Is Progress Worth the Retrogress?

Transhumanism is a movement which offers progress for all, but inevitable will leave a significant number of people in the dust. The abbreviation of H+ is enough to show that in a transhumanist society where some individuals have something extra, there will be those who have something less. A fundamental focus of the transhumanist movement should be how those who will be disadvantaged either by choice (luddites) or by circumstance (marginalized people) should be “handled”. A society where some need to be handled or given extra attention does not have equality and a shift to such a society would set the world’s attempt at equality back significantly. The question then is whether it is worth it for the good of society and individuals benefiting to make the switch anyway given the possible health of individuals and the environment. In addition the intellectual and technological gratification society would receive as a result of the profound progress and change would be profound.

            There is hardly any question that there are amazing benefits to adopting certain transhumanist ideals into society in the form of gene modification and robotics. Robots can be programmed to perform difficult or dangerous jobs that currently human error or incapability limits from occurring or proves fatal. If robotic technology was more advanced the gushing wellhead during the BP oil spill may have been able to be fixed more quickly. As it was the remotely operated underwater vehicles failed and the oil gushed for three months, allowing 4.9 million barrels of crude oil to spill into the gulf, killing countless creatures and causing  millions of dollars in damage and loss of profit. Already robotic technology is being used to supplement human action in risky and precise brain and other surgeries, where the unreliability of physical human movement can have terrible consequences. Similarly, the possibilities avoiding illness and chronic disease through genetic modification could do wonders for individuals who no longer need to suffer personally or through a sick family member while also developing the entire human genome to be free of such biological limitations. These possibilities are somewhat unbelievable, what would a society benefiting so much from non-human workers and free from the terrible burden of unexplainable or incurable disease mean for the humans living in it. With the elimination of chronic disease and the potential genetic modification methods, it is possible that humans would approach the elimination of death altogether. This is especially possible when robotic or computer technology became such that a person’s personality, intelligence, and genome could be uploaded onto a storage container allowing it to truly last forever.

The question becomes would this be a human life? If one cannot die, does one’s life lose value or meaning? Or once the restriction of death has been lifted, are countless opportunities for further development and discovery simply opened up? It seems improbable that an individual living a life with no end in sight is likely to spend every day and moment productively working for the future. It seems more likely that an individual would look at the vast empty space of time ahead of them and put off work until the next day, metaphorically sleep a little longer (assuming the necessity of sleep has been eliminated). In the area of transhumanist society wherein some are superior to others it is assumed that lazy humans not taking advantage of the opportunities given to them because of the hard work of generations before them would be scorned and inferior. What can a transhumanist society do with those who do not have energy to work and develop if the threat of starvation and death is taken away? Another type of inferior individual in such a society would be those unwilling to change their genetics to be superior whether for religious, moral, or fear-based reasons. The progressive ideal of the importance of civil liberty often goes with other progressive ideals shared by transhumanists such as the elevating of the human race as a whole by raising individuals beyond their potential. Therefore the preserving of civil liberties is often a priority, or at least is portrayed as important. In reality it is likely eventually those in charge will not even pretend to make civil liberties universal. By that time perhaps the division between those who have embraced and/or are fully experiencing transhumanist society and those who are not will be so vast that there will be a separate set of rules, expectations, and responsibilities for each. The undeveloped souls may need extra help and the developed may have extra responsibilities. The unanswered question remains is the good of all humanity worth the inequality that society will be? And beyond that, how long will it take for people to forget about the importance of equality all together?

Occupano L’Italiano-Americano Mondo Globale!

Italy 2011, Apparently Free of Cultural Imperialism

A year ago seated at a tiny expertly designed kitchen table in Parma, Italy, where I found myself in a very broad conversation about America and the world. My host sister’s father was asking me some difficult-to-answer questions. I chose to answer either flatteringly (“America loves Italy, its culture, its food, its fashion, its beautiful sights!”) or mildly (“Which countries do America hate? None!”) In response to my return of the same questions, he rattled off many countries Italy hated (Russia, Mexico, China, France, the entire Middle East) and immediately and sincerely answered “America!” when asked which countries Italy loved. I looked around the table noticing the father’s Harley Davidson shirt and my host sister’s Abercrombie sweater, though my host mother’s appearance was purely Italian (Dolce & Gabbana). As the first thing she had her daughter translate to me was “I will not speak English to her, she can speak Italian to me”, her all Italian attire fit her general attitude on the subject. Also fitting was the fact that both father and daughter eagerly spoke English to me. As someone who would never say “I love America!” with the genuine fervor that this family could, it got me thinking about how well the United States’ pop culture and identity has permeated into Italy and the global culture.

So how did the United States manage to assert its own culture and way of life as an ideal into the world culture, and in the process expand its consumer market across the globe? As expected these two realities are closely tied. Noam Chomsky helps explain an aspect of this and covers a lot of ground of the near-recent US history of the economy in his opinion piece on Al Jazeera. The US achieved and has maintained the biggest economy in the world since the 1920s, which it procured by part using imperialism to obtain cheap material and labor to begin a production based economy with high export rates. In the process it also achieved cultural imperialism and secured an enthusiastic world market for the products America manufactures. The US economy originally was able to continue to grow at such a profound rate despite the depression which shocked the 1930s due to the government’s manipulation of fiscal policy. This economic growth ushered the country into a position which allowed it to begin spreading all that was America across the world, from McDonalds to Disney to the Hollywood movie industry in general. The international fame in brand and entertainment plus the high immigration rate held by the US further perpetuated American culture and the products it presents as both modern and quality. It must be kept in mind that although the American market produces amazing and advanced products such as the airplane and the Internet, just because a culture is dominant it does not mean it is because it is better. In fact, one must often be wary of any dominant culture, ideal, or belief. Being number one often goes hand and hand with manipulative or exploitive forces meaning the dominant force is probably not in power due to its inherent superior qualities.

In the 1970s the US economy began to decline and there was a fear that Japan’s economy would surpass the United States’ in growth and size. This sparked a fear in Americans and economic practices began to shift. There was a massive deregulation of financial institutions and this slowly concentrated the wealth to those in charge of these institutions. Money and politics were now linked very tightly and the economy changed from one secure in high production to one built on the unstable and unregulated union between Wall Street and Washington. This shift led to an environment and economy so beyond the point of return to stability and normalcy that it resulted in the financial crash of 2008. The Occupy Wall Street protest was an interesting development and response in the second half of 2011, as a visual reminder to the citizens of the US who was responsible for their misfortunes as a result of the crash. One of the amazing things about Occupy Wall Street is the speed at which other Occupy movements popped up around the entire world, from big city demonstrations in London and Rome, to smaller demonstrations at universities like UC Davis and even cities as small as Parma. This is a completely different type of cultural imperialism, in this case inspired by the backlash in response to corruptness of the very institutions that originally made a living off of similar cultural imperialism. Although each Occupy Movement has its own reasons for coming about as well as its own focus, it cannot be ignored that the idea was born in the city which is the epitome of American culture, on the street that is the center of America’s economic glory and decline. I only wonder what my host family thought as they drove their Italian made Fiat past Parma’s small occupy movement, dressed as they were in American garb possibly even drinking Starbucks Italian roast coffee. 

North Beach, San Francisco LITTLE ITALY

Teaching to the Test, the Masses, and the Individual

Colored chalk dust, a thirty foot may poll covered in colorful ribbons, pentatonic flutes, refrigerators filled with jars of watercolor paints, and children without technology in their classroom. From Kindergarten until 8^th grade I attended a Waldorf-inspired school in California, and this was my life. Over the years we painted, drew, wrote, gardened, sang, knitted, played, and learned in a variety of different ways. We danced around a May Pole every spring, we had enough flute, recorder, choral, and violin concerts to last anyone a life time, and younger grades had a wonderful coming of age Winter Spiral (Kitania is walking to get her little light, all the stars are watching her by day, and by night. Now she has her little light, and her face is shining bright, carefully she’ll guard it all through the winter’s night.) and that was from memory. Memory, especially memorizing verses, songs, stories, and plain old facts was highly encouraged. We learned to read in second grade, had two years of Kindergarten (I am old for my grade), and switched from instrument to instrument depended on one’s age and focus. These various techniques were designed by Rudolf Steiner in the early 1900s as an attempt to fine-tune education to a child’s development, some would argue in an inefficient or misdirected way of teaching children. Steiner argues that although a child may have the ability to learn a new way of thinking, they may not yet have the maturity level ready to tackle it yet. Online education is profoundly efficient as it gets readings, tests, slides, videos, lectures, and grades to many people quickly, without the added cost of teachers, materials, and facilities.

In classic Waldorf schooling, one has the same teacher from grade one to eight, allowing each student to form a very close, trusting, and lasting relationship with the teacher. This teacher sees each student grow up from childhood to graduation as young men and women, and each student is able to grow as he or she did naturally with little push or pull from that teacher. This close relationship is lost in many education systems, but is especially lost in an online education where the teacher has little interaction and absolutely no physical contact with his or her students. The respect and trust I cultivated for my teachers I brought with me to my high school, an almost hilariously academic and rigorous  public magnet school in San Francisco. The teachers, students, and classes were very different, the sense of mutual respect and trust between student and teacher that I was used to was completely lost to me here and I had a lot of trouble with that. I did find a few teachers I felt comfortable with, but they were few and far between.

My respect and focus on teachers I think is what makes it difficult for me to completely accept and wish to follow the pedagogy of Paulo Freire. His book Pedagogy of the Oppressed discusses issues with the traditional and long practiced style of “banking” education. Continuing the current practices and attitudes of the oppressing class upon the oppressed create a new class of oppressors. The basis of banking education survives on the idea that teachers are the source of knowledge, and must fill the empty vessel that is every student with this knowledge. It assumes students have nothing to bring to the classroom, and that the teacher doesn’t learn anything from the process. It also makes for a very stagnant classroom set up, consisting of the teacher lecturing at the front with dutiful students writing all that is said down, no room for questioning or discussion. In the context of an oppressed class, questioning is seen purely as challenging authority and therefore a threat to the social status quo. I personally have a lot of trouble with the fact that the US education system today, although not entirely a banking system, still has a trend of the educated getting more educated which perpetuates the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Even though I appreciate Freier’s conclusions for their attempt to eradication class division and disrupt the oppressive status quo, I can’t get behind all his conclusions. Another aspect of his pedagogy, is that the classic model of teacher lecturing/students listening had to be upended and that teachers and students should be in a constant discussion, with room for questions and challenges from any student for the teacher. What goes with that is a labeling of a lecture style set up as sustaining any oppressive status quo that may be affecting. This is what stops me from completely agreeing with Freier on the role of a teacher, I feel like there can be something beneficial about just listening to a teacher and hearing everything they know about a subject, lecture style. But I think this is an example of my Waldorf schooling coming out, where lectures, stories, and performances were a big aspect of how we learned things. It therefore cultivated in us an instinct to give respect to whoever is the teacher in the situation. So I tend to have focus on the lecture portion of any given class, whether this is because I believe I learn better by ear (rather than by visuals, or reading, etc) or because I have this deep rooted inclination to give my full attention to anyone at the head of a classroom.

The classroom set up practiced by so many does not fit in with the pedagogy practiced by “free” schools whatsoever. Schools like the Brooklyn Free School have a completely free curriculum, where each student can use his or her democratic vote to decide where, when, what, and with whom they want to study. This turns lecture style teaching on its head, with no room to force lectures on students and no traditional classroom set up. Every day is different, anyone can call anything to the school’s attention, and everything is up for debate. A big aspect of Freier is his emphasis on debate and discussion, things that are practiced and encouraged at the Brooklyn Free School. The truth is, not all educations are the same. Many people don’t need an education fine-tuned to their individual needs, but if one gets a chance, different education techniques can be amazing. For the entire system to keep creating individuals ready for college or work, however, a stable and consistent system must be in place, and this system could soon become online only classrooms, with its cost and time efficiency. As seen in NPR’s piece about Coursera, it is difficult to argue there is anything bad about opportunities to take classes from top universities online for free. A balance must be struck up, of student to teacher, of specialized to standardized teaching, and most importantly between the maintenance of the status quo and progress. 

Gender Bender, A Wobbly Spectrum

"Is it a boy or a girl?" K.F. circa 1996

           The limitations of the two genders division is a game we all enter as soon as we are born. Anatomically we are all either male or female, but everything else about an individual exists on a continuum where we all have our own specific coordinates. What we feel like, who we are attracted to, how we are supposed to act, and many more gender-centric behaviors and expression have been molded and prescribed by society and the “norm” it dictates. Men are strong, aggressive, ambitious, active and big. Women are nurturing, thoughtful, empathetic, passive and small. Even if our parents don’t impose these stereotypes on us, society does with an immense force as soon as we are labeled “girl” or “boy”.

            The evolution of gender studies has made a transition from the school of thought called essentialism to that of social constructionism.  Essentialism encompasses the idea that for any entity (such as gender), there are sets of characteristics or an overall “essence” fundamental to its identity and function.  These characteristics could be as abstract as a person’s intrinsic role or goal in life, or as superficial as facial hair. Yes, many women want to have children and yes, many men have facial hair, yet is this what makes us a man or a woman? Social constructionism is the idea that there is nothing intrinsically male or female inside of each of us, and that those differences are a result of social and cultural history and practice, which have been going on for thousands of years. Our ancient cavemen and cavewomen ancestors acted a certain way to survive based on their separate biology and set a precedent, which traps us still today.  Men used their physical strength to provide for their women who had holed herself up in a cave in order to create a safe and healthy environment to have babies, an endeavor which an average cavewoman wouldn’t survive. The pattern of men working and women staying at home to focus on child rearing has hardly changed at all since the times of cavemen until the last fifty years or so.

Statistically we live in amazing time some deem The End of Men, where in the United States women actually hold a majority of the jobs. With the percentage of women to men in college fast approaching sixty percent, the statistical marvel is only set to continue. The job market steadily shifts away from physical strength and stamina centric jobs where men excel above women, to cognitive and communication centered jobs which women are just as well equipped for. Beyond being equally equipped, many men will need to actually evolve away from a reliance on their bodies to make a living to the exercising of their minds. In this recession, three-fourths of the eight million jobs lost by Americans were lost by men, many in the domains of physical strength focused jobs like construction and manufacturing. It’s not easy to be a man out of work who now depends on his wife or girlfriend as the primary breadwinner, many new male support groups have appeared to help unemployed men come to terms with this role reversal in their families. The personal pride women gain which comes with raising their formerly marginalized gender creates its own momentum, motivating women more and more.

Another school of thought is an independence from gender at all and instead an individual’s personal and specific place on the gender spectrum. This spectrum disregards the limitation of deeming yourself or someone else as male or female and instead allows room for the complicated identity, expression, and role that each of us has. Imagine for a second not being anatomically on the outside how you feel on the inside, and the struggle of everyday changing your identity to fit in with what society and people in your life expect you to look and act like. Most people wake up every morning comfortable with their body and their identity, and for many years people who didn’t have that luxury lacked resources also. Now there are organizations such as http://www.genderspectrum.org/, which educates about and reaches out to transgender adults and youth. Most people haven’t had to think about or fight with the social constructs that surround us because those constructs have suited them. Historically there have been people living outside of gender norms across the globe, yet many Western traditions have been behind the times and still are. As soon as we all realize what a trap gender and gender norms are, the sooner we can be free to be whoever we each are. The End of Gender touches upon what more and more parents are attempting to do by raising their children in a gender-neutral environment. This doesn’t always mean not disclosing the anatomical sex of the baby, like the approach Storm’s parents Kathy Witterick and David Stocker have taken, with considerable backlash. All they want is to let him or her decide exactly how he or she wants to be, free of expectation from society.  

“The end” is too definitive and limiting for this blog post, we may be at the end of classic gender roles for men, but more importantly it just may be the beginning of the end of gender roles in general. 

Living, Loving, and Learning in the Digital Age

           The Internet is an awe-inspiring invention, a tool to connect socially and intellectually and a forum by which the entire world has an opportunity to work together to further advance the human race. Most reasonable people would agree with that statement, yet most people young and old have a sense of conflict about where humankind is going, guided by this technology. It may be a loss of tradition, a change of focus, or more sinister opportunities provided by the Internet, but present also is the classic mentality of the old to be distrustful of the  new-fangled life-changing contraptions the kids today have. I can see both sides of the argument. Socially, many of us put less work into being less personal with online correspondence, yet many who would not have the chance to communicate normally with the world now have the opportunity. Intellectually, we skim articles and our attention spans have consequently shortened, yet the vast amount of information available to the world helps spread education, equality, and entertainment. So what does it mean for we who have never lived without the technology that is now impossible to escape and can we form meaningful relationships while taking advantage of the wealth of information available to us?

           Those who lament the loss of some activity or trait that makes us more “human” such as reading a physical book, writing an actual letter, or communicating face-to-face must realize that like humans themselves, the definition of “human” is free to evolve. As told by the BBC Prehistoric Life series of articles, three million years ago, the closest human ancestor, known as a hominid, first began to get enough nutrition from meat to actually develop the size of their brains. Those who therefore worry about modern developments in technology such as the inevitable computer chip addition to the brain making us “less human” must remember the original humans are barely recognizable as humans and therefore not a viable “pure” model to compare modern humans to, modern humans being much more advanced intellectually, socially, mechanically, and in many more significant ways. Humans have more trouble evolving to accept the many more people we come in contact with and must remember and interact with every day. From an evolutionary standpoint, our ancestors interacted personally and frequently with a small number of people in their villages, most of whom they were related to. Nowadays because of dense cities we live in as well as modern media, we are expected to know about, interact with, and think about hundreds more people than we are evolved to remember. The number of people we are actually able to know and keep track of has been coined as "Dunbar's Number" based on the research of Oxford Professor of evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar who has determined that 150 close relationships is all the average person can keep meaningful track of, and this number for a community comes from the societal traditions of our ancestors. Whether it is celebrities we know much about but who don’t know us, acquaintances or strangers we see and interact with on impersonal levels, or the hundreds of Facebook friends we communicate with in an abstract and new way, we are not perfectly evolved for these modern human relationships.

          I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. As a social being I like to see what is going on with my friends and family in the form of messages, pictures posted, and status updates. At a certain point however I get overwhelmed by the amount of collected data about my friends and I, not to mention the number of friends I have collected myself. I fantasize about deleting my profile and communicating with whom I want to with email, texts, phone calls, and the dear old US Postal Service, yet something always brings me back to the ease of social interaction that Facebook provides. The most recent time Facebook lured me back was when I turned nineteen this past Thursday and found myself ambushed by wall posts, pictures, and messages wishing me a happy birthday and hoping I do my best in the Big Apple. Being away from home in a place where most people don’t know my name, let alone my birthday, this attention on Facebook was profoundly comforting. Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan, authors of Your iBrain: How Technology Changes the Way We Think  would likely argue that this comforting attention I got from the Internet medium of Facebook was feeding my ego and self-worth, an argument I would not necessarily dispute. A common characterization of my generation or “Generation Y” is that we are self-absorbed, crave attention, live off of praise, and cannot take criticism. Part of my conflict about Facebook has to do with what I am gaining from it and what I am losing because of it. If I am gaining a sense of social acceptance from the internet in a world that is becoming less and less personal and more and more plugged into a different reality, aren’t I only gaining back a sliver of what has been lost? Why can’t I be satisfied with the sense of self I cultivate based on what I’ve read, what I care about, and what my values are? Since in the end the only person you can really trust and rely on is you, shouldn’t we all focus on growing ourselves and exercising our minds, instead of worrying about other people’s opinions and judgments of us? The only answer I have is that the digital age and the different reality it brings must be introduced into all of our lives differently, either embraced or tolerated, because it is here and we all have the choice to make of it what we will.

          What can be gained on a personal and a global scale from technology and the Internet should be appreciated as the result of many people’s hard work and design. It is a useful tool to keep in touch socially and delve deeply into many relevant articles from reasonable sources. For those with the appropriate expertise, it can be used to propel the human race into yet another stage of technological advances which may allow us to solve many of the global scale problems whose solutions may come to define this point in time, such as climate change, cancer, and global poverty. Since the Internet makes the world such a smaller place where people can communicate and collaborate so easily, such global scale problems are made apparent and also are made solvable.