On courage

Gary Oldman deserves every accolade that he received for his portrayal of this role.

Reflecting on this post—from before I started writing it, through its major modifications while editing, to my final insights as I approached its publication—I honestly believe that this is one of the most important arguments that I've assembled in this blog to date, and it has some hot competition.  This post attempts to resolve and to delimit a broader philosophical system that I started writing about in high school as well as attempts to articulate one of the greatest existential crises posed to the academy, today.

This post lay inert, collecting digital dust in my drafts for months, labeled as "On cowardice."   As those who've consulted the terms and conditions of this blog—or lack thereof—might discern, I'm not monetizing this platform—nor do I have any intention of doing so in the future.  Hence, the writing process tends to embody Nietzschean becoming; given that I'm more or less All-But-Dissertation and that I recently discovered that my CSSE (Canadian Society for Study of Education) proposal to present my dissertation was approved, I need to false flag a justification to publish here.

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I was half way through this post when, by coincidence, I encountered what has become known as the Grievance Studies Affair, often labeled "Sokal Squared" by the academic press in reference to the more widely known Sokal Affair.  I remarked to some of my colleagues that it felt like fate that I found myself writing and editing a piece about courage just as I encountered this fearless defense of academic freedom and of the knowledge project.  

For those of you unaware of the circumstances and significances of this affair, three exceptional scholars—James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian—attempted to co-publish twenty hoax journal articles, successfully publishing seven of them.   Deliberately non-sensical, the articles included a piece re-interpreting anatomical male genitalia as socially constructed concepts.  They sought to expose problems that they perceived among pay-to-publish models of scholarship and, especially, the inadequacies among the standards of rigor, vetting, and methodology of academic journals associated with what they referred to as the academic "grievance disciplines": including gender studies, decolonizing studies, and other fields that tend to draw lineage from the post-modern philosophy and critical theory of the 1960s.

If you've read this far, I feel that I should assure you, the reader, that I believe that what they did was highly unethical.  I have no doubt about the unethical character of deliberately lying to editorial boards and to peer reviewers with ulterior motivation if one construes of ethics as an ideal system of actionable dos and don'ts.  Arguably, they could have achieved the same ends without undermining the scholarship of people researching and writing in so-called "grievance studies" because, as their critics rightly contended, their actions undermined the legitimacy and capacity of those working in these fields who respect traditional research standards of rigor, validity, and reliability.  The public perception of these "grievance" fields can directly impact their funding and therefore solvency & growth. Despite the ongoing ideological culture wars in many North American post-secondary institutions that some of these fields tend to legitimize, scholars working in, for example, gender studies and decolonizing studies have done a lot of Good in the service of the knowledge and the human projects.

However, I believe that what they did was moral.  Morality, traditionally, concerns the "whys" of action in lieu of ethics' traditional "whats" and "hows".  The morality of the academy rests on some basic assumptions with origins traceable to the Socratics.  For example, the knowledge project depended and continues to depend, in part, on the assumption of academic freedom, its associated rights and freedoms of speech and of association.  Although those scholars had adverse, if not arguably malicious, motivations—their actions could be justified as a form of counter-attack, or even a desperate defense, in the ideological culture wars that increasingly enthrall the academy.

"Empiricism" is currently under assault.  Verifiable sensory observation of phenomena no longer serves as the gold standard of evidence-based reasoning.  I don't mean to sound like an insurgent here, but academics increasingly find themselves in exile for defending what amount to experientially evidenced-based reasoned claims.  People outside of our academic institutions might find these allegations bizarre or even unfathomable, but I assure you, this is happening, and it is getting worse.  Moreover, the consequences could be existential to the future of the knowledge project.

I anticipate that I am too honest and too committed to traditional conceptions of truth to survive in the long-term in these institutions.  Although I would never engage in the shenanigans of Sokal Squared, increasingly, it'll take a lot less than those levels of professional transgression to get "cancelled" from the academy, or at least, that seems to be the general trans-disciplinary trajectory.  Predictably, this pathology terminates in (former) academics finding themselves with no other recourse than to argue that the public should defund universities.

And not to (re)tread that clichéd slippy slide, but academic freedom is probably next.

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As a teacher, I am constantly reflecting on what capacities, attitudes, and predispositions I should be attempting to foster among my students.  Recently, due in part to political shenanigans at the University of Toronto, I stumbled upon an insight regarding an ideal or vital characteristic that could logically supersede the value and function of every other bit of wisdom and virtue as conditions for human flourishing.

In some respects, this characteristic has been in front of me the entire time.  Despite my commitments to consistent self-reflection, I tend to take my own positionality and willingness to confront dishonesty and corruption for granted.  I am and will probably always be a social gadfly.  However, I only recently realized the true significance or condition of that designation.

Thought experiment: What potential human characteristic, when removed, would only compromise and/ or weaken all other human characteristics?

If you've read the title of this post, then I un-surreptitiously spoiled the surprise.  Virtue, wisdom, and and all other knowledges can be rendered inconsequential, incomprehensible, and ultimately immaterial if one lacks the courage to responsibly enact them.  Cowardice presents the ultimate source and consequence of the failure of the intellect; in fact, I would argue given my recent experiences that cowardice can render all intention and value vacuous.

But what is "courage"?  What is its essence?  What denotes it phenomenologically? I struggled with its definition significantly leading up to and while editing this post.  Though, I'm relatively confident in my identification of this last piece of the puzzle of human action or of "why [...] people do what they do."

If ascribed values constitute the sources of intention and action, the final threshold of action can be defined by this additional variable.  Undeniably Nietzschean, this willingness to enact the will presents the last barrier to enacted choice.  Following the aforementioned logic, without this willingness, the Will or volition constituted by an individual's intuitive and experientially situated values can be rendered void of meaning and of consequence.  Therefore, courage could be defined as the most valuable of values (of objects ascribed meaning by people) since it can render all other values valueless, practically.

Construed another way, inductively, what is the only human characteristic that cannot be supported by other human characteristics?  Or that can only support other human virtues?  Courage doesn't have a "source" along the same pathways of virtue, wisdom, and other empirical knowledge.  Courage cannot be traced to Kantian empirics.  Like Kant, we often interpret free will as a freedom of choice.  To enact courage is to choose to enact a choice.  In other words, our "Will"s cannot be free without it.

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I've been inspired by Winston Churchill ever since I first encountered him.  After all, he may have hated democracy almost as much as Socrates did.  But, Churchill knew that we could do worse—that we had done worse.

And I might be witnessing a precursor to one of his worst-case scenarios at the University of Toronto at the time of publication.

I've lost count of the number of people who I respect and trust who have told me that I should just give up on the University of Toronto Graduate Students' Union, including several of its former executives. Undoubtedly, my involvement has stretched my PhD studies by at least a year and a half. But, I stand by the same principle that compelled my involvement in the first place.  If UofT graduate students can't manage Good governance, what hope is there for our municipal, provincial, and federal governments in Canada?  Democracy dies in darkness.

And authoritarianism prevails where courage fails.  I've deliberately avoided drawing any contemporaneous macrocosmic comparisons publicly in my communities given that Twitter is already inundated with presentists grafting the flavour of the month onto their every myopic political concern.  But folks, this is how authoritarianism happens.

Despite my continued commitment to defending the Left as a liberal, and given the increasing authoritarian tendencies of other parties who also assume these labels, I might be destined to join Boghossian's camp.  But if only the spectrumed Right will defend cognitive liberty, where else does an academic courageously committed to truth and to the knowledge project find themselves in modern academia?

Moreover, these failures of courage in academic governance tend to osmose from the academy.  Everything I've ever taught or tried to teach my students could be rendered meaningless if my students lack the courage to stand by their senses of truth and justice.  I reflected recently that I care far less if my students understand how and why to consistently respect pronoun-antecedent agreement than if they would stand up for the people or ideas that they care about when it matters.

Ultimately, I would teach my own kids if I were ever to procreate that they should never compromise their integrity or sense of truth for the sake of preserving or shaping their reputations.  Because honestly, what is the ethical or moral character of increased clout with people who would prefer that we compromise our understanding of truth or integrity in order to achieve such ends?

On taking truth and justice for granted

No picture can do justice to the original.

I don't watch television or read fiction anymore (unless I've needed to do so in order to teach my students), but the Game of Thrones universe plays with an interesting motif: "to break the wheel."  Daenerys was referring to a wheel of power through which the Iron Throne passed from Targaryen to Targaryen, connoting the wheel's crushing of resistance and of those found unfit to rule.

But I tend to interpret this metaphor a bit more broadly, as a representation of the political cycles of dominance and resistance.  My interpretation is inherent to Dany's; however, in the game of thrones, those resisting domination tend to do so only in order to dominate—themselves.

Therefore, I look toward a different breaking of the wheel, or at least toward a more exhaustively representative wheel to be broken.  If resistance is as cyclical as dominance, then the breaking of such a wheel would require an overcoming of both the resistors and the dominators or, in Freire's terms, of both the liberators and the oppressors—a transcendence, or at least a new wheel.

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For the minority who follow this blog consistently, this post could be considered a prequel to "It actually doesn't really matter if you're right."  The problem that I'm exploring predicates Edward Snowden's; stubbornness alone might seal our fate, even despite cowardice.

Snowden presumably broke, or at least exposed, the wheel of state mass surveillance in America.  "Presumably," because as I noted in that post, the status quo wasn't altered all that substantially even after the American public had hard evidence that their government was not to be trusted with their privacy or personal security.  The status quo spins on as the extremists among the governing and the governed continue to try to score points for themselves and their allies; the truth and justice among the relationships between both camps in America were merely adapted.

But those false senses of security and privacy that almost everyone outside of the NSA took for granted were challenged and, as a result, changed.  As with all other man-made constructs of the senses and reason, Snowden merely reminded us of their constructivism.  The truth of this perceived injustice merely altered people's senses of what can be "true" and "just."

In point of fact, our conceptions of truth and justice are artifacts, just like the words that we use to communicate them.  Ultimately, what we believe to be of most importance, even if it corresponds with the importances ascribed by the dominant authorities of our day—religious, political, or otherwise—exist as constructs.  Whether they're good or right doesn't allay their constructivity and therefore their ephemerality.

As a more-or-less life-long indiscriminate agnostic, I've been somewhat sensitive to this impermanency.  The Good and the right are only as good and as righteous as we will them to be.  Inherent goodness or rightness, (and inherence generally), is a dangerous proposition that should be consistently interrogated; as satisfying as it can be for one's world view, the ascription of inherent goodness or rightness to any value anticipates a harder fall when that construct's seams are exposed and sundered.

Moreover, if absolutely everyone you knew were in on an acclaimed lie, that claim would be indistinguishable from the truth.  I.e., if absolutely everyone you knew and trusted were lying to you, how would you know?  Their fallacious claim would be indistinguishable from the truth if your notion of truth were entangled in said claim.

Even fundamentality is constructed.  Our individualized/singular conceptions of the most fundamental elements or categories of our existences are culturally situated.  E.g., some would argue that biology is just applied chemistry, chemistry just applied physics, physics just applied mathematics, mathematics just applied epistemology, epistemology just applied ontology, ontology just applied epistemology, etc.

And not to break the divine wheel (or to reiterate its brokenness), but a classic case study of this trend remains worthy of the attention of the -structors: did God make humanity in His image, or did humanity make God in their image?  I tend to lean on the latter as an empiricist, but it's telling that even the most valued of values can be questioned, challenged, and imputed mortality.

Recently, I've been teaching my senior English students about Elie Wiesel's Night: the Nazis who coerced sonderkommandos to dig up the bodies of Hungarian Jews in Oświęcim in order to burn the evidence of their crimes also may have believed in their commitment to a construct of righteousness.  Trust our professional historians; many of the historical fascists were convinced that they were "right", and many were more than ready to die for the Nazi cause.  The fallaciousness and insecurity of their "rightness" could be identified and judged as false and deceitful only by those with other constructs.

It follows that, for humanity, fascism will always be right around the corner.  Not to beat the dead horse of the cliched cliché of George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," and its endlessly compounded mimeses & parodies, but so long as truth and justice remain constructs of and by people, they will always be subject to erosion and potential destruction.

Ultimately, if we aren't willing to defend these constructs when it matters, then they won't be able to defend us when their essential meanings and consequences are all that stand between us and annihilation.  There's a real threat in denying or ignoring the constructivity of truth and justice until it's too late—too late for them to assist in the defense of the truthful and the just.

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A bunch of my white friends and allies tell me to avoid quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. publicly (particularly in UofT graduate student governance spaces), seemingly insinuating that believing and/or attesting that he was right and just can be some form of appropriation.  Nonsensical of course, but we live in the era of woke cancel culture.  

MLK stood for something that most of us do not.  Make no mistake, MLK was hated and maligned by many of his contemporaries, even as he continued to make extreme personal sacrifices for his cause, as was basically every other person in history whose commitment to a truth and to a justice challenged others' commitments to inferior constructs of both.  Needless to say, the proportions of melanin in your skin do not determine the truthfulness of your words or the content of your character; the fact that this fact can be construed as taboo speaks volumes about the constructs of our day.  To break such a wheel as eloquently and bravely as MLK is something to which anyone and everyone should aspire.

But for us, to break the next cycle of domination and resistance, we need constructs worth preserving.  For me, MLK's righteousness, justice, and truth are worth the effort.

And so for not the first—and almost certainly not the last—time, I'll give MLK the final word, a paraphrasing of the original: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."

This world doesn't know what to do with its intelligence.

You keep using that word...

Ponderous parables for pivotal paraboles

Once upon a time, there was a human child who wanted to know the Good.  Being the insufferably inquisitive and rather philosophically minded youth they were, they figured that the problem wasn't so much identifying the Good, (there were already lots of suggested candidates), but rather determining a method by which to validate the Good.  Well, the kid did find a sort of litmus test, a rather radical one at that.

You see, this kid was raised Christian, and so they were already quite familiar with the traditional parables.  In fact, this kid would ultimately go on to endure most of their Confirmation before dropping out at the last moment.   This kid wondered whether they needed religion in order to live and be just, whether the Good was predicated on traditions and consensual wisdom, or whether it had any contingencies at all as alluded by some of its progenitors.

On the way home from elementary school one day, this kid was contemplating hell. You know.  The bad one.  Where one would burn.  Forever.  The kid was already skeptical of the existence of hell, especially since they had already studied how allegorizing hell became a tool of church compliance and coercion from the 15th to the 20th centuries historically and even earlier pre-historically.  As this kid approached the turn in the sidewalk that redirected to their home street, they stopped walking as their reflection shifted to a consideration of Jesus's divine sacrifice, especially the willingness to sacrifice mortal existence.  Within this space of reflection, this kid noted that a morality becomes transcendental in character, relative to Christian systems, the moment the agent has identified a conviction for which they would be willing to sacrifice beyond their mortal existence, assuming the verity of a transcendental existence.  Hell was conceived, or at the very least <used>, as a method of enforcing compliance to an alleged transcendental morality.  However, this threat and its invoked fear are consequential only when one's moral system is subject to and therefore determined (at least in part) by the threat of hell.  The moment you believe in a moral code self-righteously such that you would bear that code in any and all eternities in any and all transcendental existences, this coercive form of Christianity no longer has any power over you.  

Furthermore, this conviction that authentically survived an existential threat of eternal damnation likely comprises or can be characterized by the Good, if we're conceiving the Good as its progenitors did: as a universal, unchanging, and all-encompassing form.  For how could the substance of that imperative be naught but Good for someone to willingly suffer eternally?  If it did not comprise the sum total value of everything they believed and/or assumed to be right or good, would the willingness to suffer eternally be naught but insanity?

In the words that the kid used to articulate this insight at the time, the moment you become "willing to burn in hell for all eternity for what you believe", you become liberated from all preceding and subsequent moral systems.  It's a different kind of freedom.

Although this kid grew up to be relatively agnostic, exercising a reasonable measure of doubt with regards to any kind of afterlife, since that moment, that kid has been relatively fearless.

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A word has been frequently floating in and out of my reflections as of late: "subsumption."  It seems that every action, resistance, and aspiration to significance supports or is eventually constitutive of a subsumption, a subsuming of the intents and character of the action, resistance, or aspiration into a more general category—notably, in democracies a category generally acquiescing of what people call the "middle class".  Historically, people called this latter process gentrification; i.e. the process of changing the nature of actions and contexts such that they further satisfy the gentry, the traditional middle and upper classes (think "gentlemen" and "gentlewomen").  

I've often attributed this trend to tribalistic exigencies and the dominant classes' exclusive rights to delineate the parameters of signification.  Self-identifying groups of people are naturally inclined to defend and further their common interests.  The middle class emerges as the bulk of the normal distribution of their collective needs and subsequent demands.  Notably, this collective reserves control over signification: the identification, renewal, and creation of significance.  For evidence of this control, look no further than the burgeoning demands and sequitur supplies of popularized formulaic T.V. shows and movies.  Especially in democracies, this dominant group generally dictates which meanings have the most power.

Subsumption, then, presents the means by which the middle class renews its power.  As both the product and producer of subsumptions, the middle class regulates meaning-making and the power (read: significance) of meanings.

I've commented on this Blog before about the cyclical nature of dominance and resistance, especially how both sets of aspirations eventually normalize; i.e., that the status quo/societal homeostasis necessitates their constant renewal.  These days, I would characterize these Sisyphean (r)evolutions as yet other forms of subsumption.

Why does this happen?

Simply, they're engaged in the classical pursuit of meaning and purpose.

On my own permutation of this quest, I infrequently engage in the following thought experiment: if we're trying to identify the most meaningful and significant values—the usual source of purpose—and actions, then start from the opposite.  What is the most meaningless thing a person can believe or do?  I usually turn to expressions like "all tautologies are tautologies."  But even the categorization of expressions of A = A has meaning and significance, especially since the meaningfulness of other expressions of relations hinges on the alleged meaninglessness of simpler expressions.  Maybe it's the void?  It's telling that vacuousness draws from the same etymology as "vacuum."

Or, maybe it's more useful to consider meaninglessness according to its (in)significance.  However, this merely politicizes the question of meaning by evaluating meaning according to its power, as what does "significance" signify?

Logically, if the most meaningless choices, values, and actions were dichotomized, then the most meaningful choices, values, and actions could be characterized as the most exhaustive, unique, and powerful.

Yet, in the endless pursuit of purpose and meaning, a staggering proportion of people find themselves "settling down to start families."  Inhabiting the aforementioned logic of this post, this domestication follows from a subsumption of intents and purposes under a set of generalizable traditions.  But I remain perplexed as to the following: is it not suspect that so many individuals' pursuits of purpose and meaning have been resolved in starting families?  That after millenia of human development, the consistent stopgap for the problem of living with meaning is to furnish the next generation of people who will undoubtedly have the same problem?

Potential vacuousness notwithstanding, even monogamy raises the specter of a failure of the imagination to do something with one's intelligence before or after the status quo.  "Welp, I have run out of ideas.  Might as well chase tail."  

I realize that the more nihilist-leaning among my readers might counter with the axiomatic assumption that existence has only the meaning that we ascribe to it; i.e., there is no guarantee to any inherent purpose or meaning in anything.  But can we not do better?  

Especially when faced with an existential threat?

Obviously the species needs to reproduce itself at some point, but there's a threshold after which existence is merely existed for the sake of existence.

What does it mean to succeed in the midst of global turmoil?  Does it mean the same to you now as it did in September, 2019?

People tend to define success in numbers.  Equity, valuations, and margins.  There are people who I've encountered that I pity every day because the system is so absolutely rigged against them.  I have yet to encounter a "successful" company or personality cult that doesn't have at least 1-2 bodies mortaring its foundations.  I promised myself in the earliest days of my social justice and peace studies course work that I would never slit a single throat, metaphorically or otherwise, to get ahead; I'm increasingly convinced that many of my classmates didn't share that conviction.  The global pandemic just aggravates these moral and integrous discrepancies.

This world doesn't know what to do with its intelligence.  Our public schooling systems in Ontario are about to crumble wholesale because our administrations, among the ministry, school boards, and unions lack the organizational and creative capacity to imagine and to implement a new vision of schooling necessitated by one of the greatest threats of our lifetimes.  Smarts won't save us; they might give us a better way to mitigate the effects and infectivity of this virus, but this is just one relatively benign pathogen.  I predicted at about the age of 16 that antibiotic resistance alone could bring this world to its knees; you don't need to search too deeply into Google to ascertain with relative certainty that this is only the beginning.  

We've survived this long because we've adapted.  The most maladaptive systems will degrade and degenerate as we're witnessing on the daily.  Classists hate change, yet I'm not calling for a "Marxist (r)evolution."  Our systems, starting with our schools, need to refocus and reconstitute their operations in accordance with their long-standing mandates.  

And this stuff aerosols.  For the love of reason, don't pack elementary school students into enclosed spaces with no exit or contingency plan.

I worry that the problem is less about whether we have the collective intellect to survive this, than about whether we have the moral convictions and courage to think laterally and take risks.

Otherwise, private industry is going to take over every failing public system; it was already happening among pre-college schooling in Ontario; this crisis has been an invitation for private schools (especially those structured and equipped for online learning) and for privatized health care to build and to consolidate empires in Canada.  My own school is restructuring in anticipation that publicly schooled students could fall behind their private and home schooled peers by almost a year as of September, 2021.  Theodore Sizer is/would be churning in his grave.

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"Civilization" is a derivative Anglicization of its root, "cīvis", a rough Latin equivalent to our current word "citizen."  It's legal definition succeeds its essential and primordial meaning of "city-dweller".  Citizen-ship, or the rights and responsibilities inherent to constituting a city, implies higher duties than simply participating in the governance and perpetuity of the polis; thriving usually requires more of us than surviving.  We can still thrive under these conditions, as we should; but we need to commit to this end.  I know it's hard.  My own commitment wavered after March, partly due to my experiences with the bad faith of certain members of the graduate student community of UofT.

But we cannot give up.  Doomscrolling is a deontological necessity, in moderation of course.  Our appreciations for and exhaustive grasping of the significance and consequence of the Good and the right depend in part on our lucidity of the darkness.

This world cannot abide the unwillingness to speak the honest, good faith truth of our experiences, courageously in adversity.  Wisdom cannot be wasted on the wise unwilling or too dispassionate to act Justly when we're on the brink.

The Fight at the End of the Tunnel: A Tale of Three Teloi

One of my many sources of inspiration

As I near the end of my yearly New Year's gaming staycation that follows my time with family and friends and get back into zero-sum work mode, I am lead to once again reflect on why I will re-invest myself into that lifestyle.  The last three years, I've spent the transition after Christmas into the New Year gaming as much as I can to get it out of my system while most people are partying and vacationing.

I began writing this blog post before the holidays as a reflection on some of my conversations with some of my closest friends and allies.  One of these allies is a professor with whom I confide with about some of the most topical issues globally.  When discussing the most recent tax bill in the United States which promises to negate the legacies of about half of the 20th century presidents while emboldening the historically deplorable, this professor concluded the discussion by insisting that "it will get worse."

As teachers, we both have the responsibilities to foster hope and the precedents for innovation for the future among our pupils.  However, the realities of our day require a degree and type of vigilance that has little historical precedent (with the possible exceptions of the contextual contingencies of the World Wars).  Furthermore, as I insisted in confidence with another friend and ally, we can't shelter these kids from these circumstances forever (although we'd prefer to).

Most educators seem to teach as though there's some sort of light at the end of the tunnel of institutionalized education, whether in new innovations for addressing old problems, new(er) mental models for conceptualizing existing systems, and/or in some sort of well-paying, secure job.  As a student of history, I'm inclined to argue that this may have been true of 1950s-60s (and even into the 1980s) but that this perspective would now plainly underestimate the gravity of modern circumstances.  Trump was elected, climate change is happening before our eyes, and we're at the greatest risk of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I could include an extended laundry list of issues that keep me up at night, but I'd admonish that you use your imagination.  

I'm inclined to challenge the assumption that we hold any privilege to certainty of any sort of utopian telos in or through education considering our collective situation.  Moreover, true humility lay in one of the first principles of existential philosophy: that our existences could be completely meaningless.  Naturally, a cognizance of this possibility has been the precursor of existential crises globally (mine included).  By extension, there's no means to certainty that there's a definitive light at the end of the educational tunnel in spite of adamant pursuit of education (Please note that I argue this as a practicing professional teacher who's taught across disciplines and as a full-time PhD student in the field of education; I don't make that claim lightly).

I'd remind the reader of one of the main ideas in astronomy: the Earth is a nigh impossible anomaly comprising a combination of factors conducive to the sufficient development of life into sentient beings.  As articulated by many authors and scholars before this writing, we are nearly negligible in the grand scheme of the observable universe.  Given our relative insignificance, it's a rare degree of arrogance to believe that the universe and/or its potential creator(s) care(s) about us.

No, we need to work with what's in front of us or else sociopaths and their sycophants will incorporate us into the front matter of their own narratives.

We can exercise a degree of free will, albeit heavily contextualized and coerced.  In my consistent reflections and discussions, I've narrowed our options into three general paths conducive to three different final ends (teloi) of education.  These options available to those who know enough to be responsible to those of the future represent three distinct responses to the question that I find myself asking recurrently, "to what end?"

1) Somewhere on the spectrum between exile and willful ignorance

In my experience, most of the people who bear the responsibility of knowledge of the potential consequences for posterity simply choose to ignore these very real threats to themselves and even to their own friends and families.  Others choose a self-imposed exile to try to put as much distance between themselves and the rest of human "civilization."  The remainder of those of this category of teloi fall somewhere on that spectrum, varying in degree of deliberate segregation and willful denial.  Who can blame them?  Well, I don't, but the people who will suffer through our legacies might.

2) Suicide/excessive drug addiction

Some people cannot accept reality for what it is.  Never forget that "O Captain! My Captain!", who played numerous roles as exceptional mentors and teachers, ended his own life battling with depression.  Suicide is one of the final consequences of our malaise.  I hear its echoes in social media and among my own graduate student communities in the gallows humour that keeps us sane.  I am faced with these questions myself, but, to this day, I still perceive it as the ultimate act of selfishness for someone in this position.  Which brings me to the logical option of

3) Fight

We all have parts in this narrative, and so we all have parts in how it ends.  Much of my re-investment in my daily commitment to service lay in my awareness of the reality that if the people with this knowledge have the capacity to choose not to fight, then all of us could choose not to do what needs to be done.  An existential philosopher might argue, needlessly fatalistically, that it could already be over.  I am simply unwilling to entertain that possibility.

And back to marking essays...

In pursuit of moral revolution...

I am about to embark on my craziest journey to date.  Craziest, in spite of working two-three jobs while counselling as well as building and directing Students Teaching Students in undergrad.  Craziest, in spite of starting my Master's in education before my teaching degree, and then writing and defending my thesis in four months to go to China.  Craziest, in spite of completing three degrees in six years.  And craziest, in spite of teaching sciences and mathematics full-time in China for a year and a half with a history and social justice and peace studies degree.  (These were the highlights.  I am eternally grateful to all of those who made these initiatives and those that I didn't mention a reality ~ especially STS.)

Yet, what I am about to do scares the hell out of me.  My feelings inform my resolve and reflect the gravity of what I am attempting to do.  I am gambling with all of my resources and with my future with the best intentions that I can muster.

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Before I continue, I should acknowledge a new caveat in my writing in this blog.  Since teaching in China, I now have a following of students who are adept when it comes to using (and sometimes abusing) the digital and social media explosion.  I have a much higher degree of responsibility to write in a way that respects those who were and continue to be influenced by my words and actions.

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Lately, Martin Luther King Jr.'s words have been ringing in my mind.  They have been the final word on my Facebook profile since I made it, and they will likely continue to guide me for years to come.

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter."

It is with his words that I felt compelled to reinvigorate this blog.  I will continue to attempt to live those words with no less responsibility, and self-consciousness, than when I was teaching professionally.

I am heading to downtown Toronto in pursuit of moral revolution.  I have acquired a room in a condo a couple of blocks from Queen's Park after, sometimes, shameless self-promotion for a decent price without any contacts in the core.  I will be working all day, every day, to fulfill a dream that I had in high school.

I believe that harnessing the values discourse is the key to a kind of moral transcendence.  I didn't have the evidence to argue this before.  And in fact, I still don't have the evidence to argue this definitively.  I am heading to Toronto in order to pursue a PhD that will hopefully illustrate or condemn the utility of inquiring into the values discourse through values dialogue in educational institutions.  This research could change the way we think about and approach the edification of human beings.  And if so, then it could change the future.

I could be so very wrong on so many levels.

But if the most capable and willful among us choose not to do that which is necessary to ensure the future, then it's already over.

I decided against applying for vice-principal for my former school, after thinking of nothing but educational leadership for the past three years since I started my Master's in educational administration and policy, in order to pursue this dream.  For the kids, let's change the world.

It actually doesn't really matter if you're right.

This post has been months in the making.  I've wanted to say this for a long while, but I didn't have the words... or the time.

As you probably know, the world's not doing so hot.  And worse yet, very few of us are attempting to do anything about it, let alone care.

The ones who care are searching for better ideas.  The ones who act are trying to foster better habits.

Both are seeking and attempting to realize solutions.

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What if I told you that there's a significant chance that there is no "solution"?  No paradigm to shift to; no golden idea that will transform society; and no be-all end-all way to solve our problems?

These words are not those of a pessimistic fatalist.  Recently I've become tentatively confident that one could have all of the currently knowable knowledge in our world and still go through his/her entire life without making a positive impact on society.  This reality is less a reflection of the potential qualities and quantities of knowledge than of the day-to-day maintenance and function of the human race.  Our collective condition is such that one person could have an idea that could solve all of the world's problems and yet this person could forever live in a world full of problems.

I was lucky.  I stumbled upon the Meta-discourse at a relatively young age.  I'm speaking of the values discourse: the discourse that overshadows, informs, and shapes all other discourses; the first and last discourse of importance. I've often questioned whether my knowledge has been a blessing or a curse.  However, to this day, I continue to maintain that knowledge in of itself is neither good or evil; that the value of knowledge depends on what one does with it.

It's funny.  Knowledge of the highest discourse is actually meaningless given the parameters of planet Earth.  Even if one had an idea as to how every human decision is made, this knowledge in of itself is valueless.

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Exhibit Edward Snowden, our new modern middle-class hero.  He opened our eyes in ways that few have in our generation.  He gave us hard evidence that our governments in the West are not to be trusted and that our supposed representatives have a systemic distrust of the public they supposedly serve.  And yet here we are, almost years later living ostensibly the same lives we were living almost years before.  What really changed in the day-to-day habits of the masses?  The people who already distrusted our governments gleefully confirmed their biases, and the people of faith have yet to demand hard concessions.

Snowden demonstrated a reality of democracy that ironically few care to acknowledge.  You could walk into a crowded town square containing the majority of a society with a gold tablet handed to you from the highest God telling everyone how they should live their lives differently with the greatest wisdom, and almost no one would change their day-to-day routine.  If one cannot market that understanding, sell it to the masses comprehensibly, and institutionalize it for future generations, then that knowledge in of itself has no value to the future of humanity.

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In fact, it actually doesn't really matter if you're right.

This is my problem with some of the people who continue to look for that gold tablet, the so-called whistle blowers.  Practically speaking, these martyred actions change almost nothing  In fact, they will likely change less and less the more bureaucratized and institutionalized society becomes.

That's not to say that the situation is hopeless.  We just need to accept the situation for what it is, and use the resources at our disposal.  Particularly, we need to target structures.  And first and foremost, we need to stay practical.

I continuously hear my friends and colleagues demanding for better ideas.  But many of the ideas have been here all along.  "An absolutely new idea is one of the rarest things known to man."

People need to make better use of existing good ideas.

We need less armchair humanists and more people carefully leading on the front lines.  We need less concern for new ideas and greater execution of ideas that have been around for millenia.  We need less people concerned with being right and more people concerned with making us right.

On appreciation

Christmas Truce of 1914

As the first round of holy-days draw to a close, I'm reminded of all those who could not for diverse trials and tribulations celebrate them with the same warmth and comfort as myself. 

I treasure holidays as an opportunity for reflection: an opportunity to reflect, yet again, on all that I, and my community, take for granted.  Just as consciousness is always becoming, growing, and fostering, so is our understanding of our privileges.  So many of us take for granted the reality that we'll never realize just how much we take for granted.  The wisdom that we know next to nothing will ironically never cease to serve as an impetus and agent in the fostering of new knowledge.

My reflection intensified as some members of my friends and family exchanged racist and homophobic remarks and jokes during one of our gatherings, as I'm sure some of my colleagues and peers may have witnessed with their own friends and families.  My siblings and I were fortunate enough to be gifted with a liberal education that inculcated a relatively greater respect for all human beings regardless of skin colour, ethnicity, gender, and sexual affinity.  An education that itself is often underestimated; one that often contributes to the formation of impossible expectations for those without such an education such as of those making the racist and homophobic comments.  I found myself in a situation where I had ample opportunity to unleash an indignant inclusivist self-righteous fury.  But I didn't.

Because an "indignant inclusivist self-righteous fury" is an oxymoron.  Militancy with regards to inclusivity can be both thoughtless and careless.  As I stated in the forerunner to this blog post

"just as it's easy for the conservative to turn inwards, it's easy for the liberal to turn their back on the conservative.  All you accomplish by turning your back on conservatives is to alienate, victimize, and thus, feed their conservatism even more.  It's easy to mock Tea Partiers, but much more difficult to empathize with them - to invite them to come together for the benefit of all."

All I would have fostered by going on an inclusive offensive was greater defensiveness, more justifications for feelings of victimization, more walls, and ultimately more exclusion.

I find myself cautioning my former classmates and all those involved in the movement for sustainable self-actualization.  We won't win converts to our cause by oppressing them, even if they are in fact ultimately in the wrong.  We'll win converts by fostering their appreciation. 

In one of my more abstract series of posts on this blog, I argued that unity is the way.  In the context of the current post, it's unity between the racists, the homophobes, and those they prejudge and fear, that is the good life for all.  Even the most oppressive human beings on the planet were, and still are, human beings.  Paulo Freire once argued that the oppressed must liberate their oppressors.  I can't imagine a situation in which unleashing a self-righteous fury could be liberating, unless it was truly directed towards unity. 

Education more often than not is simply a call to appreciation.  Whether it's an appreciation of processes, identities, events, ideas, or wisdom, one of our roles as learners and educators is to create appreciation where there was none before.  Just as we'll never realize just how much we take for granted, we'll never appreciate just how much we will never appreciate.  I embrace holidays as an opportunity to grow in appreciation and to slowly foster appreciation in others.

To quote the wisdom of Confucius a second time in this blog, “It is not the failure of others to appreciate your abilities that should trouble you, but rather your failure to appreciate theirs.”

T2P Application for the Poland Trip: A Manifesto?

I just applied for a trip to Poland for my transition to practice (T2P).  From what I've read and been told, the trip is designed to evoke remembrance of the Holocaust and empathy for its victims through meetings with survivors, tours of museums, and a trek to Auschwitz.  Here's a description of the trip by the organization facilitating it.  We had to provide learning objectives for the application process.  Normally in these situations I'd simply employ ingratiating sophistry.  Instead, as usual, I took to being bluntly and uncompromisingly honest.  And then this happened.  Enjoy.

My first objective is to grow as a global citizen.  I've almost never left the province of Ontario (the only exceptions including a week in Cuba for my brother's destination wedding and crossing the border into Hull to see the Canadian Museum of Civilization).  I’ve declined every opportunity to “see the world” thus far and as a Social Justice and Peace Studies student from King’s who worked for [anonymous], that’s a lot of opportunities.  I always felt I knew most of what I could learn from the trips already.  Through the experiences of this trip, I want to prove myself wrong.  I always jump on vulnerable learning opportunities and this trip is an opportunity to make myself vulnerable to learn.  I want to become ever more cosmopolitan and, therefore, my first objective is to grow as a global citizen.

My second objective is to grow as a philosopher.   I’ve always thought myself a philosopher in the Ancient Greek interpretation of the term: a lover and pursuer of wisdom.  Much has been made by both philosophers and historians alike about the “lessons of the past.”  I’m of an appreciation of the paradox of our inability to value the knowledge from an experience before we’ve had it.  I see this trip as an opportunity to gain some insight, and maybe even some wisdom, about the human condition and our roles as the keepers and sustainers of memory.  I hope to draw ethics from my experiences on this trip, new perspectives and ways by which to live a good life.

My third objective is to grow as a historian.  History’s crux is primary sources and the interpretations of, and discourses around, those sources.  To go to Poland is to go to the primary sources, to the people and places touched by the people and places of the past.  Also, to go to Poland is to witness and potentially join another set of discourses of history.  As a future history teacher, through my experiences on this trip, I’ll have a wealth of primary sources and discussions to draw on when teaching about various concepts and topics in history such as Nazism, remembrance, and dehumanization.

My fourth objective is to grow as a learner.  We’re all learners before teachers.  I’m of the opinion that we should always listen more than we speak; we should always read more than we write.  As such, on this trip I plan on doing a lot of listening and reading.  I will use this trip as an opportunity to further foster my love of learning and intellectual curiosity.  Therefore, my fourth objective is to grow as a learner.

My fifth and final objective is to grow as a teacher.  I believe that knowledge and wisdom come with a responsibility to foster, to nurture, and to protect.  My personal motto is “take everything from the world but keep nothing for myself.”  I believe that as teachers, we take everything we can from the world, our experiences, understandings, and values, and share them with others to the best of our abilities.  Therefore, I will embrace this trip as an opportunity to experience, philosophize, and understand, as an opportunity to grow as a teacher to the benefit of my future students.

Just another blog update

Hello everyone,

The lifestream.

I sincerely apologize for neglecting this blog.  In truth, this blog was pulled from the web for almost 2 months.  I recently started teacher's college. Given the constant haranguing my colleagues and I encounter in our professional programs in regards to maintaining a professional identity both in person and on the web, I ended up killing this blog.  It was heart-wrenching and, given the nature of some of the arguments put forth in this blog, even hypocritical. 

As such, in order to relaunch this blog, I needed to gut it in order to make it more reader friendly and politically correct.  Over the past 2 weeks in my scarce spare moments, I've reread and edited almost every post. 

For those of you who followed this blog in the past, you'll notice the domain name, the name of the blog, and the background have changed.  The blog's domain name, and actual name, used to be "just another blog on saving the world."  But like the blog, I myself have changed.  Specifically, my understanding of the cause (the self-actualization of all life and life not yet lived) has transformed greatly in the past couple months.

I've started asking myself, as someone dedicated to changing the world, "what would we be saving?"  Really.  Just what would anyone be saving right now?  If you look out your window, most of the time you'll just see bread and circuses.  We live in a world of shamelessly glorified hedonism.  When one attempts to save a world, they attempt to return a crisis situation to a former status quo.  I desire so much more than the status quo.

Hence the change in name.  "Just another blog for improving our world" is more accurate to my own vision and my vision for this blog.  The use of the word "for" rather than "on" in the title is intentional.  This platform is meant to be collaborative.  My teaching and pedagogy both informally and formally are dominated by dialogical collaboration.  These posts are simply conversation pieces: an opportunity to engage with one another.  Improvement isn't something one imposes on society.  It's something developed and fostered by a society from within itself collectively.

Further, I've changed the background from the classic matrix code to a new graphic more reflective of the blog's new mandate of improvement.  Rather than ending the war for people's minds, which the previous graphic symbolized, this new graphic is an artist's rendition of the lifestream, a brilliant metaphor from Final Fantasy VII.  I've alluded to the lifestream before.  The lifestream represents the collective souls of the planet.  I don't believe in souls or supernatural energy, but I do believe that all life is connected; that every thought and action we take creates ripples in our existences and all future existences born from our own.

So there you have it, the way forward.  I hope this blog will contribute to the improvement of our world.  Thanks for reading.  As always, comments welcome.

On accountability: The importance of honesty

It's a kind of cosmic irony that one of the greatest systemic problems facing humanity today is our incapacity to take accountability for our own actions.  Many of us go great lengths to salvage and protect our pride, often to self- and community-destructive ends.  Even more ironic is the availability of the solution, the degree of ease in simply enacting accountability; to be honest.

This dishonesty contributes to a range of social problems and inequalities ranging from war to poverty.  It has enormous ramifications for conflict resolution, everywhere from intimate relationship, to international, violence. 

As a co-facilitator at Changing Ways, I've witnessed how a lack of accountability can destroy relationships.  As a student of history, I've witnessed how dishonesty has tarnished, and even lead to the conquering of, nations.

Accountability affects every context of our lives, and yet it's barely discussed in common conversation.  In fact, discussions of accountability are most often prompted by some sort of accusation of dishonesty; rarely is it discussed as a virtue, ideal, or something intrinsically worth enacting.

So just what is accountability?

Well, Wikipedia currently provides several context specific definitions supplying little assistance in this instance.  But the webpage demonstrates that definitions of concepts can have as many nuances as there are contexts in which these concepts can be identified.

I've been confronted with defining accountability several times, especially at Changing Ways where men were "coerced" into writing accountability statements: to take accountability for the behavior that landed them at the institution.  As such, I've encountered a plethora of definitions from which to draw my own.

In this instance, I'm referring to accountability in its primary essence, its basic values: honesty, integrity (consistency), and reason.  I developed my definition logically, as it consists of honesty, integrity, and reason, because if just one of those values is absent, one cannot be genuinely accountable.  

Without a complete commitment to honesty, dishonest behavior could be justified by reason and enacted with integrity.  I.e. left to reason and integrity, one could justify disingenuity.  I've encountered many situations where people rationalize disingenuous actions in which one behaves as though they know less than they actually do.  To spare you the list of reasons as to why such justifications can fail, I'll leave you with this: how would you feel if you were the one who suffered as a result of that disingenuous behavior?  And what's the point if you'd find out eventually, regardless?

Along with honesty, without a complete commitment to integrity, one can fail to be genuinely accountable.  I placed "consistency" in parentheses to highlight this element of integrity, but I didn't just write 'consistency' because that term alone fails to capture the range of areas within which one must be consistent to maintain their integrity.  Integrity is more than just consistent action; it's an consistent orientation to life: consistent values, beliefs, reasoning, honesty, self-criticism, etc.  Without integrity, one could pick and choose rationally and honestly where and when to be consistent instrumentally.  Integrity's not as vital as honesty and reason, but it's an essential element of persistent, life-long, genuine accountability.

Along with honesty and integrity, without a complete commitment to reason, one cannot achieve the ideal accountability so described.  I know it may sound abstract or obtuse to include reason in my definition and criteria, but bear with me.  Imagine an irrational individual claiming to be accountable based on their honesty and integrity.  In my own mind I'd picture a domestic abuser who consistently and honestly denies their culpability in an instance of domestic abuse.  By the exclusive standards of honesty and integrity, this man or woman could be described as accountable.  However, if that same situation is subjected to rational criticism and reason, that individual may be found to be otherwise.  For example, in the case suggested, the indicted might have done something they don't believe, or understand, to have affected something else.  Reason is the acknowledgement and understanding of relationships like cause and effect, consequences for behaviors, and emotional literacy.  Even if one maintains the greatest honesty and integrity, if they do not acknowledge or even deny rational deductive and inductive logic, the feelings of other individuals, or the full consequences of their actions, they cannot be genuinely accountable.

In sum, my perspective of accountability consists of honesty, integrity, and reason.

That said, why do we struggle to take accountability?

No one likes to be wrong.  In fact, as I've cited previously, in Eckhart Tolle's words, "to be wrong is to die."  Following suite, everyone likes to be right.  No one ever has trouble taking accountability for good, right, actions, unless they're prepared to confront their own pride.

As such, to take accountability is to confront our own hedonist consciousnesses: to confront our desires for pleasure and abhorrence of pain.  It's hard: very hard.  Almost, and arguably actually currently, impossible for some, depending on the context.  As it was at Changing Ways in the men's groups I helped facilitate and participated with, accountability is a process: a gradual process. And the pivotal vehicle of this process is honesty.

I'm awed and inspired by the solution.  The simple, yet revolutionary, power of honesty.  Honesty, in the sense that I use it, is simply an absolute openness, to yourself, everyone, and everything.

Meanwhile, dishonesty is dissonance.  It's a closing or alienation of ideas and people. Dishonesty is a form of conservatism; it's an act of conserving one's pride, feelings, beliefs, understandings, or principles.

As such, honesty is absolutely liberal, it's a kind of liberation: an exercise of personal liberty.  To be honest is to liberate oneself from pride, doctrines, and prejudices.

Many of us are slaves to our selves: to our own pride and hedonist values.  We exercise dishonesty, and fear accountability, because we fear the wrath of our masters: the realization and acknowledgment of who we truly are, and what we've actually done. 

Allow me to consolidate this argument with an example.  Why do we desire "privacy"?

Why?

What's the reasoning?  What's at the root of that desire?

It's because we have something worth hiding.  Whether it be worth hiding because of the consequences of its discovery, or to preserve its worth: this is the nature of any secret.  Simply put, we desire privacy because we feel we can't or shouldn't be honest; there's forces and structures preventing us from being ourselves, honestly and accountably.  We seek out and go great lengths to maintain privacy, because our society has become such that to be completely and absolutely honest about ourselves: our wants, needs, beliefs, and values, often has negative consequences.

My perspective?  Be honest anyway.  Be accountable, even if it hurts. 
Because most often the consequences of dishonesty and running from the truth far outweigh the costs of being honest and accountable.

"Be the change you wish to see in the world."  You want honesty?  Accountability?  Transparency? Be honest, accountable, and transparent.

EDIT: I ironically had to delete a link linked to the words "be accountable, even if it hurts."  That link connected to a post that I had to pull from this blog given my new status as a public servant.  That post may be reposted again, but given its controversy and probable incomprehensibility to most people, it will require reworking, or at least a lot more explanation on my part.  So in eating my own words, be accountable, even if it hurts, only when such accountability will allow you to continue to realize your self and your world.

"Unity is the Way" Part 3: Unity through Discourse; Discourse through Unity

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - MLK Jr.

I continuously learn while writing these posts; they, and I, constantly grow.  To demonstrate, this marks the second time I've rewritten this post from scratch, because I've refuted myself a second time as to the main impetus for unity.
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I discovered the greatest justification, yet, while reading Tasos Kazepides's Education as dialogue: Its prerequisites and its enemies, a book I stumbled upon while reading towards my Master's thesis. 

Like my proposed concept analysis, Kazepides sifts through the various potential requisites and obstacles to effective dialogue.  Although, as of what I've read so far, he has yet to mention the importance of unity.
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Succinctly, "unity is the way" because unity develops through discourse, and discourse develops through unity.

I've highlighted the importance of dialogue before, twice.  However, when I wrote those posts, I hadn't yet thought systematically about the criteria for effective dialogue.  While reading Kazepides, I had a small eureka when I considered the relationship between discourse and unity.

Simply stated, dialogue is a vehicle to unity, and unity: a vehicle to dialogue.   Unity develops as a result of the mutuality established in effective discourse, like that which I described in "OnMethods: How Dialogue will Change the World, Part 2." I provided an example in the former post of a dialogue on values in which participants develop and utilize empathy to understand and grasp the values of other participants.  I pragmatically labeled this development, and use, of empathy as "mutuality;" in quotations because I'm sure others have already used the term for such transactions or terms like it.  Mutuality consists of a harmony in which two or more individuals become more conscious of the degree to which their values shape their actions.  Mutuality terminates in a greater group consciousness: in collective insight and understanding.  In sum, the development of mutuality coincides with a greater harmony of the part(icipant)s.

Further, unity is a criteria for such dialogues.  As described in Part 2, unity is "the harmony of the parts that compose the whole."  Without the harmony of the parts, i.e. the absence of respect; active listening; and engagement of the the participants, dialogue will be ineffective.  As such, there is a requisite unity, or harmony, in order to create or establish a greater unity.  For example, effective dialogues have rules, conscious and unconscious, possibly including, but not limited to: respect, dignity, symbol systems, organizers, etc., all of which must be shared by participants for effective discourse.

Therefore, unity is both the means to, and ends of, an effective dialogue.  In order to tap into the transformative power of effective dialogue, unity must be the way.  And in order to create unity, there must be effective discourse.  The logic buttressing my argument is self-evidently circular.  But this circularity consists of a causal relationship.  To demonstrate, if you remove either, the other is limited: without effective discourse, unity is constrained. 

But importantly, as a causal circular relationship, unity and discourse function in a positive feed back loop.  (I.e., the more effective the discourse, the greater the unity and the greater the unity, the more effective the discourse.)

To consolidate and conclude several recent posts, to bring about real change and transformation of society: especially the good life for all, there must be discourse, and as such, there must be unity.  Neither is effective, or genuine, without the other.  Further, they are the vehicles to one another.  As such, one could equally argue that "discourse is the way," when arguing for the way of unity.  However, in general, in our society people are already discoursing: discussing, debating, deciding, etc., although most often ineffectively.  Because, in general, North American society has yet to do so truly, and genuinely, united.  At this juncture, most of us could benefit from unity more than discourse.  Ultimately, unity through discourse; discourse through unity; til my last breadth, "unity is the way."