I've often thought myself that 'it all has to collapse into chaos' first
before we can try again to get it right-er. And then I think of all the
pain ... and I get a touch of Hari Seldon complex (Asimov's _Foundation_
hero) and wonder if we can't find another way ... not perhaps through
social engineering in which I don't believe anymore (the nature of social
systems obviates longterm predictable change and so responsible large-scale
intervention; think globally, but act only locally -- and with humility)
... but perhaps at least by understanding what is going wrong and where to
look for alternatives... today so many people seem to sense in a bodily way
that things are out of control from the human scale, and yet not exactly
why or how ... critiques are not answers, but they shine some light onto
the dark path along the edge of the cliff.
Of course if we did collapse, and regress to smaller scale social
organization, then we would have great opportunities to find other ways of
re-assembling less monolithic styles of wholes, getting looser networks
with less self-created need for large-scale uniformity ... it's just an
awfully terrible way to have to do it. My generation grew up in the era of
"duck and cover" and fallout shelters, waiting even as children for The
Bomb to drop and the end of civilization as anybody knows it ... our
incredible luck in avoiding that supreme technological stupidity may have
given me an unrealistic view of our chances of avoiding the other disasters
we keep inviting to lunch.
A change of human consciousness? Is that, then, what we need to survive? In
the 60s I briefly thought that way myself, but now I have to translate the
poetry of "mind/consciousness" into something I can better fit into my
current ways of making sense ... a change of habitus? of cultural
expectations? of values and priorities in life? And all these changes could
only result, my theories say, from people leading different kinds of lives,
from childhood, in different sorts of institutional cultures ... placing
the chicken firmly in line ahead of the egg! :) Of course I would LIKE to
see some very radical re-orderings of the values and practices of my own
culture ... I detest the testosterone "wars" for domination and control
(over crime, over drugs, over sexuality, over sex-objects, over
competitors, even over evil, over stupidity, over ignorance ...) and their
resource-mediation (commonly known as 'greed') ... I suppose I can see a
certain mis-gendered origin to the impulse to bring under unified control
ever larger institutions and pyramids of communities ... but this
"macromania" must be heavily over-determined as well.
It may indeed not be 'management' as such that is the problem, but (a) how
much we seek to manage, and how short a leash we want to hold, as well as
(b) the depersonalization that authoritarian strategies of scale impose. To
manage one's own activity ... to manage, but not 'micro-manage' , one's
sense of self, emotional states, identity ... seems an innocent folly,
sometimes a useful hybris. To co-manage with others in a personalized group
the ways of collaboration and cooperative joint activity ... this seems a
very human part of what our species has evolved to do fairly well, whether
it gets us into other sorts of trouble or not. But to attempt to control
and manipulate the behavior of others for ends and as part of projects that
have not arisen as part of their own agendas and participation in a
pesonalized group, with reciprocities and care for one another, and
mutuality of interest ... that already shows the basic pathology that gives
'management' a bad name, whether in families or classrooms. That we then
build institutions that serve necessary functions (schools, corporations,
public agencies ...) and which are predicated on manipulative,
depersonalizing 'management', compounding the sin (I rarely use the word,
but it fits here) by aggrandizement of scale to impose the goals and means
of socially distant actors on vast numbers of thereby even more
depersonalized 'units', winding up in a situation in which no one can act
on the scale necessary to adjust the interdependence of large-scale
institutions ... in which we are all cogs in a machine built over so long a
time that it has achieved so vast a scale that we cannot be free within it,
nor be free of it. The machine that was supposed to help us help one
another has become our auto-tyrant, and our life-support.
The machine was built according to the wrong principles. Not just built
under the direction of people who were more interested in their own
advantage than in how well the machine worked for all of us, but built
according to principles (and in no small part out of selective preservation
of accidents) that have turned out the way they have. No one could have
known. No one did know. Even if their intentions were ill, they did not
know what they were doing.
So what do we do now? JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
<http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
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