The problem with binaries

Binaries aren’t all bad. The tao is a representation of both a binary and a spectrum, rolled into one. Yin and Yang are opposites, yet they are also bleeding into—and contain—each other. If you cut cross-sections of the symbol, you create a spectrum moving from more yin, less yang toward more yang, less yin. Importantly, the symbol represents both how we organize the world AND how that organization always unravels. Shelley’s “Destroyer and Preserver” idea here. Derrida focused on the problem of unraveling, insisting that binary pairs in language represent the self-referential nature of concept/language. He was wrong. Binarism is built into the human organism. In fact it is the basic structure of biological organization. Male and Female; left brain and right brain; lateral symmetry of the body. Lakoff and Johnson did not mention the presence of biology in metaphor-making, but it is there. You might say that the IDEA of biology, the PATTERN, the STRUCTURE that maintains the integrity of matter in organisms, is built on binaries. And since the matter that sustains us is “recycled,” the IDEA that holds it in a PATTERN is critical to life and homeostasis.

Derrida was, as I have previously claimed, a closet positivist. He wanted absolutes of meaning, that could be attached to objects and concepts. What he found and exploited for his own ends were objects and concepts that were “slippery” since they were defined by their relationships to each other rather than by some absolute referential, individual meaning. Of course he found that! The insight is old in the East. Everything is defined by relationship. The meaning of everything depends on context. The reality of things is not the matter in them, but the “forms” of their relationships—both internal and external. This was Plato’s insight, which has been called “Idealism.” But the only way we can understand and enter relationship with the world is sensory engagement, and the material and ideational are always conjoined. So it is silly to say (and eastern religion is wrong here too) that we must “ignore” the sensual world and focus on the “reality” that lies behind, beyond, above it.

Pattern and Matter are always integrated, and Matter carries Meaning as Meaning shapes and influences Matter. Representation, mapping, modeling à physical structure, behavior, actionà further representation, mapping, modeling. The structure of creatura is built on this cycle. Genetic codes “map” the body, which develops according to those maps. Neuronal “mappings” create images in the mind based on perceptual engagement with the world. Images in the mind are given names, “mapped” once again within systems of language and meaning. All the mappings, all the coding systems, are subject to re-vision and alteration. Does chaos result? Not at all. As with language itself, the system is dynamic, changing, and yet remarkably stable. It is miraculously adaptive. We can indeed reshape our destiny.

At a basic level, metaphor and narrative are forms of “mapping the world.” We use stories and metaphorical figures of speech to organize our experience and to make it meaningful and manageable. Metaphor and narrative are much more effective than expository prose at capturing the complex, relationship-centered aspect of reality. Yet they too can limit us. Oversimplification is one of our key shortcomings. For instance, Darwin’s selection of competition (struggle for survival, survival of the fittest, and so on) as the central metaphor for describing and analyzing ecosystems. Poetry reminds us that no one set of metaphors can describe anything. Seeing things and patterns anew is refreshing and vital to our effort to understand a complex world. Narratives also get reified, turned into “the word of God” instead of stories ABOUT meaning. We seek to make facts of our interpretations and to make objects of our facts. We try to stabilize the world, when in fact we bore ourselves to death when it is too stable.

Don Juan claims that the Nagual and the Tonal are a true pair—a binary that is real rather than constructed to point at what is real. That which is known and that which is unknown; that which has been experienced and described and that which has not yet been experienced and described. The key is to be able to experience the Nagual—to get outside of our current mappings, to recognize new possibilities and meanings, to “think outside the box” (or more accurately, to perceive outside the box). Language is indeed a prison-house if we let it be one. But beyond language is sensory experience itself. Attention and focus, coupled with internal silence, can open surprising doors. That’s why so many people have meditated and practiced mind-changing disciplines over the ages. But perhaps there are also physical “boxes” that we cannot simply jump out of. The structure of our minds is what it is. We cannot see ultraviolet radiation. We cannot see light particles. We cannot feel the barrage of gamma rays hitting us moment by moment. Or can we? We have seen them in our minds, and imagined them into being. Are they “real” or “imagined”?

Poor, misunderstood poetry

I’d like to begin, as the romantic poets did, with poetry itself. The talk about poems, and poetry, and life, can come later. Let’s start with a poem that, for me, represents nicely what poems can and should be at their best. It is a very short poem called “The Pasture,” by Robert Frost. This poem was the first poem in Frost’s 1915 collection North of Boston. Please read it aloud, slowly. Then we can consider what it is doing to us and with us.

The Pasture

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.— You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.— You come too.

The speaker of this poem invites us, as readers, to share a moment of experience. With lilting rhythms and simple language, the poem draws and focuses our attention. From “I’m going out” to “You come too” the speaker suggests the sharing of simple pleasures. And even though he claims that he “sha’n’t be gone long” and the poem is brief, a world of timeless awareness and possibility lies just beyond the practical moments here. “I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away,” the narrator claims, suggesting that simple daily work is the cause of this trip. But the beauty of the moment opens up with lines that suggest reflection, broadened attention, and intensified awareness. The narrator may “wait to watch the water clear,” pausing in his daily rounds. As he “fetches” the calf, he will be aware that it is so young that it “totters when she licks it with her tongue.” Pleasure and awareness of beauty are deeply connected to the world of everyday activity here. Poetry invites us to recognize, and remember, and remind ourselves of the pleasures and beauties that surround us. It provides an affective bridge connecting our different worlds of personal experience, and by doing so it captures something of essential truth. Great poetry invites us to experience new things, to experience familiar things in a new way, and to re-consider the ways we approach our daily lives and our interactions with the world. As Ellen Dissanayake claims for art in general, its role is “making special.” And that makes it valuable, indeed.

What is Poetry, Anyway?

I’ve been asking students this question for more than a decade, usually on the first or second day of class. Usually I will ask them to come up with some words that describe poetry: “based on your experience, what do you think of when you hear the word ‘poetry’? Write down 2 or 3 words that you associate with poetry.” They sit and think, and start to scribble down some words, and then we discuss their associations. While the answers have varied to some degree, a good number of terms come up nearly every time I ask the question. They include:

emotional
difficult
meter
rhyme (scheme)
feelings
boring
personal
rhythm
deep/profound

After discussing these ideas with class after class of students who are new to the study of English at the college level (first year “Introduction to Literature” and second year “British Literature II” students), I have come to the conclusion that these terms cluster around three “centers of response” that tell us a lot about how we (as a culture) think about poetry. Re-arranging the key terms above brings these clusters into view:

rhyme (scheme)                              emotion                                         difficult
meter                                              feeling                                           deep/profound
rhythm                                            personal                                        boring

The first group centers on poetry as form, or as a collection of formal rules and properties. The second group focuses on poetry as the expression of personal feelings. The third group centers on poetry as non-ordinary use of language, and both exalts (“deep”) and questions the value of (“boring”) such uses of language. As we discuss these responses, students reveal some interesting and worrisome views about language, about schooling, and about art. Let’s consider them for a moment.

First of all, students have often been “taught poetry” in one of two ways. I will call them the “objective” and “subjective” schools. The objective school of poetry-teaching focuses on poetic forms and conventions, and tends to be term- and test-heavy. By forcing students to memorize the difference between dactyls and iambs, and forcing them to identify different rhyme schemes in sonnets, and forcing them to analyze metric patterns, this school typically erases any interest students may have originally had in poetry itself. In Wordsworth’s terms, it “murders to dissect,” killing the pleasures of poetry even as it reduces poetry to clear, well-defined, rule-bound behavior. But it is clear and well-defined, and for that reason, it is well-suited to our current educational environment.

The subjective school of poetry, on the other hand, takes us into the realm of Dead Poets’ Society. It focuses on poetry as powerful personal expression tapping into the depths of the psyche, and tends to be more about performance and reaction than careful analysis. In fact, it tends to shun analysis as “murdering to dissect.” By shunning analysis, of course, it opens another set of possible interest-killing problems. What if the feelings expressed are different from my own? They usually are. And what if (shudder) the author wrote those feelings down in a prior century? What can that have to do with me, a progressive 21st century person?

Both of these schools create difficulties for students who are exploring poetry, and the third group of connections reveals them. For students who are submitted to the subjective approach, poetry is profound or deep, but inaccessible, hard to follow, and often unrelated to their experiences. For those who endure the objective approach, poetry is complicated and technical. It is, as a result, inevitably boring. So as a college teacher of poetry, my work is cut out for me. I must begin by convincing students that poetry can be more than mere technique, more than purposeful and often pointless difficulty, more than the “gush of feelings” voiced by people who are long dead and probably irrelevant.

How has poetry gotten into this mess? And what does the mess tell us about the ways we approach language, meaning, and learning?

More soon. . . comments appreciated from all my friends who are poets, or value poetry.

Meditation on Mind and Poesis

We live in a fast-paced world. The pressures we face come from a life on the run—from meetings to emails and phone calls to soccer practices, we work long and hard at our jobs, at parenting, and at figuring out what we are and what we hope to become. The job is not made any easier by our cultural habits. Fast food and fast sex, drive-through restaurants and drive-through relationships, hurry-up educations and hurried career changes. We scurry ahead toward some narrowly-defined destination, climbing the corporate ladder, fueled by coffee, cigarettes and alcohol. Slowing down is not an option, because to slow down is to be less competitive, less successful, less likely to get rich and famous. No one wants to be “slow.”

But something important is lost along the way. Quality engagement. Attention. Depth perception. We skate across the surface of our lives, coolly avoiding both the water under us and the land around us. We interact without engaging and hear without listening. We measure success dollar by dollar and award by award, rather than by personal fulfillment and meaningful, life-enriching results. Our hurry blinds us to our blundering force, which destroys the earth, disrupts our relationships with one another, and impoverishes our collective and individual spirits. We are ill, and need to regain our health—our wholeness and harmony and balance.
And so we seek meaning in New Age ideas, in a return to religious fundamentalism, in “healthy living” and diet and all sorts of quick fixes. But our need is not met. Something vital is missing from our experience of the world, and we don’t know how to recover it.
The problem, oddly enough, is the world that reason has built. Reason and Rationality have been the guiding lights of Western Culture for the past 400 years, and we have come to worship them. The light that led us out of the dark ages! But as Kenneth Burke observed, computers are not only the product of our reason, but the caricature of it. And as Robert Pirsig observed in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,

The whole university he was attending smelled of the same
ugliness. It was everywhere, in the classroom, in the textbooks.
It was in himself and he didn’t know how or why. It was reason
itself that was ugly and there seemed no way to get free.

Reason, in the particular form that has come to rule our culture, is indeed ugly. It oversimplifies and falsely formulates; it encourages hubris rather than humility; it de-sensitizes us to the local, the individual, and the personal. It encourages us to ignore the irrational, the intuitive, the imaginative, the emotional. In short, it encourages us to ignore the wellsprings of our own lives and relationships. It has become the figurehead of standardized testing, encouraging the multiple-choicing of reality. It has driven technological innovation beyond the bounds of sensitivity to the earth and the life it bears. It has encouraged us to operate within a calculus of large scale building and monetary manipulation, in the domain in which formulas can guide us, rather than in the complex domain of local decision-making and action.

How did Reason become such an ugly and perverse thing? And what can we, as people anxious for a more meaningful life, do about it (without discarding all that it GOOD about rationality)? These questions were first addressed with serious attention in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and we can learn much from the answers that poets, philosophers, and scientists of that era came up with.
One of the answers was simple. Reason is not enough, in and of itself. The manipulation of symbols and formulas, the predictive success of the hard sciences, the logic that we use to make large-scale decisions. All of these are limited in important ways. Negotiation, relationship, interaction, integration are not accommodated well by rational deliberation only. Reason can easily become a tyrannical force that ignores alternatives, rides roughshod over diverse opinions, and destroys difference. It needs to be kept in check.

In addition, we know that reason all-too-easily becomes rationalization. Ideally, we reason without personal interests in mind. Realistically, that does not happen. Reasoning depends on focus, selection, and prioritization. All of these depend on the individual mind—with its interests, prejudices, and pre-existing codes of decision. Thus we must counterbalance reason with an awareness of personal interests and habits of mind.

Reason does not cultivate attention, or wonder, or reflection, or revision. It encourages an instrumental view of materials, creatures, objects, and other people. It narrows our appreciation for uniqueness, reduces our respect for non-human creatures (they aren’t “rational”), and encourages us to dismiss intuition, imagination, and the unknown.

We need a broader understanding of mind, and a better way of looking at the biological and linguistic processes by which meaning is made. Oddly enough, poetry is a vital avenue by which to pursue such understandings.

What can poetry teach us? Well at the peak of the Enlightenment, a shift took place in the world of writing and thinking that placed poetry at the center of the stage. Why? I think it was the assimilation of empirical philosophy and the French Revolution among other things, but the moment was pregnant with possibilities. Apparently the world of brain science was engaging the “embodied mind” with an interest and seriousness that was unprecedented. At the same time, the poets were exploring poetry as a medium of interaction with extended audiences of real people—not just a handful of literati. That medium was ideal for its ability to work on the embodied mind—to create powerful experiences and to alter pre-existing codes of decision. It was, in effect, a technology for moving and uniting people.
In chemical experiments with nitrous oxide, firelit evenings reciting poetry, lecture halls filled with eager listeners and participants, there was an excitement about the possibilities of human experience and the dynamic range of the embodied mind. But there was also fear. What if that is all that mind is? What if we are temporary? Wordsworth did not deal well with this. Coleridge did not either. Somehow there was a swerving away from engagement into denial. And as a result, poetry and science both became more attenuated and less “embodied.” We need to recapture that moment now.

Somehow we were allied with nature in ways that no one was prepared to understand. Darwin’s conclusions were in the air already, but the ways in which his ideas could be interpreted were many.

Wordsworth sensed that our union with the natural world was the site of new and important understanding, and he made it very clear that the development of urban life was an obstacle to that kind of understanding. But why? Because it was fast, and frantic, and mechanical, and impersonal. Small is beautiful, according to E.F. Shumacher, and Wordsworth would have agreed.

The crux of the matter was a view of life which was in harmony with the natural world, small scale interaction, and slow, deliberate cultivation of relationship and meaning over time. Reason and rationality were not dismissed, but they were deemed inadequate in and of themselves. Intuition, feeling, spontaneous connection with all that lived and breathed—a “fellowship of sense with all that breathes” in Barbauld’s terms—were vital too.

So how does poetry fit in? By providing a matrix for experiential learning and relationship that brought the unknown, the possible, and the improbable into the hearts and minds of readers without “overstimulating” their imagination (unlike the “frantic German novels” that Wordsworth disparages).

Rhythmically structured, image-centered, abductive, exploratory language events. Feel it on the pulses, think about it and reflect on its possibilities. Poetry reminds us of the ever-vital, shifting domain of MEANING. It calls attention to the maps we live by and encourages us to re-examine and re-make them when necessary. Poetry is, in a real sense, meditative practice.

Poesis is really what I’m talking about—composition. The making of order out of chaos. The crafting of a life out of possibility. The shaping of meaning out of potential meaninglessness. To learn the right approach to life, one must grow close to poesis. To the patience that comes with faulty beginnings and premature endings, to the persistence that leads to a made thing, to the engagement that recognizes and adapts to changes in the material of life as they approach, to the wonder that recognizes and explores everything beautiful and joyful, to the laughter that never erases seriousness but only leavens it with love and relationship.

Consciousness

Consciousness. We all have it, and we know it is important. We are able to direct our attention, to choose courses of action, to notice differences in our environment. We are aware of ourselves as selves—perceiving creatures with distinctive characteristics and motivations. But in Western culture, consciousness has been de-emphasized because of its “subjectivity.” Since the early 20^th century, the questions of consciousness—where does it come from? How can we use it well? What does it mean to “expand” it?—have been largely avoided. Sigmund Freud broke the mind into three entities: the id, the ego, and the superego. In his model, consciousness was an ephemeral capability that was somehow involved in the battle to maintain a balanced ego in the face of the “darker” urges of the id and the cultural rules of the superego. Much of the battle was waged beneath the surface, and psychotherapy was used to make the history of the battle available for conscious deliberation and perhaps more “control.” Stream of consciousness writing explored the fragmentary and embryonic nature of our conscious minds—jumping from one idea to another, from one experience to another, making surprising connections from time to time, tempted to drift endlessly and without purpose. But for many years the questions of consciousness—which are central to the human condition—were avoided. It was seen as a personal thing that could not be readily measured except by our behaviors (B.F. Skinner’s Behaviorism eliminated it entirely in favor of studying visible behavior patterns without regard for consciousness at all). Consciousness was a preoccupation for poets and novelists and dramatists, but it was largely ignored by scientists.

Now, in the early 21^st century, a group of brave scientific thinkers have begun to explore the origins and characteristics of this vital aspect of human mindfulness. Some continue to treat consciousness as an ephemeral and unimportant part of the working of our minds. Daniel Dennett Marvin Minsky, and others explain the mind in terms of vast numbers of competing unconscious processes that are occasionally observed by, but not directed by, consciousness. But several are making the case that consciousness, though limited in many ways, is still central to the working of our minds. Antonio Damasio, for instance, has theorized that our sense of self emerges from the difference between two feedback loops in our nervous system: the body loop, which maps the state of the body at all times, and the “as if” loop, which notices possible differences in our body and the environment, and posits outcomes of those differences. Merlin Donald reminds us of the very limited scope of conscious awareness—only 15 seconds or so—but insists that consciousness is the center of brain organization, the pattern-builder that relies on memory, sensory input, and cultural records to extend the reach of the mind vastly.

Gregory Bateson does not grapple with consciousness itself, but provides a helpful framework for understanding its “job” in Mind and Nature. Consciousness is the stage on which knowledge is explored and extended. Difference is the engine that drives our perception, and consciousness is the pattern-finder and storer of significant differences. Writing enables consciousness to extend the moment of consideration vastly.

I believe that the mind organizes experience using stories—dramatic “moments” and overarching tales of meaning–and metaphors–connections between different domains of experience. Thus narrative and poetry are central to the way we think and make meaning in the world.

 

The Problem with Problem-Solving

We have an obsession with solving problems in our culture. Figure it out, fix it, and move on. Medicine has tried to do this with antibiotics and vaccines. Government tries to do it with legislation. Business tries to do it by reducing “problems” to simple monetary measures. But some problems are not to be solved; they may be remediated, or reduced, or offset by good alternatives, or simply lived with. The humanities work in this vital area of meaning, interpreting, and choice-making.

We think of problems as puzzles—clearly delineated issues awaiting rational intervention. But most human problems are much more complex. They do not allow for answers, but they require understanding and determination. Disease is a perfect example. We make much of the effort to cure disease, and that is well. But the effort to cope with disease, to work around it, or through it, is not validated by research money or academic career points. Who will really help a person with diabetes to deal with her condition successfully? What does successfully mean? Longevity only? Quality of life? Or a particular range of blood sugars?

Trying to “fix” our lives, we reduce them to compulsive behaviors. Whether through drugs, or alcohol, or monitoring of disease, or hard work without reward, we feel compelled to do something about our state of emptiness and worry and frustration. We are, for the most part, do-ers in a world that has become so overloaded with information that we are left feeling helpless and unable to take meaningful action. Neil Postman, in Amusing Ourselves to Death claims that the information-action ratio (ratio of information received to action taken in response) is rising so high that action seems to approach a limit of zero. And he is correct.

We need to redefine “problem” in such a way as to allow for intervention, for determined action, and for patience as a virtue. “Fixing” things and “solving” puzzles is fine. But some things cannot be fixed or solved. This is the domain of the humanities.

Literature, philosophy, and history provide context within which to make sense of, and deal with, human problems. Measurement is not helpful in this area. How mentally ill is this person? How bad is this person’s disease? How much motivation and desire does this person have? All of these questions refuse quantifiable answers. As much as we love numbers—test scores, statistics, and so on—we find that the numbers do very little for us when coping with the real problems of daily life. Stephen Jay Gould made this clear when he insisted that even though 90% of people with the cancer he contracted die within 3-5 years, he was going to be in the 10% that didn’t. And he was right.

The struggles of countries for identity and (often) supremacy, and of individuals for meaning and (often) success, are central to the stories of the humanities. Great works of literature, and art, and philosophy, and history, and psychology, and anthropology, and social science, shed light on these struggles. To be ready to deal with them ourselves, it helps to know that we are not the first or last to deal with them. We are unique, but connected to a tradition of human efforts to make meaning and to deal with suffering.

Judgment and taste are central to making choices. Science does not cultivate these traits. There is no hard empirical evidence for good judgment, but we know it when we see it. Does that mean we cannot try to teach it? There is no hard empirical evidence for recognizing patterns and valuing them, but does that mean we should not try to teach these things? “Objectivity” and “measure-ability” can actually dull our minds to the point where we are stupid and unable to make good choices. We seek proof that can never be found before taking action to change our situation. Smoking, global warming, and more follow this pattern. Proof is not the same thing as good choice-making. Which is more central to us from day to day?

In Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio reminds us that emotion is critical to good choices. Rationality is not enough. Isocrates (an opponent of Plato in ancient Greece) reminds us that we can’t know everything before taking action—the philosopher-king is a privileged myth. He claims that we should seek a “state of readiness” that cannot be measured except by our choices in the midst of real situations. Truly!

 

Artful Knowing, part I

What is Artful Knowing? Well. . .

Instead of accumulating information, or internalizing the learning of others, it is the work of learning for oneself. It is the end of the process of learning, and the beginning. As with language, we must get comfortable with the vocabulary and the grammatical structures before we can get to work making and interpreting meaning. Basic learning is that way. We must learn the fretboard on the bass, or the keyboard on the piano. We must come to know the nature of scales—the relationship of tones—before we can make music. We must learn the use of a brush, or a hammer and chisel, or other tools, before we can make visual art. We must learn the game of basketball, and its rules, and its practices, before we can join in a team effort to play well.

So everything has a grammar—a set of rules and expectations and coding norms—to learn. But the real learning begins once that grammar is internalized and operative. How can one use the tools at one’s disposal, the basic skills developed, to create something uniquely one’s own—and to interact well with others to create even greater beauties? Artful knowing makes knowledge OURS rather than a rote cataloguing of the knowledge of others we have studied. Artful knowing makes our work meaningful, to ourselves and to others. It pervades the mind of the maker and disrupts and stimulates the minds of the sharers in that making (whether audience, or teammate, or fellow thinker). Robert Pirsig’s description of the craftsman at work in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance remains the best short account of artful knowing I’ve come across:

The craftsman isn’t ever following a single line of instruction. He’s making decisions

as he goes along. For that reason he will be absorbed and attentive to what he’s doing

even though he doesn’t deliberately contrive this. His motions and the machine are

in a kind of harmony. He isn’t following any set of written instructions because the

nature of the material at hand determines his thoughts and motions, which simultaneously

change the nature of the material at hand. The material and his thoughts are changing

together until his mind’s at rest at the same time the material’s right. (148).

Deweese responds to Phaedrus here with “Sounds like art.” Of course it does. Even precision machinists and architects and engineers are artists when they are working at the edge of their understanding—when they are in a “flow” situation (both challenged and capable). And these situations are not as rare—or do not have to be as rare—as we think in a mundane, repetitive workplace.

Of course our workplaces, and schools, are built on assumptions about knowledge and the practice of knowledge that are restrictive and even counterproductive. Creativity is the exception, not the rule, and it is always threatening to the status quo. Artful knowing is, for the most part, discouraged. Those who ask “Why do we do things this way? Why don’t we try this other way?” are met with blockades and outright ugliness. Anything that threatens the system in place, and the stakeholders of that system, is tamped down or even destroyed. Even science has this problem—consider the work Kuhn did on paradigm change and scientific revolutions. New truth is always seen as heresy first.

The academic world is similar in its conservative approach to learning and knowing. “Back to basics” is the cry, and lecture and memorization remain central to the process. What about teaching the work of artful knowing? Making it conscious, and valuable, and an end worth aiming for?

How does one do so? By focusing on processes rather than simply products. A great free-throw shooter did not begin that way. She learned some fundamentals of shooting, and developed a constructive practice regimen, and found ways to focus her attention on the task at hand. Only with attention to the process, and much practice, did her free throw shooting become “automatic.” As Quintilian says in the Institutes of Oratory, extemporary speaking is the crowning achievement of the rhetor. It comes only after long practice, and it is limited to some degree by the talent of the speaker. The work of making speech look effortless takes much much effort. Much more complex than free throw shooting, of course.

Artful knowing thus emerges from attention and energy and patient application. It also emerges from reflection and extension. One must listen to the music of others, and notice the good ideas of others, and put these things to work in their own practice. Great artists, and writers, and musicians, and athletes employ artful knowing all the time. Salespeople, and teachers, and managers, and mechanics can also do so.

Why Stories Matter (and they really do!)

In Western Culture, we have forgotten the importance of stories. Throughout history (and there is a story in history, too), human beings have made sense of the world and themselves using stories. From master narratives about the origin of the world and our place in it to parables and instructive tales to family hi-stories, we have used narrative to organize and place a value on the complex world of experience. Stories have always been slippery things. How do we know what is true and what is “made up”? People tell stories that are false for many reasons, some of them helpful and some completely predatory. Myths can be used to control people’s minds and turned to the advantage of those in power. So during the Enlightenment, thinkers tried to push stories out of the picture entirely. They became novelties and curiosities at best—children’s tales—and were discredited as a source of knowledge. Unless a story could be verified by empirical evidence, it was unnecessary and probably misleading.

The problem with this approach, embodied in what most people consider “science,” is that the meaning-making function of stories was lost. “Objective” thinking was the goal of science and rational people. Stories, and poems, and unsubstantiated claims about reality had no place in the world of intellect. Of course, there can be no change without “what if” and “as if.” How can we imagine a better world, and better relationships, without stories of how things might/ought to be? Science purported to put knowledge on a factual and empirical base—or it was understood by the multitude to be doing such. In fact, science is made of stories too—stories of origin, stories of evolution, stories of human nature and social interaction. These stories are called ”theories” and are subjected to testing which might disprove them. They can never be proven, but the assumption is true until proven false. A big assumption indeed. Who could PROVE without a doubt that there are not Gods creating natural disasters and altering people’s lives for better or worse? These earlier stories were dismissed as silly, but they had their benefits as well—respect for the earth, respect for forces beyond our understanding, and more. Western Culture has enshrined the stories of science without understanding that they ARE stories. As a result, education has been re-created to focus on the skills and theories of a scientific technostructure, and real thinking about the nature of knowledge itself has been rare and academic in nature. Stories—history, philosophy, literature—have been relegated to the domain of “general education” to prepare for the real understanding of the world. They have not been given the central place in the curriculum that they deserve.

At the most basic level, we think in stories. Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind makes a convincing case that at the simplest level thinking is storying. Some have complained that his approach is too literary, and that may be true. But imagining—connecting potential causes and their likely effects, envisioning alternative courses of action, even tracking prey—all require the ability to create a meaningful story about the world around us. Poor stories fail to help us. Good, well-considered stories can save our lives. Knowing how to separate good stories from attractive, but dangerous ones, is a central human skill that cannot be taught in math and science classes. Most of the time, stories are assumed rather than considered. Neil Postman said that every subject should be taught within its own history. Not as a set of facts and theories and approaches without context, but as a developing area of knowledge with a history of its own. He was right.

In “Education by Poetry,” a monologue given at Amherst College, Robert Frost insisted that in order to understand the world we must understand the uses and limits of metaphors better. Metaphors, in Turner’s book, are projections of one story onto another domain entirely: “Life is like a game of golf” or “the world is like a machine.” Stories can operate on two levels: one immediate, and relevant to the context at hand, and one “projectible” and useful for understanding other domains. The story of picking up and throwing a ball is simple, and may not have wide use in other domains. The story of automated production and its “benefits,” however, may be projected onto many domains—sometimes with devastating results. Efficiency is good, up to a point. But human relationships and needs are not efficient in many cases, and bad stories can create bad work and unhappy lives. In the advertisement current now, “Bigger is better.” But is bigger better when you are overweight? When you have cancerous tumors? Of course not. Stupid and unconsidered projections of stories can be dangerous—even deadly. Frost challenges us to think about these issues, and to build them into our educational practices.

Metaphors, Models, Stories, Poems. Let’s talk about them here on “Expanding Minds.”

The Mind of Culture . . . and How to “Read” It

As far as I know, Edmund Burke was the first author to suggest in clear terms that cultures have minds of their own. In Reflections on the Revolution in France he differentiated between individual and cultural reason, and predicted that the immediate workings of individual reason in France would disrupt the long-term workings of cultural reason and lead to cultural madness. He was, of course, correct. The reign of terror proved his ideas decisively.

Like individuals, cultures can be reasonable, and guided by rational thinking. The efforts to help the poor, to create an equitable system of justice, and to eliminate or weaken social and sexual prejudices are evidence of that. But also like individuals, cultures have deeply-embedded habits and assumptions that cannot readily be altered. No amount of rationally-mandated legislation can change those habits. Prohibition in the U.S. was a great example. By creating rational legislation to prohibit the making and use of alcohol, the U.S. government made it all the more attractive and enabled the black market to flourish—and crime to grow rapidly. Marijuana is a similar story. Outlawing this substance has created a criminal underworld of vast proportions, enabled the drug dealers to create new markets with other drugs, and overburdened our prison system.

So part of the job of humanists is to read, interpret, and alter the mind of the culture. Not to order it to change (good luck), but to provide it with alternative visions of what it might be, what it could be, what it should be. Not an easy task. But we all use the internet, and as Merlin Donald has shown, we live in a cultural space that has expanded exponentially over the years. We have all kinds of information, and knowledge, and even wisdom, at our fingertips. But we also have the cultural “id” to contend with, and we often do not know where to begin to work in such a vast informational landscape. The idea of “information literacy” is feeble because it assumes that purposes and approaches already exist for students. They need only learn how to determine what information is “valid” and “ethical” in some very watered-down sense. . . Who directs the attention of a culture which is mad with possibilities? Why not just watch the “news” and wait for the latest developments? Because we are all part of the cultural mind, and we can all help to shape it over time. Especially when we have an understanding of it, and our own agenda and purposes. When these ideas are shared, they become all the more powerful. Ask Hitler.

Our cultural mind is in crisis at present. We live in a world that is overloaded with inputs and information. We work in our small corners and overhear the great workings of the cultural mind from a distance. Those workings are often akin to a pathological mind. Rather than being dynamically balanced, the cultural mind is on runaway—what Gregory Bateson called a schismogenic system. The evidence lies everywhere—in celebrity obsessions and superficial modes of communication, in the lack of meaningful knowledge people have of the advances of science and their meanings, in the “symbolic overload” that Neil Postman writes about. People yearn for meaning, for connection, for sacred spaces and places, but they are hard to find in our cultural milieu.

We should read, and write, and practice, with the aim of “entering the conversation” about important things. We too are part of the mind of our culture.

What is an idea?

We often hear that someone “has good ideas” or is “an idea person.” Ideas are valued as agents of change and progress, yet our means of measuring success only work with physical quantities. Ideas cannot be measured. Especially ideas that do not issue in new physical things or processes that can be measured. Some great ideas can be proven to be physically false—“all men are created equal” had no physical, historical evidence whatsoever to call on. Yet it changed the course of a country. We are so preoccupied as a culture with quantities, and measurement, and things, that we allow ideas to fade into the background without much notice. Terry Deacon calls this to attention in his book Incomplete Nature by beginning with the idea of absence—the mathematical notion of zero—and showing how absence and incompleteness drive our thinking processes. So in a sense, we don’t think enough about thinking, which creates all measurable new technologies and business models and artworks and . . . you get the point.
Only products and solutions are valuable in this culture. Once you have written a book, it may reach people—possibly. Once you have patented and created a working model of a new idea, it may be seen as worthy. We give lots of money to science research because it often issues in physical devices that may do some good in the culture. Of course it also issues in dangerous, even evil, devices for use in war. But the humanities are not well-funded because they deal with ideas, not things. Funny. Since ideas always come before things. William Carlos Williams said “no ideas but in things”—and was wrong. If that were the case, we would run out of things to think about pretty damned quick. Airplanes, and skyscrapers, and atomic bombs, and satellites would not exist. All of these were ideas first. “What if . . .” someone said, and imagined something that was not present in the physical world.
In much the same way, our lives are shaped by ideas. What if I became a doctor? What if I left my spouse and went on a long trip to explore new places? What if I call in sick today and lounge and read? What ifs become I wants over time, and the absent thing—a profession, a future hope, an unshaped need, becomes something to aim for—it becomes a sense of incompleteness that can drive us toward a new course of action. Ideas exist in the world of imagination—they are, as Gregory Bateson claimed—“no things.” Yet they are essential to everything we do and everything we are. Perhaps we should pay more attention to the cultivation of ideas, to creative thinking, to developing our capacities to do these no-things well?
Rhetoric, according to Kenneth Burke, is “symbolic action.” It plants seeds of ideas in the minds of readers or listeners that may grow and develop into motives. While it may not stir immediate response, it creates “frames of mind” that may generate the sense of incompleteness that creates physical action in the world. Speaking, Writing, and Reading are not machine processes. They are dances of interpretation and experience. Our experience is felt directly at the best of times, but usually it is contained within a web of “pre-existing codes of decision” that have been shaped by our families, our educations, and our professions. Why do we teach students to write five paragraph themes? Because it doesn’t require the difficulty of generating meaningful ideas. And generating ideas is difficult. Much easier to live within the field of ideas already presented to us—the ideology of our times and our culture. Innovation becomes the work of a select few, and most innovation involves the making of new machines or the production of entertainment for the bored population in need of stimulation. Art is the business of making new ideas real, too. But it does not produce labor-saving devices or artificial hearts or other immediate gratifications. Art, music, history, philosophy, literature—are all fields of ideas. At their best they create new and valuable ideas while preserving the best ideas that humans have produced over time. They also caution us against the dangers of bad ideas. This was Arnold’s view of the academy in the nineteenth century. “Culture” for him was great and striving ideas. Where has culture gone now?
The yoked imagination is the limited ideation of business, or the bending of all ideas toward mechanical progress, or the negation of ideas that threaten existing structures. We can imagine, but only within the field of what is accepted as “possibly real.” Who determines that? The bosses of the world, and the institutional systems of the world, and the physical demands of the infrastructure of the world that we created with ideas in the first place. Like Plato, we create ideas (for him, writings) and tell those that follow how dangerous ideas are. Hmm.
The dance of mind—being the animals we are, with language to boot. Our extended mind can impoverish us unless we know how to use it well. Discipline and purpose and what they mean. Not control, but direction. Not end-definition, but commitment to processes. Zen is correct here: follow your practice. And choose your practice well. Not to get something in particular, but to have the joy of making over time.

Point of Entry

At this moment, you are a mind reading and interpreting this text. Other activities have been set aside, and your complete attention is focused on the work of experiencing this text. You are “expanding your mind” by reading this—engaging different ideas and a different mind that has engaged other minds and brought them to bear in this moment of interaction. We expand our minds in many ways, many of them highly pleasurable—at least in the long run. We learn to play a musical instrument, despite the initial struggles. We play a team sport and join in the effort of a team to create winning conditions. We join our coworkers to develop a project or presentation and experience the satisfaction of overcoming frictions in order to create something memorable. We create art, or poetry, or a personal journal, or an email to a friend. We read novels, and listen to people, and watch movies. In every case, we are expanding our own range of experiences, our own awareness of our own—and human—possibilities. So “expanding the mind” is second nature to us all.

Why, then, is “expanding the mind” often treated as a hippie term, or a mystical term, or, in the elegant words of John Sperling, the CEO of the Apollo Group, which owns the gigantic educational factory called the University of Phoenix, “bullshit”? Because learning, and asking questions, and relating to others, makes people less likely to spend all their time buying goods and services. People who love to learn, who love to relate to the world and to other people, are rarely good “consumers.” And western culture has attempted to convince us that we are all consumers—buyers—users—first and foremost.

This text center will explore the idea of “expanding our minds,” expose the falsehood of the criticisms of the idea, and offer some strategies for working on the criticisms, and around them, in order to improve the quality of our lives.

I hope you’ll join me.