For whatever these things are worth a AP-GfK Poll says that 37% of the public back OWS. Is that good or bad? It really doesn't matter if we are dedicated to reaching everyone. My long years as a teacher of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, graduate students, and undergraduate honors students made me try to learn how to teach better every day of my career. When I got my last faculty job in 1973 the average teaching load in the medical school was about 45 lectures a year. I quickly volunteered my "load" (talk about negative framing!) up to about 150 hours a year. This was greatly resented by my colleagues who insisted that because I also was near the top of list with publications I would set a trend. Maybe I was wrong? It is hard to say. I do know that I love to teach which is why I keep writing these diaries at the age of 75. Never before in my life have I understood the need for good teaching as now. Read on below the break and I'll explain.
We are at a rare moment in our history. I really don't need to tell you that. What I can contribute is a sense of what it takes to change someone's mind. My lectures on the most radical version of modern complexity theory stole an idea from George Lakoff. I dealt with the complexity "mantra"
The whole is more than the sum of it parts.
I call it a "mantra" because it is recited far often than it is understood. This is not really a digression and if you stick with me I'll show you how relevant it is to the task that we face.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts is a life changing concept. It totally revises the way we were taught to view the world. We were taught that if we were confronted with a complex problem we needed to isolate the part we were interested in so that we could better understand it. What is so fallacious about this is that if the statement about the whole is true, then breaking it down to parts looses something essential. Our understanding gets compartmentalized and we loose the systems quality of the whole.
If you understand that idea, you have a concept that has changed you. You can never go back. Oh, you can pretend and deny, but the world is a new place.
Now to the job at hand. OWS is dealing with a failure of a system. The way most folk deal with politics (another isolated part of a complex whole) is to break things down into issues. Lists of demands and grievances are what get created. This is a primitive start at best. Systems fail not because any part in particular fails but because the whole system is stressed beyond its capacity to recover. The first place you see this in the present situation is in the political system itself. both the government and the way we form our government have become obsolete. They were designed at a time that has no resemblance to the present yet we have a naive belief that they were designed so well that they can adapt and evolve.
In fact, the system, call it plutocracy, oligarchy, whatever, has failed. We are groping with that failure. OWS knows this on some levels but I doubt they have it all.
So what do we do? First we make sure we understand. Second we learn to convey that understanding to others.
If the whole is more than the sum of its parts, and your thinking process is dealing with the parts in isolation, then you have a problem. The thing about complex systems is that you can pull them apart relatively easily. Then, all the King's horses and all the King's men won't be able to get them back together again. So we need to teach this. We need to see the systems level failure we are dealing with. Are you up to it?