Shifting Cultural Norms?!

I am about 99.5% certain little or any of this idea rambling/bungling about in my brain is original, but I am genuinely surprised with how little airplay it is getting in either the mainstream media overwhelming my mind in one form or another from time to time or in the conversations I have with people on chairlifts and during runs through the Wasatch . . .

We are on the verge of a cultural-economic-technological shift that could/should fundamentally change our existence.  But where should I start: Is it worthwhile getting into how Zarathustra created a new religion meant to explain a fundamentally changing world effecting the people of Persia and their world-view? How a new economic system (shifting patterns of labor) forced the people of the time to reevaluate their ethical system and to find new values for a new world? Perhaps, it would suffice to mention in passing and/or discuss in brief how humanity may/may not have been changed by the development of agriculture?  How the early development of cities and various forms of urbanization through time may have changed the patterns of behavior between people(s)?  How about the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modern economic systems changing our relationship to both work and the family?  These various moments all marked fundamental shifts in how we "earned a living" and they resulted in shifting our cultural norms to value the new life being experienced.  I would suggest three eras in minimum: neolithic revolution, industrial age, and the computer era represent tidal shifts in economic systems of order and society that fundamentally brought into question our way of interacting with the world.  I am going to suggest that we may be on the verge of an even bigger shift, or perhaps what I am seeing as another shift is simply the continuation of the computer era, and we must figure out how to live within this new framework . . .  

As our world advances technologically, how will the way in which our society is ordered/structured change to truly take advantage of these new technologies? As more and more jobs -- from flipping burgers to playing doctor -- become simplified/done by using new technologies, how do we react? The question/problem has been here since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but we may be reaching a near revolutionary point in dealing with the answer to this question (or at least the scope of this question).  Typically, when a worker is replaced (or diminished) by technology the onus of the issue is put on the worker -- they are told to learn new skills and to get with the times.  Don't become outdated!  

But isn't this bassackwards . . . we have been reducing the amount of human labor needed to feed, shelter, and clothe ourselves; however, we are working as much (realistically more) than ever before and people don't want to become outdated -- they want to feel as if their work contributes to the functioning of society.  And ironically enough, we still can't seem to successfully feed and shelter ourselves -- we have a million jobs unrelated to survival and yet we aren't even surviving.  I would suggest instead that, we are addicted to the idea of work.  We are addicted to the idea that people need to work in order to earn a paycheck and that they need to earn a paycheck in order to feed themselves, in order to take care of themselves.  But if technology reduces the hours of human labor needed to make/satisfy the basic needs of life (food and shelter) available to people, then why are we working even more than in the past?  What happens if/when we get to the point that robots and other forms of technology can grow all of our food, build the vast majority of our products, and perhaps even build our shelters?  Do we keep living in the world of work?  Do we continue pretending that work is a must do activity?  Does work in fact continue to become a must happen activity?  Aren't there other possibilities?  More radical possibilities?  More helpful possibilities?  What if work became an activity of choice?  I want you to suspend for a second all the dreadful apocalyptic anti-capitalist notions this is probably throwing up in your mouth currently, and think about the irony of having created an economic-social structure dependent on work and all the sudden work isn't really necessary in nearly the amounts done previously.  How long do we continue pretending that the society we have built is the necessary order?  How long do we continue to pretend the work we are doing is necessary and requisite for our survival?

When do we start trying to figure out ways to take advantage of our advances and use them to our benefit, rather than as further chains to imprison us to the world of labor?  When do we start taking advantage of the potential for increased leisure/free time?  I should explain that increasing leisure/free time doesn't need to mean sloth -- in fact, my personal guess is that with time (perhaps a generation, perhaps a half-generation, perhaps a few months) reduced labor would actually mean increased individualized productivity.  Hell, maybe some people would even use their extra time to figure out how to benefit humanity -- not my plan, but I am guessing others might head this way . . . What would I do with an increased amount of leisure time, but the same basic standard of living? Ski more, run more, read more, hang out with my wife more . . . but that isn't the point -- the point is that we can as a society live with less work, but seem to be scared to death of the idea.  We have convinced ourselves that robots will come alive and kill us all, so we better just keep marching along pretending that we need to live in the manner of our ancestors (o.k. our parents and grandparents) . . .

A Non-Believer's Argument for Belief

Although I thought it would be funny to just have a blank entry published here, which might in a sense be more appropriate given the title, I wanted to jot down an idea that has occurred to me recently while doing some reading . . .

I understand that in many ways it has gone out of fashion, especially among philosophers, to argue for the existence of god (and I will keep it in lower caps because I am not writing about any particular god -- I just mean some god at some point and time be that god a monotheistic, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god, or some random lightning bolt throwing god hanging out with a whole group of other gods although I may be prejudicially explaining a possible argument for the ONE GOD) . . . anyhow I have been thinking that there may be a pretty solid argument for at least putting belief in god as being as rationally valid as belief in the world as we "experience" it . . . warning, warning -- this may all be nothing more than Descartes' god of the thinking ones, but I have a hunch that it is something a little bit different . . . and perhaps more honest . . .

Let us take for a second the brain in a vat hooked up to a supercomputer notion of existence (it goes by a million different names and/or scenarios but I reckon you know what I mean when I, like the Buddha, say, "How can I know this is not a dream?") as not so much possible but as a pretty solid wrench in most epistemological systems.

I should warn you global skepticism keeps me up at night . . . well not really, but it probably should . . . whenever I get too worried about such things I just kick something really hard.

The sincere thinker may have to admit at some point that we really can't be sure that this whole-she-bang is REAL and that eventually we take a leap of faith in creating systems of knowledge/reality (even coherence theory is based on the notion that somehow things should fit together -- why?!).  Well, if existence as thought of in the traditional sense (by traditional I mean the everyday commonsensical notion that we are in fact physical-conscious entities existing in a world with physical and temporal properties) can be brought into question then the idea that god exists may be as valid as accepting reality . . . let me phrase it this way: if you buy into the argument of global skepticism, or if you simply ignore the global skeptics altogether rather than refuting them through the use of reason, then you may be just as reasonable in buying into the notion that god exists either somewhere within or outside of the vat . . . Here is what I am suggesting: since attempts to logically arrive at the existence of god always seem to get muddled somewhere along the line, god's existence typically comes down to a "leap of faith" and this leap of faith mirrors our standard leap of faith out of global skepticism and into the workaday world we actually live in.

Most people don't really believe they are trapped in the Matrix, but it's downright difficult to prove you don't live in the Matrix and in that sense might one "irrationally-rationally" take a leap of faith beyond the universe and toward god without being any more off his/her rocker than the rest of us simply content to pretend we know we don't live in the Matrix?  And I'm not saying god is somehow running the supercomputer, I am simply saying that we may be more than brains in a vat, or we may be brains in a vat, and that somewhere out there or in here believing in god may be as valid as believing in "traditional" existence . . .

Global skepticism puts a wrench in knowing the world exists.
I still choose to accept the world as existing in the "traditional" sense.
I consider this leap of faith rational, because it allows me to function. (of course this might be a mistake)
Therefore I am at least sometimes rational in taking leaps of faith.
I take a leap of faith in believing god exists because it gives life meaning.
Am I at least as rational in taking this leap of faith as the earlier leap of faith taken in believing that the world exists?

Probably.

Thinking

Here are some ideas for the new year -- yes I have been thinking despite the fact I have not been writing . . .

Let's do away with the current carnival that is the Presidential Election Process. It is time to shorten the campaign season (and I mean dramatically). Wouldn't it be great if candidates were not allowed to raise money, announce they were running, or do any other politicking until the January before the November election -- in other words shorten the whole process to roughly 10 months. The primaries, the caucusing and all that jazz could start up in the late spring and culminate with the party convention landing somewhere toward the end of summer. I understand a key weakness to this "shortened" campaign season would be the way it may give an advantage to a President running for re-election since their name is already out there and probably even a household name . . . but my feeling is that our country has fallen into a damaging cycle of the forever campaign. The most important job for politicians should be governing the country; however, with the ever increasing amount of time and money given over to running for office the most important job has become getting elected.

In this regard it would also make a lot of sense to radically curtail the amount of money put toward campaigning. Instead of elections being won based on how much money is spent by the people running, the amount spent could be limited to the point where the country really does get together around the internet, t.v., radio? to listen to a few content driven debates and/or speeches.

And while we are talking national election -- isn't it about time we throw out the whole absurdity of the electoral college. We are a nation and are electing a national leader. I get the whole small-state-big-state compromise issues that created the bicameral congress; however, a national leader should be chosen by the population as a whole and each person's vote should have equal weight in said election. I know this is all utopian, but this is my little rant . . . and it seems to me the idea of tweaking our system is less utopian than common sensical.

OCCUPY MOVEMENT -- thumbs up! Shocker -- the revolution didn't really happen, but what a wonderful thought. The few times I talked to members of this movement, I was full-on impressed with their sincerity and their wild optimism. The thought/idea that there was still a place in this world for acts of freedom was inspiring to me. I am not a revolutionary. I have revolutionary ideas pop into my head from time to time, but I tend to be pretty much mixed-up inside the world of life and more middle-America than I like to admit. I like to go on dates with my wife, hang with our cats, watch college football, ski on the weekends, or simply slide into vegged out oblivion; however, it makes me feel better about the world knowing that there are people still passionate about trying to change it. Oh, they might be headed in little or no direction but sideways; however, they are spinning their with honesty. In our daily life -- in the diverse societies of American society -- wouldn't it be awesome if we simply found more opportunities, more spaces, for honest to goodness dialogue about the ways in which we function within the world?!

Chaotic Humanus

I am intrigued by how the scientific/mathematical understandings of chaos and order might be connected to understanding human behavior. If "patterns" of randomness and order occur (in nature) how might that effect human interactions, systems of order, laws, rules, successes, failures, civilizations, rise and falls, marriage, divorce, happiness, sadness, thought, emotion, wealth, poverty . . .

My initial thought is that there may be an important aspect of scale involved: how (from where/by whom) the experience(s) of life are being observed may flush out the details of explaining how and why things happen in the lives of humans. For example the rise and fall of a civilization may come about from reason or randomness depending on what scale you are observing it from -- there may be "real" causes to explain the collapse of a civilization at one level; however, when taking a look from a different perspective it may be that civilizations simply come and go without there being reasons (that the behaviors of humans in effect become like the cosmic dust of matter separated into ever smaller parts . . . cantor dust of behavior and perhaps even emotion). If there is a sensation that can be broken down into smaller parts -- let's say a feeling of good/bad and you break down the components of the experience does the meeting point between good/bad become as significant as the sensation itself -- what I am trying to get at here is the examination of concepts like good and bad? like matter in physics they become ever more illusory as you begin breaking them down . . . It may be that from "our" perspective a civilization rose and fell (rises and falls) because of relatively clear causes: i.e. lack/abundance of natural resources; however, when looked at from an alien sociologist's perspective looking at the patterns of civilizations across the universe it turns out that the rise and fall of any civilization ends up being part of a pattern that has both randomness and order swirling about it . . . Part of my notion is taken from the idea of shifting perspective and how this might effect dimension the other part is taken from the idea that as you look at something on a larger/smaller scale there may be evidences of both order and randomness at play . . . does that make any sense? . . . and that patterns of order and randomness are involved in behavior . . .

Part of this simply looks Zen to me . . . i.e. the idea that the "emotional" concept -- hell moral concept -- of something like GOOD may shift depending both on perspective and scale is not that far removed from the Zen notion that our labels construct our experience of things . . . but considering human relations within the framework of history and "large" scale human organizations in particular there seems to be something else at play as well -- history need not be seen as simply ordered nor need it be seen as simply the product of its actors . . . what if within order there is chaos? again within chaos might not order exist? an individual goes crazy and kills a bunch of people -- order and chaos intertwine -- shows up as a random dot on the overall map of human behavior . . . what if things as painfully absurd as genocide are caught up within these universal patterns? what if there is a certain randomness and order to human atrocities? on a smaller scale how about a fight taking place between two people suddenly becoming violent? is it possible that their argument/their fight are intertwined into the behaviors of the universe through both order and chaos? what does this say for/against free will? are their actions that (going towards the infinite) are examples of free will? could these same actions from the point of observation also seem like prime examples of a deterministic universe? can a universe be simultaneously free and determined? chaotic and ordered? even emotional states like love could be looked at within this framework, highlighting the potential for order and randomness to effect us directly as humans . . . I'm not even thinking about the more abstract idea that we are both matter and space, both finite and infinite within our physical/mental construct (that is the human construct) . . . the physical and mental construct which classifies us as human nothing more than an abstract concept depending on the observers' perspective (I am starting to get the feeling that Berkeley's singular observer may have been overly simplistic -- multiple observers, multiple perspectives, and we and our behaviors are changed by the varied perspectives: we are both a dot and a line depending on the view, we have both chosen and had our choices made for us depending on the perspective) . . . how about the interplay between the "purely" physical and the "purely" emotional/mental? if we are space then what is thought? is thought confined? could "we" by shifting perspective become lost in the haze? as the social understanding of the universe changes how does this effect life? what I mean roughly is that as revolutions in science drift from the scientific world to the "world as a whole" how is the "world as a whole" effected? are patterns of behavior that appear to represent the breaking down of social order in actuality symptomatic of a changing universe or at least a changing view of the universe?

in particular how might a perspective of the world that moves away from the traditional sciences change our "human" understanding of ourselves? even guilt and innocence (or at least how we phrase these terms) might change . . . this isn't necessarily a new concept (Darwin not only changed human understanding of the world but he in effect changed how we view ourselves within the world, Einstein's relativity changed not only physics but in effect the very fabric of how humans saw the universe) but there needs to be an awakening to the way in which this process continues on . . . these scientific revolutions weren't one time events they continue to ripple throughout our experience . . . we literally live in a different universe from our parents . . . once you start "seeing" things from a new perspective, that new perspective will help shape your understandings and behaviors . . . again I can't help but flash back to "mental" concepts like morality and how our very judgements might be changed by our changed views of the universe . . . but what I am most intrigued by is the notion that we are a species in the process of being transformed by our own experiences and our shifting judgements made in regards to these experiences . . .

Shopping Treadmill

Just saw a cool cartoon on Colbert Report: Work, Shop, T.V., Work, Shop, T.V., Work, Shop, T.V., The American Life Treadmill.

Economic Realities?

How does an economic system based on the concept of ever-expanding markets thrive in a world of shrinking resources? Is it the case that the basic principles of capitalism are at odds with the fundamental realities of our finite existence? Can the economic platforms of the United States (and much of the "western world") be realigned with the planet itself? If these realities are not brought into line with one another, is our future necessarily bleak?

A quick reality check: the United States consumes roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day, while producing a little over 8 million barrels a day . . . China, the second greatest consumer, swallows up about 7 to 8 million and this number grows as the Chinese economy grows . . . The Law of Supply and Demand suggests prices will continue to rise as demand increases and supply decreases . . . Meanwhile, the U.S. purchases the products of China and China loans out the money needed to keep the U.S. economy plodding along in order to consume . . . Debt and Consumption.

I am not in the most optimistic of moods today: a number of global puzzle pieces seem to be collapsing inwards/outwards, and I am genuinely uncertain how long the good times can last. I don't believe in the end of the world, but I do believe in cycles of rise and fall . . .

Intro

The purpose of this blog is to put down my thoughts as they run along. I am a teacher and a closet environmentalist and the basic content of this blog will be focused on those two topics with the majority of my dribble being -- I suspect -- on how I envision a shifting world.

I believe the world is always changing, and I believe the environment is in constant flux. However, we need to take responsibility for what the world is becoming and learn how to work toward a "better" existence. I tend to see the environment, education, community, politics, and a thousand other topics as necessarily intertwined. If we fail in raising ourselves into a citizenry capable of running a peaceful democracy then we will have failed in the great american experiment.

Today:

I have this crazy notion that neighborhood running could save the planet . . . well maybe that's a gross exaggeration, but I suspect that walking, bicycling, running, and generally being out in the world can help create healthy neighborhoods. We need to see our fellow humans. The world is way different from our childhood, but it still exists. We can see our community and function within our community by simply being a part of it from time to time. In my rather self obsessed world this has involved occasionally trying to jog "locally" from place to place and see what is going on around me. Too often even our social existence takes place in the relative isolation of our offices, our stores, and perhaps most significantly our automobiles. We fly by our neighbors on our way to somewhere else, and generally miss the good and the bad happening around us. Instead of smelling the roses, we are driving past them at who knows how many miles an hour then sitting completely still in front of the television that almost never tells us what is really happening outside our door. In somekinda crazy world that I'm imagining, people would come first. Human beings would have the right of way over cars -- no I don't mean to incite radical jaywalking. Instead, I am trying to explain a concept that has been rolling around in my mind about making sure that thoroughfares don't prevent foot-bicycle travel or cut neighborhoods off from one another. Roads need to be designed in such a way as to allow for long distance travel without disturbing or reducing opportunities for local foot travel. We can see examples of this realization in communities throughout the world, but I imagine cities being designed in such a way as to actively encourage outdoor activity and to help foster community through their very design rather than having these notions plugged in at the end as side notes. We are a world apart from the one our parents and grandparents lived in: we live in virtual worlds, we move from job to job, from hometown to hometown and often from one country to another and back again. Perhaps our ties to the local community where we live TODAY do not run as deep as previous generations (more likely they are simply different kinds of ties) but in either case the differences surrounding us make it more important than ever to enhance our experience of life. We need to make our cities livable.

Specific Example:

Salt Lake City: 700 East between 900 and 1300 South is an excellent example of a road that needs to be reshaped to enhance local community experiences rather than cause divisions and obstacles to existence outside of those felt in cars driving somewhere else. There have been improvements in recent years including bike lanes running both east-west and north-south; however, this particular street still works as a divide in part because of its size and in part because of the dramatic lack of safe crossing areas. There should be pedestrian crossing areas that move with fluidity and that perhaps even include engineering changes such as pedestrian bridges/tunnels. In particular I have often thought that the city has made a mistake in not connecting one of its treasures, Liberty Park, with a smaller park on the other side of the street (running just east of 700 East to the south of 1300 South). A bridge could directly connect the two parks and the overall park experience could be enhanced with the continuation of the cedar path in the smaller park making a second loop for people using Liberty Park as a place to engage in activities such as walking and running. The idea is not original -- it is in fact based on a number of parks in Paris that have used a variety of tricks to create larger open spaces than those existing within the "natural" confines of the city. I believe connecting these two parks in Salt Lake City would create a sense of enhanced urban open space and ideally increase the overall Salt Lake urban experience by enabling the park(s) to in fact become a keystone to connecting/bridging communities that are sometimes otherwise separated.