We have access to all the information of the biosphere, arriving as elementary units in the stream of solar photons. When we have learned how these are rearranged against randomness, to make, say, springtails, quantum mechanics, and the late quartets, we may have a clearer notion how to proceed. The circuitry seems to be there, even if the current is not always on. ^[1]

Lewis Thomas

 
It got so I could smell a kludge before I ever saw it.

Anyone who’s written a computer program will know what I mean. I would code something, it worked, and eveyone was happy. But all too soon an enhancement request appeared. I patched the program and life proceeded. This got repeated repeatedly. Each iteration proved more difficult to cobble together than the last. Occasionally I noticed a faint scent, but quickly resumed programming accretions. At some point the odor became too ripe and pungent to ignore. Finally I faced facts. My program was now a kludge, a patchwork of work-arounds so brittle that its very usefulness was imperiled.

Truly this is a gift, a moment when a kludge becomes a playground. There you can bumble, inspect, consider, hack, imagine, create, and learn. Ultimately, to kludge is to learn. Only then can you discover what is fundamental but obscured, and recast it in a simple, elegant, and powerful way. To be certain this is painful, but it nonetheless opens a path forward.

Kludges happen on scales both grand and small. And, like a virus that mutates in the face of an antibiotic, a kludge enjoys unlimited reincarnations. This proves important and is best illustrated with a familiar example emphasizing only certain features.

§

The heavens have always awed humans with their mystery, but the movements of heavenly bodies also serve very practical functions. Navigation on open seas, predictions of celestial events such as eclipses, and calendrics of seasonal and religious events depend on an accurate understanding of the motions of the Earth, moon, sun, planets, and stars in the cosmos. Therein lies a story of kludges.

Let’s join the tale in the 4th century BCE, when Aristotle’s philosophical cosmology depicted a stationary Earth at the center of the universe. A series of concentric spheres, each composed of an ether substance, rotated around the Earth. Each sphere contained one visible object, including the moon, each of the five known planets, and the sun. A final sphere contained all stars since they appeared to move as one fixed unit. Each sphere rotated with a unique motion that approximated what an observer on Earth would see.

Aristotle’s geocentric conception contained circular and spherical symmetries consistent with belief in divine shapes, but its predictions of heavenly motion proved too inaccurate for practical use. Over the next 500 years, enhancements appeared that culminated in 150 CE when Ptolemy published his mathematical explanations for the movement of heavenly bodies. ^[2]

The Ptolemaic system was accurate within the measurement limits of the day, but its foundation rested on several ad hoc kludges. Heavenly spheres still rotated around the Earth, with centers now offset from the Earth. Philosophically, but not technically, the Earth remained the center of the universe. This helped match prediction with observation, but was not sufficient. Epicycles were then added. These allowed heavenly bodies to rotate in small circles within their sphere, so motion became a combination of spherical and epicyclical movement. This again helped, but not enough. Ptolemy then added another offset that effectively relaxed the requirement of perfectly circular motions. For the next 1200 years, the Ptolemaic system was good enough, as in “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

Eventually cracks did appear in Ptolemy’s constructions. For example, the equinox slowly drifted away from the 21st. This played havoc with religious events such as Easter that were determined relative to the equinox.

In 1543 CE, the year of his death, Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs ^[3]. In it he reimagined what was fundamental by scrapping geocentric assumptions. Instead Copernicus proposed that Earth and the other planets orbited the sun. This settled some inconsistencies in Ptolemy’s system, but because it still retained spherical and circular movements the Copernican system did not significantly improve predictions of planetary motions. Better accuracy wouldn’t happen until the early 1600s when Kepler proposed elliptical orbits. Then in 1687 Newton introduced the idea of gravity and demonstrated how gravitational forces lead naturally to elliptical orbits.

That, however, is not the end of the story. Kludging to learn about the mysteries of the cosmos continues vigorously. We call it science, of course, because that sounds better than kludging. But whatever its name, the core is learning; repeated iterations of kludging and learning.

§

Like Lewis Thomas, my notions on how to proceed are hazy. Unlike him, I don’t believe we need an explanation for the late quartets before proceeding.

Perhaps an electrical switch for Thomas’ metaphoric circuit lies hidden in the nose. In which case, hmmm, do you smell something rank? Nasty; it’s [fill in your favorite kludge; mine is: nations drugged on oil and blind to climate change].

We’ve been handed a gift, a moment when a kludge becomes a playground. Maybe the Earth [fill in your favorite: mine include: oil; politics; financial services; higher education] isn’t the center of the universe.

If not, then what?

We know, don’t we? Across all political persuasions, we know. There’s no need for a Copernicus or a Newton. We can all smell a kludge.

In our daily actions, don’t we have enormous latitude to bumble, inspect, consider, hack, imagine, create, kludge, learn and then live that which is fundamental but now obscured?

Indeed.
 

Reference Notes

1. ^ Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, New York: Viking Press, 1974, p15.
2. ^ The Galileo Project, Ptolemaic System.
3. ^ The Galileo Project, Copernican System.

As a result, however, I’m faced with an inevitable but entirely natural question from many people I haven’t seen in decades: “what are you doing these days?”

I only wish I knew. I could say: “I’m retired, I read and think a lot, I write a blog sometimes, I worry about the world, and I try to imagine how learning might change.”

That would be accurate, but it’s not exactly an engaging one-liner. More like a show-stopper instead.

So, unless someone can suggest something (please!), I think I’ll try the following and see what happens: “It’s all about my great-grandchildren!”

I suppose maybe a grandchild would be the first step.

ps:
Here’s the final draft of a toast I hope to give at the wedding. It’s called Wedding Thanks.

First, thanks to each of you for being who you are;
Second, thanks for reaching this moment in time together;
Third, thanks for this wonderful celebration of your love;
Fourth, thanks for your tomorrows shared with all of us; and
Fifth, thanks for the compassion each of you brings into the world.

Now factor in the multiple economic impacts of peak oil on a sprawling, dysfunctional collection of government bureacracies, on the one hand, and a corrupt and rapacious industry totally dependent on abundant credit and government loan guarantees, on the other. At the least, it’s a recipe for the end of American education as it’s currently practiced, and it’s not implausible that unless something else gets patched together in a hurry, it could mean the end of American education, period.

…

Reflection is the view that recognizes that human ideas of the order of the cosmos are, in the final analysis, just another set of human ideas, and that the hubbub and confusion of everyday life is the only reality we can be sure of. In an age dominated by reflection, Giambattista Vico’s great maxim—“we can truly know only what we make”—takes center stage, and humanity rather than the cosmos becomes the core subject of knowledge. It’s not a knowledge that can be extracted in the form of abstract generalizations, either; it’s a personal, tacit knowledge, a knowledge woven of examples, intuitions, and things felt rather than things defined. From the standpoint of abstraction, of course, this isn’t knowledge at all, but in practical application it works surprisingly well; a sensitivity to circumstances and a memory well stocked with good examples and concrete maxims tend, if anything, to be more useful in the real world than an uncritical reliance on the constructions of current theory.

gml
The two paragraphs above may seem unrelated. But within Greer’s wide-ranging post, they are not. Read the entire post; I cannot do justice to it in summary.

The post left me puzzled. It is enjoyable, erudite, and powerfully written in Greer’s inimitable style. And I’m sympathetic to his basic argument that American education, including higher education, is ill-prepared for systemic shock and urgently needs re-imagination. I also agree with Greer that reflective knowledge is under-appreciated today but will be vital in a future loaded with uncertainties.

My puzzlement stems mostly from disappointment. Greer makes the same mistake he condemns in his opening paragraph when categorizing a book on American conspiracy theorists this way:

… it was a depressing reminder of the reasons that the word “journalistic” has become a synonym for “facile and tendentious.”

For me there were just too many instances in the post where Greer made statements of fact about American education that caused me to wonder what sources he was using. Here’s an example:

It’s been shown repeatedly that the vast majority of high school seniors who enter university now will never recover financially from the economic burden of paying off their student loans.

What specifically does that mean? It’s unclear and, disappointedly, borders on the “facile and tendentious.”

Certainly in a widely read blog like Greer’s, you don’t want to impede a reader with footnotes or citations. But Greer, especially, knows that things are seldom as simple or black-and-white as they appear on the surface. Digging into complexity produces nuances, understanding and compassion.

Greer got the message right, but he missed an opportunity to tell the story in a softer but no less effective manner.

In one sense it matters a great deal whether we choose the low-carbon or high-carbon path: one way, we lay the groundwork for a sustainable (if modest) energy future; the other, we destabilize Earth’s climate while shackling ourselves even more tightly to energy sources that can only become dirtier and more expensive as time goes on. However, in another sense, it doesn’t matter which path we choose: either way, we will have less energy to burn. Plot any scenario between the low-carbon and high-carbon extremes and that conclusion still holds.
…
We will have less energy, like it or not. And with less energy, we will no longer be able to operate a growing consumer society. The kind of society we will be able to operate will almost certainly be as different from the industrial society of recent decades as that was from the agrarian society of the 19th century.

gml
Richard Heinberg is Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the Post Carbon Institute and a prolific writer and educator on peak oil and the social impact of energy resource changes. I’ve become immersed lately in sources that broadly sketch the context within which learning will occur in the future. Heinberg strikes me as someone who is knowledgeable, sincere in his concern for tomorrow, and reasoned when dealing with a topic that can easily become hyperbolic.

What might learning look like in a world that diverges significantly from more-of-the-same? It seems a question we’re about to answer, regardless of our degree of preparation.

None of the models being tried today are universally adoptable; the most we can say is that each of them happens to work somewhere, at least for the moment. This may seem like weak tea, given the enormity of the current changes, but if our test for any new way of producing news is whether it replaces all the functions of a newspaper, we’ll build things that look like newspapers, and if replicating newspapers online were a good idea, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.

…

Having one kind of institution do most of the reporting for most communities in the US seemed like a great idea right up until it seemed like a single point of failure. As that failure spreads, the news ecosystem isn’t just getting more chaotic, we need it to be more chaotic, because we need multiple competing approaches. It isn’t newspapers we should be worrying about, but news, and there are many more ways of getting and reporting the news that we haven’t tried than that we have.

gml
If you simply replaced “news” and “newspapers” in Shirky’s first paragraph with “learning” and “college and universities,” it pretty well describes the transformation of what we now call higher education.

Certainly it’s true that “if our test for any new way of producing learning is whether it replaces all the functions of colleges and universities, we’ll build things that look like colleges and universities, and if replicating higher education online were a good idea, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”

However, it is Shirky’s second paragraph that provides more insight into educational change.

First, I need to backtrack. Shirky’s multiple competing approaches and chaos will sound familiar to many programmers. You’ve got a goal in sight, which may seem solid but is often fuzzy and likely to modify with time. Moving toward the goal then becomes repeated iterations of experiment-fail-learn. You try something, fail, learn from the failure, and try another approach. Eventually you find a soft spot that allows movement toward the goal. Over and over this occurs in a herky-jerky Brownian movement forward. Experience and skill are certainly important, but in novel situations you simply do the best you can by probing, failing, learning, and persevering.

There’s a parallel between this type of programming and the chaotic social change that Shirky recommends. He’s absolutely right that we need the chaos of “multiple competing approaches.” Isn’t that what happens in evolutionary change and the adaptation of species to new environments?

Which brings me to a final point. In chaotic, evolutionary social change, it’s a matter of trial-error-learn and incremental movement. Theory provides a conversation starter because it helps you select another experiment. But rigid dogmatic clinging to theory is simply an impediment.

Let’s keep our eyes on the prize instead.

The thing that makes me bleak sometimes is just how quickly the science grows darker. We haven’t caught any breaks in the last 20 years. Everything that we’ve worried about has come in on the upper end of the projected range or off the charts altogether, whether it’s the melt of the arctic, or acidification of oceans, or the increase in drought and flood. So we’re clearly not going to stop global warming at this point. We’ve already raised the temperature of the planet one degree. We’ve got another degree in the pipeline from carbon we’ve already emitted. What we’re talking about now is whether we’re going to have a difficult, difficult century, or an impossible one. And we may still have enough room to maneuver to affect the outcome of that question.

gml
This is an interview with Bill McKibben, who edited The Global Warming Reader being published this month by OR books. From the publisher’s website:

This is a book for all of us: students, activists, Earthlings. Edited by perhaps the most widely-respected writer on the environment today, GWR is a comprehensive resource that collects seminal texts and voices on climate change from the phenomenon’s discovery in the late 19th century to the present. What is happening to our planet—and what can we do about it? This collection, which includes criticism of the very concept of global warming … attempts to answer these all-important questions.

The conjunction of climate change and new forms of learning is so obvious that I hesitate even to draw the connection. But honestly we cannot continue planning for tomorrow’s learning without factoring in large contextual changes that will influence or even determine what’s possible. Maybe I’m deaf to the discussion or listening to the wrong sources, but I do not see learning projects built or imagined for restricted conditions.

I found Moglen’s talk remarkable, principally for content but also for delivery (I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone speak that long in complete sentences without notes). Think how complicit we are in tethering ourselves to private corporations who view us primarily as consumers.

Then go check out Moglen’s Freedom Box.

Tony’s question concerned the merits of privatizing administration of higher education institutions.

If we gotten to the point where outsourcing administration is considered an option, then I wish that some institution would seriously implement differential pricing. I know this is unlikely given the extraordinary degree of transparency, internal cost analysis, and transfer/subsidy tracking required, but maybe desperate times will evoke desperate measures.

The idea is really simple … each student pays only for what they “use”.

Suppose I’m an undergraduate student attending a well-appointed public or private university in the United States. But I’m not much into sports, and I really could care less about the football team whose coach is paid more than the university president. I don’t pay that subsidy. And when I enroll in a large introductory survey course, I don’t pay those cash cow fees that subsidize graduate student seminars. I use student activities like career services on a pay-for-service basis. I take my courses from adjuncts and none from the high-profile but heavily subsidized star faculty. My prices reflect that choice. And on and on.

Doing differential pricing correctly returns some control over college pricing to the student. It gives students and their families a vote on what facets of an institutions’ offerings are valuable and which ones are patina.

I know, I know. I can hear the howls now about why this will not work. Those howls will start with the old saw about how current prices do not nearly cover the costs of higher education. My response to that is simple: give students a voice in institutional expenditures and watch institutional “costs” evaporate.

Sure, differential pricing will rend what we consider higher education now, but it just might allow some reformulation that better suits the times.

… what we both want to happen – a counter movement to greed and waste and the domination of corporations – is already happening. It is happening simply because a lot of people have seen things needing to be done and are doing them. They are at work without grants, without official instruction or permission, and mostly unnoticed by the politicians and the news industry. Eventually this movement will have political powers which will be in some ways regrettable. I hope it will have the sense and strength to remain locally oriented, and to resist the simplification and corruption that will come with power.^[1]

I like Wendell Berry’s understated tone in this paragraph. There’s none of the swagger so common these days when hyping the next-big-thing. It’s just straightforward talk in plain words. Refreshing.

We live in a time described variously as the great transition, peak oil, eudaimonia^[2], p2p, the new-economy, the turning, and various other taglines intended to convey dynamic change.^[3] Climate change, resource depletion, perpetual war, population growth, decaying financial and government institutions, grave inequality among people and nations. The list just goes on an on, matched only by the din and dissonance of competing diagnoses and prescriptions. Many of these voices provide important ways of imagining tomorrow, but in combination they’re also confusing.

Whether it’s explicit or not, we each individually place bets on tomorrow. Mine are quiet bets based on beliefs, instincts, and best guesses. The near future (20 years or so) appears abrasive yet hopeful, one of adjustment while learning to leave a softer imprint on the earth. There is no end of work that needs to be done, but little way to pay for it. Governments, corporations, and major institutions further imperil their bankruptcy, both ethical and literal. People increasingly look to themselves and to each other for solutions. Vitality exists in the huge number of projects that entrepreneurs, researchers, and citizens undertake. The failure rate in this primordial soup is high, but gradually a form of Bayesian^[4] learning occurs. And near the core is a belief that people and their capabilities provide an almost inexhaustible supply of compassion, creativity, innovation, and hope.

For me that sets the context. The focus then becomes one of building, much in line with Bucky Fuller’s notion of “making the world work for 100% of humanity.”^[5] For me personally that means helping realize ubiquitous, affordable, lifelong learning for everyone. In the process it means helping to change or obsolete whatever prevents that vision.

Notes

1. ^ See the series of letters between YES! magazine contributing editor Madhu Suri Prakash and Wendell Berry, YES! Magazine Issue 58 Summer 2011, p12-15. At this date (08-June-2011), not all articles in the issue have been published online. When online the Prakash and Berry letters should be available here.
2. ^ According to wikipedia, eudaimonia is an Ancient Greek word that translates as human flourishing. See Umair Haque on video about the “great shift from Opulence to Eudaimonia.”
3. ^ In this very diverse area of work, examples include:
   Gar Alperovitz, The New-Economy Movement, The Nation, published online 25-May-2011.
   Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation, which envisions new peer-to-peer modes of production, governance, and distribution. A good starting point is available here.
4. ^ Bayesian statistics is the formalization of a rule proposed in the 18th century by Thomas Bayes, a priest and mathematician. Bayes’ rule says that people can start with a belief, use new information to judge their belief, and progress to a revised or solidified belief based on this learning. It’s an iterative process that, I think, captures the essence of most learning.
5. ^ See the quote at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge or explore more of Fuller’s ideas about anticipatory design.

break the grip of the immediate which strangles our imagination and does not allow us to think and imagine new possibilities to save this world.

Wolcher is a professor at the University of Washington School of Law. He was speaking about The Meaning of the Commons before the Seattle Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. I couldn’t find a transcript of his presentation, but a video is available and David Bollier provides a good summary.

Here I want to touch on two points made by Wolcher. One is reflected in the quote above, where he highlights the important role played by imagination when thinking about tomorrow.

Yes, imagination is essential and again, yes, the forests of the immediate limit our visibility. Discontent with the current provides a fine starting point, but not much directional guidance except in the negative of “not like this.” Which leaves a full 360 degrees for that first step away from the now.

For me personally the discontented starting point is the rot in American higher education that, to my horror, I now clearly see I contributed during my career. And the directional step occurred when I stopped thinking in terms of education and started thinking in terms of learning. Educational systems and institutions are but a manifestation. Learning is a universal human right. It should be available to everyone everywhere throughout life. Which means it must be ubiquitous and essentially free of cost.

That then provides a foundation for imagination. How on earth do we get from today’s education to tomorrow’s learning?

Which brings me to a second point in Wolcher’s presentation. He spent a fair bit of time talking about a common misconception about the Charters of Liberty in the early 1200s.

In the 21st century, certainly in America, … it’s hard for us to think of rights as anything other than the creations of people that are more powerful than us, creations that are given to us by the powerful. But the customary rights that were confirmed in Magna Carta and Charter of the Forests were not given by anyone. They were taken by the people and they forced the king to confirm what they had already taken. The commons in this sense … is best expressed as commoning, not a noun but a verb, people actually expressing not a set of property relationships but a form of life …

Expressing a form of life. Wolcher sees this as people acting on their “shared imaginations.” Here I don’t feel as sanguine. Not that people don’t have shared imaginations. For example, I expect most people would find access to free universal lifelong learning to be a good thing, just as they would find nourishing food and adequate family health care to be good things.

At some basic level people do likely share hopes and visions for tomorrow. But that is not sufficient to make it real.

This is not the place, nor am I qualified, to discuss reasons why apparent common ground produces only modest change. But, in the context of Wolcher’s talk, I’d like to point a finger at our words.

So many things these days are tagged with monikers. At best they mean nothing and at worst they mislead. Here I’m talking about the obvious things like versioning everything (e.g., Web 2.0), but more specific to Wolcher’s topic the use of words like the commons or commoning. I seriously doubt that commoning is ever going to be a rallying cry. Nor is peer-to-peer, transitional cultures, or whatever other label we attach to what we’re doing. We seem obsessed with naming things.

It’s an old old issue. I like the way it’s expressed in the Daodejing about Tao, which appropriate to this discussion is directional and means the path or way:

Tao called Tao is not Tao.
Names can name no lasting name.

There’s an interesting modern illustration of the importance of this issue in a post by Michel Bauwens called Should we worry about capitalist commons and a response by Poor Richard in a post called Analyzing mixed socio-economic systems, who concludes that:

Too often when we argue at the level of public vs private or common vs corporate we are arguing about the “bottles” and fail to ever connect with those underlying assumptions, values, and relations that really make the wine what it is.

Even learning is a name, albeit one founded in biology, everyday activity, individual aspirations, and human rights. Perhaps that offers hope for shared imaginations. Actual realized progress seems more distant.