3 Things I Learned in Grad School ~ March 11 2017

!Three revolutionary things! Thought exercises, Gatekeepers, and Prefigurative politics

​Thought Exercises
For several years, I have had two books follow me around the world (not intelligently – they are fat and heavy books, not good for travelling with): Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett’s Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. I honestly believe that if I was either smart enough to understand these books in full I could run the world. They are remarkable but I feel like I like I need to do a bottle of Adderall with mushrooms to make them make sense. They are dense and not easy but they do give you shortcuts to develop complexity. And, I am not good at creativity or complexity so these are especially hard for me.
 
I realized that this semester my classes have been teaching me thought exercises as well – ones I hope I will remember to use in the future when confronting a challenging problem. The first two I wrote about earlier and involve developing a typology for looking at messy concepts along a spectrum and doing a compare/contrast analysis for looking at the similarities and differences of seemingly like things.The latest exercise was given to me by my advisor to teach me how to create a theme out of messy ideas that don’t fit any logical narrative. Here’s the equation: topic(s)->hybrid theme-> theme. When doing this you want to sketch out three binaries too: intellectual/ emotional, fact/feeling, and tangible/intangible. From here, the endgoal is to answer this question: “When someone hears about my [presentation/paper/whatever] on my topic, what I want them to understand is:”
 
For example, my topic is Rare Species. I listed out all the things in accordance to the binaries and here is what I came up with:
 
Rare Species are distinct, and usually local, genetic singularities that impact global biodiversity in not completely known ways and as a society we don’t fully understand why or how to value them.
 
This may not seem bananas to anyone else but I have been working on rare species for over a decade and this is the best explanation of the problem I have ever developed. I would not have created this if not for the topic/theme exercise.
  
Gatekeepers
I have a class that is one of the oddest I’ve ever been involved in. Every Monday morning I meet with about 8 geniuses in wildlife and social science and a professor who was an advisor to the directors of big government agencies and the bloody president. He’s bananas and encourages us to think creatively and challenges our sense of authority. Paradoxically, he is authority and, being at the professional level he was at, was the authority for a lot science decisions in the country. He is aware of this and in his roles as editors of journals and board members of prestigious organizations, he explains that he is a Gatekeeper. The keeper of the gate…of? Well, power. This term is one used in social science research as well and I approached it in my own research when I was not allowed to progress until a Gatekeeper gave his blessing. So what is a Gatekeeper? According to this professor, a Gatekeeper does three things in regards to decisions of power, resources, etc:
1. Control which way something goes
2. Control the speed of the flow of something
3. Control promotion, laurels, awards, etc.
 
An interesting part of being a Gatekeeper is that the flow of resources has to be less than the demand. If a lot of people want something and they have to go through one person, that person has a lot of power and is a big Gatekeeper What does this do? This 1)legitimizes the structure, and it 2) creates a lack of alternative routes.
 
Lastly, my professor asked why do we have Gatekeepers?
1. Keep quality high
2. Establishes normalcy of science (in opposition to revolutionary science – in Kuhnian terms)
3. Concentrates power to a fewer people (this creates order)
4. Influences bias (it can tell you where biases are, where they aren’t or are acceptable to be, and where they shouldn’t be)
 
Prefigurative politics
Defined as an effort to live out the vision of a better world while seeking to change it, Prefigurative Politics is a completely new term to me but not at all a new idea. Morally and individually, it makes sense in a “practice what you preach” sort of way. Strategically and socially, it is far more nuanced. While struggling with concepts of egalitarian and peaceful structures both Lenin and Che justified a lot interim chaos and inequity. The conflict they experienced was whether the means would justify the ends and whether the lived hypocrisy could be understood by the broad brush of history. Social scientist Carl Boggs defined the term and explored it in his paper “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Worker’s Control.” The paper is heavy and full of powerful yet seemingly antiquated ideas of social structure. For example, I’m currently finishing both Harari’s new book Homo Deus and Rifkin’s Zero Marginal Cost Society and the integration of the economic social structure with 1970’s-era socialism makes no sense according to these authors. They agree with Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants that the society that adapts best is the one that can handle the newest, and inevitable, technology.
 
In a paper looking at the politics of food of all things, we came across this term. Applied to a vegetarian, prefigurative politics is often high on the list of why the vegetarian became a vegetarian. How can they advocate for animal rights and still eat meat? How can they advocate for a healthy environment and still eat meat? They nailed it on the head for me at least (I wrote a whole long personal narrative but it is boring – basically, as an environmentalist I cannot reconcile behaviors of consumer capitalism, religion, or industrial meat eating with what I want for global society). But this is the example of the individual. The next step up from the individual is community and there are several examples including Food Not Bombs offering free meals, the Occupy movement setting up representative democracy, and Black Panthers providing armed security in Oakland in the 70s. The power of prefigurative politics, as I see it, is in modeling a future, in denying our risk aversion, or taking a test-run of what we want. I think it was the anarchists who advocated this. I remember reading Bakhunin in my undergrad and he championed the moral imperative – and, indeed, the lack of any other option – of this.
 
The only challenge I would offer – and I have not read up on the intricacies at all in regards to prefigurative politics – is that there is an ‘emergence’ problem when dealing with feedback systems and large social structures. The end is greater than the sum of the parts and it is hard to scale up without hitting a tipping point where previous actions that worked don’t work anymore. I don’t know if prefigurative politics is necessary in creating a new social structure. You might be able to be a consumer capitalist to walk your way into developing a technologically-based global socialism. You might be able to maintain gender inequity while working to elect a woman or a trans person. Or, related to my work, maybe the answer to saving endangered species is giving them over to agribusiness, mass producing them, and eating them like we do the approximately 1.5 billion cows on the planet.