What kind of resistance for American Totalitarianism?

 A lot of quotes by Hannah Arendt have been going around in my online circles in the last few days. (Here's some essays on Arendt by one of my favorite writers on technology criticism, Michael Sacasas: https://thefrailestthing.com/tag/hannah-arendt/)

 

Arendt was one of the great chroniclers of Totalitarianism, through Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and after their downfall. When I think about what is happening in the US, the parallels are very strong, and I think it likely that the lessons learned from fascism and totalitarianism in the past will be very useful in dealing with what is to come.

 

At the same time, when I think about what I know of those who resisted during those times, the story feels so dire and my imagination shuts down. I'm more inspired by the history of civil rights, resistance to the Vietnam war and all the other progressive causes that have been so hard won in the US. There is a dramatic attempt to shut them all down and reverse all of that progress. How do we tap into this history of the US and move forward with courage and pride? We have to think about what we love about the US. If we don't fight for it, it will be taken away, faster than we can imagine. I think one needs to fight out of love, and not out of fear. That's what I'm working with right now. The fear is easy to find, right there on the surface. The love may be more ellusive, but it is also there, and deeper down and more sustainable.

An awful election: reflections

 

Well, another day has passed, and it still seems like Trump won the election. I hate this. I'm not sure I've really understood why people voted for this wanna-be dictator. The most resonant point to me that I've heard is that the US wasn't ready to elect a competent, effective woman president. And so we elected a monstrous man instead. This explanation, mixed with a fractured media environment (TV networks + social media) that could be gamed by bad actors gives the start of an explanation for this awful result.

I've often felt through my life that I would end up involved in some kind of non-violent resistance movement. So here we are. What will it look like? Let's hope this setback leads us forward to create a climate and justice movement of the scale needed to face the new time on this planet we are up against.

 

An idea comes up as I think about how to move forward. I've been reading "The Process Model" by Eugene Gendlin, the creator of the psychological technique of focusing. It's a terribly abstract book, extremely frustrating at times, but also with a large scope of trying to create another way of thinking that includes life and consciousness and first person perspective and pushes back against the Cartesian mind-body split. It fights back against reductionism by starting with fully functioning processes rather than trying to build them up from their parts. Gendlin next introduces the concept of a stoppage in which something prevents the process from moving forward (e.g. a lack of food means the feeding-energy gathering process can't move forward). Out of this stoppage, the process is able to change and evolve. Trump's election is a kind of stoppage in our political process. How can we respond creatively to encompass a larger perspective that moves our world forward?

 

A soft snow fell on us yesterday here in Colorado. Here's a plum tree, its green, yellow and orange leaves dusted with snow. This world is too beautiful to give up on.

 

Who inspires you during this time? I've looked to Gandhi and MLK as leaders of non-violent resistance. Who else can we look to for guidance as we find our way forward through this next challenge?

More clarity on the limits of reductionism

 

I've been really enjoying Erik Hoel's book "The world behind the world". (https://www.simonandschuster.com/.../Erik-Hoel/9781982159382)

 

Spending so many years on particle accelerators and synchrotron light sources, I started to think about the x-ray experiments that are done at these facilities. They are an important part of looking at and understanding the world at an atomic scale. For example, a large percentage of protein structures have been determined by x-ray diffraction experiments at synchrotron light sources.

One of the primary tools of science is reductionism, which seeks to look at smaller and smaller scales in order to explain: understanding by breaking something down to smaller parts. While it's certainly extremely valuable, it also has its limits, and feeds into what John Vervaeke calls "The meaning crisis", one manifestation of which is the idea that we "are nothing but a collection of atoms", or perhaps nothing but molecules, or perhaps nothing but quarks, electrons and photon excitations within the standard model in a quantum field theory framework. In high school, I remember reading Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" and getting quite depressed about this view of ourselves as only truly real, or interesting on the level of DNA/RNA.

 

I've long been interested in arguments showing the limits of this kind of thinking. Hoel's work is really helpful in this respect. I have more to learn, but one very concrete result is in terms of "causal emergence" (see https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.01854 )

(I'm also motivated to get back to the writings of the philosopher Nancy Cartwright, who talks about the limits of the language of physics in her books such as "The Dappled World" and "How the Laws of Physics Lie")

 

Hoel shows that under a wide range of concepts of causality, that one actually gains causal power when one goes up to larger scales. This relates to multiple realizability (e.g. how our bodies are replaced by new matter, but our identity remains, or the Ship of Theseus which is slowly replaced part by part). As biological systems evolve, there is a pressure to create large scale causal systems that are robust to changing randomness and complexity at the micro-scale. (It's nice to see Judea Pearl's work on causation referenced as well. I really loved "The Book of Why", which Josip recommended.)

 

I also learned a lot from this talk by Vervaeke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vazO36OnGKI) in which he gives arguments towards a Neo-platonist ontology. He mentions Hoel's work here. This moves us beyond a purely materialist way of thinking, and makes room for transcendence and spirituality.

Further, the arguments in Hoel's work, show why "The selfish gene" picture is limited: there are causal structures at many different scales. And most of the human world that we care about exists at a larger scale than our genes. Our friendships and commitments, our intellectual pursuits and our everyday existence in our bodies is not on the level of DNA and does indeed have causal efficacy.

 

Anyway, this is another one of my directions that I'm really appreciating having more free time to explore!

Continuity between places

 As I start to think about what I may do next, I come back to the idea that I don't want to leave behind what I've done, either work-wise or community-wise.

I heard about a job opening in Berkeley and I think about moving there. At the same time, I've been really appreciating and getting deeper into my cohousing community here in Colorado. And I appreciate my art studio and the developing community through that.

I guess if I did move back to the bay area, I'd probably look for cohousing there and for an art community there as well.

Transitions

 I'm watching the last season of Battlestar Galactica today. It feels like an appropriate story to accompany a difficult time in human history and a difficult in my life. The crew has to start over again so many times. Even though I was ready for a change, it doesn't mean it's easy. My transition after Grenoble was definitely difficult. That was 8 years, and now I've been through another close to 8 years. I put a lot into my work at RadiaSoft and it's not so clear whether much of it will continue on. Like my years in France, a long investment. I've looked for continuity in life and it's often been elusive.

The very nature of humanity is questioned again and again. And our relationship with technology is centered.

I'm worried about the upcoming election. Are people really confused enough to elect Donald Trump? And I'm worried about climate change. Will humanity find a way to come together to address this problem, or will we put our head in the sand?

I'm glad I'll have some time now to sit with all this before figuring out what to do next.