"To study is not to consume ideas, but to create and re-create them."
          - Paulo Freire, The Act of Study

In The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation Paulo Freire provides a unique set of criteria for developing a critical posture in the act of study:

a) The reader should assume the role of subject of the act.
b) The act of study, in sum, is an attitude toward the world.
c) Studying a specific subject calls for us, whenever possible, to be familiar with a given bibliography, in either a general subject or the area of our ongoing inquiry.
d) The act of study assumes a dialectical relationship between reader and author, whose reflections are found with the themes he treats.
e) The act of study demands a sense of modesty.

This sums up an accurate description of my critical approach in study. Especially the "modest" apprehension of challenging texts. As he says, "if we really assume a modest attitude compatible with a critical attitude, we need not feel foolish when confronted with even great difficulties in trying to discern a deeper meaning from a text.... Understanding a text isn't a gift from someone else. It requires patience and commitment..."

""Top Secret America" is a project nearly two years in the making that describes the huge national security buildup in the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

I like what their doing.... let the secret world become visible. How much more will it take. Washington Post is doing us all a great service uncovering the truth of the American Federal National Security State. read more....

"When it comes to national security, all too often no expense is spared and few questions are asked - with the result an enterprise so massive that nobody in government has a full understanding of it. It is, as Dana Priest and William M. Arkin have found, ubiquitous, often inefficient and mostly invisible to the people it is meant to protect and who fund it.

The articles in this series and an online database at topsecretamerica.com depict the scope and complexity of the government's national security program through interactive maps and other graphics. Every data point on the Web site is substantiated by at least two public records.

Because of the nature of this project, we allowed government officials to see the Web site several months ago and asked them to tell us of any specific concerns. They offered none at that time. As the project evolved, we shared the Web site's revised capabilities. Again, we asked for specific concerns. One government body objected to certain data points on the site and explained why; we removed those items. Another agency objected that the entire Web site could pose a national security risk but declined to offer specific comments.

We made other public safety judgments about how much information to show on the Web site. For instance, we used the addresses of company headquarters buildings, information which, in most cases, is available on companies' own Web sites, but we limited the degree to which readers can use the zoom function on maps to pinpoint those or other locations."
     - from the editor, The Washington Post

"With the current globalization of our problems, we need to extend our circle of empathy and view humanity as a worldwide extended human family. As long as we refrain from facing that challenge, divisiveness and unsolvable conflicts will persist."
            - Rodrigue Tremblay, For a More Ethical Civilization


What would a civilization based upon a radical humanistic perspective and global ethics look like? Rodrigue Tremblay tells us:

In such a such a civilization,

• All human beings would be equal in dignity and in human rights.
• Life on this planet would not be devalued and seen as only a preparation for a better life after death, somewhere beyond the clouds.
• The virtues of tolerance and of human liberty would be proclaimed and applied, subject only to the requirements of public order.
• Human solidarity and sharing would be better accepted as a protection against poverty and deprivation.
• The manipulation and domination of others through lies, propaganda, and exploitation schemes of all kinds would be less prevalent.
• There would be less reliance on superstition and religion to understand the Universe and to solve life's problems and more on reason, logic and science.
• Better care of the Earth's natural environment—land, soil, water, air and space—would be taken in order to bequeath a brighter heritage to future generations.
• We would have ended the primitive practice of resorting to violence or to wars to resolve differences and conflicts.
• There would be more genuine democracy in the organization of public affairs, according to individual freedom and responsibility.
• Governments would see that their first and most important task is to help develop children's intelligence and talents through education.

All high sounding and wonderful ideas, but are they realistic in an age of war, famine, and ecocide? One can read such ideas as the UN Human Rights manifesto and think: yes, grand stuff, but who will enforce this grand idea? Will the current economic and political rulers of the world enact measures to incorporate such grand ideology in their everyday practices? Don't hold your breath. Will the excluded, the refugees, the millions of displaced inhabitants of our stateless camps of hungry citizens of the new world disorder become a part of this humanist world?

Every time I read some ex government official cum morality play puppeteer begin to preach a new humanism I want to reach for - as Johnny Cash said when "Death comes knocking at my door, I reach for my shotgun." So beware of old guard members bearing Trojan gifts of humanistic idealism: it smells of death camps to me.... or, maybe, just another ghetto for the world's poor. More likely a new vision of global apartheid than a truly humane realm of freedom. M.N. Roy the only great radical humanist of the last century once said: "A mighty resurgence of the common man and woman only can save modern civilization. To inspire that resurgence, organize it, guide it to fruition- that is the mission of New Humanism." Let us hope that the truly creative common men and women of our planet will awaken from their long sleep and begin to reforge those ancient links of freedom so badly needed in our time.

            "A Dark Age is a culture's dead end."
                    - Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead

Is the cultural matrix of our multicultural global heritage imploding? Are we in the first stages of a new Dark Age? The idea of cultural amnesia has been with us for some time now. We've been hearing of the erosion of the community and family, higher education, effective practice of science and technology, government policy makers out of touch with the real needs of their constituents, and the failure the intellectuals and media to to police themselves and provide the public the truth about our forthcoming cultural, political, environmental, and economic collapse. Jane Jacobs tells us that a culture becomes unstable and unsalvageable if "stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant."

In defining the cause of such collapse she tells us that the key is in how a culture confronts the radical and chaotic jolts in circumstances that their main institutions cannot portend nor adequately adapt fast enough to overcome and thereby become irrelevant, and are forgotten, thrown upon the dustbin of history as quaint artifacts of a bygone era. She points out that when stabilizing institutions are thwarted by government and corporate power, as they are in our time, then the basic self-organizing and adaptive corrections become impossible bringing on a deluge of self-defeating policies that will ultimately lead to a new Dark Age.

Could the immigration situation brewing in Arizona portend the demise of America? Jacobs tells us that "cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society's decline from cultural vigor." Instead of a culture based upon the logic of reason and science with its progressive future-oriented ideology, she sees a return to a new mythos, one of religious, political, and economic fundamentalism which see to ground their conservative agenda in the old anchors of isolationism and fortress mentality, thereby cutting itself off from an open-society view of inclusion and diversity of thought and action. She shows us that instead of turning inward through isolation and close conservative systems, that would lead to a time of cultural amnesia, we need should discover what in our cultural heritage is still alive and vibrant and worth saving.

Jacobs warns us that most of the past great civilizations have vanished due in part to a lack of cultural self-awareness. "They have neglected to recognize that the true power of a successful culture resides in its example.... Any culture that jettisons the values that have given it competence, adaptability, and identity becomes weak and hollow. A culture can avoid that hazard only by tenaciously retaining the underlying values responsible for the culture's nature and success." Her hope for the future is express in the core American values expressed by Lincoln when he "that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth." Yet, as a libertarian, I would add that the said government should be local, not federal, that at the heart of our future lies a true awakening of the power of the people to rule themselves along the lines of true liberty rather than be guided by the elite factions of a neoliberal establishment that has degraded both our planet and our economic livelihood for generations to come.

 

    "I am moving on: my new project is about methods on how to domesticate the unknown, exploit randomness, figure out how to live in a world we don't understand very well."
               - Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Fourth Quadrant

Nassim Nicholas Taleb author of The Black Swan recently said that "while most human thought (particularly since the enlightenment) has focused us on how to turn knowledge into decisions, my new mission is to build methods to turn lack of information, lack of understanding, and lack of "knowledge" into decisions—how, as we will see, not to be a "turkey"." Socrates once said "I know that I know nothing". The idea of turning one's lack of knowing into a positive formula for decision making seems interesting if not quite original. What is original is that he is speaking of probability theory, the use of statistical analysis based upon mathematical assumptions

After twenty years in the business of managing portfolios he realized that there is a divorce between the theoretical mapping of reality using statistical models and the actual lived world. "So knowledge ...matters little, very little in many situations. In the real world, there are very few situations where what you do and your belief if some statement is true or false naively map into each other." He goes on to tell us that there are two types of decision making: 1) The first type of decisions is simple, "binary", i.e. you just care if something is true or false.; and, 2) The second type of decisions is more complex. You do not just care of the frequency—but of the impact as well, or, even more complex, some function of the impact.

He goes into a full discussion of probability theory and how it relates to his Black Swan theories. read more... Not being a mathematician or logician I'll let the reader pursue the full extent of his theory. Yet, he does come up with some interesting ideas on wisdom. He provides a set of guidelines or Phronetic Rules: What Is Wise To Do (Or Not Do) In The Fourth Quadrant:

1) Avoid Optimization, Learn to Love Redundancy.
2) Avoid prediction of remote payoffs
3) Beware the "atypicality" of remote events.
4) Time.
5) Beware Moral Hazard.
6) Metrics.
7) Where is the skewness?
8) Do not confuse absence of volatility with absence of risks.
9) Beware presentations of risk numbers.

His main gist is that in the Fourth Quadrant statistical analysis breaks down and decision making can no longer be founded on probability theory but is now negotiated through a set of rules based upon our lack of understanding rather than on models of mathematical precision. An interesting theory which he seems to applying to Climatic change.

 “A black swan is an outlier, an event that lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Most people expect all swans to be white because that’s what their experience tells them; a black swan is by definition a surprise.”

The polar regions, which are warming up to three times as fast as the rest of the planet, are our black swan.

With increasing evidence that the warmed world faces the release of massive amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, from a superheated tundra, this particular black swan will drive what happens in the rest of the world."

His points made in his book, Black Swan, on the "ludic fallacy" and "narrative fallacy" help understand the complexities of our unknowing and how our minds tend to invent straight-jackets for Reality:

1) Ludic Fallacy:

What is the ludic fallacy? Ludic comes from ludis, Latin for games. … In the casino you know the rules, you can calcalute the odds, and the type of uncertainty we encounter there. …

In real life you do not know the odds; you need to discover them, and the sources of uncertainty are not defined. Economists … draw an artifical distinction between Knightian risks (which you can compute), and Knightian uncertainty (which you cannot compute), after … Frank Knight ….

Yet we automatically, spontaneously associate chance with these Platonified [or "scientitized"] games. …

Those who spend too much time with their noses glued to maps will tend to mistake the map for the territory. … I recently looked at what college students are taught under the subject of chance and came out horrified; they were brainwashed with this ludic fallacy and the outlandish bell curve. The same is true of people doing PhD's in the field of probability theory. … [A]ssuming chance has anything to do with mathematics, what little mathematization we can do in the real world does not assume the mild randomness represented by the bell cureve, but rather scalable wild randomness. What can be mathematized is usually not Gaussian, but Mandelbrotian.

Now, go read any of the great classical thinkers who had something practical to say bout the subject of chance, such as Cicero, and you find … a notion of probability that remains fuzzy throughout, as it needs to be, since such fuzziness is the very nature of [real world] uncertainty. Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties. Before Western thinking drowned in its "scientific" mentality, what is arrogantly called the Enlightenment, people prompted their brain to think—not compute. … (pp. 127-129)

2) Narrative Fallacy:

We like stories, we like to summarize, and we like to simplify, i.e., to reduce the dimension of matters. The … narrative fallacy… is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths. It severely distorts our mental representation of the world; it is particularly acute when it comes to the rare event. …

The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently forcing a logical link, and arrow of relationship, upon them. Explanations bind facts together. They make them all the more easily remembered; they help them make more sense. Where this propensity can go wrong is when it increases our impressions of understanding. …

We … have a hunger for rules because we need to reduce the dimension of matters so they can get into our heads. Or, rather, sadly, so we can squeeze them into our [strictly limited "working memory]. The more random information is, the greater the dimensionality, and thus the more difficult to summarize. The more you summarize the more order you put in, the less randomness. Hence the same conditions that makes us simplify pushes us to think that the world is lesss random than it actually is.

And the Black Swan is what we leave out of simplification.

Both the artistic and scientific enterprises are the product of our need to reduce dimensions and inflict some order on things. … A novel, a story, a myth, or a tale, all have the same function: they spare us from the complexity of the world and shield us from its randomness. Myths impart order to the disorder of human perception and the perceived "chaos of human experience." …

Our tendency to perceive—to impose—narrativity and causality are symptoms of the same disease—dimension reduction. Moreover, like causality, narrativity has a chronological dimension and leads to the perception of the flow of time. Causality makes time flow in a single direction, and so does narrativity. (pp. 63-70)