When lived experience expands intellectual understanding

Jennifer and I attended the History Pub event at McMenamins Kennedy School on Monday, Feb. 22. The topic on this evening was “Renewal and Removal in North/Northeast Portland.” Presenters included PSU professor Carl Abbott, Thomas Robinson of Historic Photo Archives, and long-time residents of the area Harvey Rice and Donna Maxey.

This event focused on the drastic changes in the social and built environments of the Albina area of North Portland beginning in the 1950s, particularly in the area bounded by Interstate (west), MLK (east), Alberta (north), and Broadway (south).

I knew some of the basics of this narrative before the presentation -- the general pattern of wide-scale infrastructure changes initiated by white urban planners in the 1950s and 1960s in which working-class and ethnic neighborhoods in a great many American cities were reduced and divided in the name of "urban renewal." However, this presentation has helped me see the area in a much different way, and I'll never again look at this area as I did before.

Yet more on the topic of why we believe what we believe

Great program on NPR this evening, "Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview," yet another discussion of a topic that seems to be at the forefront of my mind recently.

Over the past few months, polls show that fewer Americans say they believe humans are making the planet dangerously warmer, despite a raft of scientific reports that say otherwise.

This puzzles many climate scientists — but not some social scientists, whose research suggests that facts may not be as important as one's beliefs.

Another of the "Big Questions."

I don't have any answers to this conundrum, except, perhaps: Observe the golden rule and always keep your eyes, mind, and heart open.

-

Leonard Pitts on "Facts no longer mean what they once did"

Leonard Pitts penned a thought-provoking op-ed that appeared in a recent issue of the Oregonian. I am drawing attention to it here because of previous posts (here and here and here) I've written about the lamentable state of discourse in these times that, to me, reflects such severe ideological rigidity and lack of intellectual curiosity that I have a hard time coming to positive conclusions about the future of our society.

Not to sound too alarmist, mind you . . . BUT:

. . . that's the intellectual state of the union these days, as evidenced by all the people who still don't believe the president was born in Hawaii or that the planet is warming . . . I could send [Ken Thompson] more proof, I suppose . . . But those are facts, and the whole point here is that facts no longer mean what they once did. I suppose I could also ignore him. But you see, Ken Thompson is not just some isolated eccentric. No, he is the Zeitgeist personified.

To listen to talk radio, to watch TV pundits, to read a newspaper's online message board, is to realize that increasingly, we are a people estranged from critical thinking, divorced from logic, alienated from even objective truth. We admit no ideas that do not confirm us, hear no voices that do not echo us, sift out all information that does not validate what we wish to believe.

-

Quite funny indeed

I just got turned on to The Armstrong & Miller Showthrough a recent EotAW post, and just have to share the links below.

This is some of the funniest stuff I've seen in many, many years . . . I'm writing this from the floor of my office in the midst of convulsive fits, with at least three of my ribs broken from laughing . . .


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEle_DLDg9Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGp4DvFEgh8&NR=1&feature=fvwp

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ9yj_BXRp0&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeaN8UBwg2M&feature=related

(Reminiscent, a bit, of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rKYL0tW-Ek&NR=1&feature=fvwp)

-

Portland's "20-minute neighborhoods" and public health

Andy Dworkin wrote an article in the Oregonian, published Feb. 10, 2010, on the topic of public health and the urban landscape.

The article discusses elements of the Portland Plan focused on specific areas of the city where dysfunctional infrastructure tends to contribute to public health problems:

By redesigning the area where people live, they hope to change how they live, making it so simple to move and eat good foods that people start leading a healthier life. Advocates call the concept "working upstream," tackling diseases on a social level instead of an individual one.

As Dworkin outlines, urban plans and infrastructure development projects from the late nineteenth through the 1970s or so often centered on separating areas zoned for industry, commerce, and residences. This separation of land uses came about for very real public health reasons and, later, because of the mobility offered by widespread use of the automobile. However,

the separation of homes and business also wound up fueling some of today's biggest health problems. Sprawling cities that force people to drive long distances to work, school or shopping reduced the amount of exercise people got by replacing walking with increased driving. Diseases linked to sprawl include heat stroke, road rage, obesity, asthma and diabetes.

Whereas the kind of urban changes represented by the "20-minute neighborhood" may have a range of beneficial results, one thing to be mindful of is the impact that this development will likely have on real estate prices in a given neighborhood. That is, creating walkable neighborhoods often raises real estate prices in the area, which, in turn, often leads to gentrification, and gentrification often pushes long-time residents out of a given neighborhood because these residents can't afford to rent or own their homes anymore, and/or these residents lose their connection to the community as their neighbors and community institutions change.

Public health of a privileged class at the cost of diversity, equity, and community cohesion is likely not a productive long-term outcome.

--

More thoughts on the military

Bitch Ph.D. has written a thought-provoking post on an important & complex topic I've been trying to clarify for myself: What conceptual place does the military have within the broader culture of our ostensible democracy, and what place should the military have within the broader culture of our ostensible democracy, and what can a comparison of these two narrative constructs tell us?

I've tried to address this this question here and here and here. I don't know if I've gotten very far yet in coming to a conclusion I can articulate clearly and concisely but, hey, it's all a work-in-progress.

Bitch Ph.D.'s post and the comments are worth reading in full. A few highlights:

US soldiers haven't been protecting "our freedom" since . . . well, the Civil War . . . They've protected U.S. interests--which are not the same as U.S. freedoms--in Grenada and Beirut and Panama and the Phillippines and the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua and China and Russia (way back during the revolution), and we've been all over Latin America. And we're in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course. But none of those countries or wars really threatened our freedom, except by some fucked-up definition where "freedom" means "right to do as we damn well please and get cheap oil while we're at it." None of those actions threatened anything in the Bill of Rights or the U.S. Constitution.

[. . . ]

God knows I respect military folks, who by and large I think really do believe that they are serving their country, and that they *are* protecting us. . . . But it is just false fucking patriotism to think that the military is beyond reproach, or that soldiers are the only things standing between two-cars-and-a-white-picket-fence and Utter Chaos. Or that two-cars-and-a-white-picket-fence are the same as "freedom." Yes, the military protects our position at the top of the global heap, and I for one am goddamn glad that I was lucky enough to be born there. But my comfortable house and my two cats and my car that runs just fine, thank you, and my clothes that I don't have enough room to store, and my grandmother's china, and my trip to Colorado this weekend are not the same as my ability to vote, or to speak my mind, or to lobby my government to do things that I think are important.

[. . . ]

So yeah, as an American and a patriot, I would like us to quit with the soldier-worship. Respect them, as one should respect all professions, and respect their devotion to public service, as we damn well ought to respect the devotion to public service of all state employees. And yes, people whose work puts them in danger deserve a hell of a lot of sympathy and support. But until I start seeing "I support our mail carriers" or "thank a garbage collector" bumper stickers on the backs of people's cars, I'm calling bullshit on the notion that a military uniform = a halo.

I wouldn't necessarily need to curse, but I respect the strong feelings on this topic that the cursing represents. There is a contingent on the right (Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly, etc., etc.) who advocate for a slavish blindness in our veneration for the military arm of our empire, and many other players on the national media and political stage allow these extremists to control the narrative -- it's a taboo subject to question military actions, military spending, military pork, because the rabid dogs will spring back with distracting claims of "unpatriotic," "unAmerican," "weak on defense," etc. Reprehensible.

--

Some thoughts on the recent EPA critique of contaminant report from the Lower Willamette Group

The information cited below is somewhat reminiscent of the conflict between the City of Portland (CoP) and the Oregon State Sanitary Authority (OSSA) in the late 1950s regarding the city's inadequate treatment of its sewage. The OSSA (and other abatement advocates such as the local chapters of the Izaak Walton League and the City Club of Portland) were pushing the CoP to implement secondary sewage treatment, because the city's then-current primary treatment regime was insufficient to ensure adequate dissolved oxygen in and north of city limits. However, CoP leaders (Mayor Schrunk, et al.), balked at making these costly upgrades. So, the OSSA took the city to court and by 1961 forced the city to propose a tax levy and expand their sewage treatment infrastructure.

At least one place where this general pattern breaks down, however, is that pollution related to sewage is significantly less complex to deal with than the current issues with persistent, toxic, and bio-accumulative chemicals.

Ah, makes me wistful for the good ol' days of floating feces and toilet paper . . .

----

Scott Learn, "Milestone report on Portland Harbor pollution lowballs risk, EPA says," Oregonian Jan. 22, 2010, p. B8.

Key excerpts:

"EPA officials say the October report from the Lower Willamette Group prematurely rules out some harbor contaminants as threats to wildlife and overstates uncertainties about the pollution's risk to human health."

"The dispute is important: The lower the risks of harbor pollution in Willamette River sediment, the less cleanup work the group's members and other harbor landowners will have to do."

-

On science & trust

Paul Kennedy over there on CBC Radio has a great program called Ideas that I highly recommend to all.

One of the featured series on the Ideas program is called "How to Think About Science." I listened to the first of these, Episode 1 - Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, the other day, and found it absolutely fascinating.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer wrote the 1985 book Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life.

Shapin & Schaffer's book asserts that scientific knowledge is not the pure exercise of unmediated reason, but is inherently social: "There are social institutions at work to produce what we know."[1] Robert Boyle established the fundamentals of experimental science in the mid-17th century by 1) setting up experiments to create unique circumstances; 2) calling in witnesses to see the experiments in action and then agree in writing to what happened; 3) documenting the entire process thoroughly in writing both to transmit the experimental results and so that other people could repeat the experiment.

Shapin & Schaffer find that Boyle saw his new approach to science as a method of bringing people together to debate issues without resorting to violence. In the midst of a period of great political, religious, and social conflict in Britain and other areas of Western Europe, Boyle presented his model as a way to establish the trust necessary to pose and resolve not only scientific questions, but political, religious, and social questions as well.

Shaffer stresses that this fundamental question about where to place one's trust is still central to civil society:

The basic question which collective public knowledge always has to solve in every culture is, Who shall I believe, and why? Almost everything anyone knows about the world, they know on trust. Almost all our knowledge is testimony. Very little of what we believe and know about the world is based entirely and absolutely on our own experience. And the social order requires that kind of mutual trust.

These ideas have got me thinking about the theme I perceive in the sources that have motivated me to write a couple of my previous posts:

** What do the gods believe? Exactly what I do, of course!!

** The Big Questions

The theme I perceive is two-fold: First, the propensity of human beings to believe what they want to believe, regardless of whether or not they have any kind of objective, direct support for their belief; second, the necessity of establishing some kind of trust to facilitate one's belief in something for which one doesn't have objective, direct experience.

On this second point, if a person hews to Catholicism, for example, this means, by definition, that this person trusts the institution of the church embodied in its representatives, and thereby tends to close the door to critical thinking on these issues. Without having experienced directly the things written about in the Christian Bible, and more than likely without having read the Bible in its original Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, the average adherent of Catholicism trust the church fathers to interpret and state the church's stance on family planning, evolution, etc.

As Schaffer describes in the CBC program, he discerns a similar dynamic in the field of science, insofar as people absolutely have to invest trust in scientists and the scientific method to believe things they cannot possibly perceive without the proper instrumentation and/or mathematical understanding (quantum mechanics, interstellar space, string theory, etc.). Schaffer stresses that being aware of this dynamic does not undermine the many demonstrated benefits and uses of science, but it does show science to be, among other things, a cultural product.

It seems to follow, then, that understanding a given religion or spiritual practice to be a cultural product does not necessarily undermine the benefits that some people get from this practice (as Joseph Campbell showed). It seems to me that conflict between science & religion (conflict in my own head as well as in the world-at-large) often springs from two things: 1) the assertion that science cannot answer spiritual questions and spirituality cannot answer scientific questions, and 2) that trusting representatives of a spiritual practice is somehow different than trusting the findings of scientists -- and this difference is fundamental and important.

----
[1] Simon Schaffer, from the CBC Radio program.

-

Portland Brownfield Program

Here's something of interest to a historian specializing in the urban environment (such as myself).

This program is interesting to me because of a general question I raised in an earlier post, to wit: What kinds of social and cultural changes help spur a community's shifting priorities such that areas that were formerly considered OK to despoil in the name of economic "progress" are now the focus of millions of dollars of restoration and reclamation efforts?

This program is also interesting to me because of the potential for being able to contribute in some way. My cultural resource management experience in Bellingham, WA, involved researching specific parcels of land to determine the historic uses of the sites and changes over time. I delivered my findings to archaeologists who were then able to focus their survey work on areas with a higher potential for excavating cultural resources (building foundations, middens, fire pits, etc.). Perhaps this kind of research would aid in determining specific land use changes over time for the Portland brownfields?

-

Fun close reading of Star Wars

There's a fun close reading of the Star Wars narrative over on EotAW.

One of the contributors linked to this interesting comparison between the Star Wars and Star Trek universes.

Good stuff.

-