…but then what happens?

And does any­body bother to write it down?

A recent dis­cus­sion at Crooked Tim­ber about pop under­stand­ing of Com­mu­nism and Steven Berlin Johnson’s excel­lent Where Good Ideas Come From focuses my gaze briefly on a strange con­flu­ence of atten­tion I’m hav­ing. The con­nec­tion is still vague and loose, but bear with me for a while.

Recently my attention’s been sortof equally spaced on:

…Amer­i­can Prag­ma­tism, via James and Dewey and cul­mi­nat­ing in Richard Rorty’s lat­ter works—which tend to be dis­missed as illog­i­cal by folks I respect, who know a lot more about big-​​P phi­los­o­phy than I do, but which some­how still res­onate with me.

…Anarchism—not the anti-​​globalism spray-​​painting vari­ety or the car­i­ca­tured bomb-​​throwing ter­ror­ist vari­ety, but the thought­ful sort spelled out by Michi­gan­der Voltairine de Cleyre a hun­dred years ago.

…Busi­ness and Work—not the power-​​grubbing fla­vor pop­u­lar among the Cham­bers of Com­merce and the Military-​​Entrepreneurship Machine, but the sort of self-​​adapting social dynam­ics focused on deliv­er­ing col­lec­tive, mutual value that Peter Drucker and the Agile Soft­ware move­ment call for.

…And of course the “new tech cul­ture” stuff we all love so much. I imag­ine you’re soak­ing in it, because you’re here: Mak­ers and inno­va­tors and net­works and open source. Emer­gence and com­plex­ol­ogy and decen­tral­iza­tion and OMG The Future!!eleven!

Four or more threads. This is the knot that’s caught my wordy atten­tion today.

Prag­ma­tism is a philo­soph­i­cal stance I might never have heard of—nor taken seri­ously if I had, given oth­ers’ prej­u­dice against it—if not for a pleas­ant ram­bling con­ver­sa­tion I had with Michael Cohen some years back.

It has fallen from our shared cul­tural plat­form, is not part of our canon.

Anar­chism I would surely have never con­sid­ered valid or wor­thy of atten­tion, were it not that I dig­i­tize and repub­lish old books (for fun), and I recently scanned my own copy of this work, which Google has already put online:

But who’s read this 100-​​year-​​old descrip­tion of what’s hap­pen­ing now, besides me? Nobody I know.

The Agile Man­i­festo (and the other design pat­terns for what you might call Humane Mak­ing) would prob­a­bly sound weird and use­less to me—after all, I started out as a sci­en­tist and aca­d­e­mic, and moved on to become the sort of cow­boy know-​​it-​​all con­sul­tant Founder. If it weren’t for time spent with Ron and Chet, and see­ing how they—and the count­less other Agile Coaches they’ve trained and inspired—have come to make a real dif­fer­ence in the qual­ity of people’s work.

And yet this move­ment starts even now to fall back into jar­gon and cant in the hands of corporatism.

And of course we’re all bathed con­stantly by the hoopla about social net­works and com­plex­ity the­ory and emer­gence and bio­engi­neer­ing and autonomous sys­tems and look this is the rev­o­lu­tion this time—no really we swear. I’ve had the luck and plea­sure to have actu­ally been in the room when a lot of that was being born. Not just dur­ing my too-​​short time spent work­ing with Chris and Stu and all the rest in Santa Fe, but also lurk­ing at the edges of the pre-​​Web Real­ity Hacker/​WELL cul­ture, and actu­ally using genetic pro­gram­ming as it buds and blooms into a New Kind of Engi­neer­ing [FYSW].

And yet despite my own awe as a par­tic­i­pant, I see the ridicu­lous Chaordic peo­ple and Man­age­ment Con­sul­tants gar­ner as much mind­share as the peo­ple who actu­ally help explain the world and make things.

I’m lucky, I say again, on all these counts, but frus­trated in each case.

Luck­ier than I can sum up. I’ve even started to forge some kind of “career”, and some­times we can really help how peo­ple work with this strange mish­mash of notions.

And more frus­trated than I can sum up, too. Because I’m start­ing to real­ize how lit­tle we see of the things at the edges of his­tory, away from the stars.

Is it just that His­tory is a machine we can­not see from inside? Ger­ald Stan­ley Lee, as I find so often, said some­thing lovely about the beauty of loco­mo­tives. But he was actu­ally say­ing some­thing deep about the beauty we should see in the “net­work of Man”:

Unless the word “beau­ti­ful” is big enough to make room for a glo­ri­ous, impe­ri­ous, world-​​possessing, world-​​commanding beauty like this, we are no longer its dis­ci­ples. It is become a play word. It lags behind truth.

In the con­text of the joy­ous Voice of the Machines—which you should go now and read aloud to one another—Lee’s mes­sage isn’t about find­ing metal pretty, it’s about how we should value things in the world. The poetry he sees in loco­mo­tives and telegraphs doesn’t just rebel against the aes­thetic canon that excludes the engineer’s work, it ques­tions the valid­ity of that canon itself. What inher­ent right does a Great Mas­ter have to our acco­lades, which we deny to a power grid’s architects?

I wish there were a thou­sand more like Ger­ald Stan­ley Lee, despite his mis­takes. Because of his mis­takes. His poetic vision revealed a com­mu­nity that was being fos­tered by mass media and tech­nol­ogy a cen­tury ago… but he never real­ized that fas­cism and com­mer­cial­ism would feed on that same raw material.

And I want more Stu Kauff­mans to point out the “adja­cent pos­si­ble” with­out know­ing much about Prag­ma­tism. More Steven John­sons to point out this real rev­o­lu­tion we’re in with­out always speak­ing cor­rectly about the his­to­ries of oth­ers’ ear­lier rev­o­lu­tions. And more Richard Rortys to explain how to be civil and tol­er­ant of one another’s dif­fer­ences, while dis­miss­ing the entire Enlight­en­ment as a mis­lead­ing sidebar.

We need these folks to make these mis­takes more often, not less.

We need more peo­ple to draw our atten­tion to use­ful things in the world, use­ful ways of liv­ing, with­out try­ing to be con­sis­tent and proper and right all the fuck­ing time.

I think what’s both­er­ing me is the Myth of Progress.

The mass media, our ubiq­ui­tous and con­sis­tent edu­ca­tion, our canon of the­ory? They’re not tools by which “the Man” oppresses, and they’re not going to “set us free” by reveal­ing the truth about the world; there is no “Man”, and the world doesn’t give a damn about what we say on NPR about it.

The risk these social forces pose is that the increased poten­tial for gen­eral and pop­u­lar suc­cess of smart peo­ple draws our local unsung lumi­nar­ies up and away. So they can talk amongst themselves.

And not with us.

We should be linked to one another by con­ver­sa­tions that look back and for­ward and down, and most of all side­ways at one another. Not just “up” at our lumi­nous col­leagues, our canon, but across at the friend we never sus­pected knew so much about that thing we were work­ing on together.

I’ve come to detest the con­sen­sus of shared cul­ture and its keep­ers, and our canon, and the news we’re told. I’m try­ing to rely more on the peo­ple in my pres­ence, and the peo­ple they know personally.

Not because I’m con­sid­er­ing tea­party­ism, but because I pity the famous, the great thinkers I used to hang out with. All of them that I’m lucky enough to know per­son­ally? They were thought­ful and self-​​effacing enough to know that there’s more of value in a mil­lion roil­ing dis­parate details they’ve never heard of, than can be aphorized in their best-​​selling book.

We’re all of us always wrong. I pity the famous, the canon-​​makers, the reveal­ers of truth, my pro­fes­sor friends because they’ve sac­ri­ficed their right to be wrong at the altar of Progress.

And as far as I can tell, that means they’re stuck; they’re not allowed to make mis­takes in public.

Lee also said this, on the topic of my very own frustration:

So what shall we do on behalf of—and in spite of—these bright thinkers, own­ers of the canon we are taught as mem­bers of this crowd Lee talks about?

I’d like to free them, per­son­ally. Free them from the ter­ri­ble price they pay when they sac­ri­fice their par­tic­i­pa­tion.

If noth­ing else, we should at least try to build another one. Some other canon. Maybe a bunch.

Maybe one where we have no inten­tion of try­ing to get our story straight, so that it gibes with our most recent global “objec­tive real­ity” or the lat­est faceting of his­tory. One where the notion of Progress—whether it’s progress towards unmask­ing Ulti­mate Real­ity, or achiev­ing Per­fect Health, or plan­ning and exe­cut­ing (in either sense) The Most Appro­pri­ate Gov­ern­ment, or even just mak­ing every­body happy—is dead. No more Progress; just progress.

How about we change gears? Maybe we can try mak­ing our neigh­bors’ lives bet­ter. “Neigh­bor” doesn’t have to be local, or even phys­i­cal: it just needs to mean not every­body, and not all the same def­i­n­i­tion of “bet­ter”.

In other words, let’s just pro­ceed as though that canon we’ve all been wear­ing out from overuse wasn’t the only one, and see what happens.

Who knows? Maybe we won’t wear out the “reg­u­lar” one so quickly, if we don’t all use it all the time.

What will you do today instead of the thing every­body knows you should?