent of the general public’s weariness with ideological polarizations that has sanctioned not only the demonization of opponents but the trivialization of all opposing positions.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of American Unreason: Pp xvi

It endorses the rejection of … -everything. Every conviction, every conclusion, every assertion and every truth. In fact, as a false epistemology, it requires the negation of every real (grounded) position or epistemological stance that matters.

It cloaks such rejection and intolerance in smug sanctimoniousness.

It glorifies knuckleheaded ignorance. More, it makes ignorance more powerful than reason or ethical conviction or truth. It evades them, trivializes them, infantilizes them and then eradicates them.

“As both dumbness and smartness are defined downward -among intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike- it becomes much easier to convince people of the validity of extreme positions. Not only basic knowledge but the ability to think critically are required to understand the factual errors (as distinct from differences of opinion) that generally provide the foundation for policies at the far ends of the political spectrum.”

Susan Jacoby, The Age Of America Unreason: pp. 298

We assert that it is intellectual sloppiness, moral weakness, and worse to mistake this “centrism” for a “stance” or position on any sort of issue.

But is it worse? Does it cosign, endorse, legitimize, in very fact give manifestation to, radical extremism? By putting all claims on some sort of “equal ground?”

It is far beyond sloppiness and weakness to mistake this for an ethos or creed. This is a comprehensive tautological error. It is the absence of any such things.

“Most” of us are not “somewhere in the center.” “Most” of us are chickenshit, or lazy.

 We ask: Are there solid, substantial, reasoned and reasonable policy positions, ethically supported and credible, somewhere around the region of space we fondly and fuzzily call “the Center?”

Centrism may not really exist. Moderation may be an illusion. What do you think?

(End)

KEEP YOUR HANDS AND ARMS AWAY FROM THE AISLE; Stay Inside The Vehicle.

The notion of “reaching across” some “aisle” is nonsense.

It is nothing more than notional, really, isn’t it. It is metaphor. It is an abstraction of an abstraction. Go ahead; extend the metaphor. Try to complete it so it actually makes sense: I’ll be reaching across (this) aisle and… what? Furtively handing across a tight roll of large bills? Agreeing to disagree? 

This acknowledges no relationship to real, particular issues, differences, interests or money at stake. Nothing to do with judgments about policies by people in real circumstances. 

There is an aisle, somewhere, we are told, but there sure as shit isn’t anyone reaching across it, especially at this hour of the night. Unless, we hope, it is the brown-skinned Cleaning Staff, reaching for the wet end of a blunt. I suppose there is some kind of “gallery” somewhere, though I suspect it is place where schoolteachers make public school children be quiet. There may be homeless people and stranded travelers sleeping there now…

 The Aisle is something that we will all use to elbow our way to the Exits, when the shit comes down. We’ve all seen it, haven’t we? Isn’t it always in the aisles that people are trampled to death? And they plunge, from the balconies… into the aisles.

 What is intended by saying “reaching across the aisle” makes more vivid sense to me as reaching from the rail of the cacophanous, tumultuous deck of one hideous, crowded ideological ship to the deck rail of another.

 The very image suggests people who have crowded their way on to these particular vessels like sheep or ungulates elbowing their way to perceived safety in the center of a herd. If agitated by rabble-rousers, cows and sheep will shove and crowd and elbow their way onto a Stock Trailer of Doom- or the deck of a ship, for that matter, I suppose. It’s just a degree of stampede, really. Fires will get these started really well, sure thing. And so, it will be one deck or another, we suppose…

 So be careful reaching across this particular imaginary “aisle.” It is a canonical rule of boatsmanship in moving water- never end up standing downstream from a broadside hull- and never, never end up getting pulled into the gap between two heaving, rolling hulls. If there is a sure way to get mashed into a thick, splintery, salty paste, this is it.

We have been fooled enough times to be skeptical that those people reaching across that “aisle” want us over there, on that side of the “aisle,” anyway. We think they may want us down there, between the hulls, as they roll and buck and grind and slam together. Doesn’t it make you a bit nauseous?

WHAT’S THIS?

We are here to have a general discussion about acute transformations.

WHAT’S THIS?

Enticing, colorful figures, no? Enlightening explanation and stimulating discussion are sure to follow.

NATURAL SYSTEMS are highly dynamic, increasingly unstable. Geometric, compounding, multiplying, exponential.

Here is your simple graph of exponential change occurring in some phenomenon. Some thing- measured on the “y” or vertical axis- is changing. Or “growing.” (Let’s call growth a subset of “change.” that will be consistent with our discussion here).

“It” is changing with respect to something else on the “x” axis. Here, the “x” axis is denoted as “time.” That will be apropos here too. We could show lots of other things, in other ways, but for our purposes here we can let the “x” axis refer, in general, to time.

As you can see, this is a general discussion. We do not mean to lecture. You are familiar with and understand simple geometric behavior like this. (Insert citation and reference to the Web Lesson by —-.)

So let’s just intuitively treat the “x” axis as time. The time scale along this axis is not defined. It is variable from illustration to illustration. It is speculative, and illustrative only. It should suggest thought and not conclusions. The graphs illustrate only very general phenomena, and the subject of “time” in this discussion is a very uncertain (and controversial) thing. Questions of time and timing are central here, as you will well know from the uncertainty of your own speculations. When indeed? How fast? Speed is, after all, change over time…

We repeatedly use vivid, colorful figures in order to constantly keep the acute, irresistible nature of exponential growth in sharp focus as we go along.

Figure 1.

 t = TIME

Time on “x” axis. Something Else is Changing Exponentially.

Figure 2.

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM

You recognize this. This is how variable phenomena stay notionally “stable” over time under the influence of “moderating” or modulating external factors.

Figure 3.

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM (2)

Here’s a graphic way of looking at it.

Figure 4.

PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM

Something is relatively (dynamically) stable. Over a much longer time frame, external “events” perturb it, and it departs from its range of stability. It then “equilibrates” around some dramatically different, new range of stability.

Our general awareness of this phenomenon is associated with biological evolution. Good resources would be Edmund O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould, Matt Ridley and other good popular writers who discuss biological evolution. (We have here E.O. Wilson, In Search Of Nature (New York: Island Press1996), Stephen Jay Gould, Full House (New York: Harmony Books 1996), and Matt Ridley, The Red Queen (New York: Penguin Books 1993).

Of course, this behavior is not restricted to biological phenomena (none of the best rules of the universe are). This matter is studied in systems theory, chaos theory and theoretical math, too. A good place to look into this would be James Gleick, Chaos: Making A New Science (New York: Penguin Books 1997), and, of course, Ilya Prigogine (Insert Reference).

(A note about dimensionality. Our graphic figures here are in two dimension, and we will keep them that way. In general, everything we have to say can be enriched by thinking in more than two dimensions- especially mathematical constructs like chaos theory. After all, reducing things to two dimensions is really quite an abstraction isn’t it?)

Figure 5.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE ABOUT TIME.

And Some Thoughts about Numbers and Words.

 It is very difficult to explain and evoke with words alone the natural behaviors of systems that we are discussing here. Some of us are graphic learners, anyway. Some of us are tactile learners and some of us are auditory learners and some of us are oral learners and some of us are oral-genital learners. But we can all learn, right?

We do this without numbers. There are only a “couple” of numbers here, and we have taken pains to write them out alphabetically, and they will (still) be controversial. Numbers provoke controversy and argument, rightly so. They are also intellectually seductive and distracting, and rightly so. We are not demographers, or toxicologists, or experts of any particular stripe. You, dear Reader, probably are. Please comment, or argue, or help us with facts or data or references or proofs, if you care to. Please.

This presentation is crude. Intentionally. It is abstract. Deliberately. It is imprecise. On purpose. Our intent is manifestly not to make proofs, or arguments, or conclusions, or refutations. It is not to present points of view. It is to evoke understanding.

The references we include are not intended to provide up-to-date data, or cutting-edge projections, or contemporary research, either. Deliberately. They are books, generally, that have helped us with understanding and meaning. If you care to extend our conversation with data and references that are contemporary and comprehensive, please do.

We intend to be general and abstract. We argue that the general observations we make here are uncontroversial- at least among the sane. Nearly anyone likely to read this will recognize uncertainty, argument, contention and controversy in these sober matters. But no-one will dispute the generalities, we hope, abstracted as they are, unless they are ideologically or personally unable to come to terms with this.

Some of us have a hard time acknowledging the harm we do when our livelihoods -and our very lives- depend on it. People in business can have a hard time acknowledging the contradictions in capitalism. People who justify their consumption can have a hard time acknowledging the harm we do to others and our planet. For many of us, the coming transformations don’t only challenge the goodness of our self-perceptions. They provoke visceral, existential fear.

But we argue that there are not two -or multiple- sides to this. We mean to capture the whole story here, without the kinds of particularities that might personalize this or create false ideological divides or controversies. We are not right, or wrong. If you want to argue about that, do it at home. We are all in the shit here, and there isn’t any other side to it. That is what we mean by the whole story, and it is why we mean to be crude, blunt, abstract and general. No-one is innocent. And no-one is on the right side of anything. Not the Law, or Goodness, or Righteousness or Rightness, or God.

Figure 6.

EXPONENTIAL CHANGE COMPOUNDED UPON EXPONENTIAL CHANGE.

Acceleration. Turbo-charged.

Figure 7.

“STRANGE ATTRACTORS.”

When a previously stable system becomes unstable and departs (exponentially), we have no idea where it might go. In some sense, we cannot even imagine the possibilities of new “states” to which a now wildly unstable system might migrate and evolve a new state of dynamic stability. In chaos theory, these “states” can be called “attractors.” There are even “strange attractors.” Like my sister. Good references would be, again, James Gleick and Ilya Prigogine.

Figure 8.

UTTER UNPREDICTABILITY.

Again, from the perspective or point of view of a familiar and recognizable stability (or “attractor”), possible futures are utterly unpredictable. They are profoundly, literally, unimaginable. Future, altered paradigms have uncountenanced, incomprehensibly foreign paradigms of their own. Nothing can prepare us. (See Immanuel Wallerstein, cited below).

Figure 9.

“BREAKOUT:” BIFURCATION

Stable systems are dynamically “equilibrating” because external destabilizing events (inputs) are countered by relatively small “outputs” that reorient the system back toward the “attractor” around which it is “balanced.”

If  “outputs” become gradually larger relative to “inputs,” the system is increasingly unstable. This is “positive feedback.” Eventually, some “input” will cause the system to completely depart from the region of stability and head for… well, the unknowable. Some mid-sized city in Nebraska. Bifurcation.

Figure 10.

EXPONENTIAL CHANGES AND LIMITS.

Wherever you are in an exponential equation or system, everything looks the same. Your experience of the changes in the system today looks like the experience of yesterday, and of tomorrow (until some kind of “breakout” occurs). One cannot, from within the system, tell where one is on the “slope” of exponential change. Everything is relative.

Only externalities, in the form of limits, make it possible to distinguish one “location” from another inside the logic of exponential growth. It is only something from without the paradigm of geometric increase -something non-geometrical, or absolute, or linear, or “external” in a profound sense- that disturbs the “view.”

Only something that is systemically, mathematically “alien” can even enter into the picture and give it any sort of datum or baseline. Exponential change doesn’t even look like change, since it is eternal… relative change. Until something alien introduces absolute change. Then, and only then, can you see any sort of distinct landscape going by: external, non-geometric “limiting” factors like resource constraints, or catastrophe, or imminent paradigmatic transformation. Then you see immense, profound change in the system: radical departure from growth, e.g. decline, cataclysm, extermination. One could profitably read E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (London: Blond and Briggs, 1973) and (further citations: The Limits To Growth and ref. population). 

Figure 11.

GROWTH UPON GROWTH.

Look at the form here- just so we’re not mistaking anything. Externalities impose dynamic stability on a phenomenon that would otherwise multiply geometrically. Increasing instability leads to a “bifurcation” or departure from the region of stability. The system roars off to some new “attractor” or region, where it stabilizes.

Notice the overall form here. The larger form shows a geometrical “growth” at a meta-level. The local phenomenon of geometric multiplication is “regulated.” At the larger “scale,” the meta-phenomenon is also geometrical multiplication. Many natural systems exhibit this- e.g. human population.

Consider the “acceleration” of two (or more) geometrically multiplying factors. Then “multiply” that behavior by this meta-phenomenon. Phenomenal!

Figure 12.

ACCELERATION PHENOMENON.

Think of the step-wise line on this figure as some sort of progression of successive transformations. “improvements” in agricultural technology would be a good example. These “enhancements” are an accelerant- they geometrically compound the underlying exponential growth.

Figure 13.

TECHNOLOGICAL “ADVANCES” AS TRANSFORMATIONS.

Here’s an example. Quarrel with the simplification if you like. We are not experts and will do you the indignity of not being offended. The graph represents (theoretically) human population. Let’s say, planetary. The domestication of food-stock (plant and animal), cultivation, and the major technological achievement of the moldboard plow each successively multiply the productive capacity of agriculture and husbandry. Each leads to a multiplication in population. We… are in the Age of Petroleum Fertilizers and Mechanized, Industrial Agriculture and Resource Exploitation.

Figure 14.

FIRST GENERAL FORM.

Here’s the general form. Think of medical technology, or transportation. And think of social/cultural technologies too- cooperation, language, exchange media, urbanization, labor specialization, labor exploitation, capital accumulation.

Figure 15.

“TRAUMATIC” EVENTS ARE THE NORM.

Another General Form. Traumatic, Large-Scale Variations Become the Norm.

Accelerating transformations, like technological innovations, actually multiply effects beyond the underlying geometrical growth. But they are external, and may have fundamental limits in themselves. They can have their own internal, destabilizing limiting “logic-” especially since they cause the underlying phenomenon to be altered- but note that they act as “local” equilibrating events. Think about the “hydraulic civilizations” that grew enormously because of extensive irrigation technologies, such as the Anasazi, the Meso-American and Peruvian, the Egyptian and the Chinese civilizations.

Figure 16.

MAY YOU HAVE THE MISFORTUNE TO LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES.

Another figure returning our attention to human population over time. Think about it- these systemic instabilities and traumas make for exciting times! Lots of people dying and shit.

Figure 17.

WHO, ME?

 
When Barbara Ehrenreich refers to the possibility, even likelihood, of human extinction in the journal The Nation, it is time to think. (Insert Citation.) There have been some big extinctions in the past, and believe me, they must have been exciting! Again, one could refer to evolutionary paleontologists like Wilson and Gould. A particularly poignant book to go look at would be: Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns Of Life And The Future Of Mankind (New York: Anchor Books 1995). No-one in their right mind disputes that we are in a great period of great extinctions- one to compare to the grand-daddy of ‘em all, the end-Permian. And the vulnerable species are the out-liers, especially the large, the highly specialized, those that depend on a complex hierarchy of other life forms, and those that consume food that is most like themselves. In any self-respecting extinction, odds are the large mammals are toast.

Figure 18.

IS THERE A MORAL QUESTION HERE?

Probably not really, looking at the overall picture we are putting together. But here. Three figures that follow this one will explain it.

Figure 19.

“SOFT LANDING.”

“a” here can represent some (theoretical) numerical value. This could apply (does apply) to amoeba and mule deer, but say human population is increasing rapidly, and limits and traumas lead to a sort of a catastrophic “imbalance” and population “adjusts” and rebalances around some significantly lowered number. Let’s say, and we could argue, that the peak value is around eleven billion living humans, and the lower value shown is about six billion. “a” is then about five billion, no?

This is speculative. We don’t assert that human population can stabilize, long-term, around six billion. It can’t.

The question of time and timing is compelling here, too. If the elapse of time between these two points is long, then the decrease will be a significant, but maybe not cataclysmic, change in the rate of deaths over births. But maybe you are a demographer (we are not). Remember that right now, any rate of births over deaths is within a complex, exponential population growth equation, anyway.

If the time frame is shorter, say on the order of a human lifetime or a generation, things look mighty exciting indeed. Five billion people die, excess of deaths over births (roughly), young, early, reluctantly and of “unnatural cause.” Wow!

The population of parts of Europe generally decreased by about a third in the course of the Plagues. One could read Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (Toronto: Random House 1978) for a lively account.

Figure 20.

“HARD LANDING.”

A more extreme scenario. Population screams up a bit higher (this is what many of us have been concerned about). Resource crisis is more acute, rapid and generally calamitous. Just for fun, let’s say that in this scenario, humans become extinct within what we may generally think of as the same “event.” Maybe within one lifetime, or one generation, even.

Say population peaked at more like fifteen million. From fifteen to zip in a lifetime. Use your imagination. Now That’s got to have enough excitement to go around for the whole group! Just for the record: We, the Editors, think maybe birth rates worldwide will go down, now.

Figure 21.

IS THIS A MORAL QUESTION?

This figure just abstractly compares the two generalizations. Does you inner paleontologist really give a shit? Or are you really concerned about experiencing this kind of excitement yourself? Moral question, or no?

Look at “b” minus “a.” Fifteen million people die, unintentionally, leaving none (and an unrecognizable planet). Or five million die, leaving some, on an unfamiliar planet, and with a wildly unstable and improbable future. The net, b – a = ten billion excess deaths. Insofar as this matters, this is why some of us have made precautionary urges for us to change our collective behavior.

Let’s take a bathroom break. Back in fifteen minutes?

Figure 22.

EXTERNAL POPULATION EFFECTS

Back to another example of transformation. Say medical technologies lead to successive increases in life expectancy, and hence population. But then a global health event disrupts the picture- say the overload of toxic build-up in the human environment- and population precipitously declines. Our Stolen Future by Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers (New York: Penguin 1996)  (and….) is a worthwhile read. And, of course, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Laurie Garret: The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases In A World Out Of Balance (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux 1994) is a responsible account.

Figure 23.

Figure 23.

SECOND GENERAL FORM.

A general form again. Technologies have unintended consequences. Those destructive, unpredicted ones? Those consequences? Those were the unintended ones….

Let’s say that the upper graph there represents dollars spent globally, on medical care and technologies. This could be per capita, or absolute. Whatever. We, the Editors, think it has probably peaked, either way. That other curve there is human population, marching along… exponentially.

Or let’s say that the upper graph there represents human life expectancy, at birth, worldwide. It has been increasing, due to a number of factors, many of them discussed here… until now. That is human population there again, in the background, marching along… exponentially. We, the Editors, think maybe human life expectancy at birth, globally, has peaked, for the foreseeable future. Maybe forever. Probably.

Figure 24.

SALVATION? OR JUST ANOTHER TRAUMA?

There are always unintended consequences. Technologies (of this kind) are self-arresting, and inherently contain the contradictions and limits that will bring the system back within “the rules.” It is one of the astounding features of humans that some of us always believe that this solution, this technology, this salvation, this is the one… that won’t. Them’s the rules.

Figure 25.

MULTIPLYING FREQUENCY AND INTENSITY.

We have reached a region of profound instability. Relatively small perturbances in the system are producing more extreme and radical “outputs.” The global climate is disrupted. Our analytic sciences, that are only beginning to understand and describe highly complex systems, are inadequate. The sciences of stable systems are inadequate to give meaning to the reality of profound transformation.

The global “climate” (the term itself seems tiny and inadequate to the cataclysmic transformation our ecosystem is embarking upon) is disrupted.

Our society, our species and our interspecies interdependencies are on the brink of unprecedentedly traumatic disruptions that will feed back upon themselves. There is much, much more to say about social transformations, disruptions and destructive, violent “positive feedback” than we will say here. A look back at Figure 20 should do the trick. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride together.

It is refreshing that Immanuel Wallerstein has examined the implications of chaos theory for social theory. In The End Of The World As We Know It (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1999) he analyses increasing economic and social instability and disruptive positive feedback, and how they lead to radical departure from a region of social, cultural and economic stability. (Insert quote from The Nation).

Figure 26.

THE GREEN COUNTER-REVOLUTION.

 
Here’s an example. Food production has been increasing, and human population with it- exponentially. It is going to decline. It is going to go from a multiplying feedback to an absolute limit – nongeometric- situation.

And! Fisheries are collapsing.

Figure 27.

THE END OF FUEL.

Civilizations have grown as their technologies to extract, transport and utilize energy have multiplied. Then they have reached the absolute limits of their energy bases. The technologies, the complex civilizations that allowed their accumulation, and their populations have all concurrently collapsed. The collapse of civilizations correlates precisely to their blowing through -geometrically- the limits -absolute- of their resource bases. You have probably read the popular Jared Diamond books, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies (New York: Norton 1998) and Collapse (Insert Citation).

Figure 28.

THIRD GENERAL FORM.

Another general form. Resource: you name it. Water, soil, air, plant-based foods, fish, oil, wood, what-have-you.

The absolute resource constraints are reached, simultaneously, for many critical resources. Each in turn weakens the stability of the system. The unstable swings introduced by each reinforce the others, in “positive feedback.” At each instant, the increasing instability of the system makes it more brittle, less resilient, less able to neutralize destabilizing “inputs.” Each trauma, in turn, reduces the resourcefulness of the system.

Instability is a geometric phenomenon, too. This is, after all, within the logic of a geometrical system. Compounding is negative. This is what “positive feedback” means. If you have an account that grows by some percentage and you make a regular draw on it that exceeds that growth, what happens? The power of compounding works both ways.

Figure 29.

FOURTH GENERAL FORM.

Figure 30

FIFTH GENERAL FORM.

 
Another general form.  Some “thing” is accelerated by external transformation such as technology (the upper orange curve). This accelerated phenomenon runs ahead of the background rate of increase of, say, human population (the lower tan curve).  Look at the affect on human population- the bold, pink curve. Extetrnalities, in the form of a geometric “accelerant” and an absolute limit or constraint that is outside the paradigm of exponential growth, have destabilized the system. Collapse ensues.

Examples abound. We have cited many. Now’s your chance- use your imagination. Here’s a good example: petroleum. Oil extraction, world wide, has peaked. This is not subject to credible dispute.

Our production of food depends on petroleum. We use multiple calories in motor fuels to produce a calorie of food. And nitrate fertilizers are literally made of petroleum.

That big red dot there? The End. Some absolute limit. It is observable in either axis, once you see it. It is an absolute limit to an absolute number- say the number of people a resource base can sustain. And it is observable in time- the time beyond which the system cannot be “equilibrated.”

A Note About “Carrying Capacity.” (Insert Text.)

Figure 31.

ABSOLUTE LIMITS: SIXTH GENERAL FORM.

An increasing unstable system (declining upper line- declining absolutely) supported by declining resource base (declining line- absolutely) with declining resiliency (declining line) and declining ability to absorb perturbances (yes, absolutely! the declining line).

Externally, absolute limits (the ability of the natural system to be a “sink” for degradation and contamination, depletion of fisheries, limits to agricultural production, etc). Come up as events.

Instabilities in the system lead to increasing frequency and magnitude of systemic social traumas, e.g. social inequalities, injustice, instability, violence, extremism, totalitarianism, etc.

External traumatic events compound and multiply the instabilities- e.g. climatic disruption, environmental catastrophes, rising sea levels, natural catastrophes both predictable and unimaginable.

Multiply all these together. This is, after all, a geometric, exponential system and these effects all compound and amplify one another.

Figure 32.

THE SEVENTH GENERAL FORM.

Get some sleep. 

“To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect,” Jones [Judge making ruling] concluded. “However, the fact that scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions.”

Susan Jacoby: The Age of American Unreason. Random House: New York, 2008. Pp. 29. (In reference to Court Finding Re. creationism in public education.)

We offer the following. Copernicus’ theory was a complete and sufficient explanation of the observable astronomical phenomena of the time, given his contemporary tools of observation and analytic methods. The cosmologies of pre-christian cultures in the Fertile Crescent found flaming chariots arcing through the sky to be complete and sufficient explanations for their observed experience. Today’s religious extremists would use the apparent incompleteness(?) of Darwin’s thought to reject the entire body of evidence proving that evolution takes place. They would not only reject it themselves, but would expel it from our teaching curriculum. They might settle for using it to “wedge” (remember Darwin’s “wedge” analogy?) creation “science” into our schools.

Copernicus’ theory, and those of, say, Newton and Einstein, have proved to be incomplete and insufficient explanations of our entire, observable reality, partly in light of the scientific “progress” they engendered. They are still valid. Needless to say, creationism provides a coherent, credible, complete and sufficient explanation for nothing –precisely nothing- in our observed reality. It is faith; as such, it stands proudly, precisely and solely on the fact that it bears no connection –none- to observed reality.

The Roman Church painfully and reluctantly acknowledged the validity of Copernican science. They even permit it to be taught in Italian schools! Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s observations of special and general relativity seem to be accepted and acceptable science. (Or maybe not; maybe that stuff isn’t taught in our dumbed-down public education system but only in those high-brow egg-head intellectual schools up East, and is not presently targeted by the creationists.)

Einstein’s observations demanded further development of the theories (and observations) of Copernicus. Thusly, the “incompleteness” of Copernican astronomy is proved. (What business do these people have trafficking in “proofs,” anyway? Why do we bother to endure this tripe?) Before long, will this be used to thrust the geocentric “theory” of astronomy into our classrooms, alongside the heliocentric astronomical “theory?”

“Instead, I write in my notebook, Faith is belief in something you have absolutely no reason or right to believe in. Mentally, I list: faith in God, faith in the church, faith in your spouse, faith in the next sunrise, faith in motions of the stars themselves. Then I write: Faith is beyond thought. Faith is an absolute certainty of something that is so patently absurd you could never justify it to anyone who didn’t already have the same faith.”

Gerald N. Callahan, Ph.D: Faith, Madness and Spontaneous Human Combustion: What Immunology Can Teach Us About Self-Perception. New York: Berkeley Books, 2002. Pp 162