Category: Uncategorized

We Get What You Pay For

Featured Photo Credit: Jan van der Wolf on Pexels

Am I the only one who sees at least a hazy comparison between banning social media and banning vices like alcohol and tobacco?

Just for instance… over the past fifty–odd years, we’ve not only managed to restrict the age for purchasing alcohol and tobacco, we’ve also reached some level of comfort that such restrictions are more and more culturally acceptable, and even worth further pursuit.

Today, similar warning is posed by myriad age-restricted bans upon the usage of social media, even as weighed against its benefits… one Google search is all anyone needs to confirm the health concerns. And let’s set aside that any threat to the health of so-called “minors” might also be a threat to the health of so-called “adults” – we’ve apparently reached a comfort level on that, too, one that leaves the adults free to decide for themselves whether or not to damage their health.

Illicit drugs, pornography, firearms – all restricted, if not illegal. Even movie theatres, video games, and music releases can have age restrictions or purchase & supervision requirements. As for me (though not sure for you), I’ve known plenty of minors in my lifetime who were turned down when they asked adults to forgive such bans and let them purchase [ restricted Product X ]. The point just now is not enforcement, which in real consequence is hit-or-miss, but rather actuality, which by point of fact is cultural evidence that we’ve found actual reason and method in our past for imposing restrictions and bans.
 
As for the current hoo-haw… if it suggests anything, could it be simply that plenty of people have raised considerable concern? On its face, the mere call to ban social media seems grave enough to warrant a far more judicious – and far less rapid – pursuit of any usage, widespread or minimal, while we try to understand the longer-term consequences of social media, not to mention A.I. As much as the pace of e-culture has reduced our tolerance for waiting, it has also accelerated our lack of patience, which in turn has amplified our imprudence. Among these various cultural reductions, it’s that last one for me (though not sure for you) that really threatens our future.

Someone will argue that social media, and A.I. too, still have practical utility and that weighing this against any ban would short-change the deprived children and youth who use them. Yes, and a 12 year-old can’t just walk into the Motor Vehicles office and book a Road Test, yet driving too has great practical utility. Driving also presents a severe threat to public safety, even after motorists have earned their privilege by passing various licensing processes. Take issue as one may against protecting the duration or stringency of road safety and driver licensing, but for good reason, we do restrict its access.

So, as we halt a minor’s purchase of alcohol or tobacco, why not also a smart phone? Instead of banning social media or A.I., why not restrict the age for operating the devices and accounts we use to access them. How about restricting Rogers / Telus / Bell accounts to make it illegal for minors to be signed on as family members? As no responsible parent simply turns over their car keys to a 12 year-old, why hand them a restricted smart phone? That’s a cultural thing – a willingness to obey the law on account of respecting the reason behind it. Unless, of course, that’s a comfort level thing, and people just aren’t comfortable with it – and wouldn’t that tell us something more about what we value most?

Funny over the past ~10-12 millenia how human civilization managed to grow without electronic anything – even longer than that, if we start redefining “human civilization.” Funnier still how all that non-digital time finally landed us here, facing all this, just the same – did we follow some improper process along the way? Along that timeline, as social media and A.I. suddenly now present socio-economic threat, are we even capable of regulating or curtailing or halting their production and usage quickly enough? Are we even concerned enough to try? If no incentive to try outweighs the incentives to not try, at least not for the people who could try, then I’d say we definitely do and don’t know much about what we value most.

Do we value our health? As social media bears a documented health threat, why aren’t we flatly banning it all, for everyone? Or, if we won’t ban what’s addictive because its addictive, then at least we might regulate it because its addictive, and distorting, and hyper-personalized, and fatiguing, and algorithmic, and profitable. Regulate social media the way we regulate alcohol, or tax it the way we sin-tax alcohol and tobacco. Or at least license its proper usage… how ubiquitous would it be if access to social media were limited, even by dollar-cost? Wait, I forgot – it already is. So how important is any of this, as a health concern, when at least some people are evidently addicted? No problem – remember? Adults make their own decisions, plus bars and nightclubs seem to fare pretty well, and people still smoke too, if just a different shrub than before. Lucky for us, all that stuff is legal.

Bans and restrictions are no more effective in practice than their enforcement – in the world where I live, everyone who really wants to is able to smoke and drink and drive and shoot. But, as any of them might be held to account, well… that’s usually something after the fact, if even then. Lucky for us.

As for me though (not sure for you), rather than hassle everyone with bans and restrictions, rather than nag young people with “A.I. makes you lazy” or “Social media makes you ill,” I prefer to help them learn why “being lazy” or “being ill” is a worthwhile concern. I prefer to persuade people with more inclusive, longer-term responses, apart from whichever bans and restrictions might still get imposed. And I’d rather see us educating people about which choices we face, and which reasons underpin worthwhile debate, and which alternatives are available to those who want to live some better way than enduring threats to health and safety.

Create incentives that change behaviour – or hey, create disincentives that change behaviour, whichever – but create something more nuanced and imaginative than the decree of bans and restrictions, something more capable than getting peoples’ backs up. Unless, of course, we’re clearer now on what we value most.

On Teleology: V. Setting

Click here to read Pt. IV. Source?

On Teleology: V. Setting

Pretty recently, Science helped us understand two separate but related things in a more holistic way, and I think you’ll see what Science means once we dub the two things as ‘space’ and ‘time’.

Science merged these two fundamentals into one singular mind-bending concept, then imaginatively called it spacetime. Think Einstein and gravity and General Relativity although don’t think Newton and gravity and the falling apple… except of course, in our case, do think a falling acorn.

Don’t trust me… trust Science!

Let’s fall back down to Earth, ourselves, to swirl about in the gravity well as we revisit Part I’s analogies of schools and shipbuilding and students K-12, and our culture’s hankering obsession with Science and efficiency.

Being a teacher, I think a lot about efficiency, particularly for things like lessons and planning and short- & long-term objectives. Of course, in the Scientific here-and-now of the 21st century – ours being that hard core Sciencey culture of efficiency: a purpose for everything, nothing wasted – whenever I think about lessons and planning and short- & long-term objectives, naturally I think of spacetime… although maybe not quite the way you’d expect, with sole respect to ‘time’. I think of spacetime with sole respect to ‘spacetime’.

Try it, yourself, by swapping out temporal ‘short-term’ & ‘long-term’ objectives for physical ones, such as ‘nearby’ & ‘further afield’. I also swap out the emptiness of ‘space’ with the tangibility of ‘place’ although, no, I’m not trying to make placetime a thing.

And this then, finally, is what I’ve been wondering about teleology: as time and place sometimes combine into one thing that we call setting, I wonder how we’re teleologically set for some kind of fulfilment or completion by our passage not simply in time but across space through time: what is our purpose as we find ourselves set within some place and time? Naturally, this includes all those with whom we’re set alongside – as I pointed out once before, we can’t all be Thoreau.

To explore all this, I’ve been using analogies. For instance, inasmuch as we might consider any teacher a so-called ‘shipbuilder’, we might ask by analogy, within the geography and economy of the setting, what kind of ship a teacher intends to ‘build’ of each student. As we would never build a ship apart from its filling some function or purpose, we might ask by analogy what function or purpose teachers envisage or intend for K-12 graduates – what kind(s) of people do we want K-12 graduates to become? And what kinds of people do teachers actually end up ‘building’, and how much are the students involved? What kinds of people finally cross that diploma stage? What is their telos, and who gets a say?

To consider telos further, I compared people to acorns that fall from trees, themselves born of acorns. By analogy, someone might suggest our broader telos as something similar – a kind of cyclical propagation as we hang and ripen from so-called trees and eventually fall to rest upon some unique spot of ground, there to grow roots of our own.

Nothing’s carved in stone

Falling to land and coming to rest as each of us does, each in place at some moment in time, what is our purpose not only there but then? And how do we assess our surroundings as capable of providing suitable conditions for root and growth? And, in whichever conditions we actually find ourselves placed, how do we know what we are or aren’t supposed to do next? How are we even brought to know – much less to ask – anything more specific than this cyclical continuance of reproduction and propagation before we die? I ask only because… well, only because I asked.

And, amidst all this, all around alongside us, as mentioned, are our neighbours… every other acorn, landed in place across time, the same as we are – a homogenous lineage of heterogeneity, all of us together, if not all at once: each as different, and unique, and persistent, and curious, and as full of intention as you and me. For every one of these, what is their source of telos?

Or maybe better to ask, who is their source?

Who is yours?

Click here to return to Pt. I. Efficiency

On Teleology: IV. Source?

Featured Image Credit (edited) by Juncala on Pixabay

Click here to read Part III. Purpose

On Teleology: IV. Source?

Lately – for those who haven’t been following along – I’ve been pondering teleology, using illustrations like students and missiles and acorns, and frames like Science and spirituality.

A missile, seeking its target’s latent heat across miles of airspace, flies at supersonic speed, following a process from launch to strike that takes place in seconds. Highly valued efficiency, nothing wasted: very Sciencey. If anything, that missile seems impatient, hurried, even hot-tempered. It definitely seems persistent.

But an acorn spends all summer growing on a branch, and the only thing in its life that takes place in seconds is the fall it makes 20–30 feet into the grass below. There it rests, to spend the next… what, century? gradually rooting to the spot, eventually to become the next oak tree. That seems really patient and enduring, almost unflappable and, somehow, just as persistent as the missile.

So here is a heat-seeking missile that crosses wide-open space in split-second time, and there is an acorn that endures in one precise spot for eons of time… depending how you value things, like space or time, each in its own way might seem very efficient, not a thing is wasted. And each in its own way definitely seems ready-made for purpose.

And even though a missile is built and programmed while an acorn is an extant living thing, if I fire the missile at a suitable target, it should do as expected and destroy the enemy – what it’s designed to do – just as, if I bury it in suitable ground, an acorn should do as expected and grow on its own – what it’s designed to do? evolved to do? …it should do what it does – or at the least, by any reasonable expectation, we can presume it has a fair chance of doing so.

Yet how does an acorn ‘know’ any suitable conditions if I’m the one who chooses where to bury it? Indeed, how does an acorn ‘know’ it can or cannot grow the way it’s supposed to, in any conditions whichever?

During all its time hanging from the branch of a tree, what does an acorn ‘learn’, as it were, about being an acorn and being an oak tree? By analogy, looking back to Part I, imagine a teacher who imparts lessons to students about the adults we envision them to become. From there, whichever adult role a student might come to fill, someone could reasonably suggest the broader or primary telos of students is to become adults who, likewise, take up the mantle of responsibility down the road to ‘build’ students anew… and on it goes, a cyclical telos of growing up: education and adulthood, reproduction and propagation, a kind of recycling source of teleology.

By the same turn, then, what has an acorn had impressed upon it about the right conditions for becoming a tree? In a manner of speaking, we might say every little acorn that falls from every mighty oak belongs to some larger community cycle, some wider-spread lineage, some… ? Well, I was about to say ‘master plan’ but let’s have a care: yes, I’ll grant, back in Part III I did mention ‘spirituality’, but surely ‘master plan’ cannot-slash-must never-slash-won’t ever designate Intelligent Design… not in the Scientific here-and-now of the 21st century.

Would folks feel better if I said ‘grand narrative’?

… or maybe I’m just barking up the wrong tree. Better not even to waste a breath on some “master plan,” some mighty Voice from Above, not when all it has to breathe is “Let slip the Dogs of War upon the innocent purity of Science.” I appreciate you, Science, being unable to prove ‘what is’ but only test ‘what isn’t’, and I’m convinced we can still be friends.

So, in closing, let’s throw Science a bone.

Remember… Science is man’s best friend!
(No kidding… “Darwin Forever” is actually a thing – check it out!) Image Credit: Mathilde

Click here to read Pt. V. Setting