The largest ethnic group as percent of total population. (Via Wikipedia)

I’ve never been much of a fan of nationalism, or the nation-state. The idea seems to me based on imagined communities, and to invite xenophobia, exclusion, and racism. Most of all, it seems particularist (concerns itself with a small group of people) and I’m a universalist by nature (concerned with all people everywhere.)

However, a recent piece by Yoni Eshpar [Hebrew] allowed me to understand a universalist version of the nation-state ideal.

If I get this right, the idea is this: every person in the world should belong to a group of people called a “nation”; every such “nation” should live in a state in which they are able to participate (ideally, via democratic process); the states should exist to serve the “nations” that participate in it. So in the end, since every person is part of a “nation”, and every “nation” is served by a state in which it can participate, every person in the world has a part of the world to call home, where there is a state that serves and protects them.

This is a nice ideal – but it is woefully unrealistic and will never be achieved.

Let’s set aside the issue of border disputes – which are a serious issue for nation-states almost everywhere in the world.

The critical problem, I think, is that not all states serve their people. Many states actively oppress their people, on political if not ethnic grounds, even if they see themselves as nation-states and even if all of the population is considered to belong to the state’s “nation”.

So long as some states oppress their people, people will have a reason to go out into the world to live amongst other “nations”.

Insisting on the well-being of your own “nation” and saying everyone else should go and get their own state to help becomes an excuse to perpetuate the oppression of others, under the guise of a universal liberation ideology.

So long as there are people who have to run away from the government in their home country, nationalism cannot be truly, honestly universalist. It must always collapse into siege-mentality, particularism, and the accompanying xenophobia. Oppression of minorities is then just a matter of time.

Perhaps in an ideal world, each state would have one “nation”, and each “nation” one state. But we do not live in an ideal world, and it’s long past time to abandon ideologies which can only liberate the people of some other world.

Desmond Tutu writes a passionate call for American divestment in Israel. He gives me some food for thought on BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions), and on my role as an Israeli in the struggle for a just peace.

Justice requires action to stop subjugation of Palestinians

Desmond Tutu, TampaBay.com

A quarter-century ago I barnstormed around the United States encouraging Americans, particularly students, to press for divestment from South Africa. Today, regrettably, the time has come for similar action to force an end to Israel’s long-standing occupation of Palestinian territory and refusal to extend equal rights to Palestinian citizens who suffer from some 35 discriminatory laws.

I have reached this conclusion slowly and painfully. I am aware that many of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were so instrumental in the fight against South African apartheid are not yet ready to reckon with the apartheid nature of Israel and its current government. And I am enormously concerned that raising this issue will cause heartache to some in the Jewish community with whom I have worked closely and successfully for decades. But I cannot ignore the Palestinian suffering I have witnessed, nor the voices of those courageous Jews troubled by Israel’s discriminatory course.

 Continue reading on the Tampa Bay Times »

I’m not entirely sure what I think about the Palestinian BDS campaign.

On one level, I support it because it is a form of non-violent resistance (the Israeli claims that this is “financial terrorism” are absurd and preposterous – what do they not call “terrorism” at this point?)

At the same time, it hurts all Israelis to one degree or another, and that makes it hard for me to really feel enthusiastic about it.

As an Israeli, I need to worry about the internal processes, within Israeli society, that can lead to a equal and just resolution to the conflict.

If the rest of the world wants to pressure Israelis into changing course, that’s their own business, and nobody can tell them what to buy from whom. BDS is a fair and reasonable way to go about it, and as long as it’s clearly a boycott of the Israeli state and not “the Jews” I’m glad it’s now such a central part of the Palestinian struggle.

I find Tutu’s piece an excellent contribution to the debate. It is personal, passionate, and compassionate. You don’t have to agree with his position in order to appreciate his ability to communicate in that way.

He quotes the great Martin Luther King Jr.:

I recall well the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which he confesses to his “Christian and Jewish brothers” that he has been “gravely disappointed with the white moderate … who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom. …”

This strengthens my feeling on the place of Israelis in the struggle for peace. Some of us struggle because we want to see a different future for Israelis. Some because we want to see a different future for Palestinians. Often it is a combination of both.

Either way, it is legitimate for us to support Palestinian-initiated action we agree with. But it is not our place to tell Palestinians how to free themselves.

We can support them directly; we can support them indirectly by taking action within Israeli society independent of the Palestinians; if we disagree with their course of action, we can and should work against it. That much is ours to choose.

But we are not here to guide them to enlightenment. That mistake is made far too often by progressives, and a habit we have to kick.

Apparently the most popular of my old posts is one I wrote almost two years ago about university exams.

I’ve edited the post a little, and if you didn’t read it yet, you might want to check it out:

A Tirade Against Exams

[...]

So why are exams a bad idea when you want to check whether a bunch of science undergrads understood what you taught them? Well, one part of the problem should be obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of science:exams are not very good experiments. There is no way to control for interference of irrelevant, extraneous factors. When scientists conduct a study, in any field and with any methodology, they seek to control for irrelevant interferences. For example, when psychologists test hand-eye coordination, they’ll do something like only taking right-handed people with healthy hands and eyes, in order to make sure that the results aren’t skewed by irrelevant differences between individuals.

You can’t do anything like that in exams.

Continue reading »

I’ve also changed the blogs settings so that comments are now open on old posts, too (they used to close automatically after two months). Feel free to rekindle the discussion on the Tirade, or on any other old post.

After 115 years, it’s time for Zionism to retire

The national liberation movement’s time came and went. Now we have a state. Neither good citizenship nor misdeeds have anything to do with Zionism anymore.

[...]

Zionism’s way has been lost to us. That was inevitable, because it has completed its task. Once the State of Israel arose and became a national home nearly at the retirement age of the movement that engendered it, once it became established, strong and powerful, and brutal and impervious, its flag should have been folded, stored in the repositories of history as a souvenir, and Zionism should no longer have its name taken in vain. The old order of Zionism is over and the campaign over the character and appearance of the state should begin, as happens in every healthy state.

[...]

Read the whole thing on Ha’aretz.com »

( Original Hebrew » )

Human beings are obsessed with knowledge. We instinctively believe there are facts about the world which are true, which can be known, and which explain our experience of reality. But real knowledge – thoughts about reality which are true – is incredibly elusive. Human beings aren’t very good at dealing with this.

This post is quite a long and mainly philosophical one, and part of a thoght in progress.

I Intuitive knowledge

The earliest forms of knowledge, it’s safe to assume, were the result of intuitive mental “theory-building” combined with instinct. We experience things and intuitively create “theories” to explain them. When we experience something that clearly contradicts our theory so far, we either amend the theory to fit the new information, or (more often) ignore what we experienced and try to forget it as soon as we can.

We do all of this automatically, without any conscious decisions taking place.¹

This intuitive knowledge is generally very useful for dealing with things that don’t change too quickly, but it is extremely rigid and doesn’t easily adapt to new situations.

It’s also strongly influenced by other forms of knowledge, which I imagine developed later in human (pre-)history.

II Introspective knowledge

The next form of knowledge might have been the result of conscious introspection: you experience something new, and it clashes so terrifically with what you know about the world that you find yourself trying to consciously figure out how to explain it.

This gives you more flexibility: you can employ the human knack for metaphor (“this thing is kind of like that other thing”) and create thoughts that are more complex and abstract. Unlike intuitive knowledge, it involves our conscious thought and we can make conscious decisions about what to believe.

Unlike intuitive knowledge, introspective knowledge is free from the restrictions of direct experience. This enables us to reach better, more general explanations, but also means a lot of our “theories” can be completely wrong and still maintain a hold on us; the more abstract a theory, the more difficult it is to encounter direct evidence against it.

III Cultural knowledge

I imagine that Introspective knowledge gave rise to what I consider the most powerful form of knowledge in human history: cultural knowledge.

Cultural knowledge includes everything people “know” because it’s what everyone around them “knows”. One example is prejudice against homosexual activity – which became common in the West only a few centuries ago but many people seem to consider “natural”. Primitive religions are another good example, but there are many, many others.

Imagine you’re part of an ancient tribe. The oldest woman in the tribe, known and respected for her experience and wisdom in all practical things, tells you and your family “a very important secret”: there is a deity – a being with powers unlike your own – which controls the growing of the wheat that sustains the tribe.

Like people, sometimes the deity is happy, and sometimes it is angry. But when the sun is shining and the deity is happy, the tribe’s crops bloom; and when the weather is bad and the deity is angry, the wheat fails, and the weak ones starve.

Because you don’t have any better knowledge to work with, and because your life truly depends on understanding how your source of nourishment works, you probably believe this story.

What happens next is that you tell your children about this deity, and they tell their children more or less the same story, and very quickly, your whole community comes to “know” that this is how the world works. (As the Dothraki often tell a baffled Daenerys Targaryen in A Song of Ice and Fire, “it is known.”)

IV The power of conformity

Cultural knowledge arises from introspective thought and we gain it through conscious social experience, especially in our childhood, though we usually forget where it came from within a few years.

Although it spreads in a conscious way, passed from one person to another using language, it becomes anchored in far deeper unconcious processes.

If you refuse to accept the social group’s beliefs, you may find yourself quite alone. Most people will not be open to talking about such things when you refuse to see “the obvious truth”.

You may have a feeling that what you’ve been told is nonsense, but that doesn’t mean you have a better theory to offer spontaneously. The easy way out is to accept what everyone around you knows to be true, or if you don’t accept it, to keep quiet; this saves you and others the torment of being a skeptic amongst conformists.

Because of the immense power of cultural knowledge, I’m convinced this is the most common form of knowledge. It doesn’t require any effort from any individual, only the repetition of information, and conformity. This means almost every thing that we know is probably cultural knowledge; it might not all be quite as false as the belief about the wheat god, but it could potentially carry all kinds of falsities that we never notice or question because we’re busy with other things.

V Scientific knowledge

I think of intuitive, introspective, and cultural knowledge as the basic forms, but there are certainly others. One I’d especially like to consider: scientific knowledge.

In the terms I used above, scientific knowledge is a hybrid form. It mostly rejects intuitive knowledge; it is based on introspective knowledge, but makes use of the tool that gives cultural knowledge its power – social sharing of information.

Scientific knowledge is, to me, a form of cultural knowledge which embraces and encourages the skeptics. The magnitude of that innovation can’t be exaggerated: it may well be one of the biggest steps taken by humankind since the evolution of complex (syntactic) language.

VI The meaning of science

Doing science, being involved in the creation of scientific knowledge, means making the effort to introspectively consider and challenge all intuitive and cultural beliefs. But it also means to share your skeptic thoughts, in the effort to socially form a theory that is more useful than any other theory so far.

A lot of people think that scientific knowledge is even more like cultural knowledge: that what scientists think about their area of investigation is merely an opinion; that scientific knowledge is just dogma; that any experienced scientist in some field can tell you the truth about anything in that field.

People who think these things are mostly wrong.

While scientific communities are susceptible to dogma and orthodoxy, the scientific method and the scientific culture are brilliantly designed to encourage serious skepticism regarding established knowledge. As a result, scientific orthodoxies never last more than a few decades in fields where the scientific method is functional and research is active.

Individual scientists do have opinions, more than knowledge. But scientific opinion is based on relatively serious investigation of realtively well-defined issues – unlike everyday opinions, which are based on cultural knowledge and relate to vague intuitive questions about reality.

But scientists do not know reality, and discovering reality is not the goal of scientific theory. The goal is to provide a better explanation than any other explanation so far, which means that an even better explanation should be just around the corner (that is, probably less than 20 years away.)

Because of this, it’s safe to assume that this means we’re slowly getting closer to true knowledge of reality, but there’s no reason to believe we’ll ever reach it.

A scientifically literate individual informed about the current state of some field can tell you about the most realistic understanding available for that field’s set of phenomena. But if that individual is intellectually honest, they will not call this “the truth”. Just a close approximation which is close to a good match for the information available so far.

VII Convergence and confusion

In the past century or two, humanity is experiencing a very odd transformation. We are, as always, obsessed with knowledge; but we have developed scientific knowledge enough that some results – gravity, atoms and molecules, bacteria and viruses, et cetera – are understood so well that we can really make use of them in our day-to-day life. At the very least, we can use technology which is based on them, and we do, every day.

What this leads to is the integration of scientific knowledge into our cultural knowledge. When we culturally-know something, we think of it as “true reality” – even if the original source is skeptical, provisionary, scientific.

Once a belief becomes cultural knowledge, it doesn’t change nearly as easily as actual scientific knowledge.

Unlike intuitive and cultural knowledge, scientific knowledge is not created to help us deal with the world around us; science is about understanding for the sake of understanding.

So we end up with cultural knowledge that we have a hard time shaking off, but also isn’t very useful in our day-to-day lives. Even worse, it was never meant to be “the truth”, and it’s probably a decade old – or five, or ten² – and we intuitively think of it as “the truth” because nobody in our day-to-day interactions dares question it. Trying to find out what current thoery says doesn’t help, because current theory is less mature and useful, and still needs a lot of testing before it can be relied on.

It’s important to understand that this applies to every single human being. It also applies to all scientists, for everything outside of the fields they’ve seriously studied.

Sometimes, cultural biases and orthodoxy can even creep in on a scientist’s home turf and “contaminate” research – but the scientific method will clean it up within a few years if that research becomes well-known.

VIII Practical questions

What should we do about all of this? I really don’t know. It’s not my field, and I doubt there’s a definitive answer – or a close approximation – in any field, anyway. (Philosophy is even worse than science at reaching definitive answers.)

What I personally try to do is simply to identify my beliefs about the world, and try to identify where they come from and how important it is to me to hang on to them.

I try to keep in mind that “knowledge” is an illusion; that the most reliable kind of “knowledge” is the intuitive kind, which is, however, also the least accurate and the least flexible.

I try to keep in mind that anything I think I “know” could be a cultural bias. I try to remember that this applies to scientists, too, and that even the best theory is just a reliable approximation so far, and could change deeply within my lifetime.

Most of all, I try to recognize my biases, and often have to decide whether I can live with them or have to reconsider what I “know”.

What I try to never do is defend a bias simply because I happen to hold it. If I realize I don’t know why I think some thought, that thought is suspicious and I keep it to myself until I’ve looked into it again more seriously.

I can’t say any of this is fun or easy – or even that I go through with it as much as I’d like to – but considering my (introspective) beliefs about knowledge, I’d (intuitively) be uncomfortable with doing it any other way.

If you’ve made it so far in this unusually long post, maybe you’d like to share some of your thoughts/bliefs/”knowledge”. Did I miss any important form of knowledge? Is there any better way to deal with the weaknesses of the forms I discussed? Is there any point you’d like me to say more about?

References

The subject of this piece is one I’ve enjoyed thinking about for years, and I’m not sure where I stole my ideas from. A few sources that were probably influential, in no particular order, are:

• Daniel Greenberg, Worlds in Creation. Sudbury Valley School Press
• Paul Graham, What Can’t be Said. Essay on paulgraham.com
• Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge University Press
• David W. Lightfoot’s introduction in Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures. Mouton De Gruyter
• James A. Michener, The Source: A Novel. Random House (see my review on this blog)

Footnotes

1. What exactly “conscious” and “decision” are would be the topic for another long post, or maybe a whole new blog.
2. For example, I heard that what is considered “normal body temperature” is the result of findings from one small study over a hundred years ago, and not considered accurate anymore.

Family puts kids in charge for a month

A German author and his wife put themselves to the biggest test of their lives last year by handing over the family power to their two children for a month. The biggest challenge? Managing the budget.

[...]

“For one month we parents unquestioningly took orders from our children. We gave them absolute control of the family budget.”

The result was a long humiliation – asking for pocket money, begging to stay up longer in the evenings, and accepting a “No” without question.

“Even if they grow up with loving, generous parents, children have to do whatever they’re told, day in, day out,” wrote Metzger, explaining the experiment.

“Of course, we’re the big ones, they’re the little ones. It’s our job to protect and feed them, and to show them how things work. But very often we do all that with words and with an attitude that contradicts all the rules of respectful co-habiting.”

Metzger claims the psychological experiment did not come out of any radical pedagogical beliefs – “Me and Helga are not hippies” – but out of a spontaneous decision to allow his son Jonny to train him in table-tennis.

“Afterwards, he gave me a big hug and told me, ‘Dad, no adult has ever talked to me as politely as you did then. That felt really good.’ ”

[...]

(Read the full piece on The Local)

I’m glad to see adults outside alternative education taking note of how condescending and authoritarian adults’ treatment of children is. It does, however, chalk up the children’s inferior planning skills to their age, which isn’t really fair (besides being ageism.)

I bet these kids would be much better at planning if they were allowed to plan more. Since their parents “aren’t hippies” – which apparently means they go to traditional schools – they’ve spent the better part of the day every day for years in an environment in which a clock tells them what to do when. How on earth are they supposed to learn how to plan anything?

Not to mention budget management. In a Sudbury school, the Metzger children would have had the right to participate in school budget decisions – which are boring, so they probably wouldn’t, but if they did they’d know more about budgets – and they would be able to consult with friends amongst the students and staff who have more experience with money.

I guess the thing that disturbs me most about this is that even when a couple is willing to give their children serious responsibility, they do it in this temporary, schizophrenic way. Children actually can deal with real responsibility and control over their life, but that doesn’t mean the children should swap roles with the parents. There’s quite a lot of room for treating each other equally and respectfully within a parent-children relationship, without either side going all authoritarian on the other.

It has come to my attention that the blog’s design is messed up when viewing on some versions of Internet Explorer.

I’ll fix this as soon as I can, but I highly recommend using a different browser.

Google Chrome, Firefox, or Safari are all great choices, available for free, and work faster and better than Internet Explorer while also keeping you safer from threats to your computer’s security.

by Rocpoc, on Flickr

Sudbury and traditional schooling have something in common: they agree that young people leaving school should enter the world well-prepared for a successful life. For Sudbury schools too, this includes professional life – and that’s a good thing.

When talking about Sudbury schools, one point seems to get people a little worked up, at least in Europe. It’s not unusual for Sudburians to talk about students preparing themselves for a satisfying and successful life, including getting a good job. In progressive circles in Europe, a lot of people frown on this; “getting a good job” shouldn’t be so important to us, right?

I think this is all basically a misunderstanding. People don’t like to hear about school preparing children for the job market because traditional schools say they do that – but we don’t mean the same thing.

Traditional education, with its timetables, classes, hierarchy and discipline, is built upon brilliant methods for preparing young people for work in a 19th-century factory or army. Such schools and their proponents say they prepare students for work in the diverse and creative modern Western economy. But many people who come out of that system can spend 60 hours a week at a job they don’t care for, to make money for consumer products they don’t need, which they expect to enjoy in the little free time they have left – and consider themselves successful.

When Sudburians talk about being successful, we have something else in mind. We don’t mean “serve the system well”; we mean “figure out what’s important to you, and make it happen.”

Sudbury schools are about giving students the time and space to find their place in the world and to learn how to be effective in the world around them.

Without a doubt, making a decent living is part of what most young people today will want to do in order to achieve their goals and live the life they want to live. Some people might find a way through life that they’re satisfied with and in which they don’t need anything resembling a normal job. But most people leaving school this year – any school – will be working for money pretty soon.

Sudbury schools should not, and do not, especially encourage students to prepare for that path, or any other one. It’s up to each individual to decide what path to take, and because we are part of the world we live in, most of us will want to try to make money, amongst other things.

It has to be up to each individual to figure out what’s important, and to find their own way to be effective adults. To me, and to many, this means not selling yourself completely for a salary. It means finding a way of making a living that is satisfying, or at least painless, that leaves an amount of free time you’re happy with, and provides an income you’re happy with.

As a result, a lot of us will find ways to make good money doing stuff we really want to do – or at least to make it in a way that requires us to sacrifice as little as possible in terms of time and personality – while maintaining the standard of living we want. A lot of us will want to have enough free time left over for creativity, a social life, a hobby, activism, or some combination of those, unless our work gives us enough of them already.

Yes, we make these decisions within the paradigm of a deeply flawed economic system. But we’ve only got the one world as it is now, and nobody is qualified to impose their theories, expectations, or ideals on free individuals just because they’re school students. Let them prepare themselves for the world as we know it – and if they want to, for changing it.

Traditional schooling and Sudbury schooling have one central idea in common: the result of schooling should be that young people are prepared for life as adults.

The similarities, of course, more or less end there.

One difference I find very curious.

While anyone involved in education of any sort will admit that there are certain skills which every young adult should probably have – setting aside the question of who gets to identify what those are, and how, on which Sudbury schools differ radically from traditional eudcation.

It is also generally accepted that not every student will acquire all of these important skills perfectly. The curious thing is this: traditional schooling seems to be based on the belief that “at least we have to try”.¹

So on the one hand, the argument is that it’s critical that young people know things like English and math, and hence the state and its schools have to make every effort to ensure that young people learn them. On the other hand, the system and its supporters can’t escape the simple fact that they’re not going to succeed completely – but the system is still justified, because what matters is the attempt.

In some situations, that’s a fair argument. But let us be clear here: this is not some trivial pass-time being justified. It’s an enormous state mechanism that requires huge numbers of public servants, bucketloads of public money, and severe limitations on individual rights for every single human currently between the ages of (more or less) 6 and 18.

But it’s okay – at least they’re trying to help them out!

What matters is not what happens to the learner, not even what happens to society, but only that the state has “done its best” to equip the next generation with skills and knowledge. How much more could you possibly ignore young people? What are they, iPods?

Footnotes

1. This is a perspective I heard in a lively panel discussion I was part of last night; the event was basis’12, a very cool conference of school students, and the speaker in question – whom I hope I didn’t misunderstand – is a high school principal and an active functionary in state and non-government organizations representing teachers.

"Stack Exchange is that tiny asterisk in the middle."

I’ve always liked Stack Exchange. They have beautiful websites with an excellent community-edited system for asking questions and getting answers that puts the focus on the best contributions.

So far, there’s never been a Stack Exchange site I could really participate in – until earlier today, I discovered the new Linguistics – Stack Exchange, “a free, community driven Q&A for professional linguists and others with an interest in linguistic research and theory”. Check it out!