[FRIAM] "certain codes of conduct"

Thu Jul 30 16:08:29 EDT 2020

Steve,

Hierarchy is an efficient way of doing business/getting things done.  It
breaks down and becomes oppressive if the guys at the top always look alike
and stay too long ("the patriarchy"). Leaders waiting to emerge in
organizations are often suppressed by static hierarchical structures--not
to mention the dependence on "experts"-- and we lose the potential wisdom
and action of potential change agents.  "The Wisdom of Crowds" makes
sense.  Collective action is more necessary than ever.

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 5:01 PM Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:

> I haven't been able to retrieve the reference but I recently read/heard
> something about the fact that post-feudal economic/political organizations
> inherited the paradigm of managing scale and complexity through
> hierarchy.   Capitalistic Republics/Democracies and Socialist/Communist
> societies with "Central Planning" are both effectively structured this way,
> in spite of attempting (each in it's own way) to empower or equalize the
> "common (hu)man"...
>
> I think what Guerin has been babbling <grin> about most recently (at least
> since Stockholm) is his vision of what an otherwise organized "collective
> awareness/action/consciousness/intelligence/etc" might be as well as what I
> think Glen might have been gesturing-at when he criticized Nick's recent
> offering up of BHL vs NJL.
>
> I'd be interested in more discussion of what I think Glen is alluding to
> with a purists notion of "Collective Action".   It might be contradictory
> to "talk about" something which is inherently not about talking/language,
> at least (or may entirely) in the common sense of "language".
>
> I could rattle on a few more paragraphs describing my own half-baked
> ideas, but I'll save that until maybe there are more well-baked ideas on
> the table.
>
> - Steve
> On 7/29/20 3:02 PM, Merle Lefkoff wrote:
>
> Eric, thank you for your reply.  Forgive me for suggesting a larger
> systemic problem, connected for me to the problems in our democratic
> system, our global economic system, and our international governance
> system--and also ultimately related to the existential threat of the
> collapse of the living systems that nurture our species.
>
> The democracy and Constitution our founders gave us at the end of the 18th
> century has structural flaws we have tried to overcome.  The global
> economic system that the victors of WWII gave us at Bretton Woods in 1944
> has similar structural flaws that we have also tried (not very hard) to
> overcome.  The United Nations that emerged a year later in 1945 to convene
> a new international order shares similar structural problems.  There is a
> pattern here. At its core is domination and exclusivity.
>
> The present hesitant shifts in the old narratives--and relationships--
> that created our major social, economic and political systems are the
> result of gladiators and dragon-slayers finally targeting the positive
> feedback loops that keep reinforcing historic institutional design errors.
>
> I'll stop here, because I'm even boring myself.
>
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 9:49 PM Eric Charles <
> eric.phillip.charles at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Nick, the "ire" is perfectly fine. I didn't need to couch my statement in
>> that way, and doing so obviously opened me to Merle's response.
>>
>> Merle,
>> I think the social criticism is generally valid, but as a critique of
>> college in particular it is feeds a general confusion about what college
>> should be about, which ultimately speeds the fall of the system it seeks to
>> reform.
>>
>> One of the obvious legitimate functions of college is indoctrination into
>> a profession. If you don't want to be indoctrinated into a profession that
>> college indoctrinates people into, then college probably isn't for you.  If
>> you get out of college not-indoctrinated-into-a-profession, something has
>> gone wrong. For example, if you want to get a degree in psychology, you
>> need to learn to write in some reasonable semblance of APA style. That
>> includes its own horribly arbitrary set of grammar rules, formatting and
>> the like. It is screwed up, in some sense, but it isn't imperialist
>> oppression aimed at minorities. Arbitrary norms are found in all
>> professions, and conforming to them is part of being "professional". Also,
>> if you got a degree in psychology, without anyone forcing you to learn how
>> to approach problems, write reports, criticize articles, etc., in the
>> manner that professional psychologists tend to do those things, something
>> has gone wrong. If you want to think about psychology-related stuff in the
>> way you already think about those things, then don't go to college. If you
>> want to learn to think about them in the way the professional community
>> does, then college might make senes. (Note, I'm *not *saying you have to *agree
>> *with how the professional community does things, just that you should
>> be able to replicate, with some reasonable accuracy, the standard
>> professional approach.) Where you start from doesn't really matter; though
>> the curricula *should *be more adaptive to the starting place of the
>> various students, by the end you should be professional indoctrinated,
>> that's the whole point.
>>
>> In addition, college functions to indoctrinate people into a certain part
>> of society... or at least it used to. Because, traditionally, most college
>> graduates don't get work in exactly the thing they studied, this "hidden
>> curriculum" has often been more important than the obvious curriculum.
>> College graduates should be able to read, write, and math at a certain
>> level, generally think through problems at a certain level, be able to
>> present ideas to an audience in spoken or written form, be able to adapt to
>> arbitrary assignments with a certain level of comfort, be a team leader, be
>> a pro-active follower, etc.  Here again, colleges *should *be more
>> adaptive to the starting place of the various students, but that doesn't
>> mean their end point should be abandoned. Here you see big differences
>> between colleges, based on what they are preparing you for. A college like
>> Swathmore or Bucknell is preparing you to be able to do those things for
>> different audiences than Oberlin or Penn State. If you are at a school that
>> is well designed to prepare you for something you don't want to be prepared
>> for... that's not imperialist oppression, that's your having made an
>> unfortunate choice of  where to go.
>>
>> Frankly, most colleges currently suck at those two goals, and most other
>> functions you might want them to have.  It is easy to find studies showing
>> that lots of people graduate college without high school level reading,
>> writing, and math abilities. It is also easy to find students who graduate
>> with almost no indoctrination into the field of study they were purportedly
>> pursuing.
>>
>> Under those conditions, it is not surprising that people view a college
>> degree as largely symbolic marker, required for entry into the job market
>> or some such nonsense. However, the solution shouldn't be to make college
>> degrees even less indicative of having attained particular skills. The less
>> a college degree indicates having a certain variety of skills, the less
>> value is provided to employers to select based on the presence of a degree,
>> and the less value it gives a college graduate to have a degree. Returning
>> to the indoctrination thing, we can see the (potential) flaw in the
>> criticism of the curriculum. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say, "I
>> really want a degree from Rutgers, because employers value degrees from
>> Rutgers, but I also think Rutgers should change its curriculum to not be so
>> strict in only letting people graduate if they actually have the skills
>> employers value." The value of the degree, particularly to a person trying
>> to get out of a bad situation, is entirely based on its reliably indicating
>> some set of skills, and the ability to write in a semi-formal manner is one
>> of those skills (to return to the more narrow original context).
>>
>> If you formed a solid college curriculum around mastering skills other
>> than those traditionally trained in college, that would be fine (and I
>> think that is what Nick is struggling to get at). And if those skills were
>> valued (economically, or merely for personal growth) then a degree from
>> that college would be a reliable indicator of that specific valuable
>> achievement. But that is very different than allowing students to get
>> through college with whatever skills they arrived with, just because you
>> are afraid that enforcing *any *strict requirements might make you an
>> imperialist monster. The former creates a marketplace for students to
>> choose from, while the latter just guarantees that college degrees continue
>> to become less and less valuable, particularly to the people who most seek
>> to benefit by getting them.
>>
>> (Sorry, that ended up longer than intended.... but it's late... I don't
>> think I can get it tighter right now... and your question deserves a
>> reply.)
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 11:21 PM Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> And why, O Eric of a deep understanding, are you not a fan?
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 8:17 PM Merle Lefkoff <merlelefkoff at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Clearly the implicit bias is that all of these reading requirements
>>>> were written by White men.  In an attempt to redress this problem I have
>>>> noticed lately that the NY Times book review seems to be bending over
>>>> backwards to review books written by women of color.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 7:03 PM Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm trying to remember my freshman English class.  Every other Friday
>>>>> we had to submit a five hundred word essay on the class readings. On
>>>>> alternate Fridays we had to write an in-class paragraph or two on those
>>>>> readings.  The readings included the following:
>>>>>
>>>>> Catcher in the Rye by Salinger
>>>>> Victory by Conrad
>>>>> The Republic by Plato
>>>>> All the King's Men by Warren
>>>>> Brave New World by Huxley
>>>>>
>>>>> Numerous essays on personal integrity by various authors.
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't see that any of those had to do with unconscious racism or
>>>>> implicit bias unless the personal integrity essays did.  I think I had to
>>>>> read The Invisible Man by Ellison but that may have been in a later year in
>>>>> a political science or US history class at Berkeley.
>>>>>
>>>>> All this was 54 years ago.
>>>>>
>>>>> Frank
>>>>>
>>>>> ---
>>>>> Frank C. Wimberly
>>>>> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
>>>>> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>>>>>
>>>>> 505 670-9918
>>>>> Santa Fe, NM
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>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
>>>> Center for Emergent Diplomacy
>>>> emergentdiplomacy.org
>>>> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
>>>>
>>>> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
>>>> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
>>>> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
>>> Center for Emergent Diplomacy
>>> emergentdiplomacy.org
>>> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
>>>
>>> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
>>> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
>>> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
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>
>
> --
> Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
> Center for Emergent Diplomacy
> emergentdiplomacy.org
> Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
>
> mobile:  (303) 859-5609
> skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
> twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
>
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-- 
Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.
Center for Emergent Diplomacy
emergentdiplomacy.org
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

mobile:  (303) 859-5609
skype:  merle.lelfkoff2
twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff
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