[Xmca-l] Vygotsky simply

[Annalisa Aguilar]

Hello Xmcars and Venerable Others,

I've been eating my share of popcorn on the list as of late. I have a few different sharings, but the more important one is my answer to "How to explain Vygotsky simply to non-academics?" My paraphrase, of course.

I usually tell people that one of my heroes is Vygotsky who was a Russian psychologist during the Russian revolution and who proposed a radical theory that our minds are created by the society that we keep, the culture(s) we negotiate, the language(s) we speak, the tools we use, and the history/(-ies) we inherit.

Then if I haven't lost anyone, I might say: If we understand those dynamics well, we can each decide for ourselves what kind of mind we each want to have. Still here? Then I say, If we study the geniuses we can understand how they became so, if we study those with cognitive-disability we can understand how they became so, if we study sociopaths and psychopaths we can understand how they became so. Conequently, with these understandings then we can make informed choices to create the kind of minds we want to encourage, using evidence-based measures we have discovered from our inquiries.

What do you think?

To the larger more amorphous questions pertaining to healthy discourses on creaky old listservs:

I ask myself sometimes if I am listing toward behaviorism, only to say I hope that is not the case, but I feel inclined (a different kind of listing, I suppose), to remind my friends and acquaintances of XMCA that we are each a biological entity habituated by a total and whole environment, for good or bad, it is what it is.

We are each a leaky ship that must be repaired while we sail to our destinations.

But at the same time we are each vast libraries of experiences that have value to every one of us.

It is a wonder that as social beings, our diversity is the very special ingredient that has allowed us, as a whole species, to survive, for each of us cannot be and do all to, and in, all circumstances, but instead we are cognitively distributed and "wired" to work together, whereby the sum is more than the parts together.

There is always going to be injustice, and we must always be committed to struggle to bend that arc toward justice, just because. It is the only way.

However, to learn is not only to fill a void of beginningless ignorance that we are born with, and not only to understand what to learn, how to learn, but also how to unlearn what no longer serves us. It is a constant chess game of infinite combinations that can be harder for some to keep all the moves straight among the vast diversity of cognitive loads.

I am not at all being apologetic about racists, narcissists, or other inexperienced socially-unaware thinkers, but to remind that diversity has to include the bad and the ugly, which includes the racists and narcissists, and other inexperienced socially-unaware thinkers.

Let me please qualify: it is not to say that the racists, narcissists are not a social blight or do not author harm to others, but my appeal is instead to be committed to democratic processes that dictate we are each important but of equal standing, no matter our differences. Those differences must include the pathological ones. We (must) deal with them as they come, not sooner and not later, but as they come.

I find as a collective-mind, if that is possible in a sum of individual minds, if that is what the Internet has become for us, our unfortunate habit of collective-mind is to try to address pathologies before the pathologies come, when it is too soon, or far later after they arrive, when it is too late. Timing is of the most import when it comes to healing pathologies in a democratic process.

What has happened instead of a commitment to democratic processes, which poll repeatedly to the hoi polloi "How is everyone doing?" "How do we feel about XYZ?"; an isolationist, might I say elitist, tradition has evolved to ban individuals for being different, in the way criminals are isolated for committing crimes. Difference is vilified. Let me say it is not only *being* different, let me also include individuals who are caught speechifying in a way not acceptable to some, public or private. But we are all of the human family and also a member of the family of this earth, shared with other creatures, a spaceship or an ark depending upon your own theories of genesis or futuristic fantasies.

Where does this isolationist tendency NOT happen? It happens everywhere not just on listservs.

In my country we have the first amendment, and in some academic institutions we still have academic freedom. These are sacred. We should always have the freedom to speak our minds and be respected, but also to be able to take the heat for saying the unsayable. It is the cost of freedom, I suppose.

Yet I also recognize the trauma that has evolved in a variety of particular cultural contexts that have created certain kinds of minds as a consequence. These are minds shaped by those three blackguards: fear, uncertainty and doubt. I suffer this kind of trauma, of not being taken seriously, of being second-guessed, instead of my words being considered rooted to anything having integrity and authored by no one else but me. "No really, I say what I mean, and I mean what I say, because I said it."

But in my time on earth, I have also learned that everyone has suffered this kind of trauma in one way or another. I can't wait for Godot to come and provide me the answers to all my "Why me..?" questions to get out from under the darn muddy FUD. It means I must have the courage to push past my fear and to take responsibility for the way I choose to heal from my particular trauma, and to call it out to myself when I see it, as I see it. I must understand myself first before I can understand anyone else.

Which leads me to consider what it means to be free, trauma or no: Freedom is self-acceptance, but the conundrum of this, which seems to be of a peculiar design, is that I only can enjoy my freedom to the degree I provide freedom to others, regardless if they are like me, or if they like me.

Kindest regards,

Annalisa














-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20201130/5830763a/attachment.html