…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”:
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:
This outlook or glimmer of vision I have tried to trace, for the art of crowds is something we want, and want daily, in the future. We want daily a future. But, after all, it is a future.
I speak in this present chapter as one of the crowd who wants something now.
I find myself in a world in which apparently some vast anonymous arrangement was made about me and about my life, before I was born. This arrangement seems to be, as I understand it, that if I want to live while I am on this planet a certain sort of life or be a certain sort of person, I am expected practically to take out a permit for it from the proper authorities.
In the previous chapter I made a request of the authorities, as perhaps the reader will remember. I said, “I want to be good now.”
In this one I have a further request to make of the authorities: “I want to be beautiful.”
I want to be beautiful now.
I find thousands of other people about me on every hand making these same two requests. I find that the authorities do not seem to notice their requests any more than they have noticed mine.
Some of us have begun to suspect that we must have made the request in the wrong way. Perhaps we should not ask a world—a great, vague thing like the world in general—to make any slight arrangement we may need for being beautiful. We have come to feel that we must ask somebody in particular, and do something in particular, and find some one in particular with whom we can do it. There is getting to be but one course open to a man if he wants to be beautiful. He must bone down and work hard with his soul, make himself see precisely what it is and who it is standing between him and a beautiful world. He must ask particular persons in particular positions if they do not think he ought to be allowed to be beautiful. He must ask some millionaire probably first—his employer, for instance—to stop getting in his way, and at least to step one side and let him reason with him. And when he cannot ask his millionaire—his own particular humdrum millionaire—to step one side and reason with him, he must ask iron-machines to step one side and reason with him. After this he must ask crowds to please to step one side and reason with him.
Whatever happens, he is sure to find always these same three great, imponderable obstructions in the way of his being beautiful—the humdrum millionaires, the iron-machines, and crowds.
In the old days when any one wanted to be beautiful he found it more convenient. There was very likely some one who was more beautiful than he was nearby, some one who found him craving the same thing that he had craved, and who recognized it and delighted in it, and who could make room and help.
Nowadays, if one wants to be beautiful one must ask everybody. Every man finds it the same. He must ask millions of people to let him be something, one after the other in rows, that they do not want him to be or do not care whether he is or not. He has to ask more people than he could count, before he dies, to let him be beautiful. Many of them that he has to ask, sometimes most of them, are his inferiors.
I have tried to deal with how it is going to be possible for a man to break through to being beautiful, past millionaires and past iron-machines. I would like now to deal with the people-machines or crowds, and how perhaps to break past them and be beautiful in behalf of them, in spite of them….
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?