The Neverending Story of Rational Reductionism

Remember the first time you went away from home without your family?  I'd done scout weekends and that sort of thing, but the first extended time away was when I was heading to Air Cadet Basic Training in Trenton for two weeks in the summer of 1984.  Just before I left I saw The Neverending Story.  As a creative kid who was neck deep in Dungeons & Dragons and art, and whose dad kept telling him to stop wasting his time and take real courses that led somewhere, it resonated.

It's been thirty-five years since fifteen year old me saw that film and an awful lot has happened in the meantime.  Having just watched it again, I'm stunned by how strange a film it is.  What I took as a high fantasy romp when I was a teen is actually a bizarrely meta (physical) narrative that would make a suicidally depressed Hamlet snort with amusement.  The film was directed by famed German director Wolfgang Petersen, and boy does das kopfkino it produces lay on the schadenfreude thick.

The film's message, that your imagination can save you from the banality of existence, suggests that you need something more than rationality to justify your reason for being.  Or, back to Hamlet again, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."  I find a great deal of comfort in recognizing the complexity of existence, though many people seem terrified of it and go to great lengths to simplify it.

The film's thesis is that imagination allows us to withstand the pointlessness of existence and offers hope.  If you turn yourself off from the impossible it prevents you from holding despair at bay.  The scene in the film where Atreyu's horse gives up hope and sinks into the mud of a swamp (of Sadness no less) is one of the most powerful in the film.

The quest that drives the story forward is the destruction of Fantasia, an alternate reality that exists as an expression of human creativity and imagination.  It's being destroyed because people are losing their hopes and dreams, the very things that cause Fantasia to exist.


***

Viewing this film produced one of those strange lateral connections for me that science minded people put down to coincidence but artists thrive on.  I've just finished reading Michael Crichton's Travels, an autobiographical book by the popular author where he reflects on his travels, both physical and spiritual.  As a hardening atheist (thanks to reading Dawkins' The God Delusion) I found myself suppressing eye rolls as Crichton attempts new-age spiritualism again and again in search of something tangible beyond the science he started with as a Harvard trained medical doctor.  But Crichton's canny speech at the end of the book offers an approach to the unknowable that I couldn't help but agree with.

It's worth reading Travels just go get to to the closing speech that he never gave.  It deconstructs a number of scientific prejudices that hard rationalists cling to even though they aren't particularly logical, such as surgeries carried out to prevent a possibility of illness with no clear scientific benefit, or the long history of fake experimental results that are accepted because they support a current world view rather than the truth of things.  Hard rationalism is as susceptible to fantastic thinking as any other human endeavour.  Crichton's final lines highlight the space he has made for human understanding beyond the limitations of rational inquiry:

"...we need the insights of the mystic every bit as much as we need the insights of the scientist. Mankind is diminished when either is missing. Carl Jung said: The nature of the psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding."

Our rational understanding of things allows us to do many relatively mundane things in the real world, but our existence reaches deeper than that, and we ignore what we are capable of if we limit ourselves to the realms of what our remarkable but limited intellects can comprehend.  Put another way, there is understanding to be found in our being as well as in our thinking.

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching had this covered 2500 years ago.  We've
forgotten a lot of that wisdom in our information age.

In addition to critiquing science's hypocrisy, Crichton also bounces back 2500 years to Lao Tzu (who I have a weakness for) and describes how the founder of Taoism understood how our rational minds and our irrational existence must work together to bring us into a fuller understanding of our place in the universe.  It's powerful stuff, and a reminder that there is no simple (ie: only mind-based) answers to the big questions.  It takes all that we are to even begin to attempt answer them.  In embracing our existential intelligence we also come to a more balanced understanding of our place in the world.

***

With Crichton's angle on how we frame the impossible in my mind, I was slapped in the face by The Neverending Story's strident attack on reductive, 'feet on the ground' rationality in the face of the threat of non-existence.  The brief scene between Bastion and his father is stark and cruel, but I think it points to something obvious.  It's never mentioned how Bastion's mother dies, but the father's unwillingness to acknowledge it in any way suggests a shameful death, and we all know which kind of death is the most shameful and must not be spoken of.

"When a visibly sad Bastian tells his father that he's had yet another dream about his mom, he responds that he understands, but quickly adds that they have to move on, emphasizing that they can't let her passing stop them from getting things done. And just when you think he'll soften up and help Bastian process his pain, Bastian's father lays into his son for doodling in his notebook during math class."

- Things about The NeverEnding Story you only notice as an adult

Considering the metaphysical message of this film and that strange dialogue between father and son, I was left hanging on the edge of tears.  My Mum was upstairs the last time I saw this film.  She's been dead six years this time around, but that sense of loss is always surprisingly quick to surface.  Her life as an artist was frequently derailed and undervalued, and her end was, I suspect, similar to Bastion's mom's.  The Neverending Story suddenly took on a resonance that it didn't have before.

The evil that is destroying the world in The Neverending Story is The Nothing.  It is quite literally non-existence.  Bastion's father's brusque 'move on and keep your feet on the ground' advice suggests (quite obviously I think) that his mother commited suicide.  The entire narrative in Neverending Story is based around Bastion trying to summon his imagination to battle this existential disaster, something that Lao Tzu and Michael Crichton would both agree can't be done with reason alone.  The film's only weakness is it's reductive imagination is the answer philosophy.  Imagination is vital in bringing you to a place beyond the rational, but populating it with make believe isn't the goal once you get there.  Imagination is what allows us to see beyond the world around us and plumb those existential mysteries.

***

From Kermit the Frog pondering Rainbow Connections to Alice looking down rabbit holes, there is a lot of art that seeks to explore the limitations of rational inquiry and how it fails to answer the big questions.  Creativity is hard enough without tying your hands up with rational absolutism, so I can appreciate why many artists lean more heavily on the hidden intelligence found in existentialism for their inspiration; there is power in our being that cannot be easily explained.  

Our ability to reach down into our selves and gain inspiration and insight makes us powerful in a way that thinking never can.  For the Bastions of Neverending Story, travelling Crichtons and other artists out there, it's something we should never let the hard rationalists of science ever try and trivialize away as flights of fancy.  There are truths in our being that can't be found through rational inquiry.

Imagination by itself is a fine thing, but when it's used as a means of opening the door to existential comprehension it really comes into its own.  Crichton describes how measurement always misses the quiddity of a thing, it's inherently reductive to say anything can be completely understood through its measurements.  A wholistic, existential understanding, along with specific, rational comprehension, is the most complete way a human being can relate and understand the world.  Crichton's closing lines encouraging us not to ignore and belittle the irrational - something that The Neverending Story also argues, though it gets lost in imagination for imagaination's sake.

Valuing both rational and irrational human comprehension offers us a more balanced and effective way forward, and gets us into the vicinity of answering the big questions.  The trick is not to get carried away with imagination or rationalism and end up treating either one as the answer to everything.  As in all things, balance offers more insight.





Other notes:

Atreyu: If you don't tell me, and the Nothing keeps coming, you will die too, both of you! 
Morla, the Ancient One: Die? Now that, at least, would be *something*.

Urgl: I like that, the patient telling the doctor it's all right. It has to hurt if it's to heal.


I'm not the only one picking up on the weird vibe this film is giving:
http://www.dorkly.com/post/75705/reasons-the-neverending-story-is-a-psychological-horror-show
http://nerdbastards.com/2017/07/25/7-facts-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-neverending-story/
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/10/06/neverending-story-dad-bastian_n_8248450.html

From a 2018/the sky is falling/we're-all-illiterate-because-of-technology point of view, the book keeper's scorn when talking to Bastion, the pre-teen main character way back in 1983 (over two decades before smartphones) is interesting:

Koreander: The video arcade is down the street. Here we just sell small rectangular objects. They're called books. They require a little effort on your part, and make no bee-bee-bee-bee-beeps. On your way please.

... and reminds me of the Socrates quote and that we're most prejudiced with our own children.  It's also a timely reminder that the tech of our time doesn't define us any more than video arcades did in the '80s.  I grew up in them and it didn't make me illiterate.

The Way: https://terebess.hu/english/tao/chan.html

Shopclass as Soulcraft: IT Idiocy, Management Speak & Skills Abstraction

A brilliant little book by Matt Crawford

I'm currently reading the very meaty and painfully direct "Shop Class as Soulcraft" by Matt Crawford. In the book he laments idiocy in professionals and the vagaries of management language in modern business where there is no objective means of determining an employee's competency. Both of these arguments come together beautifully in the relatively recent field of information technology.

I've been working in IT in both private and public sectors for going on twenty five years now. I've worked in small offices, and on massive installs, in engineering shops, manufacturing concerns, universities, schools and in offices. With a certain breadth of experience comes a pretty good bullshit detector. Crawford's ideas around professional idiocy and manager-speak appear to have, unfortunately, come together in a perfect storm of hidden incompetence in information technology.  There are few places more managed by people who have no technical background in it than there are in information technology.

THE IDIOT

Crawford talks about Robert Persig (the author of Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance - another great read)'s idiot mechanic, who is more intent on appearances and action than submitting himself to the truths the bike is trying to tell him and what that means to his public role as a professional technician. In the book, the kid ends up butchering Persig's bike while taking no time to actually try and diagnose what the problem is; he's all hands and no brain. Crawford describes the idiot:

"Persig's mechanic is, in the original sense of the word, an idiot. Indeed, he exemplifies the truth about idiocy, which is that it is at once an ethical and a cognitive failure. The Greek idios means "private," and an idiotes means a private person, as opposed to a person in their public role - for example, that of motorcycle mechanic. Persig's mechanic is idiotic because he fails to grasp his public role, which entails, or should, a relation of active concern to others, and to the machine. He is not involved. It is not his problem. Because he is an idiot... At bottom, the idiot is a solipsist." (p98)

That lack of involvement should spark a memory with any teacher reading this. The student who refuses, at all costs, regardless of the differentiation you throw at it, to do anything whatsoever, is an idiot in the technical sense of the word.

From the IT angle, I see people like Persig's idiot mechanic every day. You know the type, they know just enough to be dangerous (and have tools on hand). They tend to make grand assumptions, usually based on a non-existent knowledge base, and then act on them to make the situation worse. They talk loudly and use a lot of word whispers ("you know?", "right?", "know what I mean?", etc) to make sure you agree with them.  It's a handy way to externally monitor what's going on when you have no idea yourself and dovetails nicely with the idea of management speak presented later.

The disengaged idiot fits especially well with information technology because it's a dark art to the vast majority of people. You can talk out of your ass to 99% of the population and they have no idea what you're saying, freeing you to say pretty much anything you want. The bigger the words the better, and because most people are users they're more than happy to sit in on the tech talk and participate at the same level as the disengaged idiot.

Many moons ago, right out of high school I found myself working in a Canadian Tire shop. One day one of the mechanics burned himself on a Fuego. He proceeded to flip out and run up a bill of unneeded repairs to the order of a thousand dollars; a good example of the moral failure of the idiot and one I see all the time in IT, especially when dealing with older customers to whom the dark art seems positively Satanic.

MANAGEMENT SPEAK

Crawford also does a brilliant dissection of the 'peculiarly chancy and fluid' life of the corporate manager (substitute administrator or educational consultant for equal value here). In a world with no objective means of assessing competence the manager lives in a purgatory of abstraction using vague language "...staking out a position on all sides of a situation, so you always have plausible deniability of a failure." Crawford goes to great lengths to point out that this isn't done maliciously but rather as a means of psychic protection for the people trapped in this morass. At any point an arbitrary decision can make you redundant (shown brilliantly in Up In The Air - many of the people in the interviews are real people who have actually been downsized) regardless of your own abilities or actions.

In a world of meaningless management language actual technical competency is devalued with every spoken word, a central theme in Crawford's book. Objective competency is ignored in favour of MBA language that allows the initiate of globalized business speak to survive regardless of what decisions they might have made. In fact, the very making of decisions is discouraged. In places where reality matters your opinion is not as important as you've been taught to think it is.  I see this with students all the time.  They attempt poorly planned, grandiose engineering projects and then are frustrated by the simplest physical problems.  They aren't used to the absolutism of reality.   As Crawford so cuttingly notes: "This stance toward 'established reality,' which can only be described as psychedelic, is best not indulged around a table saw."

One of the many reasons I'm looking forward to teaching tech this fall is because there is no doubt of the student's focus, ability and honesty of effort when reality is judging them. If you made it, ignored lessons, examples and process, and it didn't work no amount of 'but you're still fantastic' student success talk will mitigate a failure staring you in the face. The fantasy of 'everyone's a hidden genius' so popular in education today is best not indulged when reality (and the objective assessment of it) is judging the results. Having no safety net in your learning isn't necessarily a bad thing (it focuses the mind) unless you're trying to peddle a new ed-theory on zero failure.

Management speak based on the the surreal, 'psychedelic', entirely provisional world of business became popular along with globalization, itself founded on many hidden assumptions. Grown out of the initial industrially driven abstractions of Taylorism in the early 20th Century, modern business is so far from the witness of truth (like the stock market it has spawned) that it has more in common with Alice in Wonderland than it does with a technical manual.  The best you can hope for are some vague metaphors to describe the massive fiction of modern commerce.

The IT Idiot Management Babbling: Making An Objective Technical Skill Abstract

Information technology is a new field of study. It began and grew in a well established, Taylorist, globalized, MBA driven, entirely fictional world. The language around IT maintenance is often clouded in mysticism, grown from the same vague, plausibly deniable language of business and finance. In education we feed that fire with talk of digital natives, people who magically have technical skills because of their birth date. In classrooms we ignore this vital Twenty-First Century literacy in favour of magical thinking about divine digital birthrights.  Education's adherence to the vagaries of business speak serves our students poorly.

I'm not saying every student needs to be a qualified information technology technician, but it is safe to say that every student graduating at the moment should be familiar enough with digital technology that they don't get white washed by an idiot's babbling, or convinced by the parochial and intentionally misleading language surrounding information technology. Auto shop is often taught this way - as a means of delivering a basic familiarity to students so they aren't bamboozled by an idiot. IT should adopt the same position as this older, wiser technology.

IT is a measurable skill. I take great pleasure in offering up the A+ certification practice test to the resident experts in senior computer engineering. When the best of them barely get it half right it sets the stage for systemic, meaningful learning of a technical skill they've always been told they magically gained by being born in the nineties.

People born in the 1900s weren't magically imbued with the ability to fix the new automobiles just coming out. What we do in failing to teach digital literacy is absurd as it feeds misinformation and empowers the idiot. It's bad enough when we purposefully remove objective standards from academic classes (and I'm not talking about standardized tests - they are about as far from objective standards as you can get, just another fiction), but to actively discourage objective standards in a technical field? That's just downright dangerous and expensive!

Dancing in the Datasphere

From the Prezi brainstorming graphical interface: http://prezi.com/mlmks5pq65dz/dancing-in-the-datasphere/

If we live in an increasingly data-rich, but resource poor world, what do we need to do as teachers to give our students a fighting chance?

There is no reason to assume that Eric Schmidt is blowing smoke.  If we really are generating this much information, and now have a means of saving, reviewing, organizing, and learning from it, we need to radically re-think how we educate our children.  Knowledge itself is now plentiful and accessible, teachers are no longer the font of knowledge.

Traditional classrooms work on a data-drip of information, out of the teacher's mouth.  Many of these teachers are willfully ignorant of the radical revolutions going on in their disciplines as information is no longer confined to the limits of human specialists.  Interdisciplinary studies are prompting radical changes in how we understand just about everything.  Teaching your twenty year out of date university experience out of a ten year out of date text book makes you about as pertinent as a dodo.  Many of our current teaching habits assume nothing is changing, but it is, radically, quickly, meaningfully, everywhere but in the classroom.

When I was a kid I was an astronomy nut.  I memorized the nine planets, the meaningful moons, I knew distances, sizes; the universe was a (relatively) small solar system with stars beyond.  We currently know of over 600 planets, and discover an average of a dozen a week, every week.  We are discovering solar systems so bizarre in nature that they beggar belief; but none of that is in the text book, and most teachers won't bother with it because accessing the datasphere is too difficult with limited technology access in school (fixable with this).

We are discovering these things with drastically improved sensing technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution.  We record this data in abundance using storage technology that has been accelerated by the information revolution.  We often fail to access it for years after the fact because we have not yet caught up with our ability to observe and record the universe around us.  Fortunately we're now developing systems that sort their own data, and make connections without human oversight - the data itself is beginning to self organize.  The future will be smarter than we can imagine as individuals.

This acceleration is happening in all fields of human endeavor.  We are teasing free nuances in archaeology, history, and science.  We understand in greater detail how the masters painted five centuries ago, we have seen to the edge of reality and felt the remnants of the explosive expansion that started everything.  What we haven't done is evolved education to prepare our students for this deluge of data.  We still mete out information because we define ourselves as holders of knowledge.  We're holding a cup of water as the dam breaks around us.

We drip feed students information in class and then complain that they are unfocused, disinterested.  We then agonize over how to make our lessons more engaging.  We wring our hands over outright lies and insinuations instead of letting the datasphere show the truth; we cater to myth, habit and tradition of paper based learning.

In the meantime a steady stream of data overwhelms our students from social networks that dwarf in size any their parents or grandparents had.  We belittle their circumstance by demeaning their means of communication, and overvaluing our traditional modes of contact.  Because they don't 'pick up a phone', they don't demonstrate meaningful relationships like people of a certain age do (oddly similar to what the phone-people's parents said about them when they couldn't be bothered to go and visit people face to face any more).  Kids nowadays, their social networks are empty things devoid of real meaning.

Worst of all, we don't teach them how to manage the avalanche of data that threatens to bury them; then we criticize them for not managing it well.  Many teachers manage it by ignoring it entirely

We spoon feed them vetted data in tiny amounts because we think that is credible, safe and real, but that isn't the world they are going to graduate into.  Being able to manage multiple, often conflicting data, organize information out of the noise and critically analyze material is far more relevant than memorizing the right answers to the same questions we've been asking for years.

Until we take our responsibility to prepare our students for the 21st Century seriously, we will continue to think that slowing them down, unplugging them and ignoring the datasphere that continues to grow around us at a prodigious rate is not only the easier (cheaper) thing to do, but it is the right thing to do too.

What we aren't doing is making them familiar with their likely future circumstances, and we do it because it's easier to ignore a revolution than recognize it, even if it's happening all around us.