group dynamics: March 2007 Archives

(via text message):

Steph: "Normal subgroups lend themselves readily to homomorphisms."

Smita: "Duh."

Kelly: "Right!"

Ila: "Hmmm..."

Dad: "Same bs here."

Christi: "Yikes, ruff wk?"

Siny thinks I didn’t reference her last time, but I did. The birthday girl had it right: no permission, no name - but one might still appear-by-implication in an account of some interaction! This time I only intended to stay an hour but then blogtalk happened. I became excited . . .

Sangria Grrl gave me the hardest time. “The blog feels private, like I’m reading your diary!” Nah – I am just sharing my mind (such as it is!) Nicole nailed the point: once I have written and “published” online then the information (the thinking) “is public.” Some of us had fun recalling the new tradition (we tried to invent) at Winter Solstice: various cuisines throughout the night, except “American came first and was so big there was no room for anyone else!” Gulp, we’ll definitely have to recalibrate for next time. :-)
(All the parties, by the way, are categorized (with some other things) as “group dynamics.”)

I got totally jazzed talking with Adam and attempted to blog right then and there. (Never did that before!) Sangria Grrl busted me, even to the point of confiscating my notes (she did return them, so now she is complicit, right?)! Later in the evening, I was double-teamed sandwiched between Halona and The-Guy-Who-Doesn’t-Trust-Me: “Do you think everybody has an accent?” Of course! But it is not the sound that matters (imho). The cool ness factor of people learning and speaking new languages is the process of making meaning - in fact, this is a very-darn-neat process even among monolinguals: how does anyone agree on what something means?

Adam told me about Tanzania, which is the only country in Africa that is united by a common tongue. “What you have to understand is that we have one national language which one can speak east to west and north to south.” Swahili is one of the most widespread African languages, but unlike other countries with large Swahili-speaking populations (Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Congo), all 120 tribes of Tanzania speak Swahili and therefore do not have to resort to a colonial language (i.e., English in Kenya & Uganda, French in Burundi and Congo) to communicate with each other. The “local-local tribes” also speak native Bantu languages. This singular fact makes Tanzania “peculiar,” according to Adam, because the common tongue “makes us more united – we are the only [African] country where everyone speaks one language.” Indeed, Adam attributed the presence of a unifying national language to the fact that Tanzania has never had a civil war.

Neat, huh? :-) The phenomena, and Adam’s pride in it, seems to support (or extend?) Benedict Anderson’s argument about the functional role of languages in Europe as a tool in the construction of nationalistic imagined communities. My more specific interest is in how (if, whether) current language policies and practices in the European Union will promote a shift away from nationalism (egoistic, xenophobic) to broader self-identifications and also if, when, and how language policies can be extended beyond the political borders of citizenship to the practical day-to-day livelihoods of transnational workers, displaced persons, and their families.

We are (almost) all here.

"I'm one of those who believes there is life in the universe." I met Hector (the Guero who tells his kids "You're half Mexican, half Russian, and 100% American), (who might enter politics - "after tenure"), celebrating Jose's prospectus defense last night. Jose cites Noam Chomsky (The Responsibility of Intellectuals) as a possible template for his own academic career, "After tenure, no one knew him!" This translates as pragmatism now, radical structuralism later.

Conversation ranged from education, neurolinguistic programming, and Rod Stewart (The Killing of Georgie) to the cosmos. "Our moon is leaving us. That's very bad news!" At "an inch-and-a-half a year", my own sense is this is not exactly the scale on which to make decisions in my own lifetime, but I understand the disappointment. Instead of going out with a supernova, Patrick Stewart tells us life on earth will wobble and totter out via untempered precession.

I argued that the fact that "nature is going to take care of extinction sooner or later" does not justify waiting until after tenure to start changing the maps. Who needs to wait while humanity flirts with ending it sooner?

"Let me bring it down to your level" (!), Hector said to me. From entropy (countered with James Blish' The Triumph of Time), we moved to neurolinguistic programming. "We have to be creative," says Hector, "in building a reality that doesn't exist" - yet, I add. :-) All three of us are educators (or wannabes, grin): no surprise, then, that teaching and training is our preferred tool. If making connections on the basis of perceived similarities is hard-wired into our genes, then the trick is to teach to find "the likes [adjective] that matter."

"Like (adj):
1. Possessing the same or almost the same characteristics; similar: on this and like occasions.
2. Alike: They are as like as two siblings.
3. Having equivalent value or quality. Usually used in negative sentences: There's nothing like a good night's sleep."

Rather than "likes" of appearance (e.g., ethnicity, gender) or homophonic "likes" (such as speaking the same language, having no accent), we could be attracted to similarities of intelligence or passion. This doesn't mean, we clarified, that everyone has to be "the same." Variation, even versions of hierarchy, is desirable. The point is, everyone has "a right to the earth." (Don't you agree that Hector has great soundbytes?!) Just because some have more and others have less does not mean those with less must suffer sucky lives.

We agreed that most of our students have about zero agency: "the state of being in action or exerting power; 'the agency of providence'; 'she has free agency.'" How, I ask, are they going to learn this map if we are not acting as models? Here's the bind: students are being trained "to be employees, not entrepreneurs" (Hector, again, referencing Rich Dad, Poor Dad), they - and we? - are being taught "how to be good slaves." Well (I'm still asking), what about us? Is that the only map we have? Shy of financial independence and multiple streams of income, no agency? Can we live within our means and act on new maps?

I am tired. My tone fails to capture the laughter with which we engaged each other. :-) There were a couple of fallacies of understanding mentioned in reference to the problem of knowing. If everything we say is, at best, a map of a certain territory of sensory experience, then none of us can actually KNOW what another person means - "the best we can get is, 'I think I know'" (you guessed it, that Guero again). (I like him! You can't tell, can you?)

Type 1 fallacy: Fooling ourselves into thinking our map is reality.
Type 2 fallacy: Just because a map is not reality does not mean the map is crap.

There was this whole metaphor about therapy and jukeboxes which I'm not even gonna get into, except to say I've got some pretty damn good tunes going on mine these days. :-)

Robin Marantz Henig, in an article, Darwin's God, written for the NYTimesMagazine, states: "The debate over why belief evolved is between byproduct theorists and adaptationists." (links added)

The larger conversation involves collective action: why do some groups organize while others do not? The specific situation is the problem of enticing an individual to contribute to a collective action when there is not an obvious self-interest:

"I might contribute to my group's effort because the group ties my contribution to provision of some private good that I want, such as participation in the Sierra Club's outdoor activities or, in the early days of unions, low-cost group-insurance benefits not available in the market. Such private goods can commonly be provided in the market, so that their usefulness may eventually be undercut. Indeed, firms that provide insurance benefits to their employees thereby undercut one of the appeals of union membership. The general decline of American unions in recent decades is partially the result of their success in resolving problems for workers in ways that do not require continuing union effort." (From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on The Problem of Free-Riders.)

What interests me is that science is presented bereft of belief. "Belief" is posed as an action directed only toward "God", or as capable of being satisfied or filled only with a system deemed "religious."

"The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics. It is a little like language acquisition, Paul Bloom says, with the essential difference that language is a biological adaptation and religion, in his view, is not. We are born with an innate facility for language but the specific language we learn depends on the environment in which we are raised. In much the same way, he says, we are born with an innate tendency for belief, but the specifics of what we grow up believing — whether there is one God or many, whether the soul goes to heaven or occupies another animal after death — are culturally shaped."

Bloom's maneuver is illustrated by relegating language to the realm of "biological adaptation" completely dismissing the role of language in belief of any kind.

"Belief," Henig writes a few paragraphs later, "...gains power in two ways: from the intensity with which people wish it to be true and from the confirmation it seems to get from the real world." These characteristics of "intensity" and "confirmation" are measurable only through language. Too bad she does not recognize that science also requires belief.

Her hero on the adaptationist side is Sloan Wilson: "a graduate student at Michigan State University in the 1970s, Darwinians were critical of group selection, the idea that human groups can function as single organisms the way beehives or anthills do. So he decided to become the man who rescued this discredited idea. “I thought, Wow, defending group selection — now, that would be big,” he recalled. It wasn’t until the 1990s, he said, that he realized that “religion offered an opportunity to show that group selection was right after all.”

Why can't group selection and belief in science go together? Isn't this the crux of the debate between science (with its divided disciplines of knowledge) and religion (with its disparate denominations)? The question that matters is not whether we believe in religion or science, but in the outcomes and effects that any belief system generates in human relations over time. This is a moral question: its purview is not restricted to the realm of religion.

Any technology seems unfathomable at first. This youtube clip revisits the advent of the book. The clip has garnered such fame it made the television news.

Sortof reminds me of the inspirational quote and illustrative chart emailed today by my good friend, Toad:

"No matter how different we all are from each other, we more or less ride on the same curve (at different speeds though). :)"

(If you want to see the rest of the cartoon, click the datetime stamp below: 8:42 PM)

Meanwhile, our Max Planck post-doc pal sends this reminder that some curves might be disjoint.