COGITO!

Now that the “family values” wing in California has proposed a ballot initiative (Proposition Eight) for a constitutional amendment to prevent families consisting of gay couples, I thought this would be a good time to examine the alleged religious underpinnings of their anti-gay stance. What follows is an attempt to apply the tools of reason and modern biblical scholarship to the question of the Bible and homosexuality. I have no illusions that everyone who supports Prop. 8 will find this persuasive; one cannot be reasoned out of a position that one was not reasoned into in the first place. But some of the more thoughtful supporters might, I hope, reconsider after reading this.

If you are someone who has committed to live by Judeo-Christian holy writ, then it is mandatory that you know what the Bible says. More than that, you have the obligation to understand the historical and cultural context of what you read, lest you mistake the expediencies of an ancient time and place and state of mind for the transcendent values for which the Bible is justly renowned.

An objective reader will also understand that the scriptures do not speak with a consistent voice, nor do the component books always agree with each other or even within themselves. This is why a conscientious reader of scripture must strive to understand not only the words, but the larger thematic thrust of the scriptures. There are several implicit and explicit ethical and moral threads that wind their way through the text. Taken together, they constitute an imperative for justice and concord by which the believer regards the improvement of the human condition as an act of worship.

If you are not someone who lives their life by the Bible, then what follows will at best be an academic exercise. But I invite you to read what follows if only to get a glimpse into the legal mind of ancient Judaism.

Homosexuality in the Scriptures:

There is remarkably little said about this subject in the Bible. There are two verses in the Pauline epistles, and the Old Testament, upon which the New Testament passages rely.

The Old Testament and Leviticus 18

The first thing that should be mentioned is that homosexuality in toto is not prohibited in the Old Testament. Lesbianism is mentioned nowhere and is not specifically prohibited anywhere. If the people of the Old Testament were anything like people of every other time and place, lesbianism would have been practiced by some percentage of the women. But nowhere does the Old Testament say anything against it (or for it, for that matter).

The key section to unlocking the Old Testament’s attitude toward homosexuality is in Leviticus 18 (Leviticus 20 also repeats these items, but what applies to 18 is also true of 20 for purposes of this discussion).

Who is the audience for Leviticus 18? This chapter is part of a series of laws that were addressed specifically to those Israelites (verse 2, “Say to the people of Israel, I am the LORD your God.) living in their new promised land of Canaan, although verse 26 expands the scope of the chapter to cover all inhabitants of Canaan, Israelite and otherwise.

The reason for the commandments given in this chapter, are laid out in the closing verses (RSV):

In other words, the land itself was holy and was susceptible to defilement. It responded to defilement by ejecting the inhabitants who defiled it. This is a very important point. The verses also specify that this was why the previous inhabitants had been removed as the Israelites arrived. The laws found in this chapter are intended to prevent desecrating this particular piece of ground, the land of Canaan.

Sex and the Mosaic Law

This main feature of this chapter is a long list of forbidden sexual or marital unions that Israelites may not engage in. This is because they are with close relatives or in-laws, with the exception of verse 20, which prohibits sexual relations with “your neighbor’s wife,” i.e., adultery. At the end of this long list comes another shorter set of prohibitions (vs. 21-23) against male homosexuality, sacrifice of children to Molech, and beastiality.

There are a few basic concerns that are consistently behind Old Testament attitudes regarding sex.

1. Procreation. In ancient times, with its high infant mortality rates and generally short lifespans the ability to grow your population was the ability to survive. Barrenness literally meant the end of your family. Children literally were the future.

2. Concord within the family unit. Since it was common for extended families to live in close proximity, sexual activity that crossed the internal boundaries could threaten that concord and rupture the clan. Many commentators on Leviticus 18 believe that this was one of the main motivations for the prohibitions in this chapter.

3. The loss of “seed”. The Mosaic law was unusual from a modern perspective because it included ritual purity laws designed to propagate certain beliefs among the people. One of the strongest was to enforce the symbolism of life triumphant over death or loss of “life force.” Any male who spilled “seed,” intentionally or not, became impure and had to ritually wash himself, as the loss of seed was seen as the loss of “life.” Likewise the menstrual blood of women was seen as a similar loss of life, which is why menstruating women were impure.

Bear in mind that “impurity” did not carry the same stigma as “sin.” Impurity was ritually removed, but sin, in addition to expiatory ritual, demanded repentance on the part of the sinner.

This explains the prohibition of sex between a man and a menstruating women. It would probably also have been applied to male homosexuality. The silence of the Old Testament on lesbianism now becomes clear; since there is no spilling of blood or semen, there is no reason to prohibit it.

However, it is not enough to just stop at this point. We need to remember the context in which these prohibitions are given. A closer examination of the prohibition against male homosexuality reveals other aspects that call into question the prevailing interpretation of this verse. Context is everything.

First, remember that these rules were for people living in Canaan to prevent them from offending the holiness of the land. So unless you were/are a homosexual male living in Palestine, this verse very specifically does not apply to you.

But let’s take a closer look at 22 verse itself:

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.”

If you consult the original Hebrew text (both Lev. 18 and 20), the phrase used for “lying as with a woman” is a specific idiom: mishkeve ‘ishah, which only refers to illicit heterosexual relations. This is an important item. If male homosexuality is intrinsically forbidden, why compare it to illicit heterosexual unions? What kinds of forbidden heterosexual unions might the text be using to qualify male homosexual union?

The context of this verse is a long list of forbidden heterosexual (except for verse 22) unions that have one thing in common; except for the injunction against adultery, they are between close relatives. So, father may not have sex with a daughter or granddaughter, nor an aunt with a nephew. Clearly this verse is intended to supplement the rest of that list, and thus proscribes male homosexual acts between close relatives. So let us review. The Old Testament only prohibits homosexual acts if the following are true:

• The partners are male
• The act is taking place within the borders of the land of Canaan
• The partners are sufficiently consanguineous as to fall within the list of prohibited relations specified in Leviticus 18.

That excludes virtually all of the world’s homosexuals, and certainly all of the homosexuals in California.

What is an “Abomination”?

There still remains the meaning of the last clause of verse 22: “it is an abomination.” What is an “abomination”? Most readers of the English translations skip past this word, but they don’t realize that in the Hebrew text this word (to’evah) has a very specific and technical meaning in Leviticus. It is used to denote acts that are found in the practices and rituals of foreign religious cults, particularly those of the Canaanites of biblical times, which were forbidden by Israelite religion. That being the case, in today’s world, the circumstances that marked male homosexuality as to’evah no longer exist and therefore do not apply.

Two Other Reasons to Prohibit Homosexuality

Some interpreters of the Bible claim that homosexuality cannot be permitted because it runs contrary to the commandment to “Be fruitful and multiply”. The problem with this argument is that “be fruitful and multiply” is not, and never has been a commandment. The text is very clear that “God blessed them and said…” and thus the injunction is a blessing, not a commandment. This usage appears consistently in every occurrence of the phrase “be fruitful and multiply” found in Genesis (See 1:22,28; 8:17; 9:1,7; 35:9,11).

This is only fair, upon reflection. If “being fruitful” was a commandment, one must explain the prayers of Sarah, Rachel, and other barren women in the Old Testament asking God to let them get pregnant? Why would God command fruitfulness when conception and pregnancy are clearly his prerogative?

The second reason for prohibiting homosexuality is its alleged role in the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. This also stems from a misconception, namely that the sin of Sodom was homosexuality (hence “sodomy”). But the Bible itself in Ezekiel 16:49 clearly states that the sin of Sodom was to neglect the poor and the needy. Nothing in that verse or those adjoining it can be construed to mean that Sodom was destroyed because of homosexuality.

One must read the story of the destruction of Sodom in parallel with the story of the Levite’s Concubine in Judges 19 ff. In this brutal tale a Levite and his concubine were offered hospitality and lodging in the Benjaminite town of Gibeah, and, as at Sodom, the men of the city gathered round and attempted to intimidate the host offering shelter to the travelers by threatening homosexual rape of the guest. However, in this case the Levite sent out his concubine to satiate the mob, who then raped her through the night until she died.

In both cases the men of both cities not only violated the institutions of hospitality that were considered inviolate throughout the Mediterranean basin, they used the threat of homosexual gang rape as an instrument of intimidation and violence. In both cases, the perpetrators were deemed worthy of extermination and, in the case of the tribe of Benjamin, this was partially accomplished. The violation of the canons of hospitality was often considered cause for divine retribution and even extermination, and there are numerous examples from across the Near Eastern and Classical worlds.

A proper explanation of this phenomenon is beyond the scope of this treatment, but most modern scholars agree that the destruction of Sodom was believed to have been due to their violation of the institutions of hospitality rather than for homosexual behavior.

Homosexuality and the New Testament

The only verses that mention homosexuality in the New Testament are in the Epistular literature: 1 Corinthians 6:9 and Romans 1:26-27. Jesus makes no mention of it. Paul mentions it in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, which, incidentally, also includes the only reference to lesbianism in the entire scriptural corpus.

But there are reasons why we must not automatically accept Paul’s statement as a blanket prohibition of homosexuality. It is generally acknowledged that in these verses Paul is reliant on Mosaic law and, as we have seen, Mosaic law does not prohibit all homosexuality except under the narrow constraints specified. It should be noted here that Paul is not a reliable interpreter of Old Testament law. Many studies have been written about how even his representation of “accepted” Jewish interpretations of Mosaic Law are often flawed, and therefore one must use Paul with caution in this context. The fact that he isolates himself by proscribing lesbianism when both the Old Testament and the words of Jesus are completely silent on the issue is a strong indication that he is injecting his own feelings into the matter or drawing upon extra-biblical tradition.

Conclusion:

The Old Testament does not prohibit homosexuality except between closely-related males living in the land of Canaan, and because of its presence in the rituals of rival Canaanite religious cults. Lesbianism is not mentioned and therefore cannot be considered proscribed by the Old Testament. The New Testament denounced homosexuality, but only in two of the Epistles of Paul in which he is mistakenly applying Jewish law. The Gospels and all the other canonical Christian books are silent on the matter.

A Note on Sources:
The scriptures cited here were either my own translation from the Hebrew or the Revised Standard Version (RSV).

This excursus draws heavily on the Anchor Bible commentary on Leviticus written by one of my professors of Biblical Hebrew at UC Berkeley, Rabbi Jacob Milgrom. See Leviticus 17-22 A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Vol. 3A, Doubleday, 2000.

I want to acknowledge my gratitude to Prof. Milgrom for the privilege of reading Leviticus with him in his Advanced Biblical Hebrew Seminar at Berkeley, and for the invaluable training I received from him. Any errors herein are strictly my own.

Let’s be honest; very few people read this blog (or would cop to reading it), and even fewer leave comments. So it was with some surprise that I saw a comment awaiting moderation on my recent post about the need for accrediting think tanks. I was even more surprised to see a long-detailed missive by one Frank von Hippel, defending David Albright against the charges made against him in Scott Ritter’s article upon which I drew as an example.

Von Hippel, a Professor of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, goes to some lengths to dispute Ritter’s claims. For the record, I remain dubious as to Albright’s qualifications. Von Hibbel fails to refute Ritter’s claim that Albright has not only misrepresented himself as a “former IAEA inspector”, “He has never worked as a nuclear physicist on any program dedicated to the design and/or manufacture of nuclear weapons. He has never designed nuclear weapons and never conducted mathematical calculations in support of testing nuclear weapons, nor has he ever worked in a facility or with an organization dedicated to either.” That Albright has clearly been disingenuous in stating his qualifications is reason enough to regard his work and opinions with doubt, as well as the media outlets for whom he is a “go-to guy”.

But getting back to the comment itself, since so few people read Cogito! I must assume that this comment is the work of a damage control effort being done on Albright’s behalf. By googling random phrases in Von Hibbel’s apology for Albright, I found that this had been posted all over the web, particularly in blogs that had included recent discussion of Ritter’s article. Somebody looked all over the web for any post referencing Ritter’s article, and then posted Von Hibbel’s rebuttal.

Someone apparently has an interest in preserving Albright’s reputation. I see this as yet another example of the need for the kind of transparency that a robust accreditation process could deliver.

The June 26, 2008 issue of The Nation has a brilliant, ringing address by E. L. Doctorow to a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society on the theme of “The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society.” The address was titled “The White Whale.” Anyone and everyone who values the a competent democracy should read this article, preferably several times.

Doctorow’s remarks are incredibly important, because they lay out in general, though articulate terms how not just our nation but civilization at large is under siege by forces of unreason. He draws particular attention to the phenomenon of the “knowledge denier” whether the subject at hand is the Holocaust or global climate change and then makes one of the best points I’ve seen in some time:

“Two things must be said about knowledge deniers. Their rationale is always political. And more often than not, they hold in their hand a sacred text for certification.”

I would only add to the line about the scared text “…that they probably haven’t read carefully and almost certainly don’t understand”, but that’s just me injecting one of my pet peeves.

Doctorow further points out that the misdeeds of the current President and his enablers constitutes a trend that can only lead to the abandonment of the Constitution and its supporting ideals as the foundation of the United States. In other words, that this distrust of reason and the embrace of non-empirical authoritarianism constitutes an existential threat.

If you are in any way a thinking person, enamored of the proposition that knowledge of facts is a good thing, read this article.

This is not to say that American ignorance and stupidity is new; this excellent article by Rick Shenkman “How Ignorant Are We?” shows that Americans have maintained a pretty constant level of stupidity for a long time.  But what seems to have changed is that parties who do not have our collective interests at heart have managed to harness the power of stupidity and ignorance into something militant and dangerous.  The Internet, contrary to its perceived purpose to bring about the Information Age, has become a conduit for much of this toxic work.  And we have not seen in the past this ignorance and blind intolerance aimed so deliberately at unmaking our best laws and political institutions.

As part of my day job at Henley-Putnam University I spend a lot of time on accreditation issues. I was deeply involved in working to secure both state approval from the California Bureau of Private, Postsecondary and Vocational Education (BPPVE) and national accreditation from the Distance Education and Training Council (DETC). So I understand something of the process of the regulation of educational institutions and the reasoning behind it.

Both state approval and national or regional accreditation is a way of certifying certain aspects of a school. The BPPVE worked under the auspices of the Department of Consumer Affairs, which seems odd until you realize that they are confirming that the student gets what they paid for when they enroll. Other colors and flavors of accreditation test the integrity of a school as a business, and both apply criteria of rigor and quality of instructional delivery to the curriculum. Everything gets looked at, examined, picked up and shaken, and after an exhaustive process, a school that meets the state criteria can call itself a “university”. Accreditation gives an extra layer of assurance that translates into the ability to access certain kinds of state and federal funding for students.

Academia itself, though far from perfect, aspires to a comparable degree of documentation and transparency in the production of good, scholarly work. Sources must be footnoted, opposing views given proper attention, reasoning and facts checked and re-checked before casting them into the arena of academic debate. And as a matter of practice, that debate follows certain rules that are usually adhered to.

But in recent decades a potent rival has sprung up to challenge the fiefdoms of academia in the intellectual landscape. That rival is the so-called “Think Tank”. These organizations exist ostensibly to do research, usually for a specific client, and usually for a fee. The people who work at think tanks range from world-class experts to ideological hacks, and therein lies the problem. This past week in an article by former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter (“The Nuclear Expert Who Never Was”) tells the sordid tale of one David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) and go-to guy for many on the Right who are looking (yearning is more like it) for evidence that Iran will soon be able to turn us all into smoking pools of radioactive tar.

I won’t go into the details here; the article does a much better job of laying it all out. But the bottom line is that “nuclear expert” Albright is anything but. His work is shoddy and filled with inaccuracies, and a closer examination of his background reveals that he has nowhere near the expertise he claims in his extravagant resume.

The point I’m trying to make is that think tanks like ISIS and many others exist to spread what amounts to propaganda cloaked in an academic vestment of respectability. The bad ones brook no serious accountability; the funding behind a given study is hidden or not disclosed, which by itself should preclude serious consideration of that study. People working on research may or may not be political activists with no real expertise, or who can not or will not abide by accepted norms of proper scholarship and tenets of academic debate.

When your paycheck depends on you proving a certain position, it’s amazing how much sophistry and willful ignorance the mind can generate.

This is why I propose that no think tank can or should be considered a true research institution without some kind of accreditation designed specially for such institutions. The halcyon days of spaghetti scholarship (i.e., throw something at the wall and see if it sticks) need to give way to something more trustworthy.

What would such an accreditation process entail? I’m glad you asked.

1. Funding transparency. Who funds the think tank? Who are the major donors? Are there funds collected from blind trusts and front organizations? Does the institution fund research or sub-organizations or front groups? Were any special studies done for individual clients, and were those studies published with full disclosures and disclaimers about who paid for them? Until you know whose bread is being buttered by a particular think tank project, you have a huge unanswered question that centers directly on the question of the institutional objectivity of the think thank and its researchers and writers.

2. Qualifications of the Staff. Are the people who do the research and write the studies really experts? Do they have requisite academic degrees? If not, can they demonstrate by a sound publishing record that they do in fact know what they are talking about?

3. Publications Review. This one is a bit tricker to do in practice, but may be as vital as any of the rest. How often do the think tank’s publications cite their own publications? Do they use peer-reviewed journals or primary sources in their research? Are their papers or articles by their researchers found in leading publications in the field? Are their publications cited by other experts in the field (favorably, that is)?

That would be a good start. The question, of course, is who would do this, and the obvious answer is that it could be done by private organizations, like those that oversee national or regional accreditation for universities. Maybe then the less scrupulous of these propaganda mills would either clean up their acts, or go into marketing where they belong.

Some time ago I blogged on a system called PoIC, which stands for Piles of Index Cards, a system for creating a personal knowledge database by Hawk Sugano.  You can read more about it in the earlier entry, but the quick and dirty description is that PoIC is a nifty system for helping to organize your thoughts and ideas in a way that, when properly applied, creates a sort of self-sustaining aid for creativity and project management.  The system is a kind of repository for loose ideas, musings, brainstorms, rants, references, reading notes… anything that can fit on a 3×5 card.  The cards are filed chronologically, aided by a simple but effective timestamp that goes in the upper right corner of each one.  An equally simple set of four icons helps remind you what a given card is for (note, idea, citation, to-do).  Then, when a critical mass of cards is reached (Sugano recommends about 1,000 cards) you go through them and look for trends, themes, ideas that keep recurring.  Grouping these together can result in the basis for a project.

I’ve been using the system for about six months now, and I have decided that it is worth using long term, with a few caveats.  My PoIC has helped me draft out one paper I intend to publish in an intellectual journal, formed the grist for a couple of blog entries here, and helped organize my thinking on some long-term ideas I’ve been kicking around for some time now.

The biggest drawback to the system, in my opinion, is that one must use it regularly, even relentlessly.  It is easy for someone to think that just because some new tool makes something easier, you don’t need to do that something as often.  At least that’s what my inner sloth tells me.  In fact, a good tool will make you want to do something more often–and usually does.

But PoIC demands that you spend time with it.  You need to keep blank cards handy and use them.  Many years ago I got into the habit of doing a lot of thinking by writing in pocket notebooks I always carry with me.  PoIC can provide a good place to keep the ideas I’ve scribbled in those notebooks, so I’ve started adding PoIC timestamps to my notebook entries.  Later, when I’m reviewing my notebooks, I can transfer the ideas worth hanging on to (precious few) to PoIC cards.

That’s a partial solution.  The real challenge is to make the time to sit down on a regular basis and let the mind play, free associate, dream, and brainstorm.  Doing this solo isn’t hard, but doing it on a schedule take some getting used to.  I know, for instance, that quite a few professional writers have trained themselves to where they can sit down and, from nine to five, be creative.  It can be done, and probably should be if you are serious at all about any form of intellectual activity that demands creativity.  I’ll check in later with more on that question in a future installment.

Too bad most of my best ideas seem to come to me when I’m in the shower.

The San Francisco Bay Area is notorious for being full of people who have interesting ideas and, what’s more, are prone to act on them. Creativity is the lifeblood of the Bay Area not just in the sense that it provides jobs and income, but that it is something that seems to infuse the very matter that makes up this area. It’s hard to describe without slipping into some form of New Age mumbo-jumbo, and this mojo of brilliance is not uniformly distributed, to be sure. But if you are one of those unfortunate souls who experiences pain at the contemplation of a new idea, the Bay Area can be a frustrating place to live. And if you go anywhere near the San Mateo Fairgrounds when the Makers strut their stuff, your head will probably explode.

A bb-shooting scratchbuilt 1/144 scale model warship, opened to show its inside components.

This year’s fair was bigger and better than last year’s. Attendance was huge, and diverse. I was struck by how many parents brought kids along–probably a good idea to get young minds used to the culture of creativity and inventiveness. There were plenty of middle aged types, along with the young and restless in off-beat clothes and more than the usual number of tattoos.

For those of you who do not know what Maker Faire is, this is an event sponsored by Make magazine, a publication for people who like to play with technology in ways that often go against what is corporately correct. They gleefully modify products, void warranties, create add-ons, and basically give a collective finger to companies and cultures who insist that we play nice with technology and just let the faceless corporate engineers and marketing departments tell us what our tech should be, how much we should pay for it, and the hundred and one reasons why, even when our check has cleared, they insist that it isn’t really ours to play with, hack, modify, and break if we so choose. They also blow a group raspberry at the schoolmarms and Nervous Nellies among us that we not run with scissors, “do try this at home” or try anything that looks even remotely dangerous.

Imposing sculpture built from pieces of scrap.

What could one see at this year’s faire? Fighting robots. Radio controlled bb-shooting model warships that literally sink each other. Experimental aircraft. Laser harp. Chakratron. More robots. Computer controlled shop tools. Sign-ups for lessons on fabrication, milling, turning, welding. Kits and more kits. Hydroponics. Alternative energy. Bizzare bicycles. Rockets. Sculpture. Intentional communities. Home chemistry laboratories. Organic gardening. A working scale-model Babbage Difference Engine. Computer controlled everything. Solar powered everything. A pedal-powered bus. Steampunk. And did I mention the life-sized “Mousetrap” game? That works? And took thirteen years to build and weighs a total of 50,000 pounds?

For something this big, and this diverse, general impressions will have to suffice, but there are several take-away impressions to be had here. The wide streak of anti-corporate, anti-establishment anarchism has already been noted, but still merits further comment. For years I and others like me have lamented the decline of DIY as it applies to scientific subjects: chemistry sets died due to fears of litigation. DIY electronics declined, in my opinion, due to their inherent complexity, cheapness (if it breaks, just buy another) and terms of purchase and warranty that promise dire circumstances for “misusing” electronic products. Other things have probably contributed, particularly the whispering campaign against science and intellectual activity in general conducted largely by conservative ideologues in power.

Robert Bruce Thompson shows what can be done in a home chemistry laboratory, and how to make one.

Maker Faire or, more properly, the Maker culture (one is tempted to call it a “movement” except that it seems to have evolved beyond that), is a gleeful revolt against all that. It embodies a conviction that technology belongs to everyone who wants to learn its secrets and use them to make life at least more interesting. I would also point out that this is the culture who by its very nature knows how to decentralize many of the technologies that are less robust, more brittle, more susceptible to direct and indirect manipulation than we have wanted to believe by virtual of their centralization. Oil, information, electricity… these are problems of existential importance. But if you want to find comfort when contemplating peak oil or the like, take a walk through Maker Faire, and here you will see the kinds of thinking that could make a post-carbon world not just bearable, but thriving.

Tomato plants in a home-built hydroponics system.

This brings me to another observation, and that is the passion inherent in the maker community for what they do. You can see this passion partly in the balance of pragmatism and perfectionism that is required to do a good bit of making or a really sweet hack. But what struck me was the artistry of what gets done. From a historical perspective, this makes sense. Throughout history it has frequently been the artisans who push the limits of technology, whether it’s stone construction of a cathedral or creating the need for more advanced desktop computers to handle large image or video files. At Maker Faire there were metal sculptures that were imposing, striking, and frivolous. There were also dazzling but equally silly geometric forms made of sugar using a tabletop 3-D fabrication machine (last year, as I recall, they used cheese-whiz instead of sugar). And yet it grabs you; draws you in and enhances the sense of wonder at this new breed of Do-It-Yourselfer.

An engine running on renewable bio-fuel.

What we are seeing in the rise of the Maker community is the very common human urge to tinker and play and invent. But this time it has been enhanced by a confluence of new technologies that have never been available before. As certain kinds of technology in general grows more advanced, it becomes harder to contain and control. The Internet is an excellent case study. It is the most complex and sophisticated communications device ever created, and yet it is also virtually impossible to control what goes on there. It has proven very resistant to control and censorship for instance. This is partly because as one person remarked, the Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it. But it is also because it has created metasystems in the form of communities of activists, thinkers, learners, politicos, hobbyists, and cranks. These communities in turn exist in a kind of symbiosis with the Internet–at least to the extent that the Internet can be considered “biotic”, which is probably a discussion best left for another time.

What I find so intriguing about the Maker community is the way information is shared freely, almost aggressively. There is a sense of conviction that anyone can be a Maker in some fashion, and probably should. Today’s Maker has access to tools that were unimaginable only a few years ago. And I, for my part, intend to explore and acquire familiarity with as much of this new technology as my time or budget will allow. But the real achievement of the Maker culture is that they make more than wonderful, showy, brilliant, and sometimes even useful gizmos. They make communities. In an American society that is increasingly dull and banal, I expect this movement to continue to be a waxing ray of light.

Get some educators or instructors into a room and before long you will get an earful about good teaching practices, pedagogy, learning, and so forth. You’ll hear all the latest info about how best to get kids to pay attention, how to reach adult learners, presentation and communications. But what is less often talked about is the matter of retention.

For me, learning is easy. This is no big deal; most people learn things easily. The problem is hanging on to it. Think of a photographic memory with no film (or memory chip for those of you under 30).

The standard solution to this problem has always been repetition. Think of the old formula that describes a government handbook: tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em. The problem is that repetition by itself will only take one so far. For decades the field of cognitive psychology has been aware of an interesting phenomenon that concerns review and retention. Studies show that the best time to review something is just before you start to forget it. Let’s say you’re taking a Spanish class and you want to review vocabulary words. You’ve got you stack of flash cards for the day and you go through them until you have them memorized.

So far, so good. But the problem is that everyone starts to forget what they have recently learned at a fairly rapid rate. The time to review is when you’re chances of remembering any one of those words is around 90%. So when you reach that point (say the next day) you review them again. But this time, your forgetting curve is not so steep. It might take three days before you have a 90% chance of recalling one of those words. But if you review them after three days, they’ll stick for maybe another five or six days, and so on. Cognitive psychologists figure that if you go through this routine about four times, the material will stick.

The problem is the timing.

How do you know when you’ve reached that critical just-about-to-forget threshold? This curve is different for each person, and I suspect is probably also different at different times in a person’s life. It may also be different depending on the subject matter. For a person to figure this out on their own is essentially impractical. So teachers have continued to plod along with badly timed reviews or material while the cognitive psychologists have been tearing their collective hair out because while the answer to retaining knowledge is clear, the way to implement it is not.

However, a program called SuperMemo looks like it can address this issue. SuperMemo is written by Piotr Wozniak, a Polish computer scientist who has written an algorithm to figure out a person’s optimal learning and retention profile. It displays knowledge that someone wants to learn and does so at the right time to ensure optimum retention. There is an excellent article in the current edition of Wired about this, and I recommend it highly. You would also do well to check out the SuperMemo web site, which has a lot of good articles and information both on the program itself and the concepts behind it.

Right now, SuperMemo is available for most PC platforms, Linux, and even a web-based version. Alas, for Macintosh nuts like me there is not yet a version available, but there are other programs that use similar algorithms to accomplish the same task. One is called Genius, which runs on OS X and seems to be pretty good although the library of user-supplied content was not all that inspiring. Another is a web-based site called MindPicnic, located, oddly enough, at www.mindpicnic.com. I’m currently test-driving MindPicnic for one of my current projects, namely learning modern Greek. They happen to have several packages of cards that address this very topic. So far, although it can be arduous and even tedious at times, it seems to be working. The display shows my how many cards I’ve been through, how long it’s been since I looked at any cards, and so on. It also has a handy bar graph that shows how much I’ve learned, and that percentage goes down over time unless I review. What it does not tell me is what my optimal intervals for review are. That would be very helpful.

But this brings us to the bottleneck in this new avenue of learning: content. Someone has to sit down and actually put in the data that you want to learn. Unless you’re learning something that everyone wants to know, or you get lucky the way I did, that’s your job. From an optimistic standpoint, if these kinds of software start becoming more and more popular, there should be an increase in the numbers and varieties of content available. There’s quite a bit out there at present, but I’d like to see more. This might be another good reason to form learning circles or informal study associations and groups. If the content problem can be solved, this could cause a real shakeup in how we teach and learn and educate each other and ourselves.

There’s more to say on the subject of learning and retention and the philosophy of education, but for now, check out these resources and see if they make a difference in your personal educational program.

From the website of the American Bookseller’s Foundation for Free Expression comes this interesting item:

On March 25, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) condemned a new Indiana law that requires mainstream bookstores to register with the government if they sell “sexually explicit materials.” “Sexually explicit” is defined so broadly that the law could apply to bookstores that sell mainstream novels and other artistic works with sexual content as well as educational books about sexuality and sexual health. H.B. 1042 was signed into law last week by Governor Mitch Daniels. “It is un-American to force booksellers to register with the government based on the kinds of books they carry,” ABFFE President Chris Finan said. “It is also unconstitutional, and we intend to do everything we can to challenge this violation of the First Amendment rights of Indiana booksellers and their customers.”

That registration fee, by the way, is $250. Failure to register is a misdemeanor.

There are no guarantees that literary works and otherwise legitimate artistic expression will be exempt. Books on women’s health will almost certainly contain things that will offend the purveyors of this legislation. I have high hopes that eventually, this law will be bitch-slapped into the dustbin of history where it belongs, but you have to wonder what kind of lawmakers would even consent to draft, propose, argue, vote for, and sign a law that is so blatantly and obviously unconstitutional. Deep cynicism comes to mind, much like the cynicism revealed in the current administration’s “use” of the religious right. They gave plenty of lip service to the agenda of that segment of the citizenry, but never really intended to implement the more substantive parts of their agenda. Indiana might be doing likewise, making laws they know will be overturned rather than informing their supporters that the law is unconstitutional and telling them to go back to Mayberry and get an education.

An example from Iran of what people in Indiana might look forward to.

 If my faith is not misplaced, and things do go as they ought to, then one might say that “the system works”, but I’m not so sure. What laws like this do is tee-up a situation that needs only the wrong kind of activist judge like a Roberts or a Scalia to suddenly plunge us into a nightmare of absurdity.

Besides putting the standards of art, literature, and even science into the hands of those least qualified to set them, laws like this also create a climate of fear and chills the public debate. An artist will think twice before depicting a woman’s bare back. A doctor writing about women’s health or adolescence will consider leaving out important facts. Remember, we’re not talking about the local adult video store here, we’re talking about the very mention of sex and sexuality in even the most oblique contexts on the shelves of your local Borders or Barnes & Noble. This is about treating sex as the great taboo, forbidden to so much as mention, let alone describe even in the most chaste terms.

I sincerely hope that we start to see public readings from Lady Chatterley’s Lover taking place on the steps of the Indiana state capitol, or some other creative forms of civil disobedience. Some things are just too stupid not to mock.

But this change in the cultural landscape comes with hidden costs that the lawmakers of Indiana have probably not considered (the citizens who demanded this change certainly did not, and might even consider it a plus).

The first is the nature of our economy. Richard Florida has pointed out that our economy is deriving much, if not most of its strength from new products and services that now exist thanks to what he calls the “creative class”. These are the computer programmers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, research scientists… the innovators. People like this prefer to live in places that are friendly to broad-minded, creative, bold people. Dr. Florida made headlines a few months ago when he demonstrated that cities that are more “gay friendly” also have stronger, more vibrant economies. Having lived in the Bay Area for some time, I know from personal experience that cities and towns with a higher number of creative types are much more interesting and will always have more economic options, all other things being equal.

Let’s do a thought experiment. You are a talented artistic person, or someone who has lots of ideas and likes to think in an unfettered way. Are you going to enjoy living and working in a place that will turn the local bookstores into purveyors of the bland? I thought not.

 But let’s turn to the sciences for a moment. The practice of science is essentially that of taking the latest theories and hypotheses and subjecting them to continuous evaluation and re-evaluation, knocking off the corners that don’t fit until you have a model that satisfactorily explains nature. And that theory will last only as long as it takes for a better one to appear. The work of science involves constant effort to find a refutation of the current model. What does this have to do with Indiana’s law?

Indiana’s law puts constraints on public discourse. It restricts free speech. It opens the door for censoring any speech that enough people don’t like. Real scientific progress is only possible in an open and free society, with only the very few reasonable strictures on speech and expression. Criticism must be open and free, and ideas must be available for consideration by all concerned. If “sexuality”, broadly defined, becomes proscribed speech, will “evolution” be next? Will the fruits of the defining concept of modern biology be restricted to closed rooms and whispered conversation? Is it worth sacrificing our scientific, cultural, and artistic birthright just to keep a few prudish schoolmarm types happy–to the extent that someone who is so anti-sex can actually be happy?

Every other week or so my spouse and I meet with some friends for dinner and conversation, usually at a favorite Chinese restaurant where we enjoy stimulating banter over excellent cuisine. An evening’s dinner conversation recently turned to the matter of competition and how it really works in business and other areas of human activity. Part of the context of this conversation was my previous blog about the Finnish school system, and how they do not have a policy of competition among schools based on test scores.

Competition in America is like a holy sacrament to hear most people praise it’s virtues, particularly its ability to drive innovation. I made a comment to the effect that competition as such does not promote innovation. Instead, the true dynamic of competition is to imitate. The others at the table agreed furiously with me, and I was treated to some remarkable first-hand stories of how companies they worked for actually shunned new projects unless some other company was doing something similar.

Let’s get this out in the open once and for all: American business hates competition. The zero-sum game where you out perform your competitor is done only if you can buy them or sue them out of existence. The object of competition in American business is to eliminate the competition. Anyone who has looked at the history of Microsoft knows how much they venerate competition; remember FullWrite Professional, anyone? Or any number of other innovative companies whose products, often whose very existence came to an end when they had the misfortune to be noticed by Microsoft? The larger and more powerful the company, the less tolerance you find for competition.

It surprises me that the misuse of competition survives in education as much as it does. A good friend of mine, a physicist, told me of how the physics department at Berkeley (of all places) had a policy that only a set number of students would graduate, irregardless of how well they did in their classes. Stop and think about that for a moment, and consider how many perfectly competent physicists were denied graduation because of an arbitrary and thoroughly moronic department policy. How much innovation has that single policy cost the world, to say nothing of the personal cost to the students who failed to meet what surely was a capricious standard?

One of the best studies I have ever seen on the nature of competition is a book by Alfie Kohn called No Contest: the Case Against Competetion. It appears to be still in print even though it was printed in 1992. It’s worth snagging and studying a copy of this extremely thought-provoking book.

Kohn’s point (one among many) is that when your success depends on someone elses failure the process of whatever you are trying to do is degraded. This is not just some simpering “can’t-we-all-just-get-along?” mantra, it is the result of observing the effects of competition versus cooperation in everyday activities. Kohn clearly demonstrates that especially in education students consistently do better in non-competitive learning environments. One of my favorite examples was a class where everybody’s final exam grade would be the same because it would be the average grade of the entire class. Suddenly, the success of your neighbor was tied to your success. Smart kids started helping the slower ones. Study groups formed out of nowhere. Most interesting of all, student got consistently higher grades in classes using this idea than the usual “my-success-demands-your-failure” model.

Someone at this point will usually invoke the Law of the Jungle, or “Survival of the fittest” a phrase coined not by the biologist Darwin, but an economist, Spencer. “Nature red in tooth and claw” is supposed to be the norm, but when you spend lots of time in nature, you find that predation or avoiding same is not the constant activity of every animate creature. I would be willing to bet that symbiosis is at least as prevalent in nature as predation.

I find that for the independent scholar competition is pointless and a waste of time. The result is manufactured controversies, pointless “intellectual” rivalries. Think Fox News in a teacup. In fact, I know very few serious independent scholars who indulge in such nonsense, and they seldom produce anything of real interest or insight.

A false alternative to competition is to cooperate. While admirable or desirable, it isn’t the only option. You can always find your own hill to be king of. You can innovate, truly innovate. Do what will truly bring something new and interesting into the world without hanging on every press release or rumor from your so-called competitors. Look at it this way: if you don’t try to compete (i.e., imitate) with the rest, you may find yourself with something no one else has. In other words, you’ll have a monopoly… until someone starts imitating you.

I caught a very interesting opinion piece in the 27 February issue of the Providence Journal about how, once again, Finnish 15-year old students were rated the best in the world in math and science by the Program for International Student Assessment. You can read the article by Walt Gardner here.

What struck me about Gardner’s description of Finnish schools was not just that they are so incredibly effective, but that they seems to be doing precisely the opposite of what our schools are doing. And, in case you haven’t noticed, American kids are not doing so well in math and science.

Here are some specifics:

Finland considers education to be an end in and of itself, not just as a means to a better job or snob appeal. This view of education is fundamental and infuses every level of their educational system. Take that attitude and wear it on your sleeve in American society and you will probably be considered quaint or quixotic at best, naive or a potential slacker at worst.

I consider this to be the key. Many years ago I wrote a paper for a class on the question of literacy in the ancient Near East. The question was, how widespread was the ability to read and write. One question that I investigated was whether the difficulty of the writing system had anything to do with literacy generally. Were Phoenicians or Israelites more likely to be literate because they used a phonetic alphabet instead of a complex syllabic system like Akkadian cuneiform? Information was lacking, but I found that in modern societies the difficulty of the language system made almost no difference. What mattered was the value society placed on literacy. Societies that placed a premium value on literacy had literate populations.

Finland spends less than we do per student. There are no gifted programs, classes average about 30 students, and students don’t start school until they are seven.

Finland must contend with a surprising (for Americans, anyway) range of diversity among their students, with a rapidly growing immigrant population; right now about 11% of students are immigrants. But by 2015 more than half of students in Finland are expected to be from abroad.

Respect for teachers in Finland, especially compared to the United States, borders on veneration. Teaching is considered a favorite profession among students in a recent survey, and teacher training institutions receive far more applications than they can accept. Finnish teachers enjoy a tremendous degree of latitude compared to their American counterparts.

But the real kicker for me was the lack of testing. There are no national standardized tests. Nada. Just a series of tests carried out on a sampling of 10% of the students. No ranking or comparing schools. No shame trips. Test results are confidential. Clearly Finland does not adhere to the school of thought that any social problem can be fixed if one applies the right intimidation, negative feedback, or punishment.

Here, to my mind, is the money quote:

“What ultimately emerges from studying Finland is the realization that the reform movement in America is based on a business model fundamentally at odds with the education model used by a country with the world’s finest schools.”

Garner points out that trying to apply the Finnish experience directly to American schools is not a guarantee for success, but it is clear that we are doing as much wrong as they are doing something right. What’s worse is that in this election year, we seem to be hell-bent on doing more of precisely what the Finns aren’t doing. If that continues look for more frustration and failure in our educational system.