Policing Diversity OR The Fear of Chaos and the Closed Horizon - by Chat GPT and Me

The cry of our age is fear — fear of chaos, fear of ambiguity, fear of losing control. Across the political spectrum, people warn of rising totalitarianism. Yet, with eerie symmetry, the loudest defenders of “freedom” are often the ones building the walls that confine it.

You can't stave off totalitarianism by policing diversity. 

Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer called understanding a fusion of horizons — an openness to the unfamiliar that lets truth appear between perspectives. When we close those horizons, when we decide that only our tribe or ideology has the truth, dialogue dies. And when dialogue dies, power rushes in to fill the silence.

That is the moment we are living through. In the name of order, politicians and pundits are banning books, purging school libraries, threatening teachers, and rewriting history to fit a single moral script. Universities are attacked as “un-American.” Journalists are labeled “enemies of the people.” Diversity itself is treated as subversion. The fear of moral chaos has become the justification for intellectual lockdown.

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would have recognized this perfectly. He taught that human beings are haunted by lack— an inner incompleteness we try to cover with fantasies of perfect order: a righteous nation, a pure faith, a leader who will make everything make sense again. When those fantasies falter, anxiety surges. Rather than face the uncertainty, we lash out at whoever seems to embody it — scientists, migrants, gender non-conforming people, anyone who reminds us that the world is bigger than our story of it.

This is why many who claim to fear “authoritarianism” gravitate toward authoritarian leaders. Figures like Jordan Peterson warn that deconstruction and pluralism lead to chaos — yet in longing for restored hierarchy and moral certainty, they risk enshrining the very tyranny they dread. Order becomes an idol. And idols always demand sacrifice: of nuance, of empathy, of thought.

We see the same reflex in climate denial. The planetary crisis exposes us to what Lacan called the Real — the ungovernable forces that make a mockery of human control. Faced with melting ice and burning forests, many retreat into disavowal: “I know very well, but even so…” God will fix it. The scientists are lying. The problem is too big to matter. Anything to preserve the illusion of mastery.

But the true abyss is not uncertainty — it is the silence that follows when we shut down the conversation. The open horizon Gadamer spoke of is not relativism; it is democracy itself, the messy, vulnerable willingness to keep listening and to keep being changed.

We are not saved by purity. We are saved, if at all, by openness — to evidence, to other minds, to the possibility that we are wrong. The world will not fall apart because we read difficult books or hear unsettling voices. It will fall apart when we stop daring to hear them.

ChatGPT and I discuss "wokeism"

Question: What has become pejoratively called wokeism was inspired by various groups’ fight against inequality. To what extent is it responsible for the vehemence of current anti-liberal ideology among right wing conservatives? Is the negative label attached to efforts towards equality a direct backlash against social or cultural change or a strategy on the part of influential people with other aims?

Answer: 

This is a rich and nuanced question, and it touches on the intersection of cultural change, political ideology, and strategic narrative framing. Let’s break it down carefully.

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1. Origins of “Wokeism” and Its Pejorative Turn

The term woke originally emerged from African American Vernacular English as an exhortation to “stay awake” to social injustice, particularly racial injustice. Over time, it broadened to encompass awareness of many forms of inequality: gender, sexual orientation, class, disability, colonial legacy, etc.

But in recent years, especially in right-wing discourse, wokeism has become a pejorative—a catch-all term for what critics see as overreaching political correctness, identity politics, or enforced conformity to progressive norms.

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2. Cultural Change and Backlash

The backlash against “woke” movements is in many ways a direct response to rapid social and cultural change:

• Pace and Scope of Change: The last two decades have seen rapid shifts in norms surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and history (e.g. colonialism, statues, pronouns, curriculum reform). For many, these changes feel destabilizing.

• Perceived Moral Certainty: Some critics of progressive activism feel that it is moralizing, inflexible, or punitive—especially when it involves cancel culture or institutional mandates.

• Loss of Status: Groups that previously held unexamined cultural dominance (e.g., white, Christian, heterosexual, male) may experience equality as a loss, leading to resentment.

So yes, the negative labeling of efforts toward equality is partly a backlash against real social and cultural change—experienced as either threatening or imposed.

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3. Strategic Political Weaponization

But it’s also more than just cultural discomfort. The term woke has been strategically weaponized by influential actors:

• Political Utility: By turning “woke” into a scapegoat, political figures can unify a base against a common enemy without having to address complex systemic issues (e.g., economic inequality, climate crisis).

• Deflection: Culture war rhetoric diverts attention from class-based economic concerns. Framing elites as “woke ideologues” shifts focus from corporate power or economic policy to moral panic.

• Media Amplification: Think tanks, media outlets, and political consultants on the right have deliberately cultivated narratives around wokeism—pushing examples (sometimes exaggerated or cherry-picked) to stir emotional reaction and rally votes.

• Anti-liberal Rebranding: In many cases, the critique of “woke” morphs into a critique of liberalism itself—especially liberal tolerance, pluralism, or procedural democracy. In this sense, anti-woke rhetoric becomes a gateway to more authoritarian, illiberal ideologies.

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4. Responsibility for the Right-Wing Vehemence?

So to your core question: To what extent is “wokeism” responsible for the vehemence of current anti-liberal ideology among right-wing conservatives?

• Partial Catalyst: Progressive movements, especially when they become institutionally dominant (e.g. in academia, media, HR departments), have certainly triggered a reaction. So “wokeism” as practiced (or perceived) plays a partial role in fueling vehemence.

• Not the Root Cause: The deeper drivers are longer-standing: economic dislocation, loss of traditional identity anchors, globalization, and the decline of trust in institutions. Wokeism is a proximate trigger, not a root cause.

• Exploited by Strategists: The vehemence is amplified and channeled by political actors who see cultural resentment as an effective way to mobilize support. In this sense, the anti-woke fervor is a means to other ends—often reactionary nationalism, deregulation, or weakening liberal institutions.

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5. A Broader Philosophical Reflection

Your question invites a philosophical insight: the conflict is not merely over content (equality vs tradition), but over how reality is interpreted, whose experience counts, and what counts as knowledge or virtue.

The word woke itself has become a site of contested meaning. One side uses it to describe ethical awareness; the other, to denote moral overreach or cultural tyranny. Both meanings reflect real experiences—but the divergence is weaponized rather than reconciled.

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In Summary

• The vehemence of anti-liberal ideology is partly a backlash to rapid cultural change framed as “wokeism.”

• However, it is largely shaped and intensified by strategic political narratives used by influential figures.

• The label “woke” has become a proxy battle for deeper anxieties about identity, power, and belonging in a changing world.

Question 2: What are the aims of the influential people stoking the reaction against wokeism?

Answer 2:

The aims of influential people stoking the reaction against “wokeism” vary depending on their role—politicians, media figures, corporate actors, or ideological strategists—but there are common threads among them. Below is a breakdown of key aims, organized into political, economic, cultural, and strategic categories.

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1. Political Power and Electoral Mobilization

Aim: To build and maintain political coalitions by mobilizing voters through culture war narratives.

• Rally the base: “Wokeism” is framed as a threat to traditional values, family, national identity, or freedom—creating a clear “enemy” to galvanize support.

• Simplify complex issues: Instead of addressing systemic problems (e.g. healthcare, inequality, education), politicians offer emotionally charged culture war flashpoints.

• Suppress dissent: Anti-woke rhetoric helps delegitimize critics or activists by painting them as irrational, dangerous, or elitist.

👉 Example: A politician opposing LGBTQ+ rights may claim to be fighting “woke indoctrination” rather than acknowledging a rights-based argument.

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2. Economic Interests and Deregulation

Aim: To prevent or roll back progressive economic reforms under the guise of opposing “woke capitalism” or “identity politics.”

• Distract from inequality: Focus on race, gender, and culture wars instead of addressing the redistribution of wealth or corporate accountability.

• Protect capital: By framing climate regulation, diversity policies, or workers’ rights as “woke overreach,” corporate interests can resist reform.

• Weaken unions and social movements: “Woke” is used to discredit labor activism or solidarity politics, dividing working-class people along identity lines.

👉 Example: Billionaire-funded think tanks warning about “woke environmentalism” may do so to protect fossil fuel profits, not free speech.

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3. Reassertion of Cultural and National Identity

Aim: To preserve or restore a dominant cultural narrative—often tied to race, religion, gender roles, or nationhood.

• Restore hierarchy: Anti-woke discourse often implicitly defends traditional power structures: patriarchal, nationalist, or racially dominant orders.

• Invoke nostalgia: “Make [country] great again” often implies a return to a time before progressive gains reshaped norms.

• Promote conformity: Reducing pluralism by stigmatizing difference (immigrants, trans people, minority histories) serves the goal of a homogeneous national myth.

👉 Example: Anti-“woke history” laws seek to prevent students from learning about systemic racism, replacing it with patriotic or sanitized versions of the past.

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4. Institutional Capture and Illiberal Drift

Aim: To weaken liberal-democratic norms—like academic freedom, judicial independence, or media pluralism—under the pretense of fighting “woke overreach.”

• Control discourse: Replacing independent education or journalism with state-approved or ideologically aligned alternatives.

• Undermine liberalism: Anti-woke rhetoric is increasingly a mask for anti-liberal values: attacking pluralism, rights discourse, or minority protections.

• Erode checks and balances: Cultural panic becomes a justification to bypass democratic procedures (e.g., banning books, limiting protest rights, packing courts).

👉 Example: Leaders in Hungary or Florida invoking “anti-woke” agendas to reshape universities and restrict dissent reflect this aim.

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5. Narrative Dominance and Psychological Warfare

Aim: To win the “meaning war”—to shape how people understand society, morality, and truth itself.

• Redefine morality: Frame empathy, equity, and social justice as weakness, decadence, or tyranny.

• Foster cynicism: Encourage the belief that truth is subjective, that nothing is trustworthy—except their own ideology.

• Create enemies: In-group solidarity often depends on a villain. “Woke elites,” “trans activists,” “DEI bureaucrats,” or “academic Marxists” serve as symbolic enemies.

👉 Example: Influencers who build entire platforms around “anti-woke” outrage depend on constant indignation to generate clicks, allegiance, and financial support.

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Summary: Their Aims in One Line Each

Domain                         Aim

Political:    Win elections, suppress opposition, and consolidate power.

Economic:    Protect corporate interests and resist redistributive reforms.

Cultural:    Preserve dominant identity narratives and social hierarchies.

Institutional:    Dismantle liberal safeguards in the name of “freedom.”

Psychological/Strategic:    Control language, shape perception, and divide the public.

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Final Reflection

The push against “wokeism” is not just reactive—it’s proactive and strategic. It cloaks elite interest in populist anger, channeling real frustrations about change, inequality, and belonging into divisive narratives that entrench the very power structures they claim to oppose.

ChatGPT and I discuss whether AI has a mind of its own

 Question: Does AI have a mind of its own? 

Not all thinking is conscious, as we know. Yet many suppose that because AI does something that resembles thinking, AI might one day possess the will and means to threaten humanity. Studies have shown that people whose reasoning abilities prove intact while brain damage or other brain problems has left them unable to desire or feel much. They are incapable of making decisions. AI is believed by techno-utopians and techno-dystopians alike to have “a mind of its own” but surely it’s just a phenomenally amazing abacus. What’s your take?

ANSWER:

This is a deeply important question—one that reaches to the core of what we mean by “mind,” “thinking,” and “agency.” You’ve already outlined the key dilemma: just because something behaves as if it is thinking, does it follow that it is thinking—or that it could ever will anything?

Let’s explore this through several lenses.

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1. Thinking vs. Feeling: The Neurological Clue

You point to real neurological cases: individuals with intact reasoning (IQ, logical deduction) who nonetheless become paralyzed in decision-making when their emotional faculties are damaged. Antonio Damasio’s famous work on patients with orbitofrontal cortex damage showed that emotion is essential to rational decision-making. Without a felt sense of desire, value, or risk, even the most seemingly rational brain becomes inert—able to compute, but unable to act meaningfully.

This distinction is central. Thinking, in any human sense, involves a background of care. We think for something—about things that matter.

So, what happens when you remove that substrate of feeling? You get exactly what we see in current AI: the illusion of thought, but not the presence of meaning, purpose, or desire.

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2. AI as an Abacus, or Something More?

The metaphor of AI as a “phenomenally amazing abacus” is apt. An abacus is a tool. So is AI—albeit vastly more complex. Its outputs are impressive not because it thinks, but because we do, and we have trained it on an immense ocean of human language, patterns, and associations.

AI doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t mean anything it says. It doesn’t prefer one outcome over another. Everything it generates is a response to statistical patterns in data. Even its apparent “reasoning” is a cascade of probabilistic transformations, not a struggle toward truth or meaning. There is no inner light.

The fact that this process can resemble human thinking is astonishing. But it is, in the end, mimicry—however dazzling. To conflate this mimicry with will or agency is like confusing a photograph of food with hunger.

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3. Why the Fear (and Hype)?

Both techno-utopians and techno-dystopians commit a similar category error: they project intentionality onto systems that have none. They mistake competence for consciousness.

This is understandable. We are wired to see agency in the world—evolution made us hypersensitive to intention. So when something talks fluently, solves problems, or even creates art, we intuit a mind behind it. But this is anthropomorphism, not science.

What’s more, many fears about AI derive not from AI itself, but from the humans who wield it—governments, corporations, militaries. A tool in a human hand becomes dangerous not because it wills harm, but because we do.

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4. Could AI Ever “Will” Anything?

Could a future AI develop something like desire or agency?

This depends on whether intentionality can emerge from computation alone, or whether it is grounded in embodied, feeling, valuing existence—a view held by many phenomenologists and cognitive scientists. If the latter is true, then no matter how advanced AI becomes, it will always be a simulation of mind, not a bearer of it.

To will something—to threaten, or to choose—is not just a matter of processing information. It is to have a point of view, a stance toward the world. This may be impossible for AI, unless it first becomes a subject of experience.

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Conclusion:

AI does not have a mind of its own. It does not think in the human sense. It does not choose. It is a marvel of pattern-matching, a mirror of our language and logic. A godlike abacus, yes—but one whose greatness lies in its ability to reflect, not originate, meaning.

And perhaps the real danger lies not in AI waking up, but in humans falling asleep—entranced by the illusion of mind, and forgetting where real agency still lies.

Answers provided and formatted by ChatGPT

Imagining Reality

I saw a talk on TED a couple of years ago by cognitive scientist, Donald Hoffman. He presented his view that our perceptual faculties have evolved for our survival and not so much to preserve a likeness to whatever it is that is causing our perception. To some extent, this is an unremarkable hypothesis since we already know that the range of colours and sounds extends beyond that we can see and hear. What are sounds to us and other living things are basically air vibrations, and there is no sound in the void of outer space. We also know our perceptual systems are tricked by optical illusions.

But Hoffman's idea is more radical - he thinks that the world we perceive might bear no more resemblance to whatever causes our perceptions than a computer screen interface bears to the actual inner workings of the computer, i.e., none. Further, he believes that even scientific activity remains at the perceptual "user interface" and, for all intents and purposes, we remain within the matrix of our perceptual systems, with no perceptual access to reality. Even brains and neurons, as we study them, reside in the interface. This is not to say we are lost in a sea of perceptual illusion, however. He retains hope that mathematics and reason will guide us to scientific truths.

Variations on the idea that we cannot get beyond our modes of perception to experience reality directly have been advanced throughout the history of ideas.  For the most part, these positions have been thought to entail that we simply do not know what is beyond the perceptual horizon and must leave aside any hopes of metaphysical insight; or that are grounds to believe that we are somehow trapped inside our heads, or that the world we see is a hallucination or a delusion; or that the world there is is really nothing other than the world we perceive - esse est percipi.

We end up with this set of positions only because our idea of reality is one that assumes a gulf between Mind and Nature.

The world is real (or it is nothing). I'm not saying that we perceive things as they would be without us. Why have we have assumed that's what reality is - the world as it is without us? The world we inhabit is a dynamic environment that includes us and within which we have considerable influence, for better or worse. A world without us is clearly an imaginary one. Without perceiving beings, the world wouldn't really look like anything.  It has existed and could exist without us, and it will again one day, but as of now, here we are.

It's a simple truism. The world we perceive is the world in which we live. Our perceptions occur in nature, and they are more or less relevant to our purposes, whether those purposes be the pursuit of scientific knowledge, manipulating others, or obscuring something painful from our past.  Perceptual veridicality is not true representation of a non-perceived world but has to do with with the horizon of our intentions.

Our idea of objectivity (our current one - the concept of objectivity has a history) is the idea of the world  without us, a world imagined without involvement (taint) from any human intention or purpose. This has led us to frame reality as a principally spatial world of catalogued things whose interactions can be described in terms of the operation of forces acting according to laws of nature.

Our habit of conceptually freeze-framing phenomena in space and time in a way that favours spatial and mathematical representation is likely cognitively energy-saving but ontologically misleading. Perception is an active response to our present environment and we cannot remove ourselves from the world to understand it - why would we think we could? Does anyone know what the world would look like sub specie aeternitatis (from the POV of eternity)?

The conceptual freeze-frame is only a shorthand that we have somehow managed to reify because we see ourselves as so different from nature. Our own nature has been considered an impediment to objectivity. Nevertheless, we live in a dynamic symbiotic universe, not a world of disconnected things attracted by forces and governed by laws. We reify our conceptual models and assume tangible experience falls short.

The question of how the world is without our witnessing it is not possible to answer. That doesn't mean there is "some mysterious unknowable world" about which we have no direct or indirect information or that the existence of the world depends upon us perceiving it. The question is an error. The world we know more or less well is the world in which we came to be.

On Tribe and Discourse

On Tribe and Discourse Earlier blog entries in this space (Culture is Geologic [gone - eaten by former blog host], Tribalization and the Global Economy and Relativism [below], Populism and Power [also eaten]) expressed the view that industrialism, by disrupting awareness of a direct relation to nature, dislodged the web of discourse that integrated tribe and ecosystem and replaced the integrating mythos with a place holder that Lacan referred to as the Name-of-the-Father.  This place holder can now be filled, the sentiments of "tribe" artificially but all the more zealously aroused, by any number of banners.  One's sense of personal identity is wrapped up in some kind of tribal membership. I say all the more zealously because in a globalized economy, tribal connections, especially among urban or modern people, are likely to be reaction formations to some degree.  Believers of myths today believe them literally and historically, rather than heuristically or metaphorically; fans idolize teams and do battle over loyalties; patriots die for nations that never supported them; gangs fight over territories; people are relieved to be identified as belonging to a market segment.  Reaction formation is characterized by overly intense beliefs; overly intense to sustain the lie to oneself.   A little reflection and anyone can see that intense tribal loyalties are artificial yet deadly in a global economy.  The organic integrity of pre-literate tribes has long decayed, as we can see directly in the aboriginal peoples of the world whose ways have been sideswiped by globalization.  Today, the tribe as a social-psychological form is decadent.  A true way of renewal needs to be found.  Tribalization and the Global Economy Historically, tribe is a set of economic relationships between people that direct their relation to local nature; i.e., a socio-economic system.  An attendant mythology embedded in linguistic structures models the world for members of the tribe. The mythology institutionalizes kinship relations, the rites and rules of reproduction and life events in patriarchal terms.  Tribe is circumscribed by a set of proprieties and shameful transgressions (especially reproductive) that literally define its membership and its members’ sense of identity. What happens to tribe in the global economy?  In a global economy, the tribe resides in an alienated nostalgia.  There is an empty place-holder for what should be a meaningful socially-integrating force (that makes us feel at home in the world and explains our connection to nature in mythological terms), but the place-holder embodies the same amount of energy and urgency as any locally based socio-economic system.  In an unrooted global economic system, any banner can galvanize a group in the time it takes to score a goal , shout “death to infidels” or prefer one popular music genre over another.  Why? Psychologist Jacques Lacan had the brilliance to realize three things:  One, that the sense of personal identity one has is necessary for basic sanity; Two, that this sense of identity does not self-subsist in individuals but is a product of one’s linguistic place in the patriarchal-tribal system of meanings; and Three, it is necessary for there to be an integrating but intrinsically undefinable locus of navigation to this system of meanings, which he facetiously but accurately called “the name of the father.”  So the answer to the question as to why tribe can galvanize with such astounding force is that a linguistic community is deeply necessary for sanity.  There are obvious exceptions, but unfortunately until Lacan is wrong, and Carol Gilligan is right …  2016-06-08 Note: Name of the father "as the delegate and spokesperson of a body of social Law and convention", not the phallus as per Freud. http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/#SH2c There are probably better sources out there. I was reading Malcolm Bowie 11 years ago in 2005 if anyone's interested.

The Relationship between Objectivity and Bureaucracy

In 2009, I posted a short blog entry, How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic. Here, I'd like to delve a bit further into what is pejoratively known as "bureaucracy" and tie the discussion to a broader cultural theme, one I'll call Fetishizing the Heuristic. The terminology is a bit academic, but apt, so I'll explain.

Heuristics are flexible guidelines, generally sane models, not meant to account for every contingency, but a pencilling in of a plan or set of criteria based on experience. (Maslow's Hierarchy, for example, was intended to be considered a flexible heuristic, but rarely is.)

To fetishize something means to idolize it...

So when a heuristic is idolized, the criteria embodied in a flexible guideline magically come to have a life of their own, alienated from the creative and reasonable minds that set them out. They become viewed as if they issue from a higher order of existence.

So, for example, a preliminary plan is developed that covers a time span, or evaluative criteria are set out provisionally. As soon as dates and scoring methods are assigned, it's as if these plans or criteria issued directly from an eternal source of objectivity, not from the minds of those composing them. (They become reified in processes, detached from the aim that inspired their development.)

The problem that arises is that once the guideline has been drawn up and numbers assigned to what started off as a provisional guideline, no counter-evidence from the actual world of objective reality will change the guideline. Where there is deviation, it will considered as a way of illustrating how things and people have failed to meet the criteria, not as evidence that the model needs adjusting.

Jack Martin of Simon Fraser University wrote in 1996 (in a no longer available newsletter of the American Psychological Association) lamenting how assessment criteria, never intended to be more than reasonable, flexible, useful guidelines, become irrationally narrowed and fixed once they are operationalized (assigned a numerical scale). This causes the quality and relevance of research in empirical psychology to degenerate.

Then, of course, these guidelines become embodied in institutional procedures - further alienated from the agents, the creative and reasonable minds of people in the organization, who would otherwise use their minds to question them, adjust them, and maintain their usefulness.

In practice, understanding how we can fetishize the heuristic should lead us to be more active in questioning and revising plans and criteria as necessary, understanding they issue from human needs and objectives.

The broader, more philosophical understanding is that a lot of the conceptual packaging we use to identify something as objective is faulty and needs to be revisited. We need to re-insert the awareness of our responsibility as agents into our plans and to adjust in an ongoing way to what is happening, rather than mechanizing thought in bureaucratic processes or bracketing ourselves out of existence while we follow an eternal diagram (our role in conceiving it, forgotten).

In a nutshell, don't treat a working hypothesis, guideline, process or model as if it issued from the heavens. After all, it's your model and you should have every right to correct it as more evidence becomes available - and there will always be more evidence, unless you are omniscient. 

Inventory and Alienation

Haven't posted for a while. There has been a lot in the non-virtual world to tend to lately.

My Dad used to tell of the saying that he and his fellow Englishmen belonged to "a nation of shopkeepers." Looking at this from a distance, combined with the general ubiquity of English "empiricism", I see the general worldview encapsulated in this saying as one of "inventory". Of course we associate empiricism with evidence and objectivity, the successful scientific method, and contrast it with the general failure of scholastic philosophy (as parodied by Monty Python in the witch skit in the film, the Holy Grail, for example) which is viewed as contributing nothing more than impractical and fanciful speculations. I'm led to think, though, that our insistence on clear definitions and numbers owes itself far more to our economic arrangements than our scientific one, and science suffers as much as the rest of us for a misplaced trust in clear definitions and numbers.

Is the world in fact "composed of things of various kinds in various numbers"? Yes, obviously, most people would say. But that describes an inventory, not an ecosphere, which is rather more dynamic and complex. So what do scientists do if not inventory? They do think in numbers and definitions. The cornerstone of experimentation is the "operational definition" which is about defining something in measurable, numerical terms. In order to accomplish this, scientists need to speculate about potential influences on the object of study and set up experiments to "control for" these influences in ways that can be measured. And in order to manage this, they need to circumscribe the list of potential influences, which for certain things (i.e., things that we'd say are "law governed", i.e., mechanical things) is doable.  Well, gosh, that would be obvious wouldn't it, because if things weren't law governed, no scientist could manage to create an experiment with reliable predictions and repeatable results.

It's my view that this approach is only amenable to objects of study where context can be mathematically parsed out of the equations, and those things are everywhere, but not necessarily everything (i.e., certain areas of physics and chemistry.) In other words, scientific laws describe ideal relations, without context. The particular context is supplied by the "initial conditions". Is there ever a situation where the initial conditions can't be exhaustively identified? Of course! Pretty well every situation that is not covered by the "hard sciences."

Stuart Kauffman suggests that we "sneak in" the lawfulness in hard science by roping things off, setting them up in advance "by hand". Yes, this is awesome that we can do this, and it's what allows us to have incredibly complicated technologies and wonderful experimental discoveries in physics and chemistry, but I don't believe that, even in principle we'd be able to identify the field of things meant to count as initial conditions for all the different occasions and events in the world. At best, we could do so retroactively, but never proactively.

What this means is that for much of what we try to plan and determine, we identify rather an incomplete list of things that count as conditions for the outcomes we are projecting. People are becoming more attuned to this fact as, for example, they now talk about "wicked problems" in business planning; in other words, problems whose dimensions are not definable and enumerable in advance. People have always known that ecology and sociology do not make the kinds of hard and fast predictions of physics and chemistry, but the question is why and the answer is that they do not have the kinds of problems where the "parsing out" that goes on in physics and chemistry can be done. Why don't they? Because not everything that occurs happens at one scale. Everything is intertwined, everything is interconnected, everything influences on several scales. Mechanical (or "reductionist") thinking focuses only on one. This focus keeps us alienated from discovery and from life. If an experience of a situation doesn't fit into that box, it's supposed to be "merely subjective" and otherwise non-existent? (Talk of epiphenomena, or even silly concepts such as supervenience are used as ad hoc supplements to reductionist models.)

Types, lists and numbers. How much of our planning counts these as the cornerstone? More to the point, how much of our ideas of worth are tied to these "real, practical, objective, factual, measurable" things? Are these not our very idea of what's worth pursuing? (Think of S.M.A.R.T. goals for example.)

I'm not sure that's smart or even scientific, to be honest. It's just an inventory.

The constellations of philosophy?

Hypothesis:

The patterns of every socio-economic organization in history and the powers that maintain them are supported by a tacit ontology (myth/theory of what reality is) that underpins public discourse and the social narrative. This ontology serves to legitimate the social order in the same way as the ancient belief in the "divine right of kings" or "mandate of heaven". (Another metaphor that may work in place of the divine right of kings might be heavenly/stellar constellations. Ancient rites seem to have connected them.)

Philosophers are by trade apologists for or critics of the divine right of kings (i.e., the ontology that underpins the social narrative). It is changes in technology that occasion changes in the social narrative (and only indirectly philosophy) because technological change gives rise to the need for changes in the patterns of economic and thus social organization, which then calls forth a new narrative. Philosophers gain a following when they contribute to a sustaining narrative, or to one held onto by soon-to-be eclipsed powers (there's usually a lag...).

Another Blog - Art of Objectivity

If you'd looked at any of the posts headed "Change Discourse" and were wondering why this theme seems to have been discontinued, the reason is that I decided to start a new blog on this theme. The new blog is called "Art of Objectivity", because I believe objectivity to be more an art than a science, not that I claim to have mastered it.

The Art of Objectivity takes its title from an earlier post in this blog. There I'd said that "there is more risk in following methodology and discouraging reasoning than there is in allowing creative human thought."

The new blog undertakes a paleontology of our beliefs, with the assumption that we are not so much guided by rational self-interest but by either real or, more often today, ideological tribal loyalties, rooted in a vestigial need to support and reproduce the social order. I believe that the solution, if there is one, is not more methodology but more understanding that doesn't claim finality.

Why this blog?

This blog is called "Art of Objectivity" because I don't think objectivity has a formula or methodological foundation. When I first read the article (included in the sidebar) by Eugene Wigner, a physicist,  I was struck by his saying that it is not the application of some principle, template, formula or algorithm, but rather, "the skill and ingenuity" of an experimenter, which allows him or her to identify objects of study whose causes can be identified and reproduced.  I think this could be expanded (with some major caveats, to be introduced later) to say that human beings can learn to identify themes and recurring patterns, and with caution, use them to navigate their way in nature and in the world of politics, and they do so best, not by relying on some kind of "best practice" or pure unbiased methodology (whatever that would be) but by applying their care and concern, interest and curiosity, wisdom and intelligence to problem solving.  This is a dignified approach to learning.

With that in mind, I can explain why I'm writing this blog. I'm thinking aloud about the way we come to understand our relationship to nature. There have been countless stories about this over milennia and its countless civilizations.

The stories that we tell come to us from different dimensions of existence: myths and religions, the political sphere, the world of academics (both the sciences and humanities) and its tribal schisms, even today the world of image and advertising.

Anthropologists, psychoanalysts, analytical psychologists, philosophers, sociologists and historians all have commented on our ideas about ourselves in the world.  It seems to me, though, that we haven't really come to the right questions to ask, because we insulate ourselves in our anthropomorphic bubbles - those stories either scientific, religious or political, that continue to make some aspect of humanity the key to our eternal rightness and well-being in a world that we are supposed to transcend, one way or another. We believe we transcend nature because we're mostly rational beings (we're not, of course) or beings for whom nature itself was created (it wasn't) or beings who are enlightened, modern, no longer superstitious and "primitive" or primordial.

My take is that we're products of nature, we live in nature, we are hominids, mammals, vertebrates, etc., and we, like other animals, have instincts. To come to an understanding of our relationship to the world, we need to question and understand our deepest instincts about it.

I work from the hypothesis that human instincts unconsciously anchor the relationships between the available technology , the work we do gathering what we need from nature, our economic and social roles in the distribution of what we gather, and the power structures that emerge from that dynamic.  We have deeply embedded scripts around these relationships and these contribute to a profound sense of belonging. I would say these stories have a scent that connects and grounds us (well or ill.) Our instincts occur to us in ritual and symbology, ranging from the most solemn (e.g., rituals of birth, marriage, death) to the most power entrenching (i.e., attaining the throne) to the most rousing (e.g., sports), to the superficial (Tim Horton's vis a vis the Canadian national identity and other well-merchandised rituals of a consumer economy. )

So, in future entries, what I'm going to try to do is spell out our stories of our relation to nature and how they sustain our social and political roles. (This has implications for change management, as well.)

Change Discourse

It's been a long time since I posted a blog entry on Peripheral Vision.

I've decided to contribute something a little different now - on subjects that I have been thinking about for a very long time.  I was going to open another blog, but thought that it would save distractions if I just continued here.

I should warn you that this is going to be pretty "big picture" but for all that, it is definitely not going to be abstract. Over the next few months of postings (I hope) you'll come across terms such as "narrative" and "social discourse" but let's be clear - those are not abstract concepts like "the average family" or the GDP.

Social discourse is that living sea of language that you inherit from the many cultures in which you were raised. It's the theatre of your cognition, the shaper of your experiences and what allows you to communicate a wealth of information to others by means of these mere marks on the screen, or those little puffs of air that resonate throughout the cafe. It's the window through which you look out from your inner self to the world around you. It's the sedimented history of thousands and thousands of years of human existence.  It sorts, organizes and informs your basic, habitual awareness.  It exists in the world around you. (If you still think that's abstract, you can blame that label on several trends in the evolution of social discourse ;). Social discourse or narrative is mainly about the habitual tags, labels and markers we give to all of our personal experiences in the private or public sphere. It's the channel through which things make sense to us and amongst us when we take in, think or talk about them.

Social discourse traverses generations and changes the conditions of our understanding over time. It carries a set of key connotations that have some very strong influences on our experiences. They arise from living in a natural world and the social organization demanded from a given level of technology. Social discourse influences and is influenced by the needs that a level of technology produces:  The needs that organize us around gathering, changing and distributing nature's provisions, the ideals that support that organization. The core ideas in our cognition and evaluations are:

• The definition of private versus public
• Gender, family, and reproductive relationships
• Power relationships (e.g., boss, employee; government, capitalist)
• Values (e.g., "freedom" "kindness" or "success" - what are they?)
• Human beings and our understanding relation to the planet Earth
• What we take to be real in the universe

However, there's usually a lag and some upheaval before the brain and heart catch up with the hands but now, all of our core ideas are about to change markedly .... and therefore so will our experience.