#arthur shostak

[redshift-13]

Making the human future more intelligent, visionary, creative and liberating

Looking through some old notes I haven’t seen in a while I came across the following.  They contribute to a dialogue we on the left need to have and be mindful of, which centers around the theme of pushing back against conditions of conformity and forces that seek to narrow, confine, and limit us individually and socially.

...

“We believe that several key changes have happened since the high point of radical design in the 1970s that imaginative, social, and political speculation today more difficult and less likely.  First, during the 1980s design became hyper-commercialized to such an extent that alternative roles for design were lost.  Socially oriented designers such as Victor Papanek who were celebrated in the 1970s were no longer regarded as interesting; they were seen as out of sync with design’s potential to generate wealth and to provide a layer of designer gloss to every aspect of our daily lives… Design became fully integrated into the neoliberal model of capitalism that emerged during the 1980s, and all other possibilities for design were soon viewed as economically inviable and therefore irrelevant.”

“Market-led capitalism had won and reality instantly shrank, becoming one dimensional.  There were no longer other social or political possibilities beyond capitalism for design to align itself with.  Anything that did not fit was dismissed as fantasy, as unreal.”

p.8 in Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, By Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/speculative-everything

...

“A university affiliation for philosophers certainly has advantages: It roots out the phonies and incompetents; it provides thinkers with communities of peers; it keeps them in the black. But the training that Mandarins must undergo has the well-known disadvantage of churning out acolytes and clones rather than independent thinkers. Tenure can, in principle, serve to protect the freedom of the Gadfly to provoke and the Sage to meditate, but the graduate school, job market, and tenure track that must be endured along the way tend to produce a pliant, unmeditative type, willing to settle for a professorial chair, well-fed children, and picket fences.”

http://www.chronicle.com/article/Philosophy-Beyond-the-Academy/238052

...

"When I teach this class on utopian thought I ask students...design your own utopia, or what should utopia include.  And generally I'm amazed at the poverty of imagination--how limited people can think."

From an interview with UCLA Professor Russell Jacoby on Changesurfer radio [defunct], 'The Decline of Utopianism and the Public Intellectuals', from June 6, 2010.  Jacoby teaches a course on Utopian thought, and is author of The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy.

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"I had the opportunity to work with a very progressive design team, which had full participation of the owner, contractor, designer, and engineer in a highly integrated process.  They were amazing in their ability to deliver on project specifications.  At first, I thought there was no more room for improvement, they were so exemplary.  But there was an Achilles heel, and that was the ability to collectively see and design a future state which transcended the limitations of current assumptions. They were their own obstacle."

This quote is from Vera Novak, a green building early adopter and blogger, and the first person to receive the US Green Building Council LEED certification: http://www.ecobuildtrends.com/2012/11/giving-thanks-for-opportunity-to-create.html

...

The following is from an interview with Reinhold Martin, by Lee Stickells and Charles Rice.  Martin is author of Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again:

"Much of the impetus for writing the book came from sitting on design juries and teaching studios in which it was clear, time and again, that students were simply unable to think structural change in the present. ‘‘Architecture or revolution?’’ had ceased to be a question. Not universally, but predominantly."

"The utopian function of the university as a world apart, always-already compromised and ambivalent to be sure, is itself in danger of vanishing altogether."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/93395957/Interview-With-Reinhold-Martin-Utopia-s-Ghost-2010-Architectural-Theory-Review p. 325

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"If there is any hope of utopian thinking, there must be a broad-based change in thinking about long-term futures, in ways that go beyond relief of the current problems.  Would-be utopians must supply complex detailed images of the social, economic, political, and personal lives of all people if they are to have any credibility or have any value in directing the evolution of society.  Utopian visions must be at least as grainy and engaging as their dystopian competitors.

Numerous things underline the absence of positive thinking about the future but at its core is a fundamental lapse in education, in thinking positively, in thinking systematically, and in thinking optimistically.  A recent issue of the New Scientist reported on a contest looking merely to 2050; none of the contestants dealt well with the social and personal aspects of life.

My own experience, reported elsewhere, in conducting 250 people at a World Future Society meeting through a three-hour exercise on the next thousand-year future, was disappointing.  People were asked as a wrap-up to create a picture or an image of some tiny piece of life in the world 3000.  The responses could have been drawn from situations found in the previous six months of the New York Times."

From Joseph Coates in Viable Utopian Ideas: Shaping a Better World, Ed. by Arthur Shostak

...

Where does this leave progressives, lefties and radicals?  What are we doing about the general poverty of imagination?  How proficient are we in telling stories about the futures we want?  How can we polish our social design lenses to see better and beyond what’s given us?  

#utopia studies #utopian literature #design thinking #speculative design #social design #anti-design #conformity #liberation #architecture #creativity #imagination #individuality #science fiction #futures studies #joseph coates #arthur shostak #reinhold martin #russell jacoby #anthony dunne #fiona raby #vera novak

[jewishbookworld]

Stealth Altruism by Arthur B. Shostak

Stealth Altruism by Arthur B. Shostak

Though it has been nearly seventy years since the Holocaust, the human capacity for evil displayed by its perpetrators is still shocking and haunting. But the story of the Nazi attempt to annihilate European Jewry is not all we should remember. Stealth Altruism tells of secret, non-militant, high-risk efforts by “Carers,” those victims who tried to reduce suffering and improve everyone’s chances…

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#Arthur B. Shostak #Jewish Book Council

[yervand63]

Economic Stats Won't Tell Us What Really Causes Recessions

Economic Stats Won’t Tell Us What Really Causes Recessions

By Frank Shostak

Most economists are of the view that by means of economic indicators, it is possible to identify early signs of an upcoming recession or prosperity. What is the rationale behind this opinion?

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) introduced the economic indicators approach in the 1930s. A research team led by W. C. Mitchell and Arthur F. Burns studied about 487…

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[ntrending]

Our first contact with aliens might be with their robots

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/our-first-contact-with-aliens-might-be-with-their-robots/

Our first contact with aliens might be with their robots

Researchers working on Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) efforts hunt for the same thing that their predecessors sought for decades—a sign that life arose, as Carl Sagan would say, on another humdrum planet around another humdrum star and rose up into something technologically advanced.

It could happen any day. A strange radio signal. A weird, brief flash in the night sky. A curiously behaving star with no natural explanation.

It could be anything, so SETI researchers are casting a wide net, tracking down as many promising leads as they can. But one thing they’ve started to realize is that if a civilization from another world follows a similar path to our own, then we may be dealing with a whole different form of brainpower. Not a little green person, Vulcan, or strange organism we aren’t yet fathoming, but an artificial intelligence.

To understand why the first intelligence we meet might be artificial, we have to go back to early efforts to look for life around other stars. SETI researchers started listening to the cosmos on the assumption that aliens might begin radio transmissions as a first advanced technological step if they’re at all like us. There’s reason to believe that, like our own path, getting from the era of radio to the computing era is a small jump.

“By 1900 you had radio; by 1945 you had computers,” Seth Shostak, senior scientist at the SETI Institute, says. “It seems to me that’s a hard arc to avoid.”

And from there, it may just be a matter of getting those computers smaller and smaller as they get smarter and smarter. Automated processes learn to adapt on their own, and someday, rudimentary intelligence arrives, just as it has here.

“There’s currently an AI revolution, and we see artificial intelligence getting smarter and smarter by the day,” Susan Schneider, an associate professor of cognitive science and philosophy at the University of Connecticut who has written about the intersection of SETI and AI, says. “That suggests to me something similar may be going on at other points in the universe.”

So what will that actually look like from our perspective here on Earth?

Worlds of Algorithms

Artificial intelligence on Earth isn’t quite at the level where we need to be worried about it. Yet. While a series of artificial intelligence algorithms may govern the day to day world, whether they’re recommending Netflix shows or determining what shows up in your Facebook feed or even sorting through treasure troves of science data, it’s a stretch to say that a Matrix scenario where intelligent robots ensnare and enslave humanity is going to happen in the next 20 years.

But the initial development of AI was incredibly fast. The first experiments in artificial intelligence came not long after the first (or one of the first) digital computers, ENIAC, went online in 1946. By 1948, researchers were attempting to make Turing B-type machines, computers that could solve problems dynamically. By 1954, the first neural network, an artificial brain mimicking the human neuron structure and decision making process, was online. This could mean that in other civilizations—not just our own—AI comes shortly after digital computing, however primitive.

So why haven’t we heard from other civilizations yet? Sure, time and space are vast, and relatively speaking we just started looking. But there are other limitations to life as well. There’s an idea in SETI circles known as the Fermi Paradox: if there are technologically advanced alien civilizations out there, why haven’t we heard from them? One solution often proposed is the great filter.

The great filter is the idea that technological progress creates as many problems as it solves. As a society advances to a certain point, those threats can outweigh the benefits, resulting in the wholesale destruction of a civilization. It’s possible we’ve already been through one step toward the Great Filter; The first digital computer was built somewhere between 1939 and 1946—the same time period as the development of the first nuclear weapons.

Simply put, some civilizations, whether through global-scale climate change, nuclear war, or famine, may kill themselves before they can become truly advanced. Artificial intelligence has even been added onto the list of potential threats at times—the Skynet solution to the Fermi Paradox.

Our present day AI isn’t too sophisticated. It can do a really good job at pattern recognition and filtering, but that’s after a lot of training, and it currently doesn’t undergo Darwinian evolution. Unless its programmed to, it doesn’t reproduce, and it isn’t necessarily sentient—it’s more like an animal running on instinct rather than a fully self-aware autonomous entity.

In her writings on AI and SETI, Schneider says, “I pushed for agnosticism about machine consciousness. We just don’t have any clue if consciousness could be non-biological.”

But non-biological components could be added to conscious beings. Societies who DO survive the great filter may do so alongside the machines, Schneider says.

“I’m actually concerned that technological civilizations may not last long, but if they do, there’s a lot of reasons to believe they’ll be post-biological,” Schneider says. “They’ll enhance their brains towards synthetic intelligence.”

In other words … cyborg societies. And from techno-enhanced, you might start to get the sort of stuff of science fiction dreams—sentient robots. Maybe it’s computer-augmented beings uploading or replicating their consciousness, ala a few episodes of Black Mirror. Or maybe it’s AI that reached the singularity.

But as Shostak points out, planets are volatile, prone to eruptions and earthquakes and the effects of an aging star. “Machines aren’t necessarily going to stay on a planet,” he says. “Planets are dangerous for machines.”

Instead, they’ll likely do what we continually aspire to do, and head for the stars.

Points beyond

The popular image of SETI is, for many, Jodi Foster in Contact with a set of headphones at the Very Large Array in New Mexico catching a deliberate signal from some aliens at an outpost around the star Vega. But SETI researchers aren’t just listening for aliens, they’re looking for them too—scanning the skies for flashing light beacons, shadows crossing stars, or, in the next few decades, weird signals in atmospheres of planets outside our solar system.

“I try to keep a very open mind about what we’re looking for. When SETI succeeds it won’t be like science fiction where we find something like us,” Jason Wright, an associate professor at Penn State, says.

The first SETI detections, should they ever happen, may be hard to parse out, just like Tabby’s Star, the dust-dimmed star that at one point Wright and others considered a possible (but unlikely) alien megastructure candidate. If the first signal from an extraterrestrial civilization is like Contact, the signal may be designed to be captured. “If that’s true, then presumably it’ll have information about whoever sent the signal,” Wright says. But otherwise, Wright says, “When we finally do find something, we really won’t understand what we’re looking at.”

But given that compared to advanced civilizations our cosmic footprint may be small, it’s unlikely that anyone out there knows we’re here, so we’re much more likely to catch a passive, rather than active, kernel of information coming from the planet. There are still ways to tell what’s going on. One idea put forth in SETI literature is the idea that we could find aliens by their air pollution or, with even bigger telescopes, by the glint of artificial objects on the planet—like catching the spectra of a large, photovoltaic panel-like silicon structure meant to harvest a lot of energy from a star. “If you see a molecule that has to be synthetic, that does not arise in nature, then that’s pretty definitive,” Wright says.

Even then, we won’t necessarily know if the society we’re detecting is made up of organic or synthetic life. And since SETI efforts are only going off one data point—us—we really don’t know what an advanced machine intelligence might look like vs aliens with unfamiliar…everything. A radio signal will likely come from an alien machine, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the operator.

“There’s no particular SETI effort being made to find the machines because no one knows quite how to find that,” Shostak says.

Those machines could be alien technology that has advanced with some degree of artificial intelligence but that aren’t necessarily a sentient artificial intelligence. Maybe we could, instead, keep an eye out for something like an advanced alien space probe—a Voyager on steroids.

Probing questions

Last year, a cigar shaped hunk of rock passed through our solar system—but it only dropped by for a quick visit before bolting back out to parts unknown. Called ‘Oumuamua, it was the first confirmed interstellar asteroid, though recently published research suggests it may be a comet. As often happens with something weird, the question of aliens was at least briefly raised, if not taken entirely seriously.

‘Oumuamua was tumbling end over end, over and over again. While some people called it “Rama,” comparing it to an alien space probe in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, Wright says the tumbling probably indicated that it was all too natural. Comets and asteroids almost always spin, and ‘Oumuamua was definitely no exception. It definitely wasn’t a “Bracewell probe,” a type of hypothetical autonomous spacecraft designed with the express purpose of serving as an interplanetary interspecies liaison.

We know, generally, what’s a comet or asteroid by looking at it. We’ve identified most of the kinds of space rocks we expect to see. Something from elsewhere may have a different composition or color depending on where it’s from. Had we the chance to study ‘Oumuamua in more detail, we might have been able to compare it to the families of asteroids in our own solar system.

There are ways to tell whether or not an interstellar object is natural. Let’s say something coming through is a weird color. And not only is it a weird color, but it’s not spinning or tumbling, but staying in place. If it’s an alien probe, “you might expect to have attitude control, so it won’t be spinning. It won’t be tumbling,” Wright says.

Given the great distances between stars, its possible that an alien civilization may not send its own individuals here, but might send a robot our way. We’ve already done that five times over with Pioneers 10 and 11, Voyagers 1 and 2, and New Horizons, all of which are on trajectories out of the solar system, and the first four of which have messages from Earth ready for aliens to find.

In addition to an odd color and a steady path, there might be an actual lightbulb moment too. They “could have lights,” Wright says. It’s something proposed in a 2011 paper by Avi Loeb, a Harvard researcher. We could also look for a robotic probe entering and exiting certain areas of the solar system, or shifting it’s flightpath through our neighborhood.

“If it’s active then it’s probably going to change its orbit to see something,” Wright says.

The idea of finding something in our own solar system is strange and outlandish, but so, too, is just waiting for a radio signal or watching for big dimming events—which doesn’t mean something isn’t out there, however unlikely.

As our search continues (for now) to be fruitless, we’re left with one last ego-bruising answer to the Fermi Paradox: maybe we haven’t heard from the aliens because they don’t care that we’re here at all, if they’ve even bothered to notice us. And that may especially apply to robots.

What is this, a planet for ants?

Maybe the great filter comes. The augmented aliens survive. Then their AI offspring take the wheel. Do a bunch of apes with noisy radio signals and the odd act of nuclear warfare really appeal to them—are they even actively looking for something like us?

When it comes to that idea, Shostak says, “It’s not even dangerous (for the aliens). It’s uninteresting. It’s like me putting a sign up in my yard saying ‘attention all ants.’”

In this case, we’re the ants. We may not have the resources of an alien society, and if artificial intelligence is supposed to search for signs of far, far advanced technology, we’re barely a blip on their radar.

Schneider says, “Earth is actually a relatively young planet so some astrobiologists think if there are civilizations out there, they may be vastly more advanced than us.”

Sure, we got radio. Then we got computers. Then Moore’s Law turned digital computers into increasingly efficient machines, year-by-year. “Machines improved very quickly—much, much more quickly than Darwin,” Shostak says.

Meanwhile, the aliens from the older planets get more advanced. So does their AI. Maybe it becomes the most dominant lifeform on the planet. It takes over its planet, then its star. It sends itself out into the universe in general—or it’s content to stay home for whatever reason. It’s plentiful and abundant and highly advanced, and when it comes across Earth, it doesn’t see anything particularly special. An alien AI may be just a few thousand years ahead of us, technologically, but it may still be advanced enough to grow disinterested in finding ants.

“We might be like cats or goldfish compared to humans and they may not want to have anything to do with us,” Schneider says.

Our goldfish status could put us in a weird place. We may be just as likely to encounter biological life on a scale unimaginable to us right now, or we may make contact with their probes before we find them. We may find a semi-intelligent Bracewell beacon from afar, or one may swoop through our backyard, its AI trained to home in on the fingerprints of our civilization. We may find robots sent by the aliens, or we may find out robots are the aliens.

At a base level, its possible to imagine that our first meeting with intelligent life beyond Earth might not be with something living and breathing, but with a different kind of fellow explorer—who just might happen to be a machine.

Written By John Wenz

#Space

[hannah-stories-94]

First Contact –“Nine Ways We Might Discover and Interact With an Alien Civilization” (WATCH Today’s ‘Galaxy’ Stream) — The Daily Galaxy –Great Discoveries Channel Today's Galaxy Steam features two videos. The first from Isaac Arthur on the possibilities of first contact with an advanced civilization and the second featuring astronomers Martin Rees (see interview below) and Seth Shostak on the search for intelligent life.

[redshift-13]

a progressive/socialist wishlist

It’s necessarily incomplete, of course.  First, I’m not trying to brain dump everything I know or write a book for tumblr.  Also, obviously, I don’t contain all knowledge in my head nor does anyone else.  There are hundreds of things that could be added to this list, a ton of which I’m no doubt not aware of.  You may agree with some parts and not with others and that’s fine.  

An anti-human, human rights abusing, bigoted, reactionary, anti-democratic and anti-intellectual force is now in control of all branches of government.  It needs to be completely removed from power everywhere and replaced with a humanistic, feminist, progressive, socialist, environmental and human rights politics.  Anyway, here’s my abbreviated rough list of what we progressive and socialists and communists should be aiming for:

Science

improve science literacy (knowledge but more importantly scientific thinking); we need much better compensated teachers, new incentives for teaching science, and better ways of teaching it

restoration of the Office of Technology Assessment to guide policy (see Bruce Bimber’s The Politics of Expertise in Congress: The Rise and Fall of the Office of Technology Assessment for background, or probably any number of articles on the web)

laws or a constitutional amendment to require public policy to adhere to the best available evidence

continuing education requirements in science for elected public officials

comprehensively adequate funding for scientific research, with shortfalls met in the form of tax hikes on the wealthy and Wall Street

outlaw public promotion of climate change denialism and misinformation

enforce bans on the teaching of creationism in schools

Environment

green economics (nothing gets made unless there’s a clear path to its reuse or recycle; energy and byproducts of making things are all fed into other systems of production—nothing is wasted; full cost accounting—e.g., taking into account environmental, social and economic costs outside the narrow confines of corporate budgets)

emergency action on climate change

clean up ocean pollution and stop it from occurring

bring all animals back into healthy populations and away from endangerment and extinction

end deforestation and begin a massive reforestation campaign

restore biodiversity

rewild the earth (see, e.g. George Monbiot’s Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life)

largely end development in the American West

“A new study released Tuesday by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Conservation Science Partners (CSP) found that every 2.5 minutes, the American West loses a football field worth of natural area to human development.” https://thinkprogress.org/the-american-west-is-rapidly-disappearing-64b9ca4a2c5d/

permanently end the right-of-access by the extraction industries (oil, gas, mining, lumber) and real estate developers to any land that holds value for climate change or biodiversity or natural beauty

greening the energy infrastructure

eliminate logging industry access to our remaining forests; shift heavily into hemp as an alternative

Manhattan Project level investment in fusion energy research and other alternative energy sources

funding of the EPA to levels well beyond that which existed before the Trump administration; major expansion of regulatory enforcement powers

Education

religious literacy (no one should graduate unaware of basic understanding of current scholarship in biblical and religious studies)

human rights education

critical thinking (a scholar once told me that there are about literally a dozen schools in the US that teach critical thinking well)

creativity (we know how to improve it, and we know how to work it into the rest of the curriculum—what’s stopping us?)

futures thinking (for reasons too numerous to go into; for starters see Anticipate the School You Want: Futurizing K-12 Education, by Arthur Shostak)

reducing bias and dogmatism (these cognitive errors are killing us literally and figuratively)

leadership (it’s a civilization-wide crisis—we lack good leadership at all levels; 5% tops of anyone in a managerial/leadership position should be there; a highly complex and interdisciplinary problem, we need to start early on cultivating leadership literacies and personal development related thereto)

environmental education

humanistic psychology and personal development and growth (you should know vastly more about yourself, your mind and body, by the time you leave school; “the point” of education should heavily emphasize personal development as opposed to narrow vocational training

postformal education: there’s a desperate need for more people capable of higher order thinking, more complex thinking since this is the level at which problems have to be solved (see, e.g., Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures, by Jennifer Gidley)

Human rights

the US must ratify, and substantially implement in its laws, policies and practices, all outstanding global conventions that support human rights, e.g., The Convention on the Rights of the Child

emergency mobilization to end homelessness

a rapid end to childhood poverty

aggressive enforcement of laws against sexual assault

universal and comprehensive human rights education in K-12

restoration of the right to vote for felons

ending all prison sentences for non-violent drug offenses

reform of policing and reliable prosecution of criminal cops; independent civilian hiring and firing of cops and the setting of police policy, all of which adheres to human rights standards

make the US subject to the rulings of the International Criminal Court

prosecute US war crimes

Politics and public policy

statehood for Puerto Rico

statehood for Washington DC

abolish the electoral college

abolish the US Senate or replace it with a system in line with democratic norms

automatic registration to vote as a right of citizenship

abolishment of all GOP attempts to undermine democracy (gerrymandering, vote suppression, etc.)

impeachment and removal of Kavanaugh

massive tax hike on the wealthy

transactional tax on Wall Street

tax hike on capital gains

Medicare for all/abolishing health insurance companies, for-profit hospitals and clinics, free medical school tuition

free college tuition

Military: 2/3 cut to the military budget; cancellation of nuclear weapons upgrade (estimated to be an obscene $1 trillion); ending military dumping of toxics into the ocean or anywhere else 

public health: 

clean drinking water for every American

criminal prosecution for fracking operations that contaminate ground water

cleanup of all lead exposure sites, whether in the home or municipal water systems 

a near total ban on corporate speech and lobbying

Law

massive financial support for the expansion of public attorneys and low/no-cost attorneys

establishing the Law of Ecocide as a fundamental legal regime in US and global law

capital punishment for violators of the Law of Ecocide

ending the veil of protection for executives in corporations—if your company breaks the law, individuals are held personally accountable in addition to any fines on the corporation

US ratification of all peace, sustainability, human rights and other treaties, and then aggressive enforcement of these treaties in US law and policy

church state separation

the trend line globally is not moving toward secular government

we end religious privilege in the US (no right to discriminate; no right to withhold medical treatment from children; no right of indoctrination)

Housing and urbanism

making landlordism illegal over time

large rent reductions and state seizure of rental property for the purpose of advancing the values of social housing and shifting household income toward more valuable purposes

universal net-zero carbon/energy building standards subsidized with public money

ban on all billboard advertising

shift away from land agriculture to city-based vertical low-energy, low-carbon, low-water, no-chemical agriculture

abolition of the rights of real estate developers to engage in building that doesn’t primarily serve to reduce housing costs, reduce carbon emissions, and that undermines social and cultural values broadly defined; democratic approval required for all significant developments, with a total ban on spending by developers and allies to influence public opinion

design buildings and urban areass that adhere to all available information from environmental psychology and ecopsychology

Consumer rights

ban on all telemarketing that’s not consumer initiated

criminalization of commercial robo-calling

ban on all advertising to children

adequately fund the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and grant it sweeping new powers of enforcement

Economics

heavy fines and tax penalties on corporations and executives who make more than 5 times the lowest paid employee

the re-establishment of chartered corporations: using a robust full cost accounting method, companies that do more harm than good are banned

a full time job is defined as 25 hours/week

nationalization of energy production

heavy regulatory pressure on all corporations to move toward a worker-owned/directed model

breakup of all large financial, media and other companies

public banking to replace US Bank, Wells Fargo, etc.

abolishing Wells Fargo and other financial institutions with serious and ongoing illegal conduct

automatic inclusion of employees into unions; an unlimited right to strike and organize labor

the right of employees to fire executives

outlawing of the accumulation of billionaire fortunes; taxes of 100% beyond, say, $250 million total wealth

elimination of corporate profit going to non-employee shareholders, hedge funds, etc.

#progressive #socialism #communism #us politics

[redshift-13]

Imagination, the future, and explaining the forces of regression

This post began as a first-blush endorsement of a new podcast, one I have yet to hear, but one that immediately struck a chord with me: Into the Impossible, a production of the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination: Into the Impossible http://imagination.ucsd.edu/_wp/the-podcast

And then this got me thinking once against about creativity, the imagination and our current political and social situation…

Lately one of my background musings has been the relationship between practices of imagination (or their lack) and the rise of regressive politics—revivified racism and anti-Semitism, square jawed/stone headed nationalism, and the like.  Does an absence of the former increase the likelihood of the latter?  Does the impoverishment of imagination mean that, perhaps according to an as yet poorly theorized socio-psychological understanding of social change, humans are destined to keep repeating regressive lurches toward fascism, nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism, etc?

The imagination suffers from lack of training in formal education, is passively or actively suppressed in workplaces, and in private life often takes the form of something consumed through media rather than produced from one’s own creative activity.  It’s rare in education for creativity—its enhancement, the study of creative exemplars, the psychology and values of creativity, personal practices—to be an explicit part of the curriculum.  It’s not uncommon to hear about the value of creativity, but we haven’t decided as a society that the cultivation of creativity is at all a priority in education.  That it might be at the core of education strikes most people as a fantastic notion.  But could this be a vital component to accelerating positive social change?

The theories and ideas behind a humanistic approach to education, which prioritizes the fullest cultivation of all positive, ennobling, freeing, enlightening, etc., potentials within us, including cultivation of the imagination, has been around for some time, but hasn’t gotten much traction in education.  That this is not the case right now is quite painfully obvious.  We teach for tests and rote memorization and for vocational skills and for an important but limited curriculum of knowledge.  An alternative curriculum built around radical liberation of self and society remains a distant dream.  We don’t lack for ideas and theory, we lack first for a more generalized awareness of these ideas, and second the will to mobilize and push through change.

It’s in the realm of imagination that alternatives lie—alternatives to one’s self, one’s career, one’s character, one’s possibilities in life; and alternatives to the current realities of political, economic and everyday life.  But when we don’t teach for imagination and social transformation, an oppressive sense of stasis prevails.  We lie vulnerable to resurgent reactionary forces on the one hand and the powerful force of neoliberal capitalism, which seeks the transformation of the individual into its own image—the former concerned with forcing us into reifications and myths of race, religion, gender, nation, etc., the latter  concerned only with self interest, measuring human value in economic terms, and devaluing everything not concerned with profit and accumulation.  Right-wing reaction and neoliberal praxis demand that you be a certain version of yourself, but that version of yourself likely has little to do with who you’d want to be or the kind of world you’d want to live in if you knew there were alternatives.

These alternatives spring from the most powerful forces of resistance available to us—all that’s within us that yearns for connection, wonder and awe, creative engagement, exploration, compassion, the satisfactions of philosophical reflection, transpersonal states, and the like—the very things neoliberal capitalism has no use for, the things that the forces of tradition and right-wing politics finds threatening.

But, not only do we not teach for creativity, we specifically do not teach to cultivate how to imagine and construct alternative futures—better, even radically better, lives for ourselves and for non-human life on the planet.  Imagination is a key part of this, but so is exposure to utopian literature, moral perspective taking, art in a social reformist vein, science fiction, and so forth.

Because we don’t teach for the social, ethical and political imagination, and because positive futures are rarely reflected back to us through media, does this help explain why we’re seeing an apparent resurgence of bigotry, “traditional values,” the pining for historical periods that we’re never that good to begin with, etc.?  When people have little to no experience in imagining radically democratic, inclusive futures in which human well-being is the point, not the capitalist afterthought that it currently is, is regression to fictionalized idealizations of the dark past a “natural” tendency, the default of the brain at this point in history?  Would these regressive tendencies, which could be seen as a kind of dysfunctional and weakened imaginative performance in their own right, be naturally “flipped” in a positive direction if we cultivated imagination of positive futures as a priority?

Consider the following key words and phrases.  They fill in many of the blanks of what I’m trying to get at.  They are, in terms of social practice, embryos.  They have literatures behind them, scholars doing scholarly work, a few case studies here and there, but they don’t yet have a solid place in pedagogy.  They should.  Imagine a curriculum oriented around humanistic psychology, or systems thinking, or futures studies, gender equality, etc.  Herein, perhaps, taken all together, and still missing a great deal, lie the keys to a pedagogy of the imagination, to a future that many of us would prefer.  If you were brought up with these and ideas and practices, is it even possible to imagine that a Trump could be elected?

Key words and phrases:

Futures studies, futurology, human potential, planetary futures, transformation, transformative learning, humanistic psychology, humanistic education, wonder and awe in education and psychology, creativity, curiosity, social design, systems thinking, systems theory, educational futures, peace education, ecopsychology, utopian thought, utopian literature, visionary leadership, radical education, radical philosophy, ethical culture, future ethics, philosophy for children, teaching for wisdom, mindfulness curriculum, meditation for children, meditation in the classroom, social justice, evolution of consciousness, global consciousness, long-range thinking, speculative fiction, science fiction, socialist literature, anarchist literature, history of human rights, feminism, utopian feminist thought.

Books: Some of the following I’m familiar with, others not so much, but I am familiar to varying degrees of depth with all the themes presented.  The focus of following list is the pedagogy of futures studies, but titles touching on other relevant topics are included to flesh out slightly the challenge of educating for the imagination.  A systems approach to the unleashing the imagination in service of creating achievable utopias or radically better worlds would necessarily be a monumental task if you wanted to cover all significant bases.  For a more expansive field of themes that orbit a more comprehensive curriculum of the imagination, see the key word list above.

Creativity in the Classroom: Schools of Curious Delight, Alane Jordan Starko

Anticipate the School You Want: Futurizing K-12 Education, Arthur Shostak

Wonder-Full Education: The Centrality of Wonder in Teaching and Learning Across the Curriculum, Kieran Egan, Annabelle Cant, Gillian Judson

Postformal Education: A Philosophy for Complex Futures, Jennifer Gidley

The Creativity Handbook, ed. by Robert Sternberg

Educating for Humanity: Rethinking the Purposes of Education, Mike Seymour, Henry Levin

Systems Design of Education: A Journey to Create the Future, Bela Banathy

Lessons for the Future: The Missing Dimension in Education (Futures in Education), by David Hicks

Advancing Futures: Futures Studies in Higher Education, by James Dator

Transforming Human Culture: Social Evolution and the Planetary Crisis, Jay Earley

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks

Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice, by Maurianne Adams, et al.

Viable Utopian Ideas: Shaping a Better World, Art Shostak

Publications by the Worldwatch Institute - State of the World, and Vital Signs

A Future to Believe In: 108 Reflections on the Art and Activism of Freedom, by Alan Clements

Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age, Russell Jacoby

As always, I invite your comments.

#imagination #futures studies #pedagogy #education #curricululm #creativity #science fiction #utopianism