Unhinged

There seems to be a growing – I will say belated – consensus that the Orange Agent to our south has become unhinged, i.e. disconnected from reality. This has kicked off a flurry of flapping about the inability of the usual ‘guardrails’ (in the asylum they’re called attendants) to constrain him. Where oh where do we store the straitjackets?

I burst my buttons with Canadian pride when our prime minister addressed the elite of the world in Davos with a plan to get us out of this global mess. Basically he said the world had irrevocably changed and we needed to think about it differently.

Dan Yashinsky, a guy who uses stories to shift our world view, referred to ‘frame-lock’ in a Jan17/26 Toronto Star article, and recommended, as Prime Minister Carney did, that we begin to imagine a new story – in this case, I’m going to say, about how democracy works.

The current story is that educated citizens elect representatives whose platform (i.e. story about what they will do as elected officials) best represents their interests. Of the many aspects of that story that are clearly fictional, if not delusional, I will focus on the aspect of education.

Education is not about going to school. Or about knowing ‘facts’. Or about being able to read and write.

It is about being able “to hold complex ideas in mind, weigh evidence and live with uncertainty.” (with thanks to Rick Lash’s article in the same Toronto Star edition – and no, I’m not on the Star’s payroll, although I am appreciative that they continue to publish a real paper and have occasionally published my op-ed pieces.)

And what is most likely to develop the above-mentioned skills? Lash says reading. And cites scientific evidence about how reading patterns the mind to “fuse vision and language into a single circuit for understanding.”

But not just any reading: ‘deep reading’. The kind of exposure to words that requires the mind to engage with what they mean. The kind of reading that doesn’t tell you what to think but beguiles and challenges and requires you to do the thinking. (Ironically, precisely the kind of thing that AI promises it can do for you – oh wait, maybe that ‘gift’ is not ironic but terrifying – a rant for another day).

Deep reading is best nurtured by the printed word, optimally with tactile engagement. In other words, a paper book. I’m not just selling what readers know is a love object for me, (my house aboundeth with books, and I’m prepping to sell one I wrote) but sharing a statement that has empirical as well as anecdotal support. But hey, I believe that the plasticity of the brain can adapt to taking in meaningful material from e-books and audio books – I’m not there yet, and you can see me struggling with frame-lock.

But what does reading books have to do with democracy? Because reading books develops the hardware (brain patterns) and software (skills) to do the kind of thinking that is required to imagine and implement an alternative to our current practice, to help us escape from frame-lock (which, hmm, might be another word for straitjacket).

That takes me to Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who escaped WW2 and lived to write books (which I will admit I have only read about, not read) about how the circumstances that gave Hitler and Stalin legitimized control could be avoided.

Her recipe? ‘Collective deliberation by active thinkers, not passive consumers’. (with thanks to Jennifer Szalai, NYT Book Review, Jan 17/26). Which is pretty much what Carney is saying Canadians, domestically, and the democratic world, globally, needs to do, starting asap.

What does that mean to you, on the day that you read this column? It means checking yourself every time you say ‘the government should…’. Because, as a literate, educated, concerned citizen, you ARE the government. Or need to be, else others who are none of the above will be.

So how to act as if you are the government? The ingredient list in Arendt’s recipe is collectivity, activity, thinking. Maybe best added to the mixing bowl in reverse.

First you think about what the problem is and what the solution to it would look like. Don’t get stuck in what the problem is, but rather what good would look like. Escape frame-lock.

Second, you decide what you can do to achieve the good you imagine (Lash’s ‘vision’). Not the roving finger of assigned guilt, not the coulda-shoulda-woulda of procrastination, but what YOU can do in the current reality.

Third, engage others in a collective think (Lash’s ‘language’) to come to agreement (not necessarily consensus; there’ll be tweak-time later), about what good looks like and what collaborative agency you have to make it happen. Small steps, which is how the little dog got to Dover, if you recall the childhood rhyme.

And lo, the gate hinge is reconnected to the post and begins to swing freely.